May the One

polysyllabic motherfuckers think they smart

flaunting they over-education like big dicks,

acting like logic be straight brain acts with no heart

involved, no regular ass dude skill to see tricks

as they played out; these cats think they got extra-wise

analytical abilities through degrees

obtained as they daddy’s money gets recognized

into next layer of MDs and PhDs,

then they learn to forget privilege pre-ordained

and explain they success as hard work diligence,

but bitch, dig a ditch for dollars then come complain

about how people be lacking intelligence;

talk big word solutions to all the shit you want,

but you ain’t solved shit for real, just talking to flaunt.

dumb done got dumber, ain’t no doubt about that fact,

but smart done gone downhill too at a steeper dip;

we all internetted up, let like minds attract,

full of self-import like we genius for the hip,

properly inclined, tuned in through the constant buzz,

mocking ignorant ass others as lesser ass bitches

without physical flesh finger on what we was

getting done other than distractions, thick riches

of mindless clever memes, severing us from “they”,

trusting in a day of scientific rapture

where non-believing beliebers will lead the way

with like button witticisms, plus screen capture

cum animated gif of our gift to the earth -

that we so damn “best.evar” since our online birth

stack o’ books by the bed collect dust to the head

never read as I tread barely above waters

struggle to juggle financial chains until dead

while simultaneously trying to raise three daughters

without the same environmental ill effects

which had polluted me; but made me see the art

in every piece of shit I passed as paychecks

slipped through loose grips, I chased after words in my heart

after hours, in the dark, brain-lit by half-witted

delusions that them books might get etched with my name,

but you’re either born a success or pre-fitted

for failure as birthright regardless of your game;

but real deal wordsmith shapes swords from the suffering,

real grime never shines through library buffering

big ass manifesto, poor man blessed to see through

stick figure representations of attractive

images, bitches tricked into trying to do

impossible bullshit, build radioactive

hips unable to birth chilling ass children much

less wiggle from sexual friction as we pass

time in the ancient ways, buck naked caveman clutch

activating molecules excited by ass

that got power, that got force, that got mountain curves

creating earthquake motion buried inside us deep,

going deeper when stimulating them wild nerves

what which first caused man and woman to dark cave creep

and make babies for the future as eras pass,

but you can’t procreate truth with a skinny ass

April the Three

the urge to self-medicate is strongest when one

realizes the life they are trapped in is boring

holes of dullard thought where great notions once had sprung,

now buried beneath daily detritus, storing

dreams for future dates never realized in real time,

so sober don’t feel real fine, plus my mind’s inclined

to rewind through reels of stored moments with no rhyme

or reason for reflection of past intertwined

uncomfortably with here and now - furrowed brow

tenses from my temporal lobes overloading

from cortisol exploding with no knowing how

to calm down the process of conscience eroding,

and I’m left here, idle of spirit, left to think

about how easily it all blurs with a drink

sustainable farming practiced by well-endowed

individuals changing the world leisurely

with compassion, rejected roots of which they’re proud

to break free from, yet their world defined by purely

living in ways not accessible by lesser

classes herded in masses far beyond the gates

where utopias erupt for sheltered pleasure,

available at well-advanced luxury rates

for those who have achieved cognitive awareness

of true human potential, combined with raw wealth

where one can afford to live free of unfairness,

and without poor resentment if done in good stealth;

are we sustaining improvement of folks at-large,

or enabling the survival of those in charge?

There are new zines at the Thousand Feathers zine shop in the right sidebar, issues three and four which should be going into mailboxes later this week once I finish folding them up. Also Beerbox Haiku poetry book is still available and completely great, at the picture link to the right, available at Amazon as ebook or physical book you can hold in your hands. Probably going to start writing erotic post-apocalypse literature under a pen name exclusively moving forward, so not sure if that'll exist here or I'll keep it secret. I am everywhere, and yet also nothing; it's a strange existence I lead (or follow?).

April the Two

"I pray to science they don't pull me over," rapped the fat Albanian immigrant's son with the bushy red beard on his Rare Chandeliers mixtape.

The sun rose every day this weekend, though the week didn't really end because it's a week now and perhaps the days we are not bound to obligation should be the week itself and the time away in our slavicles should be the weekend. The payoff is no payoff if it is only momentary.

