One Thousand Feathers

One Thousand Feathers is a pamphlet zine, that comes out as my muse dictates. Here is how it works - in the field behind my house I’ve built a viking altar made of white quartz rocks. I’ve also added railroad spikes with various messages carved into them. At one point, I was building and scattering orgone generators (according to Wilhelm Reich’s research) and made a really nice conical one that sits on top of my viking rock altar, pointed towards my house. Additionally there is a white oak in the woods, an oak over top the house itself, and a red maple down in the field that form a trinity of old ass trees on my property. There is a force field between them. My wife and her Owlcraft Healing Ways herbal school have created a walking path through the woods around the white oak back there. We live in a dilapidated but beautiful house underneath the front oak. And my viking altar sits in the shade of the red maple down in the field. Additionally, I stored a broken jukebox on the front porch of the house for about six years, which recently I moved down underneath the red maple in the field, in fact plugging the electrical cord into a root of the tree. What this has created is a situation where I can walk our woodsland path, think things, sit in the house, think things, and go to my viking altar, and think things. They circulate between the three trees forming a psychic protectorate over our Bird Tribe Compound, and get absorbed into the orgone generator down in the field. Then I put blank 11x17 sheets of cardstock into the broken jukebox plugged into the red maple tree down in the field. Usually, after a few days, a new One Thousand Feathers zine will be in the jukebox. Lately though, the field has been hyper-charged, and I am finding more of them than ever (four in the last ten days). This means two things: one, there is awesome shit to read all of a sudden, and two, I have to print them. I print them at limited runs of 500 per pamphlet (and also don’t give a fuck if you print thousands - these are ideas wild harvested from the sky that my thoughts fermented - no one owns them, only assholes “own” things). But I figured I should offer people the chance to get these things mailed to them without hassle (unless you consider the government monitoring the fact you’re on a mailing list from me a hassle... lol). So here is a thing - for a $20 subscription, you will get 12 issues of One Thousand Feathers. They are mailed in pairs, and your subscription will start with the next printed ones. Old issues are available at THIS PAGE (as well as distribution boxes for people who distribute zines and shit). That is America pricing. If you not in America, it is $30. If you already receive the pamphlets as part of original kickstarter funding, don’t sweat it, you’re already getting zines. But consider buying my shit for your friends if you enjoy it. Or honestly, like I said, copy it for them. But I’m having a hard time keeping up with funneling funds out of my family’s dwindling budget for all the new shit showing up in the magic jukebox down in the field.

FOR ONE THOUSAND FEATHERS SUBSCRIPTIONS CLICK BELOW DONATE BUTTON

At this point I have the following ready to print, fresh out the jukebox:
ONE THOUSAND FEATHERS THE FIVE aka FREESTYLE SONNETS I
ONE THOUSAND FEATHERS THE SIX aka NAKED POLAROIDS I
ONE THOUSAND FEATHERS THE SEVEN aka RECESSION PROOF II
ONE THOUSAND FEATHERS THE EIGHT aka RECESSION PROOF III
And pretty much anything you buy art of zine-wise on THIS SITE is gonna go right back into me doing more art or zines. I ain't making no money, only crazy shit.
Actually, let's get blunted here. I need to sell 16 MORE SUBSCRIPTIONS (out of 20) to do this current printing batch that is stacked up from the magic jukebox, so I'm gonna just randomly select 2 of those 20 to get a haiku railroad spike. Just for the fuck of it.

bird tribe gambleraku tony uno

snow on the oak antennae

what which beams positive lounge

into the bird tribe's consciousness

dilapidation gambleraku number first off

dilapidated textures

mesmerize a wayward mind

looking to escape today

tatted up and draped out and dripped out gambleraku know what I'm talkin bout

owlcraft tattoo signature

upon workingman forearms

with blemish from stray grinder

what I read in bed last night

With World Cup qualifying going strong, I've had that on my mind. I've been compiling a ridiculous amount of nonsense over the past year in anticipation of a Football Metaphysics style preview book for next year's World Cup once the field of 32 is set (currently still 117 national teams eligible), and basically with the injury of RG3 last year, so was destroyed my interest in the NFL. I already had a hard time giving a fuck about Dan Snyder's Redskins, once I realized they were his and not mine, but RG3's charisma and excitement pulled me in. However, seeing that young man be allowed to go out and potentially destroy himself like that, it was inhumane. And to know he is recovering ahead of schedule, likely the recipient of questionable medicinal techniques that will probably be outlawed by the NFL in a couple of years, if they are not already technically illegal, I don't know man, I can't really get down with the NFL any more.
So I turn to the world's football, which is beautifully chaotic, and everywhere, like crabgrass. So here are a pair of articles basically related to the sport...

