SONG OF THE DAY: Riding Home (kudzu'd)

I am very tired, and full of doubt. I should go play on the turntables tonight. Or go to bed before dark. That’s not easy this time of year, but I think I could do it. As I get older, I look forward to winter solstice more and more. Even though the coldest part of winter is still to come, it means the days are getting a tiny bit longer, and closer to the redbud blossoms of survival again, inshallah.

SONG OF THE DAY: I'm Glad You're Mine

One time I fell in false love with a woman because I woke up in her empty bed in the morning (we didn’t do anything) and she was blasting Al Green while frying potatoes. Al Green really makes me feel some kinda way.

SONG OF THE DAY: Going Back to Bed

Few songs truly get the Greater Appalachian hillbilly mindset, but this one does it and does it well. Fuck all those people talking about bootstraps – that’s bossman talk. Never trust a man who lived in a gold-plated apartment in a big ass city.

SONG OF THE DAY: All Night Long (Waterbed)

I was listening to this song a whole lot last month, and it got me really wondering why I hadn’t considered having a waterbed in this year of our prophet 1444. They still exist, but they are not cheap (but what is to be honest), and look like one of those things that you gotta have a good criminal flow of money in order to actually set a space up with one, or else limit yourself to renting a waterbed room from time to time when you want to pretend you’re ballin’. Capitalism sucks man, I just wanna sleep well.

VS3D T0 3XP3CT 4PP01NTM3NT...

used to expect appointment 
with death at an early age; 
somehow made half century 

HVM4N SP1R1T L13S D0RM4NT...

human spirit lies dormant, 
buried beneath relentless 
algorithmic nothingness 

SONG OF THE DAY: Lonely, Lonely Nights

Not been sleeping well lately, nor unwell really. Just your basic toss and turn with lack of comfort in any part of existence, but fatigued enough the body shuts down for five hours solidly, before waking up so that I can study the darkness with wide awake eyes, worrying about a whole lot of nothing. Life feels pretty good for the most part, if I actually think about it in that light way of thinking where you don’t go digging too deeply. Not entirely sure life can feel good within modern civilization if you go digging deeper though. Hate to think superficially, but we’re so removed from a deeper existence, interconnected with anything more than a couple days ago, that superficiality is kinda necessary. There’s a strange loneliness to existence currently, where you have the electronic impulses of being surrounded all the time – and we certainly as humans crave those connections still. But it disappears easily, and also has a hollowness to it so that when you’re fuckin’ losing your shit in the car outside the grocery store because you forgot about an insurance payment, and it triggered overdraft shit that’s got the chance to spiral the fuck beyond control by midnight, none of those digital connections can actually sit in the passenger seat and pick a song to play or just sit there uncomfortably while you freak out, and then when you calm down, go, “well, fuck it, you know?” I see sleep depictions or mattress promises where it’s like falling into clouds that wrap around you, and maybe I’m just poor and have never had a new mattress, but I’ve literally never had an experience like that sleeping. I’m tossing and turning, or my back is aching from some soft ass mattress not built for broken people like myself, so I have to sleep in my stomach because it feels like I’m tucking myself into a spoon and I better do it backwards lest I be half-crippled in the morning. The lonely, lonely nights of a rapidly decaying empire, that is going to enter the forced part of its empirical history, demanding compliance or be damned. So I’ll probably start sleeping even worse. Well, fuck it, you know?

SONG OF THE DAY: Come and Get Your Love

brain not always working well enough to put whole thoughts into whole sentences lately 
can put half thoughts into long sentences or make whole sentences 
out of fragment clusters but fuck man 
feeling exhausted 
maybe this is what getting old is 
I don't know 
weight of the world both immediate and beyond my control 
starting to feel like too many cobwebs 
and you can't fit a broom into the corner of your mind 
so I juggle expectations and obligations 
and hope to make it to another day 
where I don't have to listen to an alarm clock 
and can sleep in my own bed 
unencumbered by anything 
need to be floating again 
like clouds 
not feeling lost but having to keep pushing 
like fog 
anyways 
come and get 
your love 
while 
you 
can 

D3NY1NG D34TH'S 3MBR4C3S...

