SONG OF THE DAY: Hold It Now, Hit It (kudzu'd)

I’ve been buying print copies of the New York Times now and then lately. The print newspaper is so vastly superior to the online one. Like, I’m not forced to see a single op-ed in the print version. That shit is drummed into my brain online. But also, even with news stories, on social media timelines, you only get a couple stories, and even with them, maybe a paragraph or two at most. The print version is still thick enough, and I can choose to read deeper into shit. I quit buying the Washington Post and any local papers years ago because they weren’t even as thick as some zines. But the NYT stays with a solid word count it seems. I buy a copy, and then just keep reading it for a few days, and when I’m done with a section, it goes into a milk crate for my girlfriend to use to start fires in her cabin. Once I’m getting low on leftover sections to read in the still readable pile (or in the bathroom), I buy a new copy. I don’t even need to buy a copy but once or twice a week. My dad only had a 7th grade education (according to my birth certificate), but he was a pretty smart dude, and a big part of that was he read the paper most every day. But anyways, I was reading about a drug raid in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where like 130 people got killed by police. I didn’t see shit about this online. Also, there was a long ass article about Trump killing civilians in boats off the coast of Colombia and Venezuela, without declaring wartime activities, and color me shocked as the article laid out the deep legal arguments being made for this shit, and how it actually was building directly off of shit Obama did in Libya in 2011. In fact, the direct line of Presidents dismantling the War Powers Act (or whatever that shit is called) was Reagan, Bill Clinton, Obama, Trump. That’s like the Mt. Rushmore of Icons of the Dying American Empire.
I do feel like print newspapers is one of those things that’s temporarily become obsolete, but will come back, one way or another, maybe not exactly like it was, but in some form. Capitalism tricks us into thinking everything has to make a profit, and that’s it’s only purpose for existing. So newspapers were consolidated by larger companies, and then phased out as they became unprofitable due to the internet. But the real reason for newspapers was to try and have a society where everyone wasn’t a Goddamned Idiot. Demographically, Goddamned Idiots have been skyrocketing in recent decades. We are ruled by Goddamned Idiots (that’s why they call them populists), and I don’t know man, the simple act of sitting in my secondhand recliner with the little reading light on and piddling around in the print paper, it is helping me feel like the Goddamn Idiocy is not colonizing my prefrontal cortex quite as quickly.

SONG OF THE DAY: Meat Grinder

I got one of those 33 1/3 books about Madvillain but I haven’t read much of it yet because it’s somehow a little bit more than a zine but not quite a book, and mostly my brain has been in zine level of attention mode lately, and if I happen to get more than that on a rare night, I try to knock 10-15 pages out of an actual book laying beside the bed, gathering more dust than thumbing. This is no diss to 33 1/3 books, other than they are zines pretending to be books and every author should be forced to get some comic artist they knew 15 years ago to do wonderful doodles to go with it. Or cut and paste some shit out of old Spin magazines.

PR4CT1C3 4LT3R1NG MVND4N3...

practice altering mundane 
existence with altars to 
your own favored chaoses 

SONG OF THE DAY: Monroe's Hornpipe

Reading An Anthropology of Marxism by Cedric J. Robinson while listening to bluegrass music, contemplating "why the fuck?" constantly as the frayed chunks of civilization have larger and larger cracks for so many people I love to be perched precariously close to falling through. Some might already have, but we lost touch, because that's what happens when people fall through cracks. Sigh.

SONG OF THE DAY: Waitin' Round to Die/Kathleen

My latest gofundme is to rent an abandoned restaurant space in an old metal building strip mall where a panaderia shut down, and I’m just gonna offer up fried chicken and pancakes, that’s all, but get one of those working class murals on the outside, you know how the neighborhood was built on people who fastened freight trains together out of the soapstone slabs they dug out the native river forks, and all the old houses of the neighborhood were that traditional cheap company housing but which is still superior to modern building techniques, although most of them are now painted pastel blossoms of property value increases, which has allowed some of the old company houses to be torn down and have new innovative things get built that look like recycling boxes devised by Mr. Miyagi if he opened a school after becoming ego-driven once Daniel-san won as a training mechanism for all his students, “no no no, you are not doing it right, watch, staple… stucco… net. staple… stucco… net.” And then I’ll decorate my new rundown strip mall restaurant in all the quirky old school ways of the 1950s, but without any real consistency. And there will be a jukebox, but it won’t actually play records, just a complete assortment of versions of this song, because I’ll actually have a tiny 4th generation ipod nano I took from my daughter inside the jukebox. I’ll take my fried chicken serious, bread it up just right; the pancakes, not so much, I mean its pancakes. Have some fancy locally harvested sustainably abstained maple syrups, maybe even extreme alternatives like cedar syrup or some crazy shit. This will all be a front to draw in the faux-country crowd who buy $45 “vintage” shirts to dress up like their racist grandfather on a Saturday night, because I’m just gonna work, be all friendly, act like it’s all good and I’m a serious entrepreneur. Then one day, when I have just the right mix of faux-country assholes, no people with trustworthy eyes in sight, and some eastern European looking dude with a Rollie Fingers mustache and a name patch on his work shirt that says “Nicky Boy” asks me how comes there’s no Sturgill Simpson on the jukebox, I’m gonna lock the door and murder everybody, but not myself. No murder-suicide for your boy the Dirtgod. I’ve got a lot of reading to catch up on finally.

STVDY1NG TH3 H41KV F0RM'S...

studying the haiku form's

historical precedents,

all while bastardizing them

R3STL3SS B3D L3FT D1STR3SS3D 1N...

restless bed left distressed in

middle of night for dropper

of motherwort in kitchen

oats hovering overhead,

hung out to dry in bedroom,

only space available

internet reading list of late

(triplicates of links that occupied my mind at *work* recently)

Citizen Khan from the New Yorker

Oh man, this story here is amazing, and really drives home the true creation myth of America that could be real, except for whatever reason people won't let it. What if instead of a bunch of hipsters buying dilapidated parcels of Detroit, you just straight up relocated 15,000 Syrian refugees? What if instead of leaving it abandoned, the old historically black college or university in Southside Virginia (Saint Paul's) was turned into a boarding home/school for latino migrant children instead of sending them back? What amazing life stories could've been created, which would've only made this fucking place less sterile and hateful and narrow and fucked? (Also, this story really pushes my innate desire to operate a fucked up food cart/shitty restaurant into hyperdrive. It won't happen, because I'm already stretched beyond thin, but if only...)

