SONG OF THE DAY: Nobody's Clown (Payaso Version)

I have a theory that Trump surviving his assassination attempt in Pennsylvania actually was divine intervention, but reverse psychology from what his cultists believe. If he had died that day, all the idiocy underlying what is happening now as the United States is being dismantled would have made a martyr of him and it would’ve further justified the illogical foundations of what they want to do. As it stands, he survived, and now the self-important idiots are smashing through DC like the Schlitz Malt Liquor Bull in an antique store, and it also turns out that all you had to do to overturn the Constitution is just decide it didn’t matter. I mean, I never would’ve argued with that, which is part I was so frustrated with folks who felt like “checks and balances” actually meant shit. So many people will get hurt unnecessarily as these idiots pretend they know what’s best, including many of the cultists and constituents who propped their congressional support up. It’ll be too late (and in fact already is in terms of checks and balances). But, the idiocy in charge is not smart enough to stay on top of everything and not have a whole bunch of gathered angry people wanting to set fire to them, and that day will come, sooner or later, and these idiots will be known as idiots for a couple generations, which wouldn’t have happened if Trump had got hit that day.
The cruelty of it all fills me with anger, and I senselessly want to fight someone today. And the reality is we have entered an era where words put in public will be held against you, not in the pretend cancel culture way they claim caused so much trouble, but the real cancel culture of fascists shitheads, who will accumulate enough marks on a person’s list of strikes against them, and folks like you and me will get an all expenses paid disappearance to the new Club Guantanamo or the one the crypto President in El Salvador said he was willing to build. Oh well. Fuck these devils, I won’t be one with them and I ain’t gonna do shit they want me to.

N4TVR4L S3L3CT10N TRVMP3D...

natural selection trumped 
by the comfort of empire 
(even as it’s declining) 

SONG OF THE DAY: Caravan of Fools Remix

Ain’t no qualified Working Class Whisperers because our concept of what’s working class has been distorted. Labor Day weekend is perfect example, because the notion of a three-day weekend is alien to a vast expanse of wage laborers working in the sprawling and rootless suburbs that all look the same no matter which city they’ve show up as freedom tumors upon. We got two political parties deemed feasible in American life, and both of them speak to fake working classes that have middle class wealth – one not necessarily with college education and living off the actual land and coin wealth of their earlier generations, and the other often depending upon a college education but still lifted beyond the crushing struggles of actual daily poverty. It’s all so performative, and these dueling middle classes – both of whom manipulated to the benefit of the actual hyper-wealthy, spit and jeer at each other, and it’s become a dueling vision for America’s late empire fascist state. And I want to be clear – I’m not “both sides”ing this thing, because the right gives zero fucks about destroying us all who don’t fit their vision of a pure American future. But the liberal left, despite (in my mind) being the lesser of the two evils, is still a very evil and entirely unsupportable entity as well. The Dark Biden memes gave way to him living the gimmick, standing in front of red and black background with Marines flanking him this past week, looking like the bad guys from V for Vendetta.
Riding actual roads (not interstates), walking actual streets (not cul-de-sacs), and talking to other people is the only thing that will ever break through this. And I’m not even sure that’s as possible as it was even 6 years ago. I remember reading a dude who engineered some Latin American elections through use of digital means how the Clinton/Trump Presidential campaign was, to him, very clearly two propaganda machines working double time to defeat each other. Neither was benevolent, or resting on their own good; they both were manipulating human consciousness as best they could, with the digital tools at their disposal. That has only worsened in the ensuing six years, and people’s brains are heavily poisoned at this point, to where they don’t even see the strychnine in their thought processes. I still think actually talking to folks long enough to break through the politics can help, but also folks are so heavily poisoned, that there’s fewer and fewer folks willing to entertain your conversation from the beginning, because they look at you and decide who you are by the stereotypes the poisoning has implanted in their thinking, and they might not even be listening to you even if they let you talk. Shit is fucked.
But like always, when there is too much chaotic undergrowth, some sort of cultural fire will come along and clear it out, open the landscape back up, and folks will see more clearly again. That fire might be destructive, and painful, but at this point, ain’t no way around it. Too much shit has been allowed to digitally grow, creating a tinder of kindling for some sort of cataclysm that’s always just around the corner right now. We can’t escape it; just gotta keep an eye out for the smoke and make sure you keep yourself from getting consumed in the actual fire when it inevitably happens.

