SONG OF THE DAY: Tip Toe

It’s really fucked up that there’s not a Suga Free fishing show yet. (This is a great article on the elder wizard era Suga Free.)

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - April '11 #8: "James River Blues" by Old Crow Medicine Show

I could write about the James River again, being I live 5 minutes from it, but instead I thought it would be funny to share some shit I wrote in college for a Nature Writing class, that my prof. kept on her page for years. I actually had contemplated applying to MFA program for Creative Writing a couple years back and contacted her to give me a recommendation, which she was willing to do, but wanted to see some recent work. I made the mistake of sending her my Me and Brown story about slitting a dog's throat and saving a hillbilly from suicide on the side of the highway, and she backed the fuck off and broke the contact we had made. I guess older women nature writer types can't handle the reality of the lower worlds.
Anyways, here is some shit called "Why I Listen to the River" which I wrote when I was probably like 20. Most people would be embarrassed about cornier things they wrote earlier on, but whatever man, this is how I got to now, and there's actually a lot of the philosophies I still carry in this, even if my musical tastes are different.

WHY I LISTEN TO THE RIVER
By Raven McMillian
One of my earliest memories is of my parents, grandparents and assorted others digging the foundations for two homes on the family's fifty acres of wooded land in Meherrin, a small Virginia town whose only claim-to-fame is a banjo picker named Roy Clark. This land would be home eventually, once a few trees and countless rocks could be cleared away for the room needed to plant a simple two-story structure. I was just four or five at the time, so me and my aunt, also too young for useful labor, would walk with my grandmother down through the woods to a creek spot deep enough to wade in thanks to the work of beavers. The area around the wading spot was fairly clear, due to the beavers ambitious teeth, and I remember the cool water feeling pretty damn good on my tiny body caked with the red dirt found throughout the property. The summer humidity baked that woodland smell into the air, and at that point in my life, everything still made sense to me.
Eventually, one of the houses was complete and the plans for the other were abandoned due to a lack of finances, and my two parents and two younger sisters and I were living the good life of a country home with gardens, a couple of goats, and a woodshed full of winter warmth. My dad handcrafted a little cedar sign to hang at the end of our driveway. At the top he painted "The McMillians," with "Rolling Creeks" underneath in his rambling, reclining manuscript.
I spent a lot of time wandering around these rural creeks while growing up, jumping from side to side of the meandering water, to whichever would branchwhip me the least. I learned to meditate back here, sitting beside the miniature dirt cliffs cut by a tiny stream, counting my breaths and ignoring the world to that trickling sound. The fall was my favorite time, when the leaves swished around my feet and I could see through the naked trees farther than usual. This time of year was always cut short by the threat of trespassing hunters booming too close to ignore.
As I got older, like most teenagers, I preferred to get away from the parents and the home and all the stuff that seems "boring" to a teenager in the country since it's all he's seen for most of his life, and me and my friends would wander southside Virginia in late model cars with illegal inspection stickers and almost empty gas tanks looking for something to get into.
One spot we would usually meander our way around to was a place called Shelton's Rock, a little turn in the Appomattox River deep in the country at the end of a ruttedout dirt road. Here, for some amazing natural reason, a large rock declined into the slow river in a series of steps, creating easy access to the water, as well as a forty foot diving platform at the top. Thirty feet upwater, the river was only knee deep, but for some reason, at this little twist, the river curved around and went underneath this rock, gradually eating away a swimming hole that was bottomless to us since no one had ever reported touching a bottom. Rumor even had it that some folks in the past, no one knew who, had tried in moments of courage to find the bottom, only to get caught in an underwater riptide of sorts, and get wedged underneath the rock as they drowned.
At least once a week in the warm season during my last two years of high school, different assortments of us would ignore the demands for our presence in classes, and waste the day away diving and swimming and drinking and enjoying each other's company at Shelton's Rock. But the world gradually pushed its responsibilities into my young mind, and I found myself hustling off to college in the "big city" of Richmond, me being a naive country boy looking to experience as much as possible, as well as wanting to get away from the "boring" rural life I had always lived. My parents predicted I would eventually miss the country and want to return.
My first week in the city was spent skipping orientation programs with other freaks on my dormitory floor to explore what was really going on around the city. One night that first week, two of these folks introduced me to "the river." We went to a place called the dead rocks, at the edge of Belle Isle, a place my southern ancestors held Union soldiers prisoner in tents. Here, a quarter miles worth of smooth granite rock faces poke up and around still water, in a little offshoot section of the James River, kept for the most part dry most of the year by a small dam of concrete and a lot of brush piles. Occasionally, during high water, these dead rocks get covered, and Belle Isle becomes an island. We went over to the north end of Belle Isle itself, where the river rushes by in rapids, rocks populating the surface, altering the river's flow, creating wild whitenesses, as well as calm swimming spots.
Over the years, I've found myself returning again and again to the river, at Belle Isle as well, as other spots here and there, looking for moments of calm amidst the city life I chose for myself, just as I always went to Shelton's Rock as a teenager, and just as I always wandered back to the streams behind my house as a child. My spirits seemingly flowed with the waters along those streams, into the Appomattox and eventually up to the James.
Well, that sounds pretty corny, and it should because it's just not true. Those streams behind my house, in all likelihood, flow somewhere other than the Appomattox, and the Appomattox itself combines into the James downstream of Richmond at Hopewell, so my spirits would have to have fought westerly, back upstream for a number of miles. But nevertheless, during my life, I've always found positive relaxing moments alongside of running water.
But why is this so? What makes me want to hang around rivers?
I asked a friend these same questions, since he told me he had been battling a paranoid schizophrenia by going to the river a lot. He said we did it because plants and water are better than concrete and steel. That's true, but that still didn't explain why I choose the river over, say, fields or forests.
So I asked myself, "what is the river?"
Well, I answered, it's water, of course, that starts way up in the mountains, almost to West Virginia, and trickles its way down through the state some three hundred miles, basically heading east and into the Chesapeake Bay. Up in those mountains, the river is a crystal clear baby of what it will become. At that point, it is an "uncarved block," a Taoist concept describing the state of nearperfection of a newborn baby, a point where the mind is not yet made egotistic by our manly things. It would be our goal in life, if we were all Taoists, to attempt to return to that state of the uncarved block, back to that original simplicity.
An uncarved block of the James River, born at a place called Iron Gate, where mountains penetrate the open sky, goes about its inevitable flowing. It goes through the Blue Ridge mountains, where the James River and Kanawha Company years ago attempted to carve its meandering nature into a series of straight canals. But the James was a difficult child, and the company eventually had to abandon its ultimate goals and settle for what little damage it had already accomplished.
The James flows past Lynchburg, where men carved mines out of the hills and let the waste go where it may.
In its adolescent stages, it wanders through the Piedmont countryside, accumulating the bruises of eroded topsoil carved from farmland by poor thinking.
It crashes past the rapids of Richmond, oblivious to the murder rates and the state government buildings. Here, it gives me music to daydream and meditate through my own insanities.
It rolls southeasterly, through lands where tobacco farms long ago were carved out of "new" land, but not without the fear of a native hatchet being buried in one's head.
The James reaches adulthood by marrying the Appomattox at Hopewell, where vast industrial "plants" have grown towards the sun. It is here Allied Chemical dumped roach poison into the water in the late seventies, contaminating fish as far away as New York. Here is where my uncle once worked, telling me of companies dumping whatever they could get away with into the river. Here, the James enters the "real world," a New World Order.
The waters become brackish as it grows past the old plantation homes of ancient landlords carved into the landscape, high above the tide and flood lines.
It eases past Jamestown, where the London Company carved the beginnings of a new nation away from the natives already present. Here, the river took its current name, once being called the Powhatan, after an Indian chief, only to be renamed the King's River by the colonists, in honor of King James, but in such a way that the new title could be used to make the natives believe it was in honor of King Powhatan. Everyone simply called it the James after the natives' influence was eliminated by similar conniving methods. The salty tears can be tasted here.
Finally, the James releases itself into the Chesapeake, where it is a physically abused giant growth from its mountain origins. At the Chesapeake, it is far from an uncarved block.
I also was born a tiny beautiful living thing, looking for the most comfortable way to go about my path, but others manipulated me and used me for their own good and took away what I could give them for very little in return. This, I cynically believe, will continue until something bigger swallows me away, my Chesapeake being death.
But the James doesn't seem to worry about it. To borrow a line from the Allman Brothers, "it just keeps on flowing, it don't worry 'bout where it's going."
One of my best friends moved to Colorado a couple of years ago, hoping to get into the music school at the University of Colorado, but he had to establish residency first for affordable tuition rates. After a few months there, he was working a shitty job, had few friends he considered meaningful, and was diagnosed with some disease in his colon. It was curable, but depressing nonetheless. He wrote me a letter about all these problems, saying he wished he could come back and "chill on the river & listen to it laugh and float around some answers."
I had this in mind as I woke up on the morning of my twenty-second birthday with a deep ball of confusion planted deep inside my guts, right where you can sense things. I was disillusioned by the seemingly useless education I was getting, and the superficial people I was surrounded by, and the endlessly futile job I was working at, so I got on my roommate's bike and rode down to Belle Isle, that same place introduced to me four years ago. It was early in the morning, so no one else was around, and I went to the rocks alongside the river rapids. Leaving the bike on the path that circles around the isle, I skipped out onto these rocks, over the holes of still water, over to one large chunk of granite that juts out into the river farther than the rest of the accessible ones. Beside this rock, the water rushed over an underwater rock, and smoothly curled down a drop of four feet between the rock I was on and another piece of granite ten feet over, towards the middle of the river. At the bottom of this flawlessly smooth descension, the water smashed over more rocks, creating bubbling white rapids and a slight mist, along with that comforting sound. I sat myself down at this vortex, shut my eyes, and listened to the river laugh at me and the situations I get myself bogged down in. The river entered me with every breath, flushing out all the traumas I momentarily thought were insurmountable.
And looking back I realize the reason I've always gone to the running water, whether it be a small stream or a raging river, is because it knows what I go through. Just as my ancient newborn mind is polluted as I travel through this material world, its mountain beginnings are corrupted by a lot of what it wanders through. But the river never gets bogged down like I do. It keeps rolling along like always. From time to time I need to be reminded that I should do the same.
________________________________________
Bibliography
Bartlett, Richard A., ed. Rolling Rivers: An Encyclopedia of America's Rivers. New York, NY: McGrawHill Book Company, 1984.
Ryan, David D. The Falls of the James. Richmond, VA: William Byrd Press, 1975.
Seelye, John. Prophetic Waters: The River in Early American LIfe and Literature. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1977.
Woodlief, Ann. In River TIme: The Way of the James. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books, 1985.

