but I wander these roads with words for my long lost
Tuesday, August 21
Monday, August 20
Sunday, August 19
Friday, August 17
WEEKLY FRYBREAD: unfuck the world
Feeling pretty good this Friday, because the past three or four weekends I’ve madly been working on the Football Metaphysics book, and this one, I’m done, I can finally fix the stupid riding mower and cut the grass and wrestle my goats and carve hobo graffiti into the backyard picnic table with my children using old railroad spikes. Everything feels pretty easy, like my Lionel Ritchie jheri curl-sized aura is solidly lime green, and solidly growing.
Seems like some wacky shit going on worldwide, what with the Israeli build-up towards war with Iran, and the Julian Assange asylum brouhaha, not to mention all the crazy surveillance state shit like Trapwire and the indeterminate detention of American citizens without charges as authorized by NDAA. And it’s all inter-related too. Seems like the United States and its two main homeboys in the U.K. and Israel are really making a grand stand grab at things, which I think the rest of the world may stand against. Hard to say, and I am not geo-political expert by any means, though I did play the fuck out of Sid Meier’s Civilization IV. Strange times lay ahead, probably full of conflict and war, and perhaps that starts trickling into our American life a little more. Perhaps not. I’m not entirely concerned.
It can be easy to get caught up in fear and worry, which is exactly what tends to happen during recent American Presidential election years, where both sides fear the cataclysmic catastrophes that await should the other side win. Guess what? They’re both right. And yet, they’re both wrong at the same time, because I’ve come to realize America is not this Great Ominous Evil power I used to think it was. It is a giant self-important bureaucracy, and basically operated like a corporation to a certain extent. And like any self-important bureaucratic corporate entity, it is becoming dilapidated, weakened, eaten from within by cancerous philosophies, and will eventually cave in on itself. That is not a bad thing. All governments should cave in on themselves every hundred years or so, because nothing works forever. Though it will be chaotic for who knows how long, we’d all be better off with a new infusion of ideas and ways of running things in our taxed and strained American system.
Oddly enough, I feel more clear-headed than ever, and have actually been reading a lot of economic theory type bullshit, as I’ve always been the standard contrarian who is like, “Capitalism is bad,” but never really had any science. Watching a number of Slavoj Zizek speeches, where he says some things but seems also to just try to rile people up in pure contrarian manner, it made me want to better understand the source of things and less trust what someone tells me. So I did some reading.
Guess what? Capitalism is on some bullshit. You take normal hunt and gather survival, add the abstract concept of money (which is a good idea usually, to create a standard for trade), and then tweak the system to that each little part of the overall culture produces constantly in order to consume constantly items outside of their microcosm, and allegedly we are made wealthier because we have more shit. The problem is, we don’t need all that shit; we just have this desire to want all that shit. Getting it does not solve the want, because automatically there is a new want. We are not wanting what we buy, we are wanting the moment of buying it, thus we’re never happy. It’s like the people who are hungry for McDonalds and eat it but get no nutrition so keep eating and eating and eating. I know the internet be making fun of people like that, but we’re all like that, whether our McDonald’s is smart phones or downloading music or eating at restaurants or whatever. It’s been bred into our psychology.
That is another thing that bothers me, is that I don’t think it is bred so much as it is a natural chemical reaction in our brains. Thus, a lot of advertising triggers for purchasing goods are not so much great campaigns at convincing you to buy something as they are great experimental activations of chemical reactions inside your body. Psychology, we will find, is something we can heal and repair but not something we can control as much as we think. That’s not to say shit like therapy is not helpful in repairing broken physical mechanisms in our brain, but it’s not the way we think.
So as you might be able to tell I’ve been reading a lot of neurophilosophy bullshit as well, as there are a lot of studies relying on functional MRI to prove some of the things I mention above, and yet fMRI assumes that brain functions are limited to parts of the brain, rather than the whole, and that the part that lights up in an fMRI is the one being used for certain tasks.
This brings me to why I feel so excited and am not afraid, because just like that misleading functional MRI, so goes people. If a man steals a loaf of bread, that is obvious, and he can be caught and punished. If a group through the cyberwebs shares music and books and such through a torrent, it is not one basic act that is obvious, but a multitude of tiny parts of the act that is split upon a myriad of separate computers. That is an action of the collective, or whole, and that is how many neurophilosophers feel the human brain probably works, not in individual parts like a machine. After all we are not machines, we are complex organic matter. That is like a torrent.
It’s something I’ve thought about a lot as I’ve chunked this first book called Football Metaphysics into the internet’s great vagina of nonsense, is how do I feel about what I have written being considered my work, in a sense no one else should ever be able to see it without paying me a fee. And honestly, I’m still working through this, because I have been trained culturally to feel I deserve to be rewarded for my ideas put into words, and there is some truth to it. I physically did the work. But at the same time, I cannot be attached to ownership of my ideas. Most all ideas have been thought somewhere by somebody in this post-modern world, and ultimately a sort of “open source” exchange of these works seems like it might not be a direction we should ignore completely. I mean, I want to be able to provide for my stupid bills through my writing, and not have to pretend to care about the other jobs that have filled my working life, but at the same time, I want to share my mad way of putting words together just as much. And if I am only selling my work, especially in an e-publishing format, I’m eliminating a big part of what I would hope to be my community.
And just as the individual thief can be punished, but the collective acting anonymously cannot, the individual activist or revolutionary (god that word fucking sucks now) or let’s just say the individual person trying to enact unapproved change, he can easily be assassinated or jailed or disappeared by authorities. Make no mistake about it, the authorities have the legal ability to do that according to many things brought into law by our last two Presidents of these American states, and legal has jackshit to do with right or wrong. Anybody who thinks the law is a matter of right and wrong has not lived enough in real life. But the group acting collectively, they can accomplish more than the individual, especially if the power structure is lacking traditional power structure that can easily be beheaded.
That’s why I’ve been loving the activity of Anonymous, gathering at the Ecuadorian embassy in London, and gathering at the U.K. embassy in New York, just being witness to the whole affair. We don’t even realize our own power most times and most days, because we are so stuck in our little over-dramatized daily lives. But we have power, when we build communities. At one point that was the excitement of the internet, that we could build “communities” with people who liked the same dumb shit we did, and feel empowered. But we can take that to our non-digital lives as well, and build community in that sense.
