SONG OF THE DAY: Rain and Snow

I am not sure there’s a more perfect song ever recorded. This dude’s wailing singing is just beyond reproach. It is like a full moon over snowy expanse, etched into vinyl. Just perfect.

SONG OF THE DAY: Noches de Media Luna

Wrestling with goats underneath the cheshire cat moon, blasting cumbia from a Bluetooth speaker to drown out the failure demons.

SONG OF THE DAY: Get Thy Bearings (kudzu'd)

Bearings being gotten, on a daily basis, except I don’t go by the calendar, I go by seeing the moon in the sky. Much easier to get your bearings when you go about it looking up towards space (which also reflect inwardly, towards equal space). My crown’s been feeling a little extra stardusted lately… the beneficial effects of sitting my ass outside watching the lighting bugs create aura arrow doodads to better focus my visions of the future. Shout out to the lightning bugs, and the moon. Shout out to the future.

SONG OF THE DAY: It's A New Day (kudzu'd)

Drank too much full moon water last time around, during shift in phases, and it’s made things kinda wild. Gotta be careful with that celestial magic because it’s way over our human heads, literally. We still love thinking we got it all figured out. Been so shook I forgot to lay out the moon shine jars for the new moon last week. That’s okay. I’m still alive, hopefully for another couple new moons too. Already looking forward to the redbud blossoms, to be honest.

a freestyle sonnet about hearing an inner monologue in Ronnie Van Zandt's singing voice

Chasing beguiled dreams of pyramid schemes of gold, 
Lynyrd Skynyrd Freebird guitar solos played slow, 
chopped and screwed interlude before Simple Man told 
of the dangers of material lust... man's woe 

manufactured by industrial fallacies. 
I'm no machine, created imperfectly by 
magical universe from distant galaxies' 
stardust, all our ancestral guides buried in sky 

raining down with metaphysical guiding hands. 
Ain't no sense in dividing lands or divining 
scientific dominion to deduce demands 
from our own deluded minds. We been designing 

our own heaven and hell with inner-demon guides, 
ignoring ebb and flow lessons of lunar tides. 

SONG OF THE DAY: Alive Ain't Always Living

I follow the Islamic calendar for a couple art projects, and prayer times as well, because it helps me be in tune with the natural cycles of the universe, and I can better place myself in the context of that universe keeping in mind the new and full moons. When I scribble on trains, I follow the tradition set before with monikers of including a date reference/time stamp, but I’ve always done the Islamic year. When 1444 came around a few months back, I got excited to switch from 1443s to 1444s, and the first Sunday after the new year, I was up before sunrise to hit a couple of my favorite nearby yards that required that type of early morning stealth. I like day time in yards better than night, but day is when workers are there, and workers don’t like people fucking up their jobsite with their presence, especially not in train yards. So it’s gotta be the right day of the week at the right time, and Sundays at sunrise are just about perfect (and always have been, my whole life). I was bumping Quelle Chris’s latest album, especially “Alive Ain’t Always Living”, so I ended up writing that a bunch of times on hoppers in the yards that day. Scribbling on trains is sort of like writing little prayer poems, and the combination of phrase/year definitely creates ties for me to where I was, both physically but spiritually/emotionally. “Alive Ain’t Always Living” was also a perfect meditation to scribble onto giant industrial hunks as a reminder/manifestation for the new year, signed with the 1444 to make it real for the whole ride around the sun. That song, and sentiment, is completely wrapped up with this whole rest of the new year in my heart, which doesn’t match the Gregorian calendar that’s more commonly known and accepted as the norm. The whole thing is esoteric, strange, but completely obvious, and not weird at all. It’s just doing things to make life more magic and less fucked feeling. That’s all prayer is, or poetry, or being alive to be honest.

