I’ve felt a very profound energetic shift in the past week, and it all came about because of the internet, and sitting outside in a chair under the cedar poles of what used to be a tipi in our yard but is now a dilapidated mess, although perfect. I had already last week came to the understanding of our financial system, and my financially dilapidated mess, that it’s not so much a process for personal success anymore that our grandparents and even probably parents experienced. That system’s bounty has been taxed, and you are usually born into opportunities, or there are chances if you are exploitable at a high enough level that you can still find a lucky opportunity now and then, what I call lottotunities, because they have more to do with accidental chance encounters than they do actual merit. We do not live in a merit-based society in America, where you can go out and do a great job and impress your superiors and pay your dues and work your way up the ladder, starting out in the mailroom, ending up owning a string of Midwestern radio stations or some shit. Our financial system has been re-engineered pretty massively in the past thirty years so that those types of things just truly aren’t possible, at least not to the extent you can be rolling around with fat sacks with $ signs on it looking like the little Monopoly dude. Doesn’t happen, and is not going to happen again, at least not in America. That may sound like horrible doomsday gibberish, but honestly it makes more hopeful than I’ve been most of my adult life.
As I sat outside, I realized how much cleaner my head felt, away from the bzzzzzz of the household gadgetry army. That shit can have a pulling effect on you, and I’m not willing to jump out on the conspiratorial ledge and proclaim it’s an engineered effort to keep the masses sedated electronically, a moping idiotic mass of humanity just doing shit other than creating real self-sustaining lives for themselves, because to be honest I don’t think the immense bureaucracy is that smart. I know it’s that evil, for sure, but I think giving them the benefit of doing something so amazingly complex is probably not gonna be true.
American culture can seem like this larger than life presence, and we all get caught up in it in our various fringe elements of idol worship. It’s nearly impossible not to. But American culture, and that huge overwhelming bzzzzzz of the gadgetry army, it’s not the Universal Goliath it would have you believe. It’s got the limelights pointed in the right direction to cast the largest shadow a man ever did saw, but it’s stage trickery. The separation between you and me and the wealthiest and most powerful, the smartest and most entertaining, it is not that large. Which might make you think, “Well, then anybody can achieve success if that’s the case. You’re going in two directions here, Raven.”
Not really, because the powerful – whether in today’s America or late ‘80s Communist-bloc Europe or ancient Mesopotamia or Rome or the communal collective in Nelson County or any fucking thing any fucking where – work to maintain their power, using the systems they’ve set up to do so. That’s why any revolution is ultimately just going to repeat the process. There was nothing wrong with Communism or representative democracy or free market capitalism or even polyamorous cannibal societies as a concept. All concepts of how we should live are born from utopian daydreams. But once the mechanisms for building and ensuring and enforcing these daydreams get set up, it will invariably go to shit, sooner or later.
So that’s where we are in America – basically in our late ‘80s Communist era, proudly hanging our hat on our history, pretending the inevitable fall is not going to happen, clutching at the security blanket of our cultural conditioning.
It’s that last part that really triggered a shift in me though – being limited by our cultural conditioning. I have realized the biggest obstacle I have is my own convoluted notions about what is or isn’t acceptable. I am limited most by my own fears basically, whether that be fear of government or fear of failure or fear of anonymous motherfuckers on the internet catching lolols off me. I also realized I could give half a fuck about the job I have and worked so hard to keep in the past nine months, so could easily hold down those duties while being like, “whatever” about it. I do not have to accept it as any real form of existence for me, as I only do it to make money, which itself is an abstract concept (as a google search for “The Shoebox Swindle” will show you), so why stress my fucking life out over that? Why feel guilty for the debts I’ve incurred while being constantly onslaughted with images of what I deserve, triggering neurochemical responses, and then being told I am psychologically weak after my credit limit has been exhausted and I am of no use to the pimps any more? But most importantly, why limit myself to conventional thinking?
So what I did was change my resume from what it reads for the fake world of jobs, that doesn’t feel like any reality I’d like to attach my living to (which is an important concept too, because we always say “it’s a living” when really it’s not life at all, but what we do to earn money which we think mistakenly think enables our life; sure it makes shit easier when you have it, because those financial shackles are loosened up enough you don’t feel yourself choking, but they’re still there), and rewrote it for the reality of what I’ve done in my life. This was The Confederate Mack years, the switch to Rojonekku philosophy, which is currently expanding into this next phase I am embarking on in the coming months. I peppered this resume with employed moments, working as a housepainter, in a charcoal factory, print shops, trade show exhibits, giving lab rats brain damage, and so on and so forth. All of that is the crockpot my life has fermented upon. And then I started sending it out to absolutely ridiculously impossible, by conventional notions, places. I had an interesting back-and-forth with a person who was the managing editor of Rolling Stone up until three weeks ago when she herself was laid off, and got a follow up from a potential financial enabler of the future from a different country, and this is all in the matter of three days. The shit has been pushed out there wider. Who does it hurt? Nobody. I mean if all our fears about the way the system actually works are true, then I’ll be punished for my unprofessionalism by not taking everything entirely too seriously, and I’ll never have a meaningful job again in my life. But guess what? I’ve never had a meaningful job THUS FAR in my life.
But also, in my mind, I’ve drastically upped my lottotunity odds, simply by not giving a fuck. I don’t give a fuck. If I don’t ever do anything enjoyable for a paycheck and work shitty jobs til death, so be it. I’ll still be writing my nonsense gibberish (which is not nonsense gibberish at all, but highly sensical and more a speaking in slanged tongues that devils cannot understand than actual gibberish). And if the crushing vultures of capital come calling in my debts and make my financial situation miserable (which they are circling fairly close, to be honest), so be it. They will not have my life. My wife and our children and our Bird Tribe may be broke, but we will not be broken.
So that’s where we are, as Americans, and me as Raven. Last week there was a comment saying they didn’t realize my situation had been so bad, which made me feel weird, because nothing feels bad. I feel better than ever right now. The past two years have been odd, and a real test, but my Viking is strong and my Chi is thick, so it ain’t shit but a test. And yeah, I’ve got a pretty ugly looming guillotine blade on my finances in the next few weeks, but I’d feel like a dick if I was all, “Hey, give me money, my situation is so bad.” (There is a paypal button on the sidebar if you feel so inclined, and I will be grateful, but my dedication to writing for free on the blog is going to be limited to these Weekly Frybread things for the most part, so don’t be expecting much other than what’s already here as some form of return on your payment if you are hung up in the thinking of capitalism.) I’ve got a solid family core, and I’m a solid mind, and I ain’t gonna be no beast’s bitch.
That’s where a lot of The Fear comes from, people thinking government is so powerful that we are all doomed, and that’s The Fear that motivates so many of you to think you are being clever by falling into the fallacy of “This guy is the lesser of two evils, therefore he is good.” I’m not doing that. In fact, 2012 will be the first year since I turned 18 that I will not vote. I’ve always done so even in my most cynical states, because I felt it made some sort of statement. Now I am old enough, and realistically hopeful enough, that I don’t need to play pretend any more. But if you think that government, even with its surveillance drones and constant police state, is an unbeatable overlord, well, again you are giving them to much credit. I mean, you may not beat them in a revolutionary sense, like overthrowing the government. But the beast is a large, slow-moving behemoth, and there are always dark corners you can build your lives, circumventing his stifling mandates as much as you allow yourself. And really, why limit yourself to America? Ideally, I’d like to relocate my family to another country in the next decade, because I refuse to believe this is the only way, much less the best way. I have no solid ideas where, or how, but I’m not telling myself, “Thank God for the fence around me, because this is the best pasture to possibly be confined in that ever did exist! Glory Lord!”
I’ve dabbled a little in the past month in the deep web, or underground internet, which – as a bold warning – is a dark, dark place. It is like the cybertronic version of that end of major cities that hasn’t seen development in forever and is where the murders happen and you can buy heroin in the open in the daylight. Because basically, in the underground internet, you can literally order murders and buy heroin. (Thus, I’d advise you to look into it thoroughly before even attempting: start with “tor browser” but be careful, because you can’t unsee things you see, even online.) And I am only peripherally interested in the deep web, not actually looking to obtain any illicit services; but it makes me happy that it exists, free from government oversight, and in outright defiance of the burdensome beast’s indignant mandates.
So shit is good. I am working diligently on the football preview, which should be ready for e-purchase the first week of August or so, called FOOTBALL METAPHYSICS FOR THE ENLIGHTENED DEGENERATE aka The 2012 Armchair Linebacker Preview. And I would expect not too long after that will be this treatise I’ve been working on about lessons taken from everyday occurrences. I’ve got this tree on the University of Virginia campus where there’s this bench I sit at a few times a week while on break, and the red-breasted robins have been talking at me. I don’t know what the fuck they’re saying, but seriously, they have landed within four feet of me twice this week and tweeted their nonsense gibberish (HA!) at me. Plus, there’s been blue jay feathers left for me there twice as well.
And the first volume of The Confederate Mack Collection should come about hopefully in September. That’s potentially going to be multiple books, as good lord I must’ve wrote three billion words in that zine, and a lot of it still knows what the fuck is up. That will unfold as I start typesetting it all after the Football Metaphysics is all done.