WHEN THE BEAUTIFUL GAME TURNS UGLY from ESPN
A long-winded piece from ESPN's Wright Thompson came out this week regarding Mario Balotelli and Kevin-Prince Boateng of AC Milan, and them dealing with racist Italian football fans. First off, before you click the link, let me warn you about this piece. You know how when you watch a movie and sometimes it's great acting, but sometimes it's just an actor acting great? Like, he's doing what would stereotypically be regarded as great acting, but it's not really great on its own? That's what type of writing you have in this article. It's not great writing, but it's a writer writing great. He does some forced cornball shit that probably seems like pretty great writing, but it kinda pissed me off. Most notably like this is everything relating to the character Wright Thompson refers to as The Hooligan. Horrible stuff. And the reason it pisses me off is if you are given this wealth of material, this story to write, and you don't execute, you have wasted it. Anybody else who tries to do it will not be considered the guy who first wrote the article, thus later attempts to get it write and dig at this in an actual meaningful way will be tainted by not being the first one. That sucks.
Nonetheless, there are some interesting things I took away from this. First off, I'd just like to say, regardless of racist assholes doing monkey sounds at him, beyond this article Kevin-Prince Boateng has never seemed like anything other than a complete asshole to me. I tend to root for African squads in the World Cup, so his German national ass fouling up the Ghanaian team in 2010 with his asshole bullshit sucked to an extent. But still, he is obviously the victim of racist taunting, which seems to be way more common than you'd expect in southern and eastern Europe right now.
The weird thing about this article is how it so easily just does the Mussolini thing. But the same thing is happening in Greece right now. How do you explain that? Same thing is happening in eastern Europe. No Mussolinis in their history. So what is it causing this? Pure racism?
That's part of it, for sure. But there's something more going on here that I was thinking about. When you have this push for global multi-culturalism, to some extent it's not so much an appreciation for all cultures as it is an assimilation of all cultures into this one sort of United Colors of Benetton ad. And I can understand why people would think that sucks. If everybody ends up being a watered down version of everything else, we lose the histories and cultural individuality that makes every foreign place so wonderful in the first place - it is foreign to us. So I can understand people being resentful of that.
Of course, crossing over into taunting people as monkeys (which seems ridiculous, but shit man, I can believe it happening), that's not chill at all. That will never be chill. But using that as a reason to just force mass assimilation onto the world is not chill either. The whole this-or-that, black-or-white argument gets tired anyways. "If you are not for this, you are obviously against it." No man, there are shades of grey everywhere (stupid book), and we should be able to have discussions about what points on this spectrum of greys are best for people.
The Balotelli part of this is interesting to me too, because he's not of Italian blood, which seems to be the biggest gripe against him, even though he was adopted and raised as Italian. No one chooses where they were born. This is why borders and immigration seems so weird to me sometimes, because as a baby you are just accidentally birthed inside of some arbitrary political boundaries. And this binds you from that point on. It goes to the old nature vs. nurture argument too, because Balotelli was nurtured as an Italian, from age 3, but was not naturally an Italian. Is it nature or nurture that creates the individual's identity?
Oddly enough, years ago I did a bunch of reading on psychological profiles of Siamese twins, who share nature and nurture completely, and those motherfuckers were always way different. So again, perhaps it's not black-or-white, nature vs. nurture, but shades of grey.
Of course, nowhere does the ridiculousness of arbitrary political boundaries play out more amazingly than the World Cup, which is going to be in Brazil next year. Speaking of which...

CITY OF FEAR from Vanity Fair in April 2007
This is the story of P.C.C. - a prison gang that grew from a football team inside one prison - causing massive disruptions to Brazilian society, operating in the so-called "feral zones" of our modern world. For one, this is interesting because well the World Cup is going to be happening there next year, and there's a crazy element to Brazil (which I guess is no worse than South Africa in 2010), but also because no matter how hard governments of the wealthy attempt to keep everything in line, or at least limit the unprivileged into accepted zones of self-destruction, it spirals beyond the government of the wealthy's control. It always does. That's sort of what we're seeing play out in America right now, which is really exciting to see. You can force a grid of order over top a map of humanity, but humanity is a wild crabgrass, a dandelion springing from cracks in the asphalt, and the grid never holds. It might work for a while, and this current digital shackle we've all been operating under without being forced to acknowledge, it might hold things in place for a few more years or decades or whatever. But it never holds forever. Look at any empire in the history of man upon the surface of the earth. It never holds.
As someone who does not trust authority, locally or globally, this is a great thing to realize.
But also, within the organization of the P.C.C., it's interesting to note how these semi-autonomous groups lack the standard pyramid of corporate hierarchy, which we've been led to believe is the way things work. This swarm mentality has been evident with hacker groups too, as well as something as simple as downloading Game of Thrones through a torrent. When a swarm of hornets stings you, you don't know where the queen (or king, or leader or whatever the fuck) is at. This will become important as we move further into history, because they've got that pyramid with the all-seeing eyeball tip ironed the fuck out pretty good. But through the use of black block tactics and swarm mentalities or leaderless movements, you can circumvent this shit.
It's all very exciting to be honest. I know a lot of people are bummed about the NSA spying shit, but honestly, to think a Department of Defense developed technology like the internet was not being used in such manners is naive. It's also naive to think that just by these things being outed publicly through an inside leak that the American government is gonna be like, "Oh yeah, sorry about that. We will remain true to American principles and go back to not being dicks about everything using some vague threat of terrorism as the excuse." This is American government at this point. It is a corporate kleptocracy, and it's going to keep being that for as long as it can because never in history - not one single time - has some group that has been in power been motivated by the greater common good of all of humanity to step down from power and share it with everybody else.
And yet this article about Brazilian prisons shows two things - you can't maintain control when you basically make a majority of the population outsiders without access. And if you literally cut them off - which we are in the early stages of in America with cuts to alleged entitlement programs - you then make these large swaths of humanity foreigners to you, and potentially your enemy, especially if you're hoarding all the good shit.
Also interesting is how even when the P.C.C. controlled neighborhoods or jails, crime went down, as P.C.C. became the new pseudo-government that, though not providing certain normal governmental services, decided who was allowed to be killed or punished or whatever, through the means they had in place. This is something that has been seen in criminally-controlled communities everywhere, something that was glossed as the romantic side to the Mafia in old Hollywood movies like The Godfather - the code of the streets, so to speak. People are chaotic, but they want to be allowed to thrive. They want to not be fucked with, and just be allowed to live a chill life. Usually if you have a full belly and are not sitting outside in the rain and nobody's gonna come into your space and fuck up those things or infringe upon you in the moment, people will be good. They don't need the world - just a little fucking piece of it to live chilly.
What's going on right now on our earth is attempting to justify ensuring that right to a chill life, by disrupting that chill life. It's a weird thing to do, but shit man, it's happened over and over again during human history. We are dumb animals a lot of times, far dumber than we give ourselves credit for. But we have potential. We always have potential. We will constantly fuck ourselves up, and then constantly find a way to carve out something better within that mess. And we'll probably keep on doing that until we can't any more.
So yeah, the World Cup next year is exciting. What will our world political landscape be like? What about in 2018 when it happens in Russia? What countries will have new shapes, or new leaderships? And really, I think this is what has ended up drawing me to international football more than anything - it is this weird fabric woven into the background of the chaotic orderliness of human existence, all over the globe, far deeper than any other sport. That in fact makes it even more interesting that America doesn't dominate football, like it has been able to with most every other sport after a dedicated two decade effort. Good fun craziness.
And oddly enough, as much as the American government freaks me out nowadays, through no choice of my own, I was born here. And though my natural bloodlines have tastes of other countries running throughout me, I'm an American. So I'll be rooting for those fuckers. But there's only so far Clint Dempsey can take us, I fear. Maybe he should start stealing good players from other teams against their will, in order to protect us against the terror of America not winning.

