SH1FT1NG L4NDSC4P3S 41N'T 34SY...

shifting landscapes ain’t easy 
for those raised inside stables; 
for me, I love wilderness 

SONG OF THE DAY: She Said

Hasil Adkins is an aesthetic mentor of the highest order. This song contains some of the best yelps in recorded music history. I have a crossfader in my brain that often blends this with “Ain’t No Grave” by Brother Claude Ely, during my dreams. It’s actually pretty great sounding, and helps me forget that I’m trying to find a clean bathroom that I can piss in in my old middle school. Anyways, if you've never seen The Wild World of Hasil Adkins, set half an hour aside and do yourself a favor.

SONG OF THE DAY: Gates of Hell

Masked Assassins always lurk around every corner, looking to chop off a true beard. True beard and fake beard discourse has always been stifled in our culture, because we live in a Great Time of Fake Beards. You see them, in fact, donning masks, and being the Secret Police lately, looking to kidnap people at work, on a “per head” bounty quota where the more they disappear people, the fatter their paycheck gets. These are fake beards, and you need not shave their face, because when they pull the balaclava down, the weakness of their bed is obvious. It is moisturized by the Yakubian propaganda they climb into through their handheld portals. A true beard is more akin to a blackberry bush, an as wild and wonderful as the worst towns in West Virginia. True beards cannot be trimmed, except by fire. This is also how a true beard’s soul is, because it is powered by heart (fire organ) and not brain (easily poisoned well of consciousness).
Thus, Masked Assassins lurk, working for the devil state, hoping to steal a true beard’s wizardly wisps of contrarian knowledge. But even if they chop it off, it’s a false victory, because the wisps have grown inward as long as they’ve grown outwards, and the visual hairs return more rapidly than a fake beard could ever hope to grow it (with all his fancy pseudo-scientific beard oil in the world). And the Masked Assassins can never chop the internal beard of a true beard. So they concentrate on poisoning more minds and growing the ranks of the false beards. But they are all weak-souled men, and they will once again scrape the false beards from their faces to appear as smooth as a baby’s ass, because they have no elderly wisdom accumulated over the generations, and desire that childlike smoothness, in both themselves and their partners. Though they appear strong right now, they are inherently weak, and a true beard will always outlive these incursions of unlounge.

SONG OF THE DAY: Wild Style Lesson Part 1 (kudzu'd)

A lot of styles ain’t all that wild. Too much basic shit out here masquerading as quirky. Or maybe I’m just tired of the shit because I never got invited to the masquerade.

SONG OF THE DAY: Rump Shaker (kudzu'd)

Was walking down the road yesterday, and saw a whole ass frying pan in the ditch. The back roads of this area are well known for their historical litter, and in fact I’m always watching the sides of the road for newly appeared glass bottles of yesteryear that may have resurfaced by whatever random magic the universe uses in such matters. So that’s how I even saw the frying pan buried in a ditch, not a cast iron joint but not a small one either. Made me wonder, how the fuck do you end up being a frying pan thrown out the window of a moving vehicle? Like, what’s that whole story? It was dirty with grease so it had been used for cooking prior to getting tossed, I’m guessing. What got made? Was it horrible? Is that why it got tossed into a ditch? Or did the non-stick not non-stick no more? But even then, why did somebody drive down the road and throw it out the window? Maybe it started further in the woods and sort of meandered its way down to the ditch. They just cleared some brush along the power lines late last summer, and been doing a lot of weird infrastructure work, hauling red clay dirt from somewhere down the road to elsewhere far away. Could’ve gotten turned up in all that for all I know. But I found the frying pan in the ditch wildly interesting. Not enough to pick it up though, just left it there, so I can keep passing it and keep wondering. Wonder is important in our lives, far more important than imposed order to be honest.