The main thing is things are good. Sure, these are crazy times, and it’s easy to freak out, but I can’t tell you enough how excited we should all be about the possibilities that are right here on the horizon. The greatest thing about some broken down piece of shit car you keep barely putting back together finally dying on you is you are forced to get a new car, and start fresh. That’s what’s on the horizon for us culturally. This broke ass shit is coming apart, and it’s absolutely wonderful. And that makes me good, regardless of financial bullshit in my personal life. I mean seriously, I am the son of a pair of teenage dropouts, born into the hunger and madness, and started self-medicating to a serious extent at age 13. There’s only been about 20 months of my entire fucking life where I’ve been a full-grown adult who is not making a dullard of himself with the Beast’s alcohol. And my Viking and my Chi has never been stronger. Great shit is about to happen, for me and for all of us.
Which brings me to my final point – sure, this website has my name on the fucking thing, but I get a lot from the interaction with you all. I feel my ultimate purpose is to be more of a conduit for movement – not a movement but just movement, or change, or fucking shit up or Unfucking The World, or really whatever. So comment on things here, even if it’s just one of the song of the day posts. Get with me on Twitter (@SSVa_Raven) or the Rojonekku Facebook page. Email me if you want, send me postcards to my PO Box in the sidebar, do whatever, but let’s join up, let’s bounce our madnesses and hungers off of each other. Let’s build real fucking lives and stop choking ourselves trying to make a living. And let’s not be too serious about it because ultimately, all serious shit does is make you cry. I’d rather laugh.
(Also, my resume is available for all interest parties. Ideal job situations would be writing epic poetry for crime lords, or being flown to different parts of Africa to write sociological gonzo pieces about the coming century of climate chaos, or if you are hung up on things remaining the same even though they won’t, you couldn’t find a better person to pen meandering yet entertaining “nonsensical gibberish” about World Cup 2014, if we ever get there.)
Showing posts with label weekly recaps. Show all posts
Showing posts with label weekly recaps. Show all posts
Friday, July 20
Friday, July 13
Testing of Will Continues
There is not too much to say in the way of updating, but the same day I was all post-happy last Friday about the direction of projects, with laser owl focus, I was hit with the wonderful returning dividends of my health issues last year, namely the medical bills coming due (in that my inability to pay them has sufficiently gone long enough they will do legal bullshit at me). Oddly enough, this all comes on the heels of everybody being all “HOORAY!” about the health care act, which always confuses me because it’s actually a health insurance law, and has as much to do with health care as buying a condom has to do with raising a child. I had health insurance (thank god, or else I’d be in for $80000 instead of the $2500 I haven’t hustled away yet), but even that didn’t mean shit. Because I went in for what is allegedly a simple surgical procedure, got dirtied up with bacterias in that process, and then spent the next three or four months recovering, and still have a bullet wound gash in my abdomen that my 4-year-old jokes is a second belly button.
Well, because of that debt, which needed to be paid immediately (as in the 28th of this month before garnishment proceedings start), I had decided to skip into doing a Confederate Mack collection I’d been talking about.
The Confederate Mack collection is something that’s been kicking around for a while as an idea, but never happened yet. I started working on it genuinely early this year, but honestly, being a happily married dude with three daughters, the oldest of which is 13, it was kinda uncomfortable reading what a miserable misogynistic predator I used to be. But at the same time, that was me, and there was still the same underlying goodness of person. Plus, the whole Confederate Mack thing was camouflage to a certain extent, to scare away assholes who care about normal bullshit. Of course nowadays, post-internet re-wiring our brains, that sounds really pretentious and stupid. But back then, it didn’t feel that way. (We are entirely too self-conscious post-internet, and thus take nothing seriously for fear of being lololed for being serious about something stupid.) This time around (the past week) digging into the old Confederate Mack zine body of work, there was a ton of good stuff to see, even in the midst of the early shitpiles of self-destruction. So a collection will be forthcoming.
Problem is, I am married to this NFL idea, which needs to be done in the coming three weeks, or it is useless. And the Confederate Mack collection deserves a little more thoughtful curation than me typing it up in a frenzy of caffeine and truck stop alertness aids. But that will come.
As for my bills and situation, I don’t know man. I still want to stick with my plan of putting some shit out there for the world in the coming months, but the immense financial need on the immediate scale has me contemplating other moves. It has me contemplating collaborations, and honestly it has me contemplating nefarious shit. The problem with illegal activity is it never pays as well as you think. You risk your ass and do some dirty shit that could bring havoc into your life and all you end up with is like $350. I think the financial benefit of crime is often overly-glamorized.
And I also don’t mean to sound like I’m bitching. I’ve got a job (at least for the next five weeks), and there’s food at my house. We ain’t dying or nothing. There’s billions of people on this planet worse off than myself and my Bird Tribe. But goddamn man, this fucking series of events the past year with a simple fucking appendicitis turning into prolonged infections which bled into a really bad work situation because I was working for a nefarious ass dude who almost immediately was trying to manipulate my days into causing me to quit or get fired, but having to maintain gainful employment to provide for a family, which in turn just maxed me the fuck out on the stress scale, and then you think you clear a hurdle after a month of mandatory down time and start working on shit and BLAMM! the medical bills are like, “Fuck you, bro.” It is a trifle, but it’s also just testing the path. No one is ever allowed to be successful by the world, at least not from where the truly successful start. You have to chop through the thickets of resistance and make that shit happen. So I will still make it happen. But the struggling gets tiring. And it is easy to see why people flip out and kill themselves, either slowly or literally in one final act, or commit heinous acts against others. It is hard to continually process that frustration of struggle in a healthy manner, especially when usually the side symptom of such a struggle is you are under-rested and over-stretched, ready to rip if one simple thing pierces the barely held together shanty of comfort you’ve barely got clipped together with the last twenty dollars of last week’s paycheck.
Oh fucking well. So as much as I’d like to say, “Hey Internet, Here is a wonderfully wacky retrospective collection of Confederate Mack writings for you to purchase this very day” so that I could pay my fucking bullshit by the 28th, it ain’t meant to shake out that way. I’ll stick with the football project first (which I did get a solid 10% done on this past week, even while reading through every Confederate Mack zine ever printed), then probably shoot to have that Confederate Mack thing done late August/early September, and then we’ll move back to whatever shows up next on the horizon. Hard to plan too well when the horizon always shakes and shimmeys on me like it does.
Well, because of that debt, which needed to be paid immediately (as in the 28th of this month before garnishment proceedings start), I had decided to skip into doing a Confederate Mack collection I’d been talking about.
The Confederate Mack collection is something that’s been kicking around for a while as an idea, but never happened yet. I started working on it genuinely early this year, but honestly, being a happily married dude with three daughters, the oldest of which is 13, it was kinda uncomfortable reading what a miserable misogynistic predator I used to be. But at the same time, that was me, and there was still the same underlying goodness of person. Plus, the whole Confederate Mack thing was camouflage to a certain extent, to scare away assholes who care about normal bullshit. Of course nowadays, post-internet re-wiring our brains, that sounds really pretentious and stupid. But back then, it didn’t feel that way. (We are entirely too self-conscious post-internet, and thus take nothing seriously for fear of being lololed for being serious about something stupid.) This time around (the past week) digging into the old Confederate Mack zine body of work, there was a ton of good stuff to see, even in the midst of the early shitpiles of self-destruction. So a collection will be forthcoming.
Problem is, I am married to this NFL idea, which needs to be done in the coming three weeks, or it is useless. And the Confederate Mack collection deserves a little more thoughtful curation than me typing it up in a frenzy of caffeine and truck stop alertness aids. But that will come.
As for my bills and situation, I don’t know man. I still want to stick with my plan of putting some shit out there for the world in the coming months, but the immense financial need on the immediate scale has me contemplating other moves. It has me contemplating collaborations, and honestly it has me contemplating nefarious shit. The problem with illegal activity is it never pays as well as you think. You risk your ass and do some dirty shit that could bring havoc into your life and all you end up with is like $350. I think the financial benefit of crime is often overly-glamorized.
And I also don’t mean to sound like I’m bitching. I’ve got a job (at least for the next five weeks), and there’s food at my house. We ain’t dying or nothing. There’s billions of people on this planet worse off than myself and my Bird Tribe. But goddamn man, this fucking series of events the past year with a simple fucking appendicitis turning into prolonged infections which bled into a really bad work situation because I was working for a nefarious ass dude who almost immediately was trying to manipulate my days into causing me to quit or get fired, but having to maintain gainful employment to provide for a family, which in turn just maxed me the fuck out on the stress scale, and then you think you clear a hurdle after a month of mandatory down time and start working on shit and BLAMM! the medical bills are like, “Fuck you, bro.” It is a trifle, but it’s also just testing the path. No one is ever allowed to be successful by the world, at least not from where the truly successful start. You have to chop through the thickets of resistance and make that shit happen. So I will still make it happen. But the struggling gets tiring. And it is easy to see why people flip out and kill themselves, either slowly or literally in one final act, or commit heinous acts against others. It is hard to continually process that frustration of struggle in a healthy manner, especially when usually the side symptom of such a struggle is you are under-rested and over-stretched, ready to rip if one simple thing pierces the barely held together shanty of comfort you’ve barely got clipped together with the last twenty dollars of last week’s paycheck.
