SONG OF THE DAY: Down Home

There’s a train yard I love not far from where I sleep most of the time, and it’s a rundown part of a rundown city that has a neat ass throwback name to whatever it had once been. Some folks made a microbrewery with the name, even though the actual microbrewery is in a different part of the rundown town, but people love a microbrewery, so that other rundown part of the rundown city is becoming less rundown as the microbrewery starts buying up abandoned warehouses and converting it into shared spaces and coffeehouse and shit like that. Anyways, the microbrewery with the throwback name that has nothing to do with them making beer in a nearby section of the rundown city just won some big ass dork beer award – saw it on my google news feed. Plus, they got microbrewery spots in another city now too, expanding their “brand” (which of course is a forgotten industrial sector in a rundown city that they’ll market themselves as savior of once they keep expanding their renovating footprint). If you look at the beer website of the place, all the founders and key players in their structure are wacky smiling white dudes with large but well-trimmed beards. This is progress to most folks, but not to me. I can kinda give it the benefit of the doubt and pretend it’s the lesser of two evils maybe, but even then, I don’t feel like giving it the benefit of the doubt, because they also just cleared out a semi-permanent homeless camp that’s closer to the beer company’s namesake than their tasting room, and I don’t see these quirky white men out here doing shit about homelessness or drug addiction or poverty, other than pretending that having to hire more wait staff to serve impatient beer tourists somehow qualifies them as leading public citizens. I don’t know man, the microbrewery cosplaying as industrial titan thing is so tiring at this point, I’m not even sure how I got a couple hundred words of griping out about it.

SONG OF THE DAY: Vaquero

Been listening to a lot of James McMurtry lately, apparently. Every time some new person tries to convince me of how great Jason Isbell is, and they are describing him and his music, I usually just think in my head, "oh, they're describing James McMurtry." No diss to Jason Isbell or fans of the entire Drive-by Truckers genre, but it ain't for me. Something is missing for it to resonate with my fucked up southside Virginia upbringing full of chaos and misery but laughter and fuckitery as well. I've never been able to put a rational explanation on it, so I just politely listen to folks attempting to convince me how much I'd love it if I just gave it a chance. But I'm more likely to listen to James McMurtry every time. Rural identity attempting to be progressive in the age of digital wokeness is such a fucked up subculture anyways. I don't know how y'all cook but the fuckin' skillet needs soap sometimes.

I love this album cover too, especially since I got a little HO scale motel like that to fix up for my dilapidated train town I was working on for a while. But then my oldest kid and their partner had to live with us for a while so HO town got used as a bedroom, and I ain't had the heart to set it back up, in case they have to come back and live here again. I'm only 49 though, so I'll have plenty of years to romanticize the decay of the American Empire in 1/87 scale in the "extra" room upstairs that's hot as fuck in the summer.

34SY T0 G3T L3FT B3H1ND...

easy to get left behind 
in a culture demanding 
a performative polish 

SONG OF THE DAY: Capulito de Alely (rebajada)

Just another south of the border cumbia rebajada classic from an old Sonido Dueñez mixtape, literal mixtapes he used to make and sell at a Monterrey flea market. Where the K-Mart closed in Charlottesville has just been this giant abandoned shopping space, and it’s close enough to fancy newer white people shit that I’m sure somebody will demolish it and build even newer white people shit to make the new white people shit look like old white people shit. For some reason, American white people shit is always about newness? Well, at least them type white people. I PROUDLY PROCLAIM MYSELF A FLEA MARKET PERSON, with the loyalties and allegiances attached thereupon. If I win the Powerball (is that tonight, or last night?), I’m gonna buy the old K-Mart, leave it exactly as it is, and turn it into an International Flea Market. You apply to be a vendor, and I slide the scale depending on how much you add to the ambiance or not. If you are a wealthy white person laundering your own wealth inequality through self small business efforts of a crafty but unneeded variety, I’m gonna charge you triple. I will be cultivating an environment of used power tools, bootleg futbol jerseys, goat meat, bright fabrics, purple camouflage cargo shorts, and I got no time for your bourgeoisie DSA “I’m one of the good ones” bullshit. BRING SOMETHING OF WORTH TO THE COLLECTIVE OR GET (remain) LOST.

