W3ST3RN C1V1L1Z4T10N...

western civilization 
is a pyramid scam, which 
launders immorality 

SONG OF THE DAY: Young Old Filipino Man

I put birdseed out for the birds because it snowed, and as I was walking down the road enjoying the forced solitude of snow day shutting everybody down to more my speed, I was watching the birds bounce around, looking for scraps, and thinking to myself how they don't have any essential workers. They just forage for life. There are no essential workers in the wild. What a strange thing to be human, where we've somehow conquered our own susceptibility to the natural order, so that we can help humans survive. Originally this would've meant the weak or vulnerable or marginalized, keeping them alive despite the fact in the wild they would've died. Somewhere along the way we factored in economics, and rather than the weak or vulnerable or marginalized not having to ensure their own survival, it turned into the hoarding of abstract wealth, and the wealthy not having to do shit to survive, because they just dole out little pieces of their hoarded abstract wealth for others to do it for them. And it got so unbalanced that now we have hoarding to an extreme level, to where the hoarders of abstract wealth feel its justified for the weak or vulnerable or marginalized to just fucking die rather than spread survival mechanisms and safety nets against death and disease around to all humans. Thus, grocery store workers got considered "essential" because without them, the logistics of food distribution, which is already hugely wasteful, would've fallen apart even further. And it's not that people would've starved, because people are already starving, even though literal tons of food is tossed in the dumpster every day, because people didn't buy it or it was perishing and the stores don't want to risk the litigation of lawsuits if somebody gets sick. But those with the abstraction of wealth hoarded to a high enough degree wouldn't have been able to get their groceries still, without the essential workers. Same with restaurants. Nobody needs to eat in a fucking restaurant during a global pandemic. But they're open, and people are sitting at tables, enjoying their expensive meals, wait staff be damned. "What an absolutely fucked system of existence," I thunk to myself as I walked along in the snow, watching the birds. A pileated woodpecker flew out in front of me at one point, very beautifully, and that reminded me I had like a third of a bag of birdseed in the closet in the laundry room, so when I got home I scattered it. I don't have hoarded abstract wealth, but I had some birdseed, so I threw it out there in the snow, and spent most of the afternoon watching the cardinals and others, but most notably those big fat red cardinals, eating it.

FL4GS W3R3 N3V3R FL0WN VNT1L...

flags were never flown until 
ships set sail across the Earth, 
looking for fresh lands to claim 

SONG OF THE DAY: Time Is Never On Our Side

When I got a house last summer through fall, there were only like three I could afford that had enough room for my kids to make sense. The only one I liked luckily ended up being the one I got – a big old ass house beside a quarry whose best years were a century ago. Supervising people used to live up in this house. Anyways, most folks don’t seem to want old shit, because the American Empire has promised an endless parade of newness, which of course is unsustainable and expensive, both short term and longer in terms of human survival. Nonetheless, that made it so I ended up being the dude that fell into this house, and it’s been happy with me ever since I got here. Very little problems, until this last week, but still minor all things considered.
Being my first year here, just moving in back in September, I have to get the feel for the seasons. My water line was frozen this morning, even though I’ve got public water, and the house was relatively warm. Discovered the weak link in the line, got it thawed without incident by pointed a space heater into the closet. Ran up to the hardware store to get some pipe wrap and hopefully some insulation, but they were out of the insulation. One of the drawbacks of being new to a house is it’s not a true southern gothic futurist compound yet, and full of all sorts of hoarded and collected odds and ends that you need. Luckily, this place had a good bit of left as is in the rough basement and sheds, so I started poking around to find something to work like insulation around the pipe wrap around the two feet of water line in a wooden box outside the house relatively exposed to the cold air. No insulation but I did find a scrap roll of foam carpet matting, that shit you put under carpets, and I sliced it up with a buck knife and tucked it all around the pipe, and it looked cozy as fuck. I was ready to climb down in there and sleep too. Ready for winter, for now. But while digging around for insulation, in one of the metal sheds, I found a whole box of mason jars, including two wide mouth quarter jars. I only had one, because wide mouth jars are a commodity, and my ex-wife is a herbalist so made sure to keep most all of them in the separation. I had one, which I used for my drinking glass. But now I got three, all because I live in a country ass house with a bunch of shit laying around. Pipes froze, but they thawed nicedly, and I found some wide mouth jars. Country blessings, baby, country blessings. I celebrated with a long walk nowhere. Nowhere is always the best place to walk.

TH3R3'S 1NF1N1T3 VNKN0WN S41NTS...