So yeah.
STEAL "James River Blues"
NEXT: Yet another Iron & Wine song, which I think may be the last since I've purged myself of that obsession!

LEARNED ELDERS: Jimmy Valiant

I was gonna write some new stuff about Jimmy Valiant, the professional wrestler, and his influence on me, but then I wrote a piece years ago for the homeboy Reverend Axl Future's Clawhold magazine about Valiant, and that sums it up as good as anything I'd ramble out my brain today, so I'll just throw that back up here for the Boogie Woogie Man write-up. Really, me and Rev. Axl Future kinda reiterate the Street People Philosophy as developed by one Handsome Jimmy Valiant. I used to keep up tight with this dude, we sent mail back and forth between post office boxes, even working on a few writing projects together that nobody ever saw but us I think. And I haven't heard from that dude in years - I would imagine his kid is like 8 or 9 now maybe, but he's out there. And if we came together or in wide traveling circles crossed paths, it'd be good times. That's how Street People are - we wander away and meander together and find new Street People all the time. It's very much like the Cockroach People that Oscar Zeta Acosta wrote about (get that book if you don't have it... most important work of the Hunter S. Thompson Gonzo movement wasn't even written by HST, it was written by his crazed lawyer). We are all in this together.
When I was living in Hamlet's Trailer Park in southside Virginia, I went to a show with Boogie Woogie and talked about going to wrestling school. At the time I was working like crazy and just redeveloping my relationship with my wife, who was obviously not my wife at that point. I was in my mid-20s, and made the executive decision that spending long weekends on the road all the time to wrestle in front of a couple hundred people, if I was lucky and if I could cut it in the training, was not worth not soaking up the love of this woman. It's hard to imagine what kind of person I'd look like at this point if I had sunk myself into the strange sub-culture of shallow south (as opposed to deep south) independent professional wrestling. I would imagine the blend of character and real person would be pretty heavily criss-crossed, which is fine. No one should know your true reality; everything is putting on a character, in order to entertain yourself. And the great thing about that is the characters you portray end up contaminating your true self at the same time, so you end up warping who you are in the process of acting slightly warped. It's great. There's a lot of things I have written over the years that people wonder if it's real or not, or assume it's real, or assume I'm crazy. I can tell you with a straight face that every word I have ever written is completely true, even the stuff I made up.
So here is my thing about Jimmy Valiant and his war with the nefarious and middle managerial Paul Jones...

“I guess a lotta people think I’m crazy, Boogie…but this chain means I’m tied up…and once I take this chain off, it means freedom…and you know what freedom means? It means get down, get nasty, and boogie. I’m here for the jam, baby…I’m here for the jam, Boogie.” – The Junkyard Dog in a promo with “The Boogie Woogie Man” Jimmy Valiant
America’s a great place because there’s all kinds of weird shit around to occupy time, whether it be drugs or porn or weird chicks with tattoos on their lower back highlighting the fat ass they’re barely covering up with a pair of blue jeans. But the seventh grade social studies lesson that anybody can become anything in America is bullshit. Some of us are born poor and the most we can hope for is to knuckle and claw and scrape our ass up to middle class at best. And it’s not so much that there are buffers against certain types of people succeeding; it’s just that some of us don’t fit in with that successful white collar crowd. I couldn’t in good conscious cut my hair. I can’t make the bad homemade tattoos on my fingers disappear. That’s me now; there’s no turning back.
Similarly, in the world of the squared circle, there are some guys who just aren’t designed for Wrestlemania main event status. Some people you just can’t polish off enough to sell to all the mainstream squares who have the loose purse strings that you’re average sleazy wrestling promoter is looking for. These are the guys the mid-carders that get bloody and battle for the TV title and make the social misfit kids excited and do their job, but they lack that clean and sterile look the main event heel or babyface has.
My favorite wrestlers have always been mid-carders. Shit, anything in my life – music, movies, whatever, I automatically hate it when it gets successful. Success equals sell-out in my book, because I’m all screwed up in the head from growing up a poor white kid sucking down King Vitamin mom got with her WIC check. I’m full of resentment and hatred for anything even suggesting success. When I was young, I didn’t care about Ric Flair versus Harley Race or Sgt. Slaughter & Don Kernodle vs. Ricky Steamboat & Jay Youngblood. What got me going was that evil Jap the Great Kabuki with his bald-headed sweaty bastard manager Gary Hart and their war with the motherfuckin’ King of My World – Jimmy Valiant. Whereas, the Steamboats and Youngbloods and Wahoo McDaniels looked like wrestlers fighting for good, Jimmy Valiant looked like the type of guy I’d see hanging with my folks on the weekends. He represented us, the insane Southern white underclass. He truly was down for the “street people” he always rambled about in his promos. Valiant looked like the type of guy that would be stabbing one of my dad’s friends for bending the corners of the threes to get them to run together at the poker table. The bad tattoos, the abundance of facial hair, the satin jackets with his name embroidered above the left breast…it all adds up to white underclass.
There has never been a feud in wrestling history that I followed like such a mark as the multi-year Jimmy Valiant/Paul Jones feud. Valiant, in his street clothes with KISS MY emblazoned on the ass end of his trunks, and his wild hand clapping and street slang and wild partners like Rufus R. Jones and Bugsy McGraw and Superstar Graham in a tie-dye shirt, he represented the white underclass that just wanted to be themselves - to get down and boogie, to spend half their paycheck on a Friday night at a shitty bar shooting pool and sucking back Old Milwaukees. On the other hand, Paul Jones, self-titled as “Number One,” as a manager, represented management – the wannabe upper level white losers who wore the goofy dress-up clothes and did whatever was necessary to become a financial success. And the soulless bad guys lined up to serve Paul Jones managerial needs against the subversive nature of the Boogie Woogie Man Jimmy Valiant. But all the One Man Gangs and Barbarians and Baron Von Raschke’s didn’t matter to Valiant. They were natural enemies.
You gotta understand, this Valiant/Jones feud played for years in Crockett country, main eventing all the small-town shows and mid-carding the major monthly house shows. And the reason Valiant was a main event draw in the small towns that got one wrestling card a year was because he was the wrestler under contract to Crockett that spoke strongest to the rural types. My favorite wrestling card I’ve been to live to this day is seeing NWA in Buckingham, Virginia, at the Buckingham County High School on the middle of the football field. The main event that night was Jimmy Valiant vs. Shaska Whatley. And therein lies the beauty of the Jones/Valiant feud.
Like I said, Paul Jones represented management, and Jimmy Valiant represented getting drunk and having three ol’ ladies. The two didn’t mix. But Paul Jones would convince Valiant’s best buddies, first Pistol Pez Whatley, and later “The Ragin’ Bull” Manny Fernandez, that going the way of management was the way of success. Pez became Shaska, with a shitty militant African attitude as opposed to just being a street person and getting down regardless of what their race was. Jones changed Whatley. And the Manny Fernandez turn, that was absolutely sick and out of nowhere. Valiant disappeared, as it was the ultimate betrayal. It takes a trashy looking woman with the most gigantic natural breasts, aptly title Big Mama, searching for Valiant, to find him in front of a liquor store moaning the blues about losing his best friend. Who the fuck heard of that? A wrestler so distraught over losing his tag team partner he’s playing a damned harmonica in front of a boondocks liquor store? Absolutely fuckin’ beautiful.
But the culmination of the feud was the Great American Bash. It started slow, with Valiant and his old best buddy and newest enemy Shaska Pez Whatley battling in coal miner’s glove matches and the such. Eventually, it came down to hair vs. hair, with Valiant putting the long locks and long beard on the line. Of course Whatley lost.
But it got worse. By the end of the summer, Paul Jones was bald and Jimmy Valiant had no beard left either. It was a true professional wrestling war, where both sides took losses and bladed nightly and did what was necessary to pack the working class stiffs in the seats.
And that’s my problem. There’s nobody doing that for me today. All the guys trying to represent the white underclass culture seem like MTV-style cartoonish portrayals of trailer trash. How many wrestlers take the time to grow a long-ass beard nowadays, much less have shitty eagle tattoos? The world ain’t what it used to be; the Paul Joneses have won.
It makes me happy though, that a couple of hours down the road, at a cinderblock compound on the side of a mountain in Shawsville, Virginia, “The Boogie Woogie Man” Jimmy Valiant runs Boogie’s Wrestling Camp, where he trains the new breed of wrestling fan how to take a bump and be insane. Valiant’s a lot older now, and he moves slower, but he is still apt to bust out a kiss on the lips for the big black dude in the front row, and most likely he’ll put a clawhold on the bad guy’s dick. And in big crude letters across his chest is “COME TO PAPA”. Writers and booking committees and corporate sponsored pay-per-views, none of that has room for a crazy hillbilly with a “COME TO PAPA” tattoo. And that’s why the fuck I could give a shit less about wrestling anymore.

