SONG OF THE DAY: Knocking On Your Screen Door

I've got a screen door that slams real good at my new place, the tension spring pulling that bama hard on a screened in porch where I got a weight bench and old rug for wiping feet and taking off shoes before coming in the house. The other day my mail lady dropped off a package and I knew she did because the screen door slammed and by the time I got from the other side of the house to where she'd left the package of B.B. King 45s on the foot wiping rug, she was in her car already, so I yelled "THANKS!" and she bip-bipped the horn in friendly acknowledgement as she backed out the driveway, and the soothing slam of screen doors in an old country house which ain't perfect but neither am I, it all feels just about right.

L.E.o.R. - Fall ’10 - 20 to 10 - 1 of 2

We will make this round a simple best of three questions format...
ATSUSHI ONITA vs. JIMMY VALIANT
Where do they live? Somewhere in Japan vs. Shawsville, Virginia.
Do they have a beard? Not that I know vs. yes, a long ass one.
Advantage: Jimmy Valiant, two to none.
CHAZ BOJORQUEZ vs. GABRIEL DUENEZ
Who is older and more obscure? Duenez.
Were I rich, who would I more likely commission to do something for me? Bojorquez.
Am I rich? No.
Advantage: Gabriel Duenez.
JACKIE TYSON vs. JOHN RIGGINS
Which has cut down a tree in my back yard? Jackie Tyson.
Which has taught me awesome things in real life and once almost shot me with a .357 because he is really paranoid and I thought I was a neighbor crackhead trying to rob him? Jackie Tyson.
Who was on a football team I watched on TV when I was a kid? TV heroes are gay.
Advantage: Jackie Tyson.
CHARLES MANSON vs. TED KACZYNSKI
Who is smaller? I don't know; they're both small as fuck.
Who has the better beard? Upon arrest, probably a push, but I'd bet Manson keeps better facial hair in jail. Still, no photos to prove this.
Who wrote a better manifesto? Again, a push, because The Unabomber Manifesto was a nice piece, but very intellectual. Manson was a word-of-mouth oral manifesto manifester. There is something to be said for that.
Who would I rather receive a letter from if I wrote both of them in jail? Oh, without a doubt, Manson.
Advantage: Manson.
LARRY FLYNT vs. OXANA MALAYA
Who subjugates women? Flynt. (This would not be considered an advantage, in case you were wondering. Women can be objectified, but they should be treated well so as to enjoy their rampant sexualization as much as you enjoy it.)
Who wants to live amongst wild dogs? Malaya. (This is an advantage.)
Who is more obscure, thus making me feel like more of an obtuse internet hipster fuckface, and after all, isn't that what this is ultimately all about? Definitely Malaya.
Advantage: Oxana Malaya.