SONG OF THE DAY: Sonnet 33 and 55 / Friendship Dance

Haven’t felt all that artistically inspired or challenged lately, which stems from in real life. I could definitely use a circle of more ridiculous and possessed artists, at least at times like this, when I’m feeling rundown or stuck in some ruts. Where I live is overly saturated with boring and mundane artists doing boring and mundane work which is idolized by boring and mundane people. I see people posting shit in their social media that’s supposed to be deep and brilliant, and it feels so forced and egotistic and pathetic. But people lap it up. I ain’t trying to be a hater, but damn, don’t we hold ourselves to a higher standard than that? Does the artistic urge dry up? Do people stop feeling compelled to create shit and then just sit back and barely work on a project while they fondly reminisce about their glory days 15 years ago? That shit feels wack to me, and irrelevant. Then again, maybe I’m wack and irrelevant. That’s how I feel, to be honest, which is fine, because feeling like that forces me to try and find inspiration in some other fucked up shit, switch up my own bullshit patterns. Art should not be boring, ever. What the fuck? That’s like having shitty sex, why the fuck bother? Creation never sleeps, if you are tapped into the universe the way you can be.

SONG OF THE DAY: Angelitos Negro

 

Been wearing overalls mostly lately, because all my clothes were ill-fitting, not just shape-wise but just didn’t feel right, like I’d changed my aura shape and was forcing myself into some shit from previous versions. I also been writing poems on empty bottles I find in the woods and along the river, and I swear overalls is helping me find bottles easier, even though it’s full-blown spring now. I was actually thinking about how spring and fall are the tides of nature, where the green rolls and rolls back out, and the best time to gather up the quartz rocks and empty bottles that got pushed up to the surface is after low tide of winter, once it’s warmed back up, before high tide of greens rolls in deep. Everything is starting to get grown over for the summer season around here, even the old TV that got dumped off by the river last fall, then shot up and fill with beer cans, is almost unseen now because of the green that’s done taken it back over for the time being. Anyways, this makes it harder to find bottle dumps this time of year, because there’s green everywhere, full of lyme ticks and scratching ass things and you get all tangled up in green. But I look for humps in the land just off the gravel roads or foot paths, hopefully a glimmering glisten of glass, which sometimes is a single busted bottle, sometimes is a whole slew of awesome shit from decades back, and sometimes ain’t shit but a plastic Coke bottle. I go on pretty long walks, away from my car, either at home or parked somewhere, so if it’s along a back road, I’ve taken to stacking all the good bottles up just off the road, over the ditch, where nobody will see, and putting a single beer can at the edge of the road, set upright, so I know where to stop when I come back through. When I first started hearing the bottles call me, and found a nice one, I had set it up beside the road, sitting up, and this motherfucker who lives down below me came running through on his riding mower and snatched it. Not sure why, it was really weird as fuck to be honest, and in fact he came down the road ‘til he saw me, then looped back around and went back to his place. I’ve always wanted to go down there and be like, “Yo, why’d you take that bottle?” but now it’s been so long, it’d be awkward. He’d remember, because you don’t take a bottle set up on the side of the road then go looking for who set it there without remembering. And I’d remember. But it’s been so long and nobody said nothing, it’s like that TV busted up down there, except time that’s passed is all the green that grew up all over it by now. Then again, shit like that piles up when you’re dealing with folks, and becomes the buried detritus of your long-term dealing with each other, so that one day, should it ever come to some sort of head, we can dig all that shit out, yelling, “WHY THE FUCK YOU TAKE THAT BOTTLE THAT ONE TIME, BEFORE YOU KNEW ME?” and he’s yelling about some shit I did that I didn’t think nothing of, like cutting through his property by the river to get to under the bridge, but didn’t even know it was his property or some shit.
That’s country life, and southern gothic futurism, which is the same as the past, just with a whole lot more bottles that got marked up with paint pens and spray paint. Somehow I’ve been wearing this one pair of overalls four days straight and still ain’t got spray paint on it, not even wiping my fingers on it without thinking. When I was a housepainter, I used to use my thighs as rags, so fingers full of caulk eventually created these silicone thigh pad plates on all my pants where they could almost stand up on their own from the knees up. But the overalls are helping me be better at finding the bottles that are hiding out there, forgotten, and then I leave them in the yard to clean up, set on rebar, paint, and they hang out there until they’re yelling a poem at me real loud. That’s when I write it on there. Hopefully, by the end of the summer, I’ll have a couple million, and I can set them up in the yard like they’re for sale, but get mad at anybody who tries to buy one, because people who buy things on a whim tend to be annoying and full of shit, so mostly I’ll just get a reputation as that guy in the overalls who wrote all them poems on bottles he found but just yells at you if you stop and hang out too long. And don’t even get him started on the dude who lives in the trailer down below him who took one of his bottles off the side of the road that one time.