So that's an older style than what I rock now with words, but still, the point holds true. And if you're out there my spiritual brother RAF, much love bro. Hope all is good.

Weekly Recap

I have not done much with myself, but there are some things going on. Mostly, I have been laid up in my stupid bed this week, to the point I am going mad with frustrated energy. But beyond here, I am still doing things at the Armchair Linebacker blog, which still includes bitching about the stupid Redskins. But my weekly NFL thing is located there now, and this week was about the conference championships, if you be caring. Also started contributing to a beisbol blog called Baseball Feelings, and I did a thing about baseball payrolls last year and how much teams paid for each victory they had. It's fucking ridiculous.
But more importantly to me, I started a photo blog called Cyclotron 3000. The world doesn't exactly need another picture blog, but I have been bored, I guess, or inactive, or something. Or I just want a compendium of weird pics to use for brainwashing myself. I'm not sure. I tried tumblr, but the one thing I learned was that tumblr sucks. Seriously, I do not say that from the "I don't like to do things differently" angle, but because I set a bunch of shit up, it was queued, and never did anything. Tags wouldn't show, and it was impossible to edit, so fuck tumblr.
I also want to mention and give a Big Ups to The Acid Sweat Lodge, which is my favorite picture blog of forever. I love that place, and have co-opted many images from there for using in the J.J. Krupert write-ups. I won't be using any Acid Sweat Lodge images at the Cyclotron 3000, at least not on purpose. When homeless guys drink with me by the river and talk about aliens on earth and I pull out my laptop to show them proof of alien technology on earth, it is the website I take them to as an example of how this evil technology can be used for awesome.
So yeah. What's up with you?

Weekly Recap

The great nonsense this week is that now there are Rojonekku t-shirts available - in the below design which is Fall '10...

I am going to run a super-limited edition set of t-shirts every season of every year, mostly because I don't have any t-shirts I like to wear so this will stock my goddamned closet up. In case the pic is too tiny, front has ROJONEKKU SS VA WORD FIGHTING ARTS and the back has a line of mine from the song "True Loungers" by Prolo - "true loungers find comfort in the hardscrabble ground". You can click the ENABLE ROJONEKKU button over there on the right to get one, cost is $20 if you get it from me real life in everyday person effect, $25 through American mail, and $30 I guess internationally, although all I'm sure on that front is Australia, and I might not even be sure on that. Specify size because like I said, quantities are mad limited. You will also receive a few other assorted goodies, including a mini-zine THAT WILL NEVER SEE THE LIGHT OF INTERNET DAY with your order.
So yeah. There is also the Amphetazine site that I am on, although I never posted my own post until last night. But the dude who runs it digs through my assorted meanderings through multiple websites and zines and guardrails and whatever else and he puts up notable shit. Here is the Amphetazine output for this past week:
something about taking the kids to the science museum, which I have no recollection of writing but is the greatest thing I've read all week
talking about why Hank Williams III is better than the rest of the punk ass country music made nowadays
an old thing about Jimmy Valiant done for Clawhold zine back in the day (what up Rocco if you're still out there!)

And then there is the Armchair Linebacker NFL football blog, which even though nobody knows about it, is one of the greatest motherfucker internetted pro football places ever. Seriously. Mad love to my man Neil as well as Harpo, LPOY, Mike Dikk, and anybody else who has made that place into what it is now. This past week, not only did I do my usual Redskins shit, but I moved my weekly NFL thing from here to there because I'd like this place to not be so much the place as a launching point, so hopefully I start launching more thing. I am big on carrots in front of my eyes lately. Anyways, my ACLB contributions this past week went a little something like this:
post Redskins/Lions game metascience positives/negatives recap
laying out all the players - major and minor - in the Redskins QB drama
week 9 NFL recap/preview/NFLuminati Index

So that's it for this week. As always, I ask that you share my nonsense with others, upon the Facecrooks or Twitters or whatever the fuck you use to pretend you are in touch with real life people. If you are with me now, I will be with you then. I am loyal to a fault, so exploit that as my explosive trajectory is still low on the cultural horizon. And together we will Scud missile the world, or at least some tiny little corner of it.

Weekly Recap

Well, I skipped a week there but ain't shit to recap anyways. New editorial command at Heavy dried up that gig, but Armchair Linebacker is always there, where you can read my angry and drunken Washington Redskins fandom play out firsthand. This past week, I recapped the loss to the Colts, and talked about how important in the modern NFL climate it will be for the Redskins to concuss more people than concuss them.
Additionally, the dude that be doing Amphetazine is putting up older classics from this site over there (like this thing about Goat Rights vs. Property Rights). Amphetazine is a noble idea, and the other stuff over there is interesting, so you should check it out. I hope I have remembered to put it in my sidebar, but mayhaps I have not yet.
Speaking of which, you can order the book I have a story in (story called Escambia Counties) called Florida Heat Wave, with other projects on the horizon. Everything I do, I have to do all grand and convoluted, so none of these projects are on the immediate horizon, but they are there. I can definitely feel an energy shift of shit about to be changing in the coming year. In relation to that, I know I have a loyal fanbase, but whenever you feel the lololols or enjoy some of my dumb shit on Rojonekku, it helps to click those sharing buttons under every post. I could remain an obscure dude forever and live a long frustrated life, or I could become exploited in exchange for fame and ultimately self-destruct through my own drunken recklessness because of the way my DNA is swirled. You can help me do the latter by sharing links and helping spread my fresh-dipped SS Va. ways to the rest of the crooked ass world. Mad daps to you if you do. And the reason I'd prefer the exploited ultimately destructive route instead of the obscurity route is because one involves dick tattoos and the other does not. It has long been my goal in life to have a dick tattoo, meaning a tattoo on my penis, not a tattoo of a penis. Also relatedly to the new-fangled cybertronic hyping machines of the world, I have the twitters now (@rojonekku) and yes, twitters is the stupidest fucking idiotic goddamn thing ever. Yes. But I am there. And being certain real life people who are Facebook fans are not in the twitters, I find I can get away with saying stupider things there, which of course, just perpetuates what the twitters actually is. It is a bizarre spiral we are in.
Also, Rojonekku t-shirts, hopefully beginning of November, will be for sale. You can always donate money to my dumb ass to buy caffeine-free ginger ale to take my medicines with by clicking the ENABLE ROJONEKKU button. If you give me $10, I'll postcard you back. If you give $20 or more, I'll write you a letter. (Triple N - your letter is on my desk at home; I keep meaning to tear this one page out of a magazine to put in the envelope too but keep forgetting to get the magazine in question out of the camper behind my house after work. John B - I will write you a letter this weekend... thanks bro.)
Another also, this past week I wrote about an Uncle Sinner song in the J.J. Krupert countdown, and actually got an email from the dude Uncle Mike Sinner, who is as solid as his song suggested to me, and fights that good/bad fight with pushing your ideas out to the world through the inhibiting DNA of deeply embedded recklessness and destruction. Anyways, Uncle Sinner has a myspace, and after talking to the dude, I felt compelled to share the link. Check it out.
Finally, I am in the preliminary stages of setting up a monthly event called the CVA WFA or Central Virginia Word Fighting Arts. This is an offshoot of my personal brand of meandering writing - Rojonekku - which is a SSVA (southside Virginia) word fighting art, not so much to fight other people but just generally to fight the entire fucking world and everything that makes life so goddamn hard to handle on a day-to-day basis. It is so easy to just fellate a pistol and cash out early, and I had an uncle of mine do that back in the day and he was one of the most solid dudes I ever knew. But fuck man, when you are blessed with the unlocked creativity flow of whatever medium your brain is predisposed towards, you have to use it to keep yourself from being dead. And if you ain't got it unlocked yet, you have to find that shit. Ultimately that's what Rojonekku is all about anyways, and I should have some sort of explanation for all this on the blog, but I don't. That's one of the projects on the horizon, the Rojonekku Training Manual, which literally what it sounds like, methods and exercises I've used with the semi-delinquent vagabond teenagers I tend to attract to the compound, to put them on the path to not fucking up the world normal-style, where all you do is get put in jail, but fucking it up on that other level, where you destroy norms by proudly being your own form of normal, disrupting the status quo's standards of normalcy. It's an important fucking thing to do, in fact it's imperative. Honestly, I regard my paypal donations as slush funds for just such endeavors, so I don't tell my family about it. Those $20 drops here or there do not go to electric bills or gas for the truck or new ballet shoes for the kid; it all goes on fucked up things. Old Easyriders off Ebay or 17 different world flags that look fucked up to string up along the roadside in front of my house to scare the world or india ink to continue putting raggedy ass homemade stars on my thighs or a box of wine to go hike all the way through the pitch black darkness of the Crozet tunnel through Afton Mountain with my man D-Mo. It generates psychic nonsense for my little corner of the world, which in turn is filtered into more psychic nonsense words - Rojonekku - inside the interweb demons, which hopefully is strong enough to transmit through all the electronic clutter in our lives just enough to spiral your day into a more nonsensical and non-normal way. That's really all I want to do - fuck shit up with words.