a Rojonekku contest

Florida Heat Wave is a book put together by this dude Michael Lister, and I was lucky enough to be included in the collection, with a story called Escambia Counties. I have an extra review copy that the publisher sent me like two months ago to give one away inside the interwebs, and I never have yet, mostly because one copy got buried beneath old issues of Sports Illustrated, Harper's, Juxtapoz, and the weekly free newspaper they put in our mailbox that has the Food Lion circular tucked in the middle. I anxiously look to see what's on sale that week that might afford me to cook giant amounts of foods in the back yard for hours and hours and hours while drinking beer, which hopefully will be on sale as well, though they rarely advertise that, probably because of god and shit.
Anyways, there are two ways this will probably go. One way is the path I've felt destined to follow from a young age, where fame shines its ugly light on me, no matter how hard I try to avoid it or how many times I fuck it up. The second path is I have the life sucked from me like the liver cancer rats at my work, and all I do for the rest of my life is work, come home, watch TV shows, drink beer, have the weekend to piddle around the yard, and then go back to work.
For the sake of argument, and to remain hopeful for the future like Whitney Houston before cocaine, let's hope for the former, which means a pre-print copy of my first published short story will eventually be worth like half the cost of the paper it's printed on. But honestly, if you are still here, after all my flame outs and freak outs and nonsense, you are either somebody who knows me or someone who enjoys my bullshit or maybe both, though those people seem to be few and far between, which is probably best for this stupid world.
Nonetheless, I have a copy to give away. Here is the deal. Let's pretend for the sake of pretending that the eventual winner has me show up in their town on the Greyhound around 10 am on a Saturday morning, and you shall host me, probably after not sleeping and making friends with some kid from east Tennessee who had traveler's flask of Jim Beam to share, through the Saturday, and I’d catch a bus back home the next morning around 9:30. Feel free to make me sleep wherever and do whatever, judging my personality from what you expect of me, and pretty much plan on me having $23 to blow during this visit. But I will leave you a copy of my stupid first short story, a pre-print review copy in fact, where they throw in extra “l” in my last name because I don’t smoke blunts, I smoke els. Tell me what we might do that day, what you’d expect to happen, whatever. Email it to my shit over in the sidebar, which is ravenmack at gmail.com in case you are lazy as fuck, which means you probably wouldn’t enter anyways.
I’ll give it a couple weeks roughly, let’s say like middle of August, whittle it down to three, let the publisher dude knock one off the list, and my wife knock one off the list, and then we’ll see what kind of balance is left on my credit card at that point, and maybe I’ll bring this shit straight to you, via the glorious Greyhound bus system.

Don De Dieu

AFFORDABILITY: There was a literal styrofoam cooler of beer for me at the post office the other week, with one-and-a-half four-packs of this here Don De Dieu beer, compliments of my man Pitz Dogg in North Carolina, which was perhaps the most amazingly large and pleasurable package to have showed up at Scottsville, VA's, box 270 in quite some time, maybe ever. I know in real people's world, where people pay for the things they use along their days, the Don De Dieu is exspensives, if you can even find it in your town (probably can't unless there's a college there, and total population is over 35,000). But I am a dude who has people mail me things... free things... and free is the greatest price of all. I mean, I know they lay it on you heavy about dead soldiers dying to pay the cost of freedom or whatever, but even that's not that bad. If a couple of broke assholes from Texas had to die for you to personally steal all the music and look at all the naked bitches you wanted for the rest of your life inside the internets, is that really that expensive? Not to sound cold or anything, but seriously. 5 out of 5.
DESTROYABILITY: Firmly destroyed. Does "Don de Dieu" stand for "gangsta of God"? Because this were a beer that put me on all fours mentally, and had me walking with a mighty wobble literally. I am sure it costs a million dollars a four-pack, which is a shame, because I could enjoy this being a weekend part of my life. 5 out of 5.
LABEL AESTHETIC: Some sort of viking ship glowing with a magical yet demented aura. Ideally, this is my soul, but honestly, the world sucks that glow down to halogen hallucinations most of the goddamned time. Still though, the label instills in my drunken hope for a better tomorrow, where I am paying more than the minimum payments, or better yet there are no payments at all, not because I am rich, bitch, but because the great facade has crumbled down and I can be a Myself again. 4 out of 5.
CORPORATE MASTER: Don De Dieu, the gangsta of god, is made by Unibroue, which I am sure is French talk and not pronounced the way I pronounce it, which is "you-ni-brow" like one long eyebrow across some dude's forehead. I have never had issues with their Frenchie flavors of beer, and have in fact enjoyed some of them numerous times during my life. They only show up at the strangest of places, like in a cooler in my PO Box, or at some fringe ghetto liquor store in Manchester, New Hampshire, or the frou-frou beer stores that pop up in college towns for about five years on average before whoever their owner is sells the place or shuts it down because frou-frou types tend to move on to $500 of wine and not $12 4-packs of beer. Also I am not so anti-Frenchie as I used to be, because World Cup 2010 thinking has got me to believing if you were to set up some sort of scientific criteria for what makes French people suck, and then apply it to the rest of the World, America would finish second in that data model. Thus, when I diss the French, I diss myself. So I don't actively diss the French so much anymore. 4 out of 5.
OVERALL AMBIANCE: As the mayor of Drunkachusetts, I hereby declare this beer to be totally awesome! (I vaguely remember using that joke before, but not enough so to know I did it for sure. My life is a blur of lost dreams, hallucinated novels, actual experience, and the things beamed into my head by the thousand tentacled beast, each tentacle with a wi-fi transmitting tesla coil artery running to the very tip.) 7 out of 5.
TOTAL RATING: 5 STARS!

