SONG OF THE DAY: Play At Your Own Risk

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

SONG OF THE DAY: I Heard It Through The Grapevine (kudzu'd)

Perhaps you don’t know this song upon the title, but once you listen, you will always most certainly recognize it as “the Friday song”. Roger Troutman was a national treasure, and in a non-racist world, he would be old and fat and have horrible opinions rather than Morrissey.

SONG OF THE DAY: Dance Till We Die

A few years back, at first, my center kid was bummed I actually listened to Lana Del Ray, because dads aren’t supposed to listen to shit their kids are listening to. Takes the edge out of it. But then they got mad at me because Lana Del Ray was a fascist, or some shit. I don’t know. It’s all too much to keep up with; I just play music and sometimes I like it but mostly I hate it, which is why I like to point out what I like on here. I don’t ever dance really, not in front of other people, because I always felt I had bad rhythm. Family members used to make fun of how I walked, because it wasn’t white enough, and then when I danced, I realized it was just flopping my body around so I got self-conscious about how my arms flopped, because that seemed to be the part of my gait that wasn’t white enough. Who the fuck knows? Now, I shuck a little dance from time to time around my kids or girlfriend, and I do elaborate spinning mambas holding the cats if a good cumbia song comes on in the middle of the day. But I ain’t dancing in front of nobody I don’t know too fucking well.

SONG OF THE DAY: Every Saturday Night

It's been four years since I made this post about the KKK rally in Charlottesville in July of 2017. Today, they took down the confederate monuments in Charlottesville, including the one where this rally happened, and the other one where what came to turn Charlottesville into a hashtag happened a couple blocks away. As someone who was raised in the rural south, loves the American south, grew up around confederate flags and even used to wear clothes with them when I was younger, about these confederate monuments getting taken down in Charlottesville, let me just say...
good. The monuments were racist in intent and meant to intimidate. People holding onto the philosophies behind those monuments' intent has held back the progress of a truly beautiful, diverse, and culturally unique geographical part of America. and I'm very thankful for the leadership of Black women in making today happen. We are very blessed in the American south with a lot of strong, intelligent, but also very real and practical people like the ones who were instrumental in making today happen. And to be honest, that's the south I've always loved, even when I didn't know any better.
We don't have many public spaces in American culture, despite that being the precedent in most all indigenous cultures on this continent, in Africa, even in Europe to be honest. Public commons were considered expected, not something that had to be created. So for the few public spaces we have in our culture to be marked by monuments which say "not for y'all" is even more fucked up. I hope DJs set up on the abandoned concrete plinths and we have Saturday evening cookouts all summer long forever moving forward. Plenty of room for horseshoe pits at the former Lee Park too, in my opinion. Fuck the confederacy, but long thrive the south.

