WEEKLY FRYBREAD: bird tribe lessons

I had not planned on posting a weekly frybread this week, partially because I haven’t done much in way of writing this past week but also because if I did do some writing, why just do a stupid blog update instead of working on the 7000 things in my head? Not sure. But then I took a lunch break and escaped the constant buzz of the inside of buildings and computer screens, and had a moment to reflect. A lot of times if I am hungry, I grab some $3 dumplings at the dumpling spot near where I work. They are in all likelihood from big bags of frozen dumplings from the Chinese grocery store, but they are heated and have soy and some rooster pepper sauce of some sort, and I enjoy taking them into the park near my work and kick back and chill on a bench with some dumplings. I have learned to use chopsticks in the past four months by doing just that. It’s a nice day so the easily accessible park areas by campus were pretty crowded, but I’ve also found these gardens tucked in between the main lawn of campus and the hospital expansion that nobody seems to know about. There’s like five of them, with multiple levels to most all five, and usually I sit by this one with a spire, but today I went to the far one in the string as I’d never gone in there. I found a bench completely underneath a scrubby tree, so kicked back with not another soul in sight. I mean, I could hear the dudes scraping and replacing the slate roofs of ancient student housing, but it was cool because my eyesight was full of nothing but greenery and chillage. I really do love these gardens a lot, not sure their history and if they come straight from Mr. Jefferson himself or not, but I’ve contemplated etching haiku or tanka or maybe even full sonnets onto scrap slate or maybe just haiku on railroad spikes and leaving them hidden in these gardens. That will come with time. Anyways, I got a spicy noodle bowl to go with the dumplings today, and was leaning forward eating, so as to not slop sauce all over myself while using chopsticks with noodles, when some small grey bird – bigger than a hummingbird but not nearly as large as the red-breasted robins that have been my spirit guide this year – came floating directly in front of my face, like a foot out. It just hung there, bouncing as it flapped, and I wasn’t quite sure what was going on or what to do. I felt like I should hold my arm out for it, but didn’t. It flew up in the branch above my head, and I noticed another one to my left as well. Then I noticed the three had a pretty good population of birds. This of course was a positive omen to me. Birds have been more prominent in my psychic space this year, which would seem odd considering my birth-given middle name is Raven and my familial unit’s street name is Bird Tribe. (Remind me to show you my rhinestone Bird Tribe overalls at some point; I only wear them on the most special of occasions.) But starting around February, I became very aware of the red-breasted robins that seemed to be following or guarding my path most days. It was weird actually, to where if I didn’t see one it freaked me out. I still don’t know shit about bird species, and have no desire to be one of those O.C.D. bird watcher types, but this floating bird before my face was a good omen. I get caught up in what I haven’t done too often, how I have all these books and stories and ideas in various stages of outline but very few completed. Mostly this is because I use the internet and the internet is full of writers. I would dare say four out of every five people on the internet consider themselves writers. I read some bar graph defense of some dude dissing free form poetry the other day which talked about how if there were far more writers, you have this flow of quality where the majority of it is half-assed and mediocre, but with so much input, your final high-quality output is a higher level as well. That may be true, but there has to be some way to find that, because mostly what I see is shitty writing, or self-important people always self-hyping themselves. One of my biggest difficulties with finishing the Football Metaphysics book was having to then tell people, constantly, that it existed. I hate this aspect of writing because I see “writers” doing it all the time for lackluster crap. I’m not just talking e-publishing wannabes either; I see well-respected writers with major book company deals who are busy talking up some really mediocre and barely thought out crap. I don’t want to be that. I won’t be that. Thus, sometimes it can be hard to find the motivation to get work done, because I fear I’m part of that industry. But having the bird float in my face while I ate a spicy noodle just drove home my whole Bird Tribe reality. I am a dude who uses words, because it is how my mind works. But I am probably more of a poet-philosopher than actual writer, even though if you asked me I’d say poetry was stupid (for the most part). I enjoy language and the way certain words roll together, and mostly it is like freestyling to me, and the key is to attune the mind to being more receptive to unleashing the freestyles that are always there. Now that I’m to a point where I have long stories and novels and projects laid out, it becomes an issue of fine-tuning these mental wanderings to be incorporated into larger projects. That’s not really that difficult, but it can be tedious, and the more tedious it gets the more it reminds me of all the assholes. Here’s the thing though – my oldest kid, who is 13, has already finished one novel, and is starting another. In fact, she just started a blog and put up her first post the other day. She is already on a path of creativity far ahead of where I was at age 13. And I was pretty intensely creative when compared to the other kids my age back then. My second child is a natural director of large theatrical efforts, and a natural born dancer, and overall creative mind as well, but with the spirit of a healer. She will take care of people at some point, I know, whether that be as a simple nurse or in some complicated self-help/self-realization way. She is still young, so it will have to show itself to her. And the youngest is only four but has this strange unseen world where she communicates with the bees, and knew their leader was named Melissa (which it is, according to Greek mythology) without anyone even explaining to her that bees could have leaders. And all of this with my lovely ol’ lady, who is an artist and plant healer and probably the only woman who could be as much of a creative anarchist as me and yet still wholesome as fuck, in a sort of weird twisted urban degenerate in the middle of the country sort of way. We both come from broken families. There’s no need to get into the specifics or use anything from then as an excuse for now. But we’ve built together this Bird Tribe family of creative chaos. And yes, I do not think us perfect, and know there are broken things about us as well. But we are at the most less broken than what we were born into, and at least broken in new ways that are less corrosive for personal happiness. Our children are enabled to express themselves easier than we were, and that is progression. Ultimately, when my ol’ lady talks about her plant work, or I talk about writing, it becomes clear we don’t give a fuck about money. I mean, we do. Ideally, I’d be able to work from home and still afford the electric bill. Ideally, we’d be able to financially enable ourselves to more deeply explore our personal arts. But that’s not necessarily the world we got born into either. And all you can do is live where you was born, and make the best of it. So though I don’t have book deals like I sometimes have felt I should have gotten, when others who made lesser zines got book deals when that was a thing, or people who wrote lesser blogs got deals as that was a thing, I know that what I’m doing is what I’m supposed to be doing. If I write it at a slow boil, so be it. I mean, I am competing against mortality, but should not be against any outside notion of what being a writer means. Fuck most writers. And my children are already percolating, getting their slow boil going a lot earlier than me or my wife did. It’s pretty important to be part of that as well. So yeah, I don’t know what the fuck I was deciding to say by deciding to do a weekly frybread, other than maybe: writers sucks, birds are awesome, and though there’s no money in it what we are doing is what we are supposed to be doing. We might want to do more of it, but we don’t need to kill ourselves in the struggle to do it, or accidentally blow out our creative fires sucking on poisoned thinking. Bird Tribe motherfucker, floating right in front of your face, and sitting in the trees all around you. I don’t need to call your attention to it, you can look if you want to. If you don’t, so be it; it’s still happening.

