t p o s t

heaven’s seven layers of

acceptance best brace they self

for my heathen arrival

r r s a a

industrial megaliths

transport slave messages for

moloch; you can’t fight progress

f i r a i

burn this cold world back to ash,

then let’s pick up scrap metal

and build fields of whirligigs

MNZ: Juxtapox February 2011

I usually always grab Juxtapoz when it’s there in front of my eyeballs at a bookstore. A lot of the whole street art movement has become dull imitations of its own self, and frankly, Juxtapoz only perpetuates that. There’s a lot of strange art being done on actual streets that I think should fall under the philosophical umbrella of Juxtapoz, but it gets overlooked because it’s not part of the cool clique that is acceptable to them. Nonetheless, every other month, there’ll be something worthwhile in there for me, although it seems like that’s less so lately.
The February issue was interesting to me because there was a feature on a revitalization project for Detroit. Like I said yesterday regarding Aliquippa, Pennsylvania, I’m very intrigued by the decline of America’s urban and semi-urban clusters. As the recent media meme has proven, nowhere is that more visible than Detroit, a city that had a million and a half people living there in the 1950s when the city was on top of the World, so to speak, and has terminally dwindled down to about half of that now. There’s been photo essays about the beautiful neglect, articles galore written on the city, even the stupid Eminem anti-commercial commercial that launched during the Super Bowl about how ain’t nobody know how Detroit really is. But the fact of the matter is they’re reeling in public services from certain sections of the city, encouraging people to consolidate, sort of contracting themselves, creating these actual economic wastelands of areas that used to be full of people and now are pretty much fairly secluded and almost rural-feeling areas, even though there’s city gridlock of streets and water mains and mail routes and everything you’d expect with organized civilization.
Well, this art project bought up some of these cheap rundown houses in one couple block area, with the idea of bringing art to the neglect. This, I think, is a good idea, and one I’ve not understood why hasn’t happened more often. Why not have a group of young, artistically minded people buy up houses in a rundown part of a town and create something for themselves? I know this sounds dangerously like “gentrification” which usually entails running out the locals with more police presence and higher property taxes, but I think if you had people who cared about the original spirit of a neighborhood, as opposed to a grand vision of an affordable urban neighborhood upgrade, it could work.
My problem with this art project in Juxtapoz was it wasn’t functional. Of the four houses, three would not ever be inhabited. One was, and actually was my favorite anyways because it had the big weird alien cholo writing of RETNA all around the top of each room. But two of them looked more like installations that you could only look at. And if it’s calling itself “art” when it’s being done, then they’re probably not going to let people walk around amongst the place and check it out. And the fourth was like some dude just doing weird street art pieces on an abandoned house. It wasn’t a revitalization so much as giving the guy open clearance to go nuts all over an abandoned house without repercussion. I don’t know… the whole thing seemed stupid to me. I see the beauty of helping a place like that reblossom through wacky crazy art, but when the art becomes what the function is, the places loses its value as a home. And if a city, even abandoned, can’t be used as a home but only as a museum for the chosen to install their visions, then it’s still elitism, just scooped off the bottom of our world instead of skimmed from the top.

f r m a a

mentally ill ghost children

laughing just off the staunton

interstate on old state land

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown – January ’11 #7: “People In The Country (instrumental)” by Prolo