13, Right Now from progaganda ass Washington Post

This story scared me because - despite the higher level of privilege (which is not to say we are not a privileged family, because I know we are - and I try to remind my children of this) - this reminds me a lot of my own 12-year-old. Technology has outpaced our ability to adapt, and we won't know the long-term effects of all this robot phone shit until, you know, it's been a long term. By then IT MIGHT BE TOO LATE!!! (lolol)

Bobby Shmurder: His Surreal Saga from Gentleman's Quarterly megazine

With the idiotic Troy Ave video making news, GQ jumped up to push this out about another NYC rapper who already went to jail. This story is sketchy as fuck though, and reminds me a lot of some "social media mapping" bullshit article I read a couple years back where NYC police busted a "gang" which it seemed highly probably were just a bunch of kids who lived around each other, and everybody's home was broken so they had not a whole lot of guidance. I think mainstream people (police, media, you know deep space white people organizational shit) underestimate how fractured a lot of communities are, and how it is natural human desire to try and piece together those fractures with a semblance of tribal belonging. Unfortunately, this is painted as "OH MY GOD! GANGS!" After reading this, I'm not sure what Bobby Shmurda did wrong other than be a teenager who got caught up in suddenly having money given to him in abundance.

internet reading list of late

(triplicates of links that occupied my mind at *work* recently)

The Empty Brain aka YOUR BRAIN IS NOT A COMPUTER from Aeon website

I used to have Aeon on my google reader (which is now old reader) because I loved that site enough to keep up with that shit like so. But it started to suffer from Short Quirky Smart Website Blast Syndrome to speak to our lower attention spans, and it got cut from my old reader starting line-up. Perhaps I've missed a million articles like this (but I doubt it). The main concept behind this article is not all that shocking to me, nor to anybody tuned into the good living of wild natural bullshit (which includes manmade things like abandoned factories and railroad tracks and little children playing with imaginary friends), but still, the level of explanation of how during various times of humanity's civilization, we regarded the brain as different important technological progresses of that period was very interesting to me.
The weird thing is, I had this on my internet reading list checklist since late last week, and then an author guy I know put a link to this on his various social medias, and I momentarily thought "well now I can't use it because he used it," which is ridiculous as fuck. We've somehow started to put stock in this notion that our digital curation is an extension of ourselves, that This is who we Are. We are literally making ourselves believe we are computers and shit. Ultimately I came to my senses (y'all probably don't know that author dude anyways) and included this article in this list of three links for you read-y types, because honestly I'm not sure anybody even sees this. I mean the data suggests somebody might but I don't have any real life verification of that.

The Short Life of Deonte Howard by stupid ass Buzzfeed

Generally there are a list of historically trash websites that I won't visit even if longforms suggests one or somebody sends me a link. All the gawker sites are part of that, also Bleacher Nation SB Report, and also anything that considers itself some sort of Grantland. And definitely Buzzfeed is on that list, in fact it probably tops that list. I can't take seriously anything that used to be the bread and butter (and might still be) of all the grandma's facebook page. But for whatever reason I powered through my personal bias for this one, and found it worthwhile. (The writing is not so great - very basic, but whatever, whoever the kid is who wrote it at least forms sentences without needing animated gifs of Michael Jackson eating popcorn.) The story is one that could probably be told over and over and over again, in various cities. Right now Chicago is that place most obviously in the news with high murder rate, but also Baltimore. It has also been closer to me in DC and even Richmond was always right at the top of this list when I first moved there for college. Now when you live in a place like that you know the boundaries, where people get killed and where they don't, but those boundaries blur and shit creeps over from time to time. If it creeps too far into a safe (white, or more appropriately wealthy, which usually is majority white) then it'll blow up into Serious Public Safety issue.
But an interesting component to this story, which also was the same component to the explosion of gang murders in L.A. back in the mid-80s, was how the breakdown of older gangs and elder gang members actually contributed to a fracturing of traditional codes which caused a spike in murders and assaults. In L.A. this involved them clearing the streets of known hoodlums before the '84 Olympics, which reverberated for the next half dozen years, and only really stopped because of the post-Rodney King verdict riots gang truce. (Man, what a fuckin' pure American sentence that last one was.) This is not to blame the problem on policing alone, but the combination of no future, no hope, plenty guns, plenty drugs, is always gonna ferment into shit like this. I can't help but believe there's some hidden methodology behind the whole thing, because how the fuck do you have so many guns in the street? Like when you think about it logistically, it's mind-boggling. Same with heroin/coke/crack... for something allegedly completely illegal to not only be distributed but broken down to corner level, consistently, despite decades of arresting those corner level people and ruining the rest of their lives, I got no idea how it's been maintained without some hidden methodology behind the curtain that keeps it going.
Nonetheless, this is (another) sad story. Local to me, earlier this year there was a young man who was a 19-year-old senior in high school (this was pointed out, to shine bad light on the kid) who was all-state in football still, and had gotten scholarship offers to attend Division II colleges for football. Something happened, he attached his mom in a store and ran off and ended up getting shot dead by local sheriffs. It sounded like synthetic drugs to me, because even if you have hard drugs, you know what you have and don't flip out on your mom at Ali's Country Store (great fried fish in there, by the way), so I'm speculating synthetic shit. But still, how do you end up shot dead that easy? So many guns and so much self-medication, including by those who are the alleged good guys according to the storyboards.
They said after the shooting state police were investigating the incident, and then there was no more news about it at all, since February. I actually emailed the state police PR person last week to get an update. They are still investigating, she said. Synthetic drugs don't always show up on toxicology reports clearly so I imagine that might've confused their original autopsy-proves-drugs-so-then-say-police-acted-on-threat standard play.
I don't know... the cheapness of human life is bothersome, but I can't but help think there's something institutionally behind it all.

A Severed Head, Two Cops, and the Radical Future of Interrogation from Wired magazine

Speaking of institutional bullshit, this article really lays it all out, but under the pretense of bold new copping maneuvers that listen and allow the truth to be revealed. But let's be clear about a few things - first off, this is handed down from Department of Defense. When you see those huge military budgets, people think it's all about drones and bombs but we all have no idea how much medical research, psychology research, all types of weird shit like that is done off what it technically military budget. Most historical medical advances have come from such research. (I got no proof on that but a PI I worked under told me that one time, and those fuckers think they know everything.)
But secondly, this article basically says the best defense against cops in the old way was don't say shit to the cops. Any even petty criminal knows this. My own father taught me this at a young age (speaking of petty criminals) (me, not my father) (but him too). But even with this new age "let's have a little talk" method, YOU'RE STILL OKAY IF YOU DON'T SAY SHIT TO THE COPS. I guess it's easy to believe that if they're yelling at you, but easier to forget if they're all chummy inviting you into a hotel suite for warm cup of chai.
But even more than that, here is the thing that gets me about this article - it basically accepts the old ways were bullshit and not built off any real proof they worked. So they've now, with the help of top level intelligence fuckers from the military, started to utilize this new method. But the end result is still you get some dude who chopped up his lover to admit guilt, inadvertently, and then get thrown into prison system. The prison system is still very much built off those old broken ways too. So if you want this new age let's listen and let people say their full story, you need to do that shit in prison system too. You might actually be able to apply that and actually rehabilitate somebody, instead of making things worse (which often happens) and also giving them a government paperwork black mark forever which makes it three times as hard to get a job with. So ultimately, my reaction to this article is, "wow, cops doing some new shit, fuck the police though" and I remember my father's voice (he's dead now, been dead for a while) saying "never tell the police anything, ever". You stick to that, and you're still okay, despite their new-fangled psychological tomfoolery.

internet reading list of late

(triplicates of links that occupied my mind at *work* recently)