So with that, although it has nothing to do with any of this world-changing, I ask you to go preview my book Football Metaphysics for Enlightened Degenerates. It is entertaining as fuck, but also deeply peppered with real shit, with secret positives and thick tangents that “undermine the social order” as the Russian judge told Pussy Riot in court. And I want you to buy it, because if I could do this shit from home, I could grow pigs and goats and a garden and fuck around with my kids and build a more fulfilling crazier life for myself. But that ain’t crazy at all, because that’s what I was wired to do, how I was born to live. And I can tell you this about the book, it’s more than worth $4 for what you’ll get out of it. You’ve spent $4 on much dumber shit in the past week, guaranteed. But it’s also the first book in the Workingman Books attempt at something, which is not meant to be a business at all. I could give a fuck about building a business. I’ve had my own business before – businesses suck. I want freedom, not business. And the idea behind Workingman Books is to just throw these things out there. On the surface, a football book is just a stupid football book. But anybody who’s ever read more than a little of my writing knows that what I write about is not often what it looks like I’m writing about. You can’t undermine social orders by being obvious, or you end up like the bread thief. I hope Workingman grows into a thousand authors doing a thousand crazy things, all for the financial benefit of themselves, but more importantly for the larger benefit of their communities. Seriously, fuck money. I mean I feel I deserve $4 for what you’d get, but if you didn’t want to pay it because you’re like, “whatever,” I ain’t gonna get all indignant. Fuck the entitlement of the creative class, that feels the capitalist system somehow needs to reward them for their creativity. Your creativity rewards what feels the benefits from it, and that bounces back on you. So if you find a way to bootleg my book, go ahead. You’re only taking a potential $4 from me, and if you ain’t got that $4, fine. In fact, if you don’t have that $4 and want the book and are a Rojonekku fan and are reading this, email me and let me know. Seriously. I’ll give you the book. Just tell me what’s up. I’m not looking ever in my life to be some strict asshole ruling the value of my words with an iron legal fist. Fuck that. Anybody can do what I do. I am not saying what I do is not done in a very special way, but shit man, any kid could sink into his brain like I did and end up right here, mixing and matching the same grand ideas and obscure references and a thousand tangents into a solar burst of creativity. I see my own children already developing this. But they develop this because they are exposed to it.
So yeah, it’s crazy times in this world, but it’s also exciting. New things are going to take place of the old, and it’s not going to be the End of the World, as the Mayan calendar (and them dudes were tapped into them alien motherfuckers with the pyramids) predicted a great change. There’s going to be a big shift in thinking. The few who are still pushing this ownership idea to the max, because they sit at the top of that legal “right” (which again, has nothing to do with actual right in a moral sense), they’ll fight change until the whole thing caves in on them like earthquake rubble. They will. And it’s gonna suck.
But within that, we can build our own shit, anywhere we want, figuratively and literally. That’s what Workingman is already, and will continue to be. That’s what Football Metaphysics is about. Shit man, that’s what my every day is about. I want this shit to make it so we can be together better, me and you, all over the place. I want this to enable us sitting together in strange places, sharing our wild ideas. Because the world is fucked. And we ain’t go no other worlds, so we might as well unfuck this one. And in a world where almost anything you can think of has already been done three times over, all that’s left to be done is undoing what’s been done wrong. So fuck it, let’s unfuck the world.
Seems like some wacky shit going on worldwide, what with the Israeli build-up towards war with Iran, and the Julian Assange asylum brouhaha, not to mention all the crazy surveillance state shit like Trapwire and the indeterminate detention of American citizens without charges as authorized by NDAA. And it’s all inter-related too. Seems like the United States and its two main homeboys in the U.K. and Israel are really making a grand stand grab at things, which I think the rest of the world may stand against. Hard to say, and I am not geo-political expert by any means, though I did play the fuck out of Sid Meier’s Civilization IV. Strange times lay ahead, probably full of conflict and war, and perhaps that starts trickling into our American life a little more. Perhaps not. I’m not entirely concerned.
It can be easy to get caught up in fear and worry, which is exactly what tends to happen during recent American Presidential election years, where both sides fear the cataclysmic catastrophes that await should the other side win. Guess what? They’re both right. And yet, they’re both wrong at the same time, because I’ve come to realize America is not this Great Ominous Evil power I used to think it was. It is a giant self-important bureaucracy, and basically operated like a corporation to a certain extent. And like any self-important bureaucratic corporate entity, it is becoming dilapidated, weakened, eaten from within by cancerous philosophies, and will eventually cave in on itself. That is not a bad thing. All governments should cave in on themselves every hundred years or so, because nothing works forever. Though it will be chaotic for who knows how long, we’d all be better off with a new infusion of ideas and ways of running things in our taxed and strained American system.
Oddly enough, I feel more clear-headed than ever, and have actually been reading a lot of economic theory type bullshit, as I’ve always been the standard contrarian who is like, “Capitalism is bad,” but never really had any science. Watching a number of Slavoj Zizek speeches, where he says some things but seems also to just try to rile people up in pure contrarian manner, it made me want to better understand the source of things and less trust what someone tells me. So I did some reading.
Guess what? Capitalism is on some bullshit. You take normal hunt and gather survival, add the abstract concept of money (which is a good idea usually, to create a standard for trade), and then tweak the system to that each little part of the overall culture produces constantly in order to consume constantly items outside of their microcosm, and allegedly we are made wealthier because we have more shit. The problem is, we don’t need all that shit; we just have this desire to want all that shit. Getting it does not solve the want, because automatically there is a new want. We are not wanting what we buy, we are wanting the moment of buying it, thus we’re never happy. It’s like the people who are hungry for McDonalds and eat it but get no nutrition so keep eating and eating and eating. I know the internet be making fun of people like that, but we’re all like that, whether our McDonald’s is smart phones or downloading music or eating at restaurants or whatever. It’s been bred into our psychology.
That is another thing that bothers me, is that I don’t think it is bred so much as it is a natural chemical reaction in our brains. Thus, a lot of advertising triggers for purchasing goods are not so much great campaigns at convincing you to buy something as they are great experimental activations of chemical reactions inside your body. Psychology, we will find, is something we can heal and repair but not something we can control as much as we think. That’s not to say shit like therapy is not helpful in repairing broken physical mechanisms in our brain, but it’s not the way we think.
So as you might be able to tell I’ve been reading a lot of neurophilosophy bullshit as well, as there are a lot of studies relying on functional MRI to prove some of the things I mention above, and yet fMRI assumes that brain functions are limited to parts of the brain, rather than the whole, and that the part that lights up in an fMRI is the one being used for certain tasks.
This brings me to why I feel so excited and am not afraid, because just like that misleading functional MRI, so goes people. If a man steals a loaf of bread, that is obvious, and he can be caught and punished. If a group through the cyberwebs shares music and books and such through a torrent, it is not one basic act that is obvious, but a multitude of tiny parts of the act that is split upon a myriad of separate computers. That is an action of the collective, or whole, and that is how many neurophilosophers feel the human brain probably works, not in individual parts like a machine. After all we are not machines, we are complex organic matter. That is like a torrent.