Boogie Brown can multi-track harmonize with the best of them. His hook parts of this song he pre-manufactured and sent to me to fill up with a couple verses has so dazzled me over the past year that I still haven’t written shit for it. I enjoy working relationships like that, where the other guy can throw something at you that is so intimidating that you don’t want to let them down by doing some chump ass shit. I need more of that in my life. I do not feel there are many people within my daily routines or weekly interactions that are creatively driven by anything in particular. Hell, I’m not sure I’m creatively driven anymore sometimes. I have felt at times the passion for things dwindling in me as the shine and hum from the technobabble around me gets brighter and louder. There is never real darkness nor total silence. There is also not a group I can toss ideas off of and who toss them off of me to spiral each other up into the creative chaos necessary for good things to be born from.
Of course, I’ve been infected with demons for a few weeks now, as part of the process of cleansing myself of the poisons of my previous life. In fact, as this thing has dwindled, I am realizing that I’m not even sure how many generations this poison inside of me comes from. I’m not sure how hard I have to sweat to be clean again. But I know I am excited to see the sunrise on the other side. And I know that once I get there, the creative chaos that has curled up into a safe little ball inside of me will stretch itself back out and really be able for the first time in my life to fully unleash itself. And I am confident I will get there, without turning back for fear of the rocky path I’m walking, because people in the country do know how to get by. I have always been instilled with a survival instinct, from the same people who instilled in me a get drunk technique. But all I can do is take the good and let it grown and weed out the bad and make myself awesome and then totally skull crush the world. “As simple as a bird flying high through the sky…” Things seem complicated at times, and I’ve definitely not hit anywhere near my highest arc just yet. But it’s coming. Once I get out this hospital and this three-inch deep wound in my side the are packing twice daily and draining the demons from deep within my soul starts to seal itself back up, I’ve got three whole CDs of Boogie Brown beats to do a project with. It’s gonna be spring time, so I can plug in the camper trailer and get my out-building on, late at night loud as fuck. Then hopefully we can find a weekend to get the key ingredients back together one weekend down in Newport just under the railroad bridge from the New River, and make this Prolo thing happen one more time. Really, it usually only takes us three days of well-connected loungin’ to get a CD together. Perhaps I should start a kickstarter page for someone to rent a rundown farmhouse and financially enable me and Brown to work on music for three months straight. We’d probably make twenty albums worth of stuff, with various theme projects and strange offshoots. Or we’d build weird sculptures out of scrap stuff we found alongside the road. Either way, the world would be a better place.
STEAL “People In The Country”
NEXT UP: When will I run out of Big K.R.I.T. songs on my J.J. Krupert!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown – January ’11 #8: “Sunny Meadowz” by Del The Funky Homosapien

Happy rap tends to be crappy rap, which is sad, because I’d like to be able to enjoy more positive rap music. For some reason positive rap music just doesn’t have the same kick though, which I guess would be the case with conscious rock music as well. There is something very raw and rude about certain musics, and being all conscious and concerned for things dulls that raw edge. Nonetheless, a few months back, I decided to DL a whole slew of older rap, including most of the Native Tongues classics, and some west coast stuff that would fall into that same classic milk crate of vinyl as well. Most of the Native Tongues stuff fell to the wayside, just not speaking to me at all. It seemed so gimmicky and contrived, especially considering the clustered nature of east coast life, even if you did come from the suburbs.
Del’s first album though got heavy bump, and still does. Still does. I kinda let it fall to the wayside because when I was in college and it got popular, too many chump ass dudes I would not want to psychologically associate myself with were way too into it. But damn man, it’s a solid album, all the way through. Really, in my humble expert whiteboy opinion, Ice Cube’s most classic album ever was Amerikkka’s Most Wanted, and every solo record he did after that was about half as good, suffering from some sort of creative radioactive decay factor. But when you think about how good that Amerikka’s Most Wanted was, and that Del – Cube’s cousin of some sort – got his deal off the back of being associated with Cube, and that served up I Wish My Brother George Was Here, it’s a very strange one-two punch from an alleged crew of individuals, though it’s hard to imagine Del sitting around smoking blunts with Yo-Yo and Da Lench Mob, sipping on a 64 oz. bottle of Olde English. Two albums with very distinctive sounds to this day that essentially came from the same distant family.
“Sunny Meadowz” is probably the more over-the-top positive vibes song on the Del album, and somehow, despite the corny chill vibes, is an actual good fucking song. Maybe it’s the fact it’s California and not east coast, or maybe the P-Funk backbone to the sound (those two things could go hand in hand though), but, to put it simply, I enjoy the fuck out of this song. I hope that wherever you are, whether there has been feet of snow or simply standard winter cold, it is a warm beautiful day, and you will download this song, and pump it the fuck up, and sit outside in the sun for a little while today. Get that vitamin D soaking up into your skin and let the natural cleansing rays of solar aura washes vibe you upwards instead of downwards. It is almost spring. It is almost time to reblossom, motherfuckers. Make sure you grow your proper bloom.
STEAL “Sunny Meadowz”
NEXT UP: A Prolo instrumental but with the hook just no verses because I ain’t never done it yet even though I love the song already!