SONG OF THE DAY: Oldie Kinda Lovin'

Some would argue it’s in bad taste to enjoy yourself as your mythologically moral institutions fall apart before your eyes. But ultimately the institutions are not compromised so much as they were never what we were told in the first place. Thus, I’d say it’s more important than ever to find ways to enjoy yourself as our late American institutions continue to fail the majority of us. Like think about throwing a Molotov cocktail, and imagine doing it stressed and angrily. But then imagine performing the same act with joy and a touch of whimsy, how easily the arm rotates to fling the bottle with lit wick at a higher, more exuberant arc. I’d say it’s in bad taste to be too serious about shit like this because it gives the institutions we need to replace too much credit for being serious. They’re not. Many of these hallowed institutions are pretty hollow. Fuck ‘em.

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?

4M3R1C4N DR34MS M4NGL3D...

American dreams mangled 
by diminishing returns 
of an empire in decline 

TH3 R3D, WH1T3, 4ND BLV3 F4C4D3...

the red, white, and blue facade 
is faded and flaking, but 
folks keep swearing it’s all good 

R3ST0R3D P4SS3NG3R C4R S1TS...

restored passenger car sits 
outside visitors center 
in another dying town 

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: Blue Yodel #3 (Evening Sun Yodel)

No more new shit. We got enough shit already, and somehow something half-good that's new is seen as superior to some old shit just laying around that just needs a little fixing. Then again, we’ve been dependent upon new shit for so long, most new shit is so cheaply made that even old shit sucks if it’s too new. I ran by the Goodwill yesterday, and they had a whole slew of metal weights, those ones that are all metal dumbbells, all hexagonal like a robot caveman would use – 30 lbs, 20 lbs, 15 lbs, each one with a $2.49 sticker on it. I threw them all in the cart, and got a winter coat for $2.50, plus some fall knick knacks because the kids are always wanting “décor” and to go to the dollar store, but I’d rather get some hard shit from the Goodwill that might be worth putting in a box in the attic until next fall. It was right at closing, and four sweet Hispanic women, varying ages from old as fuck to about my age were checking out with cartloads of shit. One of them was wearing small jean shorts and a white t-shirt and was one of the ones around my age, carrying the extra pounds like myself, and I ain’t gonna lie, I ogled a minute. Good for her, dressing all sexy as fuck, not giving a fuck. I should do that more. Anyways, the two young women working the register spoke Spanish too, so checked the ladies out pretty fast considering they had a truck bed’s worth of stuff between the four of them. By the time I got up there, the two young women had a method of getting everybody the fuck out of there, since they were closing in about five minutes, where one read the price and the other punched the buttons. They rung up two of my Halloween knick knacks for $1.88 instead of $1, and I said something, and they were like, “Oh, okay, we’ll make it up.” Then my total was like $12, when the weights alone were more than that. “You get all these too?” I said pointing at the solid ass metal weights, just good to have laying around to stub my toe around the house to motivate me to do something with my slow death ass. “Don’t worry about it,” they giggled. “Closing time,” I thunk, when you rush everything along, and give shit away.

Some folks panic at the thought of the way of American life we’ve known the past half century (or maybe not, maybe it was a bit before my prime years) coming to an end. But don’t, it’s like closing time. Give shit away, hook folks up, rip shit off, get excited about down time. There’s no better moment in the work day than closing time. We’ll figure the rest of the shit out. People always do.