3V3N TH3 WR0NG S1D3 0F 0VR...

even the wrong side of our 
histories is filled with folks 
forgotten and exploited 

M4RK1NG MY PR4Y3RS 1N BL4CK...

marking my prayers in black 
and white beneath a full moon, 
while world buzzes all around 

STVDY1NG TH3 W0RLDS 1NS1D3...

studying the worlds inside 
wires too hard, we lose sight of 
the moon itself, mapping paths 

L0V3D ST4R1NG 4T TH3 C4LL0VS3D...

loved staring at the calloused 
finger pointing at the moon 
as much as the moon itself 

C3L3ST14L D1SC0NN3CT...

celestial disconnect - 
finding full moons in late night 
unscrolling of smart phone glare 

N3GL3CT3D F33LS F4M1L14R...

neglected feels familiar - 
overlooked by progress’s 
eyes for turning a prophet 

SONG OF THE DAY: Summer Breeze (slurred & blurred)

Summer might be over if you’re bound by the shackles of the calendar boxes, but the summer breeze never stops if you got your fifth eye activated to the synchronized dance of Jupiter and Saturn, with the hunter’s moon making night as if day. The summer breeze is much colder this time of year, but that’s just to encourage hibernation of spirit to process the devils who have blossomed in your life over the past planting season, and cast those who need to be forgotten away as memories instead of accomplices. Place a white quartz stone at your back door for environmental benefit, and also stack a few in your front yard as a warning to any carriers of negativity that their intentions shall not pass. Usually a quartz pile of ten to three thousand stones, from seven inches to 469 feet high, should do the trick.

SONG OF THE DAY: Shake That Thing

There is an abandoned soapstone factory in the woods around here, like a giant structure made of soapstone slabs with no roof where narrow gauge train used to roll in and get loaded up. I do a lot of wandering, so accidentally discovered that if you’re sitting around down there on a new moon that falls on an increment of 7 as a day (like the 7th, 14th, 21st, or 28th), it turns into a spirit dive, so you see (hallucinate? who knows, nothing is real, especially not reality) an old bar take the form of the building, and a bunch of weird characters (me included) are all hanging out. I never drank the first time I was there but the second time an old dude named Juney told me it was okay, the wine didn’t actually have alcohol in it, or anything, like if you drank it nothing came out the cups, but it got you drunker on the vibes by pretending, so I did. Great time. That night an old spirit they called Haze started banging this song out on a homemade cigar box guitar, loud as fuck he was yelling the song, and all the spirits – man, woman, other – just started shaking their (our) asses like wild, “MAMA, SHAKE THAT THANG! DADDY, SHAKE THAT THANG!” for what felt like hours and hours and hours but I couldn’t tell time at all because it was a dark new moon and the kerosene lanterns (hallucinated) in the joint were the only light. When I made my way back up the hill, I’d only been down there about 15 minutes, but I was sweaty as fuck, and somehow I lost a sock, but still had my walking boots on. Never quite figured that part out, hallucinations or real or whatever. How the fuck do you lose a single sock without taking your shoes off? It was one of my favorite socks too, blaze orange Polo crew sock. Shit kinda bums me out but I hope a spirit just took that shit as a memento. Still though, what the fuck?

SONG OF THE DAY: A Wonderful One

A beautiful Saturday which I have hopefully spent at a car show in Carolina. Or in a secluded railroad yard scribbling dirtgods. Or just laying around as if I lived on clouds. I think one of the great abominations of modern human language is calling the unseen places we store all our digital data a "cloud". In fact, they're on giant energy-sucking server farms, not up in the sky, so it's false in that sense. But it's also just fucking disrespectful to actual clouds. Man is such a narcissist.
This song is a from a Marvin Gaye/Pink Floyd mash-up, where there was a write-up about how they actually performed a live sound check to record this in London or some shit back in the day. It was a wacky made up story, and I'm all about mythology, but basically just some white dude did a mash-up of Marvin Gaye and Pink Floyd, and created the story. That's not necessarily outside the realm of dirtgod industries, but it also feels a little hollow heavy-handed to me. But what do I know? I'm just a dumbass country boy from Meherrin, Virginia.