It’s something I’ve thought about a lot as I’ve chunked this first book called Football Metaphysics into the internet’s great vagina of nonsense, is how do I feel about what I have written being considered my work, in a sense no one else should ever be able to see it without paying me a fee. And honestly, I’m still working through this, because I have been trained culturally to feel I deserve to be rewarded for my ideas put into words, and there is some truth to it. I physically did the work. But at the same time, I cannot be attached to ownership of my ideas. Most all ideas have been thought somewhere by somebody in this post-modern world, and ultimately a sort of “open source” exchange of these works seems like it might not be a direction we should ignore completely. I mean, I want to be able to provide for my stupid bills through my writing, and not have to pretend to care about the other jobs that have filled my working life, but at the same time, I want to share my mad way of putting words together just as much. And if I am only selling my work, especially in an e-publishing format, I’m eliminating a big part of what I would hope to be my community.
And just as the individual thief can be punished, but the collective acting anonymously cannot, the individual activist or revolutionary (god that word fucking sucks now) or let’s just say the individual person trying to enact unapproved change, he can easily be assassinated or jailed or disappeared by authorities. Make no mistake about it, the authorities have the legal ability to do that according to many things brought into law by our last two Presidents of these American states, and legal has jackshit to do with right or wrong. Anybody who thinks the law is a matter of right and wrong has not lived enough in real life. But the group acting collectively, they can accomplish more than the individual, especially if the power structure is lacking traditional power structure that can easily be beheaded.
That’s why I’ve been loving the activity of Anonymous, gathering at the Ecuadorian embassy in London, and gathering at the U.K. embassy in New York, just being witness to the whole affair. We don’t even realize our own power most times and most days, because we are so stuck in our little over-dramatized daily lives. But we have power, when we build communities. At one point that was the excitement of the internet, that we could build “communities” with people who liked the same dumb shit we did, and feel empowered. But we can take that to our non-digital lives as well, and build community in that sense.
So with that, although it has nothing to do with any of this world-changing, I ask you to go preview my book Football Metaphysics for Enlightened Degenerates. It is entertaining as fuck, but also deeply peppered with real shit, with secret positives and thick tangents that “undermine the social order” as the Russian judge told Pussy Riot in court. And I want you to buy it, because if I could do this shit from home, I could grow pigs and goats and a garden and fuck around with my kids and build a more fulfilling crazier life for myself. But that ain’t crazy at all, because that’s what I was wired to do, how I was born to live. And I can tell you this about the book, it’s more than worth $4 for what you’ll get out of it. You’ve spent $4 on much dumber shit in the past week, guaranteed. But it’s also the first book in the Workingman Books attempt at something, which is not meant to be a business at all. I could give a fuck about building a business. I’ve had my own business before – businesses suck. I want freedom, not business. And the idea behind Workingman Books is to just throw these things out there. On the surface, a football book is just a stupid football book. But anybody who’s ever read more than a little of my writing knows that what I write about is not often what it looks like I’m writing about. You can’t undermine social orders by being obvious, or you end up like the bread thief. I hope Workingman grows into a thousand authors doing a thousand crazy things, all for the financial benefit of themselves, but more importantly for the larger benefit of their communities. Seriously, fuck money. I mean I feel I deserve $4 for what you’d get, but if you didn’t want to pay it because you’re like, “whatever,” I ain’t gonna get all indignant. Fuck the entitlement of the creative class, that feels the capitalist system somehow needs to reward them for their creativity. Your creativity rewards what feels the benefits from it, and that bounces back on you. So if you find a way to bootleg my book, go ahead. You’re only taking a potential $4 from me, and if you ain’t got that $4, fine. In fact, if you don’t have that $4 and want the book and are a Rojonekku fan and are reading this, email me and let me know. Seriously. I’ll give you the book. Just tell me what’s up. I’m not looking ever in my life to be some strict asshole ruling the value of my words with an iron legal fist. Fuck that. Anybody can do what I do. I am not saying what I do is not done in a very special way, but shit man, any kid could sink into his brain like I did and end up right here, mixing and matching the same grand ideas and obscure references and a thousand tangents into a solar burst of creativity. I see my own children already developing this. But they develop this because they are exposed to it.
So yeah, it’s crazy times in this world, but it’s also exciting. New things are going to take place of the old, and it’s not going to be the End of the World, as the Mayan calendar (and them dudes were tapped into them alien motherfuckers with the pyramids) predicted a great change. There’s going to be a big shift in thinking. The few who are still pushing this ownership idea to the max, because they sit at the top of that legal “right” (which again, has nothing to do with actual right in a moral sense), they’ll fight change until the whole thing caves in on them like earthquake rubble. They will. And it’s gonna suck.
But within that, we can build our own shit, anywhere we want, figuratively and literally. That’s what Workingman is already, and will continue to be. That’s what Football Metaphysics is about. Shit man, that’s what my every day is about. I want this shit to make it so we can be together better, me and you, all over the place. I want this to enable us sitting together in strange places, sharing our wild ideas. Because the world is fucked. And we ain’t go no other worlds, so we might as well unfuck this one. And in a world where almost anything you can think of has already been done three times over, all that’s left to be done is undoing what’s been done wrong. So fuck it, let’s unfuck the world.
Tuesday, August 14
My Football Metaphysics book
FOOTBALL METAPHYSICS FOR ENLIGHTENED DEGENERATES at Amazon
FOOTBALL METAPHYSICS FOR ENLIGHTENED DEGENERATES at Smashwords
Amazon will have the necessary apps to make it work on all your devices of time waste, not just a kindle. There are versions available that work for your kindles and nooks and crannies and Sonybots and tabloids and even your iPads and iPhones (with the Stanza app), but you can even get a pdf at the Smashwords link and look at it on your computer or print to old-fashioned rolling papyrus if you’d like to put a fat binder clip on it and leave it on the peach crate by the toilet. It’s a good 140-pages printed out single-spaced in 10-point font though, so there’s no lack of content. Aside from a long-winded overview of the project where I explain how the NFL has only about ten years at most of actual awesomeness left in it, for each and every team, I cover the following items: an overview of the team, pertinent data regarding last season and this one, most important games, each team’s individual trendsetter and spirit warrior, the coach/QB situation, their team elders, and scrappy Rudy, and assorted other player info, which includes but is not limited to historical information on the team and the city they are located in. Additionally, you’ll get psychic analysis as to the metaphysical force of each team in relation to the NFL’s entire history, as well as the past decade, and I’ve deduced not only each team’s best case scenario, but have a solid finger on what will go down this coming season.