SONG OF THE DAY: Dead Confederate

There was a dude from Charlottesville, Virginia, who got rich as fuck working with the stock exchange in the early 1900s, named Paul Goodloe McIntire. Towards the latter part of his life, like most people who got obscenely rich, who started being a “philanthropist” to throw everybody off the fact he shouldn’t have ever gotten that rich off stock market speculation. Large chunks of his money were given to University of Virginia, which he attended for a single year before leaving to go to New York and get paid. He also gave a good bit to the city of Charlottesville, most notably in parks and statues, including the giant park that still bears his name right on 250, with a relatively new skate park in there. But the place where his statues and parks came together was what was once known as Lee Park, and now has some other name that I can’t remember but is either Justice or Progress or Biden 2024 or something like that.
The statues he commissioned bear mentioning as a whole, since the entire lot of them have not stood the test of time. The one most folks probably see easiest is the Lewis and Clark monument, where Main and Ridge Streets intersect, which famously (for local activists and concerned folk) has Sacagawea cowered down behind them in a less than honorific fashion, which the recontextualizing of history has taught us them dudes might’ve been fucked out there in the western “wilderness” indigenous nations without her guidance. Similarly, a half dozen blocks to the west, there’s one just to George Rogers Clark, which similarly is kinda fucked, depicting dude standing over top a lot of other folks, including some cowering beneath his great white greatness and whiteness. This one is near where my office used to be so I used to walk up there and sit sometime, but to be honest, this was not an early pick for lunchtime fuck-off bench within walking distance of the office back then. Lots of gardens tucked away on a major full of itself university like UVA. I wouldn’t put the Clark statue park on my draft board, it’s a walk-on that might play special teams, at best. But it’s a problematic statue in retrospect.
The other two statues commissioned by McIntire are far more obviously fucked – a Stonewall Jackson one put right outside the courthouse in 1921, with a giant dedication where folks were flying the Confederate battle flag (as popularized by stubborn idiots to this day). A couple dudes allegedly smashed the angels at the foot of this sculpture, but I don’t believe the charges at all. I bet it was Q Anon folks who did it, but tried to make it look like anti-fascist activists did.
And of course that last statue is the most well-known – the Robert E. Lee monument erected in a park right by the downtown library, where McIntire bought up that block back in the day, demolished everything on it, and turned it into a public park, with a lost cause statue, nearly four decades after the Civil War was over. A local teen activist named Zyahna Bryant led the call to have the monument removed, and other activists began rallying around that. Eventually, self-serving politicians got involved to make a cause of it as well, and the whole thing became a culture wars flashpoint to cause the park to be chosen as the site for a Unite the Right rally in August of 2017. (A month before this, a Ku Klux Klan rally was held at the Stonewall Jackson monument, with strong police protection for the Klan, and anti-racist protesters getting tear gassed and arrested. I’ve got a thing I wrote about that day here.) Unite the Right became known to most of the world as “Charlottesville” because of the bullshit we got to experience here firsthand, which was namely a bunch of nazi racists and fascists openly meeting hoping to at the least intimidate people, but more likely kill a lot of people. They were armed for assault. Luckily, with no help from the government or police – both of which chose to use the “ignore them” tactic, which included police standing down the day of the event – local and regional antifascists organized a resistance to their presence, which likely saved a lot of lives. The day will be known though for Heather Heyer being murdered by a racist in a Dodge Charger, but anyone who was there that day knows many people who were affected by that vehicular rampage, jumped out the way, got hit, or were involved. (Shout out to Tim Sauce, local rapper, who was on the streets that day, and in July, and when he got locked up on separate charges briefly after all this, got to hold a little one-on-one session with the driver of that Dodge Charger on the inside. Tim Sauce is a hero.)
Anyways, the actual removal of the Lee monument seemed more important after all that, but has never happened. It got covered for a while with giant tarp, but rednecks kept coming to tear it open. It’s surrounded by orange fencing and signs saying you’ll be prosecuted, and has been the site of multiple incidents since 2017, that I can’t even begin getting into. Shit, I even had a giant fucking Nazi fuming at the mouth as he was being detained by police on the one year anniversary, yelling at me that he had the duty to dispatch of anyone who went against the Constitution, with a confederate flag dangling out his pocket. An activist poet I know had confronted him in that park, very bravely, up in this giant racist’s face, putting herself at risk. She got a stiffer sentence than he did, by the way. He also was walking free a couple hours later after his arrest, a few blocks from my apartment at the time, after telling me aggressively how he had a duty to kill people who thought like me. Probably relevant is that apartment was one block from where the local shithead who invited Unite the Right to Charlottesville in the first place once lived, and did a lot of the organizing for it. So the shit is all around us, and has been ever since August 2017. That’s just the sediments of history since 2017. The monument itself, not erected until 1924. Lost cause statues were erected in abundance around that time, throughout the south, not in remembrance of southern history so much as to work in tandem with Jim Crow laws and the legalized repression of black people as opposed to outright slavery. The monuments were ominous warnings that ain’t shit changed. So even before 2017’s events locally, those monuments are not meant as a symbol of pride, but as one of foreboding.
Of course, pro-southern “heritage not hate” people have laundered the immorality of slavery in the south’s plantation system through all sorts of means, so that the Civil War was somehow about the freedom to go bass fishing without a license, or some shit completely unrelated shit that pretends slavery had nothing to do with it.
Many places have rightfully, since 2017, tore these statues down. Some were taken down by the people themselves. But the Lee monument in downtown Charlottesville, Virginia, remains – a giant middle finger of stubborn resistance to accepting all people as equally worthy of the basic human rights of life, liberty, and a pursuit of happiness.
After the dumb shit that happened in Washington, DC, the other week, a lot of pundit types have written “the lessons from Charlottesville” and how what we experienced should have been a warning to everybody else. The idiot mayor of Charlottesville at the time, Mike Signer, has even used it to ramp up his media appearances to sell self-serving books and try to further his political career, even though he was entirely useless in fighting Unite the Right, despite activists telling him exactly what was likely to happen. Basically, the political establishment doesn’t hear the people, much less serve them, but also the ragtag pack of clueless nitwits who raided the Capitol building, allegedly as self-described patriots, also don’t serve the people, as a whole, but instead their propagandized core of those who have mutated white supremacy from its foundation into some strange more diverse white supremacy based on the benefits of western civilization, which basically means capitalism, along with believing all the American exceptionalism mythologies. Of course, just like the Lee monument and its claims of being there to honor a great historical figure, these belief systems can give the surface appearance of being honest, but their built on a far more flawed and fucked up foundation.
I say all this as a man who grew up in the rural south, wore shirts with confederate flags on them as a kid, even did a zine for a number of years called The Confederate Mack during my younger edgelord days, in an attempt at that time to “own the libs” or shock the hypocritical suburban kids I found myself surrounded by as a first gen college student. “Own the libs” didn’t exist then, as it was a decade before the internet got poppin’, thank god, because my digital footprint would be a fucking train wreck. (I mean, it already is, but this is after great personal growth and maturity and breaking of cycles.) But I can also say, as a 47-year-old white male who still lives in the rural south, fuck those statues, and fuck that flag. They serve no purpose of good whatsoever, and all these motherfuckers saying “We have to remember our history” the loudest tended to not be the best students of any sort back in school.
The dimwit kid across the road from where I lived for two decades, where my family still lives, he grew from a dumb kid who loved horses to a grown man-child who has a confederate flag in the front yard with a spotlight on it. And when I’ve talked to him, he has that blank look in his eyes of those who have digested far too much nutritionless information, the online equivalent of McDonalds drive-through intelligence, where you think you’re learning new and truthful facts, but actually just getting fed a bunch of shit that’s not healthy for you in any way and doesn’t contain the building blocks for actual truth, just simulations to give the taste and appearance. There’s a growing army of these types, as was evidenced by what happened, and I’m not really sure how you fix it. You can’t just simply “educate” people who already feel like they’ve been educated in a bold and more correct way than you offer. They’ve been brainwashed, for lack of a better term, and unfortunately America’s rugged individualism means folks automatically look at deprogramming themselves of the brainwashing as a type of brainwashing itself. You know, like how actual news is now fake news, and how anti-fascists are known by most old people, including your grandparents and parents and aunts and uncles, as the fascists. Erecting monuments to confederate heroes happened a century ago. They’ve got far more complex tools building their armies of blank-gazed supporters now. And we’re not going to be able to reach a lot of these people, because it’s a century later, AND WE STILL HAVEN’T EVEN TAKEN DOWN THESE STUPID FUCKING RACIST MONUMENTS.

