SONG OF THE DAY: Cruisin' to the Park (kudzu'd)

It ain’t easy being half-assed fresh when you’re born greasy. This is a recipe actually. Your psychic yokefellow is gonna do a produce order last week, because why buy produce at the grocery store when you can wholesale that shit and go straight to the produce man? You ask for turnip greens (feeling like an alternative to your standard bearer mustard greens), some mushrooms (maybe lion’s mane, or shiitake, the good shit), and fresh peas (meaning the little ball bearings of deliciousness). You end up getting collards, because they don’t have turnips, and your partner has them put back the lion’s mane, because it’s like “Epstein is my financial advisor” expensive. And you get sugar peas instead of ball bearing peas, but that’s okay, because you love them fuckers. You forget about the collards for a day or two, but then remember they’re about to go bad, so you gotta cook them. But then you see some smoked turkey legs on markdown at the grocery store, so you gotta get that to flavor the green. Anyways, first thing is you chop up a couple big ass sweet onions, like either the biggest two left in the onion crisper drawer, or if you don’t have big ones, then three of the other ones (2 bigs = 3 mids; standard dirtgod measurement). Let them sizzle on high heat in olive oil from the Afghan store (big glass gallon jug). Watch ‘em, because you don’t want them to burn. Start chopping collards. If the leaves are big as fuck, slice ‘em down the middle, then slice up the greens, keeping as much of the stem as you can. Stems are good, just slice ‘em thin enough to cook down. Your cutting board ain’t big enough to chop all the greens, so add it to the pot with the onions as necessary to keep the cutting board open for more super destruction of collards with your best knife (the one that can still accidentally break flesh, and nip off part of a fingernail). But you don’t wanna fry up greens necessarily, so keep the pot on high but add just enough chicken broth to almost cover what greens is already in the mix. Let that boil up while you keep chopping greens until you run out. My measurement for all this is for one big ass head of collards. If you have more than that, double up on the onions and other shit, but if you have any common sense about the kitchen, you already know that. Actually, if you know your way around the kitchen, you’ve probably already tuned this out, which is fine. I hate long ass explanations of recipes like you read online myself. But this isn’t actually a recipe; it’s about how hard it is to stay half-assed fresh when you’re born greasy. Once you got all the greens going, don’t let it boil on high, go ahead and cut it down to medium heat, or your preferred simmering heat. My “burner is on” light on the left side of the stove got stuck on last weekend, so it fucks up my flow on the stove. Shit freaks me out when I walk in the kitchen in the middle of the night when I wake up and need a drink because the CPAP cobra clutches all humidity from my body like an evil demon of medical advance. I go medium at this point, maybe a little less. Then you bust out the turkey legs, which to be honest, are one of the most annoying entities on earth, with all that succulent dark meat all weirdly entangled with those gristle bones that turkey legs got – too soft to be a full-on bone, but too cartilagey for my human teeth to gnaw through. And see, this is where the problem arises, because you’re in your fuzzy “I look like a teddy bear” Polo hoodie, which you wish you had 37 of, in a full array of colors, but you only got the one, so it’s gotta last you the rest of your life, since this is what you hope to be cremated in, this hoodie and your orange patch motif overalls. You kinda like the purple patch motif overalls more, but that one has base layer of blue denim overalls, while the orange patch one has base layer of that brown duck fabric, so it matches the brown “I look like a teddy bear” Polo hoodie better. Anyways, you don’t wanna be stripping turkey meat from cartilage with your bare hands, getting greasier and greasier, while wearing the Polo hoodie, so you take it off, and drape it over a chair. But you’ve got a Polo long sleeve like fake long john material underneath, and that’s pretty nice, too, and mostly white, which good lord, why would somebody like me even try to own white clothes? It’s a losing effort. So you take that off, too, and drape it over the chair as well. Now, it’s like been cold as fuck, so you’ve got the heat set at 60, because you can’t afford to be heating the whole ass house all the time (again, Epstein is not your financial advisor; empty pickle gallon jar in the bedroom, half full of change is). But you find yourself wrestling the meat off some smoked turkey legs, to chop up and put in the greens, bare-skinned from the waist up, as all good men in the kitchen should be ideally. I actually think the toxic masculine-induced shame most men feel about not wearing a shirt, which has led to a whole slew of dudes going swimming with shirts one (which is weird as hell), also contributes to how we are not comfortable being shirtless in the kitchen. Fuck that shit, let your gut out, and get to fixin’ some more things to stuff into it. Eventually you get most all the good meat off the turkey legs, and into the pot, which is now in that like 1/3 of the way between medium and low but on the medium side of my stove (fancy people may have fancier dials where the “in use” light actually goes off and them flat stovetops that look like spaceships have, so adjust my dial instructions as your current economic standing in the dying American empire dictates). The dog that’s been on the runner out back can smell all this shit going on inside, so is barking to come in. Go ahead and throw the smoked turkey bones into another small pot to boil up briefly, to drive the dog crazy. But then cool that pot down, so you can put the dog back on the runner and throw the turkey bone out to them. Bougie folks (dog moms and dads) don’t like to feed their dogs poultry bones, because they’re afraid it’ll do damage and they’ll have to take the dog to the vet, but true country people never take their animals to the vet, and also know life is a gamble, but you gotta live the way you wanna live, and that dog wants them turkey legbones. So you throw them in the yard, with the dog back on the runner, and the collards are slow cooking on the stove, filling the whole house with smells, so that when you walk to the back door to make sure the dog didn’t choke on a turkey bone and is dead out there, you think, “Haha, no Xes on the dog’s eyes,” like they are a cartoon. But then the smell is so good that when you turn around, you float up into the air and your nose pulls your body back into the kitchen, nose first, like six feet in the air, and you almost hit your head on the top of the doorways because your eyes are closed, and your nose is leading the way, but somehow you don’t, and it smells so fuckin’ good. But you can’t eat it for another 4 or 5 hours. In fact, the true cook time of collard greens is sort of like a mini-Ramadan, in that you deny yourself the indulgences of the greens for as long as possible, so that it can cook down to its purest essence, and be entirely flavored with the turkey as well as additional spices you add (black pepper, definitely some cayenne), so that once you finally break your temporary fast and enjoy a flat bowl (not a deep bowl, but not a plate, somewhere in the middle aka a flat bowl) of collards, it has cooked for so long and you are so hungry that it’s the greatest goddamn thing you’ve ever eaten in your life. This is best served with nothing, you don’t need 3 or 4 goddamn things in every meal. The empire is dying, lol, start controlling your desire for a smorgasbord at every moment. But if you absolutely have to have something with it, I’d suggest making a little round cast iron frying pan of cornbread. I think there’s still old buttermilk in the fridge, and technically buttermilk that you’d use for cornbread never goes bad, like for years you can still use it. But I don’t personally feel like making cornbread, and you’re not here to make it (I feel your judgment), so I’m just having a couple flat bowls of collard greens, while I listen to Motley Crue’s Too Fast For Love, with the pitch shifter on the turntable slowed all the way down. (I will leave the concept of “Too Slow For Love” unmentioned – inside these parenthesis don’t count – so that you can have that idea. I hope you do something with it, I really do.) Oh yeah, don’t put your hoodie back on ‘til you’re done eating greens, but you can put the long johns Polo thing back on. It’s cold in here, and white clothes should know better than to be around you.