WEEKLY FRYBREAD: returning to writing

The Football Metaphysics for Enlightened Degenerates book (still available over in the sidebar) did okay, about as I had hoped, maybe a little less, but also highly naïve of me to be the complete contrarian I am and write a book allegedly about football that’s not about football at all really and wonder why A) football fans were afraid of it, and B) people who hate football but follow my site/writings are afraid of it. But that is who I am. The hardest part has been getting back into the swing of things with writing. I absolutely detest the marketing part of shit like that, as I keep abreast of a lot of neurological studies and read shit regularly about neurophilosophy, so pretty much think the entire concept of “marketing” is somewhat based on immoral behavior, should you believe in morals, which I guess I do, though I have no real solid opinion as to what those morals are based on beyond my gut intuition towards what is right and wrong. Fuck science, fuck religion, unfuck the world – that’s what I say. But get back into it slowly is exactly what I’m trying to do this week, and not be completely lull-brained by the enticing siren buzz of social media into crashing my creativity onto the rocks of wasted time. I had planned on a book about everyday lessons around us being the second offering, with a collection of short stories hopefully by the end of the year being my third, but in starting to work on the observational stuff, my Rojonekku Manual came back to the forefront of my mind, and that shit needs to be done. So it shall be done, hopefully before Halloween, as that is the tentative target I am poking into my brain at this moment. However, I’ve also been getting into poetry for whatever reason, except not free-form but strictly rigid structural poetry, as is usual for me since my brain is somehow afflicted with mathematical viruses that cause me to think in numbers and grids and patterns and crap like that. So I started outlining multiple crowns of sonnets related to a 5-trailer trailer park, and am hoping to work up 120 sonnets related to this imaginary trailer park. By making them crowns of sonnets, with a 15th sonnet comprised of the last line of the first 14, and each crown relating to one person in one of the five trailers, and trying to construct a story somewhat through the 8 crowns in the 120 sonnets (good lord, the twisted mathematical literary mind inside my head), I have to sort of work backwards partially, and build it in a completely different way than most poetry is built. But I like that. And I hate most poetry. So it will be done. Also, trying to start finger-peck the Confederate Mack collection together little by little. That’s definitely on the backburner at the moment, but hopefully by spring at the latest I’ll get that dumb shit done. Of course, football season has started officially again, so I am sure I will start doing nonsense gibberish over at Armchair Linebacker like always, including a new thing I started this week where I put up a Redskins-related tanka every morning. That will last for as long as it lasts, which I told myself would be until ten days after their last game is done, but let’s be honest, may be next Tuesday. Additionally, new month’s worth of Krupert songs should show up at some point. I got a nice DMMA notice the other day from mediafire, so I was afraid my entire site would disappear in Orwellian fashion, which it probably will at some point anyways. Remember that. I know most people don’t care, and my site is certainly contradictory to the normal 2012 enjoyment of the interwebs where things are short and pictured and goofy and not-serious and all that hoo-ha. But I am proud of the elaborate labyrinth of nonsense that has slowly been built here, rather than abandon for a new blog or start a tumblr (though I’ve always done those things as well), and there’s a strange thickness you can get lost in at this site. Maybe nobody does this like I do, but I love strange, cryptic websites with large tag pools clustered along a sidebar or at the bottom of the page and after posts and you can click and clack your way through one site’s craziness, getting lost along strange tangents for hours. That is this. In fact, this is the 2100th post on this blog. That’s a lot of nonsense, of which much of it is not nonsense at all, but elaborate wrought-iron prophecy laid out in a purposefully confusing manner. It is like creepy medieval alchemist math, making things you don’t even realize, below your conscious mind. Won’t you please indulge?