First of Da Month

(I know it is already almost half through the month, but whatever. I rock the calendar of Islam. I'm still in the 12th century.)
This past month not much more came to my PO Box, which should be expected because this is the internet and that is a PO Box and those things are like oil and water and only make tarball clusters that clog up my goddamned personal daily wish list, where I'm like, "OOOH OOOH OOOH I BET SOMETHING AWESOME IS IN MY POST OFFICE BOX!" but instead nothing, and then in my gmail somebody sends me an email saying they like the same stupid fucking song I like. Yay for assholes.
Anyways, I have created a convoluted and retarded list of the three monthly people that will be whittled down each month so that there is a constant and fluctuating list of 9 people from my PO Box to get my new zine, which is zine only. Fuck the internet, and fuck people having things. No one deserves shit, except us humans, who do actually deserve shit. That's why the BP oil spill is a great thing. People can be all, "Shocking!" as much as they want and screen print wacky t-shirt designs that are barely clever plays on common cultural memes, but damn, we all bring this shit on, and the quicker it all falls apart, the better. Or something. But what I'm saying is there will be a constant 9 person list working (after next month's list), and as I do new issues (shooting for one every 2 months), the nine people on the list get a copy, as will five real life people who are soul infusers (not many of them in my life lately, to be sure, but I could think of five still), and I keep one, for a grand total of 15 copies per issue of the zine. In the age of over-information, I have decided to go limited edition as fuck. So adding to last month's list of three (RussMac in GA, Pitz Dogg in North Cackylack, and Ten Dollar David) are this month's top three people who have put things in my PO Box. And being only two notable voluntary hook-ups happened in that tiny little Box 270 Scottsville Virginia America Land of the Free Home of the Fuck it You Know the Rests, I filled in the third with a notable donor of personal treasure from the past.
#1: Mr. Leroy in Wisconsin - An actual indy publisher fucker who sounds and seems like an actual chill dude, but is also from inside the internet, so it could be an elaborate holographic trickery device by the devil. But the dude has been supportive, and got me included in a collection of crime fiction stories called Florida Heat Wave (where, I proudly say, mine is the only story where nobody got murdered), and mailed me the early review copy of it, plus an extra for me to give away on the blog, of which I will be throwing that contest up soon enough. So for all you fuckers who have known me somewhat at some point throughout our lives during brief intersections of paths who feel entitled to anything I ever accomplish to be a part of your miserable life too, this will be a chance for you to get that. But Mr. Leroy mailed me two copies of the first book I've ever been published inside of, so far as I know, and even though there's an extra "L" in my name throughout, it made me believe that all the dreams I've been too retarded to give up on all these years, even though recent post age 35 cynicism has started to choke the carotid artery of those dreams a little tighter each month, I was briefly enthused for my own future being a bright and wonderful golden spotlight beam into the heavens again. At least until the alarm clock went off about three hours earlier than I had hoped, yet again. 78.7 points.
#2: Downn Unnder Dann - Sent me the latest copy of his actual print zine, which featured a reprint of my big ass Me and Brown story, which is something I've always been proud of, but liked seeing in a glossy zine even more. I submitted that story to Riverteeth, some journal of creative non-fiction, and they rejected it, which is always to be expected when you submit anything anywhere. But it would've been a good fit for Riverteeth, if they weren't so pussy. Luckily Downn Unnder Dann is not such a pussy. And by the time he reads this, he will hopefully be the proud papi if a second child. Congratulations Dann. 42.9 points.
#3: Jersey Jared - Has not technically sent anything in the past month, but the third spot was between him and this dude Joel who bought me a subscription to Countryside magazine. Jersey Jared has sent me frou-frou coffee as well as a giant box of like 5000 pumpkin truffles from Godiva chocolates, that I think he got from his uncle who works in the Mafia or some bullshit. But he is number three, in month number two. 27.3 points.
So you know, if you actually made it this far, I am actually just about done with the actual zine, so it will actually happen. And better yet, I've developed a style for adding to it that will guarantee more issues. Because if there's one thing I've got inside of me, in abundance, it's more issues.