Oh fucking well. So as much as I’d like to say, “Hey Internet, Here is a wonderfully wacky retrospective collection of Confederate Mack writings for you to purchase this very day” so that I could pay my fucking bullshit by the 28th, it ain’t meant to shake out that way. I’ll stick with the football project first (which I did get a solid 10% done on this past week, even while reading through every Confederate Mack zine ever printed), then probably shoot to have that Confederate Mack thing done late August/early September, and then we’ll move back to whatever shows up next on the horizon. Hard to plan too well when the horizon always shakes and shimmeys on me like it does.
Friday, July 6
Returning to Myself
The past 18 months have been a trying one for me, and I’m not entirely sure what has caused all this. Seems like after I quit drinking to break some negative familial habits, shit went hoo-ha for me. And it would be easy to suggest – as some friends have – that quitting drinking broke everything. I suffered some health issues that malingered, had a pretty intense high stress situation related to employment which caused anxiety bullshit, and was just, to be honest, a complete wreck. Of course, I have stubborn southern blood – part Viking, part Scot, part back roads America – and that causes one to feel they can plow right through everything, like a mule, a literal manifestation of mule inside man’s body, making things happen even as the man himself is ready to crash and wishing for the long content sleep of death.
For whatever reason, I recognized this and realized I was forcing, and under the heavy advice of professionals, I shut it all down so to speak. Work - where I was struggling to maintain employment (still am), navigating various inter-personal mine fields - was taking most all my energy. Trying to chase creative endeavors afterwards, eating into the night at my usual adult clip, to where I’d get by on 4 to 6 hours of sleep a night, honestly it was probably killing me. The battery was drained. Unfortunately, I am the sole (and soul) provider for a family of five, so cutting out work was not an option. I was not born into that lane, and though sometimes I can get filled with resentment towards the leisure class who can easily accomplish things I lust after (grad school, vacations, two working vehicles at one time), I know that what I was born is what I was born. This is my path, and for whatever fucked up reason, contrary to all pre-existing examples or patterns, my brain was wired to work the way it does, and do it as intensely as possible. To say there is a higher purpose would be misleading because it assumes there is a higher authority of some sort…
Well fuck, I initially was going to start giving a simple weekly update of where I am with writing, to start a dialogue with whoever comes to this site, being my ultimate goal is to move away from this site. The internet has become (or always was) a vast interactive network of commercials, so ultimately whatever I do for no obvious cost is allowing others to profit. And to think the internet is “free” is sort of a mistake anyways, as basically there is an unsigned contract where you give up information about yourself to Google/Facebook/Whatever in exchange for using the services. It’s not free so much as you’ve willingly entered a contract no one laid out for you to officially sign. That info is used to tailor the vast interactive network of commercials back at you. So I am viewing this site as a commercial for my other purpose, which itself is not very clear to me.
A lot of what I’ve been thinking on lately has been that much like our flaw-heavy two-party political system in America, there is a two-party philosophical system in place, where most of us feel our world is comprised of Religion vs. Science. Either you believe in God and everyone else will suffer in your religion’s version of Hell, or you have faith in science and to do otherwise is foolish and will jeopardize the future of humanity (oddly enough, in a global warming fate remarkably similar to Christian Hell).
The problem with this two-philosophy system is very much like the problems with our two-party political system – both have very heavy flaws in their methods and ways, and neither really is able to encompass the entirety of what it means to be a human. Thus, I say above, “To say there is a higher purpose… assumes there is a higher authority.” For religion, this is your God (or Gods or whatever); and for science, this is Science (with its rigid methods for extraction of “facts” from experience). I don’t believe entirely in either, and probably believe partially in both. But neither explains what has happened to me thus far today, much less throughout my entire life. Neither never will.
So what I do is communicate the way my mind wraps itself around and through concepts and stories and ideas like honeysuckle vines and poison ivy, together. I do this through words mostly, because words make the chemicals in my brain tingle as neurotically as the blood in my penis does when I’m looking at my wife naked. I can’t help it. Even during this health-imposed sabbatical, all I’d think about was stories and narratives, and how to switch the angles, and who I ultimately would want to serve in these stories, which often times weren’t even stories at all but something somewhere in between fiction and non-fiction, but not conscious enough to be “creative non-fiction” or “memoir” or fuck man I just don’t know. But it is what I do, and what I am supposed to do, and ultimately me – the man with body and skull full of chemical translations of the world I sense – seems to be nothing more than a vessel for that process.
Thus, I am here inside the vast network of interactive commercials to tell you I am writing. I am not a writer, and never will be. The past 18 months I have entertained that delusion, and the delusion impregnated my dreams with bastard wealths that would never love me or allow me to be myself. I have dabbled with the grad school process, had interactions with literary world figures in that process, tested the marketability of the end results of my purpose with literary agent, and all of it made me less able to do what I was supposed to do than ever.
And the odd thing is everything is so out there now. I can basically make the 2012 equivalent of a zine, spontaneously (as I am now doing) available to anyone who has cyber-network access. And of course, our ability to process longer communications is hindered by that sensory overload.
I would bet of every 10 people who started reading this, maybe one is still with me at this point, and it’s not because of the lack of style to the writing, though maybe the content drives some way; but an inability to care to focus beyond thirty seconds is a large part of it, as while you spend time with this, the computer beams at you with the sexy allure of LIMITLESS POSSIBILITIES THAT YOU MIGHT BE MISSING OUT ON by focusing too deeply on this. Which of course drives home my belief that we don’t actually “know” more now than we did a hundred years ago; we just know very little about a far wider array of things.
Nonetheless, the purpose of this post is to say, Hey you, random reader of my website, I have returned to allowing myself to write. The end results will be ebooks from now on, at whatever rate they come. These will be under various names, most likely, and completely off-topic from each other, often times. I’m gonna try to check in here weekly though (aside from the manifestation sonnet/Rojonekku song of the day thing) and let you know where I’m at with these things. I would hope you would comment and talk with me (or do twitters with me, or mail a post card, or whatever feels right), and we can interact. But here is the project I’m working on, as well as the two on the horizon.
#1: Armchair Linebacker NFL Preview – This is something Neil and I did last year, but I’ve done for six or seven years in a row, either online or in various zines. It’s a good, easy, pop cultural way to ease myself back into the water of my stream of thought, so to speak. I’ve built the framework for it all already, and am a couple thousand words into it. I am expecting this to be done the first week of August, to be available for a few months, into the middle of the NFL season. If you know me or my style, it will be as enjoyable for non-NFL fans as for fans (in fact, maybe more so if you don’t like football), and will be far different from the crap that passes itself for internet sports writing opinions for you, most of which are tired, sober, third-rate imitations of Hunter S. Thompson’s second-rate ESPN columns anyways.
#2: Raven Mack’s First Book – The structure of this will be very similar to old Confederate Mack zines, as I’ve been taking notes on Lessons my daily experiences are teaching me. This has been to notice my real world more closely, but also because I feel everything is a fucking lesson. Every thing. But at this point all I’m doing is taking notes on this, and letting it all ferment in the background of my brain, as I’m very much following Henry Miller’s advice and focusing on only one project at a time from here forward. One of my biggest character flaws to this point has been to allow my energies to flow ten ways at once. The health struggles of the past year have helped me realize my energies are not limitless, even when a back roads Viking Scot redneck ninja like myself. My energies are like stone, and sure throwing giant chunks of quartz at people can be painful if you are lucky to hit somebody just right sometime, but carve that bitch into an arrow point and you will pierce a motherfucker’s heart, for sure, so long as your aim is true.
#3: Recession Proof collection of stories – I’ve actually got the title story in final shape, and three others in complete but unfinished stage, plus around ten to fifteen others completely outlined in basic framework just not fleshed into full. I build stories in composition books, then on notecards, then finally into a robot keyboard when they are ready for flesh. I was working on this late last year as possibly being published by Benjamin Leroy at Tyrus Books, but as I’ve thoroughly explained, my life has been a derailment process. This collection of stories would probably be better for me financially if it was some sort of Frank Bill-esque rural noir vicarious thrill for book buyer types, but I feel like I am a representative of Southside Virginia, like for real its written embodiment, and I don’t want to be a backwoods Uncle Tom show for the leisure class of our “civilization” that still throws down $25 for hardcovers. That might profit me personally far better, but that wouldn’t be real of me. So the stories are more straight up Southside. There’s a lot to it, but I don’t want to get into it all too heavily, as that’s third on the list at this point, so I’ll save that energy for later, hopefully this fall. I do want to thank Ben for his support over the years though. There are two ways to be a successful force in life:
The first, and easiest, is to be born into that lane, as I mentioned before. You are afforded opportunities that many could never hope to get a sniff of, and you should feel thankful for that. This does not make you free of the repercussions, because as I wrote a friend yesterday, there are a large number of men and women who have boots on their throat from birth, by birth, and if you are one who is part of that boot, just because you acknowledge the fact the boot is on the throat of the less fortunate, as opposed to pretending everything is decided by ambition and skill, it does not make the person who is being choked from birth less angry at you for having your boot upon their throat. I mean, it may make you feel better to acknowledge it (or maybe not), but it does not change the fact. Don’t hate yourself though if you are one of these types born into this affluence. The system we have is what it is, and there will be those born choking and those born breathing fully. We do not choose where we are born, so do not feel guilty.