Manifestation Sonnet #0812

books are outer space in places I come from
working minds draped up in sweat and flat screen's fog
we breathe deep the soul glue and let our glow go dumb
perfect storm of still bodies and electrosmog
but I wander these roads with words for my long lost
armed with wild man's beard face and workingman's handshake
uncle sam's goddamn bastard 'cause I can't be bossed
understand self-medication, still I stand straight
this crooked world don't want straight words in a child's head
they want us drunk on dumb when we need sober truth
so old ways ain't forgotten when old folks is dead
want my words to spark a desire for fire in youth
     all day we're kicked in the head and yet still we stand
     when mind matches body's strength, we'll be workingman

J.J. Krupert August '12 #1: "Amen" by Tim Barry

all day we're kicked in the head and yet still we stand

when mind matches body's strength, we'll be workingman

!∞--☈℧⌡℧∏∑Ж☋--∞¡

J.J. Krupert August '12 #2: "Shine a Light" by The Rolling Stones

want my words to spark a desire for fire in youth

!∞--☈℧⌡℧∏∑Ж☋--∞¡

J.J. Krupert August '12 #3: "Gone But Not Forgotten" by Hank Williams III

so old ways ain't forgotten when old folks is dead

!∞--☈℧⌡℧∏∑Ж☋--∞¡

J.J. Krupert August '12 #4: "Tear My Stillhouse Down" by Gillian Welch

they want us drunk on dumb when we need sober truth

!∞--☈℧⌡℧∏∑Ж☋--∞¡

J.J. Krupert August '12 #5: "Sweet Child o' Mine" by Guns n' Roses

this crooked world don't want straight words in a child's head

!∞--☈℧⌡℧∏∑Ж☋--∞¡

J.J. Krupert August '12 #6: "Oxy Music" by Schoolboy Q

understand self-medication, still I stand straight

!∞--☈℧⌡℧∏∑Ж☋--∞¡

J.J. Krupert August '12 #7: "Black Lip Bastard" by Ab-Soul

uncle sam's goddamn bastard 'cause I can't be bossed

!∞--☈℧⌡℧∏∑Ж☋--∞¡

J.J. Krupert August '12 #8: "Fu Manchu" by Desmond Dekker

armed with wild man's beard face and workingman's handshake

!∞--☈℧⌡℧∏∑Ж☋--∞¡

J.J. Krupert August '12 #9: "Melophobia" by DJ Burn One

but I wander these roads with words for my long lost

!∞--☈℧⌡℧∏∑Ж☋--∞¡

J.J. Krupert August '12 #10: "Storm" by Gregory Isaacs

perfect storm of still bodies and electrosmog

!∞--☈℧⌡℧∏∑Ж☋--∞¡

J.J. Krupert August '12 #11: "Lungs" by Townes Van Zandt

we breathe deep the soul glue and let our glow go dumb

!∞--☈℧⌡℧∏∑Ж☋--∞¡

J.J. Krupert August '12 #12: "Draped Up" by Bun B feat. Lil Keke

working minds draped up in a sweat and flat screen's fog

!∞--☈℧⌡℧∏∑Ж☋--∞¡

J.J. Krupert August '12 #13: "Looking for Alien Love" by Yelawolf

books are outer space in places I come from

!∞--☈℧⌡℧∏∑Ж☋--∞¡

WEEKLY FRYBREAD: unfuck the world

Feeling pretty good this Friday, because the past three or four weekends I’ve madly been working on the Football Metaphysics book, and this one, I’m done, I can finally fix the stupid riding mower and cut the grass and wrestle my goats and carve hobo graffiti into the backyard picnic table with my children using old railroad spikes. Everything feels pretty easy, like my Lionel Ritchie jheri curl-sized aura is solidly lime green, and solidly growing.
Seems like some wacky shit going on worldwide, what with the Israeli build-up towards war with Iran, and the Julian Assange asylum brouhaha, not to mention all the crazy surveillance state shit like Trapwire and the indeterminate detention of American citizens without charges as authorized by NDAA. And it’s all inter-related too. Seems like the United States and its two main homeboys in the U.K. and Israel are really making a grand stand grab at things, which I think the rest of the world may stand against. Hard to say, and I am not geo-political expert by any means, though I did play the fuck out of Sid Meier’s Civilization IV. Strange times lay ahead, probably full of conflict and war, and perhaps that starts trickling into our American life a little more. Perhaps not. I’m not entirely concerned.
It can be easy to get caught up in fear and worry, which is exactly what tends to happen during recent American Presidential election years, where both sides fear the cataclysmic catastrophes that await should the other side win. Guess what? They’re both right. And yet, they’re both wrong at the same time, because I’ve come to realize America is not this Great Ominous Evil power I used to think it was. It is a giant self-important bureaucracy, and basically operated like a corporation to a certain extent. And like any self-important bureaucratic corporate entity, it is becoming dilapidated, weakened, eaten from within by cancerous philosophies, and will eventually cave in on itself. That is not a bad thing. All governments should cave in on themselves every hundred years or so, because nothing works forever. Though it will be chaotic for who knows how long, we’d all be better off with a new infusion of ideas and ways of running things in our taxed and strained American system.
Oddly enough, I feel more clear-headed than ever, and have actually been reading a lot of economic theory type bullshit, as I’ve always been the standard contrarian who is like, “Capitalism is bad,” but never really had any science. Watching a number of Slavoj Zizek speeches, where he says some things but seems also to just try to rile people up in pure contrarian manner, it made me want to better understand the source of things and less trust what someone tells me. So I did some reading.
Guess what? Capitalism is on some bullshit. You take normal hunt and gather survival, add the abstract concept of money (which is a good idea usually, to create a standard for trade), and then tweak the system to that each little part of the overall culture produces constantly in order to consume constantly items outside of their microcosm, and allegedly we are made wealthier because we have more shit. The problem is, we don’t need all that shit; we just have this desire to want all that shit. Getting it does not solve the want, because automatically there is a new want. We are not wanting what we buy, we are wanting the moment of buying it, thus we’re never happy. It’s like the people who are hungry for McDonalds and eat it but get no nutrition so keep eating and eating and eating. I know the internet be making fun of people like that, but we’re all like that, whether our McDonald’s is smart phones or downloading music or eating at restaurants or whatever. It’s been bred into our psychology.
That is another thing that bothers me, is that I don’t think it is bred so much as it is a natural chemical reaction in our brains. Thus, a lot of advertising triggers for purchasing goods are not so much great campaigns at convincing you to buy something as they are great experimental activations of chemical reactions inside your body. Psychology, we will find, is something we can heal and repair but not something we can control as much as we think. That’s not to say shit like therapy is not helpful in repairing broken physical mechanisms in our brain, but it’s not the way we think.
So as you might be able to tell I’ve been reading a lot of neurophilosophy bullshit as well, as there are a lot of studies relying on functional MRI to prove some of the things I mention above, and yet fMRI assumes that brain functions are limited to parts of the brain, rather than the whole, and that the part that lights up in an fMRI is the one being used for certain tasks.