Friday Love/Hate

I hate flying, which apparently I will be doing more often with my new job, even though before last November, I had never flown in my entire life of 36 (at the time) years on this stupid hunk of ball called the Earth. I had always said the first time I went up in a plane, I wasn't going to come down in it, meaning I wanted to do a tandem jump first time, but the convenient opportunity never arrived. And I compromised my lifelong nonsense parameter for something (those types of things rule my life in a ridiculous amount of ways, and help make me the self-retarded person I am) to build a relationship with asshole relatives-in-law who don't even speak to us anymore. What a fucking waste.
My problem with flying has never been a fear of being in the sky, and after having flown a number of times, it still isn't. My dislike of flying comes from losing touch with the passage. There is a theory that one reason so many women suffer from postpartum depression is the overuse of painkillers during child birth, so that the woman does not feel the transition of her offspring from inside her body to outside of her body, so there is a certain disconnect as if the baby was lost, and that chemically creates depression inside the mother, even though her baby is right there. Our conscious mind often times is overruled by all the little million year old cellular memory-filled molecules inside of us. Nothing can be done about this; it is scientific fact beyond the reproach of human studies or words.
For me personally, this is similar to how I feel about flying. When I get on a plane in Virginia, and end up two hours later in Florida, the climate, the environment, the type of people I'm around, it all is different, rather suddenly. There is no gradual ascent into a different weather zone, or seeing the make-up of the land shift and the constitution of the people start to alter ever so slightly in common roadside interactions. You are just there.
This has helped lead to why there are so many suburban clusters of chain stores and restaurants that are the same regardless of where you live. The land is clear cut and covered over with a fresh coat of asphalt and pre-fab boxes with easily identifiable brightly lit brand signs. For someone on the move, they don't want to be immersed into another region's insanity all of a sudden; they want familiarity, even if it is a sterilized and homogenized familiar face. It makes me sad there are people who feel more comfortable in a world like that, and that that world dominates the country I live in. Hell, I don't even like taking interstates on long drives because of how soulless they are. You ride the old US routes like US 1 or US 250, and you hit these long desolate stretches with burned out and crumbling restaurant shells or hotels that house illegal immigrants at best nowadays, and you think about what it must have been like back in the day.
Oh well, this ain't my world to control. I just walk around on the goddamned thing until I stop breathing oxygen and they stuff me back down six feet into the surface.

I love getting a review copy of a book that has my first ever published in for-real print story inside of it in the mail yesterday. I opened to the page to see it, read the first paragraph and the last paragraph, both of which did not seem fucking stupid to me. And I scoped one random sentence in the middle, that said, "He smiled a flat grin, missing a few pieces." This made me think that maybe the story didn't completely suck, but I was too afraid to sit down on the couch and actually read it. Plus I had to pick cherries from our honeysuckle vine/poison ivy entrenched cherry tree patch before the goddamned birds ate them all.
The publisher sent me an extra review copy of the book. Sometime in the next week, I'll be throwing up a contest for someone to win it here on the blog. That means that all three of you stand a 33% chance of winning a copy. When I become a famous, full of shit writer/author/runaway teenager self-help master/threat to the government/halfway outlaw type, you will have a ridiculously overvalued piece of my early rise to fame. When I don't become famous, I will help clutter your life a little bit more for as long as you deem it worthy to keep holding onto this obscure thing that nobody cares about. Either way, it will be a thing that happens. And it's better to have things happen than to have things no longer happen, that is for sure.