The good news is for the first time in my life, the place I've worked at the past three years has a retirement plan and I just got the bi-annual paperwork bullshit, and from what I have saved up, I should be able to retire about 24 days before I die. That's gonna be the longest weekend of my life.

Hand-to-Hand Haiku Tournaments a-coming

Hey great news, as I've found two local venues to commit to at least one and hopefully four Hand-to-Hand Haiku tournaments/Rojonekku Workingman readings for this year of our existence 2013, though we sort of already existed before the odometer started rolling. And both venues will be hosting their first events this month!

On Friday, April 19, around 7:00 pm or so, at Green Willow Farm, a few miles east of Charlottesville on Milton Road, we'll be holding a Hand-to-Hand Haiku tournament/Rojonekku reading on the theme of Family Traditions. Basically the theme is just a suggestion; if you come with haiku in hand they can be about whatever feels right (or wrong) to you. Thanks to Patty at Green Willow Farm, we seem committed to four events this year, roughly every two months or so, and we hope to set it off with a nice one this month. There's a $3 suggested donation, to benefit Green Willow Farm, and there will be some light refreshments (probably cornbread and beer) available, and 1000 Feathers tracts for the taking. Contact rojonekku at gmail dot com for more info, or comment below. Parking here is a little limited, so directions will not be made super-public, but I encourage you to come in packs of eager jibber-jabberers of short poems. I'll be sharing some material, including from upcoming print projects, and hosting the festivities like Mr. Rourke at Fantasy Island, so bring the midgets (meaning kids are cool).

Then on Saturday, April 27, at 7:00 pm, at Blue Padma Yoga in Scottsville, at the corner of Valley and Main, by all the restaurants, we'll be hosting the first public Hand-to-Hand Haiku tournament in my hometown, with the theme of Embracing the Spirit of the River. There will be a $3 suggested donation at this event as well, benefitting Blue Padma (I don't believe in money). I will be reading a slightly cleansed version of my tale of the Great Willie Young & the River People, as well as haiku from my forthcoming 1000 Feathers collection called Beerbox Haiku, and have 1000 Feathers tracts available as well. I hope to have four events at Blue Padma this year, and am very excited to make my chaotic beauty more known to my local community in our quiet little river town. Again, if you are interested in competing or attending or whatever, contact rojonekku at gmail dot com. Light refreshments will be available (cornbread and maybe beer) and you will be expected to take your shoes off so as to not muss up the yoga floor, so wear some chill ass socks.

Below is an in-depth explanation of how the Hand-to-Hand Haiku Tournament works, and what to expect, as a participant, judge, or innocent bystander. And it should be assumed that my fool ass will try to keep things lively. I look forward to seeing old and new faces, connecting different circles together, and spreading the joy of fighting a boring ass world with some live ass word play!

Hand-to-hand haiku is an actual thing that has existed in various forms as an offshoot of poetry slams for over a decade, but I am bringing it to the here and now wherever my chaos tornado spins because it is a thing I wish was happening all the time on every street corner around barrel and pallet fires so that I could take part. So I guess I will emcee the affair and create its existence locally.

WHAT HAND-TO-HAND HAIKU ENTAILS

A hand-to-hand haiku battle works as a single-elimination tournament, meaning eight people start out in one-on-one matches, where one winner advances to the next round, with eight going down to four, then four down to two, and so on. Thus, there will be four first round battles, two semifinal battles between first round winners, then a final showdown between the two semifinal winners. For our purposes, the first round will be a best of 5, semifinals will be a best of 7, and the finals will be a best of 11.

What does that “best of” mean, and how does that work? Well, that’s easy. There will be three judges pre-selected for the evening’s festivities. They will have two flags (different ones obviously, we’ll assume red and blue for ease of explanation). In each match-up, one competitor will have a red flag, and the other a blue flag. Red flag reads a haiku first, then blue, then after a brief moment of thought, the three judges, who hold both flags, raise the flag of who won that round, in their on-the-spot opinion. Whichever flag a majority of judges raises is considered the winner of that round, meaning if two out of three judges say blue, then blue wins the first round, and is up 1 to 0. Loser of any round reads first the next round, so red would read a second haiku, followed by blue, followed by judges’ decision, and so on, until one of the first round competitors wins 3 rounds. At most this would need 5 rounds to decide, thus it is called a best-of-5. The same process is repeated, but with more rounds, for the semifinals and finals.