This brings me to why I feel so excited and am not afraid, because just like that misleading functional MRI, so goes people. If a man steals a loaf of bread, that is obvious, and he can be caught and punished. If a group through the cyberwebs shares music and books and such through a torrent, it is not one basic act that is obvious, but a multitude of tiny parts of the act that is split upon a myriad of separate computers. That is an action of the collective, or whole, and that is how many neurophilosophers feel the human brain probably works, not in individual parts like a machine. After all we are not machines, we are complex organic matter. That is like a torrent.
It’s something I’ve thought about a lot as I’ve chunked this first book called Football Metaphysics into the internet’s great vagina of nonsense, is how do I feel about what I have written being considered my work, in a sense no one else should ever be able to see it without paying me a fee. And honestly, I’m still working through this, because I have been trained culturally to feel I deserve to be rewarded for my ideas put into words, and there is some truth to it. I physically did the work. But at the same time, I cannot be attached to ownership of my ideas. Most all ideas have been thought somewhere by somebody in this post-modern world, and ultimately a sort of “open source” exchange of these works seems like it might not be a direction we should ignore completely. I mean, I want to be able to provide for my stupid bills through my writing, and not have to pretend to care about the other jobs that have filled my working life, but at the same time, I want to share my mad way of putting words together just as much. And if I am only selling my work, especially in an e-publishing format, I’m eliminating a big part of what I would hope to be my community.
And just as the individual thief can be punished, but the collective acting anonymously cannot, the individual activist or revolutionary (god that word fucking sucks now) or let’s just say the individual person trying to enact unapproved change, he can easily be assassinated or jailed or disappeared by authorities. Make no mistake about it, the authorities have the legal ability to do that according to many things brought into law by our last two Presidents of these American states, and legal has jackshit to do with right or wrong. Anybody who thinks the law is a matter of right and wrong has not lived enough in real life. But the group acting collectively, they can accomplish more than the individual, especially if the power structure is lacking traditional power structure that can easily be beheaded.
That’s why I’ve been loving the activity of Anonymous, gathering at the Ecuadorian embassy in London, and gathering at the U.K. embassy in New York, just being witness to the whole affair. We don’t even realize our own power most times and most days, because we are so stuck in our little over-dramatized daily lives. But we have power, when we build communities. At one point that was the excitement of the internet, that we could build “communities” with people who liked the same dumb shit we did, and feel empowered. But we can take that to our non-digital lives as well, and build community in that sense.
So with that, although it has nothing to do with any of this world-changing, I ask you to go preview my book Football Metaphysics for Enlightened Degenerates. It is entertaining as fuck, but also deeply peppered with real shit, with secret positives and thick tangents that “undermine the social order” as the Russian judge told Pussy Riot in court. And I want you to buy it, because if I could do this shit from home, I could grow pigs and goats and a garden and fuck around with my kids and build a more fulfilling crazier life for myself. But that ain’t crazy at all, because that’s what I was wired to do, how I was born to live. And I can tell you this about the book, it’s more than worth $4 for what you’ll get out of it. You’ve spent $4 on much dumber shit in the past week, guaranteed. But it’s also the first book in the Workingman Books attempt at something, which is not meant to be a business at all. I could give a fuck about building a business. I’ve had my own business before – businesses suck. I want freedom, not business. And the idea behind Workingman Books is to just throw these things out there. On the surface, a football book is just a stupid football book. But anybody who’s ever read more than a little of my writing knows that what I write about is not often what it looks like I’m writing about. You can’t undermine social orders by being obvious, or you end up like the bread thief. I hope Workingman grows into a thousand authors doing a thousand crazy things, all for the financial benefit of themselves, but more importantly for the larger benefit of their communities. Seriously, fuck money. I mean I feel I deserve $4 for what you’d get, but if you didn’t want to pay it because you’re like, “whatever,” I ain’t gonna get all indignant. Fuck the entitlement of the creative class, that feels the capitalist system somehow needs to reward them for their creativity. Your creativity rewards what feels the benefits from it, and that bounces back on you. So if you find a way to bootleg my book, go ahead. You’re only taking a potential $4 from me, and if you ain’t got that $4, fine. In fact, if you don’t have that $4 and want the book and are a Rojonekku fan and are reading this, email me and let me know. Seriously. I’ll give you the book. Just tell me what’s up. I’m not looking ever in my life to be some strict asshole ruling the value of my words with an iron legal fist. Fuck that. Anybody can do what I do. I am not saying what I do is not done in a very special way, but shit man, any kid could sink into his brain like I did and end up right here, mixing and matching the same grand ideas and obscure references and a thousand tangents into a solar burst of creativity. I see my own children already developing this. But they develop this because they are exposed to it.
So yeah, it’s crazy times in this world, but it’s also exciting. New things are going to take place of the old, and it’s not going to be the End of the World, as the Mayan calendar (and them dudes were tapped into them alien motherfuckers with the pyramids) predicted a great change. There’s going to be a big shift in thinking. The few who are still pushing this ownership idea to the max, because they sit at the top of that legal “right” (which again, has nothing to do with actual right in a moral sense), they’ll fight change until the whole thing caves in on them like earthquake rubble. They will. And it’s gonna suck.
But within that, we can build our own shit, anywhere we want, figuratively and literally. That’s what Workingman is already, and will continue to be. That’s what Football Metaphysics is about. Shit man, that’s what my every day is about. I want this shit to make it so we can be together better, me and you, all over the place. I want this to enable us sitting together in strange places, sharing our wild ideas. Because the world is fucked. And we ain’t go no other worlds, so we might as well unfuck this one. And in a world where almost anything you can think of has already been done three times over, all that’s left to be done is undoing what’s been done wrong. So fuck it, let’s unfuck the world.

