D1R3CT10N W3'R3 SVPP0S3D T0...

direction we’re supposed to 
go ain’t always obvious 
when lost in our own darkness 

CL1MB1NG 1M4G1N4RY...

climbing imaginary 
ladders of wealth, but hoping 
nature reclaims dominion 

SONG OF THE DAY: Jezebel of the Morning (kudzu'd)

Rail industry has been dying out in a lot of places for decades, as the major railroads bought each other up and phased out the short lines because everybody uses diesel trucking now (which, by the way, has seen fuel costs skyrocket the past month). And most all these old small towns have their old train depot, many of them renovated or turned into some other shit.
But what you don’t hear as much about is the bus industry dying out, or barely holding on, and all those immaculate beautiful old bus stations that got built in the shift to driving after the interstate highway system got built, they’re all shutting down. The one in Charlottesville has been closed down for years, with the Greyhound just picking people up at a street stop instead – no ticketing window, no staff, nobody to pay cash for a ticket to go on the run from life all of a sudden. We were just in Huntington, West Virginia, which has a beautiful old bus station, with the Greyhound signage still, and it’s used as a local public bus system depot now, so it’s surviving.
And I don’t really care about keeping capitalism alive or anything like that. But we did used to make travel in group ways more of an acceptable thing, and decorated it with these nice depots and stations that were additions to the architectural landscape. One thing I hate about America (which is actually two things) is that we don’t re-use spaces all that easily, and we also get so hung up on the prospective value of real estate that shit will just sit there going to waste rather than being opened up to some sort of functional use for the community it’s located within. I hear these white ass motherfuckers talking about “third spaces” all the time, which is kinda pretentious because it assumes you have a stable first (home) and second (job) already. But the owner class just sits on these things forever. There’s an abandoned back roads grocery store a few miles from me, and I’d love to be occupying that thing with some sort of chaos art market. Shit man, I’d even lie to myself that I could swing the rent for a minute if they made it cheap enough. But nah, it’s just sitting there, rotting back into the ground, because they “know what they’ve got”, and they’re seeing the abstract potential value instead of any actual use.
Last time I rode the Greyhound, it was from Los Angeles to New Orleans, and by the time I got to New Orleans, I told myself “never again”. But that was long enough ago, it sorta feels like a good idea to take the bus from here to 17 states away, down, over, then back again. I love having a trickster brain that even wants to self-trickster.

SONG OF THE DAY: La Danza de Los Tigres (kudzu'd)

I went to Bread and Puppet Festival back in 1994 (I think), not knowing a thing about it. I’d quit my summer job because a dude I’d met once on a porch of some friends was going to Maine to rake blueberries, and wanted somebody to go with. So I went. Bread and Puppet was something he wanted to see one weekend while we were up there, and getting to upstate Vermont from east coast Maine, one Friday evening, with me and three other stank ass young hippie/loser/dropout/nomads stuffed into this dude’s tiny Mazda was a trip unto itself. Slept on the side of the road in a ditch, and then woke up and it was Bread and Puppets, the old full festival, a few years before the drugs and a stabbing or whatever got them to pare it down. And to be honest, it was one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen, to this day. Blew my mind seventeen times over that day, probably compounded because I had no idea it existed when I was tossed onto a hillside and witnessed it. A wonderful blessing.
The woman who was part of our traveling foursome wrote me a few times afterwards, but I lost touch, mostly because I never wrote back. Classic Raven distance, even though in my mind there was none. My mind and the physical world don’t always line up real well. That’s probably why a giant freaky puppet show with schoolbuses creating a stage made so much sense to me.
Anyways, the dancing tiger for this video I slapped together is from an old Bread and Puppet Festival performance. These videos are never my music, but a 45 I’ve played enough to fall in love with it slowed to 33 and then ripped to cyberlord files, and then I dig up some sort of footage that connects to the song in my mind, and tweak it with some filters, glow it up, scribble a Southern Gothicc Futurism over it, and load into the internetz gutz, for whatever eternity this cyberlibertarian entity can actually hold out for before the digital crash. I own no part of this, yet the slapping of it all together, in the particular ways I do it, is a sort of art, like poking a rhinestone into your jacket. This is my bedazzling of the internet, and I will never go viral, but I never wanted to. I am from the old internet, where you just did all the weird ass shit you wanted to do, and threw it up inside the land of 0s and 1s, and maybe somebody else on the Earth was freaky like you, and enjoyed it. I hope you are freaky like me. If you are not, then why did you read this far?

SONG OF THE DAY: Ridin' (kudzu'd)

It’s fun to sit in the secondary DPUs on a long ass train, at night when nobody can see you sitting in there, and pretend you’re driving the train. Granted, your front view is blocked by the other half of the train you’re behind; but it’s still fun as fuck. Especially pretending to hit the horn at crossings. I love that shit.