This means for all people reading haiku, you may need up to 23 different haiku, in the off-chance the first round, the semifinals, and finals all go to their maximum amount of rounds, and that you advance accordingly. Thus, I say you need a minimum of 23 haiku, although if you are eliminated early or win rounds quickly, most likely very few of you will actually use 23 haiku, perhaps even using as few as 3. No worries; save what you wrote for the next one.

Here is the thing though: you select which haiku you read for each round, rather than reading them in a set order, so to have a larger, more varied arsenal of haiku gives yourself the freedom to choose ones that might fit your opponent or the moment more easily, to tap into the flow of the evening, or which one you would assume might strike a favorable mood with the judges. I look at it as each haiku is an arrow, and the more arrows you have in hand, the more likely you are able to find a sharp one. So come equipped as you see fit.

On a personal aside, as a man who has literally written several thousand haiku over the past decade, a method I use is writing them one per index card. This is a good method for a hand-to-hand haiku battle, as you can have your handful of index cards, mark out ones you use, and shuffle them around and use them accordingly. Just a tip; you can use it or ignore it as you see fit.

WHAT ABOUT HAIKU?

Ah yes, the terribly pretentious question us westerners are forced to ask ourselves with regards to a Japanese literary tradition based on a language of characters while we speak syllables. Haiku traditionally was tied to the seasons, and the most common western translation has been a three-line poem of five syllables, seven syllables, and five syllables, which is often times seen as the truest replication of the Japanese poem. For the sake of our Hand-to-Hand Haiku purposes, to keep everybody on even ground, we are going to go with this. Now somebody may say, “Wait, counting syllables goes against what haiku actually is, Raven Mack!” Well, let me tell you, I know this form on a deep and personal level, and could tell you that haiku is not even a poetic form on its own, but is part of a larger group form of poetry called renga where the first part was called hokku and became the title of famous renga poems, thus it became its own thing as literary time passed. So haiku is not even technically what the hell it is supposed to be. So for all haiku traditionalists insulted at counting syllables, once you are holding mass parties where groups of people compose poems as a group with 100 verses per poem, you can hold your complaints to yourself. We cannot accept part of a tradition but pretend the rest doesn’t exist and call ourselves traditionalists. I mean, we could, and in fact that’s what most people do, but I’m not supporting that.

So for our sake, our haiku will be three-line poems, preferably of 5-syllables, 7-syllables, and 5-syllables. I will not count them though, and if you feel overly confined by this structure (form is good for you though), you can stretch the definition of haiku to mean a short poem of 17-syllables (or less).

Also, traditionally, these have been tied to the seasons, or nature, but I regard the act of haiku as more a meditation or habit of observation, which means all the fucked up parts of the world made by man are as natural as nature, and more than perfect for haiku. You can go traditional or you can go with observing the world around you or you can go experimental. Whatever’s clever.

And obviously, you should write your own haiku. If you have competed before in a different Rojonekku Hand-to-Hand tournament, you're expected to come with fresh material. Obviously there is no haiku police who will count syllables or be like, "Didn't she read that one before?" We, as the viewing community, will police ourselves, so if you are in the crowd at an event and it seems someone's gone long on syllables or repeating themselves, I encourage you to chatter amongst yourselves about it to create that uncomfortable buzz thing that happens in public events. If the competitor repeats these shady activities, hopefully the buzz will turn to outright booing and jeering. In fact, unlike your standard poetry reading, I encourage the crowd to make noise and respond. This is not to be a silent awe affair.

BUT HOW WILL THESE BE JUDGED?

A valid question, as none of us wants to be judged, and yet judges will be involved. Honestly, there is no right or wrong way to pick a winner, and this method will always be subjective. Always. But I am going to have three judges, and attempt to curate each of them from a different angle of cultural sensibilities. Judges’ decisions will be final, and also subjective, so never take it personally. This is meant to be fun, and will be fun, so nobody needs to get all, “Damn, why wasn’t my eternal creativity of poetic greatness not properly recognized in this damn hand-to-hand haiku thing? This is bullshit!”

Judges: You will judge as you feel appropriate. Like I mentioned above, I’ll pick you because I'm thinking you'll observe from a certain perspective, but I might be completely off on judging your personality, so feel free to toss that aside completely and just go with your heart. In fact, the whole point of haiku is to go with your heart, and this whole nonsense endeavor of a tournament is meant to motivate people to go with what’s in their heart, not worry and become anxious.