MNZ: Sports Illustrated January 31, 2011

Sports Illustrated is one of those vanity magazine subscriptions that offer up more purty color pictures than actual worthwhile content a lot of times, but they have to try and hold down their reputation as a place where actual quality pieces get published, so they bust out a good one now and then. This issue of SI was just such an issue, talking about Aliquippa, Pennsylvania – a shithole rundown mill town just northwest of Pittsburgh that has produced a good number of great football players over the decades (Mike Ditka, Tony Dorsett, Ty Law, Sean Gilbert, Darrelle Revis). Ever since a trip a few years back where me and Boogie Brown ended up in Weirton, West Virginia, I’m intrigued by these rust belt mill towns that are all fucked-up now. Like, the ‘80s have culturally sensitized us to rundown inner-cities, but all these whole industrial towns are turning into wastelands too. In southside Virginia where the textile factories split in the last decade, there’s wastelands there. In fact, the guy in the hospital bed next to me right now is from one such place – Martinsville – and the preacher who was preaching at his bedside talked to me about used to being a weed smoker, and now is a preacher, but also a survivalist. I was halfway expecting them to bust out a rattlesnake. But that’s how it works in those types of places – hard times, hard struggles, but people who can get it together enough to get past the obstacle course have an internal drive that you don’t often find.
Aliquippa itself was interesting because of the racial tensions, and sure, the article played the whole corny “football unified us as one” storyline, which whether it’s true or not, is still corny. But people coming from hopelessly fucked situations, finding success, and yet still being drawn back to that completely warped sense of home, that’s something I enjoy reading about. I feel like it’s somewhat a characteristic of the American success story to move away from the shithole you come from, distance yourself from it philosophically and geographically, to get on the other side of the fence and abandon your roots. This has helped add to the problems of shitholes, and ensured that shitholes remain even more of a shithole. How do we make shitholes no longer shitholes? Same way we have a bunch of shit ass kids become football champions – work hard as hell, set up good discipline, and smash everyone else in the face. Thing is, most of us want to be on the other side of the fence, not in a bad place, and our the financial cultural ways of our predatory credit system has allowed a lot of us to pretend we got it good in suburban enclaves as opposed to trapped in the obvious decay of semi-urban communities like Aliquippa, where there’s at least a good rundown part of town to show and prove that, yeah, shit ain’t like it once was, because there used to be things for sale in all those empty windows. But we tend to remove and shelter ourselves now, so we don’t know if we have it bad or our neighbors do or what. We just keep poking along, making minimum payments, hoping it all picks back up. It won’t though. A lot more of us are doomed than we realize.
Of course, some of us have always learned how to get by. Like the survivalist preacher for the dude next to me in the hospital room was saying, a country boy will survive. Except it ain’t just country boys. You grow up in the wasteland, you learn how to survive. So really the same thing that ended up making Aliquippa football a powerhouse in western Pennsylvania high school athletics will end up either making or breaking America on the world stage again. When times get worse, as they will, will this be a breeding ground for ass kickers who come up hungry to conquer the world anew, or will we just end up a slowly dying nation of overweight weaklings not understanding why we don’t have all the same nice shit our parents had.

g r f a m

concrete canvasses cause wild

differing visions to come

together at the corner

Friday Love/Hate

Can’t really outright say I hate anything, as having had a lingering illness the past month yet still feeling pretty positive about the way things are going, I am obviously blindly optimistic. But being within the hospital three times in two weeks, seeing the rapid mood swings in care you get depending on the individual, seeing (and hearing through curtains) the mentally weak who use emergency rooms as psychological crutches, having to fill out paperwork or wait for paperwork to be filled out by someone else as I am stifled by pain – the entire bureaucracy of it all makes me sick that the health care reform thing of last year was supposed to be some sort of grand achievement. Health care and more importantly health insurance (since it is the beast that has perverted health care) has absolutely nothing to do with being healthy. And yet everyone is either up-in-arms about how ridiculous the reform thing is, or how great it is. We are such a deluded populace here in America. The things we are pointed at to think are important have nothing to do with actual importance in our lives. I hate that. Although I am also thankful for Obama’s Presidency because he used up the “I’m different than those other guys” card harder than anybody else, so hopefully next time some political “maverick” comes out acting like they are somehow different, that loud crying of “WOLF!” by that faux revolutionary leader won’t be met with such naïve joy. Also what the fuck people? There is no such thing as a revolution when you are using the established system and network to change things. That’s why they call it an “establishment” because the shit is deeply entrenched and designed to keep out the rabble rousers, much less actual visionaries.