B4PT1Z1NG MYS3LF 1N TH3...

baptizing myself in the 
wild; grounding myself in the 
woods; keeping myself rooted 

SONG OF THE DAY: I'll Keep Searching

Often I think about being Time Machine True in my own personal behaviors, so that if we end up with time machines for regular people (and not just space lords), I’ve acted throughout my life in a way that won’t cause me to end up murdering myself. One of the biggest adjustments to time travel is going to be figuring out fourth dimensional consequences, and there’s going to be so many cases of time travel suicide, where older versions of yourself come into the future to murder you for being a sellout, or newer versions of yourself go back and kill older versions of yourself for being a dumbass. It seems like if you killed your older self, your newer self wouldn’t exist anymore, but that’s likely not how that shit is gonna work, and there’s going to be a whole bunch of each of us running around a whole bunch of universes, you know, the string theories. I’m honestly not smart enough to figure all that shit out, but I would like to take a time machine to like 1977 or 2429 or whatever. I mean, I figure if time machines become more common, and I actually get one, it’s likely going to be a raggedy time machine, with a cracked windshield, that can only go to like five states around here, and only go back or forward 75 years, so I’d probably have to limit myself, so that I don’t accidentally break down in 1958 Charleston, West Virginia, or some fucked up shit like that.
But even in acknowledging my own intellectual limitations when it comes to four dimensional existence, I do know it’s fairly easy to be Time Machine True, meaning always act in a way that no other version of myself would be so ashamed of he has to kill. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve done some stupid and ignorant shit, but I’ve tried to learn from it, and have that be part of my growth as a human. So I have to assume, with my limited intellect, that bodes better for four dimensional existence, should that become a reality I’m confronted with at some point. I think that’s important, and often think, “What would 17 year old Raven think about this?” or “What would 79 year old Raven suggest I do here?” It’s helped me tremendously to take into consideration their feelings and input, and also know when I should give them suggestions. Shit, 9 year old Raven is way more at ease now that I’ve been telling him for a couple years that shit’s gonna eventually work out, don’t get too stressed. I wish that little motherfucker had a time machine so he could see it.

SONG OF THE DAY: Polk Salad Annie

Elvis Presley popularized this song, and is well-known for ripping off black artists. But in this case, he ripped off a white one, although I guess the originator and composer of it - Tony Joe White - probably got paid, so it wasn't necessarily a rip off. I'm sure Tony Joe White's raggedy swamp ass lived off the royalties of Elvis for the rest of his life. Mostly when I hear this song, I realize how much I've forgotten from reading Euell Gibbbons' Stalking the Wild Asparagus back in the day. One day wild foods will be our only foods. Then again, Euell Gibbons famously ate a bicycle one time, so the future is hard to really figure out. Shit, the present is hard to figure out.

4TT3MPT1NG T0 B34VT1FY...

attempting to beautify 
life by scattering wild arts 
as easy as possible 

M4K1NG TH31R W4Y, TH3 0NLY...

“making their way, the only 
way they know how…” in extreme 
yelling Waylon Jennings voice 

W1LD H4B1TS C0M3 N4TVR4L...

wild habits come natural 
to some folks - skulls thickened  by 
bad breaks for generations 

N4TVR4L B0RN R00TL3SSN3SS...

natural born rootlessness 
perhaps coming from lack of 
comfort - born to toss and turn 