SONG OF THE DAY: 3 6 9

The interesting thing about a decline of an empire is it can take generations of diminishing returns and there is no cataclysmic moment of failure, just a slow decay back into the Earth, where the shine and luster of newness is slowly replaced by rust and abandonment, so slowly you may not even notice it’s already around you. I had to run to the Wal-Mart for a toaster because I don’t have one, and my youngest wanted toast in the morning when we get up earlier than fuck because she goes to school two counties over, so we take off at a godawful hour which actually isn’t that godawful, I’m just weakened by my post-modern existence and way off celestial schedules and more attuned to machines. It does eat into the day though to drive her and drop her off, not really the day itself so much as my employer’s preferred schedule for my constant availability, which now happens inside my own home, like a company house, which ironically mine is, though it was attached to a mostly defunct quarry that created multiples holes in the ground within walking distance. Found the shortest checkout line I could at the Wal-Mart once we were done, and two women in front of me, one of them had a few scattered tattoos, a surly mean-spirited look in her face, and some sort of freedom fascist adjacent shirt proclaiming proudly on the back MY RIGHTS DON’T END WHERE YOUR FEELINGS BEGIN, which is a pretty cocked and loaded statement, because it’s suggesting you know, not wanting to spread diseases or have food to eat or some shit is a feeling, whereas her ability to be as mean-spirited (and unmasked) as she wants is her god-given right, most likely protected by weaponry. The checkout lady, pretty young, was talking about how cool the shirt was, and I just did my purple masked laugh at it all, because goddamn, all these freedom fighters are out of fucking shape, and America is a pre-diabetic generation away from having both feet of the empire’s food soldiers amputated. What’s the empire gonna do then, when all these fucks have to do anything more than video game bomb brown people from a safe drone distance? We can’t actually fight. We’re a slothful soft nation of lazy fuckers who hire other people to do anything too physical. These motherfuckers act like the empire is a home owners association and we’re just gonna send everybody threatening glances to have them bow down in deference. America is fucked, very much in the obvious ways but also in ways that aren’t so obvious, because nobody is actually looking anymore.

Anyways, I listen to the country radio station with my kid because it’s mutually agreeable for the time being, but we both agree it’s not actually country, and just fuckin’ suburban propaganda for these slack-minded mean-staring marks, who consume mind-numbing news from questionable sources that give them poisoned wells of brains, which combines with the reinforcing messages of pop country drivel, and it builds a cabin of close-fisted thinking that’s chinked together with memes they get off Facebook or more likely even worse digital places at this point. That’s what’s so fucked up, is as bad as Facebook is in fucking up everybody’s brains, it’s the Wal-Mart mainstream source, and many of these people are going to whatever the digital equivalent of a strip mall gun store is that has Don’t Tread On Me decals on the front door but will absolutely call the county cops to enforce a grass cutting ordinance on your ass. America’s great red pilled mass is shitty ass subreddit at this point, but thinks it’s a bunch of pioneers who could hew a home from the wilderness, when in actuality most of these DIYer freedom fascists would be crying for Chik-Fil-A within a week. I worry about what’s gonna happen when something cuts off the power supply and has everybody’s weaponized outlooks pointed at each other for a couple weeks, or a month. What are people gonna do? I hope the internet goes out too because the detoxifying effects of not having that constant stream of poisoned information might balance out the implanted desire to dehumanize everybody who doesn’t performatively post up in the same way as you. But I don’t know. We’re fucked.

And yet also not, because once the manufactured storm dies down, same frogs gonna be peeping down in the ponds, and same cicadas gonna be making noise in the woods. The comfort of empires ebb and flow, and you’d be surprised how comfortable a shade tree is, even if you thought you needed that $80,000 truck with the air conditioned seats. which the Three Percenter who did my home inspection before I bought this company house I plan on dying in had told me his was. Always kinda made me laugh, a Three Percenter who had to have air conditioned seats in his truck, very symbolic of how we like to look like we’re something we ain’t at this point, because we’re all, as Americans, about as self-sufficient as white Cornish crosses, those big ass birds interbred so deeply to grow as fast as possible that if they aren’t just killed, their legs break under the weight of their abnormally large breasts and thighs. That’s us, at about 10 weeks into our maximum 16 week empire, so there’s a lot to go, but it’s gonna be painful, and nobody’s gonna move all that fast the whole time.

SONG OF THE DAY: El Tren (rebajada)

Walking slowly through the yard when the veil between day and night is thinnest, with kudzu creeping in from one side and gentrification from the other. Hadn't gotten to the point the worrisome gentrifiers call the cops on footsteps in the yard, but they don't like making eye contact from their side of the wrought iron fence, pretending I don't exist, a rough-edged blackberry bearded man wandering through the last remnants of industrial revolution's detritus at the fringes of late capitalism imaginary empire of eternity. Their ways are far less sustainable than mine, even as my beard turns grey this remains true.