SO WHAT DO WE WIN?

Winner of the night’s tournament will receive the accolades of an adoring attending public, and I'm sure I'll find something from the Bird Tribe compound to show my gratitude to you as well. But don't expect anything in particular, or at all, because one never can predict what I'll do.

Speaking of which, as part of hosting the festivities, I'll share some of my own writing, or unique perspective, or perhaps just talk about what I've been cooking up in the kitchen. The entire motivation behind Rojonekku WFA (Word Fighting Arts) is to battle the complacency of routine life with words, and this means not just books or printed matter but stories and jokes and strange tales from stranger places and just everything and anything to be honest.

So that is how the Hand-to-Hand Haiku Tournament works. If you are interested in participating - which I hope you will be - contact me at rojonekku at gmail dot com. Even though this is a slam poetry tradition, my goal with this is to bring different styles of poets from different backgrounds into a mutually accepted format, and interact. Then we cross-pollinate each other, and everything will taste better.

April the One

I'm sorry I haven't posted more lately but honestly I don't owe you shit and also my brain has turned to rust because the electrofog machines have been on high since sometime in probably 2011, at least here in America they have been, and I can only speak from where I sit. We have no say in where we are born but I was born here and it's really starting to make my head hurt, literally, I think it's a trick to put me on psychoactive pharmaceuticals to neuter my caveman molecules still firing to my brain, and I know this could probably be conceived as the words of a crazy man but let me be clear I am not being entirely serious though I am sort of completely serious and that is the beauty of the Raven Mack style of New Writing, it is just enough fiction spiced with just enough fact that the potential devils who read it don't understand it and are not sure what to make of it. I mean how else can I account for the fact I've not been snubbed out by floating surveillance eyeballs although perhaps I should myself refer back to my "neuter my caveman molecules" line from like right there just above. (By the way, the faded graffiti patinas of freight trains are perhaps man's most beautiful yet unobserved beauty. And within that is the lesson of Industrialism's horrible presence - when left to dilapidate back to within nature's realm, even man's most horrific transgressions against nature become just another beautiful part of the whole. That's because we're not separate, bro, totally not.)

The best thing about fire is it totally burns the fuck out of things. And there are a lot of things with a lot of fuck in them, so much so that when I pass I have to scream "FUCK!" at them out of sheer overwhelming realization. But fire gets rid of a lot of that. 

On a personal Rojonekku Word Fighting Art update sort of tip, there will be a pair of Hand-to-Hand Haiku Tournaments upcoming this month, first at Green Willow Farm just east of Charlottesville, VA, on April 19, and then at Blue Padma Yoga Gallery in Scottsville, VA, on April 27. Both of these events will feature an 8-person haiku tournament with some sort of reading/ranting/hosting methodology by your's truly, Raven Mack aka 1000 Feathers aka Sheikh Libertad Molecules. Both events will hopefully be the first of four events at each particular spot this calendar year of 2013, and both will have a suggested donation of $3 which will benefit the hosting facility in each case, because I don't believe in money personally. I will have 1000 Feathers pamphlets available for the taking IF you make a donation, and if anyone who randomly lays eyeballs upon this thinks to them self, "Man, I wish I could take part in this hand-to-hand haiku tradition that Raven Mack is ringleading throughout the various back roads and dark alleys of Americana," then totally just shoot me an email, because we can make that happen.

Additionally, if there is a Greyhound autobus service that has a drop-off bench in your locality and you are wishing I would do such a thing there and you know a place that can host it and potentially give me a scrap of floor to sleep upon, then again, by all means, send me electronic mails explaining what you have in mind.

Also a thing that may or may not be of interest to my loyal readers, the Beerbox Haiku which was here at one point but then disappeared is about to re-appear as an ebook collected in chronological form with an introduction and shit like that, in the coming few weeks. Having a chance to revisit that project has made me realize that although I ignore my own creations most of the time, I've written some fucking amazing short form poetry. It is a slice of life that has perhaps been sliced completely out of existence. In other words, I'm proud as fuck.