SONG OF THE DAY: La Raza

Apparently, La Raza Cosmica is now problematic too, because in the process of seeing the combination of all the main human racial types, you’re eliminating the originals. The term was coined by Jose Vasconcelos in 1925, reacting to white supremacist thinking being sent out to the world from the USA and Europe, which argued that the mestizos of the Americas were a combination of the four dominant races on the Earth, creating a fifth, unifying and conglomerate cosmic race. And I can see that complaint against it, because it’s not a huge jump from chosen race to say a super mix of all races is the actual chosen race. Everything is problematic nowadays. But you know why though? Everything was built on a problematic foundation. Shit’s all fucked up. When that woman got shot in the Capitol shit, it was interesting to me how cops called everybody off, called in paramedics, the people storming shit backed off – the reality of what had happened sobered everybody present up right away. Traumas are supposed to do that, to shock you into sheltering and surviving. All the conflict that had been manufactured came to a pause, because a human life was fucked up all of a sudden.
And yet, that’s exactly the problem with racism. When George Floyd was killed, everybody present should’ve been like “Whoa… what the fuck, everybody back up, call 911.” But time after time, that’s not been the response. So it’s when dehumanization goes beyond just thinking your race is some extra special shit to thinking other races don’t deserve to exist. Death of a human being should be shocking to you, to some extent, because you’re a human, and self-preservation is part of your natural make-up. Once you get to a point where you’re deciding some humans don’t deserve preservation and others do, then you’ve gotten to that point where your brain has been educated beyond your heart’s intelligence. There’s a lot of that going around now, in both the obvious and not so obvious ways. I hope we all sober the fuck up.

SK1N T0N3S S33N 4S 4L13N...

skin tones seen as alien

and unwanted which once was

all that was known in these parts

SM4LL PS3VD0-S0VTH3RN C1TY...

small pseudo-southern city

where America revealed

how it doesn't give a fuck

V1NT4G3 C0P P1CTVR3 FR0M L4ST...

vintage cop picture from last

summer's march; they were far more

militaristic this year

SONG OF THE DAY: Mestizo

Mongrelized nature confusing, especially with broken connections galore from dysfunction leaving one floating alone in this Earth space. I tend to sit at night and write words to nobody because that’s what I’ve always done – it’s always been me by myself it feels like, even though I share blood in direct sense with small group of people but in larger sense with everybody. So many divisions wedged into every fissure of the brain, denying simple fucking heart truth that people is people.

Without human connection to really offer solid support, the one thing that grounds me is the ground – the area I’ve known all my life, because it feels more familiar (as in family) than anything else, and I was unsettled to leave the land I’d known the past 20 years, but at the same time all these little slivers and parcels ain’t really ever owned in any sense, and I can find that same feeling with land of similar make-up throughout this area.

Mestizo, mongrel, mulatto, mutt – a small army of M-words to cover the natural fact that any ideas of purity of human origins is more than likely not true, and we are all the sum product of each other. None of us is pure in racial sense, and yet there’s purity in that. I’ve been feeling very disconnected from my classification, but also understand the system works through classification so it saves me hassle in many steps along my days. There is a grid of thinking that’s been applied to the natural world that doesn’t match the natural world’s ways, so likely that’s why I find walking the land grounding. It doesn’t have to be woods land or along the river – railroad tracks through town or rippling city sidewalks with weed resistance in every crack make just as much sense. Saying “hey man” to familiar faces with unknown lives on the bus does that. Lot of times it feels like we’re disconnected by design, but the grid and classification applied over top of everything is less about serving the needs of all the people, and more about squeezing productivity out of us, or casting aside when there’s nothing productive to be squeezed out of us in a way that allows our feralization from abandonment to not poison the herd.

Me personally? Polish immigrants I know, Swedish/Norwegian orphan-ish and homeless grandmother I know, Scot surname I carry filtered through Appalachian mountains and then a few generations of rural southside Virginia I know, Pennsylvania Germans of some sort I know; and yet I don’t know none of this completely. Grew up my whole life in in the same rough area, know the trees and the rivers and the main roads and the people who live here. Half-cousins and step-nephews and before it all fell apart, family gatherings with more last names than side dishes. In the sense of that applied order, we are all dysfunctional, because the order wants us to function in a way that’s not naturally easy.

Fuck it. It’s that shit that makes me feel alone – that I’m lost from where I’m supposed to be. But I’m not supposed to be anywhere, except right here. Existential crisis depends on existential purpose, which is likely a myth anyways. I’m gonna walk ten miles today, and every face I see is gonna be my brother or sister. So easy to get lost in the hatred manufactured by the classifications and purity tests and ill logic masquerading as intelligence. Just gonna walk this shit off, like humans have done since the beginning of humans.

SONG OF THE DAY: It Ain't Fair

Was reading about a local ass unite the right organizing ass chump this weekend, who was schooled at same shithole rural school which had harassed my offspring this past year, and contemplating the subtle differences between whiteboy and white male, how the entitlement of white male is often lost thru transition to whiteboy status, going from male to boy, economically emasculated, often times within penal system, but also learning not as much difference between skin tone as most assume. Being this is the internet, plz allow me to clarify not denying the presence of white privilege, but just saying even within white spectrum there’s difference between white male and whiteboy and also not even really trying to discuss it unless some white dude wants to argue, and even then I ain’t arguing pon the internet.

I say all this because I’ve seen a number of white males, seemingly progressive, do the social media two-step joke complaint about not being able to have free speech enough, or “lol am I not supposed to buy a second house is that too capitalist for you lefties?” or “wow don’t wanna trigger anybody” and this is ppl who consider themselves progressive or the voices of righteousness or at the very least in that choir. Guess what? It doesn’t fuckin’ matter what you think, and sure you can say or do whatever the fuck you want ultimately, law is just some shit to dance around nobody knows that more than white males, but there’s always repercussions. And sometimes you got no control over those repercussions, and yeah sometimes it’s not even fair. That’s because fair is a myth, and entirely subjective, and law never has anything to do with fair, ever, unless it’s lucky. Neither does social media. So if you say or do some shit and ppl get ruffled or you look like a bougie ass fucking white male because your hard work coming up honest sweat looks like gentrification to somebody else, fuck it. If you’re living decent, in your actions, decent folk will treat with you respect. This tip-toeing into alt right talking points about free speech or bootstraps is some bullshit. Stop being so fucking white male. There is nothing fair about life other than what we all build together, and even that’s bound to get fucked up. You are owed nothing, I am owed nothing, none of us are owed nothing, other than the respect we earn from others. Yeah, ideally at basic sense we all treat each other with basic levels of respect as fellow humans with valuable life and human potential, but to be honest that’s been pretty fucked up in all levels of civilization, so hard to understand why anybody would be shocked by the lack of that, much less white males. Of course it ain’t fair. It never was.