denying death’s embraces 
thus far - creating nonsense 
as often as possible 

SONG OF THE DAY: Burning Shit With Dried Up Dreams For Kindling

This is another Boogie Brown Blue Globe Beats track. Brown remains prolific as fuck. I took some news footage of a junkyard fire, with burning Cadillacs, to make a video for it. Then today I was feeling pretty shitty about everything, so I wrote a depressing fucking freestyle sonnet. For such a large world, we sure did build a system that crushes people's spirit. What the fuck? Anyways, did something different with this sonnet, with a pair of 4-line stanzas, then threw a 2-line stanza in the middle, technically rhyming knot with not, like I'm Bushwick Bill or some shit, then flexing into a different tone for the last 4-line stanza, which recognizes everybody out here struggling. This is a poem, which my mind wrote in the very moment, posted into the digital oblivion that is a blogspot in 2021, thus will never be published anywhere else, and only you and the few other eyeballs that actually read this will ever see it. Making tiny ripples in oblivion.

Dreaming of relaxation and actual rest 
without incessant testing of whether I’m bad 
or good enough to deserve to not feel compressed 
by constraints, depressed by position, wanting pad 

around the struggle to fight well-designed riptide, 
wishing for a safety net hammock as I punch 
the lottery machine, hoping my stars collide 
into big bang of that bank balance number crunch 

not still twisting my insides into anxious knots, 
trying to remember my haves more than have-nots. 

Just simple fatigue growing into exhaustion, 
definitely physical, perhaps meta- too; 
thus, listen to expressed frustrations with caution, 
as I can imagine the same is crushing you. 

SONG OF THE DAY: Woke Up This Morning

A rare moment of sleeping in this morning, with strong storms last night that made this old house rattle along with the thunder, but fell asleep with the fan in the window blowing in teasing glimpses of fall. Stayed overcast this morning long enough to cut the warming southern earth’s humid broiler oven effect to let me lay wrapped up in a top sheet, bare ass naked, chasing the cool spots in the cheap cotton, until the digital clock had four numbers, not three. Turned it face down so work ethic guilt didn’t kick in, and laid there another twenty minutes, cyber phone in the other room (on purpose), until the waves of “better do this” started crashing against my chill. But still gotta say, for the most part, it’s been a day of lounge, as the creator intended, not just on Sundays but all days. Not sure why we fucked that one up so badly. Still gotta do laundry, and cut some grass, but then again don’t really “gotta” do either, so probably won’t.

D34TH F0R MY PHYS1C4L SH3LL...

death for my physical shell 
will come - not the end… more like 
jar breaking, freeing spirit 

TH3 VN1V3RS3 1S W4TCH1NG...

 

the universe is watching 
whether you feel it or not; 
every moment's a test 

SONG OF THE DAY: Water

I don’t drink nearly enough water so I’ve been making myself drink a quart jar as soon as I wake up. I read about some old Chinese guy doing that, and everybody knows the easiest path towards ultimate health is to reactively mimic something you heard about an old Chinese guy. But the water hasn’t taken completely yet, and often times my quart jar still has some left from the day before. Also I haven’t slept enough pretty much my entire life. I must be a shriveled raisin version of my true self at this point, perpetually exhausted, dehydrated, yet still burning the metaphorical candle on both ends, twirling it on my middle finger, dripping wax everywhere, all over the carpet, even in the rice cooker. Fuck.

TH3 B3ST W4Y T0 N0T BVRN 0VT...

the best way to not burn out 
is to never consider 
stopping to think about it 

SONG OF THE DAY: Lost

Max aka Millz passed earlier this year, and had been half of the tag team champs of our local War Games battle rap league, where we had hip hop battles inside an MMA-like cage. Him and his partner Chuck Nasty made up GRYSCL, who dropped a project after Max’s death, which hurt his creative community. In the recent protests in Richmond, at the very beginning, on the Lee Monument (which is now known as Marcus-David Peters Circle, in honor of a man who was shot and killed by police a few years back), someone sprayed “MILLZ” high up on the monument. It survived the first few weeks, but now the monument has become a layered message board of graffiti messages. Many of us who knew Max were stoked to see his name up there posthumously, still being part of the revolution. RIP Max.

SVN S3TT1NG 0N 3SC4P3 R0VT3S...

sun setting on escape routes;

guess I'll rest here for the rest

of my life, and try to sleep

0NC3 F4C1NG M0RT4L1TY...

once facing mortality,

realizations of squandered

time haunt our final moments

S0 M4NY N0T10NS BL0SS0M 1N...

so many notions blossom in

mind, but body lacks the space

to make them reality

D1S4PP34R D0WN L0GG1NG TR41LS...

disappear down logging trails

for overnight "motel" rooms -

sleep outside under my scars