First of Da Month

So I've started a print zine that hopefully I'll have a new issue of every two months. It's gonna be limited as fuck, doling out copies (along with some sort of retarded Raven care package) to the top three each month in my very personalized and non-scientific Mailed Shit To My Post Office Box monthly standings. I figured beginning of each month, I'd list out the top five, at this point a few them are cumulative from previous mailbox donations, along with the rating (on a 100-point scale) they accumulated to be in the top three, or be in the fourth or fifth spot to position themselves for next month, as once you make the top three, you reset to zero, thus hopefully encouraging a healthy pipeline of wacky and useful shit to my post office box, so long as I can deliver a worthwhile print-only zine to make it worth their while, along with whatever other dumb shit I put together to send out as well. Here are the top 5 mailbox rankings for May 1, 2010...
#1: RussMac in Georgia - dude hooked me up with the motherload of Iron Chef episodes, which for some reason are still not available on normal people DVD, along with the Iron Chef handbook, plus a ton of other wacky shit like space documentaries (perfect for stoners, as well as 11-year-old homeschoolers) and old UFCs and shit. 87.3 points.
#2: Pitz Dogg in North Cackalacka - an old roommate who seriously slid into second place on the last day of April by mailing me a literal styrofoam cooler of beer. Like I went to check my PO Box and there was the wonderful yellow card that says, "Go pick up some shit from the counter fool!" and I went and the guy came back out with a fucking styrofoam cooler with LIQUID and FRAGILE stamped all over it. I took it home and it was full of Canuck beer, mostly some Don De Dieus (which translates from Franch as "gangsta of god" beer) and a few Maudites (which do not jibe well with the sudden 90 degree heat we have in central Virginia). 64.2 points.
#3: Ten Dollar David in RVA - another old roommate of mines, who apparently broke his leg in severe fashion like where he couldn't walk for a while and now has a metal rod inside of him so all he did was sit around and do nothing. He got his nickname from me because the first time (and actually only time) I ever road a passenger train, I woke up on a hardwood floor wondering where the fuck I was. I had been living between couches in Richmond at the time, but did not recognize this particular hardwood floor. The night before had been a blur of whiskey and painkillers and purple passion and cop parties and chopping some girl with a samurai sword, and apparently I ended up in Williamsburg, at David's apartment, talking shit to his roommates, who he had just moved in with like two days before. Awesome. I had no money on me that I could find, so I had to borrow $10 from David to take the Amtrak back to Richmond. Except he had no money either, so we had to go to his work, some restaurant, where I sat around uncomfortably drinking a free water while he bummed the money from his boss. Then I went and bought a train tickets and laid on the bench sweating a thick and stanky whiskey sweat while the train station guard dude cut up the radio so I could listen to the Detroit Lions/Washington Redskins game that was going on that day. A wonderful memory. Oh yeah, what David had mailed me was a couple beers, plus a soccer magazine. 35.7 points.
#4: Jersey Jared - just missed the cut, and had previously hooked me up with like a giant case of fancy pumpkin truffles, plus frou-frou coffee, right about the time I started drinking frou-frou coffee, so long as it was cheap. And it don't get cheaper than free. First in line for next month, unless the PO Box has surprises. 27.9 points.
#5: Some dude Joel - bought me a subscription to Countryside magazine, which is still the greatest fucking magazine ever to be having a country compound for. Mother Earth News is for city faggots who go to political meetings and hang out on Facebook all the time, talking about oil spills and political scandals that don't involve them. Countryside is for people who want to build chicken houses out of old factory pallets. 17.4 points.
In case you didn't know, the post office box is on the sidebar, but it's Raven Mack PO Box 270 Scottsville, VA 24590. You're also always welcome to give me money through the Enable Rojonekku button, but nobody ever does that, and you don't get shit for it except if you give me enough money to buy some beer, I'll probably let you special request some bullshit for me to write about. I ain't got shit else to do.