My Football Metaphysics book

For the past two months, I have been working diligently and deliriously on this preview of the upcoming NFL season, built off the Spiritual Warrior philosophy that has secretly been fermenting at the Armchair Linebacker site, and it sort of spiraled out of control into this book – Football Metaphysics for Enlightened Degenerates. On the surface, the book is very simply a preview of the upcoming season, with in-depth coverage of important players, games, and trends for all 32 teams. But anyone who is familiar with my Raven Mack styles knows that it’s also so much more than that (or less than that, depending on your outlook). The subject matter is not the only subject matter, as football and the players who play the game are used as a springboard for all sorts of philosophical meanderings, and I can honestly say to you that this book, if read even partially, will make you explode in “WTF?!?!” laughter. Seriously. There is nothing covering pro football that is anything like this preview manual, and for the price of a fauntleroy cup of coffee, you will be entertained for hours and hours and hours. Again, that is no lie. This shit is as thick as a Hemingway novel, but with all the gonzo insanities of a Hunter S. Thompson/Oscar Zeta Acosta tract, except it’s neither. It’s me – Raven Mack aka Raven McMillian aka 1000 Feathers aka The Confederate Mack aka Dr. Lounge aka the guy who wrote a ridiculously insane preview for an NFL season and is telling you that you will enjoy it but you probably are hemming and hawing and like “whatever, I’m just gonna go look at some other dumb crap on Facebook” when you should be loading this into your favorite robot device and turning on, zooming in, and cropping out.

FOOTBALL METAPHYSICS FOR ENLIGHTENED DEGENERATES at Amazon
FOOTBALL METAPHYSICS FOR ENLIGHTENED DEGENERATES at Smashwords

Amazon will have the necessary apps to make it work on all your devices of time waste, not just a kindle. There are versions available that work for your kindles and nooks and crannies and Sonybots and tabloids and even your iPads and iPhones (with the Stanza app), but you can even get a pdf at the Smashwords link and look at it on your computer or print to old-fashioned rolling papyrus if you’d like to put a fat binder clip on it and leave it on the peach crate by the toilet. It’s a good 140-pages printed out single-spaced in 10-point font though, so there’s no lack of content. Aside from a long-winded overview of the project where I explain how the NFL has only about ten years at most of actual awesomeness left in it, for each and every team, I cover the following items: an overview of the team, pertinent data regarding last season and this one, most important games, each team’s individual trendsetter and spirit warrior, the coach/QB situation, their team elders, and scrappy Rudy, and assorted other player info, which includes but is not limited to historical information on the team and the city they are located in. Additionally, you’ll get psychic analysis as to the metaphysical force of each team in relation to the NFL’s entire history, as well as the past decade, and I’ve deduced not only each team’s best case scenario, but have a solid finger on what will go down this coming season.
And yet, even if you don’t like football, even if you are a woman who thinks pro football is the dumbest crap that ever existed, you will find immense joy in this offering of mine. This is because of my traditional Rojonekku style of writing, which is designed as a decoy, where beautiful life truths are buried in what looks to be just some dumb football shit. If we revealed the truths about the society around us out and in the open, those who monitor our interactions would stifle the real talk. That’s why I affectionately call it “nonsense gibberish” because it is akin to speaking in tongues that the devils don’t understand, like when I was a little boy in a snake-handling Pentecostal church in rural Rice, Virginia. This Rojonekku style is a lol-heavy sugar-coating on deep spiritual truths, so that we can feel like we are moving in a better direction as a group, without being some super-serious asshole about it. You know what is serious business? Nothing, because business is a joke and money is an abstraction and how can you expect me to take an abstraction seriously when it can’t bite or burn me? Wait, I’m getting sidetracked here…
This Football Metaphysic for Enlightened Degenerates is also my first offering from the Workingman Books collective press chaos factory doohickey/donthickey thing that I have chopped together in the crock pot of various co-conspirators minds, and it is fermenting away as we speak, into something that will give us greater gut intuition to enjoy the world around us, and be healthier on the inside, where are brain funks and chest clenches are. That is the hope. And this is the first offering, and I hope that you will support it, and that you will find it abundant in bringing you joy and spirit inside a dark and crooked world.

Football Metaphysics for Enlightened Degenerates

I have been working like a deranged madman on this project for a good part of the summer but also fairly insanely the past two weeks. It should be available for purchase in the next 48 hours, and I will put it to you very simply... In regards to written words about professional football, first there was SNAKE by Kenny Stabler. And then there was FOOTBALL METAPHYSICS FOR ENLIGHTENED DEGENERATES. Even though on the surface it's just a full bore preview of the upcoming NFL season, it speaks to truths that will last a lifetime. I look forward to you being like, "Whoa... Holy shit," when you actually read it.