I love my family, meaning my wife and daughters. I am a blessed ass dude. The core nucleus of my life is far more stable and loving than my chaos brain and delusional writings/ramblings would give off probably. But the fact of the matter is this is a twisted ass world. I feel that twist and crook of axis, as I’m sensitive to that type of nonsense going on beneath my feet. I am thankful to have the family I have that can allow me to focus on channeling the Universal Magnetics word flows into Earth patterns, and try to give some sense to the crookedness for those of us who feel it. Without them, who knows what type of dirtbag life I’d be clouded within.

s u z z y

sometimes, when my wife is mad

at me, I ride a freight train

for nineteen years and five months

x m a s o

creative light bulbs going

off above my head looking

like the nineteen seventies

x m a s p

alligator skin porch posts

wrapped in gaudy lights, drop cord

snaked through crooked front window

x m a s f

piano blasts muffled through

farmhouse siding, some sort of

wild throwdown concealed inside

p i g z s

blessed are those that struggle –

the stunted of the earth shall

inherit whatever’s left

m e m a a

cold world seems worse inside of

heartless stacks of concrete with

mosaics of faded paint

g y p a a

firstborn offspring blossoms with

a blur from baby to young

lady, always so focused

Friday Love/Hate

I hate, absolutely hate being incapacitated like I have been. It has been nearly three weeks since I first bed-ridded myself, and my nature is not to sit still much at all. Today I was feeling better, and walked through the yard twice, plus stood around the house inside a lot. Tonight that made me feel like parts of my organs were falling south through my crotch. I am done with it. But I’m not. Frustration is a motherfucker, and I am a frustrated motherfucker.

I love the strange world we live though. I have a friend dumpster diving for my pigs tomorrow. That’s really the only thing I could think of. People are bringing us food, which is really great and I appreciate it, but I am craving all the bad things in life. I want to wander back roads to weird defunct steel mining towns and eat at shitty Chinese buffets and take pictures of railroad tracks beside smokestacks. Shit man, I’ve started taking pictures of things from my bed, which is a very difficult canvas to continue to find inspiration. At least my narcotic prescription ran out so I have my brain back to full functionality, though this boring as fuck love/hate probably is not a testament to it. Oh well… I thought I would’ve wrote 9 novels by now while laid up, but it’s been physically impossible to stay comfortable for more than an hour or two on the best days of the past three weeks. I ain’t bitching, because most all the world has it worse than me. And this whole thing had kinda been a test for me to make sure the path I’ve chosen to switch up on in the past three or four months is the path I really want… and it is. Fuck you World. I’m gonna take your ass down. Bully me all you want, but I got you. Now, if you’ll excuse me, my water bottle is empty, so I’m going to take four minutes to wiggle my way upright off the couch, take four minutes to walk the twelve or so normal steps around the corner into the next room to the refrigerator, think how I want something to eat but not be able to bend down to open the bottom crisper with baby carrots in it, so I’ll eat a cheese stick, take four minutes back to my couch aka nighttime bed, position myself to be barely comfortable, click the button on the remote to see what time it is and how long it’s been since I took Advil or Tylenol, focus on whatever Iron Chef episode is now on my TV screen… (By the way, BIG motherfuckin’ UPS to Russ Mac in Georgia for sending all those DVDs a while back. I never actually watched too much of the Iron Chefs, but have been working my way through them all this week. I want to have that book out too, to full-on nerd out, but I only remember at night when everyone’s asleep and it’s in the peach crate by the toilet below where I can reach. Yeah, I can’t even put socks on right now.) Then I’ll sleep uncomfortably for a little while, wake up, let the internet make me a little stupider for a few minutes, click the Iron Chef back to whatever episode I fell asleep on, and repeat it all, in a slightly different order. In the morning, I’ll be really afraid the toddler is gonna come running in and Superfly Snuka me (like she has done already) so I’ll wake up with the light outside the window and uncomfortable wait for everybody to wake up, when I’ll relocate to the bedroom bed, read a few short stories, think about how awesome this short story I’ve been planning in my head is about someone doing asemic writing in an abandoned school, think about how I’d like to just do that in that old hospital in Staunton by the Frontier Culture Museum rather than write a story, then I’ll think about the hospital and how awesome old abandoned mental institutions are and why they intrigue me so much, which is probably because in the olden days they would’ve just put me there, which would probably be cool because then I could just draw pictures with soot like James Castle or actually do asemic writing all over my walls except I’d be restrained physically so they’d give me paper and probably an electric pencil and I’d make weird drawings like that instead. I actually filled about ten pages of a notebook trying to work up a new personal graffiti font because I don’t like the one I naturally have developed as it’s not cholo enough. I got some good things going on early, but was having trouble with the second row of letters (H-N) from that toy I learned my alphabet from as a kid, which I still divide the alphabet up by (A-G, H-N, O-T, U-Z). And I really didn’t want to skip rows, so I just worked on A through G a whole fucking lot because I just couldn’t wrap my head around a good way to do an H. That’s part of the problem right there, trying to “wrap my head” around something instead of letting my head unleash itself upon the dilemma. We are too filled with false knowledges about minor things to really allow ourselves to unleash anymore. I am not sure where I am going with this – probably nowhere, just rambling, like always, but without a point, like often. But my ass is starting to hurt so I’m going to shut down the laptop and shift myself painfully about two inches one way, an inch back the other, and see how Hiroyuki Sakai and this French dude do in this lamb battle. I’ll probably fall asleep and wake up craving Aladdin’s from Richmond circa 1996, but hey, my mind, it’s a fucking thing, what which lets things in and shakes around like Boggle and then things come back out and I just go, “Hmmm, intriguing idea,” and then worry about work because there’s so much to do when I get back.