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - August '10 #5: "Dixie On My Mind" by The Charlie Daniels Band

I am going to run a marathon of donations at some point in the coming weeks, like a two day period with a chunk of new posts, one per hour, where you donate money to my paypal to support me riding a Greyhound bus across the deep south into Texas and then back up through the lower midwest, down through West Virginia, back home. Not really, I just need money because my bills are expensive and I don’t have enough discretionary income to get a tattoo of a ruler on my dick, which I really really REALLY want to get so that I can visually pretend my penis is larger than it is. The Brett Favre texted pics just drove that point home to me. At the same time, I’ve always wanted a back tattoo in seven layers that involves my entire life, a map, SS Va. but looking all fresh-dipped as fuck in a tweaked out style, and I actually wrote a long ass thing about that but I mailed it off to the Oxford American. You know them bitches ain’t gonna print it, but if I give up and post it here, then they’ll use their jewbot internet tracking softwares to see if it’s been printed before and they’ll find it here and rather than go, “Oh shit, this muthafucka be writing all types of stupid shit,” they’ll think “We can’t use this, it’s been previously published in a public forum,” like Waldo from that Van Halen “Hot For Teachers” video all growed up. So pretend I didn’t mention it, and hopefully they will publish it and pay me probably like $25 if I’m lucky and I will supposed to be happy about that. Man, fuck writing. I should just spray paint haiku on people’s cars instead.
STEAL "Dixie On My Mind"
NEXT UP: Stupid ass hipsterism, but bright and sunny!

Weekly Recap

Not too much outsider shit to recap, though I did keep up my footbal-related obligations at Heavy for Week 2 of the NFL, and at Armchair Linebacker for the game against the Texans by my beloved yet doomed Washington Redskins.
I also listened to some personal branding bullshit book on tape for some people I am doing some online hypeman for, and it tricked me into starting a twitter account for Rojonekku. Then like a day later, it felt stupid as fuck, and then the guy who handles the money at my daughter's ballet school, who has a sorta tool-ish aspect to him regarding sales and marketing, he was talking to my wife about how great twitter was and how many people followed him and that was the final straw for me so I went ahead and deleted it already. But I did get a $20 donation through Paypal using the ENABLE ROJONEKKU button over there to the right in the sidebar, and realized that people's addresses are in their Paypal donations. So I sat down and wrote the dude that gave me $20 a one-page letter and mailed it to him. Actually, it's sitting in my truck still because I didn't make it to the post office in time today, but I'm gonna mail it Monday. Sending people handwritten nonsense is so much more my speed than stupid fucking twitter. I am about real people in real places.
So yeah, if you donate anything above $10, I'll send you a postcard at least. Above $20 and I'll bust out a letter. One-of-a-kind insane internet man gibberish, but real life in your hands like paranoid schizophrenics who write about Jesus on yellow legal pads and tack their shit in every phone booth around town. And now there are no more phone booths. Where has all the real shit gone?
You also don't have to do shit and things will most likely continue along as usual. That's sort of how this thing works.

Weekly Recap

Football season has sprang upon us.
At Heavy.com, I have a weekly thing that will go down on Mondays. Here is the past week's column.
At Armchair Linebacker, I did a post-Redskins/Cowboys game metasciences analysis, as well as a defense of Clinton Portis the other day.
And of course, you could always buy yourself a copy of the book I'm in too.

Weekly Recap

All non-Rojonekku work this week has been football-related, meaning American football, not Champions League discussion. At Heavy.com, I wrapped up previewing the second half of the league in four installments:
Knockin' On Second's Door (Houston Texans, Philadelphia Eagles, San Francisco 49ers, and Cincinnati Bengals)
Playoff-Equipped (New York Giants, Atlanta Falcons, Pittsburgh Steelers, and New England Patriots)
Second-Tier Super-Teams (Minnesota Vikings, Green Bay Packers, Baltimore Ravens, and San Diego Chargers)
and Super Bowl Darlings (New York Jets, New Orleans Saints, Dallas Cowboys, and Indianapolis Colts)

Also, Armchair Linebacker has been cranking up as the NFL season begins, and I have two notable to me at least Redskins things there:
why Dan Snyder sucks, pt. 148
Metasciences preview of the impending season

My apologies if you don't like football. This is a phase I'm going through.

Weekly Recap

It was an internettedly interesting yet ultimately in real life no change week in Rojonekku land. I got mentioned at the white people famous Huffington Post, which made people in regular interactions thinks there was some sort of fame in my life. What people understand is this is a path I've been on since birth, and it doesn't matter half a fuck if the world recognizes that path or not, it is my predetermined path that I was born into. It may not get recognized until long after my death, but I have known inside my self the soul trajectory, and that's why this cybertron shit is ultimately a joke to me. But still, it was nice to see, like a panty shot but for the ego and not the penis.
Also, I have been doing NFL previews at Heavy, and basically those NFL updates I've done the past few years on this blog are there this year. I can't post the whole thing here, and I get very little money for what I am doing, but that's the nature of trying to go legit with your illegitimate bullshit. Here is the rundown of direct links from last week (and previews of the lower half of the NFL, team by team):
Intro to the previews
The Wretched of the Turf (previews of the Buccaneers, the Rams, the Bills, and the Browns)
I Swear, It Will Be Different This Time (previews of the Lions, the Chiefs, the Jaguars, and the Raiders)
M4MF Please Be Real (previews of the Broncos, the Seahawks, the Panthers, and the Cardinals)
Don't Believe The Hype (previews of the Bears, the Redskins, the Titans, and the Dolphins)
Also, there is Florida Heat Wave, of which I have a story called Escambia Counties inside the middle of it. It is from inside my brain, the story not the book. There are, at this moment, nine books inside my brain. I am working on building a transponder machine to bring them to the real world, to corrupt children and brainwash old people with early signs of Alzheimers.

Weekly Recap

I haven't had anything to recap the past week or so, but this week I got back into the swing of football opinions for you. Namely, over at Armchair Linebacker, I had a lengthy and personalize write-up about the Albert Haynesworth/Mike Shanahan thing going on with the Redskins. Additionally, starting next week, I'll be covering the NFL at Heavy, which has some questionable content, which means I'll probably fit in well there.
Additionally, the Florida Heat Wave collection of which I have a story in is actually available now (here it is at Amazon, or direct from the publisher).

Weekly Recap

So I contribute to a couple of other blogs sporadically, and kinda realize I'm a piece of shit who doesn't have the focus or mind freedom to contribute anything better to this world than half-retarded well-worded ridiculous opinions, most likely featuring some sort of libel or conjecture or outright lie, and I figured a good thing to do, rather than copy all those posts here, would be to - on Friday mornings - bust a post with links to all that other dumb shit. This would be the first one, and perhaps the last knowing my moody ass.

From the new TV Makes You Retarded blog - a recap/mind meander of The Corner miniseries' first episode
and the second episode
From Armchair Linebacker pro football blog (where I write about the Washington Redskins) - A New Season Dawns

Plus, there is the Florida Heat Wave anthology of short stories I am in that will be coming out this month. You can get that inside the internets or even win an unedited preview copy in this thing.

March Madness Coverage At Heavy.com

Don't know why I haven't been linking up these week daily coverage columns of the NCAA tournament, but here will be a collection of the links up to today's thing. There will be daily nonsense as well this week and through the championship game next Monday at Heavy.

The Number One Seeds
The Play-In Game
Things To Watch For On First Round Thursday
Things To Watch For On First Round Friday
NCAA Superstar Mentality vs. Team Mentality
NCAA Tournament Expansion Pack
NCAA Underdogs
Sweet 16 Thursday Night Preview
Sweet 16 Friday Night Preview
The Final Four

Fuck John Feinstein. I should have a basketball book, where all I do is ride around to shitty hotels and watch the tournament with whatever low lifes I befriend along the way.