Cuvee Du 8eme

AFFORDABILITY: This was mailed to me by my broken legged homeboy Ten Dollar David, so it was free, but it was only one bottle, and I had to drink it, and my time is worth something. Isn’t it? 2 out of 5.
DESTROYABILITY: There was only one in the package, and it was tiny, and French. I drank it and it left me feeling unfulfilled and wishing for more. But it magically appeared inside my PO Box, so I guess that counts for something. 1 out of 5.
LABEL AESTHETIC: Looks like the label was printed on white linen paper like you would've used for your resume back in 1999, before 9/11 changed everything and you started emailing your resume to HR@youfuckfaceyoullbestuckinconstructiontilyoudie.com and you worried more about fonts than the type of paper. But then what if they didn’t have your perfect font? Do you include the font so they can look at your resume in all its glory? Of course not; that’s pretentious as fuck of you, and who the hell is gonna unzip and plug in a font for somebody’s random resume, especially when it’s a fat lady at the human resources office looking at it and she’s thinking more about if she can eat one of those donuts in the break room and not trigger her diabeetus by lunch time. The very uppermost left-sided thing on the label says, “be smart, say it in French: ((Q-V-DUE-WHEATY-M))”. That’s what it says. This is the stupidest fucking beer ever. If we lived ten years in the future, this beer would include a font file when you downloaded it so that you could properly see just how clever its label really was. 0 out of 5.
CORPORATE MASTER: Cuvee Du 8eme is made by a Switzerland company but written with some French bullshit and imported by Connecticut people. Do the Switzerlese speak francais? I do not know. Whoever makes it does so with a nice looking bottle, so they have a flair for style. Yet the label looks like somebody printed it on their computer, so they cut corners in cost, and still charge the astronomical realm of prices, I’m sure. They are confused people obviously, which is understandable. European culture is so entrenched and so old that the cellular memories probably cross wires internally, not to mention the thousands and thousands of years of history and the pollutants and buried environmental scars from all that. Somewhere a couple sediments down, the Plague is still kicking it over there. Still though, I cannot give a beermaker credit because of the poor upbringing they might have had that left them confused and needing therapy. There comes a time when a beermaker should be old enough to know better. 1 out of 5.
OVERALL AMBIANCE: How could a gift from an old friend be so disappointing? I think I was reading about this beer on the internet at some point and people were all like talking about the year or some bullshit like that. I don’t understand. I don’t care about beer, good or bad, to become a historian. I like to drink things that make my brain wonky, and I like them to have interesting tastes, which is funny since beer, good or bad, is an acquired taste. Cuvee Du 8eme will never cross my lips again. 0 out of 5.
TOTAL RATING: 4/5 STAR!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - April ’10 Intro