Unearthing the Secret's of New York's Mass Graves from New York Times
At my previous position in the great bureaucracy of research-related paper stacking (now with digital), I tended cadaver heads. I always kept it respectful and chill, even though I knew from the demo sheets that came with them that most of these folks likely were indigent (I guess that's not an "even though" so much as "especially because") but it was weird human bodies were donated to SCIENCE and just ended up having neurosurgeon trainees perform like 9 different surgeries on the head until it was a puzzled together chunk of human-ish head.
Anyways, reading this giant article about the island of unclaimed dead bodies for New York was not shocking at all, sadly. The immense bureaucracy is awash in too much to do combined with little incentive to be motivated so the fact bodies there were never claimed because ownership was never properly vetted by the assigned bureaucrat end up getting hauled off to an abandoned island to be buried en masse in trenches by prison labor is not really shocking at all. In fact, it's about as American as it gets. We like to think everything is working towards utopia, but our trajectory as a nation moving in that direction apexed probably 30 years ago (maybe longer) and the recent era of "things don't feel as hopeful" is actually noticing the sea level rise after the icebergs have melted - you can't freeze them back.
This is not to say we are doomed. Nation-states have an amazing ability to survive long periods of lethargy brought on by immense bureaucracies caving in on themselves partially. Just like an old plantation home left to rot, when it caves in on itself it doesn't do it all at once in a giant fell swoop, and then you haul it off and start over. It... takes... forever. Decades. Centuries. We can be this type of America for another 150 years, easy.
That doesn't change the reality we (living humans) put a lot of value on the humanity of dead humans (who don't care, so far as we know), so I'm sure people caught feelings reading this, or got pretty shook realizing their loved one was in a mass grave on an abandoned island. But hey - people got lost in the labyrinth of the immense bureaucracy every hour of every day! You just have to avoid the minotaur, and steal as much as you can without anybody catching you.

From Belief to Resentment in Indiana from Jeff Bezos Presents: The Washington Post
It is my belief that the Washington Post has become especially horrible and propaganda-like the past year. Like it's horrible. Those fuckers who write The Fix are the absolute worst. And just as it got more propaganda-like than ever, a paywall I'd never before experienced popped up. I love shitty propaganda news site paywalls, because they assume not only has their propaganda worked already, but it's worked so well that I'd PAY TO BE BRAINWASHED! Fuck you Washington Post.
But should you click this and it not open, try opening it in an incognito window (or tor, or whatever). It is a wonderful Apter mag piece. Apter mags were wrestling magazines in the 1980s that wrote these long, narrative profiles of wrestlers that worked to further the angles chosen by local promoters. It was all made up, even many of the letters to the editor, all of it. Likely there were two maybe three dudes who did the whole thing, and all one of them did was call the local promoters to make sure shit was cool they were about to do.
That's how this article read - like total fabrication, or at least written by that reporter from the last season of The Wire. It has some serious ass Dickensian aspects. So much so I actually googled Chris Setser to make sure he exists, and some Chris Setser from Indiana had some big surgery two years ago, so either he does exist, or I don't know it's not that hard to create a human internet footprint to support your articles. BUT WAIT A SECOND! I'm not trying to go down the path of All This Is Imaginary, because I'm sure it's based on reality. The point of misinformation is not to prove bad truths as false, but to cloud and fog up all the unwanted truths so that nothing seems true.
But even with the caveat this seems embellished as fuck, it's still funny to read, especially when you read it thinking, "Hahaha, the Washington Post propaganda machine is trying to put across a certain philosophy. What are they trying to implant in me?" as you read this.

Emptying the Tower of David from Vocativ
Speaking of doomed, check out this tale of various housing woe from Venezuela. Venezuela survived off of Hugo Chavez's cult of personality (and high oil prices) but New President Maduro is not nearly as personably cult-ish, which makes people less likely to turn a proud but blind eye to your corruption. But let's not blame socialism, because all governments are corrupt to various extents. You have to be adept at that shit though, keep the social contract honored by keeping things moving. That has failed in Venezuela, and seriously that shit could pop off into its own Arab Spring moment any fucking day now.
And at the same time, this article is very interesting due to the squatters movement that took over this abandoned skyscraper, which of course sounds like it too became corrupted. All things do. But people have moments where they help each other survive fucked up situations, then become predatory with each other again, and they alternate these cycles towards other tribes. Humans are fucking tribal apes still.
I live near Charlottesville, Virginia, and there was a BIG HOTEL DEVELOPMENT on the downtown pedestrian mall of expensive shopperies and eatings, and whoever was doing it went bankrupt so the shell of the building has towered there for years. People hate it, and there are often verbal condemnations given pretty much anywhere you go. I find the whole thing funny. It's a big giant unfinished and now ruined carcass of a building, and homeless people and drug addicts and danger teens all probably do sketchy shit inside of it despite all the proper authorities most proper efforts to stop that type of stuff, and that's the reality of the world. It's scary as fuck and yet also pretty damn beautiful. Humanity remains just barely humane, everywhere (but more obvious in some places - like Venezuela right now - than others).

internet reading list of late

(triplicates of links that occupied my mind at *work* recently)

The Aspiring Novelist Who Became Obama's Foreign Policy Guru from New York Times machine
I often look at streams of readers at *cutting edge* and *progressive* reading series, and the steady parade of unphotoshopped but pure shinefaces freaks me out. How is a scuffed fucker supposed to become pyramid success when already so obviously flawed? Every little known site avatar full of perfect white face with perfect MFA, and it's freaky. So to read about one of these *cutting edge* and *progressive* new world not-traditionalists being, well, just a deeply embedded part of the establishment, I don't know, it's already weird enough this collection of facts.
But what's weird as fuck is the mentions of Holden Caulfield in this piece. Holden fucking Caulfield. Now the internet machine has been great for clouding and fogging all things into conspiracies, to where everything is stupid and means nothing, and that way we can elect Donald Trumps and have robot planes bomb Pakistani weddings. But did you know that there are weird Catcher in the Rye conspiracies? That Sirhan Sirhan was carrying the fucking book when he shot that Kennedy bro. That the John Lennon murdered also was carrying the fucking book. That even Winona Ryder, when she got all weird and spaced out and was arrested for shoplifting, was fucking carrying that book. Now whatever, I can see somebody loving a book a lot. I love a couple of books a whole lot, so much so I buy used copies whenever I find them to give to other people. But if I was gonna go murdering somebody, I'd probably leave the book at home to be honest. And yet here are multiple instances of people carrying that same book when they do weird shit.
Well, even weirder is the secret yet allegedly based in truth notions that Salinger was on CIA payroll. But deeper than that is the connections (all of this is whispered, and obviously there's no proof to any of this, especially now that we have the internet fog and all proof is just a joke meant to obfuscate all shit into oblivion philosophies) the CIA is supposed to have to highly credentialed MFA programs, specifically (as I have heard) the Iowa Writer's Workshop. There was some article a while back I read about some novelist talking about becoming a spy, and I was like, "Holy shit, he's saying the conspiracy, but making it some 'hahaha, check out how strange my life journey has been' crap."
Now of course this is all nonsense, just gibberish by dumb ol' Raven Mack at his dumb ol' blogsite in the dusty ass corner of the internet on his 2004 ass looking website. But damn yo, read this article. This shit is reality. And we're supposed to be impressed by it. I don't get this fucking world, at least not the one put forth by those who are writing the history.