SONG OF THE DAY: Orosi

There’s a lot of talk about the removal of dumbass Confederate monuments that suggests if you don’t have shit like that around, you’ll forget history. The obvious flaw in this is most folks supporting Confederate monuments already don’t remember the actual history of the Confederacy. On top of this, the histories we’re told are so often skewed from the perspective of the victors, even in the context of progressive histories. As an example, until digging deeper into the things this “Orosi” song talked about, I had no idea about the Filipino farm workers who initiated the grape protests back in the ‘60s, for better working conditions for farm workers. Now Orosi is central California, but mostly populated with Filipino people who have resided in the area after migration related to farming jobs. The small city is actually majority Filipino. The Delano grape strikes happened in the same region, about an hour south of Orosi, back in the ‘60s, and were started by a group of Filipino farm workers, who eventually called on Cesar Chavez to aid in their movement. Chavez initially refused, because he didn’t think they had the money to support their own movement’s goals, but other members of the group Chavez was head of forced him to take part, and he led a long distance walk to the California state capitol in support of the grape workers. I knew about Cesar Chavez, but only recently realized he was involved in outing people as Communists, that he wasn’t supportive of outside movements too easily that didn’t support his own image, and had quite a cult of personality that grew up around himself, which he used to his benefit. Nothing is simple and straightforward, not even resistance to obvious bullshit like the current American empire as it holds itself up in the highest positions. But even dissecting the patriarchal elements to black resistance or the inequality involved in white women’s feminism is necessary shit, because we’ve got a whole slew of shit woven into our society that fucks people up and holds them down. Many people we’d prop up on pedestals, literally, even by right now’s standards, are gonna end up flawed down the road. Cesar Chavez is a good example of that. Doesn’t mean what he did accomplish wasn’t good.

The same is true of individuals. I’m a white dude. I also do not necessarily have the economic benefits born to me the average white dude would have. But I also do benefit from outsider perspectives judging me as a white dude in many situations, and probably wouldn’t have the good job I have now if I wasn’t a white dude. I’ve done fucked up shit in the past, far from perfect, and have done a lot of work to try and be a better human being. I’m still not perfect, and still got shit I need to be better about, and past bullshit I need to try and heal myself over so it doesn’t keep coming back up as a negative ripple in my here and now. But ain’t nobody perfect that’s truly human. I’m gonna allow others the room to grow, gonna try my best not to judge nobody unless they’re so over the top in militantly enforcing their beliefs on others that don’t seem right that I have to judge them, and either keep a distance or stand against as protection for myself and others. It’s a lot of shit shifting rapidly right now, which is such a good thing to see, and be a part of and experience. It’s historic. But if we keep growing as humanity, I’d expect sixty years from now, even some of what we’re seeing today is gonna seem like bullshit in retrospect. That’s good. That’s hopefully gonna be a sign of continuous growth towards betterment.

By the way if you don’t know by now, you should support Bambu on Bandcamp. Dude’s one of the top political MCs there is. I’m anxiously awaiting Exrcising A Demon: Article III, even if it don’t exist yet.