And yet, even if you don’t like football, even if you are a woman who thinks pro football is the dumbest crap that ever existed, you will find immense joy in this offering of mine. This is because of my traditional Rojonekku style of writing, which is designed as a decoy, where beautiful life truths are buried in what looks to be just some dumb football shit. If we revealed the truths about the society around us out and in the open, those who monitor our interactions would stifle the real talk. That’s why I affectionately call it “nonsense gibberish” because it is akin to speaking in tongues that the devils don’t understand, like when I was a little boy in a snake-handling Pentecostal church in rural Rice, Virginia. This Rojonekku style is a lol-heavy sugar-coating on deep spiritual truths, so that we can feel like we are moving in a better direction as a group, without being some super-serious asshole about it. You know what is serious business? Nothing, because business is a joke and money is an abstraction and how can you expect me to take an abstraction seriously when it can’t bite or burn me? Wait, I’m getting sidetracked here…
This Football Metaphysic for Enlightened Degenerates is also my first offering from the Workingman Books collective press chaos factory doohickey/donthickey thing that I have chopped together in the crock pot of various co-conspirators minds, and it is fermenting away as we speak, into something that will give us greater gut intuition to enjoy the world around us, and be healthier on the inside, where are brain funks and chest clenches are. That is the hope. And this is the first offering, and I hope that you will support it, and that you will find it abundant in bringing you joy and spirit inside a dark and crooked world.
Sunday, August 12
Football Metaphysics for Enlightened Degenerates
Friday, August 3
WEEKLY FRYBREAD: football metaphysics on my mind
This week has been a busy one for your homeboy Raven Mack aka Wildbird Johnson aka The Confederate Mack aka Ruben Omega Tercera Acosta aka one thousand aliases. I am diligently whipping myself into psychic frenzies to continue work on the Football Metaphysics for the Enlightened Degenerate e-book, which hopefully should be finalized, formatted, and available for that ass by next Friday. It is fairly insane, and for football fans will be the second greatest text on the NFL ever written since ever, second only to Kenny Stabler’s autobiography. I know that may sound like hyperbole, especially for what is only a preview for a single season of professional football in America, but I’m not lying. If you are not a football fan even, there will be so much great stuff in it that seemingly has nothing to do with football, that you’ll get your money’s worth. I mean, it’s basically metaphysics, which translates from football to making homemade pizza to replacing the alternator on a ’92 Subaru Legacy, if you really think about it.
“Your money’s worth?” you may ask, thinking why would you pay for an e-book when you can read all types of free jibber-jabber on the internet for free? Well, basically fuck you first off. Secondly, nothing on the internet is free because they are trading your data for ads and making money off you. You are the product. And yet also the target audience. Basically, you’re pimped the fuck out online, so I advise you to buy far many more long rambling metaphysical texts to read offline on your personal robot devices. Sure there is the question of what will the poor read, and what will any of us do if the power grid crumbles like it did in India this past week? I don’t know, we can cross those bridges after we’ve burned them.
But make no mistake about it, my Football Metaphysics for the Enlightened Degenerate will be available for you in the near future. Obviously, being it is an NFL preview, there is a short shelf life on it, or so you’d think. I mean there is, but also it’ll be relevant regardless. I’ll probably hype it incessantly for like 10 days, then forget about it, as that is my writing plan at this point, to treat it more like an outsider artist just doing shit and leaving it on the side of the road – The Information Superhighway (remember that?) in this case – for whoever passes along to maybe take interest. I am excited to get to work on my next book as well which will be Raven Mack’s First Book by Raven McMillian. And to start digging into the Confederate Mack collection. And to help teach my 13-year-old daughter typing so we can release her first novel she’s written into a stack of composition books either at the end of this year or beginning of next.
Also performed my first wedding ceremony this week, which went well, I guess. I put such a high expectation on everything that I’m never as good as I hope to be. It’s a double-edge sword, because that relentless drives is pretty good for the creative process when it comes to pushing yourself hard as fuck; but it also can be defeating because you’re never as good as you hoped for, which can easily shift into self-loathing. But whatever.
Basically, not much more to say – no long-winded philosophical meanderings on this or that, as I’m busy at stupid work today and also trying to stay focused on the football stuff in free moments, chipping away in five-minute increments during the day time. But mad shit is cooking. And I actually have already gotten my crap together for the August J.J. Krupert, I just haven’t uploaded the songs to the cyberwebs yet. Does anybody download those songs still? Is anybody here? I guess if I am going to take the outsider artist perspective I shouldn’t ask. I doubt James Harold Jennings was asking people if they were there. But how do you make a blog look like an abandoned schoolbus? Perhaps I should let that percolate in the dark corners of my mind…
“Your money’s worth?” you may ask, thinking why would you pay for an e-book when you can read all types of free jibber-jabber on the internet for free? Well, basically fuck you first off. Secondly, nothing on the internet is free because they are trading your data for ads and making money off you. You are the product. And yet also the target audience. Basically, you’re pimped the fuck out online, so I advise you to buy far many more long rambling metaphysical texts to read offline on your personal robot devices. Sure there is the question of what will the poor read, and what will any of us do if the power grid crumbles like it did in India this past week? I don’t know, we can cross those bridges after we’ve burned them.
But make no mistake about it, my Football Metaphysics for the Enlightened Degenerate will be available for you in the near future. Obviously, being it is an NFL preview, there is a short shelf life on it, or so you’d think. I mean there is, but also it’ll be relevant regardless. I’ll probably hype it incessantly for like 10 days, then forget about it, as that is my writing plan at this point, to treat it more like an outsider artist just doing shit and leaving it on the side of the road – The Information Superhighway (remember that?) in this case – for whoever passes along to maybe take interest. I am excited to get to work on my next book as well which will be Raven Mack’s First Book by Raven McMillian. And to start digging into the Confederate Mack collection. And to help teach my 13-year-old daughter typing so we can release her first novel she’s written into a stack of composition books either at the end of this year or beginning of next.
Also performed my first wedding ceremony this week, which went well, I guess. I put such a high expectation on everything that I’m never as good as I hope to be. It’s a double-edge sword, because that relentless drives is pretty good for the creative process when it comes to pushing yourself hard as fuck; but it also can be defeating because you’re never as good as you hoped for, which can easily shift into self-loathing. But whatever.