field jukebox gambleraku number three

I've tried all the buttons, knocked

on a million inboxes,

and still I'm undiscovered

caveman molecules gambleraku number one

caveman molecules activate

with freshly slaughtered buff orp

meat hunks being fire cooked

field jukebox gambleraku number two

the choices we make become

obsolete so easily,

seeming stupid in hindsight

support One Thousand Feathers nonsense

ancient hobo gambleraku number let's say one

my boots got gilded splinters

forged in western world hellfire;

burning pallets cool them down

support One Thousand Feathers endeavors

this is not farming gambleraku number one

glyphosate corn grows after

date raping the earth to yield

food stuffs from depleted soil

what I read in bed last night

I read some shit last night, though I wasn't naked for once. I was wearing camo cargo shorts and a Tim Barry t-shirt.

COCAINE INCORPORATED from the New York Times sometime last year
Strangely enough I had Mexican drug cartels on my google news feed years ago, so I've been following these fuckers since before it became a more mainstream story. And this profile is specifically of the Sinaloa Cartel and their leader, Chapo Guzman. The cartels themselves are all over the place, with scary sociopaths of an organization like the Zetas, and weird hippie cult-like groups like La Familia (my personal favorite drug cartel). Sinaloa is sort of the chosen cartel, meaning they've either bought their way into favor with the Mexican government or have been selected as the most desirable of the cartels to thrive over top the others. This is the cartel that was involved in the ATF's gun-running scheme (which oddly enough, has sort of been buried). This is also the cartel that very openly ran a drug distribution hub in Chicago, and had a higher-up who was arrested claim he was immune from prosecution because he had a working relationship with U.S. government agencies. Of note to all this is how Chicago's murder rate has been astronomical in recent years, although it is generally poor black men killing and dying, and not people directly tied to the Mexican drug cartels. The thing is, there is no direct tie to Mexican drug cartels top to bottom. It's not like McDonald's where when you are selling hamburgers you are very obviously an employee of McDonalds. The entire process is broken down to sub-contractors essentially, over and over, so that no intricate pyramid exists, which is necessary for any illicit activity. The less people involved, the less likely somebody fucks it up.
There are a lot of things about the Sinaloa Cartel and Chapo Guzman that are smoke that may or may not be indicative of fire. He's lived in a mountain region that everybody pretty much knows he has holed up at, and yet no one has stormed into get him. There have been so many hints of U.S. government involvement with the Sinaloa Cartel, not necessarily in some obvious conspiracy to import drugs, but tacitly implicated in certain aspects, like CIA men in Mexico purposely targeting Zetas members at the behest of Sinaloa. I don't think there's any large conspiracy going on here, because I don't really believe in conspiracies like that any more as it gives too much credit to conspirators to be intelligent about their dastardly plans. Humans in general, and American humans specifically, lack a strong sense of deep thinking and critical planning and are overruled by ego and desire, which would cause most conspiracies to fail. It's mostly just sketchy fuckers doing sketchy shit as fast as possible, to stack fat cash and then disappear before they die. So essentially the cartel system is how most larger endeavors operate. One of the faults of modern American crony capitalism is these corporations are attempting to legalize their extortions of resources and wealth, attempting to get in and stay in. That will bring them death, meaning this system won't exist in fifty years, at all. It can't. But I digress...
The thing that struck me most about this article is the fact Sinaloa is now making more than Pablo Escobar was making in his prime, because Pablo was making a fucking shit-ton of money. Escobar and the Cali and Medellin cartels permanently changed Colombia. So to realize Mexico is now being changed to an even larger extent, I don't know, it's crazy because I've known it's a failed state in that "let's pretend governments do good and protect people" false image of government we're supposed to believe, but that simple amount of money involved made me wonder just how failed it is. And with all the smoke around our current U.S. government and the Sinaloa cartel (not just the gun-running scheme, but you have THE major hub for distribution of drugs located in the same American city whose political machine created our current President), and I expect shit might be about a thousand times more fucked up than any of us realize. But again, the great thing about stuff like this is that no conspiracy can actually survive because humans are fickle and ruled by ego and desire, and it will all come unraveled. It's just a shame so much bullshit and pain has to be thrust into so many lives while it all plays out. Then again, that's sort of the nature of being human. We do this to ourselves, consistently throughout history, and it's as much a part of being man as opposing thumbs.