 

there's infinite unknown saints 
of fractal geometry 
inside this vast universe 

SONG OF THE DAY: When I Grow Up

Saw Michelle Shocked perform years ago, and always loved her older stuff. At that show, my wife bought a pair of Michelle Shocked underwear from the merch table. Now that wife is my ex, not attracted to men, and Michelle Shocked is homophobic. Life sure is something, ain’t it?
Also strangely, there used to be a video for this, made back in the day, that existed on youtube. But then it was gone, and only available on Michelle Shocked's Vimeo page. But now that is gone as well. Which means in the past few months, Michelle Shocked has taken all the time necessary to scrub the internet of the official video of this song that was done back in 1989. She does have an official youtube page, with a "YouSteal" logo in her banner, and the few videos she's posted are about god being real and how you should respect artists and their creations. It's all kinda sad to be honest. I mean, I try to post songs that I actually play on my little physical device the most, as often as possible, and try to have a video to share too so you can see it and enjoy it, maybe support the artist too, or maybe not do shit because fuck it, the Earth's capitalist world-system is all fucked up and useless right now. But she's taken herself out of that equation. I can respect that, I guess, but she's also still online. So what the fuck?

4N VNVS3D M3NN0N1T3 CHVRCH...

an unused Mennonite church 
which I cut through the woods to, 
dhikr clicking tiny beads 

SONG OF THE DAY: Stare Directly Into The Sun

[a freestyle sonnet] 
Staring directly into the sun, 
establishing eye contact with solar flare, 
watching those who lust after gold dreams spun 
through manmade pyramid schemes pretend it's square 
to be crooked in alternative ways. 
Rays of sun in day plus moon's reflection 
at night, combined with maps the stars make blaze 
the path for me to follow; deception 
is the rule rather than exception here 
in this empire of greed where we all pretend 
want is need, while keeping our focus clear 
of seeing those who actually depend 
upon aid from others for survival; 
the wave of change needed remains tidal. 

0PP0RTVN1TY 1SL4NDS...

opportunity islands 
in far off cities, across 
the metaphysical seas 

SONG OF THE DAY: Good Day

This song is a classic. Nappy Roots might be better known for "Aw Naw" but this is the absolute seventeen star jam. Fuck that Greg Nice remix where he ad-libs all over the beginning. Just rock the old and simple "Good Day" with the kids singing, which my own kids know from their mom playing it in the minivan on the way to homeschool collective, where we did our best to not let the poisons of church and state get sown into their brains. In some ways, we were successful, and in others, we were not. It's impossible to be perfect in this world, so sometimes you gotta just settle for a good day. An underrated all time lyric is "last night, hit the pick three, bought some Air Force Ones." Shit, makes me want to go play 634 again, for old times sake.

TH1NK T4NKS D3T3RM1N3 WH1CH ST0N3S...

think tanks determine which stones 
the collective Sisyphus 
should push first to get things right 

SONG OF THE DAY: Cumbia Del Organito

I lack the mentoring influence of solid elder influences, and in recent years, as metaphysical battles have happened on the psychic plain, I’ve realized how much this has limited me in life. I’ve done well to be unmentored, by my true universal abilities are largely unmassaged from the raw potential dirtgod nature I began as. Because of this, I’ve been talking to a few trees a lot more lately. This began one time on the hill behind my girlfriend’s compound, where I wrote a haiku in my head about leaving some haiku unwritten for humans so that they could float up for the oak trees to enjoy instead. The trees seemed to flaunt in the golden hour light in that moment, and it seemed that rather than just writing my narrow-minded human word poems for the trees, I should ask them questions. I’ve found it helpful, but it’s also pretty limited because the Monacan language was spoken around the trees around me for thousands and thousands of years. That language is a dead tongue for the most part now, sterilized from its speakers by missionaries and “Indian” schools. It’s been mostly English spake here the past couple hundred years, so most of the young trees recognize my human words. But the really old trees are only one generation removed from a much longer history of Monacan language, which they understand much more deeply at a root level. None of our root words speaking English in these woods I wander actually match the roots of the trees, geographically. This is one of the great limitations of this American experiment - that colonists came and conquered, decimating the cultures that existed here already, and filling those spaces with selectively curated immigration influxes. So though I don’t speak the trees’ native language, I talk at them, asking questions, sharing poems that blossom in my mind that don’t feel too stupid to share. Telling the old trees deep off the beaten and clear cut path is the most intimidating open mic environment possible. You know your words are self-important, because you’ve known not even a fraction of what those elder beacons of old knowledge contain. So I don’t share poems as often, instead asking questions to them, leaving them quartz crystals at their base as an offering, to show my gratitude and hopefully unlock their advice. I wish I had an old human who knew their words better than me, who could help me hear it more easily. But lacking that humane elder, I’ll just keep looking up to these handful of old trees tucked away in the semi-wild, and soak up as much wisdom as my dumb ass can.

TH3 B0RN WR3TCH3D L1K3 T0 CL41M...