"You Want a Description of Hell?" Oxycontin's 12-Hour Problem from Los Angeles Times machine
So Oxycontin and it's parent pharma company have been taking heat lately in media for having a pretty strong hand in helping the latest heroin epidemic as much as any Mexican drug cartel. The sad thing is this only became newsworthy now that suburban kids are starting to OD. Oxycontin has been a huge issue in rural American parts of Greater Appalachia for a long ass minute. I know people who have been in that rabbithole (thankfully, so far as I am aware, none of them have ended up down the heroin route, at least not long enough for it to be obvious), some of them people I love. The issue is not, however, just a corrupt pharmaceutical company alone. They were able to game the FDA system because the system is designed for gaming. That is by design. This article is painting Oxycontin as an aberration, that the family who profited off of this - passing other dynastic families like the Rockefellers and Carnegies in the process - somehow is lesser than those other mentioned dynastic families, that rigging the system in the 1920s was somehow more pure and acceptable than rigging the system in 2000s.
I don't know, I don't really have anything specific I can say. I mean you have the earlier article about OBAMA'S QUIRKY NOVELIST SPEECHWRITER FOREIGN GURU guy, and Obama's health insurance plan is still touted, for some reason, by many, as a step in the right direction for our nation's broken health care system, as if having wolves circling the henhouse but then demanding all the hens pay into the wolves to trust the wolves to not eat them (for profit) is somehow fixing a fucked up situation. I don't get it. There were fucking opioid-related constipation drug commercials at the Super Bowl this past year - the most expensive commercial time on earth, a drug for a side effect symptom of opioid abuse saw it a worthwhile investment to buy that commercial time. You realize in terms of dollars and cents how fucking crazy that is?
People are getting eat up by this system. We are living in fogged times unlike anything we've seen before, and a large part of that is due to the progress of technology - both our social media as well as our pharmaceutical inputs (including through our *non-drug* diet). Fuck man, today's INTERNET READING LIST OF LATE is sounding like crazy man Alex Jones shit, but I don't know, the fog is fucking thick right now. I feel overwhelmed by it some days.

The Sacred Grain of the Northwoods from Roads & Kingdoms
The final of these 3 links for this morning is about wild rice. I was at the Trader Joe's yesterday getting myself some more European style yogurt containers for my cayenne yogurt drinks (just like Karoun's! but I did it myself!) and I laughed at the "cultivated wild rice" label on the cultivated wild rice. We recently had some bona fide self-harvested wild rice gifted to us from some people connected to that realm, and no shit, it has felt important to eat it right, like don't just whip it up with some black beans on a Tuesday afternoon.
I will be honest, I feel too fogged to write clearly about all these things today. But I live down the road from former dairy farmland now leased out to giant agri-business entities who plant slave corn or slave soy depending on the year. You can actually feel the slavery in the plants. I walk up there sometimes and vibe to them. (Perhaps you will find this crazy but) Plants have feelings. They do not want to be enslaved any more than pig farms are full of happy pigs dancing in happy circles as someone makes barbecue from them (as the label often suggests). But what do we do? We can wild harvest enough food to support all these people, can we?
(That leads to philosophical jump to tech industry shit like soylent, which itself is heavily invested in the philosophy of MAN HAS DOMINION OVER THE EARTH even if they took mystery god out of the equation. I'm not down with that. None of it.)
But the simple fact that wild rice exists less, for what seems to be fairly obvious scientific reasons, yet that is overruled by bigger interests, leaving original cultures at a loss for something that has far more than economic importance to them but spiritual significance, I don't know. We very obviously went wrong somewhere. We think economic significance enables a progressive replacement for spiritual significance. It doesn't though. This is why we might end up with a fucking President Trump, because people know the emperor has no clothes on, and they don't really care that the guy pointing it out is an idiot liar with a bad hairpiece. They're just going, "hahaha, no shit! Fuck the emperor!"
There is no way to tie all this together, but if you read the articles, it will tie together for you I hope. Those two words are important, too - "I hope". No empire is bigger than earth; this has been shown time and time again. And though many humans may die due to our greedy incompetence at living with the rest of the biosphere, some humans will survive, and adapt, and regenerate, and stack stones into cities and write words into prophecy. I maintain hope that all will work out, or at least continue, and all one can do is have hope and do their best to survive. But goddamn, the fog is so fucking thick...

internet reading list of late

(triplicates of links that occupied my mind at *work* recently)

The Digital Afterlife of Lost Family Photos by Teju Cole
Buying up old photographs at junk stores has long been a part of art school projects, or zine making, or an activity part of the brain of anybody wired up in that old-fashioned post-modern (lolol) mindframe of "everything is art" when you derive new meanings from old shit. Internet, however, has complicated that because you end up having pictures as part of "your art" that are actual human beings who have actual human meaning to others, who then end up seeing it. That doesn't necessarily bother me, but I think there's a respect that should be used. This article by well-known internet thunkpiecer Teju Cole, touches on that, but maybe not as deep as could've been touched upon. Still though, in an age where everybody simultaneously believes that: A) they can re-appropriate everything they find, and B) they own intellectual property over whatever derivative they appropriate from it.
I take a lot of pictures, but have mostly refrained from taking pictures of people, mostly because I am uncomfortable with the notion I in some way have any ownership over pictures of somebody else. I've got a couple new projects in mind which will force me out of that comfort zone though, and I've been contemplating how I would apply concepts of verbal consent to taking pictures of people, and how I'd want to share what I end up getting from taking pictures of them. (Understand off the jump, I make no money off art to speak of, so there's no Richard Prince factor here... just some dumbass taking photographs who doesn't appreciate the othering of others in most photography, especially since I could've easily fell under othering categories during large swaths of my own life.)
There's a whole gentrification/cultural appropriation factor to art projects involving old pictures once they become digital entities, because generally it's people with access to art/photography world benefitting off *their art* while the people pictured, who make up more than a small amount of the significance of the project, often get nothing. A photographer I've followed in recent years, Chris Arnade, caught a lot of flack for having bought people he took pics of drugs or giving them money, because it broke the photographic rules of documentary, that you were supposed to somehow be removed from the person, simply documenting their existence. But how the fuck do you do that when you are sitting in a drug hotel room with two other people, having talked to them enough to know them well enough for them to be comfortable even letting you into that world?
In our house, on the refrigerator, we keep a copy of that famous Dorothea Lange photo of the Dust Bowl mother looking all stressed the fuck out. My ol' lady put it up, to remember that shit could be worse. I found out in some other article a year or two back that the lady in that pic wasn't even at her bottom rung. They had a flat tire and she was sitting on the side of the road with her two kids. Dorothea Lange apparently promised to give them copies of the photographs or something and never did. And then became famous off the image.
None of us live in a vacuum, and that's even more true in digital era where all our old bullshit might resurface if the clouds shake right. That mostly seems to be applied negatively to some, othering them as counter to digital conventions, but it should also apply upwardly as well. You can't own every stupid fucking tweak and filter you put on other people's lives. But this is America - we don't respect people, we respect property, so Digital Artists creating new *genius* *content* from old shit (that is actually other people's real lives) will always get the props. But intellectual property remains an oxymoron to me.