Also, beyond that, Confederate Mack Chronicle ebooks should start arriving this summer. Not sure how many it'll end up being, but I'm guessing even after editing out shit I'm too shamed to share or is no longer relevant and crap like that, it's still going to be four or five volumes. I have written a billion words in my lifetime, many of them demented, some of them genius, none of them truly mine other than something shot them through my head, and at times I wonder how come the world does not know me better by now? But the shining flashlights of popular culture never really know anything, even what they do shine a light on, so I hope for those that have read along with me over the years, some of these words have meant a thing to you somewhere along the way. Because if I never wrote another word ever again for the rest of my life, I would still be proud of what I've done, even the shameful shit.

March the Five

 

I think so many exclamation points they appear on walls around me as I pass.

 

My prayers have withered and mildewed and hang like past hopes mocking me.

I have an idea! Let me waste my life!

March the Four

 

I have been crazy lately, unfocused and scatter-brained, and it's completely technology (aka tricknology) related, and the presence of constant wave bombardments at work and in my own home through wi-fi router/satellite receiver/etc. But here's the thing I realized this week: my brain is not being re-wired, as I've said before and is often suggested with regards to modern tech toys/tools. Saying your brain is being "re-wired" follows that tricknological philosophy that man is a machine, made of parts that can be replaced and improved. We are not a machine; we are a holistic entity. Sure, you can pinpoint one part of the brain that lights up when someone looks at pornography or reads Jane Austen or whatever, but that does not mean that one part of the brain does that one thing. It is spread out throughout the entire mind, through the entire body, through everything. We are not fucking machines, and that's the biggest mistake we've made in the past thousand years as a western culture is assuming - even when liberal and all crazified with the philosophies - that man is machine-like and a collection of organic cogs and wheels and bells and whistles and shit like that.

 

So if I don't find "re-wired" as appropriate, what would be the best way to describe it. Very easy - polluted. Our bodies, our minds, our holistic existence is being polluted, which on the grand scale can be attributed to "humans" but on a more direct level is corporate entities acting on behalf of collection of financial wealth. This has nothing to do with improving the human condition, and no explanation of economic theory will every justify that any form of finance - capitalist or communist or otherwise - is going to benefit every human being. If there is finite wealth, if one 0.1% section accumulates a large amount, then the other 99.9% to varying degrees will have less. If there is finite resources, if one little 0.1% group utilizes those resources, then the other 99.9% will suffer the lesser. You can suggest that reasonable, intelligent people be put in charge to decide how those resources can best serve the larger population, but you won't be able to show me where that's successfully happening, in America, in Russia, China, anywhere. Because it's false.

Here's the thing I've come to painfully realize lately - there is no freedom, no grand protection of inalienable human rights. Our world governments are run by individual interest groups, and even those groups don't represent the entire nation they represent. If men, acting as corporate entities or government bodies, can justify the poisoning of segments of the environment, or exploitation of resources that destroy segments of the environment, they are obviously not using the holistic approach. Nature is a machine too, with pieces and parts, and you might mess up these 9 parts over here, but that's to benefit this one part here, where everything is peaches and cream. If these men think that way about nature, why would you assume they'd think any differently about humans? We're sort of pimped by this belief still that man is somehow special and more developed than everything else, and that there's some sort of inalienable kinship between fellow members of humanity. Not so, bro. If men who make decisions for the larger population have no qualms about strip-mining West Virginia mountains, they most likely have no qualms about strip-mining West Virginia minds. So even by saying "re-wiring" with regards to our brain, we are falling prey to that industrial overlord's thinking, to where people actually exist that are like, "Hey man, I'm stoked to be having my brain re-wired, can't wait for Google glass to come out, I'm gonna be right on the front edge of this." You, effectively to these decision makers, are not a human being with rights, but a tool or a resource. You literally are a tool in a box, that as long as you are useful, will be kept somewhat polished and stored nicely. If you become less useful, but might be needed again at some point in the near future, you will be stored and kept on the fringes of things. If you become no longer deemed beneficial, you are then expendable. You can live where expendable parts of nature are left, and maybe they'll eventually find a new resource underneath of you or inside your brain and you'll be re-introduced or gentrified back into the "civilized" world.

I'm sort of rambling here (as usual), but my point is this - you are being polluted, right fucking now. And you are probably like, "lol I know" because what the fuck else can we do about it? Who the fuck knows? But we are not cogs and wheels that sit around until the larger "civilization" finds need for our tiny little fucking usefulness, and that's how we earn money, and that's how we buy sustenance, but the money has less and less value and is harder to come by, and the food has less and less sustenance and is harder to trust. You know why safely grown food is so expensive? That's the design. You are expendable.