THE INFORMANT from Washingtonian Magazine
COMPLETE BMF SERIES from Creative Loafing Atlanta
Both of these are just gory street tales of street violence. The first one is about a series of murders that happened in D.C. a few years back. I remember following the story in the Washington Post as it happened, and being really struck by one of the victim's grandmothers - Patricia Jefferies - who was so young but full of proud opinions on how this was all such bullshit. A triggerman who became the informant of this story, Nate Simms, stuck an AK-47 out the sliding door of a minivan and just started squeezing shots out at a group of people. Can't tell you how fucked up that is, having shot both AR-15s and AK-47s. I could not imagine just shooting that off into clusters of people. Still though, a lot of murder in this article over some dumb shit.
Second story is about the Black Mafia Family from Atlanta, and also has plenty of murder over dumb shit, except with ridiculous wasting of money involved in this one, like buying $500 bottles of champagne for every member of Big Meech's crew on Monday night at the club. So fucking stupid. But if you liked The Wire and crap like that, I'm sure you'll enjoy these vicarious articles.
The thing is, why is there not longform journalism infiltrating financial scams with snitch sources to expose those dastardly acts? Why do we get fed this street-level criminal shit in such intricate detail, but not hedge fund scams or mortgage bubble bullshit? I've got the latest Rolling Stone on the peach crate by the toilet at home, and that Matt Taibbi guy is highly-touted as some sort of smart fucker about exposing that type of shit, but his article on the deficit is basically - and I'm not kidding here - condescending lolols at what everybody thinks is going on with the deficit, then not much more. So we get deep level recreation of a bunch of poor motherfuckers murdering each other in Any-inner-city, America, but when it comes to for real crimes that are fucking up everybody on earth, literally, we just get some wise ass mocking common opinions on what's going on, and then some pseudo-gonzo shitty-Hunter Thompson without drugs derivative commentary. But hey, I will say this - at least I'm in a position to live a comfortable enough life I can get fed the lies instead of existing in conditions where I get fed the bullets. But as the lies start stifling the hunger for real freedom by more people, the bullets will start feeding more of them. Watch and see.

NEW YORK IS KILLING ME from the New Yorker magazine
Finally, a long profile of Gil Scott-Heron as his CD came out last year, done in New Yorker fashion, meaning boring as fuck and for a class of people about five rungs higher on the socio-economic ladder than me. I think the basic premise of smoking crack in this article is not to go any deeper into that aspect of Scott-Heron's life other than to assume anybody reading it is like, "OMG! Crack!" I'm not like that so the article felt kinda short on saying something. But I'm not the biggest Gil Scott-Heron fan anyways. I mean, like anybody, I like that "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" bit, especially the part about liberation jumpsuits, as I've always wanted one. But Scott-Heron's music is that sort of light jazz, light revolution, light on the ears muzak that plays well in upwardly mobile restaurants that serve "soul food" like barbecue tofu. And I get the sense that Gil Scott-Heron feels that bullshit too, which is probably part of the reason he was so drawn to crack.
I would've liked to know more about the falling out between him and Brian Jackson, because basically if you have to listen to Gil Scott-Heron, you should only listen to albums he made with Brian Jackson. They are the only good ones, and even those you can filter out about half the songs. Of course, their's is just another standard one-dude-in-the-group-got-all-old-school-record-company-ish-and-ripped-the-other-guy-off, like almost every old school New York musician (google Paul Simon and Los Lobos for reference). Still though, this article was bland and vanilla, considering you had two old friends ripping each other off, and one of them on crack. These New Yorker motherfuckers don't know how to let a story tell itself a lot of times.

Is this content for you? Do you give a fuck? Do I give a fuck? I don't know. But please consider supporting One Thousand Feathers endeavors.

ol' lady gambleraku number one thousand probably

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that man taps and sometimes saps -

sour men stealing sweetener

what I read in bed last night

Even though I abandoned what I was doing with Armchair Linebacker, I'm still more of a football (soccer) fan than American football fan at this point. I have many opinions for you on this subject that I don't really share online because I've been building source material for a World Cup preview I'll release next spring that'll be sort of like the Football Metaphysics NFL preview ebook I did, but for real football when the World Cup happens in Brazil. I am still trying to convince myself that somebody will pay me to go cover that, but as capitalism crumbles slowly before our eyes, it's hard to see that necessarily happening.
There are sociopolitical undertones to the world's football more than any other sport, and I know most of you are Eurocentric assholes who are probably like, "The Champions League just finished. It was that game between the two German clubs at Wembley." Well, you are right but also wrong, you colonial fuckface. The African Champions League has just entered group stage (two groups of four clubs, and unfortunately my team - TP Mazembe - were eliminated by the stupid Orlando Pirates, probably using albino witchcraft of some sort). And even more exciting, in South America, the Copa Libertadores just last week got itself narrowed down to the final four. Unfortunately, Tijuana - the last Mexican team, got eliminated on away goals by Atletico Mineiro, who have Ronaldhino and are probably the favorites, though hell man, who can be the sole favorite in a tourney like this? Copa Libertadores has been very different than the UEFA Champions League, as there have been deaths in the crowd from fireworks, melees at the end of games, and fights between players and police. And to the Eurocentric/Americanized eyeballs, this may seem like chaos and horrid backwards lack of economic development, but honestly, fuck economic development. Fuck capitalism. Fuck money. That shit is not sustainable. Anyways, last night I read this about Argentine soccer...