Pork Life by Todd Kliman
This is such a weird article. Like, it's a fine read, and entertaining I guess, but a deep dive into gluttonous and privileged consumption of pork. Now for full clarification, I used to raise pigs, and in the process got to know the intelligence level of pigs. This combined with a job in medical research which allowed me access to tons of scientific articles led me to learn the genetic proximity of pigs and people. (That's why they be putting pig hearts in humans.) Those two factors (along with reading A LOT of old Sufi Islamic philosophy) combined into me swearing off pork forever. So reading this thing is like insight into what seems to me to be strange human devilry.
The highpoint of this is "III. Bacon Cheeseburger" because with my first two pigs, I actually made bacon. You know what I learned making bacon? It is the longest, most time intensive, and wasteful activity both in terms of man-hours and animal life just to result in a few slivers of salty ass flesh. After making my own bacon I came to the conclusion bacon should actually cost like $150 a pound if it was made in any way conscientiously (if killing distant kin animals is okay, which might be questionable on the morality scale too, but I ain't a vegetarian so I won't make that argument), so all this artisanal bacon and bacon topped cupcakes and hipster bullshit bacon boxes that are supposed to be "okay" forms of bacon somehow not tied to Big Pig have got to be bullshit. They've got to be. There's no way they're not.
People love bacon though, and honestly that shit freaks me out. Like I try to go through my days glossing over everything with this underlying mantra of hope that we're all just humans caught up in our little bullshit, but ultimately we're all trying to survive life and want everybody to at least be okay but hopefully even happy. But then I see some motherfuckers being happy as shit about bacon. About fucking bacon. And that loose thread gets pulled by my brain and the reality of predator drones and tribal nationalism and tribal politics even within concept of American nationalism and just general mean, hateful nature of humanity just comes out.
So yeah, this essay is like bacon - a long process, salty as fuck, but perhaps tasty, and yet ultimately unnecessary and pure devilry. So enjoy.

What Happened to Worcester? at New York Times
At first when Trump looked unstoppable, there were a slew of "Who the Fuck Are All These Dumbasses Voting for Trump?" articles. We have lately moved into the second wave, where people analyze the broken American Dream, how shit used to be compared to how it is now, and how that probably feeds the Trump movement. And I'm sure it does. My neighbors are a couple and their young adult son. Both son and father work labor, for the father that means side jobs both weekend days driving livestock or working at a farm. They raise cattle for selling as livestock, as much as their three acres will allow. And they are always broke. And they fly confederate flags. They're not bad people, not at all, but they were fermented in a different world. Democrats abandoned these people decades ago, because they didn't need them. Republicans whispered sweet subliminal racisms in their ears for decades, encouraged and enabled their worst habits, but have now suddenly - on the heels of the first black President - decided that the best business move for the Republican party is to not be so subliminally racist (kind of). As a business move, to maintain support, Republicans have now abandoned these people that they basically helped make so monstrous, because they no longer need them either (or so they think).
I don't say any of this to excuse people being narrow-minded or prejudiced. I say this to point out if you made a giant Venn diagram of our American system, no matter how much you broke down the circles demographically, a whole fucking lot of us would intersect in the FUCKED part smack in the middle of the diagram. These people are definitely in that same part. I will always be of the mind people who are fucked, so long as they are divided, will be conquered.
I think it goes without saying the America known by the grandparents in this article is no longer there. I know my maternal grandfather's parents were straight from Poland, went through Ellis Island, and raised their family in New Jersey. My grandfather wandered nomadically after naval duties, and still somehow managed to build a good life - owning a home, then building a new one to move into, then buying a farmhouse to retire in, having to sell one to finalize the other, but he died with cash in the mattress and enough left to take care of my grandmother for the most part until her death.
I'm not gonna have that, not even close. And the weird thing is I'm way better off than I should've been. Like I've climbed the fucking pyramid scam good as fuck, to where my children are at least not nearly as fucked as I was starting out. But the environment that allowed my grandfather to have money left at death, or even retire, is not the same one I live in. If I retire, that shit ain't gonna be grand at all - it's gonna basically mean I can stop driving to work and stay home, and if I tighten my belt and don't live too long, there'll still be groceries in the cupboard when I die.
Applying the racial aspect to it, or more appropriately xenophobia because often it's about immigrants when the monsters that were created start thinking about how they don't have jobs, they think of immigrants. But this country always had immigrants. That's not any different than it ever was. There just ain't shit happening to keep everybody occupied. If all of us benefitted off the technological advances, and got to kick back and enjoy the early retirement, with at least groceries in the cupboard, that'd be one thing. But we ain't getting that. We're getting told we should've gotten more education, been more marketable, been more skilled. It's our fault our lives suck.
I don't know man, it's a giant fucking mess, and this Presidential election is only going to make it worse, regardless of which evil gets anointed the more acceptable evil branch of evil bullshit. But whatever. Hopefully more and more of the FUCKED will realize our shared spaces on the grand Venn diagram of nowadays America, and we can start trying to keep each other okay. On the large scale, I don't have much hope for that, because the bureaucracy is immense, and corrupt, and benefits by maintaining FUCKED, but in the little pockets, where people actually talk to each other beyond the fog of manufactured divisions, I hope it will get better.

internet reading list of late

(triplicates of links that occupied my mind at *work* recently)

The Secret Shame of Middle Class Americans by a semi-famous writer dude who lives in the Hamptons
Well, this article's already gotten plenty of online vitriol and hype, but I should mention off the top I was pretty bummed to read this online, though I didn't know at the time, but I had gotten a subscription to the print version a few months back but you never know when they finally show up. This issue showed up the other day, BUT I HAD ALREADY READ THE COVER STORY! I was bummed. Much rather read magazines IRL to be honest.
Nonetheless, most of the response pieces that have gone off on this have pointed out the obvious flaws in the author's position, and perhaps insensitivity to those struggling more than him. I'm not gonna do that (even though it seems pretty easy) but instead mention something I talked about in a rambly talky poetry reading thing tonight. We all live in a giant pyramid scam - all of us. It is the system we are living in. It is a giant pyramid, and all of us are on that pyramid somewhere, and we all look up (because all of us are not at the top) and we get mad at somebody up above who has shit, born with privilege, doing shit we want to do, and we get mad. They are standing on our heads, holding us down, and it is unfair and it pisses us off and god we hate them.
And yet at the same time, all of us (this means you, if you are reading this online then you are not at the bottom of the pyramid, I don't give a fuck what you think) are above someone else on that pyramid, through no planned intent of our own. We likely were born there, but we are standing on those below us, holding them down. We don't realize it probably, don't do it malevolently, but we are fucking doing it nonetheless. That's the nature of the pyramid scam.
This has gone on forever. The actual ancient pyramids of Egypt were not just somebody being like, "Whoa, let's make these awesome big ass pyramids for no reason." They were tombs for THE FUCKING KING! They were built by slaves. When the king died, he was put to rest in the pyramid tomb, servants sealed up with his ass because even in death, kings need somebody to clean up their shit I guess. So the pyramid scam existed 4000 years ago, and will probably exist 4000 years from now.
So instead of getting mad at the guy who wrote this because he is standing on my head, holding me down, and he gets long-winded pieces in the Atlantic and I never will, I'm gonna just say, he probably doesn't mean to sound like an insensitive idiot. And even though people are born with privilege above us on this pyramid scam (I am likely above many, below many; we all are if we are being honest - although I def fall into that "couldn't bust out $400 for an emergency" group, and to be honest, always have been in that group other than when I sold drugs), they are still in the same fucking scam that consumes and mostly crushes us all. CRUSHES US ALL.
So with that in mind, I will forgive this dude for having a 5000 word essay of personal revelation of what seems fucking obvious to me, and has seemed obvious since birth. If you know the struggle though, you gotta realize, that shit is not so obvious to everybody. That's how the pyramid scam works - keep the majority deaf, dumb, and blind. So if my man the movie review bad part of the Hamptons house dude is having a personal revelation and is ever so slightly less dumb, less deaf, and not quite so blind, then I can give him the benefit of the doubt. But being this has been going on for thousands of years, something's bound to give at some point. And if it does, and shit pops off, he better be ready to rock for these personal revelations, and not just stand there on my fucking head, telling me I'm doing it wrong.