If you think you can change this system, you are wrong. This system is perverted and always will be. If new people took over the entire system, within 40 years they too would be perverted. That's just how it is. But you can change your life. I can change mine. I am not a tool, not a machine, so I'm not going to act like one. I'm not doing shit today, not as a tool, not as a resource. I am going to sit here, in my little windowless work spot, and fucking doodle haiku all day. Fuck work. Fuck being a tool. I will never merit wealth, I will never be hired for a dream job. That's just what I was born into, namely being outside those walls. I was born expendable, and have tried to pretend I could weasel my way with intelligence and problem-solving and good people skills into being part of that 0.1%. It's not going to happen though. I am painfully expendable.

The thing is, I'm only expendable to the machine industrial mind. As part of the holistic whole, I'm neither expendable nor necessary. I just am. I am going to daydream aka manifest in my mind all day long how all of us who are expendable realize we are not even part of that, we are not being re-wired, we are not a tool for industry or should ever consider ourselves "industrious" even fucking slightly. We just are.

There's a lot of shit being deemed expendable nowadays, as the western system slowly crumbles. They are almost out of freedom duct tape, and the freedom duct tape factory is closed. I know; I passed it the other weekend, just south of Roanoke. There's a COMMERCIAL SPACE FOR RENT sign out front, and packs of hobos building pallet fires behind the place, where the delivery docks used to be filled with freight trucks, loading up on the freedom duct tape to hold this system all together. It will all get swallowed back up by the wild if no one finds use for it. And that's the beauty of accepting yourself as expendable, and removing yourself from the industrial psychology where you are a machine to be industrious or re-wired - we all very easily get swallowed back up by the over-ruling all-encompassing holistic nature of all shit. All we have to do is nothing. Fuck changing a broken system and replacing one corrupt pervert with another corrupt pervert. I'm doing nothing. I suggest you do nothing. At work, don't do shit. Fuck work. And eventually if all the do-nothing expendable aspects of our world - both human and land mass and buildings and plants and animals and really all of nature including man because fuck we are not separate from it please stop fucking putting that in your head - it all goes wild again, goes feral. And the feral will swallow up "civilization" little by little, and eventually instead of "civilization" controlling the wild, the wild will control "civilization", except it won't be controlling it all because it won't even be concerned with the concept of "control" as that's not what true wild is about. Wild just takes over.

So dear friends and random internet eyeballs and spambots and DHS monitors and everyone else, don't do more, do less. Don't try to force broken things to start working again, and don't think switching parts out of a broken thing like government or civilization is going to fix it. You'll be jamming new philosophical cogs into broken machines for the rest of your family tree's existence. Do less, warp back into the wild. Stop pretending you are a machine. Stop pretending you are anything at all necessary or expendable to this civilization. Embrace the wild, and remember that nothing is also everything once you shake that "civilized" industrial psychology. The wild nothing looks like nothing to civilized mind because it has to be mined and harvested and re-manufactured and improved upon. That's the pollution of civilized thought. It pollutes mountains and roadsides, very obviously, but it also pollutes you. It pollutes me. The pollution is thick inside all of us, and we will start to get wilder and wilder thoughts. That's good. Embrace those wild thoughts, because they might very well be more right than all that "civilization" promises.

March the Three

 

Our brains have become fragmented by electrosmognetic impulses, to where we collect the pieces of detritus and consider it art. Our brains have been industrialized, yet are still tainted by the beautiful perversions of natural existence. This conflict ultimately will be our demise.

 

I saw the Spring Breakers movie this past weekend, actually spent $21 on it for me and the ol' lady to go, because I had read reviews that it was some sort of intelligent dissection of our modern broken culture. It was not. It was broken itself, but we are so fragmented intellectually that you can just pretend you are making a grand statement even when you are basically stumbling along haphazardly with no purpose, and nobody can really question that. We are post- post-modern, where everything has been done already and everything is completely fucked. There's really nothing left to do except unfuck what little bits of your individual life you can.

As for the Spring Breakers movie, it is horrible. Harmony Korine has done what I thought nobody would ever be able to do - he has surpassed Fred Durst on my internal list of People I'm Going To Smash With A Bottle When I Become Famous. Because I am (going to become famous, and also smash Harmony Korine with a bottle). Often times in our post- post-modern culture of the allegedly intellectual, we think violence is a bad thing. But the largest impediment to humanity's continued survival is the fact we have somehow enabled lesser aspects of humanity to not only survive but thrive. It is important to physically take things to task sometimes, to stay strong, and keep humanity's herd thin. Conflict causes weight loss, trust me.