And if you see dirtgod and gotta identify me by race, please out of respect, if I’ve earned it from you, call me a whiteboy not a white male. As a whiteboy, I fuckin’ hate white males. That’s boss culture, khaki and polo shirt culture, docksider culture. I’m way too cursive tattoo to identify with that shit. But also, life ain’t fair, so judge me however the fuck you feel compelled to. I’m gonna be the same raggedy ass dirtgod raven mack regardless. Salam.

TH3Y R41S3D 4 TH1RTY F00T BY...

they raised a thirty foot by

fifty foot confederate

flag nearby; we should burn it

JJ Krupert Jan 2018 number thirteen "bad to the bone"

of course Your Ol’ Droog is the Big Lots Nas for Williamsburg Brooklyn tinkersmith hackerspace *working* class types WITH AUTHENTIC WORKING CLASS ROOTS LIKE A GRANDFATHER WHO OWNED A FARM to be cool with. it pairs well with the Action Bronson Big Lots Ghostface model. [plz note: I don’t diss either of these acts necessarily, as obviously I am listening to Your Ol’ Droog if he shows up here, and it’s hard to really find too much fault with Action Bronson because he seems to just genuinely be enjoying himself, although then again I almost typed it as “AB” which could mean Aryan Brotherhood too so mb this whole slew of clever sort of sounds like rappers is a giant White Supremacist conspiracy to funnel hip hop into a darker direction.] [obviously I just used “darker” in terms of psycho social implications, not skin tone; plz update your stereotypical frame of references accordingly]

H1GH SCH00L M4RCH1NG B4ND P4BLVM...

high school marching band pablum

from predominately white

demographic lacking THUMP

25-Man Metaphysical Roster: Chelsea F.C.

(just a skinhead hooligan Chelsea supporter throwing

up a Sieg Heil while holding up a kid giving the middle finger)

[25-Man Metaphysical Roster is a football dork methodology meant to establish a listing of players who have been most active for English Premier League teams in their past 100 non-friendly matches. Essentially, it is calculated by minutes played, but weighted towards most recent games. The end result is a listing of the 25 players in a team’s recent history who have had the largest hand on their metaphysical sporting trajectory. The English Premier League was chosen because it is the highest level of football played in an English speaking country, and I speak English. Also, it is what comes on TV here in the USA, where I fucking live. And yet still I should clarify I hate English, and also America. Thus maybe I hate myself. Should I not fail in maintaining my unpaid deadline, a new 25-Man Metaphysical Roster will appear on the 1st and 15th of every month.]

It is appropriate that Chelsea is owned by a Russian oligarch, because I think of the football club similarly to how I think of Russia, or the Soviet Union. They are obviously an imperial force (Chelsea in football, Soviet Union/Russia in history), and I am obviously against all imperial forces and hate all forms of imperialism with a contrarian’s blind passion (or as passionate as a jaded bearded fortysomething fucker can still be). But for whatever reason I don’t really directly care or feel effected by Chelsea (or Soviet Union), so I’m not an active hater of them, like I would be for Manchester United or United States of Amerikkka. Those forms of imperialism are obvious and in my face.

This means I don’t care to wish all forms of failure upon Chelsea, but much like the Soviet Union’s Afghani quagmire, when Chelsea fucks up and finishes outside the continental-qualifying top seven, like they did two seasons ago, I take great joy in that. It’s fun to see imperial forces fail, even if their relative failure still puts them four spots above your relative favorite’s normal. (Although we had great fun two seasons ago, didn’t we, imagining “what if Chelsea get relegated? what if???? But they did not, although failure to qualify for Champions or Europa league is the Big 6 version of relegation, at least for now.)

The Chelsea life cycle during these last 100 matches as is the basis for metaphysics here is pretty simple – Jose Mourinho was on the downward “let me burn out everybody” cycle of Jose management lifespan, and Chelsea finished 10th, which meant he got shit-canned early on during that season. Antonio Conte came in as the eventual replacement and took mostly the same batch of players with a couple of key upgrades, and combined that with lack of continental competition to keep a fresh and fit squad at the top of the table for an EPL title last season. But the alleged personnel changes that were going to definitely happen – both coming and going – didn’t necessarily happen, so for now (until December) Conte has what he has. Of course, they sit in 3rd right now, and powered through their first Champions League match to boot (albeit against a lowly Azerbaijani outfit), so it’s hard to bemoan Chelsea life right now. Of course, they are an imperial force in football, so all of this is expected of them, and even though I don’t actively hate them, I hope it all falls apart in horrible and comedic fashion. But here are the 25-men who played the heaviest metaphysical role for the club’s past 100 matches…

#1: Cesar Azpilicueta – Spaniard vice-captain and anchor of defense has survived multiple management regimes at Stamford Bridge, and it’s easy to see why, as Mourinho to Conte has been questioned (for some fucking reason) going into the early stages of this season, despite them being in 3rd and having crushed weak ass team in first Champions League match. It seems very much like EPL is determined to keep up pattern of having defending champion managers get sacked the following season. But in recent weeks, Azpilicueta has been the vocalist on the squad, offering words of support and encouragement for Conte, that the board room hasn’t necessarily seemed to echo in their own actions. Some people will classify such a player as natural born leader, but there’s something more to it than that… an ability to politically navigate all the fucked up situations football is bound to deliver inevitably, and come out not looking like an asshole. It’s hard to do in an industry overflowing with asshole (due to how they’re manufactured). But Azpilicueta has somehow done it, and seems attached to Conte right now, just as he did to Mourinho  before, and Guus Hiddink in the interim between the two. Some players are political cockroaches, and survive it all, and they usually end up vice-captain.