Basically, not much more to say – no long-winded philosophical meanderings on this or that, as I’m busy at stupid work today and also trying to stay focused on the football stuff in free moments, chipping away in five-minute increments during the day time. But mad shit is cooking. And I actually have already gotten my crap together for the August J.J. Krupert, I just haven’t uploaded the songs to the cyberwebs yet. Does anybody download those songs still? Is anybody here? I guess if I am going to take the outsider artist perspective I shouldn’t ask. I doubt James Harold Jennings was asking people if they were there. But how do you make a blog look like an abandoned schoolbus? Perhaps I should let that percolate in the dark corners of my mind…
Saturday, July 28
Manifestation Sonnet #0712
ain't no god, no science, just this right here right now
sometimes your savior is the worst choice you could make
expecting spirit jesters to gesture somehow
finding shame in pleasures your senses want to take
same old game, repetitive medieval thinking
"right" and "wrong" illusions make the carrot seem close
slow death procession, self-medicated drinking
syrup from the masters, sipping poison sucrose
I fly from the false laws of gravity and gods
love and death intertwined in my mind as one whole
my homeland's got trick prophets and tesla coil rods
littering the back roads which I routinely roll
but I bury them both behind the horizon
and yet the sunshine rises on more confusion
sometimes your savior is the worst choice you could make
expecting spirit jesters to gesture somehow
finding shame in pleasures your senses want to take
same old game, repetitive medieval thinking
"right" and "wrong" illusions make the carrot seem close
slow death procession, self-medicated drinking
syrup from the masters, sipping poison sucrose
I fly from the false laws of gravity and gods
love and death intertwined in my mind as one whole
my homeland's got trick prophets and tesla coil rods
littering the back roads which I routinely roll
but I bury them both behind the horizon
and yet the sunshine rises on more confusion
Friday, July 27
J.J. Krupert July '12 #1: "Free Born Rambling Man" by David Allan Coe
but I bury them both behind the horizon
and yet the sunshine rises on more confusion
WEEKLY FRYBREAD: the itch of the workingman
Every day is a joyful struggle to find true chill in a world gone hyper, although sometimes it’s not much natural joy involved and an actual pain in the goddamned ass. But we do it, because it’s better than the alternative, which is giving up. I’m not allowed to do that, even as we are in the midst of the bombardment of public relations campaigns for Tweedle-D and Tweedle-R aka The Doe and the Ram, which would make any sane individual want to give up on hope. But The Doe and The Ram are not my spirit animals, so hahahaha, wait a second…
You have to forgive me. At the time of writing this, I just came in from my naked qigong in the field so I’m sort of wired on my shamanic wildman shit. But here is the real deal from the holy fields – I am born Workingman, southern by birth Raven by the grace of god. Born Workingman in the sense I know ladders and calluses and pawn shops and week-to-weeks and so on and so forth. And inside that born Workingman is the blood of the Viking and the fire spirit of the Dragon. I have sailed through the ice and I have sat idly amongst rocks carving characters into cliffs. These things are deeply embedded inside my family tree, deeper than the visible circles my conscious family even realizes. But on the surface of it all, I am a Workingman.
For the Southern American Earthly Workingman, life is just that – motherfucking work. The higher castes jerk the yoke chains, and we move left or move right as necessary to loosen the chokehold on our short life. All of the movements are not necessarily our heart’s wants and wishes come to expression, but simple acts of survival and self-preservation. There are those amongst you who consider your minds opened, and you will judge the jerky right or left motions of the Workingman, but you don’t always understand. You don’t always try to understand.
I’m not here to be that. Honestly I could give a fuck if you ever understood the Workingman at all, because then all that’d mean is you’d gentrify trailer parks and rural wastelands as quickly and happily as you gentrify the ghettos, and then we’d be as displaced as the rest. At least as stereotypical mountain goat people, you leave us to our dark corners, at times, to ferment in our own madness. And I don’t fault you for doing what you do. We all only know what we think we know, so I guess the key is to not think you know so much all the time. I try to do that, but am not perfect, which is obvious especially if you saw what I was born from, deeply fermented during my formative years in that rural madness.
Of course, that madness breeds philosophies that if they read these words, they’d be like, “Man, this is some bullshit. What the fuck is wrong with you, Raven?” But I’m not shooting words at them right now – I do that on my real foot path. I am shooting words at you because you are the one that is here to read whatever the fuck I am saying.
So what am I saying?
I don’t know yet. I might not never know it. But I’m going to scratch at it, and the forum for that is going to be Workingman Books. That might already be something, or it might not. Shit man, everything’s been thought of by now in this greatly clustered post-modern world, and I’m not really concerned with intellectual properties or copyright infringements or whatnot, mostly because that is not my world anyways. That is the world of those that jerk the yokes, not those like me that work the ground. But I am going to use Workingman Books as the format for the scratching at It, from here on. This will start in the next two weeks with some sort of football preview (called Football Metaphysics for the Enlightened Degenerate), and will expand from there with my first “philosophical” treatise, which sounds douchebaggy as hell, but I’m not sure at this point what else to call it. I will figure it out along the way.
Now let me be clear about this – it’s sort of a business plan but without any real business plan to it. I am going to be saying, “Hey, why don’t you give me $3 for this thing?” and you can do it or you can not do it. I certainly understand the thought that there’s a zillion words of free content available to you inside the internet. But I also understand there is a cartel of web habits behind that façade of freedom that you are paying for without realizing. I also realize that most all of us that would have enough internet access to be reading this easily spend $3 on a cup of coffee or bottle of soda waters or hunk of food that leaves us dissatisfied often enough that giving me $3 should not seem such a trifling burden upon your soul. And if it is, so be it. I can handle that. I do not give a fuck if you support me or not. I’d hope if you got here we are together in some line of thinking, so I hope you do, but I’m not gonna stress myself out over it. It will be here for you whether you want it or not.
My hope though is not to follow the American Dream lies of financial success through alternative means. Fuck financial success as a dream. I want freedom from the bullshit, and I have this strange suspicions that the carrot-key of wealth dangled in front of my face all the goddamned time may not necessarily unlock the gate the way I’m hoping. Thus, Workingman Books will start out as me, but I’m hoping to add people to what it is, and have it be more than one man, or one book, or one this or that. An important shift in thinking I try to stress to myself is if you are part of a “revolution” as a head of it, that head is easy to decapitate. And if it is not decapitated, and a “revolution” is successful, history has shown 100 times out of 100 that the revolting forces end up repeating the same corruption of power. It’s human nature, called self-preservation, and it’s deep enough in our DNA that even the purest of hearts can’t escape the eventual symptoms of it.