THE BEAUTIFUL GAME from Outside Magazine

In short, Argentine football is ruled by gangs, literally. It's not a stadium scenario friendly to women and children. All of this is bad in one sense, yes, but also refreshing because honestly, do women and children really give a fuck about football? Also, for me - and I will be perfectly honest and admit I am being biased - the European industrial model of football is not nearly as great to watch as the South American artistic flourish style. And I know Lionel Messi is touted by everybody as the greatest, but he is someone born from that artistic style who has been industrialized into a Euro-machine. I feel sad for him actually, because he has grown into a man without a home. He's not truly embraced by Argentines, because he is so European now. But he'll never be completely embraced by Europeans, because he's not one. They will love him as long as he scores goals, then turn on him once he becomes old. Look at Diego Maradona though - with all his abundance of faults and fissures - he is a God in Argentina (with the hand to prove it). There is a beauty in that which behaving properly according to these civilized standards can never achieve. Sure, Lionel Messi will sell a lot more corporate boxes and have a fatter endorsement check (although realize that the endorsers make tenfold what the endorsee does - Nike will be wealthy beyond belief long after Michael Jordan's riches have been frittered away either by himself or his heirs), but what does that matter? Seriously, why is that better? And I'd actually compare that to actually winning games as well. I think we're seeing the last decades of capitalist industrialism, as people are realizing it's unsustainable, and are also spiritually hungry for something that an endless parade of cheap crap and flashy gadgetry is not fulfilling. I would imagine in the coming decades this will mean more quality African football teams hopefully snagging a couple more of the World Cup spots. South America is already maximizing its potential with regards to that. Maybe Asia continues to improve, and really what's going on in the Middle East with crazy football academies and super leagues popping up, that combined with the spiritual sustenance of Islam may ferment into the next fifty year's biggest football surprises. But this upcoming World Cup, I expect, will still belong to the industrialists, and some sort of machine like Germany or perhaps Spain with its liberal application of the artistic flourish within the industrial gamesmanship will still reign supreme. I'd like to see Brazil or Argentina or oh man an African team win the whole thing, but I'm not sure it'll happen.
However, even the concept of keeping score and having clear winners and losers is somewhat a capitalist industrialist notion, chasing superior numbers. And football is the one sport where a draw is allowable, so that the industrial notion that one must be superior can sometimes get sidestepped. That's the thing a lot of Westerners hate about football, but it's also a little seedling of revolt against Western culture. I imagine I will enjoy the Brazilian and Argentine teams more than Germany or Italy in next year's World Cup.
Anyways, this is an interesting article about the craziness surrounding top club football in Argentina. Get yourself footballed  up in preparation for the 89 World Cup qualifiers that'll be happening over the course of the next two-and-a-half weeks starting tomorrow. And while I am rooting for the United States, because it is my home, I also hope for failure of our industrial capital ways, along with the European teams which have claimed colonial dominion over the World Cup.

what I read in bed last night

So I got a Kindle for Consumermass last year, and though I still don't dig reading actual books on it (because they don't seem "actual"), Kindle plus Instapaper has been a wonderful thing. I get those long ass articles in my reader feed online, and instead of reading them bitches online where I'm distracted by large-breasted Russian girls looking for boyfriends or animated gifs featuring goats, I can read them on my Kindle, laying in the bed naked, just as our learned elders once did. So what I figured I'd do sporadically (meaning maybe never again) is just share the interesting things I read with you here, although who the fuck is you? Who the fuck am I talking to? Man, the internet is fucked up because it makes us think we have an audience and we have to present shit. Fuck that. Scratch that whole first part because that sounds like asshole talk.
I got a Kindle, and I use it with Instapaper and that shit is tight. Here's some shit I read last night...

THE DEATH AND LIFE OF CHICAGO from New York Times

The on-the-surface subject of this article is about activists reclaiming foreclosed homes for homeless families. But very obviously it brings to mind for me a lot of shit about how capitalism is a failed model of freedom, because these free market motherfuckers fail to point out that shit that has no value gets ignored. That's why these alleged free market motherfuckers act like people getting food stamps or having a place to live is considered an "entitlement" as if that's a bad thing. Look, I would like to think if America is half as fuckin' great as it acts like it is, that just by being born an American, you are entitled to eat a fuckin' meal and sleep in some sort of structure that mostly shelters you from natural disasters and inclement weather. And the descriptions of Rahm Emanuel in this article jibes with that pretty well. It's kind of important to realize that endless production of wealth assumes we have endless amounts of materials, which is not exactly a sustainable philosophy. And when you factor in that mostly this endless production is not done so we all have a bunch of really useful shit that will last us our lifetime but a bunch of crap that will break and is mostly unfixable so that we have to buy another, all so a corporate kleptocracy can accumulate abstract wealth at the expense of everyone else and the condition of the fuckin' PLANET WE ARE TRAPPED ON CURRENTLY, it seems even more fucked up.
On top of this, for whatever reason, Cabrini Greens in Chicago has always fascinated me. There was some 48 Hours program when I was a kid about it, and good lord, it was so shocking and somehow exciting to realize that was America too. I don't mean exciting like "Yo, I wish I lived in big shitty projects in Chicago," but the human experience is fucking weird. Many of us (like most) are born into really fucked up circumstances, which we have no choice in, and we have to struggle physically to do something with ourselves, and more often than not struggle mentally (aka psychologically but more actually neurologically) to make things okay. This of course means shit gets hooey in our brains, just because we can't handle the sensory input being put in.
The thing is, and what I take away from this article and this J.R. cat, is we can control that shit ourselves. Government doesn't give a fuck. Like I said, it's a corporate kleptocracy. We're not changing that. We're not. Most of the infrastructure and laws and all that shit is built for enabling creation of wealth, not creation of providing for people. And though the free market motherfuckers are like, "But hey, the creation of more wealth means we provide for more people," there's nothing that backs that up with hard data. There's no science to that shit; it's just a quote from the Bible you're supposed to believe or else you gonna get sent to the Hell of Hating Freedom boy.
I don't know man. I used to give a fuck about thinking things should improve and people should be taken care of by whatever government infrastructure is in place, but the older I get, the more anarchist I get. And not flash anarchism where you smash a window, but life anarchism where you just don't give a fuck about laws unless they make sense. There will be more of that. We've been domesticated pretty hard, and had our human goods milk production increased and increased and increased in America. They tell us Americans are lazier and won't do the jobs for the wages that illegals will do or other countries will do. They don't tell you America is the only country where there is no legal minimum for days off in a year. They don't tell you a bunch of shit that shows how fucked it is. Make more stuff, make more money. If you have creative ways about you, figure out a way to make money off it. Are you really good at something? Make money off it. Everything goes to money. Fuck money. I just want to live my life.