The second, but much harder way to be a successful force in life is to have advocates. Going back to the vast interactive network of commercials, a commercial is basically advocacy on behalf of a product. I am not a product. I have a purpose, and I am thankful to Ben Leroy for being an advocate on my behalf within the system of literary product manufacturing. But I am also thankful to all those who have read my online writings over the years, who perhaps collected Confederate Macks back in the day, or who just get what I do in ways that neither of us understand, because like I said, we are vessels, that science and religion can’t explain completely. This shit happens, because it’s supposed to.
I am very thankful for my wife as well, who has helped nurse me through the past 18 months (and more), and who is a true partner in this. We are the honeysuckle vine and the poison ivy, together, a bit of both of that in both of us, yin and yang, make do and do make (which is my personal yin/yang). We are the Bird Tribe, and we both have our purposes, and for whatever reason we have been thrown together, and that too will serve something larger than simply our two physical manifestations as well. It is exciting to have unfold, and I know how blessed we are to have found that with each other.
So yep, that’s it. I’m cranking back up the old kookery factory. So holler at your boy.
For whatever reason, I recognized this and realized I was forcing, and under the heavy advice of professionals, I shut it all down so to speak. Work - where I was struggling to maintain employment (still am), navigating various inter-personal mine fields - was taking most all my energy. Trying to chase creative endeavors afterwards, eating into the night at my usual adult clip, to where I’d get by on 4 to 6 hours of sleep a night, honestly it was probably killing me. The battery was drained. Unfortunately, I am the sole (and soul) provider for a family of five, so cutting out work was not an option. I was not born into that lane, and though sometimes I can get filled with resentment towards the leisure class who can easily accomplish things I lust after (grad school, vacations, two working vehicles at one time), I know that what I was born is what I was born. This is my path, and for whatever fucked up reason, contrary to all pre-existing examples or patterns, my brain was wired to work the way it does, and do it as intensely as possible. To say there is a higher purpose would be misleading because it assumes there is a higher authority of some sort…
Well fuck, I initially was going to start giving a simple weekly update of where I am with writing, to start a dialogue with whoever comes to this site, being my ultimate goal is to move away from this site. The internet has become (or always was) a vast interactive network of commercials, so ultimately whatever I do for no obvious cost is allowing others to profit. And to think the internet is “free” is sort of a mistake anyways, as basically there is an unsigned contract where you give up information about yourself to Google/Facebook/Whatever in exchange for using the services. It’s not free so much as you’ve willingly entered a contract no one laid out for you to officially sign. That info is used to tailor the vast interactive network of commercials back at you. So I am viewing this site as a commercial for my other purpose, which itself is not very clear to me.
A lot of what I’ve been thinking on lately has been that much like our flaw-heavy two-party political system in America, there is a two-party philosophical system in place, where most of us feel our world is comprised of Religion vs. Science. Either you believe in God and everyone else will suffer in your religion’s version of Hell, or you have faith in science and to do otherwise is foolish and will jeopardize the future of humanity (oddly enough, in a global warming fate remarkably similar to Christian Hell).
The problem with this two-philosophy system is very much like the problems with our two-party political system – both have very heavy flaws in their methods and ways, and neither really is able to encompass the entirety of what it means to be a human. Thus, I say above, “To say there is a higher purpose… assumes there is a higher authority.” For religion, this is your God (or Gods or whatever); and for science, this is Science (with its rigid methods for extraction of “facts” from experience). I don’t believe entirely in either, and probably believe partially in both. But neither explains what has happened to me thus far today, much less throughout my entire life. Neither never will.
So what I do is communicate the way my mind wraps itself around and through concepts and stories and ideas like honeysuckle vines and poison ivy, together. I do this through words mostly, because words make the chemicals in my brain tingle as neurotically as the blood in my penis does when I’m looking at my wife naked. I can’t help it. Even during this health-imposed sabbatical, all I’d think about was stories and narratives, and how to switch the angles, and who I ultimately would want to serve in these stories, which often times weren’t even stories at all but something somewhere in between fiction and non-fiction, but not conscious enough to be “creative non-fiction” or “memoir” or fuck man I just don’t know. But it is what I do, and what I am supposed to do, and ultimately me – the man with body and skull full of chemical translations of the world I sense – seems to be nothing more than a vessel for that process.
Thus, I am here inside the vast network of interactive commercials to tell you I am writing. I am not a writer, and never will be. The past 18 months I have entertained that delusion, and the delusion impregnated my dreams with bastard wealths that would never love me or allow me to be myself. I have dabbled with the grad school process, had interactions with literary world figures in that process, tested the marketability of the end results of my purpose with literary agent, and all of it made me less able to do what I was supposed to do than ever.
And the odd thing is everything is so out there now. I can basically make the 2012 equivalent of a zine, spontaneously (as I am now doing) available to anyone who has cyber-network access. And of course, our ability to process longer communications is hindered by that sensory overload.
I would bet of every 10 people who started reading this, maybe one is still with me at this point, and it’s not because of the lack of style to the writing, though maybe the content drives some way; but an inability to care to focus beyond thirty seconds is a large part of it, as while you spend time with this, the computer beams at you with the sexy allure of LIMITLESS POSSIBILITIES THAT YOU MIGHT BE MISSING OUT ON by focusing too deeply on this. Which of course drives home my belief that we don’t actually “know” more now than we did a hundred years ago; we just know very little about a far wider array of things.
Nonetheless, the purpose of this post is to say, Hey you, random reader of my website, I have returned to allowing myself to write. The end results will be ebooks from now on, at whatever rate they come. These will be under various names, most likely, and completely off-topic from each other, often times. I’m gonna try to check in here weekly though (aside from the manifestation sonnet/Rojonekku song of the day thing) and let you know where I’m at with these things. I would hope you would comment and talk with me (or do twitters with me, or mail a post card, or whatever feels right), and we can interact. But here is the project I’m working on, as well as the two on the horizon.
#1: Armchair Linebacker NFL Preview – This is something Neil and I did last year, but I’ve done for six or seven years in a row, either online or in various zines. It’s a good, easy, pop cultural way to ease myself back into the water of my stream of thought, so to speak. I’ve built the framework for it all already, and am a couple thousand words into it. I am expecting this to be done the first week of August, to be available for a few months, into the middle of the NFL season. If you know me or my style, it will be as enjoyable for non-NFL fans as for fans (in fact, maybe more so if you don’t like football), and will be far different from the crap that passes itself for internet sports writing opinions for you, most of which are tired, sober, third-rate imitations of Hunter S. Thompson’s second-rate ESPN columns anyways.
#2: Raven Mack’s First Book – The structure of this will be very similar to old Confederate Mack zines, as I’ve been taking notes on Lessons my daily experiences are teaching me. This has been to notice my real world more closely, but also because I feel everything is a fucking lesson. Every thing. But at this point all I’m doing is taking notes on this, and letting it all ferment in the background of my brain, as I’m very much following Henry Miller’s advice and focusing on only one project at a time from here forward. One of my biggest character flaws to this point has been to allow my energies to flow ten ways at once. The health struggles of the past year have helped me realize my energies are not limitless, even when a back roads Viking Scot redneck ninja like myself. My energies are like stone, and sure throwing giant chunks of quartz at people can be painful if you are lucky to hit somebody just right sometime, but carve that bitch into an arrow point and you will pierce a motherfucker’s heart, for sure, so long as your aim is true.
#3: Recession Proof collection of stories – I’ve actually got the title story in final shape, and three others in complete but unfinished stage, plus around ten to fifteen others completely outlined in basic framework just not fleshed into full. I build stories in composition books, then on notecards, then finally into a robot keyboard when they are ready for flesh. I was working on this late last year as possibly being published by Benjamin Leroy at Tyrus Books, but as I’ve thoroughly explained, my life has been a derailment process. This collection of stories would probably be better for me financially if it was some sort of Frank Bill-esque rural noir vicarious thrill for book buyer types, but I feel like I am a representative of Southside Virginia, like for real its written embodiment, and I don’t want to be a backwoods Uncle Tom show for the leisure class of our “civilization” that still throws down $25 for hardcovers. That might profit me personally far better, but that wouldn’t be real of me. So the stories are more straight up Southside. There’s a lot to it, but I don’t want to get into it all too heavily, as that’s third on the list at this point, so I’ll save that energy for later, hopefully this fall. I do want to thank Ben for his support over the years though. There are two ways to be a successful force in life:
The first, and easiest, is to be born into that lane, as I mentioned before. You are afforded opportunities that many could never hope to get a sniff of, and you should feel thankful for that. This does not make you free of the repercussions, because as I wrote a friend yesterday, there are a large number of men and women who have boots on their throat from birth, by birth, and if you are one who is part of that boot, just because you acknowledge the fact the boot is on the throat of the less fortunate, as opposed to pretending everything is decided by ambition and skill, it does not make the person who is being choked from birth less angry at you for having your boot upon their throat. I mean, it may make you feel better to acknowledge it (or maybe not), but it does not change the fact. Don’t hate yourself though if you are one of these types born into this affluence. The system we have is what it is, and there will be those born choking and those born breathing fully. We do not choose where we are born, so do not feel guilty.
The second, but much harder way to be a successful force in life is to have advocates. Going back to the vast interactive network of commercials, a commercial is basically advocacy on behalf of a product. I am not a product. I have a purpose, and I am thankful to Ben Leroy for being an advocate on my behalf within the system of literary product manufacturing. But I am also thankful to all those who have read my online writings over the years, who perhaps collected Confederate Macks back in the day, or who just get what I do in ways that neither of us understand, because like I said, we are vessels, that science and religion can’t explain completely. This shit happens, because it’s supposed to.