Carbon 14 article: All-American Story of Killing Dogs and Wrecking Cars for Fun

(This also was in some issue of Carbon 14 magazine, which is a fine glossy periodical full of smut and wrestling and whores and rock-n-roll. This is one of my favorite things I wrote in the past two years, and I sent it to an old professor to get a letter of recommendation for some bullshit and she stopped talking to me afterwards. People get shook up over you admitting you slit a dog's throat.)
My wife and I both had our respective dogs before we became attached ourselves; in fact, one of our first “dates” was after some party, taking what was left of a half-gallon of Jack Daniels and what was left of a quarter bag of kind bud, rounding up both our dogs and “borrowing” a friend’s minivan to go to Montana. I finally passed out behind a K-Mart somewhere near the West Virginia state line.
Once we actually were married, the dogs ran together for years, making it to almost ten years apiece, before they both died in the tragic ways dogs in the country always die – getting hit by trucks or mauled by pit bulls or always something fucked up. So we looked a little too easily for new dogs to replace these old ones.
The first one to come along was a small, scared hunting dog who came from the woods, cowering in anticipation of beatdowns, wagging her tail, looking for food. I didn’t really want her, but the wife and kids, even though she’d never get close enough for you to pet her, had attached themselves to this stray. That became our first new dog – Burdock. You could hardly ever touch her, and if you did it was because you cornered her and she’d cower down onto her belly, holding her head under her body, but still wagging her tail, the classic runaway beaten stray.
We acquired our second dog to complete the new pair from my youngest sister. Where I grew up – Farmville, Virginia – is a hopeless shithole where factories have plywood windows and folks’ favorite leisure activities are testing life’s limits through suicidal recklessness. This may involved machines or drugs. My youngest sister had gotten wrapped up the local art of meth abuse, leaving the house only to go to her job as a waitress, her and her boyfriend holed up in their shitty cave-like house along a back road, indulging beyond their limits to pull back. Turned out her boyfriend had also started dabbling in crack use as well, and the whole time they had this part lab, part chow, big yellow goof of a dog named Buddy who basically stayed chained up at the front door so as to scare away all the more thievish members of the black folks who lived nearby. One night, while driving home from something or another, my sister dropped her cigarette in the car, and her boyfriend held the wheel while she fished for it. He decided it better to slam the wheel to the left and smash them into a tree because he had, without her knowing, been stealing thousands of dollars from his job to help keep up his taste for crack rocks. Car burned up, destroyed half of what my sister owned, he ran off and disappeared and the cops explained they were looking for him, sister got her wake up call and moved back home to get herself back together. So we took in Buddy.
Now previously, before they had moved into the shithole they lived in, Buddy was riding in transit in the back of a pick-up truck, which he dove out of, hobbling off into the woods miles away from where he left and where he was going. They looked and looked for him, but never found him. Three weeks later, he came limping down the road, goofy as ever, and he had made it to his new home. My sister’s boyfriend had found him a few years earlier from some other similar mangled discovery, so Buddy was a sort of impervious freak of an animal, more feral than pet-like, though friendly.
Buddy and Burdock – our new pair of dogs – never worked. They ran the roads around the farms we lived near too much, dragging home deer carcasses, coming home with scrapes from scraps, and just being general nuisances. They scared my kids half the time, and when they dragged in an unskinned baby deer I realized they weren’t just finding hunting leftovers in the woods but actually running down weaker deer. I never could see the logic in having a dog in a rural setting and keeping them penned up or chained, but I tried to train them. No luck though. Buddy’d chase every motorcycle or dump truck that drove past and Burdock came home with trash or critters in her mouth all the time. I waited for the day for some redneck hot shot trying to be Jeremy McGrath on his crotch rocket to wipe out because the dogs dove out the tall grass in the ditch, trying to bite his rear tire.
I had tried half-assedly to find somewhere for the dogs to go, asking around and calling the local shelter, which was always booked beyond capacity. The last straw came when I got home one day and my wife was down in the field, hollering for me. We have three goats, and we don’t milk them, but I’ve become attached to them. Goats are weird creatures, and a lot of fun to play with, though they’ll clip your knee from behind like a mid-‘70s middle linebacker. Growing up a metalhead, it seemed so perfect to have these weird album-cover like creatures, and I forever wanted to name them things like Exodus or Kreator or Cirith Ungol or some other band from my youthful doodles of skeletons thrashing stages in front of a thousand impaled, decapitated bodies on notebook paper meant for math problems. Having two daughters and a wife though, the goats ended up with names like Carrot or Gingerbread or Lavendar all the time.
Well, the dogs, who had gotten more feral than we realized, cornered our oldest goat in the pasture and mauled her. My wife fought them off and was holding them at bay, standing protectively over the dying goat, holding our two-year-old, who for months would ask in broken child talk, “Goat hurt? Goat die?” I grabbed both dogs and threw them in a couple rabbit hutches I found in a dumpster one time, and went down to tend to the goat, who had bled a lot and had innards dragging along underneath her. I’ve always been the one to feed and play with the goats and I’ve got a weight bench out there by their pen, so I’ll get high and lift weights and sit in my chair and just hang out at the edge of this field with the goats a lot of the time, so they became attached to me, as goats are very social creatures. This goat perked up when I got there, so instead of dying like she should’ve easily done, she just kind of wobbled on her gnarled-up legs, looking at me like, “Yo, fix this shit.” There was nothing I could do, and I didn’t have money enough to do things like pay a phone bill, much less spend it getting some timid animal lover to overcharge me to act like my goat was my grandfather and sew her and operate her and all that crap. After about an hour and it getting dark, it was obvious the goat wasn’t going to go on her own, so I threw a towel over her head, and she was pretty weak from blood loss, so I leaned on top of her, suffocating her to finish what the dogs had started. A friend who has farm animals told me the quickest way was to slit their throats or shoot them, but I don’t keep guns and couldn’t quite build myself up to using my Marine Ka-bar knife to slice the family’s elder goat.
The problem now was the dogs had to go as well. As a kid growing up, we had stray dog killings from time to time, when we’d look around and realize we had about seven half-wild mange-ridden beasts running around the yard all the time, and my dad and his buddy would pull out pistols and shoot them all down when necessary. Like I said, I don’t keep guns, so the knife was the only way to go, and that seemed pretty fucked up to me. I took the smaller dog – Burdock – with a rope tied around her neck as a lead as neither dog had a collar, and took her back into the woods behind my house. I thought to myself how easy in physical effort (not in mental effort) it had been to choke out the goat, so I mistakenly thought I could just strangle this little stray hunting dog, even though I had my knife with me. I tightened the rope and wrapped it around my fist and pulled, pushing against the back of the dog’s neck, straddling it out in the pitch black woods, and no matter how hard I did this, the dog never would die. I’d let up to see what was going on, and the dog would whimper meekly and wag her tail. Here I was, a grown educated man, sitting on top of a dog who’s whole life had been beatdowns and torture, trying to strangle her. It creeped me out, like I was some degenerate killing a hooker, putting me far too in touch with some primal shit inside us all. Finally, after about ten minutes of this, when I realized there was no turning back because I’d probably brain damaged the dog so I couldn’t just let the rope loose and have her wobble around like a halfwit now, I had to slit her throat with the knife. Now I’ve cut deer before that have been dead for a short time already, but never cut the throat of a live animal. Sitting there in the heavy dark on a stump, wanting to make sure the dog died, and hearing the sounds of blood pumping through a gaping slash across the neck… it was some fucked-up sounding shit that etched right into my heart. There was no way I could do that to the bigger dog, the one that had been chained up outside my sister’s house for years. Maybe I’m too weak or too emotional, but I didn’t really want to start making a practice nor even one more memory of doing shit like this to a dog.
So I pulled the bloody rope lead off of Burdock, buried her, and put it on Buddy, driving him to the shelter that was forever overfull in the middle of the night, and looping his ass to the front gate for them to find in the morning. It might not have been right in their eyes, but they’d probably mind that less than me killing his ass with a foot-long blade.