TH3 C1ND3RBL0CK L4BYR1NTH...

the cinderblock labyrinth 
we've built for ourselves to get 
lost within ain't made from stars 

N4V1G4T1NG TH1S C0LD W0RLD'S...

navigating this cold world's 
stolen heart of abstract worth 
causes physical decline 

TH3 P4TH 1'M W4ND3R1NG D0WN...

the path I'm wandering down 
don't always feel that solid, 
because I can't walk like goats 

SONG OF THE DAY: Computer Love (kudzu'd)

I probably should've posted yesterday's post with today's song, but today's song wasn't the next one to post yesterday. So I didn't. Most everything I do is the intersection of multiple constant practices, and it leads to intersections, which occasionally end up one block over from what would've been perfect to see. But that wasn't my path to take, so its perfection was just an after-the-fact footnote. And ultimately, nobody reads the footnotes, except those who are forced to by academic delusions.

SONG OF THE DAY: Cry My Tears Away

This is such a great song. There’s so much good modern souldies music happening nowadays, that it makes me wonder why the fuck I don’t have a ’63 Bel Air painted purple that I’m saving up for nice rims for that I just ride around in blasting shit like this, driving nowhere in particular and everywhere at once, one finger waving at strangers and doing the solemn head nod sideways arm to those I know. Wherever Raven is doing that in the multiverse, I’d like to venmo money for a tank of gas.

SONG OF THE DAY: A Freight Train In My Mind

A freight train in my mind is about all I got most days, wishing these damn hoppers would move, or I had time to go spend the night at my boy’s house where all the coals are, or even that I had bought a house right by a yard somewhere. Or that I had known about all the coals lined up at the plant down in Bremo back in the early 2000s, when I first lived that way. Can’t wait for time travel to be real so we can indulge our obsessive compulsions across four dimensions instead of just three.

SONG OF THE DAY: Cold, Cold, Cold (kudzu'd)

Riding a train to New Orleans so this track showing up as me writing about it next on my secret list that's always too far behind but nobody sees it so it doesn't matter is just about perfect. I love trains, and looking forward to walking around an alien place not doing shit for a couple days. Keep it slow, forever. The slower you live, the more timeless you are.

SONG OF THE DAY: Slow Coastin

I’ve been tormented by Flee Demons lately. I’ve been afflicted with them for as long as I’ve had a conscious mind, since I was little disappearing into fields behind the ragged cinderblock house my young ass folks was renting in Rice, Virginia. Flee Demons just show up in your mind, because you can’t comprehend how to possibly fix everything that’s broken in front of you, can’t possibly begin to clean up the messes piled in every direction, even outside the doors, piled up on the porches, out in the yard. Shit man, you got piles of messes at the last three places you stayed at, in other people’s basements and attics, sitting there with bad memories you left behind for somebody else. Flee Demons are pretty common amongst a lot of folks, but you don’t really see them in popular culture. Pop culture is made for those that got the ability to sit in one place and collect experiences they bought. They don’t have to actually live them all, so they consume what others make and consider it expanding their worldview.
I’d thought I’d gotten the Flee Demons under control, silenced them with a bit of stability and a big old house in the country that leaks air but seems to love me. But then the still life you’re living has some sort of perspective shift, and all of a sudden all the angles look darker and less welcoming. The good life you thought you’d achieved slips further away, without anything actually seemingly changing. But you realize all those piles from forever ago, they’re all still there, piled up in every direction, stuff you can’t throw away but can’t fix either, don’t have the skills or strength or even the desire to figure all of it out. And then the Flee Demons start piping up again, with that siren song of somewhere elseness. I’ve been feeling it heavily, because it’s cold, and I’m tired, and I don’t feel like doing the same thing next Tuesday that I did this Tuesday, so I want to set fire to the stability and run off and start over again, enjoy a brand new puzzle where there are no piles. Fucked up thing is even if I did that, once I sat still for half a year, and started putting the new puzzle together, all those piles would show back up, sitting on the porch again, stacked up beside the couch, filling every hall closet possible.
I don’t know what to do about it. If I can’t get rid of the piles, how do I learn to live with them? Can I at least recycle some of this shit? Setting fire to it never seems to get rid of it, because the ashes are changelings and rearrange the soot back into shape, slowly over time, when you ain’t watching the fire to keep it going constantly. And nobody can be that vigilant with their scorched Earth.
So I’m just sitting here looking at these piles, and hearing the sweet song of the Flee Demons again, thinking about where the westbound line stops to let a coal pass east almost every day around the same time on the weekend, and how I could just sit there and wait to see what all is on the other end of where that train goes. Been hearing that since I was little, and sometimes I wish I’d listened to it better all these years instead of trying to make sense of the senselessness.

a freestyle sonnet about being hype about drawing the fool card (again)

Outlaw minds don't do well with domestic guidelines; 
rules made by rulers blind to mindframe of dancing 
fool carrying worries in small bindle. Sun shines 
on other side of darkest storm clouds advancing 

in worst times. But end times are a myth engineered 
to manufacture fear and loathing inside brain. 
Gut intuition remains hopeful despite smeared 
futures stained with weak visions hoping to sustain 

insane, self-destructive existence. Knees weren’t made 
for walking on… feet was, so cast a prayer but 
keep it moving, and get going - the past is staid, 
and living there leaves one rather weighed down with what 

can’t be replicated now… that’s the true fool’s plight; 
probably best practice to keep your bindle light. 