The Internet Really Has Changed Everything. Here's the Proof. by Rex Sorgatz
This suffered from similar seemingly obvious delusions, but Rex Sorgatz's bio says "creative technologist" so he's made delusion a CV bullet point, so I'm not gonna fret that. His premise for this piece is great enough: I was born and raised in a shitty little town in South Dakota, but back when there was no internet. Now there is internet. Let's see how my shitty little town in South Dakota is different.
There's a lot of Holden Caulfield in this essay, and though it's pretty easy to flip out on young men getting all A Catcher in the Rye misty-eyed, I can say as a kid who had grown up in a shitty little town, that book spoke to me when I was 13 too. It seems less amazing now that I'm older, and I wouldn't weave it into an essay about *digital natives* (he didn't really use that term, but I hate that term so I used it), but whatever.
This is not a great essay in sense of it's going to change your perspective on life on earth; but it is a good story somebody tells you while waiting for your ride to show up sitting on a bench together for 15 minutes. The premise is pseudo-scientific enough to warrant the meander, and the photography is pretty nice (glad they sent the second photographer!), but it's mostly this Rex Sorgatz guy realizing the call was coming from inside the house the whole time.

The Smug Style in American Liberalism by Emmett Rensin
This is from Vox, which falls under an umbrella of "popular but untrustable" major websites for my personal bias. But I read through this, because it felt relevant enough with all the Hillary hype which will soon consume the Bernie Sanders love, once the primaries are over and everybody who is hardcore political shifts into their MOST IMPORTANT ELECTION IN HISTORY OF AMERICA and IF YOU DON'T VOTE FOR LESSER OF TWO EVILS YOU ARE ESSENTIALLY VOTING FOR WORSER OF TWO EVILS twin arguments, neither of which really matter half a fuck to me. But it's coming.
I am no pundit, but to me this election - should it end up being Trump vs. Clinton - feels a lot like Bush vs. Gore when people who supported Gore were on coast mode because they couldn't not even fathom Bush winning. Like that shit wasn't even conceivable in their world. And then he won. Sure there was hanging chad bullshit, but every election is probably fixed. (Ultimately that leaves me to wonder about whether Trump will get fixing shit support like a normal Republican candidate. I assume both parties engineer as much shady shit as they can behind the scenes. That's the "ground game" they always talk about.) But there's a lot to this. The whole condemning poor or lower middle class whites who vote against their own best interests because they are stupid to know what's good for them which is discussed at length in this piece is something that we will hear a lot of if Trump is the candidate. People will not reason with others and say, "You know, Donald Trump's making some pretty big promises. How's he gonna do that shit?" They will go, "ARE YOU A FUCKING IDIOT? HOW COULD YOU VOTE FOR HIM OVER HILLARY? OH I KNOW... YOU ARE A FUCKING IDIOT!" Honestly, even by pointing this out in this brief write-up, somebody is reading this and wondering if I'm an idiot for not just outright agreeing that anybody who would vote for Trump is a fucking idiot.
Mostly this essay reminded me of a Right! Now! less-researched and not as well written version of Joe Bageant's Deer Hunting with Jesus. You should check that book out if you can. It is a worthwhile read. But basically it has the same premise - that liberal America overlooks the huge vast portion of less-than-privileged white people because liberal America figures they're all too stupid anyways so why bother. And again, I imagine somebody reading this might be thinking that way too. But guess what? That's a lot of fucking people you're talking about, and you still have to live with them. I mean, we do a pretty great job of clustering ourselves up in geographically reinforced filter bubbles, but we're all still landlocked here together in a larger American sense. Somehow some shit's gonna have to change. I don't know if it will, and actually it's probably gonna get way more hateful (by both those too fucking stupid to know better, as well as though too fucking self-important to realize how they too are stupid in their own more cultured ways) and probably pretty fucking ugly before it gets better. But that's okay, sometimes that's how it has to be. We'll survive.

internet reading list of late

(triplicates of links that occupied my mind at *work* recently)

How Green Was My Valley at Roads & Kingdoms
Roads & Kingdoms used to be one of my favorite sites because of the photo-heavy pieces on far-flung places, but it kind of morphed into this corny Anthony Bourdain wannabe where young writers write short pieces about drinking alcohol or eating fried shit in some city most of us can't afford to go to. If you are exposing me to something completely foreign to me - that's one thing; but drunken travel tips? Fuck that.
But good shit still flows through, and this piece on an old dude who seems somewhat obsessed with fruit trees in Tajikistan is pretty great. Some guy just tapped into fruit tree nature, to where he can't not think about it, so it becomes his life's purpose, that's some beautiful human interest type story I will read all the fucking time. But then again one time I got sexually aroused by picking cherries at peak ripe season off a tree on my land and was pretty sure the cherry tree was seducing me.

Farm-to-Fable by the food critic at a Tampa Bay newspaper
This made the internet rounds, but for good reason. I figure pretty much anywhere in America, if you started pulling the strings on claims like "farm to table" or even "organic" it'd all come unraveled, unless somebody in charge has paid the proper government organization for the proper government certification to be able to "legally" make the claim. So this expose is kind of like having John Stossel investigate whether pro wrestling is real or not. Still though, I appreciate the GOTCHA! effort, although there is a website mentioned in the article that's supposed to be where we the people can keep track of these things on our own, but I know a number of the local to me spots listed as kosher on that website are bastard places likely to be fake as fuck as well. Oh well, everything is fake now. The Age of Facade.

Godmother of Soul by somebody who writes for the New Yorker
My local library has a free magazine bin where you can put your old magazines in it for other people to take. Some kind folks always leave old New Yorkers there, but they're always from like 14 months ago, and I still end up getting them and bringing them home to flip through and get mad at the stupid poetry (unless it is Charles Simic) or read a profile of something I understand well but the thing is written from New Yorker perspective, which is always kinda weird but predictable to me. When I was a lowly housepainter, this one guy I worked for/with, we did a lot of work at this one place where the man of the house was some sort of editor or writer or some shit, allegedly connected to the New Yorker. They obviously had money because they had a Liberian lady raising their children and there were fancy paintings on the walls, like those big ass ones of old white people with little lights in the ceiling pointing at it just right. Sometimes we'd finish work early and go through the field to go kick it by their river access, and the electrified fence would always hit my sweaty naked back and shock the fuck out of me. But that guy had a writing building which is near the size of my family's house, but it was just an outbuilding in a field, yet really nice. To him, it was considered rustic and slummy and rootsy and real as fuck. Hahaha, oh man, this world is intersectional as fuck but we all ignore each other so easily.
Anyways, I got some good new New Yorkers (less than two months old) the other day, but read this online. This is a profile of Erykah Badu, and it made me love Badu all over again. I sort of stopped listening to her at all (we used to listen to a lot of Badu in this house, due to the ol' lady, but I'll be honest, I wasn't complaining), but this piece had me seeing what's actually survived a couple hard drive crashes and is still on our piecemeal absconded itunes. Not much newer stuff (which I'll have to abscond freshly I guess) but "Southern Girl" rip from my own vinyl still there, as well as the first album and the Live thing that came out, so I can call Tyrone to my heart's content until I find some unstale zippyshare links.