The cheapest con in our post- post-modern culture is the "Y U Mad?" suggestion that anyone dismissing what you do as trivial bullshit is somehow a hater. I am sure this is the defense used for Spring Breakers. But I am a hater - a hater of hodge-podged crap masquerading as high art. It all just reaffirmed my belief we've wasted the last thousand years as a species. After the movie my wife and I walked the downtown pedestrian mall in Charlottesville, and everybody had this hallucinogenic tweak to them, where I was freaked out by their lack of humanity. This happens to me at times when I am tuned into it, very much like that scene from Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas where everybody is a lizard. Everybody on the mall was fucked up and polluted and poison animals and my wife was seeing it too so we made a sharp right to a neglected side street and settled ourselves to escape back out to the Bird Tribe Compound before any of the floating surveillance drone eyeballs discovered our human emotion and human intelligence and marked us for DHS confinement in the coming Austerity Wars.

 

I was born from trash, so to speak - a giant tangled mess of copper wires and acrylic yarn and twisted metal clotheshangers. I've worked very hard in my life to untangle as much of that as possible, but I fully realize I am still a huge fucking mess, and always will be. That's the beauty of my existence though - I am struggling to make the most unentangled psyche as I can. I have these images of each person's brain as a universe I've been writing about for my One Thousand Feathers project, in an attempt to keep myself less judgmental of others, but it can be very difficult. I am from working class people, and blessed with great internal combustion of mindframe, but this has not truly made me more financially beneficial to myself at all. That's probably good, to keep it pure. I have been struggling with this lately - why do I write? What should I write? I am taking a fiction class under a dude who won the National Book Award in the 1990s, and his attitude is a story should have catharsis, a very clear ending where combustion has happened. Problem is most of the stories I write end where it's just another day and tomorrow you scrape, struggle, and strive to survive another. Seems to me - and this could be personal prejudice, I'm sure - that for the literary academic world, stories do need to have nice clear endings, because that's how life should be. But for many - meaning the working class - there is no end, no retirement, no dream vacation home, no nothing but work work work work work die. Life is a constant struggle.

There is a guy who has a book out now named Frank Bill who wrote this piece in the Daily Beast about masculine writing, and I agree with a lot of what he says in this piece. His first novel is coming out right now called Donnybrook, which if you google reviews of it, you'll find all sorts of terrible stereotypical metaphors used by reviewers for poor white people. And ultimately this is my problem with writing, on my level. I got Frank Bill's collection of stories Crimes in Southern Indiana, and honestly didn't finish it. It's too negative, although I didn't find it dark at all. Darkness is struggling to survive. Having nice tidy rapes and murders and crime is not darkness, because all of those things are very clearly marcated endings. This does not match the constant struggle of the workingman.

And it seems to me that if one is a Frank Bill - who is a warehouse worker in Indiana - or a Raven Mack or any piece of shit born from trash who takes up writing, your best bet towards receiving mass accolades (or reviews where reviewers use horrible white trash metaphors galore) is to write exploitative type pieces that flatten the working class you come from into somewhat stereotypical fantasies for the reading public, which skews wealthier. For me, this is difficult to accept, because I would prefer to empower working class types. I live with these people and come from them, and rather than think, "Wow, what a crazy story this is this former pill-addicted person who is about to have a baby, I bet that baby is cursed and will have a horrible life, let's go with that," I think, "Hey, what a chance to find meaning in the daily struggle, to find power and build strength and become a motherfucking modern day viking who conquers all the poisons laid out in front of you, or at least enough of them to where you continue to exist." I need hope, not noir, because my life is a daily fucking struggle. Escapism is self-medication, ignoring the reality, and it's not until you face this shit that you figure out how to make it better.