So I try to keep the focus on a headless, fluid entity. Sure the first few Workingman Books things will have one of my thousand aliases as the author, but the hope is it will bloom like bacteria into a group, and then if I disappear or die or whatever, the thing itself still exists. So it starts out by me, in the traditional sense, but it is for us, eventually, at least whoever ends up wanting that us to be.
I understand the shifting consciousness on a personal level very well, and understand self-preservation. And if we break down ownership and heritage, in the direct paternal sense, I have done a lot of shifting my own consciousness to persevere. My grandfather I share a first name with I never knew. I don’t even know what he did for a living, other than he was a Scout troop in both World War II and Korea, and he saw some things, and he drank heavily, and was a violently stubborn man. I was told – and I felt so proud of this at the time I found out years ago, and still am to be honest – that he would always wear brown work pants and a white t-shirt and sit on a stump in the yard drinking Black Label. Always. He also was given a furniture set by one of my grandmother’s siblings, who felt bad about my grandparents financial situation, and my grandfather said he didn’t want it. The sibling insisted, so my grandfather said, “It’s mine? To do what I want? And you won’t take it back?” and he then dragged it in the yard and set it on fire. There’s something very obviously metaphorical about that, and it’s definitely very McMillian of him. He died at age 46.
My father also lived hard on the self-medication tip. There was bad about him in our relationship, as his only son, but there was good as well. I’m not here for therapy so let’s just leave it at the man was an amazing Spirit Warrior and taught me psychic swordplay styles that no one else could have. He died at age 47, and has a chainsaw graphic etched onto his grave marker.
So my personal shifting of consciousness the past two years involved at least eliminating factory alcohol from my life, and again, this is not therapy, and I’m no teetotaler who gives a fuck what anyone else does. I did not find sobriety through Jesus, and do not quiver in fear if a cooler full of cold ones is at the end of the picnic table. But I had to shift the way I thought about a lot of things, and not to become some sort of lame ass bitch, but to persevere, and see myself making it past those mid-40s ages of my father and grandfather. Perhaps I’m sexist, but I feel the paternal blood in a man is strong, so you should respect it. But you should not be ruled by it, because then I wouldn’t be a very good theoretical metaphysicist, would I? And though they were both Workingmen, or at least drunkards, both my father and grandfather were theoretical metaphysicists. My grandfather found it in the Buddha in his Asian tours of duty, and my father was a raw visionary, uneducated psychonaut from the fertile nonsense of the early ‘70s, post-Woodstock. And yet they were both very severely small town Southern men, born to die tragically, like all good Southern men. It is our way.
So I do not deny that destiny, nor do I deny my Workingman nature, even my natural drunkard mind. It’s all in there. But I am not going to let it control me, and I am not going to channel it into someone else’s benefit by way of religious sidetracks or falling into that American Dream trap where I replace what’s missing with something else new and shiny and still missing It. I am after It, not stuff, and the reason the self-medication is so high amongst the wretched of the earth is that they are missing It, and the ways they are misled to think they achieve It – through financial reward for hard work – that doesn’t exist. So they try to side-step that false broken system with self-medication. I can’t blame anyone for that. I don’t regret my own times in that mode. But one of the root realities for every Workingman is that the self-medicated weekend, even if you call in sick on a Monday morning, it eventually has to come to an end, and you’ve got to sober up enough to get back to work. And if the promises of financial reward for hard work is all a sham pyramid con anyways, then ultimately you have to figure out what you are truly working for. And I am working for It – that great big unexplainable set of truths the world camouflages behind a thousand dazzling diversions. And all you can do is scratch at it, like a fucking prisoner with a stolen spoon, scraping at the concrete under the cover of darkness, hoping to one day find your way through the bullshit that entraps you. So I am going to start scratching, again, as a Workingman.
The Workingman concept itself was brainstormed into my mind by my boy Boogie Brown, who always called his self-released CDs Workingman Records, which apparently was something that existed, so he called it Wreck Chords. I have a t-shirt he gave me once that says “low budget music for low budget people” and that made sense, and is why it is on the sidebar of this site and has been since the beginning. It is low budget art for low budget people. Industries have been built from all the arts, and I actually read some article the other day where a writer was complaining about the e-publishing movement because he was having a hard time staying a professional writer in the capacity he’d known for two decades. He called what he did “a professional maker of culture,” which I thought was the most godawful, ridiculous bullshit to say ever. Writing, music, art, culture – it just is what it is, and is born from people doing what the fuck they were born to do. You do it, whether you want to or not, like breathing or fucking or fighting or eating when you’re hungry. So that is what Workingman Books will be. In all likelihood it’ll be ugly, funny, the greatest thing you’ve ever seen, and completely ridiculous bullshit, perhaps all within a single paragraph. But it’s gonna be scratching the whole time. And we can see together what we uncover. And if we don’t uncover a damn thing, then so be it; hopefully we will have a wild time in the process.
So you know, I actually bought the domain name too, because I knew if I wrote about it, some asshole who respected the legal entities of ownership more than actually doing anything would buy that shit up right away. Workingman.com already exists as some hopeless job site, and workingman.net, which is what I really wanted, is owned but not operated, and sitting there waiting for somebody to make an offer. Fuck making an offer. I don’t make offers, I scratch at the truth.
Oddly enough, workingmanbooks.com is already owned too, again not operated and just sitting there waiting for someone caught up in the notion of “I have to have this!” to make an offer. So I bought workingmanbooks.net, which in itself was a hassle because the domain registrar I’ve traditionally used has been bought by some other registrar, and they complicate it enough to squeeze additional payments out of whatever it is you build with the name you choose to attach to your scratching at It. Because they are stuck in the ownership mode, where people own their brand and own their name and will pay every extra dollar they can to protect it. Meanwhile, I don’t give a fuck.
I did actually prefer the .net suffix anyways, as I am thinking of this long-term as a means for whoever gets involved to self-publish whatever the fuck they come up with, as part of this collective, but keep their individual rights and ideas and not let bullshit business sense get in the way. Thus a .com or commercial site didn’t make me feel right. And though I guess .net is for internet or network or whatever, in my mind I can say to you it is Workingman Books dot Net, because we are trying to catch something real.
So there it is. I hope in the next few months you will support it with your input, perhaps your involvement. I hope you will support it by sharing the info or hollering at me at the myriad of methods in the sidebar, or just even if you at least roll your eyeballs over it and let it percolate and either laugh at something stupid or think on something angled funny or do whatever the fuck it is that would make you feel good with it, that’s good.