SONG OF THE DAY: Drip Drop

Another Cadillac spaceship banger perfect for time traveling because the audio is skewed ever so wonderfully as the 4th dimension recalibrations happen upon re-entry to earthly atmosphere. If you've never experienced it, it's like the sound of having done 17 whip-its all at once, but it doesn't hurt your head and feels like you just dove off a cliff into deep mountain spring. Pretty great, except for the realization that, "Oh fuck, here I am back to my normal base life, back to work, no more playing dominoes with 1971 Pam Grier lookalike in Dayton, Ohio, motel." Hate that shit.

R04D D0G P1LGR1M4G3S T0...

road dog pilgrimages to 
where the patron saints of lounge 
gather when necessary 

TH3R3'S 4LW4YS 4 H0R1Z0N...

there’s always a horizon 
perfect for disappearing 
after, if you are rootless 

1T'S N0TH1NG T0 DR1V3 S3V3N...

it’s nothing to drive seven 
states away, just to see a 
certain face for half an hour 

H1GHW4Y 15 4RT3RY...

highway 15 artery 
intersecting James River 
blue vein - that X marks my spot 

SONG OF THE DAY: Back to Hell in a Greyhound

My first extra-long on purpose Greyhound trip was to Oklahoma, from Farmville, Virginia, and there was a gas station on the west end of town (now gone) that was the Greyhound stop, and I had a big backpack all packed up and met my dad at his lunch spot at the park, and he drove me to catch the bus, because he was quietly worried about why the fuck I’d ride a bus to Oklahoma for no good reason. A lady we both knew, older outlaw woman type who feel in age between the two of us, so I had lustful thoughts of her as a child, she worked the register and had to do the sliding credit card machine thing to charge my ticket, because this was in the 1990s still. The bus came, and two dudes got off to go in and grab some drinks and one of them fell out in the store, like passed out, and I got on the bus and then those two dudes came back on, and apparently one of them had just given the other a pill which knocked the second one out. After Roanoke, where the pill-giver got off, and I had a phone call on the pay phone (those still existed too) calling a dude that used to be tight with my dad, just checking on him, but all he did was complain about how his back was all fucked up and he couldn’t work. One of his two kids ended up being a methhead in Washington, sadly. When I got back on the bus, the passer-outer sat across from me, and we shared stories for hours and hours, long into the night. He’d just gotten released from mental hospital, because he got sent there instead of prison, but explained to me how that wasn’t so good because at least with prison, you got released, but with the mental hospital system, “Once they got you, they got you whenever they want.”

Anyways, I’ve had a number of long ass bus rides since then too, and they’re always full of people and stories like this. It’s a world full of people with more time than money, and that type of person always has some shit going on. Having been in an MFA level creative writing class before, I’d say the back of the Greyhound is a way better writing class than any MFA program operated by the CIA, or by a cash-hungry school mimicking the popular CIA MFA programs at the more prominent universities. I could tell some of my favorite Greyhound stories for hours, and I wonder if I’m anybody else’s favorite Greyhound story? I kinda expect my last ride I might’ve been, when I rode from Los Angeles to New Orleans, and it was hellish and I hadn’t showered in a long time, and stank really bad, too bad for a bathroom baby wipe bath to address, like nasty balls dick stank level stank. And I squeezed into the back row with a nice lady who I considered old but to be honest she was probably around my age, and I was the only gringo on the whole Greyhound. We rode near enough to the border through a chunk of Arizona and New Mexico that we had a couple of immigration stops even. But this lady sitting beside me, who I felt sorry for having to have me beside her, we started talking, and then she was watching a George Lopez comedy special on her phone, and she shared an earbud, and we laughed and laughed together at George Lopez and started telling each other shit, and I was explaining how I was riding the train and bus all the way around the country, had just done Amtrak from Seattle to Los Angeles, just in time to catch this bus to New Orleans, and she was fascinated by my ridiculousness, or so it seemed. She got off in El Paso, and convinced me not to cross the border while we were stopped there, because the bus station was literally a block from the border crossing. “The bus is only here for 45 minutes, you would get lost over there in something, I am sure.”

I kinda told myself when I got to New Orleans that time that I would never ride a Greyhound again, no more long ass slow ass rides like that. But lately I’ve been seeing the Greyhound heading south out of Charlottesville when I’m driving, with LOS ANGELES or DALLAS on the front of the bus, and I briefly think about riding the Greyhound from here to LA or Texas or go up through the northwest again (one of my all-time favorite bus rides, for the beauty of the landscape as well as chaotic bus stories galore). Covid plus being responsible has me itching to do something stupid like ride a bus for 5 days straight.