SONG OF THE DAY: So Low (kudzu'd)

There's piles of railroad detritus here and there along the tracks. Nice little hills of clasps and spikes and plates, and sometimes you find a great big siding of ragged old ties stacked high, and replaced rail. One time last year, I strapped 38 miles of rail to the top of my Corolla, because I'm building a 1:1 scale replica of an old small town railroad depot in the woods behind my house. I got a big DILLWYN sign too, from when they replaced that the other year, and a friend hipped me to the old one being stashed behind a building before they threw it away. You'd be surprised how much old shit they just throw away. I hope to one day build a whole town, with like 5000 residents, and a small public liberal arts college, in the woods behind my house, all with recycled things found in the trash.

SONG OF THE DAY: I'm A Hobo

Just a little Sunday hobo throwback track, because even if the world falls apart, you can hopefully still walk away and disappear. They can never cancel the right to disappear from civilization.

SONG OF THE DAY: A Freight Train In My Mind

A freight train in my mind is about all I got most days, wishing these damn hoppers would move, or I had time to go spend the night at my boy’s house where all the coals are, or even that I had bought a house right by a yard somewhere. Or that I had known about all the coals lined up at the plant down in Bremo back in the early 2000s, when I first lived that way. Can’t wait for time travel to be real so we can indulge our obsessive compulsions across four dimensions instead of just three.

SONG OF THE DAY: Hobo Blues

I never was an official hobo, partially because I know my obsessiveness (aka alcoholism/addiction genes) and also my penchant for embracing a disappearance. I likely never would’ve come back if I ever left. I also never finished learning the banjo. It was antithetical to my brain patterns for some reason. Oh well. There's always next year, for learning the banjo or disappearing from respectable society.

SONG OF THE DAY: My Walkin' Shoes

“My Walkin’ Shoes” written on 360 train cars, by this time next year. That’s the goal. And to be honest, that’s a conservative goal.

SONG OF THE DAY: La Chankla (kudzu'd)

Dancing on the dirt in fresh white Jordans, keeping them crisp in spite of a grimy ass world that wants to sully all that touches it. Flat footing on a hunk of plywood sitting by the train tracks, tapping a beat of “fuck this”ness that matches my heart’s natural rhythm. When I finally get banished to hell, I hope they got cumbia rebajada on the shuttle bus.

SONG OF THE DAY: Nuthin' But a G Thang (kudzu'd)

Broke a banjo string and was waiting on another pack to show up in the mailbox, but it was the 2nd so I could still practice my 3-finger roll, tuned in G, and just kept practicing that same ol’ open roll, over and over, singing in my head, “AIN’T NUTHIN’ BUT A G THANG, AIN’T NUTHIN’ BUT A G THANG” and then freestyling some sad verse about being lonesome as fuck walking the railroad tracks by the river. I got in about 139 minutes before I got bored. That’s two hours closer to my ten thousand goal.

SONG OF THE DAY: Slow Coastin

I’ve been tormented by Flee Demons lately. I’ve been afflicted with them for as long as I’ve had a conscious mind, since I was little disappearing into fields behind the ragged cinderblock house my young ass folks was renting in Rice, Virginia. Flee Demons just show up in your mind, because you can’t comprehend how to possibly fix everything that’s broken in front of you, can’t possibly begin to clean up the messes piled in every direction, even outside the doors, piled up on the porches, out in the yard. Shit man, you got piles of messes at the last three places you stayed at, in other people’s basements and attics, sitting there with bad memories you left behind for somebody else. Flee Demons are pretty common amongst a lot of folks, but you don’t really see them in popular culture. Pop culture is made for those that got the ability to sit in one place and collect experiences they bought. They don’t have to actually live them all, so they consume what others make and consider it expanding their worldview.
I’d thought I’d gotten the Flee Demons under control, silenced them with a bit of stability and a big old house in the country that leaks air but seems to love me. But then the still life you’re living has some sort of perspective shift, and all of a sudden all the angles look darker and less welcoming. The good life you thought you’d achieved slips further away, without anything actually seemingly changing. But you realize all those piles from forever ago, they’re all still there, piled up in every direction, stuff you can’t throw away but can’t fix either, don’t have the skills or strength or even the desire to figure all of it out. And then the Flee Demons start piping up again, with that siren song of somewhere elseness. I’ve been feeling it heavily, because it’s cold, and I’m tired, and I don’t feel like doing the same thing next Tuesday that I did this Tuesday, so I want to set fire to the stability and run off and start over again, enjoy a brand new puzzle where there are no piles. Fucked up thing is even if I did that, once I sat still for half a year, and started putting the new puzzle together, all those piles would show back up, sitting on the porch again, stacked up beside the couch, filling every hall closet possible.
I don’t know what to do about it. If I can’t get rid of the piles, how do I learn to live with them? Can I at least recycle some of this shit? Setting fire to it never seems to get rid of it, because the ashes are changelings and rearrange the soot back into shape, slowly over time, when you ain’t watching the fire to keep it going constantly. And nobody can be that vigilant with their scorched Earth.
So I’m just sitting here looking at these piles, and hearing the sweet song of the Flee Demons again, thinking about where the westbound line stops to let a coal pass east almost every day around the same time on the weekend, and how I could just sit there and wait to see what all is on the other end of where that train goes. Been hearing that since I was little, and sometimes I wish I’d listened to it better all these years instead of trying to make sense of the senselessness.