#2: Thibaut Courtois – Belgian GK and soulless android.

#3: Gary Cahill – Okay, maybe Cahill at center back is the true anchor of the defense, as he’s also the captain (and also English as fuck, which means he “speaks the language” or “the fans relate to him” or whatever coded racialism talk is used to justify him as more the main man than Azpilicueta, whose name sounds a little too revolutionary, a little too anti-Brexity to truly be the anchor of a club supported by the notorious shitbags Chelsea is supported by.

#4: Diego Costa – Some guys just look like an asshole, and most folks understand this, though they’re delegation of assholery may be based on nationalistic biases and racial under currents. I’ve worked to try and rid myself of as much of these biases as possible, so very few men still cross that threshold of just naturally looking like an asshole at the pure and unexplainable universal sense. Diego Costa is one such man. Every atom spins with the energy of self-importance and conniving heart. It was no shock that Conte wanted nothing more to do with the man, as Conte comes from Italy – land of many spirited assholes, where the natural inclination of asshole somehow has transformed into almost lovable malcontent. Conte, I am sure, knows the difference between regular run-of-the-mill asshole and absolute universal asshole. But of course, in true asshole ways, Costa was unaffordable and/or unwanted by all potential suitors in the transfer window, so he has been resigned to sitting in the stands duty until his self-value decreases enough or some other club becomes more desperate to move away from London in January.

#5: Eden Hazard – Another Belgian, and Hazard is weird, because he can be an enjoyable player to watch, but there’s something that sterilizes the experience of him away for me. I don’t know what it is, but I just never transition from barely enjoyable to actual excitement.

#6: N’Golo Kante – (previously #14 for Leicester City on 15-Apr-2017) I’m a Kante mark, because I strongly believe that African defensive midfielder is one of the main metaphysical keys to successful football club. Granted, Kante grew up in France, but was born to Malian immigrant parents, and fuck if any nation on this Earth has been a colonizing force of fuckedness, it’s France. Frantz Fanon wrote The Wretched of the Earth specifically about them, for fuck’s sake. Nonetheless, full geographically based African or not, Kante had Malian national team eligibility until France finally called him up last year, and it supports my African defensive midfielder theory. Only a person with deeply ingrained survivalism but also flair can fully operate that fulcrum position of defensive midfielder, able to help stifle others, but quickly flip it into counter attack. N’Golo Kante has won the Premier League title the past two seasons, and that’s no accident. His style was the perfect trigger to unleash buckshot Jamie Vardy and .22 Magnum Riyad Mahrez at Leicester City. And last season, he brought stability in the middle to complement the entrenched back line and feed shithead Diego Costa (and others) up top.

#7: David Luiz – Luiz has done a couple stints with Chelsea, and I don’t love him (because it’s Chelsea, and also he’s Brazilian, whom I also boycott metaphysically at international level, for some odd reason… an odd reason called Neymar likely), but I don’t mind him. He makes me think of Ygnwie Malmsteen – I think it’s the hair. Malmsteen is playing locally near me later this year, and I can’t imagine any reason on Earth not to go see Yngwie Malmsteen play a shitty club in 2017.

#8: Pedro – Fun fact about Pedro: he played forward for the Barcelona C team the last season they existed, in Spain’s fourth division (unable to move higher because Barcelona B was in third division). He then moved up to Barcelona B and helped them get promoted to second level of Spanish footballing pyramid. Then he spent seven seasons with Barca itself before getting cashed outside to England, and Abrahamovich’s bulging pockets.

#9: Nemanja Matic – (previously #23 for Manchester United on 01-Sep-2017) Matic and Mourinho are hardcore homeboys from way way back, so Matic was the one Mourinho was intent on poaching over to Manchester United. In my humble metaphysical analysis of football, defensive midfielder types are the truest fulcrum upon the pitch, and the likeliest extension of manager’s mind in the grass. Thus Matic has already been assigned that role at Old Trafford. Mourinho recently told the story of once putting Matic in midway first half, then pulling him midway second half, and how that made Matic one his all-time favorites, because Mourinho knew it sucked to do but Matic came in the next day and was like, “Yo, that sucked, and made me sad, but whatever, because I was playing shitty.” AND THAT WAS WHEN JOSE MOURINHO KNEW NEMANJA MATIC HAD NO RESISTANCE LEFT TO HIS SOUL OR SPIRIT, AT LEAST TOWARDS JOSE, so that’s why he’s in Manchester now.

#10: Marcos Alonso – To be honest, I’d rather talk about Islam Feruz here, a Somali immigrant to Scotland who got all his youth footballing at anti-fascist Celtic, but didn’t sign a contract with them once at professional level, and ran off to Chelsea, where he is part of their vast army of young talents who never actually end up playing for the parent club. Feruz appears to be a bigger flame out than most Chelsea wonderkids, but I love him (and always use him at lower level Football Manager experiments, because I sign all guys named “Islam”, always) because he plays for the Scottish national team at U-21 levels, but also can still play for multiple African teams apparently. (I don’t think Somalia sports a team, but he apparently has legal enough ties to play for Tanzania or Zanzibar.) And while Marcos Alonso is a regular presence still for Chelsea, I do not enjoy regular presences at valuable top of the table clubs valuated at the billions. What I enjoy about football is fucked up Somalian kids ending up in Glasgow and scoring hat tricks against shitty loyalist assholes while being named Islam.

#11: Cesc Fabregas – Forgive my stupid American ignorance, but I always feel like part of his name is missing. He also always reminds me of somebody Furio would kill on the Sopranos as well. My brain is a horrible buffet of media-manufactured stereotypes.

#12: Willian – As much as I try to be indifferent to the point of dislike towards both Chelsea and Brazilian players, something about the hair makes me enjoy Willian dashing up and down the flank as winger. My apologies to anyone who would hold such a joy against me.