HECTOR CAMACHO'S MACHO VIDA from Men's Journal

Hector "Macho" Camacho was a world champion boxer from the '80s, who turned into kind of a showy freak (a forebearer to Money Mayweather to some extent). He died last year in standard boxer fashion - getting murdered with a blood stream full of coke. But this article sort of encapsulates his life, and just how crazy it all was. I mean fucking crazy. It's hard to feel bad for a guy who got to experience the craziness he got to experience. I mean, sure, you might read this article with an empathetic heart and be like, "How sad," but I can't do it. Like I mentioned in the above article, many are born fucked. And considering how fucked Macho Camacho was born, he lived a life full of hilarious stories. I'm sure it was full of hollow sadness too, which he filled with the obvious ways of human self-medication - sex with sluts and lots of drugs. And sure, we could hope that humanity could expand and be something more, but shit man, look around you, the infrastructure for human progress is not in place at all. It's about wealth progress, and for all those millions Camacho frittered away, I bet there's ten times as much tucked away by groups that made money off him. So if you get all sad and are like, "We could be so much more," go talk to those motherfuckers, not me. Camacho lived a bold life, and it's crazy to read about.

THE DARK ARTS: HOW TO APPROACH BLACK METAL from The New Yorker

My friend KS hipped me to it, and he is a great dude and a fan of both The New Yorker and metal music, like even that weird synthy metal stuff that kinda freaks me out because it makes no sense to the molecular parts of me that sat on milk crates getting half-high on dirtweed in the woods behind the grocery store listening to Slayer. Still though, the most important takeaway from this article is "Death to False Metal". I don't even listen to metal all that much, but still think that constantly, mostly because of the hipster metal factor in our world now. I was paying my Best Buy bill the other week and there were fucking Ride the Lightning t-shirts there. I thought to myself, "Oh, so that's why there's so many promotional photos of bands now where some chick is wearing a Ride the Lightning t-shirt." But this also got me to thinking on what I said above about what you were born into. Why do I hate what I deem as false metal, or poseurs? They can't help they were born sheltered inside the walls of privilege? Don't they have a human right to explore whatever is there for them, including shitty metal music?
Here's the thing though, and where the resentment comes from. Certain things get built around the notion, "We are the fucked and forgotten, and nobody gives a fuck about us, so this is our thing." And that's what metal was when I was 13-years-old, getting high with my best friend metalhead back then (whose born again now, by the way), listening to Slayer. And it actually relates to the first article because it's gentrification of art. It's taking this thing that has zero value to anybody, and these go-nowhere born-nothings make something of it that is fucking wonderful and nice, and then it gains value. Once it gains value, once a neighborhood has been cleaned up and a retail development can afford to invest in building two blocks away, or once an art form has been built and nurtured by a little sub-culture of freaks and losers to where a label can invest in pushing a few acts from that genre, then outsiders start coming in. You can't really blame them, because it looks awesome and is cheaper (housing) or neater (art) than whatever they're used to. So they start joining it. And eventually they become the old heads of these things, like the gay couple that first moved into an overly gentrified neighborhood who complain about how there's no Puerto Ricans around any more, or the metalhead who was into metal in the late '80s after And Justice For All came out. You really can't blame these people.
But the problem is, then it prices out the go-nowhere born-nothings, who are still going nowhere and born to be nothing, who no longer can afford either the property taxes on the neighborhood they re-built, or can't afford the ticket price to the 3-day music festival built on their music, or even if they can afford either of those, maybe they just can't stomach the new neighbors. Maybe the new neighbors fucking suck, and aren't familiar enough with the ways and methods of the old neighborhood or scene. And yeah, that's weird and shitty, because fuck scenes, but it's the truth. So that's why when I see some cutesy chick in a indie folk rock band wearing a Ride the Lightning shirt, I am like, "what the fuck?" And that's why I understand the whole Death to False Metal concept, because fuck man, death to all false metal, whether it be metal or hip hop or seedy neighborhoods suddenly having high end "consignment" thrift stores or fracking boomtowns in North Dakota or taking jobs in North Dakota or fucking whatever man thinking you are changing the fucking world by voting for a kleptocratic corporate motherfucker... all of that shit. Death to all these false metals.

field jukebox gambleraku number one

no one fixes shit no more;

jukebox sits in field waiting

for world's old ways to return

an update of sorts

So I've built what was to be my main and only site at ROJONEKKU which has all my various books and zines and art and pictures and haiku spikes and whatever the fuck else I'm trying to get by with. I think the internet is a failed promise at this point, so had anticipated having all my shit just fold into that site, which is exactly what most of my web names (rojonekku.com, workingmanbooks.net, confederatemack.com) all point at.