There’s a shit ton of strange things going on this day and age, and perhaps we are hyper-aware because of technology, and perhaps we are hyper-unaware because of technology. But I truly believe there is a major shifting of consciousness going on, perhaps underneath the surface, hopefully at the ground level, eventually with the obvious Workingman. Shit is changing. The old ways are broken and there’s no amount of psychic financial duct tape they can patch over it to prove it not broken. Shit is straight up broken, bro. And being they got all these ownership issues with everything, I’ve got no reason to try and put my mind to fixing it. Nor should you. Fuck gentrifying this system, because a fresh coat of pastel paint over the whole thing is not going to make it not broken, not busted, and ultimately worthless.
So come with me and let’s do this other thing. I make no promises. I’m just a dude, scratching at It like all the rest. I don’t pretend to know the answers. I do know this is what I do, and I could lump myself in with everyone else who is a writer with a site and a long con and a freelance hustle, but that ain’t me. I am a lifelong Workingman, born from the broke but not broken, infused with Viking blood and charged with T’ang Dragon spirit. I am one in a million, and yet there are millions like me. We are all It. We just don’t fucking know it, because we get stress exhausted by all this other crap, but we are It. We just need to keep scratching at It, to realize that shit.
Word the fuck up yall.
You have to forgive me. At the time of writing this, I just came in from my naked qigong in the field so I’m sort of wired on my shamanic wildman shit. But here is the real deal from the holy fields – I am born Workingman, southern by birth Raven by the grace of god. Born Workingman in the sense I know ladders and calluses and pawn shops and week-to-weeks and so on and so forth. And inside that born Workingman is the blood of the Viking and the fire spirit of the Dragon. I have sailed through the ice and I have sat idly amongst rocks carving characters into cliffs. These things are deeply embedded inside my family tree, deeper than the visible circles my conscious family even realizes. But on the surface of it all, I am a Workingman.
For the Southern American Earthly Workingman, life is just that – motherfucking work. The higher castes jerk the yoke chains, and we move left or move right as necessary to loosen the chokehold on our short life. All of the movements are not necessarily our heart’s wants and wishes come to expression, but simple acts of survival and self-preservation. There are those amongst you who consider your minds opened, and you will judge the jerky right or left motions of the Workingman, but you don’t always understand. You don’t always try to understand.
I’m not here to be that. Honestly I could give a fuck if you ever understood the Workingman at all, because then all that’d mean is you’d gentrify trailer parks and rural wastelands as quickly and happily as you gentrify the ghettos, and then we’d be as displaced as the rest. At least as stereotypical mountain goat people, you leave us to our dark corners, at times, to ferment in our own madness. And I don’t fault you for doing what you do. We all only know what we think we know, so I guess the key is to not think you know so much all the time. I try to do that, but am not perfect, which is obvious especially if you saw what I was born from, deeply fermented during my formative years in that rural madness.
Of course, that madness breeds philosophies that if they read these words, they’d be like, “Man, this is some bullshit. What the fuck is wrong with you, Raven?” But I’m not shooting words at them right now – I do that on my real foot path. I am shooting words at you because you are the one that is here to read whatever the fuck I am saying.
So what am I saying?
I don’t know yet. I might not never know it. But I’m going to scratch at it, and the forum for that is going to be Workingman Books. That might already be something, or it might not. Shit man, everything’s been thought of by now in this greatly clustered post-modern world, and I’m not really concerned with intellectual properties or copyright infringements or whatnot, mostly because that is not my world anyways. That is the world of those that jerk the yokes, not those like me that work the ground. But I am going to use Workingman Books as the format for the scratching at It, from here on. This will start in the next two weeks with some sort of football preview (called Football Metaphysics for the Enlightened Degenerate), and will expand from there with my first “philosophical” treatise, which sounds douchebaggy as hell, but I’m not sure at this point what else to call it. I will figure it out along the way.
Now let me be clear about this – it’s sort of a business plan but without any real business plan to it. I am going to be saying, “Hey, why don’t you give me $3 for this thing?” and you can do it or you can not do it. I certainly understand the thought that there’s a zillion words of free content available to you inside the internet. But I also understand there is a cartel of web habits behind that façade of freedom that you are paying for without realizing. I also realize that most all of us that would have enough internet access to be reading this easily spend $3 on a cup of coffee or bottle of soda waters or hunk of food that leaves us dissatisfied often enough that giving me $3 should not seem such a trifling burden upon your soul. And if it is, so be it. I can handle that. I do not give a fuck if you support me or not. I’d hope if you got here we are together in some line of thinking, so I hope you do, but I’m not gonna stress myself out over it. It will be here for you whether you want it or not.
My hope though is not to follow the American Dream lies of financial success through alternative means. Fuck financial success as a dream. I want freedom from the bullshit, and I have this strange suspicions that the carrot-key of wealth dangled in front of my face all the goddamned time may not necessarily unlock the gate the way I’m hoping. Thus, Workingman Books will start out as me, but I’m hoping to add people to what it is, and have it be more than one man, or one book, or one this or that. An important shift in thinking I try to stress to myself is if you are part of a “revolution” as a head of it, that head is easy to decapitate. And if it is not decapitated, and a “revolution” is successful, history has shown 100 times out of 100 that the revolting forces end up repeating the same corruption of power. It’s human nature, called self-preservation, and it’s deep enough in our DNA that even the purest of hearts can’t escape the eventual symptoms of it.
So I try to keep the focus on a headless, fluid entity. Sure the first few Workingman Books things will have one of my thousand aliases as the author, but the hope is it will bloom like bacteria into a group, and then if I disappear or die or whatever, the thing itself still exists. So it starts out by me, in the traditional sense, but it is for us, eventually, at least whoever ends up wanting that us to be.
I understand the shifting consciousness on a personal level very well, and understand self-preservation. And if we break down ownership and heritage, in the direct paternal sense, I have done a lot of shifting my own consciousness to persevere. My grandfather I share a first name with I never knew. I don’t even know what he did for a living, other than he was a Scout troop in both World War II and Korea, and he saw some things, and he drank heavily, and was a violently stubborn man. I was told – and I felt so proud of this at the time I found out years ago, and still am to be honest – that he would always wear brown work pants and a white t-shirt and sit on a stump in the yard drinking Black Label. Always. He also was given a furniture set by one of my grandmother’s siblings, who felt bad about my grandparents financial situation, and my grandfather said he didn’t want it. The sibling insisted, so my grandfather said, “It’s mine? To do what I want? And you won’t take it back?” and he then dragged it in the yard and set it on fire. There’s something very obviously metaphorical about that, and it’s definitely very McMillian of him. He died at age 46.
My father also lived hard on the self-medication tip. There was bad about him in our relationship, as his only son, but there was good as well. I’m not here for therapy so let’s just leave it at the man was an amazing Spirit Warrior and taught me psychic swordplay styles that no one else could have. He died at age 47, and has a chainsaw graphic etched onto his grave marker.