SONG OF THE DAY: Mi Abuelo (rebajada)

 

slow it down slow it down slow it down
you ain’t got to keep up with all this shit
slow it the fuck down
stop for a minute if you got to
and forget to count the minute
sit there and look around
wait til you hear five different birds
say seven different things
let the moon come up
eight or nine times
then get back up
if it’s still worth chasing

SONG OF THE DAY: Lestkal

Sadly there is no freebird synth culture to speak of, at least not yet. You’d think with our abundance of excess junk and born again thrift stores, more back roads weirdos would have taken the electronic Hasil Adkins path in life, but that does not to appear to be the case so far as I can tell. Imagine how great opioid fog greater Appalachian synth wails would be, synthgrass through the foxfire fog, demented gospel synthelations about hellfire upon earth, or just good ol’ base instinct 200 proof synthshine, autotune howling the full moon rising over the mountains like fire. There’s enough junk Honda Civics laying around these nether regions of the American wasteland that somebody’s had to think of how to turn it into a giant Sun Ra-esque Casio creation of madness. Where’s our great American degenerate ingenuity? Is everybody just scrolling memes? What the fuck is going on here?

LVN4R CYCL3S C0NT1NV3D...

lunar cycles continued 
over multiple Earthly 
epochs, with consistency 

4 F1NG3RN41L SL1V3R 0F...

a fingernail sliver of 
crescent moon peeking around 
buzzing demon's left shoulder 

SONG OF THE DAY: Soub Hanak

 
VIDEO 

Intentions are important. One of the worst things about this human age where we have been trained to believe we’re machines with mechanistic schedules, where we have to be productive, and achieve goals all the time that are laid out like a project manager’s flowchart, is that we go through the physical motions in a lot of parts of our life. I mean, I’m writing this while going through the physical motion of being "at work”, while at home, which means that productivity has crept into the space I’m supposed to be free from that shit. Going through the motions, of appearing to be doing something while our heart (or mind) is not emotionally into it, at all. And in fact, I’d say a lot of our current politics has began to mimic this entirely, where we’re now in a pro wrestling-esque political age, with all these grifters who play characters that start to reap benefits, so they then remain that character, even if it’s not how their mind actually feels. But they do it so long and so hard, that the angle they’re selling becomes what they believe. They start to become victim to their own con, and become that shit. And to be honest, there’s a lot of capitalist-based self-help people who will instruct you as to exactly that – the one path to economic success is to believe those things without listening to your heart at all, and forgetting the humanity of others or the beauty of the natural world, and only “work” towards those “goals”.

Intentions though, are giving voice to our heart, before our body goes through deliberate physical motions. Speaking what our heart (mind) actually believes, so that the body knows in advance, “This is why we are about to do this thing.” It’s important, because I know I feel much better about what I’m doing if I do it purposefully, instead of getting to the end and being like, “What happened?”

Of course, there’s a lot of unexpected and unexplained that still happens – both positive and negative. There’s always little signs of whether you’re on a good or bad path with that too, which a lot of folks ignore, call superstition or silly, but I live by that shit. Even today, saw a big bright beautiful quartz rock sticking out a fallen tree’s roots/dirt clump while tromping through the woods with the dog. That was a great sign on the day; I knew I was doing good. But I also went into the woods with the intention of not thinking about civilized dramas, and just taking the dog out there to sniff around, and be outside, and see what happens. The dog’s gotta shit, and they can’t do it in the house.

The full moon was last weekend, so the new moon’s not too far away. They use the sighting of the new moon as marker to switch months in the Islamic calendar. I like that, and to be honest, my heart prefers that to Gregorian calendar. My brain has been taught otherwise, in a deep cultural way, so as my heart and brain battle for what my mind does, there’s not a lot of give on the Gregorian calendar. But I practice observing the Islamic calendar, because it makes way more sense to me, innately. The new moon is also, traditionally, considered a time to sow your intentions. It’s also, quite literally the time farmers planted, because according to those unknown vagaries people lived by before the scientific age claimed dominion over the Earth, it was better to do so. So I’m gonna try to get some new moon intentions together, maybe start trying to have my months (according to those new moon delineations) have a little more of my heart speaking some plans into existence, at least some hopes, before my body starts going through the routine motions that occupy most of an average month. I’d like my body to be giving me more happiness, and not just fucking around wasting my life going through motions that I could give half a fuck about.