WEEKLY FRYBREAD: football metaphysics on my mind

This week has been a busy one for your homeboy Raven Mack aka Wildbird Johnson aka The Confederate Mack aka Ruben Omega Tercera Acosta aka one thousand aliases. I am diligently whipping myself into psychic frenzies to continue work on the Football Metaphysics for the Enlightened Degenerate e-book, which hopefully should be finalized, formatted, and available for that ass by next Friday. It is fairly insane, and for football fans will be the second greatest text on the NFL ever written since ever, second only to Kenny Stabler’s autobiography. I know that may sound like hyperbole, especially for what is only a preview for a single season of professional football in America, but I’m not lying. If you are not a football fan even, there will be so much great stuff in it that seemingly has nothing to do with football, that you’ll get your money’s worth. I mean, it’s basically metaphysics, which translates from football to making homemade pizza to replacing the alternator on a ’92 Subaru Legacy, if you really think about it.
“Your money’s worth?” you may ask, thinking why would you pay for an e-book when you can read all types of free jibber-jabber on the internet for free? Well, basically fuck you first off. Secondly, nothing on the internet is free because they are trading your data for ads and making money off you. You are the product. And yet also the target audience. Basically, you’re pimped the fuck out online, so I advise you to buy far many more long rambling metaphysical texts to read offline on your personal robot devices. Sure there is the question of what will the poor read, and what will any of us do if the power grid crumbles like it did in India this past week? I don’t know, we can cross those bridges after we’ve burned them.
But make no mistake about it, my Football Metaphysics for the Enlightened Degenerate will be available for you in the near future. Obviously, being it is an NFL preview, there is a short shelf life on it, or so you’d think. I mean there is, but also it’ll be relevant regardless. I’ll probably hype it incessantly for like 10 days, then forget about it, as that is my writing plan at this point, to treat it more like an outsider artist just doing shit and leaving it on the side of the road – The Information Superhighway (remember that?) in this case – for whoever passes along to maybe take interest. I am excited to get to work on my next book as well which will be Raven Mack’s First Book by Raven McMillian. And to start digging into the Confederate Mack collection. And to help teach my 13-year-old daughter typing so we can release her first novel she’s written into a stack of composition books either at the end of this year or beginning of next.
Also performed my first wedding ceremony this week, which went well, I guess. I put such a high expectation on everything that I’m never as good as I hope to be. It’s a double-edge sword, because that relentless drives is pretty good for the creative process when it comes to pushing yourself hard as fuck; but it also can be defeating because you’re never as good as you hoped for, which can easily shift into self-loathing. But whatever.
Basically, not much more to say – no long-winded philosophical meanderings on this or that, as I’m busy at stupid work today and also trying to stay focused on the football stuff in free moments, chipping away in five-minute increments during the day time. But mad shit is cooking. And I actually have already gotten my crap together for the August J.J. Krupert, I just haven’t uploaded the songs to the cyberwebs yet. Does anybody download those songs still? Is anybody here? I guess if I am going to take the outsider artist perspective I shouldn’t ask. I doubt James Harold Jennings was asking people if they were there. But how do you make a blog look like an abandoned schoolbus? Perhaps I should let that percolate in the dark corners of my mind…

Manifestation Sonnet #0712

ain't no god, no science, just this right here right now
sometimes your savior is the worst choice you could make
expecting spirit jesters to gesture somehow
finding shame in pleasures your senses want to take
same old game, repetitive medieval thinking
"right" and "wrong" illusions make the carrot seem close
slow death procession, self-medicated drinking
syrup from the masters, sipping poison sucrose
I fly from the false laws of gravity and gods
love and death intertwined in my mind as one whole
my homeland's got trick prophets and tesla coil rods
littering the back roads which I routinely roll
     but I bury them both behind the horizon
     and yet the sunshine rises on more confusion