SONG OF THE DAY: Straight Loungerism

The Power of Lounge is not so much the abandonment of caring about everything, although it might appear that way to an outsider who is more of an insider, and not an innate dweller of shadows. The philosophy of “loungin’” is an acknowledgement that institutions and systems are not built with the people in mind, not the full spectrum and abundance of people, and that institutions and systems, by design, tend to fail a whole lot of people, purposefully. I can’t think of any six month period in recent memory that has made that more obviously clear in American history during my lifetime. But the entrusting the Power of Lounge to provide sustenance to soul in a world hell-bent on material satisfaction of the brain, which we often find is never satisfied, due to its own unlimited expanse, which when trained to chase greed, only finds avarice. And though it’s a noble heartfelt pursuit to attempt to reform or tear down and rebuild institutions and systems to provide for all, human history is littered with empires that were founded on noble principles that ended up enforcing their aged visions of a perfect order on a world that had spun slowly in directions that can’t ever be controlled entirely, not by human hands at least. So the Power of Lounge is acceptance that you can’t control it, not the whole pile of bricks and mortars and village and mass of people. So you work to do well with your own actions, spread raw joy in your interactions with others, both human and non-human, animal and plant, the whole fucking deal. Anybody who has experienced the full economic spectrum of life in America will tell you in a heartbeat that poor folks are far more generous, that a cookout aluminum tray full of leg quarters bought with an EBT card is gonna have less strings attached to it as far as who can get a plate. The Power of Lounge is knowing the world is fucked, not because it’s a world but because of how men act upon the surface of it, but you can always shift yourself more underground, more into the shadows, find freedom in the margins, and maybe find happiness. It ain’t always easy, and moving away from the system always has repercussions, when you try to do normal shit, like acquire material wealth or buy a piece of land with a house on it or whatever. But again, all that shit ultimately is unloungin’; the act of “owning” land is perverse anyways. Doesn’t mean you don’t do it, because the institutions and systems we live under are far more over-reaching than most of us realize in all the little ways. But the philosophy of “loungin’” is also accepting that shit as much as you have to, rejecting that shit as much as you can, and building camaraderie and community despite and outside those institutions and systems as much as possible. They call it “networking” when it comes to economics – building relationships that benefit you. Outside of that metaphor I don’t really like the word “network” though; it’s more like long ass mycelium connections beneath the Earth, tendrils of shared existence and survival, that helps clean the superficial poisons from your brain, so that you can keep on living by your heart, and enjoying life. Because if we can’t enjoy our life, being it’s the only one we gonna get, then what the fuck’s even the point?

SONG OF THE DAY: African Hustle

Right now can feel overwhelming because it’s a pretty thick barrage of images and videos of police state brutality, as well as a lot of radical information to digest. You don’t have to digest it all this weekend. 500 years is not undone by the 4th of July. But don’t do the consumer-based thing we’re all trained to do, to put it all in a box, or closet, or desktop folder, and promise to go back to later only to forget it all until we dump it out or drop it off at a thrift store. A long term hope of mine is we lose track of time too. Time fucking sucks, forcing industriousness on me, guilt as well. Much like money, it was a unit for comparing and organizing that’s been just brutally overused in all the wrong ways. I’m afraid of time. I hate time. Fuck, it’s only Saturday and I’m already fearing a specific time on Monday. Of course, I’ll be fifteen minutes late, like always.

If you’ve ever known immigrants from Africa, you might’ve heard African time, which is an even stronger version of what we know in America as black time (which like many things considered black, has a lot of crossover with southern traditions due to the heavy cultural influence on the south), where specific times can be a goal you shoot for, but not necessarily met. This challenges a lot of the shit built here around order and productivity. “Well what would people do?” You’d wait. Read a book or something if somebody hadn’t shown up yet. “Oh, so you’re time is more important than mine?” No, not at all. I’m just not there yet, so you can do something else. Or maybe I’m already there, and you’re not. No worries. I always keep notebooks and books and magazines laying around or at least one or two of these things in a backpack on me while on foot. Just sit there, and do “nothing”. This is the only doing of nothing that should be tolerated. Then get back to the barrage of radical information. In fact, you can even combine the two. YOU COULD ACTUALLY BE DOING AMAZING WORK TO CHANGE THE ENTIRE WAY OUR SOCIETY IS BUILT, all by doing “nothing” in those moments. So I think in a roundabout way I’ve somehow talked myself into doing nothing as a revolutionary act, so long as the nothing I’m doing is a conscious act of nothing, rather than the fake nothing of avoiding actually addressing things in my own life.