SONG OF THE DAY: Wondering

Fences are assholes, and one of my favorite asshole fences, for all it represents, is the fake ass wrought iron fence along the train yard in Belmont, Charlottesville, which separates an old part of the yard with a coal tower where delinquents used to fuck around until a teenage girl got killed there years ago, from the actual still operational yard. The coal tower stretch has been a road for a while and now all these expensive ass townhouses and an "urban living" apartment building have gone up, and the fence keeps everybody jogging along the bike path safe from whatever vagrancy or minimal industry might still be going on in the barely functional yard. And Belmont is starting to creep in closer on the other side as well, from the southern end, with the old office building there being renovated into apartments, and the houses in that part rising in value at a crazy rate. Won't be long until another fence goes up most likely. I find it hilarious to an extent, because all the folks living good comfortable lives for the most part, at least financially, in those new townhouses and all, don't want the industrial blight, perpetuating this myth that all the hard work to have a society is just magically done by unseen elves (the poor) that keep everything functioning smoothly in the exceptional way America was god blessed. A few blocks over, there's a giant mural of the train yard done by a Richmond artist, hearkening back to an older era when people actually had jobs in train yards. There's other murals like that nearby (and anywhere that's being gentrified from old industrial abandonment zone to new thriving renamed neighborhood in any city around America), probably a little brewery that's popped up too, with either the brewery or some of their beers named after defunct industries or local landmarks, pretending to honor the memory while actually just exploiting the ghosts they refuse to acknowledge. I pray that the trickster gods of working folks rise up from the creosote dust left behind from their existence, and haunt these assholes by blowing through that asshole fence. We no longer have wrong side of the tracks, because everything's been settled so long, but we most definitely still got wrong side of the fence, everywhere. One side, you're good, but on the other, you're a threat. And your politics don't matter at all, to be honest. It's just what you're born into.

0VTL3TS W1TH0VT G4T3K33P3RS...

outlets without gatekeepers 
allow for free expression 
of internal life turmoil 

4LW4YS BVRN BR1DG3S B3F0R3...

always burn bridges before 
you feel like jumping off them - 
lighten your own psychic load 

R3C0GN1Z3D BY W0RD P4TT3RNS...

recognized by word patterns 
representing who I am - 
but it’s all temporary 

W4ND3R TH3 W4ST3L4ND'S 3DG3S...

wander the wasteland’s edges 
and ponder the pointlessness 
of chasing your false purpose 

M3T4ST4T1C P0ST-M0D3RN...

metastatic post-modern 
American existence 
ain’t gonna kill me today 

"S0 34SY T0 G3T L0ST" C4N...

“so easy to get lost” can 
be a blessing or a curse… 
change path when necessary 

4W4R3N3SS 0F L4RG3R W0RLD...

awareness of larger world 
complicates the purity 
of internal processes 

L3SS C0NSVM3D BY M1NVT134'S...

less consumed by minutiae’s 
frustrations as I panned out 
to infinite perspective 

C4RRY1NG TH3 W4T3R 0F...

carrying the water of 
a world spun intricately 
by men without grand design 

BL1ND F41TH "1T'LL B3 0K4Y"...

blind faith “it’ll be okay” 
replaced blind drunk “fuck it” as 
personal philosophy 

TH3 3BBS 4ND FL0WS 0F 3MP1R3S...

the ebbs and flows of empires 
make history books; meanwhile, 
regular folk keep walking