#13: Victor Moses – It should be noted that I have been jotting down pertinent metaphysical data for a metaphysics offering about the World Cup (self-published, like all quacks do), and it makes me happy to say, that despite an inconsistency due to corruption of governing bureaucracy, the Nigerian Super Eagles still look to be poised to qualify for Russia out of Group B in Africa, shockingly so considering they were drawn with Cameroon and Algeria in African qualifying’s Group of Death. Victor Moses and the gang have done well, losing only one qualifier, and already seeing Cameroon and Algeria eliminated. (Algeria’s elimination has been cause of great concern in African football; no way that team should have only 1 pt in qualifying, and Algerians are not known for their footballing patience.) Anyways, Victor Moses is key member of the national team, so I use his listing as an excuse to bring all this up. I’m reading an anthology of poetry for each nation that qualifies as well (because Eduardo Galeano taught me that poetry and football pair together perfectly, when done right, although both have been mangled horribly by dominant power systems), so I use google’s algorithm (on an incognito search, which we all know is not incognito, but it forces them to pretend and thus not use as much bullshit against you from your filter bubble) to search “Nation poetry anthology” and then I get whatever the top result book is that actually exists in local university library. Thus far I’ve only read Russia and Brazil anthologies, and let me tell you, poetry is fucking sick.

#14: Branislav Ivanovic – Yet another player technically born in Yugoslavia, which obviously came apart at the ethnic seams in the ‘90s, thus he is now classified as Serbian. The sheer number of world class players who come from what was traditionally Yugoslavia is insane when you start adding them all together (which they will never do themselves, because tensions remain hot, and UEFA actually is running out of different groups to slap former Yugoslav republics into now that Kosovo is recognized national team). Like his country mate Matic, Ivanovic was loved by Mourinho, and also like Matic, he became expendable to Antonio Conte. Ivanovic is aging though (33), and after nearly 400 club matches with Chelsea, he went back to Russia again to play for Zenit St. Petersburg this past February.

#15: John Terry – John Terry’s remarkable (you have to use that word as even a contrarian “sportswriter” with regards to his time) tenure at Chelsea was going to come to an end, and there was no better way than as Premier League Champion one more time. It seemed signal for him to do the “retirement” phase of a couple seasons in the United States being overpaid to perform in a shitty league where a bunch of middle class hooligan wannabes drink microbrews and beat on drums and pretend to be “supporters”. But obviously Terry has not given up on his ability to occupy a prominent(ish) Starting XI in Europe yet, as he instead opted for playing for freshly-relegated Aston Villa. This move suggest Terry will forego the U.S. money tour and instead make the transition to second-tier player-manager, then outright manager. That’s got to be a weird thing to have as a force on your team if you’re the manager though – an elder spirit of the sport, who you know can help out a ton, but also might slip the boardroom knife between your shoulder blades during any bad spell.

#16: Asmir Begovic – Around the time of World Cup 2010, I fell in love with the Bosnia and Herzegovina national team, and thus fell in love with Begovic, as he was big part of their run during that period. When it appeared obvious he was leaving Chelsea this past summer, and I was also concerned Lukasz Fabianski would leave Swansea City, I was wishing and hoping for Begovic to come to the Swans. Along with my African heritage defensive midfielder beliefs, I also feel strongly that your most metaphysically solid GK is going to come from Eastern Europe, where darkness has hung over existence for many decades. A GK requires the ability to navigate the darkness, and not become too emotional over successes or failures. A coldness of  heart and survival mode eyesight with wide peripheral vision is necessary at GK, and Eastern Europe has been benefit of an environment which would nurture such psychic genetics. But instead Begovic went to Bournemouth, and Fabianski stayed in Swansea. (An odd aside to Begovic – he played youth football during his teens in Canada, of all places.)

#17: Oscar – Oscar is about the smuggest looking dude ever, and also he (along with later listing John Obi Mikel) did what Diego Costa couldn’t do – get that Chinese Super League money. Fellow Brazilians Hulk and Elkeson also play for the same Chinese team, and they actually caused a giant brawl this past June, where Oscar booted the ball at opposing players creating the fracas. He got suspended 8 matches, but Shanghai SIPG is still sitting in second, and looking good to qualify for the Asian version of the Champions League. Sometimes I actually catch Asian Champions League matches on the computer, but I tend to go for eastern Asia brackets with clubs from Iran and Saudi Arabia, not the western Asian clubs. I can’t even say “Arab clubs” because then Persians would be mad. Oh, by the way, Oscar and his Shanghai SIPG club are in the final four of the Asian Champions League, with the first leg (against Urawa Red Diamonds) set for 12 days from now. DE-COLONIZE YOUR FOOTBALLING EXPERIENCE! THERE’S MORE TO THE WORLD THAN JUST UEFA.

#18: Kurt Zouma – On loan to Stoke City all season. It seems Chelsea loan out all their non-white players, to let them sort out who is best elsewhere, and not upset the Chelsea Headhunters with too many players at once that they have to whistle at like assholes every time they touch the ball.

#19: Michy Batshuayi – Belgian striker most famously known for authoring the dystopian classic 1Q84, and many felt was going to win the Nobel Prize for literature in 2014, but he was narrowly edged out by Luis Suarez.

#20: John Obi Mikel – I did all that talking about Nigeria already, and here was the fucking team captain sitting right here, waiting for me to gloss him as well. Mikel is no longer with Chelsea though, having been one of the lucky men to cash in on those ridiculous Chinese Super League contracts. Sadly, as of right now, his Chinese Super League team – Tianjin Teda – is sitting next to last on the table, and flirting with relegation. I can’t imagine his contract will still be feasible as second level of Chinese football.