internet reading list of late

(triplicates of links that occupied my idled mind while at *work* recently)

What the Hell Happened in East New York by Kevin Heldman
An interesting but also depressing as fuck read about a part of New York City left behind, and even if it did get gentrified, it's not like the fuckers who live there now would be the ones who benefit. Where do they ship off all the poors as they gentrify all these urban downtowns across America? Who the fuck has the money to afford these newly gentrified areas? I am by no means a destitute person at this point in my life, but I seriously got no idea how these things are afforded, and why it is happening. I feel like a fucking alien many days - and I am a fully employed and comfortable enough person. The pyramid scam has us all looking up at what the ones above us got that we don't, without seeing all the people below we're stepping on. All any of us see, all the way up to the 1% at the top, is "Look at that motherfucker up there, with all his success. He ain't shit." Sigh.

The Throwaways by Melissa Chadburn
A couple years back this piece came out, but in true internetting fashion, it just crossed my stream of digital consciousness early this week. Obviously, there's some shit that I can't relate to (I have not been raped, I would be considered by society at large as a white male) but there's some parts I relate to so fucking well it literally made me want to cry. Poverty, and the instability that goes along with that, can make motherfuckers crazy, for the rest of their lives. For me, this was a very beautiful essay to read, and a good thing to hit myself with on a Monday morning. Also, despite shit being totally fucked, and those who have mostly fucked it being completely unwilling to even admit any part in this, much less actually change, there is always hope. Perhaps not through the system (lol, y'all voting ass motherfuckers always thinking that shit's more important than real life actions) but around the system, in the tall grasses at the edge of the system, like dandelions sprouting through cracks in the sidewalk. There's some haiku that came from my brain that I used to love to paraphrase at haiku events about "cracks in the system / always need middle fingers / inserted, wiggling". That's the only way.

The Sugar Conspiracy by Ian Leslie
A very different bent on this article, but also not really. I have complained to many people beyond their tolerance for my diatribing about the inherent shortcoming of Science. We live in an era of scientific worship, and still seem to apply those antiquated "dominion over the earth" philosophies that came from Christianity, but we now filter them through science. Like, "we'll fix global warming, because Science!" Science is fucked, and corrupt, like all other human institutions. This article is a very good explication of that. And beyond that, on the specific level, it's a very real and interesting chunk of information on our diet, and how we may be (lol, "may") completely fucking ourselves up. Of course this article is at the Guardian, so it doesn't say it in such crude manners, but the historical account of saturated fats vs. sugar in making us all obese fucks causing our heart to clog into emergency brake one day is a solid enough read. My wife the herbalist has talked about a lot of this shit to me a lot, diatribing very much like I do about science, but only to me, and I got some yogurt after work because I'm on a yogurt drink with my adaptogenic herbal powders and some cayenne (keep the shit unclogged internally with the cayenne), and I always get whole milk because, well because. But the whole milk yogurt at stupid Trader Joe's (where what I thought was "good" yogurt is affordable) is full of sugar. The lowfat yogurt had sugar as ingredient too, and actually had more grams of sugars than the whole milk. The Greek shit had no added sugar, and like a fifth less of sugars on the nutritional label, but also was a dollar more. Why the fuck would we have a world where the less healthy shit, in fact destructive over time shit, is cheaper? Like, what is the thinking of "Well, you can get food to survive off of, I mean it's gonna give you cancer, but you got food, right?" Like why even make that shit? Oh yeah, money. So this third article does relate to the other two.

Deny, destroy, deface all devils.

TOP TEN FATWAS AGAINST FALSEBEARDS

t00 m4nY f4ls3b34rdz
t0d4Y, pr3t3nd1ng d1rtg0d
bVt sh1n3f4c3 d3v1lz#haiku#rojonekku#falsebeards pic.twitter.com/FBh6AZ49ZT

— Tha Dirt-God (@rojonekku) January 21, 2016

f4ls3b34rdz n3v3r w1sp
c0m1ng fr0m cVltVr3 0f sm00th3d
c0mf0rt & sh3lt3r#haiku#rojonekku#falsebeardprivilege pic.twitter.com/eI6kCMN4Xe

— Tha Dirt-God (@rojonekku) January 21, 2016

th3 f4ls3b34rd 3th0s
bV1lt fr0m 1mm0r4l1tY
c0mf0rt3d bY w34lth#haiku#rojonekku#falsebeardethos pic.twitter.com/dlUycqpttS

— Tha Dirt-God (@rojonekku) January 21, 2016

f4ls3b34rdz Vnd3rst4nd
s1lk3n sV1t3d w4ys b3tt3r
th4n trV3b34rd d1rtg0dz#haiku#rojonekku#falsebeards#dirtgods pic.twitter.com/6R8WHrWwfY

— Tha Dirt-God (@rojonekku) January 21, 2016

"playing lawyer ball"
4s n0t3d ph1l0s0ph3r
h4nk h1ll h4d 0nc3 s41d#haiku#rojonekku#realtalk pic.twitter.com/ALzNAASZUb

— Tha Dirt-God (@rojonekku) January 21, 2016

h4t3rz g0nn4 h4t3
& f4ls3b34rdz g0nn4 f4ls3b34rd
- c4n't d3nY n4tVr3#haiku#rojonekku#falsebeardnature pic.twitter.com/xcqoD1SlXn

— Tha Dirt-God (@rojonekku) January 21, 2016

1'm n4tVr4l b0rn
trV3b34rd - 3v3n wh3n sh4v3d st1ll
r0Vgh 4r0Vnd 3dg3z#haiku#rojonekku#truebeard pic.twitter.com/FD1G58RUir

— Tha Dirt-God (@rojonekku) January 21, 2016

f4ls3b34rdz cVlt1v4t3
"artisanal poverty"
w1th g3ntr1f13d 4ctz#haiku#rojonekku#falsebeardethos pic.twitter.com/MZ4oc3GCUW

— Tha Dirt-God (@rojonekku) January 21, 2016

r4z0r 4ll f4ls3b34rdz
sl1c3 th31r s0ft 01l3d w1spz fr0m sm1rkz
sh0w th3m wh4t sc4rz 4r3#haiku#rojonekku pic.twitter.com/w27OKsAZF2

— Tha Dirt-God (@rojonekku) January 21, 2016

m0th3rfVck f4ls3b34rdz
f0r3v3r - 1'm fr33b34rd... "and this
beard you cannot shave"#haiku#rojonekku#truebeard pic.twitter.com/OEseAKazPV