I have decided to roll out the J.J. Krupert in a different manner starting this month, with a daily post of the songs that make up my stupid countdown of shit that I be playing semi-obsessively, complete with a stealing link for you to taste test the crap. Now two things about this I am uncomfortable with. First off, the internet is all about stealing music, and I have no problem with that. But this is not, nor will it ever be, some stupid fucking music blog. There are only actually about seven good music blogs left inside the internet, if that, as most of it is a compilation of links and demands to thank motherfuckers for the illegal download or share links back to the blog if you jack the upload link. That's a fairly pathetic attempt at ego boost through internet traffic, and I'm not gonna roll with that. I'm also not gonna put up one of those fake ass "The links on this page are for reviewing purposes only and you should remember to support the artists!" or that standard bullshit legal disclaimer that most music stealing blogs have. I love music, and you should too. This is shit I love. If you do not see fit to support the artist, fine. You live by that. And actually you probably support them more by going to see them live and buying a fucking t-shirt at the merch table. Plus some of the shit I will talk upon is obscure outdated nonsense from far-off lands, so you couldn't support it with money if you wanted to. Hell, you probably support that type of stuff by stealing it through my link to a song more than you could any other way. Spread the disease.
I also feel like a punk ass for switching up the format from one long ass post into 14 smaller posts, because it's not the overload of nonsense that I like to put my fake name behind. It makes me feel like I'm trying to drive up hits to pretend I'm internet famous and can con companies into giving me money for banner ads or some bullshit. But I'm not. To be completely honest, I just wanted an excuse to put up wacky pictures more often, usually pictures that I stole from other wacky websites, to make the thing more visually pleasing to me, and more of a clusterfuck of nonsense. I am all about clusterfucks of nonsense.
So with that intro, we shall start the J.J. Krupert Countdown of the Most Played Songs That I've Not Yet Talked About Under The J.J. Krupert Tag On My Tiny Shuffle Ipod Survival Of The Fittest Machine For The Month Of April, this time of day every day, for the next two weeks, bro. Feel free to comment. Also as a completely unrelated sidenote, there is a PO Box to the right there that is my bonafide actual PO Box that exists in real life like ugly people and Ikea stores and barbed wire tattoos on the girlfriends of dudes who wanted to be a Marine but didn't get in so now they lift a lot of weights. I have started a bonafide real life in the print thing that will come out every month or two, limited release each time, and every month the cumulative top three dudes who have sent shit to my PO Box will get a care package including whatever zine I've done. As it stands right now, I know RussMac in Georgia would be at the top of that list the end of this month, then probably Jersey Jared, and finally Ten Dollar David in Richmond, but that dude Joel I think from Williamsburg or some shit probably would deserve consideration too, but at the end of each month, the top three people who have mailed shit to my PO Box who are the strongest in my mind will get a package that might be nothing much or might be a shitty box full of nothing much more than nothing much. But there is that as well.
Damn... and I wanted to stop after that "I am all about clusterfucks of nonsense" but I had to go and ruin it with my usual verbal interpretation of that philosophy.
TOMORROW: Old school flavors of Richmond remembrances on warm Friday afternoons!