I am very thankful for my wife as well, who has helped nurse me through the past 18 months (and more), and who is a true partner in this. We are the honeysuckle vine and the poison ivy, together, a bit of both of that in both of us, yin and yang, make do and do make (which is my personal yin/yang). We are the Bird Tribe, and we both have our purposes, and for whatever reason we have been thrown together, and that too will serve something larger than simply our two physical manifestations as well. It is exciting to have unfold, and I know how blessed we are to have found that with each other.
So yep, that’s it. I’m cranking back up the old kookery factory. So holler at your boy.
Monday, August 22
Hype & Intentions
What is going on? Had meant to do a plug for a couple things last Friday, but got sidetracked by life, and not really sure if I feel compelled to make time for things like this, but would like to pretend I'm trying to accomplish something by having a cyberhole to fill, so let's do it this way on a Monday morning...
First looking back, my man Neil and myself (along with the motley crew of associated contributors) are gearing up for the new NFL season as Armchair Linebacker. Me and Neil are doing team previews, starting with the bottom of the league, working our way up until kickoff the second week of September. You should check out the previews, and know that my NFL bullshit I usually do is just going to be there.
Also, my Rojonekku tumblr has sort of developed into something or other... I'm not sure, but I put a lot of my robot phone pictures up there, as well as other dumb shit. It is a thing, to be sure, but like all tumblrs, just a fucking distraction. But hey, look at you, staring into the cyberboob like you is. Maybe you'll like it.
As for intentions for this week, I am conjuring up/outlining/fleshing out/working on a six-pack of short stories, which I'd previously thought of submitting here or there, but I may do some wacky kickstarter thing to just publish them here instead. Fuck the way the world works, because the world is crooked.
I am also writing long-form poetry, for whatever reason, probably because I have enjoyed sitting by my pigs and rambling insanely in a scientific computational notebook lately in red ink. It makes me feel like Walt Whitman, though to be honest, I have no fucking idea how Walt Whitman wrote, or if he was crazy, or what.
Also, there is a zine in the works, which features some of the better nonsensical recent items from here along with some uninternetted nonsensical things. This zine will be a strictly in person type deal, set at a couple of places, but I am planning on doing some sort of kickstarter deal for that as well, and there will probably be a chance to get a copy through that mechanism of patronly cybertronning. I've been laying shit out on that one, and hope to have the first full issue close to done by next weekend, though my day job (which I have kept, thank you very much stereotypical critic) has promised to be a fucking blitzkrieg of soul-blocking lately, so who knows what will actually happen with that.
There has been a bump in comments on the blog lately, and I enjoy that. Not because it gives me any ego boost or anything but because shit man, I feel like this is an open space, or else I'd just carve all this jibber jabber into trees down by the creek. Feel free to have some ownership in it and jibber jabber back at me. I am inside the twitters as well, but that place is like four real people, 3 million sales pitches, and 400,000 propaganda programs being run by the government. But if you dabble in such pretend revolutions where the propaganda is the revolution because the greatest trick the devil ever pulled off was convincing you he didn't exist, then I am @rojonekku. Rojonekku is me everywhere. If you see a motherfucker with that shit, that means they are good people. If they are somehow co-opting it for nefarious means, then whatever man. I got cosmic karma and a fifty-foot aura, so when they diss Dre, they only diss themself.
Saturday, January 22
Weekly Recap
I have not done much with myself, but there are some things going on. Mostly, I have been laid up in my stupid bed this week, to the point I am going mad with frustrated energy. But beyond here, I am still doing things at the Armchair Linebacker blog, which still includes bitching about the stupid Redskins. But my weekly NFL thing is located there now, and this week was about the conference championships, if you be caring. Also started contributing to a beisbol blog called Baseball Feelings, and I did a thing about baseball payrolls last year and how much teams paid for each victory they had. It's fucking ridiculous.
But more importantly to me, I started a photo blog called Cyclotron 3000. The world doesn't exactly need another picture blog, but I have been bored, I guess, or inactive, or something. Or I just want a compendium of weird pics to use for brainwashing myself. I'm not sure. I tried tumblr, but the one thing I learned was that tumblr sucks. Seriously, I do not say that from the "I don't like to do things differently" angle, but because I set a bunch of shit up, it was queued, and never did anything. Tags wouldn't show, and it was impossible to edit, so fuck tumblr.
I also want to mention and give a Big Ups to The Acid Sweat Lodge, which is my favorite picture blog of forever. I love that place, and have co-opted many images from there for using in the J.J. Krupert write-ups. I won't be using any Acid Sweat Lodge images at the Cyclotron 3000, at least not on purpose. When homeless guys drink with me by the river and talk about aliens on earth and I pull out my laptop to show them proof of alien technology on earth, it is the website I take them to as an example of how this evil technology can be used for awesome.
So yeah. What's up with you?
But more importantly to me, I started a photo blog called Cyclotron 3000. The world doesn't exactly need another picture blog, but I have been bored, I guess, or inactive, or something. Or I just want a compendium of weird pics to use for brainwashing myself. I'm not sure. I tried tumblr, but the one thing I learned was that tumblr sucks. Seriously, I do not say that from the "I don't like to do things differently" angle, but because I set a bunch of shit up, it was queued, and never did anything. Tags wouldn't show, and it was impossible to edit, so fuck tumblr.
I also want to mention and give a Big Ups to The Acid Sweat Lodge, which is my favorite picture blog of forever. I love that place, and have co-opted many images from there for using in the J.J. Krupert write-ups. I won't be using any Acid Sweat Lodge images at the Cyclotron 3000, at least not on purpose. When homeless guys drink with me by the river and talk about aliens on earth and I pull out my laptop to show them proof of alien technology on earth, it is the website I take them to as an example of how this evil technology can be used for awesome.
So yeah. What's up with you?
Sunday, December 19
Weekly Recap
Look at this, a weekly recap. But what to recap? Ain't been doing shit, though it's probably more than most humans do, but it ain't shit to me. Not enough release of the words which are like a tea kettle steaming inside my fucking brain all day long, wandering through the workaday, thankful yet hateful if that makes any sense.
But hey, the Redskins have not disbanded, though they've become even more embarrassing than ever before (which is really amazing when you think about it). I'm sure this spring they will sign like one dude and draft one dude and those two dudes will magically make them the best team ever yet again. Anyways, Armchair Linebacker is the greatest NFL football blog there is inside the cyberlordz, and I am still covering the Redskins. This past week that meant a recap of the shitty Buccaneers game and talking about roster changes in the wake of McNabbgate 2. Also, if you missed my weekly NFL rankings things from here or heavy.com or wherever the fuck they were at one point, they are now there, including this past week's round-up of the playoff bound.
Also, even though I have not yet put it in the sidebar of links (which I really need to update anyways), there is a hip hop blog I am now part of as well, called Good News & Bad Dope. Though I had brief nonsensical write-ups about a CunningLynguists remix and a The Streets song, the real thing there that I think is a good internet thing is the Xpert whiteboYZ Video Countdown #002. Hopefully I will fuck around and do one of those every Friday. Or not. Really it's hard to say with me.
Also there are still Rojonekku t-shirts available. Check the sidebar. T-shirts come with a zine that will only go to t-shirt buyers, not be internetted (not by me at least) as well as a mix CD. They make a great new year's gift to yourself after the Xmas 10% tithe of your wages for useless bullshit. All proceeds go to a fund to buy my rojonekku students kindles to read secretly downloadable guides to destroying the world from within. Every dollar helps this world end quicker. Won't you help?
Finally, I am starting a group haiku/renga thing through the electronic mails, so if you are interested in something along those lines, please be emailing me to the email along the sidebar over there on the right side. If I forget to talk to you before then, have a great holiday.
But hey, the Redskins have not disbanded, though they've become even more embarrassing than ever before (which is really amazing when you think about it). I'm sure this spring they will sign like one dude and draft one dude and those two dudes will magically make them the best team ever yet again. Anyways, Armchair Linebacker is the greatest NFL football blog there is inside the cyberlordz, and I am still covering the Redskins. This past week that meant a recap of the shitty Buccaneers game and talking about roster changes in the wake of McNabbgate 2. Also, if you missed my weekly NFL rankings things from here or heavy.com or wherever the fuck they were at one point, they are now there, including this past week's round-up of the playoff bound.
Also, even though I have not yet put it in the sidebar of links (which I really need to update anyways), there is a hip hop blog I am now part of as well, called Good News & Bad Dope. Though I had brief nonsensical write-ups about a CunningLynguists remix and a The Streets song, the real thing there that I think is a good internet thing is the Xpert whiteboYZ Video Countdown #002. Hopefully I will fuck around and do one of those every Friday. Or not. Really it's hard to say with me.
Also there are still Rojonekku t-shirts available. Check the sidebar. T-shirts come with a zine that will only go to t-shirt buyers, not be internetted (not by me at least) as well as a mix CD. They make a great new year's gift to yourself after the Xmas 10% tithe of your wages for useless bullshit. All proceeds go to a fund to buy my rojonekku students kindles to read secretly downloadable guides to destroying the world from within. Every dollar helps this world end quicker. Won't you help?