The whole incident, though normal old school farm activity, knocked my non-old school non-farming ass out of whack. The creepy degenerate killing a hooker parallel kept bouncing around in my head, and I just didn’t feel right. I felt like a piece of shit about the whole ordeal, even though I did what I had to do.
Anyways, I had been building myself up for months for a spring road trip out to rural Illinois to this giant demolition derby called Metal Mayhem, with a $10,000 purse. It’s one of the biggest demo derbies of the year, with almost 200 cars, and me and my boy Brown were hyped. I was hoping this trip, and just wandering the road free of responsibility, even if just for four or five days, might wash me of my guilt.
Going to the midwest was interesting, as I’d never been out there. Chicago creeped me out in its endless sprawl and sterilized appearance. My mother was actually born in Chicago, and it was strange to imagine I could’ve been bred here instead of rural Virginia. Before and after Chicago on the trip though, the midwest just tweaked me and Brown out, as it was nothing but flatland, forever.
Demo derbies are big-time in this part of the country. Whereas back home, they might have five or six in the whole state of Virginia all year long, in the midwest, demo derbies are big affairs, and crews of guys will actually form teams of drivers and travel a couple of state in any direction to go for bigger trophies and meager pay-offs. The make-up of the land has to have something to do with it, because back home with the hills and mountains and curves and creeks, you’d be hard-pressed to drive for half an hour without seeing a plastic bouquet on a guard rail or wooden cross in a ditch where someone died in a car wreck. Out in the midwest, the roads are so straight and the land so flat, I imagine it’s hard to really wreck a car bad enough to fuck yourself up, so the demo derby gives these guys, who all seemed to be pretty young, to test life’s limits through recklessness, just like the folks back home.
The day of the derby starting up, it was drizzling and cold, just pure miserable weather, which also made the pits muddier and slower, so the 40 car overflow heat for $2500 we were watching took almost three hours to finish up. This was going to take forever. It was great enjoyment watching how cars could become so mangled, with tie rods broken and one car even having its tire turned sideways so one wheel laid on the ground like a frisbee, and the engine still powered through, forcing the smashed metal to move around further than it ever should. But demo derbies are like porn in that any sane person doesn’t need to sit there and watch eight hours straight. This was at the Ogle County Fairgrounds in nowhere, Illinois, families all hunched together in the grandstands, sad sacks like us standing around against the concrete railings getting rained on and mud splattering at us from the fight pit. Me and Brown made a pit stop out to the car to pull a couple beers out the cooler, and sitting in the car, raining, miserable flatland, we decided fuck it, we’d go back to the hotel and get good and fucked-up and just come back tomorrow for the second day when hopefully the weather would be better.
On the way back, we stopped at some dive called Labon’s Oasis for a beer or two. It was a beautiful place – biker-style rednecks sitting around in satin jackets drinking Old Style tall cans. I put “Longhaired Redneck” on the jukebox, and we drank a couple, soaking in the local vibe. All these guys and girls looked like the type of folks who would’ve ran with my parents, except all these people talked funny, with that northern midwestern accent. And the jukebox had nothing but outlaw country and southern rock, full of my homeland twang. I found the whole thing amusing, as I’m sure if we had stayed all night, one of these guys would’ve eventually talked shit to my dreadlocked ass since I was a stranger. But for now, I just flashed my chipped-tooth smile, wild dimple behind a unkempt beard, got a knowing grin from the sad waitress while we settled up, and we went back to the hotel.
The next day it was raining even harder, so we decided to meander back towards home, so we didn’t have to drive twelve hours on Monday. And most of the midwest was not to our liking. We had occasional joys – riding through a Hispanic part of southside Chicago where folks obviously understood the importance of loungin’, and we got a shit-ass room in Dayton, Ohio, where we were surrounded by the comforts of a ghetto with bass-thumping by now and then and dingy Chinese buffets and check-cashing joints and the like. Tweaked out chicks would walk through the hotel parking lot, two of them catching me opening the door to stand there and drink a beer and trying to come in to wait for their ride, which in all likelihood would’ve been wherever we drove them. Fuck all that. I know tweaker chicks, and they never look as good as they remember themselves looking, and it’s never worth the trouble.
The next day, after what seemed like forever driving along 35 south through Ohio, we started to see signs of the land having depth to it and not just being stamped into long square fields. The four-lanes of 35 through Ohio narrowed down to two once we crossed into West Virginia, and it started to look like home again. Me and Brown started to unclench. Sometimes going on a road trip is good for nothing more than reminding you of what you love about where you ended up in life. Piedmont Virginia/North Carolina has been my home my whole life, except for brief forays in one direction or another, and whenever I get back towards that part of the country, whether in my own car or someone else’s or on a Greyhound, it feels like home more and more each time. Shit, I’m raising my own kids there now.
About half an hour into West Virginia, we saw a van pulled over on the side of the road with a lady frantically waving her arms. There were a couple cars in front of us and a couple behind, and the ones in front kept on trucking. Me and Brown decided to turn around and see what was up, and the car behind us honked at us for taking so long to find somewhere to turn around. When we got back to where the van was, a tractor and trailer had pulled over already with the driver running back to the van full speed. I pulled behind him just in time to see him reach in the back of the van and a body fall out, head first, into the gravel, feet still in the van. I ran over and asked if anybody had called 911, and the driver pointed me to his truck to get his cell phone. After calling, I handed the phone off to the frantic lady, because I didn’t know where the fuck I was. This kid, probably about fifteen, and with cut marks all over his arms already, had somehow wrapped the seat belt around his neck in an attempt to commit suicide while no one was paying attention to him. He was lifeless, no pulse, with his eyes open and glazed over, just like my goat’s looked after I choked her, foaming at the mouth. But a minute or so after the truck driver had cut the belt from around his neck, he started choking and gasping a little and his pulse came back and he was still alive. There was a purple ring around his throat from where he’d tied himself, and he just looked all mangled. As he came to, his first words were, “Am I dead?” And we told him no and made him lay there and wiped water on his head, and he started to get all freaked out, asking about his mom and about what happened and how he didn’t mean to do it, and I just told him to calm down, don’t worry about none of that shit right now. He just laid there, feet still in the van, sobbing lightly. He asked, “Am I going to be all right?” and the frantic lady who had been driving the van said, “You’re going to be just fine. These angels stopped and helped you.” She looked at me and the truck driver, “Every morning, I pray for angels, and they came today.” And she hugged us and the volunteer rescue squad showed up, so me and Brown cleared the fuck out quickly, anonymously.
Oddly enough, and even though I didn’t really do anything, that incident seemed to have righted me after sitting on top of a dying dog’s back in the dark. I don’t feel like there was anything special about it, nor do I feel like I did myself any karmic good by stopping along some foreign road to have a small hand in keeping some sad kid from killing himself, but I feel like I got myself even-keeled again. That old bullshit cliché is life’s a gamble, and clichés tend to be true, but in most gambles, there’s a lot more losing than winning, so that the house comes out on top. I feel like if I can get through all this bullshit called life and deal with all the bad hands it feels like I’m always dealt coming from where I come from, and relatedly thinking the way I think, if I can come out even, then I’m doing pretty damned good.
EPILOGUE: I went to that local shelter looking for some kittens to get as a surprise for my daughters the other week, and on their little dry erase board it had written on it “Buddy adopted”. Now, my Buddy had no name tag, so that couldn’t have been him; but also knowing his history of dodging all the death that surrounds him, it might be, and he’s probably getting into the trash in someone’s back yard right now.
Also, the biggest demolition derby that happens in Virginia is going on next week at a local fair, the same place I go to the dirt track races from time to time. It’ll be nice to watch cars destroy each other in comfortable environs where people have the same bad accent I do and I can see the blue ridge skyline in the distance.