So my personal shifting of consciousness the past two years involved at least eliminating factory alcohol from my life, and again, this is not therapy, and I’m no teetotaler who gives a fuck what anyone else does. I did not find sobriety through Jesus, and do not quiver in fear if a cooler full of cold ones is at the end of the picnic table. But I had to shift the way I thought about a lot of things, and not to become some sort of lame ass bitch, but to persevere, and see myself making it past those mid-40s ages of my father and grandfather. Perhaps I’m sexist, but I feel the paternal blood in a man is strong, so you should respect it. But you should not be ruled by it, because then I wouldn’t be a very good theoretical metaphysicist, would I? And though they were both Workingmen, or at least drunkards, both my father and grandfather were theoretical metaphysicists. My grandfather found it in the Buddha in his Asian tours of duty, and my father was a raw visionary, uneducated psychonaut from the fertile nonsense of the early ‘70s, post-Woodstock. And yet they were both very severely small town Southern men, born to die tragically, like all good Southern men. It is our way.
So I do not deny that destiny, nor do I deny my Workingman nature, even my natural drunkard mind. It’s all in there. But I am not going to let it control me, and I am not going to channel it into someone else’s benefit by way of religious sidetracks or falling into that American Dream trap where I replace what’s missing with something else new and shiny and still missing It. I am after It, not stuff, and the reason the self-medication is so high amongst the wretched of the earth is that they are missing It, and the ways they are misled to think they achieve It – through financial reward for hard work – that doesn’t exist. So they try to side-step that false broken system with self-medication. I can’t blame anyone for that. I don’t regret my own times in that mode. But one of the root realities for every Workingman is that the self-medicated weekend, even if you call in sick on a Monday morning, it eventually has to come to an end, and you’ve got to sober up enough to get back to work. And if the promises of financial reward for hard work is all a sham pyramid con anyways, then ultimately you have to figure out what you are truly working for. And I am working for It – that great big unexplainable set of truths the world camouflages behind a thousand dazzling diversions. And all you can do is scratch at it, like a fucking prisoner with a stolen spoon, scraping at the concrete under the cover of darkness, hoping to one day find your way through the bullshit that entraps you. So I am going to start scratching, again, as a Workingman.
The Workingman concept itself was brainstormed into my mind by my boy Boogie Brown, who always called his self-released CDs Workingman Records, which apparently was something that existed, so he called it Wreck Chords. I have a t-shirt he gave me once that says “low budget music for low budget people” and that made sense, and is why it is on the sidebar of this site and has been since the beginning. It is low budget art for low budget people. Industries have been built from all the arts, and I actually read some article the other day where a writer was complaining about the e-publishing movement because he was having a hard time staying a professional writer in the capacity he’d known for two decades. He called what he did “a professional maker of culture,” which I thought was the most godawful, ridiculous bullshit to say ever. Writing, music, art, culture – it just is what it is, and is born from people doing what the fuck they were born to do. You do it, whether you want to or not, like breathing or fucking or fighting or eating when you’re hungry. So that is what Workingman Books will be. In all likelihood it’ll be ugly, funny, the greatest thing you’ve ever seen, and completely ridiculous bullshit, perhaps all within a single paragraph. But it’s gonna be scratching the whole time. And we can see together what we uncover. And if we don’t uncover a damn thing, then so be it; hopefully we will have a wild time in the process.
So you know, I actually bought the domain name too, because I knew if I wrote about it, some asshole who respected the legal entities of ownership more than actually doing anything would buy that shit up right away. Workingman.com already exists as some hopeless job site, and workingman.net, which is what I really wanted, is owned but not operated, and sitting there waiting for somebody to make an offer. Fuck making an offer. I don’t make offers, I scratch at the truth.
Oddly enough, workingmanbooks.com is already owned too, again not operated and just sitting there waiting for someone caught up in the notion of “I have to have this!” to make an offer. So I bought workingmanbooks.net, which in itself was a hassle because the domain registrar I’ve traditionally used has been bought by some other registrar, and they complicate it enough to squeeze additional payments out of whatever it is you build with the name you choose to attach to your scratching at It. Because they are stuck in the ownership mode, where people own their brand and own their name and will pay every extra dollar they can to protect it. Meanwhile, I don’t give a fuck.
I did actually prefer the .net suffix anyways, as I am thinking of this long-term as a means for whoever gets involved to self-publish whatever the fuck they come up with, as part of this collective, but keep their individual rights and ideas and not let bullshit business sense get in the way. Thus a .com or commercial site didn’t make me feel right. And though I guess .net is for internet or network or whatever, in my mind I can say to you it is Workingman Books dot Net, because we are trying to catch something real.
So there it is. I hope in the next few months you will support it with your input, perhaps your involvement. I hope you will support it by sharing the info or hollering at me at the myriad of methods in the sidebar, or just even if you at least roll your eyeballs over it and let it percolate and either laugh at something stupid or think on something angled funny or do whatever the fuck it is that would make you feel good with it, that’s good.
There’s a shit ton of strange things going on this day and age, and perhaps we are hyper-aware because of technology, and perhaps we are hyper-unaware because of technology. But I truly believe there is a major shifting of consciousness going on, perhaps underneath the surface, hopefully at the ground level, eventually with the obvious Workingman. Shit is changing. The old ways are broken and there’s no amount of psychic financial duct tape they can patch over it to prove it not broken. Shit is straight up broken, bro. And being they got all these ownership issues with everything, I’ve got no reason to try and put my mind to fixing it. Nor should you. Fuck gentrifying this system, because a fresh coat of pastel paint over the whole thing is not going to make it not broken, not busted, and ultimately worthless.
So come with me and let’s do this other thing. I make no promises. I’m just a dude, scratching at It like all the rest. I don’t pretend to know the answers. I do know this is what I do, and I could lump myself in with everyone else who is a writer with a site and a long con and a freelance hustle, but that ain’t me. I am a lifelong Workingman, born from the broke but not broken, infused with Viking blood and charged with T’ang Dragon spirit. I am one in a million, and yet there are millions like me. We are all It. We just don’t fucking know it, because we get stress exhausted by all this other crap, but we are It. We just need to keep scratching at It, to realize that shit.
Word the fuck up yall.
Thursday, July 26
Wednesday, July 25
Sunday, July 22
Saturday, July 21
Friday, July 20
WEEKLY FRYBREAD: shifting forward
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.)
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.)
Thursday, July 19
Wednesday, July 18
Tuesday, July 17
Monday, July 16
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