Finally, I am starting a group haiku/renga thing through the electronic mails, so if you are interested in something along those lines, please be emailing me to the email along the sidebar over there on the right side. If I forget to talk to you before then, have a great holiday.
Friday, November 5
Weekly Recap
The great nonsense this week is that now there are Rojonekku t-shirts available - in the below design which is Fall '10...
I am going to run a super-limited edition set of t-shirts every season of every year, mostly because I don't have any t-shirts I like to wear so this will stock my goddamned closet up. In case the pic is too tiny, front has ROJONEKKU SS VA WORD FIGHTING ARTS and the back has a line of mine from the song "True Loungers" by Prolo - "true loungers find comfort in the hardscrabble ground". You can click the ENABLE ROJONEKKU button over there on the right to get one, cost is $20 if you get it from me real life in everyday person effect, $25 through American mail, and $30 I guess internationally, although all I'm sure on that front is Australia, and I might not even be sure on that. Specify size because like I said, quantities are mad limited. You will also receive a few other assorted goodies, including a mini-zine THAT WILL NEVER SEE THE LIGHT OF INTERNET DAY with your order.
So yeah. There is also the Amphetazine site that I am on, although I never posted my own post until last night. But the dude who runs it digs through my assorted meanderings through multiple websites and zines and guardrails and whatever else and he puts up notable shit. Here is the Amphetazine output for this past week:
something about taking the kids to the science museum, which I have no recollection of writing but is the greatest thing I've read all week
talking about why Hank Williams III is better than the rest of the punk ass country music made nowadays
an old thing about Jimmy Valiant done for Clawhold zine back in the day (what up Rocco if you're still out there!)
And then there is the Armchair Linebacker NFL football blog, which even though nobody knows about it, is one of the greatest motherfucker internetted pro football places ever. Seriously. Mad love to my man Neil as well as Harpo, LPOY, Mike Dikk, and anybody else who has made that place into what it is now. This past week, not only did I do my usual Redskins shit, but I moved my weekly NFL thing from here to there because I'd like this place to not be so much the place as a launching point, so hopefully I start launching more thing. I am big on carrots in front of my eyes lately. Anyways, my ACLB contributions this past week went a little something like this:
post Redskins/Lions game metascience positives/negatives recap
laying out all the players - major and minor - in the Redskins QB drama
week 9 NFL recap/preview/NFLuminati Index
So that's it for this week. As always, I ask that you share my nonsense with others, upon the Facecrooks or Twitters or whatever the fuck you use to pretend you are in touch with real life people. If you are with me now, I will be with you then. I am loyal to a fault, so exploit that as my explosive trajectory is still low on the cultural horizon. And together we will Scud missile the world, or at least some tiny little corner of it.
I am going to run a super-limited edition set of t-shirts every season of every year, mostly because I don't have any t-shirts I like to wear so this will stock my goddamned closet up. In case the pic is too tiny, front has ROJONEKKU SS VA WORD FIGHTING ARTS and the back has a line of mine from the song "True Loungers" by Prolo - "true loungers find comfort in the hardscrabble ground". You can click the ENABLE ROJONEKKU button over there on the right to get one, cost is $20 if you get it from me real life in everyday person effect, $25 through American mail, and $30 I guess internationally, although all I'm sure on that front is Australia, and I might not even be sure on that. Specify size because like I said, quantities are mad limited. You will also receive a few other assorted goodies, including a mini-zine THAT WILL NEVER SEE THE LIGHT OF INTERNET DAY with your order.
So yeah. There is also the Amphetazine site that I am on, although I never posted my own post until last night. But the dude who runs it digs through my assorted meanderings through multiple websites and zines and guardrails and whatever else and he puts up notable shit. Here is the Amphetazine output for this past week:
something about taking the kids to the science museum, which I have no recollection of writing but is the greatest thing I've read all week
talking about why Hank Williams III is better than the rest of the punk ass country music made nowadays
an old thing about Jimmy Valiant done for Clawhold zine back in the day (what up Rocco if you're still out there!)
And then there is the Armchair Linebacker NFL football blog, which even though nobody knows about it, is one of the greatest motherfucker internetted pro football places ever. Seriously. Mad love to my man Neil as well as Harpo, LPOY, Mike Dikk, and anybody else who has made that place into what it is now. This past week, not only did I do my usual Redskins shit, but I moved my weekly NFL thing from here to there because I'd like this place to not be so much the place as a launching point, so hopefully I start launching more thing. I am big on carrots in front of my eyes lately. Anyways, my ACLB contributions this past week went a little something like this:
post Redskins/Lions game metascience positives/negatives recap
laying out all the players - major and minor - in the Redskins QB drama
week 9 NFL recap/preview/NFLuminati Index
So that's it for this week. As always, I ask that you share my nonsense with others, upon the Facecrooks or Twitters or whatever the fuck you use to pretend you are in touch with real life people. If you are with me now, I will be with you then. I am loyal to a fault, so exploit that as my explosive trajectory is still low on the cultural horizon. And together we will Scud missile the world, or at least some tiny little corner of it.
Friday, October 22
Weekly Recap
Well, I skipped a week there but ain't shit to recap anyways. New editorial command at Heavy dried up that gig, but Armchair Linebacker is always there, where you can read my angry and drunken Washington Redskins fandom play out firsthand. This past week, I recapped the loss to the Colts, and talked about how important in the modern NFL climate it will be for the Redskins to concuss more people than concuss them.
Additionally, the dude that be doing Amphetazine is putting up older classics from this site over there (like this thing about Goat Rights vs. Property Rights). Amphetazine is a noble idea, and the other stuff over there is interesting, so you should check it out. I hope I have remembered to put it in my sidebar, but mayhaps I have not yet.
Speaking of which, you can order the book I have a story in (story called Escambia Counties) called Florida Heat Wave, with other projects on the horizon. Everything I do, I have to do all grand and convoluted, so none of these projects are on the immediate horizon, but they are there. I can definitely feel an energy shift of shit about to be changing in the coming year. In relation to that, I know I have a loyal fanbase, but whenever you feel the lololols or enjoy some of my dumb shit on Rojonekku, it helps to click those sharing buttons under every post. I could remain an obscure dude forever and live a long frustrated life, or I could become exploited in exchange for fame and ultimately self-destruct through my own drunken recklessness because of the way my DNA is swirled. You can help me do the latter by sharing links and helping spread my fresh-dipped SS Va. ways to the rest of the crooked ass world. Mad daps to you if you do. And the reason I'd prefer the exploited ultimately destructive route instead of the obscurity route is because one involves dick tattoos and the other does not. It has long been my goal in life to have a dick tattoo, meaning a tattoo on my penis, not a tattoo of a penis. Also relatedly to the new-fangled cybertronic hyping machines of the world, I have the twitters now (@rojonekku) and yes, twitters is the stupidest fucking idiotic goddamn thing ever. Yes. But I am there. And being certain real life people who are Facebook fans are not in the twitters, I find I can get away with saying stupider things there, which of course, just perpetuates what the twitters actually is. It is a bizarre spiral we are in.
Also, Rojonekku t-shirts, hopefully beginning of November, will be for sale. You can always donate money to my dumb ass to buy caffeine-free ginger ale to take my medicines with by clicking the ENABLE ROJONEKKU button. If you give me $10, I'll postcard you back. If you give $20 or more, I'll write you a letter. (Triple N - your letter is on my desk at home; I keep meaning to tear this one page out of a magazine to put in the envelope too but keep forgetting to get the magazine in question out of the camper behind my house after work. John B - I will write you a letter this weekend... thanks bro.)
Another also, this past week I wrote about an Uncle Sinner song in the J.J. Krupert countdown, and actually got an email from the dude Uncle Mike Sinner, who is as solid as his song suggested to me, and fights that good/bad fight with pushing your ideas out to the world through the inhibiting DNA of deeply embedded recklessness and destruction. Anyways, Uncle Sinner has a myspace, and after talking to the dude, I felt compelled to share the link. Check it out.
Finally, I am in the preliminary stages of setting up a monthly event called the CVA WFA or Central Virginia Word Fighting Arts. This is an offshoot of my personal brand of meandering writing - Rojonekku - which is a SSVA (southside Virginia) word fighting art, not so much to fight other people but just generally to fight the entire fucking world and everything that makes life so goddamn hard to handle on a day-to-day basis. It is so easy to just fellate a pistol and cash out early, and I had an uncle of mine do that back in the day and he was one of the most solid dudes I ever knew. But fuck man, when you are blessed with the unlocked creativity flow of whatever medium your brain is predisposed towards, you have to use it to keep yourself from being dead. And if you ain't got it unlocked yet, you have to find that shit. Ultimately that's what Rojonekku is all about anyways, and I should have some sort of explanation for all this on the blog, but I don't. That's one of the projects on the horizon, the Rojonekku Training Manual, which literally what it sounds like, methods and exercises I've used with the semi-delinquent vagabond teenagers I tend to attract to the compound, to put them on the path to not fucking up the world normal-style, where all you do is get put in jail, but fucking it up on that other level, where you destroy norms by proudly being your own form of normal, disrupting the status quo's standards of normalcy. It's an important fucking thing to do, in fact it's imperative. Honestly, I regard my paypal donations as slush funds for just such endeavors, so I don't tell my family about it. Those $20 drops here or there do not go to electric bills or gas for the truck or new ballet shoes for the kid; it all goes on fucked up things. Old Easyriders off Ebay or 17 different world flags that look fucked up to string up along the roadside in front of my house to scare the world or india ink to continue putting raggedy ass homemade stars on my thighs or a box of wine to go hike all the way through the pitch black darkness of the Crozet tunnel through Afton Mountain with my man D-Mo. It generates psychic nonsense for my little corner of the world, which in turn is filtered into more psychic nonsense words - Rojonekku - inside the interweb demons, which hopefully is strong enough to transmit through all the electronic clutter in our lives just enough to spiral your day into a more nonsensical and non-normal way. That's really all I want to do - fuck shit up with words.