t i p i a

paleface spend seven hundred

pictures of first president

on archaic pointy house

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown – January ’11 #9: “Lonely Woman” by Ornette Coleman

Originally obtained this on an Atlantic Jazz: The Avant-Garde LP I bought at Plan 9 in Richmond’s Carytown. Just recently heard that that record store was shutting down, which ends an era. I mean not continuous, because the orginal Plan 9 I knew was a few doors up the street, but it’s all connected. The place I fantasize about digging through albums or 7-inches is always the basement of Plan 9, because you can always stay ahead of the record store dork curve and find awesome shit for cheap. Last time I was in there (over a couple of years now), I got 12-inch singles of “Life is Too Short” by Too Short and “Cell Therapy” by Goodie Mobb and “Cadillac on 22s” by David Banner, all for a buck. I can’t even begin to imagine all the wonderful pieces of vinyl I got from Plan 9 over the years. I actually was busted one time, because of Plan 9, when me and a guy stole a bunch of CDs from a guy back home who we didn’t like, split up the CDs, and I sold a bunch of them to Plan 9, carefully taking apart the CDs to mark out where the dude had discreetly placed his initials inside the CD jewel case (obviously a paranoid fuck). Still though, they found CDs at the other dude I did it with’s house, he snitched on me, and Richmond Police found records of me selling CDs to Plan 9 that partially matched the list of what was stolen. That was enough to arrest me, and Richmond PD had a warrant for my arrest about to get faxed to them, to arrest me coming out my freshmen dorms, or perhaps at the room, I don’t fucking know, when a local detective who had gone straight and narrow after drinking a lot and racing hot rods with one of my uncles as teenagers, he intercepted the warrant, said he was a friend of the family, and would handle the arrest. I plead down to misdemeanors, took the full fall (being I wasn’t gonna snitch out my friend, even if he did me… In fact, my dad said that was something he was proud of, and I matter-of-factly told the cop, “You know who did it.” And he said, “But you have to say it.” But I didn’t.), had to pay restitution which involved me borrowing a lot of money from my grandfather, and taking a good chunk out of my financial aid reimbursements each semester for the following three years to pay him back.
Even before then though, we would skip high school, get high, and go to Richmond to find some sort of adventure. I would always want that to involve going to Plan 9 to buy music we’d never find in Farmville, because the first time I ever skipped school after getting my driver’s license, me and this dude Dave took my ’69 Ford Future, beat-up beige beauty it was with the speakers that rattled like tambourines all the time, and rode up to Plan 9 specifically. Richmond was this insane city to me at the time, a simple-assed country kid who thought the one elevator in town was an amazing thing when he was five years old.
Richmond still is an insane place to me, bred a lot of my creativity into me, and I was surrounded by a lot of similar types who seem destined for things. There’s a lot of people who formed cliques and seem like some sort of alternative fraternal organization to this day, and I’m an outsider because I didn’t just have kids and buy a house in a gentrified southside neighborhood and support my local Waldorf school or whatever. But Richmond is a special fucking place in my life, and it’s had that effect on a lot of people, and Plan 9 was one of its Power Sites, for sure.
Shit man, I go to Richmond now and hardly recognize places I knew so well. The VCU area has been pretty heavily commercialized/sterilized, which I guess is good for the big business of going to college. Oregon Hill seems like it wants to be a better place, but seems like it’s half empty still, and the crackheads and miscreants and 14-year-old mamas with weasel faces will take it back over soon enough. Downtown doesn’t seem as vibrant as it once was, and I don’t mean businesses, but people. Used to be people around, and activity. Seems slower now, or more geared towards something else. I’m not sure. I think Church Hill’s natural flow was disrupted by all the new stop signs, but that’s probably a good thing because parts of Church Hill were something else, like The Wire but with different architecture using lots of asbestos siding shingles that looked like fake bricks.
Anyways, the song “Lonely Woman” is fucking amazing. I am not a huge jazz fan by any means, but I dig some stuff. Honestly, this song is one of the two that are all-time faves of mine, because they transcend music into just pure emotion. This Ornette Coleman song is such a truly sad song, so deeply and painfully sad, that I just can’t help but gone drawn into it, every fucking time. I have listened and tried other Ornette Coleman things, and a lot of it sounds like normal jazz – kind of annoying and the type of thing that makes me feel white as fuck to be listening to. But “Lonely Woman” – this is a fucking real deal song. It is the fucking truth.
STEAL “Lonely Woman”
NEXT UP: Happy rap!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown – January ’11 #10: “River” by David Allan Coe