For whatever reason though, I've decided to keep this, mostly as an archive, perhaps as a source for new shit, or whatever. Some old shit may disappear as I move it to something else. But for now, I plan on putting up simple homepix again, with a gambleraku, perhaps daily, perhaps not even close to daily. This blog has existed in various forms for a number of years, and it's a good introduction to what I do, although it's deep and thick enough that it's probably hard to actually delve into. I'm not really of the belief that people are actually looking for shit online though. It's more of a distraction. But I'll leave something here because I'm one of you, and will start fucking around online too, and will want somewhere to put dumb shit. So this is that somewhere.

freestyle sonnets

religion

believe what you want, do what you will, find reasons

to affirm what you believe, whether spirit-based

or built on scientific trial, but seasons

shall pass and all things change; new tribulations faced

will challenge your thought patterns; how will you adapt

for survival, conquering an altered landscape

littered with altars and lab space where wisdom trapped

itself in tradition, and yet changes take shape

daily in all moments, our world is forever

shifting truth, with man dragged along by tooth and nail,

clutching at his heartworn ways, which seemed so clever

and permanent, though permanence is doomed to fail

time and time again, yet we learn not this lesson -

our dominion to exist is still a question

beethoven

the Beethoven principle is plenty present

in current writing, meticulously crafted

creations of heavy-handed brilliance, pleasant

to high-minded, academically drafted

individuals born inside the gates of Smart,

accepted as standard method for writing words;

in fact if you’re not tortured, you’re not doing art

worthy of furrowed brow scrutiny; sure, the herds

will never hear (much less feel) your contributions

to civilization’s secret progress behind

the sheltered closed walls of ivy institutions,

but without such hidden dedication, man’s mind

will not be properly inclined to serve Self first;

without ego, the western art bubble would burst

May the Three

freestyle sonnet on bench seats (word to Matt C.)

smooth masculine maneuvers sideways in parked cars

were made easier across long leather bench seat,

but we live in a time of cupholders as change jars

not man and woman (or whatever) making sweet

beneath the stars; in fact where the fuck went the stars

clouded out by overcast reflections from street

lights clustered all civilized around homes and bars

and stores and shit and filth but cleaned to neon neat

beacons of sustenance but quickly falls apart,

much like the vehicles of today, buckets dumped

full of failed humanity, lacking unclogged heart

yet full of self-importance, flabby chests well-thumped

with pride for the slide into decline and despair,

in a clean plastic ride, where only eagles dare

freestyle sonnet on New Coke (word to David D.)

the old traditional ways are classic, never

forget them (nor end your support) but the greatest

thing ever created throughout our endeavor

to bring you some great shit is also the latest,

and it’s certainly mostly the same, so it seems,

but also totally different completely,

trust us, see we’re splitting one game into two teams,

and maybe more, so that any choice discreetly

goes back to one source, one sole provider of shit,

and you’ll be so stoked to ingest our crap you’ll brand

yourself unable to accept alternates, lit

in the brain with identity attached to stand

proudly with one debilitating choice above

another, two (or more) the same, one hate, one love

freestyle sonnet on Grampage (word to Chelsea M.)

old man of Chernobyl, after eating homegrown

vegetables for twenty years, developed powers

magnified by internal fission of his own

molecules, altered by the iodine showers,

thyroid devoid of standard man limitations

until he stormed like a tornado through locales

across east Europe, creating devastations

across multiple borders, destroying morales,

disgusted by modern morals, or lack thereof,

waving his radioactive cane he’d hand-hewn

from a twisted juniper bush his life-long love

had planted, before tumors took her far too soon

for his liking; in his anguish, he decided

to smash all cultures where atoms are collided

freestyle sonnet on moonflower vines/luna moths (word to Nathan S. & Sean T.)

moonflower vines intertwined with wrought iron where

I recline as sunshine goes dark while the earth turns;

moonrises are less regular, I sit and stare

at stars’ bright light, which through “heavenly” fabric burns

navigational maps for both man’s heart and mind,

whether crossing oceans or making decisions

of more personal natures, yet also inclined

to follow lunar calls once the moon has risen

is the perfect white blooms of the vines on my porch,

attracting the attentions of magic, large-eyed

moths flocking to these blossoms as if a fire’s torch;

the scene pollinates my thoughts, with truth I commune;

glorious vine, moth, and I, all slaves to the moon

freestyle sonnet on M.C. learning to drive a stick shift (word to Matt C.)

restricted license afternoon crawl in Datsun

late model, longhaired driver not wearing seat belt,

fuck that, tortured rock-n-roll genius rides shotgun,

they pass fat-gut cop fishing for citations dealt,

blue lights flashing, pull over into loose gravel,

“license and registration,” “sure, here you go sir,”

cruiser snitchbot reports back that driver’s travel

is legally limited to work and back, “your

aware of blah blah blah Mr. Mack?” “yes, of course,

can my friend drive us home?” “well... I guess that’s okay,

but if I catch you again, you’re fucked with full force,

get out of here, consider this your lucky day;”

I’m back in passenger seat, saying, “let’s go... quick,”

my friend looks to me and says, “I can’t drive a stick.”

bonus freestyle sonnet on self-publishing I guess I don't know (word to Raven Mack)

self-published sucker existing on the edges

of respectable decisions, not knowing when

to clutch at safety’s comfort, pull back from ledges,

“you don’t what’s too far ‘til you’ve gone there,” I’ve been

motivated by madmen, both by blood as well

as environment, born cheap beer-bent and hell-bound

except hell ain’t real, just fairy tales old folks tell

to keep my wild ass in order, calm the sound

of fury internal, I’d burn the whole world down

if I could - scorched earth, start over, reset caveman

molecules back to the essence, when life was brown

not green, not a falsely sustainable gameplan

where “righteous” fuckers decide what constitutes health;

y’all can wait to be told, I’m doing it for self.