— Tha Dirt-God (@rojonekku) January 21, 2016

#1: t00 m4nY f4ls3b34rdZ/t0d4Y, pr3t3nd1ng d1rtg0d/bVt sh1n3f4c3 d3v1lZ

#2: f4ls3b34rdZ n3v3r w1sp/c0m1ng fr0m cVltVr3 0f sm00th3d/c0mf0rt & sh3lt3r

#3: th3 f4ls3b34rd 3th0s/bV1lt fr0m 1mm0r4l1tY/c0mf0rt3d bY w34lth

#4: f4ls3b34rdz Vnd3rst4nd/s1lk3n sV1t3d w4ys b3tt3r/th4n trV3b34rd d1rtg0dz

#5: "playing lawyer ball"/4s n0t3d ph1l0s0ph3r/h4nk h1ll h4d 0nc3 s41d

#6: h4t3rz g0nn4 h4t3/& f4ls3b34rdz g0nn4 f4ls3b34rd/- c4n't d3nY n4tVr3

#7: 1'm n4tVr4l b0rn/trV3b34rd - 3v3n wh3n sh4v3d st1ll/r0Vgh 4r0Vnd 3dg3z

#8: f4ls3b34rdz cVlt1v4t3/"artisanal poverty"/w1th g3ntr1f13d 4ctz

#9: r4z0r 4ll f4ls3b34rdz/sl1c3 th31r s0ft 01l3d w1spz fr0m sm1rkz/sh0w th3m wh4t sc4rz 4r3

#10: m0th3rfVck f4ls3b34rdz/f0r3v3r - 1'm fr33b34rd... "and this/beard you cannot shave"

accumulating clutter

like consumer dust; life needs

regenesis now and then

TOP TEN SWOOSHES OF BIG CHIEF'S BROOM

#1: Chief Bromden was right/about the fog about the/unseen wires buzzing
#2: this industrial/psychology THEY've installed/in us unliving
#3: "UNLOUNGIN'" caw crows/no longer willing to pick/our dead cyborg flesh
#4: mental processes/become rainbow doom cogwheels/infiltrating heart
#5: heart is organic/pumps raw blood thru arteries/bypassing bitch mind
#6: but mechanized mind/be like "THIS COULD BE US HEART/BUT YOU JUST PLAYING"
#7: mind has posted pic/of crushing mechanism/flattening pig heart
#8: mind posted this on/heart's twitter timeline, now heart/feels threatened, unsafe
#9: mind is relentless/trolling heart lolling at heart's/sensitivity
#10: mind doesn't realize/it too was once organic/not a fucking tool

Solitary Confinement

So hey, I was gonna share some articles that showed up this morning in my reader feed, because they related to each other and also related to what I was babbling about in my sermon portion of the Hand-to-Hand Haiku in Cville the other week talking about prisoner class/political class. In a nutshell, what I said was if you have a dog in the fight - if you give a fuck about Obama/Ted Cruz type shit, then you are political class. God bless you, you have a voice in this shit. But for many, most of us, that shit is irrelevant. We don't know what stocks are, we don't have bank, we battle daily, weekly to keep from being a prisoner, literally or financially. It's a constant fucking struggle. Now I'm lucky enough that I've avoided the hardest ends of prisoner class - and make no mistake about it, it's a lot of luck involved in that. There's no merit to this shit, no you earn your way out of what you're born into. It's a lot of luck, and good timing, and shit man I don't know. But contrary to the constant proclamations on the flat screens, shit is not getting better for the American empire. Well, check that, for the Imperials, it probably is better, and data supports that. But for the mass amount of people living underneath the imperials, it is getting worse, and all the economic shit they talk on the flat screen is, again, irrelevant to real life shit. Thus, more people are going to find themselves doing dirt to survive (as in Duke freshman student convincing herself that doing porn is somehow financially empowering her family), and because of that more people will find themselves into the deeper realms of the American prison state.
Which brings me to the articles to share, both about solitary confinement. I was reading the Outlaw Bible of American Essays the other night in bed, and it had this Iceberg Slim piece talking about getting out of the pimp game finally, and how solitary had completely fucked his head up, made him crazy. (And interestingly enough, I was discussing with my wife how probably the reason the pimp character is so respected in lower classes is because it's the closest thing to indiscriminant successful capitalist that socio-economic level sees - manipulating others into making him profit.) That was 40 years ago Iceberg Slim wrote that. And the use of solitary confinement has done nothing but expand as the prison industry has expanded (and privatized and been monetized). Anyone step out of line? Lock them away. Rehab is not even considered a viable option, or communicating or teaching people to learn to value themselves so that they can value others. But hey, I'm going off on some grandiose humanistic bullshit with all that. Let's just talk about what solitary does in a real sense. And these two articles contain that info.

What Solitary Confinement Doest to the Brain (from Aeon Magazine)
Aeon is one of my internet favorites, but this is an article outlining the actual neuroscience studies being done about solitary confinement. I can tell you from my own dirty work in the field of science that a lot of what has long been considered psychological manipulation - both in terms of criminal punishment as well as most of our western advertising - is not a simple psychological trigger but an actual manipulation of the brain with negative consequences. Unfortunately, this type of advertising or punishment/reward system is a major foundation to our western capitalist society, so it'll never be admitted as morally wrong without suggesting our way of life is immoral. I'm here to tell you that I believe what American advertising does constantly, what solitary confinement does to prisoners, these things should be seen as morally wrong a hundred years from now. However, morals are not decided by any universal code of right and wrong so much as they are by the mightiest hand which inscribes the history book. Morality is decided by whoever ends up being judge, not by the masses as a whole. This is true for dictatorships, democracies, and everything in between (including corporate kleptocracies like we have in America 2014).
Now take all this info with a caveat - that science thinks it can explain everything. It can't. But at least sometimes like with these studies in this article, it's at least still trying to challenge the common beliefs put forth by the corporate kleptocracy. I would imagine though, that once too much info is found out, whoever's behind the research will get quieted down through lack of funding or support.

The Plot from Solitary from New York Magazine
California has been one to use solitary more aggressively than anywhere else, in an attempt to squelch gang violence inside (and outside) of the penal system. The story of how sworn enemies in Pelican Bay's solitary housing unit were still able to plan out and stage a huge hunger strike, statewide, is fairly amazing, and also testament to the outlaw spirit. Oddly enough, as negative as all this "corporate kleptocracy" "prison state" shit might sound, I don't feel overwhelmed by it personally. People are people, and people will always resist bullshit oppression. We've done it since the beginning of time, and regardless of initial intent, every government known to man has always become corrupted by special interests hijacking its once pure intentions. People are people - those few at the top and the masses beneath them in the pyramid scheme that civilization has always been. Leadership cartels get run the fuck off, and old ways become new taboos all the time. All the fucking time. No matter what anyone does to try and stop it.
That's actually a part of why I don't do so much online any more. It's a means of exposing creative spark to light, immediately, but without the real life tinder to help that spark explode into something huge and warming and cleansing and that can burn bullshit the fuck up into ash. This medium called the internet is promised as a revolutionary tool that connects blah blah blah but that's already been hijacked to a large extent by corrupted intentions. And who can even say the entire point was not for that hijack to take place anyways? Keep it street, face to face. You can make connections through this medium, but unless you build them in real life, it's not a solid connection. That is true whether it's one person who shares your same special interests, or one hundred thousand people you want to occupy public space with in frustration. Build in your physical life. The Revolution will not be digitized, but the commercials will.