D3S1R0VS 0F G4VD13ST...

desirous of gaudiest

delusions of polished life,

like manufactured shineface

SONG OF THE DAY: g01n' d0wn sl0w

The act of screwing previously recognizable music is an intentional act of sabotage upon the defining shackles of accepted time management. The concept of time is taught to us at a very young age in order to stifle our innate desire to play and wander and roam and explore life, and is the beginning of tethering our human existence to the mechanistic expectations of productivity. The creative act of song composition, as originally done, was potentially a shot at breaking free of these confines, but generally speaking if you’ve heard a song from back in the day, it was already compromised and perverted by the materialistic and exploitative actions of the music industry. Why would anyone make an “industry” of music? What a horrible idea.

Taking this original composition and then further fucking it up, altering the speeds at which it is heard adds nuance, and also resists the notion that an accepted standardized length is the only one acceptable. The single beginning length can be altered longer or shorter (longer is always better in my opinion, it jibes with my personality which has been baked into loving sloth by the southern humidity for over four decades). It is often argued that the human mind won’t be able to handle time travel, because we are three-dimensional creatures (x-axis, y-axis, z-axis… so firm in this belief we make them the end of our alphabet) and time travel is a fourth-dimension, where you exist along multiple points on the time continuum. I’d suggest even further that true transcendence of three-dimensional slavery is to accept there are no longer even points on that space-time continuum, to be charted like a colonizer’s map, but instead just the full oneness of time itself. This is the abolition of time, and true freedom. Fuck your clocks, and fuck your appointments, and fuck your expectations that I be “on time”. I am always on time, simply by being alive.

SONG OF THE DAY: Extra Consent

We can’t have nothin’ nice. The brief bright trajectory of Lizzo soon to be crushed by Democratic Party speaking engagements, Nissan commercials, and other types of neoliberal homogenization. Of course the automatic reactionary rebuttal to this is WELL JUST ENJOY THE THINGS YOU ENJOY WHO CARES? and yes, that is very much true. But also, they (the big inexplicable Shadow People type but not in the shadows at all but instead living on top of all the pyramids of wealth) have a way of bleaching the soul out of everything. By soul I mean that gut tingling don’t give a fuck makes perfect sense like sunshine on the river type shit, which makes perfect sense yes, but then somehow they dam it up, put the shine through a filter, and it just hits awkwardly after that. Ain’t no scientific explanation for it (likely because the same they that’s THEY control scientific method) and it is what it is. Go ‘head Lizzo – get that bag.

SONG OF THE DAY: Test Drive

E-scooters are the fun new way to signify gentrification of a space, although actually it's for the community's good, and they'll promise to station them all over the city for people who don't have easy access to affordable transportation, except then it's just at colleges and around gentrifying neighborhoods or from bars to apartments, it's not like you see a hard-working person with their metal lunch pail riding the Lime to the ol' nuts-n-bolts factory. I mostly like to use them in one of two ways - either driving them into public housing and leaving them there, which I guess unfortunately might be giving the company false data which supports their claims that it actually serves the community instead of their profits. So maybe I'll do the second one more, which is drive them down to Moore's Creek, leave them, and once they've sat there for a day or two, throw them in the creek. Nobody's going back up that hill on one of those things. I keep waiting for my account to get locked for always driving them to a place where they end up disappearing but it hasn't happened yet.

R4GG3D BVT B34VT1FVL - TRV3...

ragged but beautiful - true

essence of all the dirtgods

and dirtgoddesses I've known

SONG OF THE DAY: Quarter Life Crisis

Culture is trash. There is a Wikipedia page about quarter-life crisis, and it all comes from presupposition that one is going to have higher education and move out on their own from family and wrestle with career choices and romantic relationships and shit like home ownership or investing. The majority of people don’t live like that. Stop assuming your bougie ass existences are the foundation for everybody. But that is the basic way for those with wealth, or discretionary income, and most generational labels are not scientific, even socially, and more about applying marketing techniques to those who come from wealth who have money to spend. And most of marketing, which has always been justified as psychological so the individual allegedly has free will, is likely more neurological than psychological. So if marketing and cultural norms are all built from the perspective of those with wealth, who have discretionary income, that means the rest of us suffer these neurological triggers incessantly, literally everywhere (alongside the road in billboards, shit I was just at the beach and they were flying overhead), thus the rest of us who are not beneficiaries of the wealth of this trash culture we’re living get neurologically triggered into feeling guilty that we’re failures, that we’re not normal, feel emotional depression because we don’t have access or the ability to achieve what is displayed as our cultural norms. So fuck western culture.