May the Two

I struggle with the locale I live at, feeling the allegedly artistic and intelligent and creative are deficient in those qualities yet abundant of confidence that what they do is important. The problem with this is I struggle with those feelings as well. It's hard not to wish you were recognized for your talents more, especially when you literally struggle to maintain status quo in your financial life and are pretty much doing the slowly sinking tread water thing that pretty much everybody is doing from $13K a year up to $87K a year. It's our culture; that's what's been built, and what holds us in place.

Also with everyone being able to circulate their thoughts/art/creations online to what is potentially an audience of EVERY FUCKING PERSON ON EARTH, you start to feel like there should be some sort of acknowledgement of what you are doing, some affirmation that what you do is worth it not just to you but someone else, and you are having an affect on the world. I know I have been paralyzed by wishing for that at times (not literally paralyzed, but my thoughts are too often attached to the fruits of creative actions as opposed to just doing shit for the sake of doing it). And there are people who are successful with the things they do, meaning they seem to be doing it for their job, and that confuses me as I'm not even sure how you do shit like that. I guess I fall back on my assumption you have to be born with a certain amount of shelter to afford yourselves psychic luxuries like "doing what you love" with your life, but that's only partially true and also partially a cop-out on my part.

One thing my wife and I jibber-jabber about is cutting ties, which has direct visual relation to being attached to the fruits of our actions. For us, it's in relation to bad relationships in our lives, visualizing a rope physically being cut between yourself and that person, to have no attachment to them, which doesn't mean you are like "fuck you" but does mean you are not controlled by their emotional tugs and pulls and nonsense. I am trying to be better about visualizing that with regards to my creative business on this earth. It's my job to blather nonsense constantly, that's what I'm supposed to do. And whether self-publishing or internet posting or haiku tweeting or zine making or traditional publishing or whatever, I have to cut the ties that attach me doing these things to some sort of end acknowledgement by others, whether that mean people wearing a t-shirt of mine or I get paid and pay my monthly bills with words essentially. I have to cut loose of that. In fact, to be honest, we all do. Shifts are happening, and honestly everybody is online right now feeling like they are sharing their special ways with the world, waiting for the world to acknowledge how special they are. Guess what though? We're all special. Everybody has fucking art in their head; whether you let it out or not, it's there. Also guess what though? With the globalization of culture through internet (which is still heavily segregated believe it or not... I know we like to think we see the entire world better now but seriously, any google search has a filter bubble over it, and it's not like if you search "soccer results" they show you shit from the African Champions League) we've all become more homogenized, more like each other. That actually makes it even more important we all let our individual crazy art out of our head, to fight the homogenization of bullshit, because nine times out of ten, when something is homogenized, there's somebody looking to make a dollar at the far end of the homogenization process. All the googles/facebooks/apples are not just kicking it trying to improve humanity; they are trying to improve profit. If they can make you think they are "doing good" and making life better, then you'll buy in.

Essentially that's the problem too - always buying in. I just self-published a book of haiku which actually is a pretty neat fucking collection of haiku. I have sold like 12. I didn't expect to sell more than that, but that gives you an idea of how things translate into reality. And one day when I sold two copies the same day, the book was like in the top 20 of poetry on Amazon's American site. Seriously, with only two copies sold. So no matter how skewed the algorithms are, there's not a lot of actual financial gain involved if I can jump into the top 20 and clear like $5.50 profit. What I'm saying here is the big pay-off is not imminent, no matter how wildly creative and talented and special genius you are. Perhaps you have the financial backing behind you to push yourself hard in the internet paint, and start to turn a nice profit, but having financial backing/promotional support does not directly correlate with artistic genius, ever. In taking a fiction workshop with an author dude who won the National Book Award before this semester, he told me there are two things required to become a successful author - you have to be good, and you have to have the right person notice you are good. That's the way our culture is built.

So here's the thing though... I don't want to support that. I don't want to be made into some asshole who looks like an asshole doing asshole things as a self-proclaimed writer. I just want to make shit. So many ideas and so few hours. Once you unleash the creative inside you, that's how it gets, and that's how it should be. You should be struggling to keep up with your artistic productivity, everybody should. Fuck making money, fuck being recognized, because all that is going to crumble under its own greed like a Bangladeshi garment factory. Creative processes are supposed to help us see the bullshit in our own lives, and to beautify the ugly. That's the whole point of it, from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel to graffiti on freight trains - it beautifies the ugliness. It doesn't take a genius to want to make something ugly look pretty, so no matter how wildly creative you or I am, we are not unacknowledged geniuses or artists yet to be discovered. We should be taking the pressure and turning it into gold and diamonds and leaving it all around us, fuck whether somebody knows about it or not. It's important to do so, leave it everywhere, hidden in letters to prisoners or lost tweets or left on benches and stapled to telephone poles. Too often in our culture, especially where everybody feels like they are "marketing" to EVERY FUCKING PERSON ON EARTH through the cyberbot machines, we do our thing and see it as gold and diamonds and automatically are like, "Man, I wish I could get paid for all these gold and diamonds I created." But that's not how it works. You leave it in the world, and then some other asshole will come along and mine it and make the money, and then it will be gone and hidden behind locked doors. That's how this culture works. Don't feed that; do your thing and do it fucking everywhere and don't be attached to that meaning this or that should happen and most of all, don't ever give a fuck about what happens after you do it. If you unlock that creative onslaught, let the miners come along and exploit it or the assholes steal it, because as long as you stay in that solid creative space, you'll do it forever. It'll be like breathing or eating, just something that has to happen daily. And if it's happening daily, why the fuck would you be so attached to what you did three months ago? Leave it there. Cut the ropes. Cut the fucking ropes.