Additionally, the dude that be doing Amphetazine is putting up older classics from this site over there (like this thing about Goat Rights vs. Property Rights). Amphetazine is a noble idea, and the other stuff over there is interesting, so you should check it out. I hope I have remembered to put it in my sidebar, but mayhaps I have not yet.
Speaking of which, you can order the book I have a story in (story called Escambia Counties) called Florida Heat Wave, with other projects on the horizon. Everything I do, I have to do all grand and convoluted, so none of these projects are on the immediate horizon, but they are there. I can definitely feel an energy shift of shit about to be changing in the coming year. In relation to that, I know I have a loyal fanbase, but whenever you feel the lololols or enjoy some of my dumb shit on Rojonekku, it helps to click those sharing buttons under every post. I could remain an obscure dude forever and live a long frustrated life, or I could become exploited in exchange for fame and ultimately self-destruct through my own drunken recklessness because of the way my DNA is swirled. You can help me do the latter by sharing links and helping spread my fresh-dipped SS Va. ways to the rest of the crooked ass world. Mad daps to you if you do. And the reason I'd prefer the exploited ultimately destructive route instead of the obscurity route is because one involves dick tattoos and the other does not. It has long been my goal in life to have a dick tattoo, meaning a tattoo on my penis, not a tattoo of a penis. Also relatedly to the new-fangled cybertronic hyping machines of the world, I have the twitters now (@rojonekku) and yes, twitters is the stupidest fucking idiotic goddamn thing ever. Yes. But I am there. And being certain real life people who are Facebook fans are not in the twitters, I find I can get away with saying stupider things there, which of course, just perpetuates what the twitters actually is. It is a bizarre spiral we are in.
Also, Rojonekku t-shirts, hopefully beginning of November, will be for sale. You can always donate money to my dumb ass to buy caffeine-free ginger ale to take my medicines with by clicking the ENABLE ROJONEKKU button. If you give me $10, I'll postcard you back. If you give $20 or more, I'll write you a letter. (Triple N - your letter is on my desk at home; I keep meaning to tear this one page out of a magazine to put in the envelope too but keep forgetting to get the magazine in question out of the camper behind my house after work. John B - I will write you a letter this weekend... thanks bro.)
Another also, this past week I wrote about an Uncle Sinner song in the J.J. Krupert countdown, and actually got an email from the dude Uncle Mike Sinner, who is as solid as his song suggested to me, and fights that good/bad fight with pushing your ideas out to the world through the inhibiting DNA of deeply embedded recklessness and destruction. Anyways, Uncle Sinner has a myspace, and after talking to the dude, I felt compelled to share the link. Check it out.
Finally, I am in the preliminary stages of setting up a monthly event called the CVA WFA or Central Virginia Word Fighting Arts. This is an offshoot of my personal brand of meandering writing - Rojonekku - which is a SSVA (southside Virginia) word fighting art, not so much to fight other people but just generally to fight the entire fucking world and everything that makes life so goddamn hard to handle on a day-to-day basis. It is so easy to just fellate a pistol and cash out early, and I had an uncle of mine do that back in the day and he was one of the most solid dudes I ever knew. But fuck man, when you are blessed with the unlocked creativity flow of whatever medium your brain is predisposed towards, you have to use it to keep yourself from being dead. And if you ain't got it unlocked yet, you have to find that shit. Ultimately that's what Rojonekku is all about anyways, and I should have some sort of explanation for all this on the blog, but I don't. That's one of the projects on the horizon, the Rojonekku Training Manual, which literally what it sounds like, methods and exercises I've used with the semi-delinquent vagabond teenagers I tend to attract to the compound, to put them on the path to not fucking up the world normal-style, where all you do is get put in jail, but fucking it up on that other level, where you destroy norms by proudly being your own form of normal, disrupting the status quo's standards of normalcy. It's an important fucking thing to do, in fact it's imperative. Honestly, I regard my paypal donations as slush funds for just such endeavors, so I don't tell my family about it. Those $20 drops here or there do not go to electric bills or gas for the truck or new ballet shoes for the kid; it all goes on fucked up things. Old Easyriders off Ebay or 17 different world flags that look fucked up to string up along the roadside in front of my house to scare the world or india ink to continue putting raggedy ass homemade stars on my thighs or a box of wine to go hike all the way through the pitch black darkness of the Crozet tunnel through Afton Mountain with my man D-Mo. It generates psychic nonsense for my little corner of the world, which in turn is filtered into more psychic nonsense words - Rojonekku - inside the interweb demons, which hopefully is strong enough to transmit through all the electronic clutter in our lives just enough to spiral your day into a more nonsensical and non-normal way. That's really all I want to do - fuck shit up with words.
Saturday, October 9
Weekly Recap
Man, I always forget these things. The Heavy hook-up ended with an editorial change so I am no longer getting money to watch football. Motherfuckers. But I still be writing dumb shit, for nothing, on the reg. Here is some thangs...
ARMCHAIR LINEBACKER is a football blog that me and some dudes started a few years ago and it has really gotten good in recent weeks, so if you are into NFL football or even if you're not really, it's worth a check out. This week, I liveblogged the Redskins win over the Eagles, metaphysically recapped the game, talked about Ryan Torain and Clinton Portis, and wrote an incredibly fucked thing about the Packers game this weekend.
And then there is this book here to your left that I have a wonderful short story inside the middle of that you could buy. I just got my check for it in the mail this week and had to throw it in the bank because the electric bill check was gonna bounce. That's it. Nothing glorious. I made an early morning run to the night deposit box at my bank in Short Pump to keep from bouncing a check for the fucking electricity. Short story payment glamour over, counting the full tank of gas and hazelnut Wawa coffee I got on the ride back to work. Some days, I want to walk on water; other days, I want to fellate handguns.
Semi-related to that book is this new blog that started up that I am part of called Ampheta'Zine. Basically the dude who plugged me up at Huffington Post got shelved at Huffington Post for what he wrote in his next article, so he started his own bullshit.
Also, while I'm hyping up a bunch of dumb shit I'm involved with, I remembered the Prolo myspace page, which has a bunch of country ass rap songs me and my boy Boogie Brown did that you can listen at. It is something, and I am stoked that it was done. I've been meaning to plug my USB turntable/flea market 4-track/$15 microphone into my new computer and lay down some warbled tracks over the 68 beats I have from Boogie Brown that I've never done nothing with. But hey, only 24 hours in a day, and this goddamned real life gets in the way, cockblocking my creative offspring too goddamned much. Fuck it. Life is life.
Oh yeah, should hopefully have some Rojonekku shirts in limited edition for sells by the end of the month. If you know you will pay like $20 for a Rojonekku t-shirt, post a comment about what size you be wearing preferably, because the edition is gonna be limited as fuck.
ARMCHAIR LINEBACKER is a football blog that me and some dudes started a few years ago and it has really gotten good in recent weeks, so if you are into NFL football or even if you're not really, it's worth a check out. This week, I liveblogged the Redskins win over the Eagles, metaphysically recapped the game, talked about Ryan Torain and Clinton Portis, and wrote an incredibly fucked thing about the Packers game this weekend.
And then there is this book here to your left that I have a wonderful short story inside the middle of that you could buy. I just got my check for it in the mail this week and had to throw it in the bank because the electric bill check was gonna bounce. That's it. Nothing glorious. I made an early morning run to the night deposit box at my bank in Short Pump to keep from bouncing a check for the fucking electricity. Short story payment glamour over, counting the full tank of gas and hazelnut Wawa coffee I got on the ride back to work. Some days, I want to walk on water; other days, I want to fellate handguns.
Semi-related to that book is this new blog that started up that I am part of called Ampheta'Zine. Basically the dude who plugged me up at Huffington Post got shelved at Huffington Post for what he wrote in his next article, so he started his own bullshit.
Also, while I'm hyping up a bunch of dumb shit I'm involved with, I remembered the Prolo myspace page, which has a bunch of country ass rap songs me and my boy Boogie Brown did that you can listen at. It is something, and I am stoked that it was done. I've been meaning to plug my USB turntable/flea market 4-track/$15 microphone into my new computer and lay down some warbled tracks over the 68 beats I have from Boogie Brown that I've never done nothing with. But hey, only 24 hours in a day, and this goddamned real life gets in the way, cockblocking my creative offspring too goddamned much. Fuck it. Life is life.
Oh yeah, should hopefully have some Rojonekku shirts in limited edition for sells by the end of the month. If you know you will pay like $20 for a Rojonekku t-shirt, post a comment about what size you be wearing preferably, because the edition is gonna be limited as fuck.
Sunday, September 26
Weekly Recap
Not too much outsider shit to recap, though I did keep up my footbal-related obligations at Heavy for Week 2 of the NFL, and at Armchair Linebacker for the game against the Texans by my beloved yet doomed Washington Redskins.