 

the born wretched like to claim 
royalty in our blood lines; 
there's no monarchs in the wild 

SONG OF THE DAY: #KingButch

I miss doing haiku slams, and being around actual people. I wonder if we’ll ever have that shit again. Used to do them at Balliceaux in Richmond years back, which was a decent environment, before it went down in metaphysical online flames. Often we were the early show, and there was at least once that I think Butcher Brown was the late show. They put out an album last year that’s absolutely wonderful, which is what this track is off of. It’s weird funk/hip hop/all over music art, which is something I miss about Richmond so much – how there’s all these different flavors that are rubbing up against each other in a very weird way, creating new flavors in the process. It’s like cultural seasoning I guess. Charlottesville, which is where I’ve lived for a while now, has never impressed me artistically. A lot of overinflated senses of self, often propped up by unacknowledged privilege. Any art I’ve seen or experienced or been part of was done completely outside the arts scenes, and usually goes somewhere else as soon as it can. Anything within the arts scene tends to be unseasoned, so to speak, and thus sort of bland, even when intelligent or competent or skilled. That’s a hard thing to admit to be honest, because for better or worse, I’m going to be in this area the rest of my life. But I don’t find that much inspiration here, and usually have to go looking elsewhere. I guess that’s why I miss the haiku slams right now – I’m getting older, and don’t want to be completely insular, inspiring myself all the time. I need outside inspirations, other people doing wild shit that challenges and pushes. And I’m not getting it, which means I do stupider shit in the process too, because now I’m working off the diminishing returns of past inspiration.

R3FL3CT1NG 0N TH3 PL4C3S...

reflecting on the places 
I've been, I realize that I 
rarely planned my direction 

W0RSH1PP1NG 1D0LS, L0ST 1N...

worshipping idols, lost in 
distraction, anti-idle 
grind mentality stunts growth 

0PP0RTVN1TY 34CH D4Y...

opportunity each day 
to consult your own heart when 
stumbling across this damned Earth  

SONG OF THE DAY: Calm Mall

Abandoned malls a place of tranquility, perfect locations for encampments and illegal flea markets and food distribution and machete shops and oh man the potential for permanent taco trucks driven into the middle of the abandoned just sitting there, lengua tacos for days. The sun still comes through the skylights, and we like to sit on milk crates in the old Foot Locker where the security gate is stuck halfway down so we put some milk crates in there and we sit and discuss nothing at all but also everything all at once. Where there used to be some sort of shitty Starbucks kiosk, we have a slew of big two gallon coffee dispensers, and all the hazelnut creamer a man could ever want. I have been dragging shelving from the old JC Penney to the main concourse by the now-free coffee kiosk, and I’m building a labyrinth of shelving, and asking everybody to donate the five most important books they think should be part of our super library. The goal is to have a library labyrinth that you can walk until you find the perfect book. I tested it out and ended up reading Mary Oliver in the vacant Gamestop for four days.

TH3 VN1V3RS3 1S W4TCH1NG...

 

the universe is watching 
whether you feel it or not; 
every moment's a test 

SONG OF THE DAY: Marquillos Colombia (rebajada)

Google purple hoodie velour. Google lavender hoodie velour. Google lavender velour track suit. Google imaginary football clubs space. Google no white people in space. Google elon musk accidentally leads to white genocide on mars. Google how to spell elon musk's grandson's name. Google elon musk granddaughter first martian emperor. Google gender non-binary word for ruler of space colonies. Google false progress. Google lavender velour track suit with purple bedazzled letters that say false progress. Google dirtgod wikipedia. No results, alhamdulillah.

4B4ND0N3D H0M3 PL4C3 C4RC4SS...

 

abandoned home place carcass 
rotting in the scrub pines, caked 
with memories of lives gone 

SONG OF THE DAY: Th3 R

My biggest problem with politics is all politicians probably have somebody cooking for them, or at the very least it's like a PBS cooking show where somebody is just standing to stage right to clean up after them or prep things, and they don't have to cook bowtie noodles and then not want to use the colander because fuck man, I'm so tired of washing all these goddamn dishes all the time, so you just pour the pot through the slotted spoon at an angle, using the spoon to hold the noodles in the pot, trying to get as much boiling water out as possible, running cold water down the drain too so the hot water doesn't explode your cheap ass pipes, and then like three noodles fall over the edge of the spoon because you're fighting gravity the whole time, and you go GODDAMMIT but as quiet as possible so the kids, who are upstairs waiting for some bowtie noodles, don't think you're mad about some dumb shit. Then you stir in some butter and pretend all the water still in there is just butter too, and there's dinner, with maybe some shredded parmesan, the $2 a bag store brand kind, not no fancy parmesan that comes in shapes or chunks, you want that raw shit that's got pine tree in it that probably got transported on an open hopper freight train before they processed it down to whatever nine syllable ingredient it is as an additive to prevent the cheese caking, because everybody knows if you trying to not make a cheesecake, just put some wood chips in it. So all of that is to say fuck politicians, with their colander-using, real-parmesan-eating, not-only-can-afford-a-plumber-but-can-afford-to-have-somebody-else-on-payroll-who-actually-calls-the-plumber-so-they-don't-ever-actually-even-talk-to-a-plumber-that's-how-much-they-can-afford-one asses.

N0N3 0F VS 4R3 V1CT1MS S0...

none of us are victims, so 
much as trapped in this system 
which never gave half a fuck 

4S 4 K1D, 1 G0T BR41NW4SH3D...

as a kid, I got brainwashed 
to believe if I worked hard, 
I'd find financial freedom