Carbon 14 article: Uncarny Wrestling

(I don't keep good records of things, but this was in some issue of Carbon 14 magazine, which is a fine glossy periodical full of smut and wrestling and whores and rock-n-roll.)
I’m old school, so sometimes I like to just lay in the bathtub and read something or other and try to talk my wife into scrubbing my back, which she never does because she’s got a convoluted post-liberation notion that scrubbing your life partner’s back is submissive in some way. So I usually just lay there by myself, reading whatever’s come in the mail lately. The other night I was digging into this article in the March 2007 issue of Skin & Ink magazine, that had a long in-depth retelling of Captain Don Leslie’s life as a tattooed, sword swallowing, circus freak, who’s now dying of mouth cancer and at the end of a long, winding, and colorful life – with all of those adjectives meant literally as well as figuratively. The early part of his life, he had joined the circus and was just working a performers’ concession stand, but he had become captivated by watching the sword swallower work, to the point he would sneak it to watch the dude every day, not because it was fake or to figure out the trick or anything like that, but just because it was such a great thing – to swallow daggers and swords in front of these local bumpkins who had shelled out hard-earned dollars to watch the freak parade.
Eventually, that particular circus’s sword swallower taught Capt. Don the work, but this first sword swallower apparently was not so great, as Capt. Don, even though he didn’t need to, would feign chocking and gagging sounds as he thought that was how it was supposed to be done. A few years later, when being at his own gig, a midget freak watched Capt. Don and was shocked at how amateur his performance was, so told him he’d set up a fellow sword swallowing friend who would be performing nearby to come and check things out. This guy was Alex Linton, who at the time was the Guinness Book of World Records sword swallower. (Ahh… that childhood dream we all had to get into the Guinness Book for something, whether dribbling a basketball or growing our fingernails or eating a bicycle – it called the inner-carny in all of us.) Linton took to Capt. Don, taught him better techniques, and they developed a friendship that carried on into winter lay-offs from individual performing circuits where they would reconnect in Sarasota, where a lot of freaks wintered, and Linton would tell Capt. Don of great sword swallowers from the circus circuit’s past. At the time, Linton was a good thirty-some years the elder to Capt. Don, and he was passing on the stories of these legendary performers who were thirty-some years his own elder – an oral history of people who were near-perfect at something they had dedicated themselves to wholeheartedly, and whom no written word probably had ever been printed over.
This got me to thinking about the concept of the secret oral history and shared secrets involved in carnival-based performances, and how this relates to wrestling, or more specifically, how this relates to my recent conclusion that I don’t really care too much for the professional wrestling, itself a carnival-based performance at its root.
Pro wrestling lost the “It’s real!” charade, publicly, in the past twenty-five years, but that veil had been ripped away long before that 20/20 expose where John Stossel’s little weasel-voiced head got the hearing knocked out of one side of it. (To be fair, John Stossel is just as carny as any wrestler ever was, pretending he helps and cares in his role as fear-mongering household television journalist, and I guess he deserves credit, because his con will probably far outlast any con the wrestling industry can repackage itself into in the coming decades.) I doubt seriously the people of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s thought of a Harley Race or Ric Flair as an athletic parallel to Muhammad Ali or even Larry Holmes. People have known, or at best at least suspected, that wrestling was fake all along for quite some time. But the performance was executed in such a manner that… I don’t know, you just wouldn’t question it because so much had been put into doing it, I’m not sure what made people just go along. I guess that’s what’s drawn me to the wrestling all along, the WHY is this happening?
Post-kayfabe-breaking, the wrestling fan in the past decade or so has dwindled in the tangible world, but has thrived online, so that at most wrestling events, you can break the crowd down into two separate forms of retarded people – one half is physically retarded and probably still has the mental capacity to believe it’s real shit going on inside the squared circle, and I guess they help me enjoy the live wrestling experience a bit, because the other half is the social retard, chanting and yelling clever insider quips, and generally tweaking my own nerves a little too much. This is most likely a results of my own egotism, thinking I’m too good to hang out with the internet wrestling nerd who tends to be the type who loves comic books and actually knows the name of theme songs to Jap cartoons.
The internet wrestling nerd accepts the fact that the professional wrestling is not, nor ever was, real in any sense, and tends to take a scientific approach, considering himself (always himself, and usually not a very attractive himself) a student of the pseudo-sport, and often will be heard saying he “needs” to see this obscure match or some Best of So-and-So in Amarillo 1977 triple DVD set, which is nothing more than absolutely every appearance of So-and-So that the dude who put the collection together could find, with no actual attention being paid to what was best or not best, just a gluttonous grand buffet of one freaky slice of the pseudo-sport.
Within the internet-based Wrestling Nerddom, this creates a backlash where others abandon this scientific attitude and become the ironic lovers of the more strange and stupid gimmicks like Umaga or The Boogeyman, simply because it falls outside of the realm of science, and causes these contrarians great glee to have the analysis-based nerds struggle to explain something.
And with me being, unfortunately, a denizen of the Wrestling Nerddom myself (www.deathvalleydriver.com), I have at times complained about how shitty the wrestling now is compared to whatever it was when I used to still see whatever it was I saw in it. I’ve never really been able to figure out why this was, because it wasn’t as simple as people still pretended it was real, though the easy admission of it not being real combat certainly did add a homoerotic bad taste to sitting around watching sweaty men grapple with each other. But while reading the piece about Captain Don Leslie, I realized that what it is that made me love wrestling, and why I probably hate it now, is not the real or fake, or how it’s done, but the WHY was this happening? And this applies to whether it be pro wrestling or slight-of-hand magician or a sword swallower at the freak show. WHY were these things happening? Why would people pretend to swallow a sword to make a bunch of local bumpkins “ooh” and “ahh” for fifty cents a head? Why would two big guys actually beat each other in a simulated athletic competition, and why would all these other people sitting ringside be so captivated by it? Why was all this happening?
This got me to thinking further about the freak show, featuring sword swallowers and bearded ladies and strong midgets and the such, which would have been run by a promoter. I am assuming the freaks made a decent enough living for being freaky, but I doubt any of them were living high on the hog at all. It was scraps of money – nothing great – but you got to travel around and look at a bunch of weird-looking people be shocked or awed by what you did. And the dude who made the real money off this was the promoter or circus-owner or whoever was running the whole set-up. And it seems the performers were drawn in with a cult-like religious aspect to what they were doing – complete with the passing of inner-secrets and traditions, to make one feel like they were a part of something small and select. And reading about Capt. Don talk of hearing thirty-five years ago from Alex Linton about great sword swallowers from thirty-five years before that… and all this happening outside of earshot of anybody else who need not know these things, that all added to the Why. It allowed a performer like Capt. Don to completely believe in what he was doing, even if what he was doing may not have been what it was perceived to be exactly. This is not to suggest all carnival-based performances are faked, but just that when you add history and cult religion undertones to the performer’s mind, it becomes far more than just what he is doing on the stage, which separated jobs like this from just being a Starbucks or Kinko’s employee or someone sitting in a cubicle shuffling numbers back and forth. One was there to make the bumpkins believe in what was happening, or at least if they didn’t believe it, do it in such grand and well-executed fashion that they dare not ask if it wasn’t really what it looked like, because you’d be insulting the freak carny wrestler midget dagger eater by doing so.
And I would think it’s safe to say that with the professional wrestling being well-established cable TV programming and not something set up in a tent in a field on the outskirts of town, it’s far more of a regular business now than it would’ve been when closer to its circus roots. But even up into the ‘80s, before 20/20 feigning newsworthiness, wrestling’s traditions were carried on in the same way. Wrestlers heard stories from others and learned the subtle details – how to say this or that to an old lady in the front row or how to fall flat on your face on concrete directly in front of little kids – and the old-timers passed these lessons, and these legends of previous purveyors of this secret art, onto the next generation. Some people learned from really shitty old wrestlers (like Capt. Don’s first sword swallowing teacher), and some learned from better ones. Sometimes the guy who looked great in the ring was barely coherent when it came to teaching anyone else what must have just come naturally to him. And sometimes a guy who never did much more than work a three-town circuit for ten years might’ve been the best at laying out the subtle nuances of that little circuit. And the promoters promoted it all to the public, while promoting the special cult-like secret of it all to the wrestlers, to pull them into the religion of the wrestler. Thus, the promoter could make his money off both ends of the bargain – public and wrestlers – to varying degrees, but everyone went home happy at the end of the day. (And who gives a fuck about the end of the life? You have a good run riding the roads and get some ass and scars and great stories out of it, in my opinion, you’re better off than having a padded bank account.)
But we’re twenty-five years removed from this line of thinking, as if it being real or fake was the entire point of it all – the answer to Why – and it’s moved to more of just a merchandising machine, with indie promotions not as concerned about live audiences as they are with DVD sales. I think this misses the whole Why, which like I said, is probably unexplainable, and that frustrates peoples. The unexplained is why we have religion and science, to keep our little minds from fretting over things like this. But still, twenty-five years removed, wrestlers are far more casual about chatting with internet fans on how things are laid out, and pretty much anyone can pay a wad of money to a plethora of wrestlers with varying degrees of personal success to “live their dream” and be trained to be a wrestler or referee on a smaller level. And this has created more and more wrestlers who know it’s fake and never feel the need to ever pretend otherwise too hard, which is fine I guess, but they go through the motions of a wrestling match and try to make it look beautiful to the filter of an analytical mind, turning it to science, abandoning the Why.
This reminds me of this dude who is friends of friends – Penn Rollins – who’s some sort of celebrated minor figure as “seminal member” of math rock (prog punk?) bands from years ago. For Rollins, playing guitar has little to do with feeling or spirit; it’s just points on the guitar that he’s assigned numbers to so he’ll learn a riff, memorize the numerical sequences to put these together, and then proceed to follow the sequence on his guitar neck, to a tee. It allows him the ability to add different mathematical sequences that might seem odd or intriguing to the average musical ear, but there’s no magic or muse involved in the process whatsoever – all pure analysis. And to the analytical mind, it sounds awesome and seems like dude is the greatest guitar player who never got known on a large scale.
This is the wrestler of today – numbers in a sequence strung together so that analysis will find it to be highly acceptable.
And that’s how I realized why I hate wrestling now when I used to love it, because there is no more Why to it anymore. What is happening is far too obvious, and it doesn’t matter how hard two guys actually hit each other in the jaw or kick each other in the back, it’s still all too obvious. And that makes it looks fuckin’ stupid.