SONG OF THE DAY: Didn't I?

So many gods of dirt out here, making magic out of emptiness, building art in every direction pointing outwards because that’s how the unrestrained human heart works.

DIDN’T I TREAT YOU RIGHT, NOW? DIDN’T I?

Folks too busy living and creating and being natural born artists in the way all humans was meant to be, adding blossoms of thought to the dreary land that’s been scaped into shape by inhumane master plans which somehow built fences around us all while we was too busy being occupied. Life without all these blossoms of expression from all the folks that couldn’t be stopped from being true human in the non-manufactured ways… it’d be unbearable without that artistic medication.

DIDN’T I DO THE BEST I COULD? DIDN’T I?

And how many of these folks, like Dynamite D Darondo the Bay Area street hustler who likely did ugly things to survive this western world, but also gave the world immense beauty as well, albeit in obscurity because it never got held up at proper marketing angle for the shineface world of material consumption to recognize as legitimate… how many of these folks are seen as illegitimate because authenticity is decided by pre-determined algorithm of wealth which holds the keys to the gates and decides what is worth your attention and what is not? Out here making beautiful sense of this nonsense pyramid scam we all done got trapped underneath of, whether y’all know it or not.

DIDN’T I GIVE YA EVERYTHING? DIDN’T I?

Darondo died of heart attack half a decade ago, and only now is his music circulating to a wider audience, after he’s gone. A lifetime spent creating, for the most part unseen, but steady doing it because that’s all he knew how to do. The art don’t stop being beautiful even if the creator is gone, but damn, I often wonder what kinda world we’d have if we supported these people while they were alive. Would they have done more? Bigger and wilder things? Or would they have crashed under the weight of too much light? Of having to navigate manicured spaces where you can’t hide in the tall grasses of the margins?

I TRIED MY BEST JUST TO BE A MAN. DIDN’T I?

MY P00R 3X-W1F3, T0RM3NT3D...

my poor ex-wife, tormented

by creative detritus

of true and living dirtgod

T1NY P13C3 0F GR4FF1T1...

tiny piece of graffiti

on Keysville siding freight car,

up close and much loved by me

F4NCY D0M3S D3T3RM1N1NG...

fancy domes determining

what's considered fine and what's

just illegitimate trash

SONG OF THE DAY: Don't Pray On Me

I distrust white dude americana folk music for the most part, because a lot of times it feels like comfortable middle class white men pretending to be whiteboys through the performative act of playing traditional lower class musics. The weird thing is most actual whiteboys all like hip hop (or that weird fucking country rap shit... ugh). I’d like one day for American discourse to get into the deep work of race and class and my internal dialogue of the differences between being white male and whiteboy and how a lot of times whiteboys have had to navigate environments where they’re not the immediate majority despite being the cultural majority, and how that fear is manipulated into creating a stronger racial division between people from similar and/or same class background in order to maintain the bullshit system we have. I mean shit it’s all relevant, because the media still blames poor white people for voting for Trump, when in actuality it’s wannabe middle class suburban polo shirt white people who carried him over the top. Shit, most actual poor people hardly vote because they already know they’re fucked, or they can’t vote anyways because they’re in jail or disenfranchised due to record or they’re caught up in life’s constant bullshit. But white males have jumped on the americana roots music bandwagon so trimbeard shinefaces make music like this, and if I can’t see the person or realize they’re ultimate goal is to play the jam band circuit, a song like this one will sneak through sometimes and I’ll actually enjoy it for a minute. But then usually I go past a new pie shop opening in a gentrifying neighborhood, and some white male who looks like he actually not only uses beard oil but has a preferred brand (or two, depending on his goals) is going in to get a $5 slice of pie, and I shift back into whiteboy mode and end up sitting at the house (which is actually a basement apartment) freestyling over old 4th Disciple beats about murdering the world and planting blue corn seeds in the ash of the fallen.