I also listened to some personal branding bullshit book on tape for some people I am doing some online hypeman for, and it tricked me into starting a twitter account for Rojonekku. Then like a day later, it felt stupid as fuck, and then the guy who handles the money at my daughter's ballet school, who has a sorta tool-ish aspect to him regarding sales and marketing, he was talking to my wife about how great twitter was and how many people followed him and that was the final straw for me so I went ahead and deleted it already. But I did get a $20 donation through Paypal using the ENABLE ROJONEKKU button over there to the right in the sidebar, and realized that people's addresses are in their Paypal donations. So I sat down and wrote the dude that gave me $20 a one-page letter and mailed it to him. Actually, it's sitting in my truck still because I didn't make it to the post office in time today, but I'm gonna mail it Monday. Sending people handwritten nonsense is so much more my speed than stupid fucking twitter. I am about real people in real places.
So yeah, if you donate anything above $10, I'll send you a postcard at least. Above $20 and I'll bust out a letter. One-of-a-kind insane internet man gibberish, but real life in your hands like paranoid schizophrenics who write about Jesus on yellow legal pads and tack their shit in every phone booth around town. And now there are no more phone booths. Where has all the real shit gone?
You also don't have to do shit and things will most likely continue along as usual. That's sort of how this thing works.
I also listened to some personal branding bullshit book on tape for some people I am doing some online hypeman for, and it tricked me into starting a twitter account for Rojonekku. Then like a day later, it felt stupid as fuck, and then the guy who handles the money at my daughter's ballet school, who has a sorta tool-ish aspect to him regarding sales and marketing, he was talking to my wife about how great twitter was and how many people followed him and that was the final straw for me so I went ahead and deleted it already. But I did get a $20 donation through Paypal using the ENABLE ROJONEKKU button over there to the right in the sidebar, and realized that people's addresses are in their Paypal donations. So I sat down and wrote the dude that gave me $20 a one-page letter and mailed it to him. Actually, it's sitting in my truck still because I didn't make it to the post office in time today, but I'm gonna mail it Monday. Sending people handwritten nonsense is so much more my speed than stupid fucking twitter. I am about real people in real places.
So yeah, if you donate anything above $10, I'll send you a postcard at least. Above $20 and I'll bust out a letter. One-of-a-kind insane internet man gibberish, but real life in your hands like paranoid schizophrenics who write about Jesus on yellow legal pads and tack their shit in every phone booth around town. And now there are no more phone booths. Where has all the real shit gone?
You also don't have to do shit and things will most likely continue along as usual. That's sort of how this thing works.
Saturday, September 18
Weekly Recap
Football season has sprang upon us.
At Heavy.com, I have a weekly thing that will go down on Mondays. Here is the past week's column.
At Armchair Linebacker, I did a post-Redskins/Cowboys game metasciences analysis, as well as a defense of Clinton Portis the other day.
And of course, you could always buy yourself a copy of the book I'm in too.
At Heavy.com, I have a weekly thing that will go down on Mondays. Here is the past week's column.
At Armchair Linebacker, I did a post-Redskins/Cowboys game metasciences analysis, as well as a defense of Clinton Portis the other day.
And of course, you could always buy yourself a copy of the book I'm in too.
Saturday, September 11
Weekly Recap
All non-Rojonekku work this week has been football-related, meaning American football, not Champions League discussion. At Heavy.com, I wrapped up previewing the second half of the league in four installments:
Knockin' On Second's Door (Houston Texans, Philadelphia Eagles, San Francisco 49ers, and Cincinnati Bengals)
Playoff-Equipped (New York Giants, Atlanta Falcons, Pittsburgh Steelers, and New England Patriots)
Second-Tier Super-Teams (Minnesota Vikings, Green Bay Packers, Baltimore Ravens, and San Diego Chargers)
and Super Bowl Darlings (New York Jets, New Orleans Saints, Dallas Cowboys, and Indianapolis Colts)
Also, Armchair Linebacker has been cranking up as the NFL season begins, and I have two notable to me at least Redskins things there:
why Dan Snyder sucks, pt. 148
Metasciences preview of the impending season
My apologies if you don't like football. This is a phase I'm going through.
Knockin' On Second's Door (Houston Texans, Philadelphia Eagles, San Francisco 49ers, and Cincinnati Bengals)
Playoff-Equipped (New York Giants, Atlanta Falcons, Pittsburgh Steelers, and New England Patriots)
Second-Tier Super-Teams (Minnesota Vikings, Green Bay Packers, Baltimore Ravens, and San Diego Chargers)
and Super Bowl Darlings (New York Jets, New Orleans Saints, Dallas Cowboys, and Indianapolis Colts)
Also, Armchair Linebacker has been cranking up as the NFL season begins, and I have two notable to me at least Redskins things there:
why Dan Snyder sucks, pt. 148
Metasciences preview of the impending season
My apologies if you don't like football. This is a phase I'm going through.
Sunday, September 5
Weekly Recap
It was an internettedly interesting yet ultimately in real life no change week in Rojonekku land. I got mentioned at the white people famous Huffington Post, which made people in regular interactions thinks there was some sort of fame in my life. What people understand is this is a path I've been on since birth, and it doesn't matter half a fuck if the world recognizes that path or not, it is my predetermined path that I was born into. It may not get recognized until long after my death, but I have known inside my self the soul trajectory, and that's why this cybertron shit is ultimately a joke to me. But still, it was nice to see, like a panty shot but for the ego and not the penis.
Also, I have been doing NFL previews at Heavy, and basically those NFL updates I've done the past few years on this blog are there this year. I can't post the whole thing here, and I get very little money for what I am doing, but that's the nature of trying to go legit with your illegitimate bullshit. Here is the rundown of direct links from last week (and previews of the lower half of the NFL, team by team):
Intro to the previews
The Wretched of the Turf (previews of the Buccaneers, the Rams, the Bills, and the Browns)
I Swear, It Will Be Different This Time (previews of the Lions, the Chiefs, the Jaguars, and the Raiders)
M4MF Please Be Real (previews of the Broncos, the Seahawks, the Panthers, and the Cardinals)
Don't Believe The Hype (previews of the Bears, the Redskins, the Titans, and the Dolphins)
Also, there is Florida Heat Wave, of which I have a story called Escambia Counties inside the middle of it. It is from inside my brain, the story not the book. There are, at this moment, nine books inside my brain. I am working on building a transponder machine to bring them to the real world, to corrupt children and brainwash old people with early signs of Alzheimers.
Also, I have been doing NFL previews at Heavy, and basically those NFL updates I've done the past few years on this blog are there this year. I can't post the whole thing here, and I get very little money for what I am doing, but that's the nature of trying to go legit with your illegitimate bullshit. Here is the rundown of direct links from last week (and previews of the lower half of the NFL, team by team):
Intro to the previews
The Wretched of the Turf (previews of the Buccaneers, the Rams, the Bills, and the Browns)
I Swear, It Will Be Different This Time (previews of the Lions, the Chiefs, the Jaguars, and the Raiders)
M4MF Please Be Real (previews of the Broncos, the Seahawks, the Panthers, and the Cardinals)
Don't Believe The Hype (previews of the Bears, the Redskins, the Titans, and the Dolphins)
Also, there is Florida Heat Wave, of which I have a story called Escambia Counties inside the middle of it. It is from inside my brain, the story not the book. There are, at this moment, nine books inside my brain. I am working on building a transponder machine to bring them to the real world, to corrupt children and brainwash old people with early signs of Alzheimers.
Saturday, August 28
Weekly Recap
I haven't had anything to recap the past week or so, but this week I got back into the swing of football opinions for you. Namely, over at Armchair Linebacker, I had a lengthy and personalize write-up about the Albert Haynesworth/Mike Shanahan thing going on with the Redskins. Additionally, starting next week, I'll be covering the NFL at Heavy, which has some questionable content, which means I'll probably fit in well there.
Additionally, the Florida Heat Wave collection of which I have a story in is actually available now (here it is at Amazon, or direct from the publisher).
Additionally, the Florida Heat Wave collection of which I have a story in is actually available now (here it is at Amazon, or direct from the publisher).
Friday, August 13
Weekly Recap
So I contribute to a couple of other blogs sporadically, and kinda realize I'm a piece of shit who doesn't have the focus or mind freedom to contribute anything better to this world than half-retarded well-worded ridiculous opinions, most likely featuring some sort of libel or conjecture or outright lie, and I figured a good thing to do, rather than copy all those posts here, would be to - on Friday mornings - bust a post with links to all that other dumb shit. This would be the first one, and perhaps the last knowing my moody ass.
From the new TV Makes You Retarded blog - a recap/mind meander of The Corner miniseries' first episode
and the second episode
From Armchair Linebacker pro football blog (where I write about the Washington Redskins) - A New Season Dawns
Plus, there is the Florida Heat Wave anthology of short stories I am in that will be coming out this month. You can get that inside the internets or even win an unedited preview copy in this thing.
From the new TV Makes You Retarded blog - a recap/mind meander of The Corner miniseries' first episode
and the second episode
From Armchair Linebacker pro football blog (where I write about the Washington Redskins) - A New Season Dawns
Plus, there is the Florida Heat Wave anthology of short stories I am in that will be coming out this month. You can get that inside the internets or even win an unedited preview copy in this thing.
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