J.J. Krupert July '12 #1: "Free Born Rambling Man" by David Allan Coe

but I bury them both behind the horizon

and yet the sunshine rises on more confusion

!∞--☈℧⌡℧∏∑Ж☋--∞¡

WEEKLY FRYBREAD: the itch of the workingman

Every day is a joyful struggle to find true chill in a world gone hyper, although sometimes it’s not much natural joy involved and an actual pain in the goddamned ass. But we do it, because it’s better than the alternative, which is giving up. I’m not allowed to do that, even as we are in the midst of the bombardment of public relations campaigns for Tweedle-D and Tweedle-R aka The Doe and the Ram, which would make any sane individual want to give up on hope. But The Doe and The Ram are not my spirit animals, so hahahaha, wait a second…
You have to forgive me. At the time of writing this, I just came in from my naked qigong in the field so I’m sort of wired on my shamanic wildman shit. But here is the real deal from the holy fields – I am born Workingman, southern by birth Raven by the grace of god. Born Workingman in the sense I know ladders and calluses and pawn shops and week-to-weeks and so on and so forth. And inside that born Workingman is the blood of the Viking and the fire spirit of the Dragon. I have sailed through the ice and I have sat idly amongst rocks carving characters into cliffs. These things are deeply embedded inside my family tree, deeper than the visible circles my conscious family even realizes. But on the surface of it all, I am a Workingman.
For the Southern American Earthly Workingman, life is just that – motherfucking work. The higher castes jerk the yoke chains, and we move left or move right as necessary to loosen the chokehold on our short life. All of the movements are not necessarily our heart’s wants and wishes come to expression, but simple acts of survival and self-preservation. There are those amongst you who consider your minds opened, and you will judge the jerky right or left motions of the Workingman, but you don’t always understand. You don’t always try to understand.
I’m not here to be that. Honestly I could give a fuck if you ever understood the Workingman at all, because then all that’d mean is you’d gentrify trailer parks and rural wastelands as quickly and happily as you gentrify the ghettos, and then we’d be as displaced as the rest. At least as stereotypical mountain goat people, you leave us to our dark corners, at times, to ferment in our own madness. And I don’t fault you for doing what you do. We all only know what we think we know, so I guess the key is to not think you know so much all the time. I try to do that, but am not perfect, which is obvious especially if you saw what I was born from, deeply fermented during my formative years in that rural madness.
Of course, that madness breeds philosophies that if they read these words, they’d be like, “Man, this is some bullshit. What the fuck is wrong with you, Raven?” But I’m not shooting words at them right now – I do that on my real foot path. I am shooting words at you because you are the one that is here to read whatever the fuck I am saying.
So what am I saying?
I don’t know yet. I might not never know it. But I’m going to scratch at it, and the forum for that is going to be Workingman Books. That might already be something, or it might not. Shit man, everything’s been thought of by now in this greatly clustered post-modern world, and I’m not really concerned with intellectual properties or copyright infringements or whatnot, mostly because that is not my world anyways. That is the world of those that jerk the yokes, not those like me that work the ground. But I am going to use Workingman Books as the format for the scratching at It, from here on. This will start in the next two weeks with some sort of football preview (called Football Metaphysics for the Enlightened Degenerate), and will expand from there with my first “philosophical” treatise, which sounds douchebaggy as hell, but I’m not sure at this point what else to call it. I will figure it out along the way.
Now let me be clear about this – it’s sort of a business plan but without any real business plan to it. I am going to be saying, “Hey, why don’t you give me $3 for this thing?” and you can do it or you can not do it. I certainly understand the thought that there’s a zillion words of free content available to you inside the internet. But I also understand there is a cartel of web habits behind that façade of freedom that you are paying for without realizing. I also realize that most all of us that would have enough internet access to be reading this easily spend $3 on a cup of coffee or bottle of soda waters or hunk of food that leaves us dissatisfied often enough that giving me $3 should not seem such a trifling burden upon your soul. And if it is, so be it. I can handle that. I do not give a fuck if you support me or not. I’d hope if you got here we are together in some line of thinking, so I hope you do, but I’m not gonna stress myself out over it. It will be here for you whether you want it or not.
My hope though is not to follow the American Dream lies of financial success through alternative means. Fuck financial success as a dream. I want freedom from the bullshit, and I have this strange suspicions that the carrot-key of wealth dangled in front of my face all the goddamned time may not necessarily unlock the gate the way I’m hoping. Thus, Workingman Books will start out as me, but I’m hoping to add people to what it is, and have it be more than one man, or one book, or one this or that. An important shift in thinking I try to stress to myself is if you are part of a “revolution” as a head of it, that head is easy to decapitate. And if it is not decapitated, and a “revolution” is successful, history has shown 100 times out of 100 that the revolting forces end up repeating the same corruption of power. It’s human nature, called self-preservation, and it’s deep enough in our DNA that even the purest of hearts can’t escape the eventual symptoms of it.
So I try to keep the focus on a headless, fluid entity. Sure the first few Workingman Books things will have one of my thousand aliases as the author, but the hope is it will bloom like bacteria into a group, and then if I disappear or die or whatever, the thing itself still exists. So it starts out by me, in the traditional sense, but it is for us, eventually, at least whoever ends up wanting that us to be.
I understand the shifting consciousness on a personal level very well, and understand self-preservation. And if we break down ownership and heritage, in the direct paternal sense, I have done a lot of shifting my own consciousness to persevere. My grandfather I share a first name with I never knew. I don’t even know what he did for a living, other than he was a Scout troop in both World War II and Korea, and he saw some things, and he drank heavily, and was a violently stubborn man. I was told – and I felt so proud of this at the time I found out years ago, and still am to be honest – that he would always wear brown work pants and a white t-shirt and sit on a stump in the yard drinking Black Label. Always. He also was given a furniture set by one of my grandmother’s siblings, who felt bad about my grandparents financial situation, and my grandfather said he didn’t want it. The sibling insisted, so my grandfather said, “It’s mine? To do what I want? And you won’t take it back?” and he then dragged it in the yard and set it on fire. There’s something very obviously metaphorical about that, and it’s definitely very McMillian of him. He died at age 46.
My father also lived hard on the self-medication tip. There was bad about him in our relationship, as his only son, but there was good as well. I’m not here for therapy so let’s just leave it at the man was an amazing Spirit Warrior and taught me psychic swordplay styles that no one else could have. He died at age 47, and has a chainsaw graphic etched onto his grave marker.