#21: Baba Rahman – The young baby Baba Rahman is a Ghanaian who has been potential Chelsea star for a few seasons now (of which they have hyped many, but few have come to fruition). As a follower of African club football, I can tell you one of the most heated rivalries in all of black Africa (African football is still culturally somewhat segregated in style by Arab and black regions) is Hearts of Oak and Asante Kotoko in Ghana. Rahman’s first professional season of football was played for Asante Kotoko (having played youth football, and thus contractually owned by Dreams FC in Ghana). One season there, and clubs like Manchester City, Parma, and Arsenal came sniffing for the young man. He ended up at Chelsea by way of a German stint, and has since been about to breakthrough for a while. Last season he went back to Germany on loan, and one has to wonder if Rahman has much life at Chelsea left barring a miracle turn in his fortunes.

#22: Ruben Loftus-Cheek – Young 21-year-old “about to breakthrough” Chelsea-owned midfielder on season-long loan to Crystal Palace, who have had their worst start to Premier League season ever. Chelsea’s “out on loan” Wikipedia section is bigger than most clubs actual rosters. That shit is wack and goes against the integrity of football and antifa are the only true supporters of real football in Europe, and it’s sad that American antifa think antifa is only about macing Nazis. Then again, MLS sucks.

#23: Nathaniel Chalobah – Another “about to breakthrough” Chelsea wonderkid, which meant he was loaned to the following clubs: Watford (42 matches), Nottingham Forest (12 matches), Middlesbrough (19 matches), Burnley (4 matches), Reading (20 matches), and Napoli (10 matches). In that same period he only accumulated 15 appearances for Chelsea proper (10 of which were last season, which is how he cracked the list). Finally, the kid from Sierra Leone, now 22, and seven years into English football property, he transferred to Watford where he can actually appear for the club that owns his rights. (I wanted to make some sort of blood diamond reference, but it seemed heavy-handed, and it’s not like he’s free – he’s still in England, and earning lots of money that a poor kid from Freetown probably finds mind-boggling, as does everybody back home, which has made him an alien in his own homeland. Corporate colonization is real.)

#24: Antonio Rudiger – If Action Bronson is so fuckin’ Albanian, how come he doesn’t drop more soccer references?

#25: Kenedy – Look, I got Ibn al-Arabi’s Meccan Revelations Volume 1 in the mail today, and I’m trying to wrap this thing up to go lay in the bed naked and read some more of that. So I’m out.

WH4T 1F DVK3S 0F H4ZZ4RD DR0V3...

what if Dukes of Hazzard drove

through Sparta, Mississippi?

would the Bottoms accept them?

[2k=0] Alone In The Crowd (Trying Not To Be A Glass Shard Person)

(say "word")

Broken people, likely out of learned survival skill, are very good at pretending nothing is happening. It’s that ironic “It’s all good!” or “It is what it is…” after they just told you about some horrible, wretched hardship or trauma they’ve endured, and are still standing, at least physically. The psychic (metaphysical, psychological, perhaps even neurological once science catches up – if it ever does) realm they perhaps are not standing so straight in though. But generally if you are from broken people, you know the edges are sharp, and we rub each other in ugly and painful ways, pretty consistently, and nobody ever really wants to take responsibility for their ugliness and the pain they’ve caused. A lot of broken people (think of them as sigils made of glass shards) tend to think of themselves as victims themselves, from a previous generation’s ugliness and pain, and the shit just compounds, both in unseen genetics as well as physical environment – a one-two double psychic dropkick that gives the next generation a pretty good traumatic shot to the soul, either in large horrible events, or the slow accumulation of instability and chaos.

When you come from broken glass shard people, there is a likelihood to some extent you will also become a broken glass shard person. It’s not set in stone (it’s glass, remember?) but that path is certainly laid out for you. Not becoming that type of person is really a crap shoot, to be honest. Self-medication, self-hatred, or that hatred being channeled outward to others are all fairly easy redirects of this negative energy that occur regularly in our late capitalist American culture. Two of the prominent news trends of the past few weeks have directly related to broken glass shard people, seen as white by racial constructs: opioid epidemics, and white supremacy/nationalism/neo-Nazis.

(As an aside, being this is the internet, which seems to be a medium for manufacturing hate at all levels, I want to clarify that by saying “seen as white by racial constructs”, I’m not denying the reality of those constructs. In fact, I have benefitted from them greatly in life. Even though I’m very much a broken person from broken people, I can put a $4 button down shirt over top my shitty tattoos, cut my hair, say “yes sir” and “no ma’am” enough to appear to be as safe a white as possible. I would not have the job I have now if I wasn’t white, not coming from the background I came from, nor with the internal jaggedness that I’ve always possessed. Though our racial structure in America is very much a created structure, it is also very much a real and oppressive creation. It’s important for me to acknowledge that, and also do what I can in my life to not perpetuate that.)

I’m not entirely sure why the opioid epidemic is now an epidemic as compared to previous decades when self-medication leading to addiction decimated so many urban minority communities as well as many rural lower socio-economic ones. When you click the map of Appalachian counties suffering the most overdoses in the currently defined epidemic, these are mostly places that have always been known to be homelands of hopelessness, long before greedy pharmaceutical companies starting pushing oxycodone through doctors in these areas. Certainly having a sort of legal way to self-medicate helped make that problem worse, but it was always there.

But as someone who has been blessed enough to sit in on jail writing workshop classes before can attest, or anyone who has been part of a similar recovery groups in the public sphere, these addictions travel back generations, and become learned behaviors, or at the very least acceptable behaviors. You don’t know any better. But you still grow up, become an adult, and then are saddled with the legal responsibilities as part of civilized society to know better. I think of it a lot of times like being asleep in the numbing fog, to avoid all the glass shards of others as well as yourself, and then needing to wake up at some point, and be like, “Oh fuck, I’ve got to stop cutting everybody else up with my glass shards!” There’s no real definitive point that happens but you see it a lot in the prison system, as well as recovery programs from substance abuse. For a lot of folks, that’s when they hit a personal low point where they can’t ignore it anymore, but also they’re often forced by the legal system to detox long enough to actually feel for a minute.