And let me be clear about one more thing. I don't fault Frank Bill for this at all. Here is Donnybrook, and if you are one who reads a lot of books, I would hope you buy it and support the guy. In my heart, I want a warehouse worker from southern Indiana to succeed so badly in the literary world, so that it's not such a fucked up anomaly where reviewers do the standard "grit lit" "working class writer" bullshit. I want this warehouse worker from Indiana to be successful so that some daydreaming mechanic from Georgia, or ebay hustler/independent wrestler from Alabama, or air conditioner repairman from east Texas, or nutjob chicken/goat farmer/housepainter/haphazard piece of blessed trash from Southside Virginia can have their works read by a larger audience, that's not expecting the same old crap that the literary world gives you. The working class, who often times aren't actually working in an official sense, so let's call it the struggling class from now on - the struggling class needs their voice too. And you motherfuckers need to start hearing it.

And while we're at it, let's reappropriate that term "trash" too, because I use it too often to describe where I come from. This mess of tangled copper wires and clotheshangers and yarn and whatnot is being recycled. I don't know what it'll end up being, and what it'll be useful for, but it ain't right to consider it trash, because it's too goddamned beautiful.

March the Two

Hi, I'm Raven Mack, and I'm always up to something even if it's not cybernetted for your eyeballs. It is March and as you can tell by the rotten basketball from my pig pen above, basketball is not my favorite sport. My favorite sport is actually word fighting arts aka writing.

The wires above will have you pretend the cyberbot machines are a newfound way of expressing yourself. This is a lie, friend, trust me, I have seen the internal panopticon. The future is fire, not wifi-er.

With that in mind, I am looking for two willing people to co-author book projects with. A raw development of Rojonekku Word Fighting Arts is this New Writing that has started to volunteer blossom within the compost pile that is the internet. I have recently started a project with a longtime comrade, which will be a secret obviously other than me teasing you with that. But if you are a writerly person who can do a back-and-forth writing style and want to brainstorm a project, hit me up at ravenmack at gmail dotcom. We can do this under fake names, a combined fake name (like that O.U. Levon book from Ken Kesey teaching writing at Oregon), or go by our real names. We can even mix and match that. But here is what I'm looking for:

1) A person who is serious as fuck about writing, but not one of those serious writers. In other words, all you think about is writing, yet you don't really have fucking time to talk about how to write to other assholes inside the asshole machine.

2) A person with prolific creativity who works well with others and also embraces chaos.

3) Sliding scale here with three parts that go to 50 each: be strong with words (like no asshole writers please), be strong with spirit (even the mundane), be strong with brain wildfire (and able to let it loose rather than contain it). If on a sliding scale of 1 to 50 on those three categories you score above 123 total, we might be a good match.

If you are having asshole writer thoughts about what we will do with it when done, man I don't know. We can sell it as ebooks or put it on pastebin for free or mimeograph with the blood of albino pygmies and leave it on the painfully bouncy backseat of every Megabus from here to Chicago. We can cross that bridge once we've finished building it, Cochise.

But when we are done, we will have built word versions of Vollis Simpson's whirligigs, hidden along the back roads of the information superhighway. And we will have done something real.

So all interested parties holler at your boy Raven Mack aka 1000 Feathers.

March the One

I have struggled mightily lately, coming to terms with the fact there is no dream to be realized. Money blessings are from a false god, thus never really happen. All I can really do is do what I do, meaning with regards to art, separate from any notion anybody will ever give me money for what I do. Working towards money seems to compromise the integrity of work, whether you are talking about writing, building a house, sewing Old Navy jeans, whatever.
And yet at the same time I feel good with the fact our Bird Tribe children live in an environment that encourages artistic growth. What it took my ol' lady and me 25 years to accomplish, they'll already be at by 15. As humans, we build our culture slowly over generations. We are building our desired culture, even in the midst of a poison culture civilization we were born into. That's all we can do. I am content with that.

A lot of rocks have been stacked in the process of building our western civilization, and now we don't even stack rocks with permanence. We have embraced the capitalist fallacy of renewal a little too much, to where everything is seen as temporary - and we can just tear it all down and start over. Nobody stamps their concrete no more with their name.

Still though, I throw my horseshoes into the sky. My dreams of getting shaded under a money tree are dead, but money ain't real anyways, so I can still dream - dream of all this bullshit falling apart and when we build something new next time we actually fucking build it, no facades no personal brands no corporate citizens no whatever the fuck it is that has made us America. The spices and fertility of ground found in America are still grounds for something big; it's just we've had shitty "freedom" cooking for too long, and rather than mix up the menu, we've been told to double down on the "freedom" cooking, so motherfuckers are starting to get hungry for some real nutrition of soul.