So my personal shifting of consciousness the past two years involved at least eliminating factory alcohol from my life, and again, this is not therapy, and I’m no teetotaler who gives a fuck what anyone else does. I did not find sobriety through Jesus, and do not quiver in fear if a cooler full of cold ones is at the end of the picnic table. But I had to shift the way I thought about a lot of things, and not to become some sort of lame ass bitch, but to persevere, and see myself making it past those mid-40s ages of my father and grandfather. Perhaps I’m sexist, but I feel the paternal blood in a man is strong, so you should respect it. But you should not be ruled by it, because then I wouldn’t be a very good theoretical metaphysicist, would I? And though they were both Workingmen, or at least drunkards, both my father and grandfather were theoretical metaphysicists. My grandfather found it in the Buddha in his Asian tours of duty, and my father was a raw visionary, uneducated psychonaut from the fertile nonsense of the early ‘70s, post-Woodstock. And yet they were both very severely small town Southern men, born to die tragically, like all good Southern men. It is our way.
So I do not deny that destiny, nor do I deny my Workingman nature, even my natural drunkard mind. It’s all in there. But I am not going to let it control me, and I am not going to channel it into someone else’s benefit by way of religious sidetracks or falling into that American Dream trap where I replace what’s missing with something else new and shiny and still missing It. I am after It, not stuff, and the reason the self-medication is so high amongst the wretched of the earth is that they are missing It, and the ways they are misled to think they achieve It – through financial reward for hard work – that doesn’t exist. So they try to side-step that false broken system with self-medication. I can’t blame anyone for that. I don’t regret my own times in that mode. But one of the root realities for every Workingman is that the self-medicated weekend, even if you call in sick on a Monday morning, it eventually has to come to an end, and you’ve got to sober up enough to get back to work. And if the promises of financial reward for hard work is all a sham pyramid con anyways, then ultimately you have to figure out what you are truly working for. And I am working for It – that great big unexplainable set of truths the world camouflages behind a thousand dazzling diversions. And all you can do is scratch at it, like a fucking prisoner with a stolen spoon, scraping at the concrete under the cover of darkness, hoping to one day find your way through the bullshit that entraps you. So I am going to start scratching, again, as a Workingman.
The Workingman concept itself was brainstormed into my mind by my boy Boogie Brown, who always called his self-released CDs Workingman Records, which apparently was something that existed, so he called it Wreck Chords. I have a t-shirt he gave me once that says “low budget music for low budget people” and that made sense, and is why it is on the sidebar of this site and has been since the beginning. It is low budget art for low budget people. Industries have been built from all the arts, and I actually read some article the other day where a writer was complaining about the e-publishing movement because he was having a hard time staying a professional writer in the capacity he’d known for two decades. He called what he did “a professional maker of culture,” which I thought was the most godawful, ridiculous bullshit to say ever. Writing, music, art, culture – it just is what it is, and is born from people doing what the fuck they were born to do. You do it, whether you want to or not, like breathing or fucking or fighting or eating when you’re hungry. So that is what Workingman Books will be. In all likelihood it’ll be ugly, funny, the greatest thing you’ve ever seen, and completely ridiculous bullshit, perhaps all within a single paragraph. But it’s gonna be scratching the whole time. And we can see together what we uncover. And if we don’t uncover a damn thing, then so be it; hopefully we will have a wild time in the process.
So you know, I actually bought the domain name too, because I knew if I wrote about it, some asshole who respected the legal entities of ownership more than actually doing anything would buy that shit up right away. Workingman.com already exists as some hopeless job site, and workingman.net, which is what I really wanted, is owned but not operated, and sitting there waiting for somebody to make an offer. Fuck making an offer. I don’t make offers, I scratch at the truth.
Oddly enough, workingmanbooks.com is already owned too, again not operated and just sitting there waiting for someone caught up in the notion of “I have to have this!” to make an offer. So I bought workingmanbooks.net, which in itself was a hassle because the domain registrar I’ve traditionally used has been bought by some other registrar, and they complicate it enough to squeeze additional payments out of whatever it is you build with the name you choose to attach to your scratching at It. Because they are stuck in the ownership mode, where people own their brand and own their name and will pay every extra dollar they can to protect it. Meanwhile, I don’t give a fuck.
I did actually prefer the .net suffix anyways, as I am thinking of this long-term as a means for whoever gets involved to self-publish whatever the fuck they come up with, as part of this collective, but keep their individual rights and ideas and not let bullshit business sense get in the way. Thus a .com or commercial site didn’t make me feel right. And though I guess .net is for internet or network or whatever, in my mind I can say to you it is Workingman Books dot Net, because we are trying to catch something real.
So there it is. I hope in the next few months you will support it with your input, perhaps your involvement. I hope you will support it by sharing the info or hollering at me at the myriad of methods in the sidebar, or just even if you at least roll your eyeballs over it and let it percolate and either laugh at something stupid or think on something angled funny or do whatever the fuck it is that would make you feel good with it, that’s good.
There’s a shit ton of strange things going on this day and age, and perhaps we are hyper-aware because of technology, and perhaps we are hyper-unaware because of technology. But I truly believe there is a major shifting of consciousness going on, perhaps underneath the surface, hopefully at the ground level, eventually with the obvious Workingman. Shit is changing. The old ways are broken and there’s no amount of psychic financial duct tape they can patch over it to prove it not broken. Shit is straight up broken, bro. And being they got all these ownership issues with everything, I’ve got no reason to try and put my mind to fixing it. Nor should you. Fuck gentrifying this system, because a fresh coat of pastel paint over the whole thing is not going to make it not broken, not busted, and ultimately worthless.
So come with me and let’s do this other thing. I make no promises. I’m just a dude, scratching at It like all the rest. I don’t pretend to know the answers. I do know this is what I do, and I could lump myself in with everyone else who is a writer with a site and a long con and a freelance hustle, but that ain’t me. I am a lifelong Workingman, born from the broke but not broken, infused with Viking blood and charged with T’ang Dragon spirit. I am one in a million, and yet there are millions like me. We are all It. We just don’t fucking know it, because we get stress exhausted by all this other crap, but we are It. We just need to keep scratching at It, to realize that shit.
Word the fuck up yall.

J.J. Krupert July '12 #2: "I'm a Country Boy" by Lynyrd Skynyrd

littering the back roads which I routinely roll

!∞--☈℧⌡℧∏∑Ж☋--∞¡