I’m almost seven years sober, so I understand that part. I have family who has battled addiction, both hard as well as legal (alcohol). Liver failures and disappearances happen. Suicides and early deaths. One of the scariest sights I saw before my 18th birthday was my dad attempting to quit drinking in the trailer we shared at the time, and watching him suffer withdrawals. But even my quitting had less to do with me than it did with the fact I had my own children, who I did not want to recreate this pattern with. It’s easier for us to love someone else than to love ourselves, easier to use that motivation for someone else to try and break these broken people glass shard cycles than it is for ourselves.

I will also clarify that I would never have been successful for seven years if I hadn’t practiced learning to love myself more. I still struggle with it, too, wanting to sink into the blinding, numbing fog of medication, legal or not, and disappear from this bullshit world. It’s very literally a daily battle.

Which brings me to the white supremacy/neo-Nazi part of this. When the Ku Klux Klan rally last month and the white nationalist/supremacist rally this month happened in Charlottesville, I felt it necessary to be present, as a rural-born, rural-raised, Southern white male, or as I prefer to think of it if I am forced to identify myself racially, as a country ass whiteboy, to say to these fuckers, “yo, I might look like you and be from where you are from, but fuck you, I’m not with you.” Those fuckers know people of color and marginalized groups are not like them, and they have a perverted pride in that. I feel it’s important for people they think might be down with their demographics as they wage their bullshit memetic wars for western culture, stand up and say, “nah, fuck you.” In fact, it’s necessary. It’s not enough to claim you’re not one of the bad white people; you have to go out and stand up to those who are bad, and prove you’re better than them. (If you wonder why that’s not enough, or think that’s bullshit, think about putting on the shirt and cleaning up for a job interview or court appearance, and wonder why that’s possible. If you can use your whiteness as an inside lane to then cooperate and navigate obstacles, you’re benefitting from the shit. I’m not saying it’s your fault, or you created the fucked up bureaucratic somewhat amoral mess that is America today, but if you can smooth your way through it and others cannot, then that’s a benefit. And thus when assholes are out being Nazis with confederate flags and the white polo shirt/khaki combo of every construction site foreman in America, instead of sitting back in the safety of your own circle and saying “heritage not hate”, you need to get your ass out there and confront those fuckers; not leave it for others to do for you.)

Charlottesville the weekend of August 12th was a horrible community trauma. It happened in the days before, punctuated by a fucking torch march on Friday night (caught the after effects of that in person by chance, with my daughter driving me), through the coordinated attack that happened at the rally itself, all while police did nothing (personally witnessed a truck almost run over 3 people a few hours before Heather Heyer’s death, and personally yelled the license plate out to a nearby police officer, who ain’t do shit but shrug her shoulders and say “the National Guard is back there”), through Sunday’s attempted press conference by the rally organizer, and is ongoing. There are a couple of scenes I saw that weekend that continue to haunt me, continue to make me wish I had done this or that differently. And I wasn’t even at the front lines of this shit! People are hurting everywhere.

On the Sunday of the press conference, I felt like I had to go. I wasn’t aware of any organized plan for people to be there, so I didn’t know what to expect. I texted my boy D and asked him to meet me up there, saying I needed him to because I didn’t know what I’d be walking into. Luckily, there were many people, seemingly disorganized other than by their own indignant morality, who also showed up, and we all yelled that asshole down. Apparently, a couple hundred freedom of speeches ring louder than one asshole’s freedom of speech.

After that weekend, I got texts, calls, and emails from friends all over, asking if we were okay, saying they saw me or my wife on this clip or that, making sure everybody was doing well. But a strange compounding to the post-traumatic stress of the weekend was the fact no one from my birth family checked in. I’m not sure they even knew. But because of the fractured relationships, the glass shards refusing to stop being glass shards, only unless we all just pretend we’re not cutting each other up inside, nobody checked in. Not once.

I’ve heard of multiple other people who had this same effect after that weekend – no family support. It’s a weird feeling, to feel completely unsafe in the face of an overwhelming threat to your community’s security, while to also feel like you got no family there to help. There’s such a strong sense of being unmoored, lost at civilization’s sea. But it’s also something many others have felt, and from many segments of our community’s they’ve felt this for decades themselves.

My glass shards are still there, but I try my best to not psychically cut up my children. Am I perfect? Fuck no. I need improvement, always. I am not the best father all the time, but I am trying to be aware of when I’m faltering or failing. That too is a daily battle.

Just as importantly though, I’m trying to wear down my glass shards for myself, so I’m not wracked with that psychic pain where hatred and self-medication feels so necessary. That process is far more difficult, and when I’ve been most successful with it, that’s usually been direct result of being in group of people attempting the same work. This culture we all live under has manufactured no short supply of broken people; they are everywhere. That’s why there’s an opioid epidemic (which always existed) and a rise in hate groups (which never went away). The traditional notion of family is built on a concept of unconditional support, which is not a reality for everyone in these modern times. But there are those around us all, in our communities, who need that same sense of family, outside of the traditional form (which has failed them). There is no shortage of broken people who need at least a little chunk of unconditional support somewhere in the week to try and dull those internal psychic glass shards just a little bit, to help make it easier to navigate the days.

At societal level, I’m not sure I believe there’s any fixing of the underlying issues that caused the August 12th attacks in Charlottesville, or outright end the current (and ongoing) growth of overdoses, but at that local level – our In Real Life communities – we can start to support each other more like a traditional family would, actively, getting ourselves emotionally dirty with each other, to try and lessen those sharp edges. And actually that might be the weakness of traditional family – that you just pretend everything is okay and ignore the actual issues, and come together at holidays and funerals and act like nothing’s wrong. But in our little pieces of the larger world, at that localized level, we can quit pretending everything just fine, quit saying “It’s all good!” or “It is what it is…” and get the fuck down to doing the painful work of helping ourselves heal, and take care of each other, unconditionally.