Carbon 14 article: Little Red Hendricks & His Damned Roommates

(I don't keep good records of things, but this was in some issue of Carbon 14 magazine, which is a fine glossy periodical full of smut and wrestling and whores and rock-n-roll.)
Even though Carbon 14 can be chock full of adult-oriented material, me being the father of two children and understanding the new-fangled nature of young families steeped in the filthy rock-n-roll environment of post-hip hop America, I know there’s kids toddling around well-kept apartments in bad neighborhoods and in ranch houses that came cheap here and there who have copies of the Carbon 14 laying around their folks’ house, because when you’re kid-friendlying up the house in the morning (which is around 10), cleaning up empty beer bottles and emptying ash trays is obvious, but censoring the literature left lying around is not so obvious. Well, I figured I’d kick in a little something for the kids this issue, so once they get tired trying to figure out what’s going in the Justice Howard pictorials or why the cartoon people in King Velveeda’s pages are poking at each other the way they are, they’d have something to read. You older kids read to the younger ones, because reading is basis for hope for a better future and shit. So here’s a story for you kids…
Once upon a time, there was this dude named Little Red Hendricks, who was a short dude, and he lived with his cousin and his cousin’s homeboy and his cousin’s homeboy’s girlfriend on a farm, where they worked as laborers and shared a dilapidated doublewide the old tobacco farmer kept on the property for his laborers. Except what had happened was, the old tobacco farmer had always been losing money lately, because the companies that bought his crops added cancer to it to exploit it for their own gain, and then the lawyers who look for crap like that to exploit for their own gain got wind of it and made money off the obvious, and what all this meant was that the fast-talking old-timey dude at the tobacco auctions didn’t have to talk fast for so long anymore because the prices were driven down. So the old tobacco farmer sold off his farm to agribusiness that was gonna grow genetically rockified soybeans for use in Funyuns, and Little Red Hendricks and his cousin and his cousin’s homeboy and his cousin’s homeboy’s girlfriend, who had lived in the dilapidated doublewide for at least like a year-and-a-half, moved to the nearby city, to sort of try and find some new work.
It was the beginning of the month on a weekend in the city, which had a big college right there where they moved at, so college kids had all moved to new apartments for coming back to college in August, and there was tons of awesome shit in trash cans or piles in alleys, because the college kids would just throw what they thought was crap away, not realizing one man’s crap is another man’s some awesome shit. It was Friday, and there really isn’t any use looking for a job on a Friday because it just means you didn’t find a job earlier in the week and all the good stuff they save up for the Sunday paper anyways, so Little Red Hendricks was walking through the alleys, looking for good shit to put in his new apartment that he shared with his cousin and his cousin’s homeboy and his cousin’s homeboy’s girlfriend that his cousin’s homeboy’s girlfriend’s aunt had paid the first and last month rent for them on a one-year lease. About two blocks from their new crib, Red found a sweet-ass four-piece sectional sofa in the alley, that had been reupholstered in black and white leopard print fabric. Red dragged it behind an alley garage and covered it with some plastic he found at a construction site dumpster down at the other end, and went back to his apartment to get some help bringing it back.
“Hey, I found a brand new-looking four-piece couch down this alley,” Little Red Hendricks told his cousin, Goosebird Hendricks. Goosebird rolled his eyes.
“Damn, Red, we already got that nice-ass couch in the living room we took off that ol’ farmer dude because he didn’t want to have to move it. We don’t need another couch.”
“I know that, Goosebird, but I thought this one would be nice for putting on the back porch so we could lounge back there and look out on the city and the alley and all that. Why don’t you help me move it down here?”
“Damn, Red, I’m fixin’ to walk down to that campus and watch the college girls walking by. I ain’t gonna help you carry that thing up here.”
“Alright, where your man at?”
“Bulldog? Oh, they’re in the back watching the TV.”
So Little Red Hendricks went to the back room to see if he could find someone to help him bring the sofa back to the apartment. Bulldog got his name because he was sort of fat and his face was all scrunched up looking because of that. He and his girlfriend, Kat, were sitting on the nice sofa they already had watching Montel Williams.
“Hey, Bulldog, I found this nice couch up the street in the alley. Can you help me carry it back down here?”
Bulldog looked over with eyes like a Chinaman. “Do what?”
“Can you help me carry this four-piece sofa I found in the alley down here from up the road?”
“Aw man, Red, I just got high. I ain’t walking up there and sweating and shit to carry some raggedy-ass couch you found in an alley, man.”
Red looked at Kat. “What about you, Kat? Will you help me?”
“Hell naw, Red. Jerry Springer’s ‘bout to come on.”
So Little Red Hendricks went back to the sofa, uncovered one piece, hoisted it up onto his left shoulder and toted it back to the apartment for the back balcony porch. Then he went back and go the second part of it, toting that one back as well. The third piece was a large center piece and heavier than the others, but Little Red Hendricks shifted it up onto his strong little shoulders and wobbled back to the apartment with it. Finally, he carried the last section home, and after that big center piece, this last one was light as a feather. It was while carrying this last piece home, he passed a flyer on a telephone pole for a plasma clinic nearby that paid $25 to a first-time donor. The clinic’s address was like fifteen blocks away, but $25 was $25. Red dragged the last piece of the sofa out onto the balcony porch in the back of the house, set it all up in place, and put two milk crates side-by-side in front of it for a table.
He went back downstairs where Goosebird was making a mayonnaise and hot mustard sandwich. “Hey, Goosebird, I saw a flyer where we can give blood and get $25 today. You wanna go down there with me?”
“Where’s it at?”
“Just past 9th Street.”
“Damn, Red, I ain’t walking all the way down there to give no damn blood. I don’t even like no needles. You know the government’s giving people diseases on purpose in places like that anyways.”
“Do what?”
“Yeah, for real. I saw that shit on TV one time.”
“Whatever, Goose, you’re acting silly. Where’s Bulldog?”
“They’re in the back, watching TV.”
Little Red Hendricks went to the back room, where Bulldog and Kat were still sitting.
“Hey Bulldog, I know a place we can both go and hit a quick lick for $25 each.”
“How long is it gonna take?”
“I don’t know, like an hour or so.”
“Where?”
“Down past 9th Street.”
“Hell naw, Red. I ain’t walking all the way down there. It’s hot as a mug out there.”
Red looked at Kat. “What about you, Kat? You wanna walk down there with me and make some money real quick?”
“Huh? Nah, Red. Springer’s on, and that Maury Povich dude is gonna come on next.” So Red turned to the door to leave.
Bulldog hollered out, “Hey Red, you gonna go down there and do that still?”
“Yeah, Bulldog. Why, you change your mind?”
“Hell naw, Red. I was just gonna see if you could pick me up a peach blunt on the way back.” Red just turned and kept on walking out. “Make sure you get a philly blunt, and not no white owl,” Bulldog called out behind him.
Little Red Hendricks walked all the way down to the plasma clinic, and waited around for a while, then answered all the stupid questions, and the nurse lady was even nice enough to pretend he brought in an ad from the newspaper for an extra ten bucks, so Red was gonna get $35. He sat in the main room and they hooked the machine up to him that took his white blood cells out and replaced it with some cold liquid, and they had cable on the TV monitors, which was showing Good Times, one of the later ones where J.J.’s sister was married to that light-skinned dude who did the cartoon voices all the time. Little Red Hendricks finished up fast, squeezing his palm in and out of fists the whole time, got his $35 in cash money, and walked home. On the way back, he asked some dude he passed where the nearest grocery store was at.
“Well, you got that corner store on 3rd, but if you walk on over past Main Street towards that big baseball field by the college, they got a big grocery store over there, with vegetables and everything.” Little Red Hendricks thanked the stranger, and went back to his apartment, where Goosebird was peeking out the kitchen window at the house next door.
“Hey, Goose, I’m gonna walk over to a store over by that big baseball field. You wanna roll with?”
“What for, Red?”
“In case I need help carrying something back.”
“Naw, Red. I ain’t your slave. Besides, I’m busy,” and he peeked back out the curtain, which was a piece of orange fabric that Kat had stapled over the window at the top.
Little Red Hendricks walked to the back room where he heard Bulldog and Kat laughing.
“Bulldog, I’m gonna walk over to the store by that baseball field. What’re you doing?”
He looked up with the eyes of a tired Chinaman. “I ain’t walking nowhere like that, Red. You must be crazy. I’m gonna sit right here on my big ass and watch Cops.”
“What about you, Kat? You wanna walk with me to the store?”
“We’re watching Cops right now, Red. You know we like to watch Cops.”
So Little Red Hendricks walked all the way over to the strip mall. He cut through a couple of alleys to make the trip shorter, where he passed a young, dark-as-night dreaded dude. Making eye contact, on a lark, since the kid looked thuggish but had gentle honest eyes, Red asked if the kid knew where he could get some weed. The kid already had him covered, so after Red promised he wasn’t the police, he bought himself a dimebag. At the grocery store, he grabbed a case of Natural Ice, and a peach white owl. He was gonna get some chicken from the deli, but he saw a Burger King across the street outside, so he just paid for his case of beer and blunt and went to the Burger King, where he got a Triple Whopper value meal, king-sized, and still had like seven dollars leftover. He walked all the way back to the apartment, waiting to eat his fast food and drink a beer on the couch he dragged home today. When he walked in the door, Goosebird was trimming his beard in the bathroom mirror, and smelled the food when Red walked past. He followed the smell.
Red walked through the back room to take the stairs up to the back balcony porch. Bulldog saw him walk through with the case of beer and jumped up to see what was going on. Kat cut off the second episode of Cops and followed as well.
Little Red Hendricks sat down on the four-piece sectional sofa he had dragged back piece by piece, tucked the case of beer beside the end of the couch, pulling out one can and popping the top, and took his king-sized value meal out the bag, ripping the bag open to dump his fries out on along with some ketchup. He saw Goosebird, Bulldog, and Kat standing at the door, surveying the scene.
“Who will help me eat this Whopper and drink up all these beers and smoke this blunt I’m about to roll, chilling out on this zebra-printed couch?”
“I WILL! I WILL! I WILL!” they all said together, excitedly.
“Oh no you won’t. Ain’t nobody help me carry this couch up here, and ain’t nobody go with me to the clinic, and ain’t nobody even wanna walk to the store either.” And Little Red Hendricks sat there comfortably, ate his burger, got high, and drunk as hell to boot, and didn’t share any of it with nobody.