SONG OF THE DAY: Superman Lover

The other week I was on a long ass vehicular wander, through the nether regions of upper Appalachia, where there apparently is some sort of coordinated secret effort to turn all school boards into write-in candidates, who oppose a bunch of made up things that aren’t actually happening, but Fox News beams strong in rural America. Anyways, as one does, I got a few pieces of fried chicken somewhere near the West Virginia/Maryland or Virginia/West Virginia or some fucking border, who knows… I am just a man driving long distances to vibe, I do not recognize the imaginary lines on a map while vibing that hard in a car in the actual world where those lines don’t exist (though y’all motherfuckers do put up a lot of fences, don’t you?). The chicken thighs had the taste of fish as well, a shared fryer, which I don’t mind, that’s a blessing, anyone who tells you otherwise is a prude who expects too much from fried meats country folks adore. You gotta look for those dope ass country stores for the fried chicken hook-ups, which I found, and it hit, hard. A little too hard probably, and as the DJ Screw mixtape I was bumping, I felt impending problems with continuing my drive too much further without a gastrointestinal pit stop. That sucks though, because country stores, and gas stations in general, are horrible places to take a shit, so I usually look for a Sheetz or Wawa, in that region at least, because they are consistent in making their wage slave employees clean up the bathroom. Found a Sheetz, and it was weird, because there was a freestyle rocking on the Screw tape over a song that had sampled “Superman Lover”, that old Redman beat I think it was, but it might’ve been something else using the same sample, but then when I went into the Sheetz, and found my temporary road dog throne, I realized “Superman Lover” was blasting in the Sheetz. Why the fuck were they playing Johnny “Guitar” Watson on the Sheetz radio? It made no sense, other than one of those perfectly synchronized moments of magic. I knew then that my choice in fried chicken, car music, and stopping to get myself right all were perfect. And when I was done on my throne, I got two Perrier peaches, got back in the car, and kept driving. I haven’t stopped since. I’m driving now, texting this straight from my mind to the internet, because they have that technology now in the nether regions of Durango state in northern Mexico. I figure I’ll just keep driving down to Chile, then off to the moon while it’s full again. I bet driving on top of a full moon is transcendent. Probably gonna listen to some vaporwave for that leg of the trip though.

D0M3ST1C4T3D B3Y0ND...

domesticated beyond 
our desires, which remain wild; 
hearts and brains think different 

TH3 B0RN WR3TCH3D L1K3 T0 CL41M...

 

the born wretched like to claim 
royalty in our blood lines; 
there's no monarchs in the wild 

R3FL3CT1NG 0N TH3 PL4C3S...

reflecting on the places 
I've been, I realize that I 
rarely planned my direction 

SONG OF THE DAY: Where'd You Come From

I don’t use streaming services like Spotify so I have no Spotify wrap-up for you. I’m not acting like I’m better than you, or worse; I just don’t stream shit. I have an innate distrust of algorithms because their artificial intelligence is most likely programmed by the same people who have always suggested to me how much I would love the Drive-by Truckers, whom I hate, even though I’ve tried multiple times because even people I respect tell me how much I’d love them. Same thing with The Mountain Goats. Also, which should be obvious, streaming rips the fuck off artists, so if you’re going to stream, I’d suggest Bandcamp. I’ve been making an effort this past year to support more and more Bandcamp artists, because I know from experience they actually get that money. One Bandcamp purchase goes a lot further than streaming your favorite artist’s album on Spotify. If I bought an album on Bandcamp that the artist got an $8 cut from, I’d have to stream songs from that album over two thousand times to equal that payout for them. I know even y’all’s number one artist on your social media-friendly image post about Spotify wrap-up probably ain’t got two thousand streams. Even if it does, think how much work it takes in terms of time to stream that shit two thousand times as opposed to buying it once on Bandcamp? Nonetheless, so that I don’t sound like an old man yelling get off my lawn full of external hard drives containing mp3s gotten from Mega links in old blogs, I figured I’d share my song of the year for 2020.
It’s “Where'd You Come From” by Psalm One, from 2004. I love this fucking song. Simple tales of writing on trains, riding on trains, getting high in the yard, and freestyling. It’s a dirtgod heaven anthem, and it’s my song of 2020. I’ve played it at least three dozen times. The best was when I bumped it right after wandering for a couple of hours in a CSX yard on the Potomac River on the West Virginia side, with the tiniest sliver of Maryland across the way so that if you rode the bridge across, then through the tiny town there, you were in Pennsylvania before you ran out of town completely. This shit sounded extra good that day, seeing all the Trump signs and a slow death small town called Hancock after having just baptized myself for a while in giant idling freight cars covered in the homemade tattoos of a buffet of vagrants and vandals.

TH3 M3D1C1N3 0VR R4GG3D...

the medicine our ragged 
asses needs has always been 
all around us, in the wild 

4B4ND0N TH3 P0L1T1CS...

abandon the politics

of claiming space which ain't our's;

release all ownership claims

TH3R3'S N0 S3CVR1TY L1GHTS...

there's no security lights

in the wild; allow your eyes

the time to adjust to see