I mark my various prayers on the steel carcasses, already well-tattooed with the prayers of others like me, from across this old mycelium network of rails. Some of these vandalous saints of the yards have practiced their devotion, and developed full-color master peaces, and others like myself are esoteric minimalists with a more primordial traditions, scribbling our hopes into unmarked corners. All of it is just cries against the foolishness of being a productive member of an industrial society, and also yet somehow more attuned to that than the blossoming townhouses and pastel-colored homes renovated beyond affordability or practicality for regular folk. They have their full-color murals on that side of the fence too, but it's not done by saints of the late American yards, instead professional artists are imported from affluent families to bedazzle these neighborhoods with giant visuals hearkening back to a past that has been stomped on by poverty and bleached from actual representation in the neighborhood itself.

Thinking about this, I write "just another mark" on a CSX hopper, tucked in between two pieces by Moms Worthless Sons crew members. We are all just marks here at the dying American carnival of the 21st century... it's just some of us have deeper pockets to pretend the kayfabed mythologies are real. Others of us have always known it's all a fucking lie, no matter how often they switch the barkers around between booths. Fuck America, I am a god of destruction.

0VR M0D3RN 4M3R1C4N...

our modern American 
culture feels hollow, lacking 
benefits of pilgrimage 

FR0M TH3 D1L4P1D4T10N...

from the dilapidation 
of this late American 
empire, beauty still blossoms 

SONG OF THE DAY: Mentiroso Boquisaboroso (rebajada)

daydreams of digging through crusty ass boxes 
at some back roads flea market 
that's only back roads to you 
but a main thoroughfare to locals 
whom you've never seen 
all their oldies but goodies 
barely sorted into empty boxes 
and milk crates 
and scattered across cheap plastic 
banquet tables underneath 
back yard pop-ups 
the great american dirty southern 
flea market 
actual antiques and implements 
of useful life from back when shit got made 
with metal or wood but also 
a bunch of useless shit piled in 
many decades of american empire 
prevalence of having shit 
all which got left behind 
and brought here together 
in this holy trinity of the post modern 
american experience 
poverty 
necessity 
and time 
the time to wander slowly down 
aisles built mutually 
actual community 
time to dig through the shit that looks good 
or worth your while 
coming out of it all with 
a bunch of kitchen utensils 
including a fat skimmer your ex wife kept 
plus an empty kitty litter tub 
full of 45s mostly old country hits 
but also some bluegrass and gospel 
including long distant cousins 
allegedly 
according to your dead dad 
who you think of lovingly 
as you look at the glass bowls 
which is longhaired redneck slang 
for weed pipes 
the swirling colors inside the glass 
like marbles you lost in the backyard 
back in the day 
back in the far corner 
of the late american empire 
digging through displays 
of better than nothing 
at the big ass 
flea market 

SONG OF THE DAY: The Great Northern Coal Company

Most afternoons I day dream about walking through empty coal train yards, scribbling nothing prayers to float across nowhere, back and forth from mountains to ocean as earth’s guts get scraped out to keep all these screens feeling lit. A post-industrial late American empire message in a bottle of sorts, except there’s all sorts of other messages in bottles stuffed onto the coal trains too, in every open spot sometimes, and you sit there when blessed by one rolling past and look for people you know, or wish you knew, or folks you love, and some you don’t like at all because you know they’re full of shit and fake as fuck. It all floats past.
Most nights I lay in the bed, staying up too late, worrying about how I’m gonna do everything that needs to be done, plus the shit I wanna do, and have enough time for family, for friends, much less my solitary pilgrimages along the tracks, “silver blazing” as the great American wandering poet Marcher Arrant calls it; and I don’t get enough sleep, and I wake up tomorrow even more rest-deprived, with the need-to-dos stacking higher, and you shovel as much of that shit out of the way as you can on the weekends, which means the weeks never really end… just the responsibilities you get paid by some fuckers for bleed into the responsibilities you squeeze around bleed into each other and all over any dreams you once had, which is why you can’t sleep. You don’t dream anymore… you just keep trying to shovel the needs down as fast as you can, but they’re piling up even faster, and it’s a fucking nightmare, but this is how it will probably be until it all collapses.