Imperial Extra Double Stout

AFFORDABILITY: An amazing thing is the Post Office box, separate from my house, where when I used to do my zine regularly, magical oddball shit would show up all the time. Not so much in recent years because I don't do tangible things anymore, I just put dumb shit inside the internet's guts and people read it and are like "lolol" but their day just flows on along. Sometimes they send me an email that basically says, "Hey, your blog is awesome," but that's about it. I used to get naked Polaroids of chicks, weird wrestling tapes of handicapped Japanese guys wrestling each other, porn, belt buckles, adult Mexican comic books, mix CDs galore, patches, other weird zines, and fan letters from prisoners in Tennessee, on the regular. Now all I get is a fucking email now and then. Fuck man, we haven't progressed at all, we're just more easily able to delude ourselves from realizing we hate everything in our lives. Well, last week I got an email from my man Ten Dollar David (all people I used to write about in my zines had nicknames and he got that nickname because one time I woke up from a really strong drunk in a strange house, which wasn't unusual because I was technically homeless at that point in life, but the odd part was I was in Williamsburg but didn't remember anything outside of Richmond happening, but my man Ten Dollar David took me to his work where he washed dishes so he could borrow $10 from his boss and I could catch the train back to Richmond) asking me if I had gotten his package. I said no, because nobody sends me shit so I never check the PO Box. But I had to go dry some work clothes because my dryer still wasn't fixed and it makes sense to spend $93 one quarter at a time over the course of four months rather than buy the $50 part and fix it. Well, I had thirty minutes to kill while the clothes dried, and the Ms. Pac Man machine in the laundromat has ripped me off enough already, so I walked down to the post office after hours where there was a big key in my box meaning I had packages in one of the boxes in the lobby. Hooray! It was a couple beers well wrapped and an English soccer magazine. This was the awesome beer of the two beers I got, because it is from Russia, and Alexander Ovechkin has made me a fan of Russia. But it was free, and just showed up at me, all for reasons I know not. To me, that's what America should be all about. But I guess it's more about ripping people off and being able to retire early in life and live off the exploitation of others. Which sounds communistic, taking me back to the whole Russian thing. 13 out of 5.
DESTROYABILITY: 9% Russian alcohol kicked my ass. I wish I could find this locally because I'd drink the fuck out of this (except I bet it's too expensive in real life). I've not been a big fan of the super stouts in my lifetime, but this winter has been one of the worst two in Virginia in my 37 years alive on this stupid planet, and there's been at least five inches of snow on the ground for the majority of the past two months, and I have to slop through it to feed animals or do anything at all beyond the two paths from the cars to the wood pile to the house, so my soul has grown cold. Not in a negative attitude type way but in a just used to the cold. My bones are cold. And this fucking beer made perfect sense to me. I actually went outside while drinking it and kicked it at the back of my truck looking up at the stars analyzing the sky and thinking, "Yeah, I see why motherfuckers drink the thick and warm beers in them Slavic areas," because it's like pouring an alcoholic afghan into your guts. 9 out of 5.
LABEL AESTHETIC: A very nice label with a ton of information about shit I didn’t need to know about, simple stylings, and it gave me something to decipher upon while warming myself with the brew-dog in hand. Plus it had Russian alphabets on it, and I’m in “Alexander Ovechkin is tha best ever” mode after he had his rabid toothless sheep ice skates at the Olympics. That dude is all sorts of great, because how many superstars of a sport have been the hardest ones too. It’d be like if Barry Sanders played football like Mike Singletary or Michael Jordan acted like Bill Laimbeer. His total destruction of Jaromir Jagr in the preliminary round was the greatest piece of live hockey I’ve ever been lucky enough to be watching on the television screens, except for maybe that one Red Wings/Avalanche game from way back where the goalies were fighting each other center ice. That was a pretty cool too. I wish there was a bar that sold this fake Russian shit on tap and I could go watch the Caps play the Penguins in the Eastern Conference finals this spring and get drunk and hate on the very probably stupid Pittsburgh people that seem to be in every sports bar on earth. 5 out of 5.
CORPORATE MASTER: I am mad confused at this point, because it is a Russian imperial stout (complete with Russian words and shit), but it also is called “Le Coq” which sounds French, and it’s made by a Harvey’s Brewery in England. I guess that’s the nature of this modern world, all smalled down by our global connectivity. This is fine, because I can imagine Russian mafia types dealing with a British brewer who employs soccer thuggish types in his breweries, and it’s all just crazy white fuckers getting drunk and wild. Ultimately, that’s all I am as well. 5 out of 5.
OVERALL AMBIANCE: Drinking this beer, which came in the mail, during the midst of a long, snowy winter, when I was dragging trash bags of washed clothes to the laundromat to dry since I couldn’t afford a new heating element just yet (spending way more than $50 of quarters in the process, making me wonder why I couldn’t just have all them quarters at once and buy what I needed to make my life easier, which I guess is the problem with my entire doomed life in a nutshell), this beer going into my system did more than just be a beer. It made sense. It was one of those moments of clarity where you go, “Oh yeah, now I know why these Russian fuckers make their beer taste like this.” It has put Russian Imperial Stouts in my lexicon as something to enjoy. In fact, it’s cold and windy as fuck today and I’m gonna go look for some Russian beer for after work for tonight, because it makes sense. Used to be I thought Polish Porters were the deal for that, but after a few too many internal piledrivers from Okocims and Zywiecs and such, I think I’m gonna roll Russian. It also begs the question why the fuck does American beer get made the way it gets made? Not to sound all beer snobby, because I could give a fuck about what the rest of the world thinks of us, but what the hell man? Don’t Americans like getting drunk and tasting things? Are we that fucking myopic in our own ignorance we’re like “fuck yeah man all I eat is tasteless red meat full of carcinogens and all I drink is tasteless watery alcohol unless I can’t get drunk and then I drink syruppy chemical water sodas”? It’s depresssing as fuck. And then the only alternative is your left wing proud-to-spend-seven-times-as-much-because-then-it-must-be-better alternative types, who are just as annoying. Man, I was born into one shitty ass country. Oh well. It’s all I know, so fuck you rest of the world. 9 out of 5.
TOTAL RATING: 8 & 1/5 STARS!