River is the name of my youngest daughter, and she is the wide open spirit amongst our children, most reminding me of myself when I was little, both in wacky style and looks. Her name and mine, in fact, I have noted in my nerd brain are 60% exact replicas of each other (R-x-V-E-x). All of our children have copied what my parents did with me by giving me the name Raven – we have a Gypsy, a Phoenix, and a River. Thus, they can tattoo their names on themselves graphically when they are older (though my oldest has already said she’s never going to drink or get a tattoo because she doesn’t want to “pollute my body”). The go-to name for a son was going to be Nation, which would’ve been fine, but I’m kinda glad it never happened. That’s a heavy fucking name to be saddled with. I know my life has probably been altered plenty by carrying the name of “Raven” on my birth certificate, and being known as that from birth. The name was inherited from a friend of my folks’ who had a sort of infamous ’57 Chevy muscle car back in Cumberland County in the late ‘60s. He suffered a mysterious death involving wrecking his car along a road he had driven blind a million times before. He had previously upset some people from up north in a money race, so the theory I heard most growing up was he had been ran off the road.
I feel that some of their names have automatically influenced all of my children in similar manners. Gypsy is quiet and artistic and a truly beautiful and cerebral person. Phoenix is young and struggles to find comfort in her self, and even wants to be called Charlotte at times (her first name). We have not said no, but instead said if she still feels that way in two weeks, we’ll start. She never does. She is Phoenix, and will eventually find her rebirth from whatever internal struggle she was born with as the center child in this family. River just goes. More than any of other children, she leaps before she looks, and if she lands head first on hardwood troubles, tends to find laughter in that as often as tears. As a parent, this can be distressing, because you’d like for your child to protect her skull. But at the same time, with such a seriously psychically powerful household with multiple fifty-foot auras crowding around each other, it’s nice to have that “don’t give a fuck” youthful goofiness shine into the mix with a little bit of purple to mellow out all the lime greens.
I just found the Heartworn Highways this version of “River” comes from, and every time I play it, I go, “Hey River, here’s a song about you,” and she’ll take her wooden noisemaker thing she uses for a microphone and sashay around the kitchen singing barely intelligible 3-year-old songs from her pure little golden head. In-laws who respect money more than aura bought her some high dollar record-your-own-voice doohickey microphone for Christmas, nice enough to leave the price tag on it as well (how tacky – and what a waste at $75). That sits in a moldy basket on the bathroom floor with some dollar store mermaids. When she is singing her soul out, River uses that same wooden noisemaker thing as her microphone. And if she’s really getting into something, she pushes this purple turtle footstool we have into the middle of the kitchen floor and stands on top that to get everyone’s best attention.
STEAL “River”
NEXT UP: One of my two favorite jazz songs of forever!

s h e d g

sunshine beacons of freedom

betray the barbed wire outside;

one day, I’ll maul my master

p r t a b

having three daughters has made

me a master of twisting

and taping colored streamers

f e n c b

safety-minded embraces

from civilization’s lights

dull the stars to a pink blur