SONG OF THE DAY: Stubborn Woman

 

I hit the Megaball number on Saturday night, but hadn’t even looked at my ticket to see what I won. When I get them, I only get 3 or 5 tickets, and memorize my Megaball numbers. Generally, I let the computer pick all the numbers, but occasionally I’ll pick my Megaballs. I know nobody hit the big jackpot, so I just let that shit percolate on the shelf. Maybe it’s $40K sitting on the dresser, but it might just be a free ticket. I ain’t stressing. Ain’t like I’m gonna be able to quit my job, or even escape the slow death of American existence. So thinking about it from time to time, letting a little dopamine slip into the brain juices, that’ll do just fine for now. The balance of the dying empire is getting just enough dopamine to ignore the overwhelming cost of being alive, and postpone cousin death for one more calendar box.

TH3 F4D3D 4LLVR3 0F MYTHS...

 

the faded allure of myths 
about great American 
opportunities to thrive 

SONG OF THE DAY: We Can't Make It Here

Went for a long walk down the dirt road I live along yesterday, teases of spring in the early March environment. Some ol’ dude with a beard in overalls (classic style) was hacking away some grapevines that were trying to cobra clutch some apple trees into submission. “How you making it today?” I asked, in my yokel ass ways. The guy stopped, sighed deeply, and said, “Well… slowly but surely, I reckon.” The “surely” was more “shorely”, and this of course unlocked about twenty minutes of shooting the shit. He and his wife lived in the garage apartment of the place up the road, where the big house was owned by some big doctor and his trust fund wife from the nearby university. They owned that place, an old logging chunk across the road with a five-acre lake, and 155 acres across the river too, which had just been logged. They weren’t hurting for money, but they logged it anyways. I guess according to ol’ boy, they had two grown kids who spent like a month there every summer, but lived in San Francisco and Boston. The couple themselves lived only half an hour away, but only stayed there in the summer, sporadically. But ol’ boy I was talking to and his wife were paid servants, to caretake the property. Ol’ boy, of course, told me about his triple bypass he had a couple years back. Got me to thinking about that old phrase “living off the fat of the land,” and how that used to be the rugged individual notions of America that feed our mythologies to this day. Much of the MAGA talk as well as neoliberal dreams are built off that living off the fat of the land. But there ain’t no fat on the land anymore. It’s all bought up. There no new worlds to find, to colonize, to continue the great western civilization ponzi scheme with. It’s just super rich folks, and the rest of us trying to find enough use to them to be on their payroll. We live off the fat of them, sucking sustenance out of the bones and scraps they throw us, after they’ve cherry-picked all the good parts. This is true of wealth, of land, of jobs, of non-profits, of the entirety of American civilization. They pick what they want, and toss us the rest. Some do it begrudgingly, and others do it sugar-coated with progressive mantras, convincing themselves they’re one of the good ones.
I’m luckier than ol’ boy. I bought my house – an old company house on executive’s row of a quarry that’s been mostly unproductive for the past century. But I could afford the house – one of the only ones I could afford in this entire area. But I’m first generation college graduate and affording a low end house (value-wise, not aura-wise… this house is dope as fuck). All I’m gonna have in this life is what I personally earn, no inherited wealth will ever come to me. When my dad died, my mom – whom he was no longer married to – had to take a personal loan out so we could bury him. And we put a collection pickle jar in the small engine repair shop he worked most all his life when he wasn’t too drunk to go in. I don’t say all this to bemoan anything about my life, because like I said, I’m doing good. No triple bypass yet, and hopefully after a few years, I’ll have more life insurance than Earthly debt, and maybe my kids can keep this house briefly after I’m gone. It’s all a gamble. But there is no fat of the land to live off at this point. Our culture has parceled it out, to where obscene factory farms rape our food from the depleted soil, and boutique elite folks create little organic operations to convince themselves they’re doing good in this late capital hellscape. They don’t farm it – others living off their fat do that, college-educated farm managers for the cheap and interns drunk off promises of a better world still being possible. Humanity has triple bypassed that shit though.
We’re not doomed though. We’re never doomed. I mean, because of the unrealistic greed of those who have hoarded all that fat, a lot of us will die, and continue to needlessly suffer. But people will keep scratching out lives upon the Earth for a long ass time. We’re too goddamn stupid and stubborn not to.

TH3 D1STR4CT10NS 0F DY1NG...

the distractions of dying 
empire have been digitized 
to seemingly endless scroll