SONG OF THE DAY: Just Me and You (kudzu'd)

I love bumpin’ the slowed souldies, and wish I could build a spot where this type of vibe could be enjoyed publicly. Seems like all you can do is either the familiar or the expected. Like there’s a certain style of “funk vibes” that’s allowed. I don’t know man, everything feels so predictable, even the allegedly clever stuff, I guess because our whole society has been tag teamed in the brain by long covid and digital dementia, and all you can really do is get a bunch of drunks to have cheerful pavlovian responses triggered by dopamine spikes from their nostalgia biases being triggered. Death to ‘Merica, baby!

SONG OF THE DAY: Oh Honey (kudzu'd)

Worker bees don’t organize No Queen Bees protests. They just work, rising and grinding, inspired to maintain that drone life. Neurologically, they become addicted to the drone worker bee lifestyle to the point their actual neurology changes to where that’s all they think about. They acquire an artificial intelligence that becomes their nature. Anyways, let’s go get this honey!

SONG OF THE DAY: So Low (kudzu'd)

There's piles of railroad detritus here and there along the tracks. Nice little hills of clasps and spikes and plates, and sometimes you find a great big siding of ragged old ties stacked high, and replaced rail. One time last year, I strapped 38 miles of rail to the top of my Corolla, because I'm building a 1:1 scale replica of an old small town railroad depot in the woods behind my house. I got a big DILLWYN sign too, from when they replaced that the other year, and a friend hipped me to the old one being stashed behind a building before they threw it away. You'd be surprised how much old shit they just throw away. I hope to one day build a whole town, with like 5000 residents, and a small public liberal arts college, in the woods behind my house, all with recycled things found in the trash.

SONG OF THE DAY: I Get Lifted (kudzu'd)

I wanted to write about how much I love Latimore in general, and this song specifically, but then I let the video I made a month back play, from some old ass cartoon, and boy, this one is a banger. I hope somewhere on this expansive Earth, somebody just gets baked as shit and lets the dirtgod’s 45s on 33 channel shuffle on their screen, big and loud as possible. Because I try to be a big and loud as possible, but also small and unassuming. Within my sweetness is a touch of masculinity, and within my masculinity is a touch of sweetness. Like a yin yang, but with untended beard instead.

SONG OF THE DAY: Easy Evil (kudzu'd)

The reason I love slowing down music is because it can take something entirely familiar, and reshape it in your experience. We are three-dimensional creatures (don’t let the “time travel is possible” types try to fool you otherwise), and thus when our notion of those three dimensions is even slightly shifted, it refreshes our attention. Anyways, this is a pretty chill AM soft rock classic, which then becomes even more chill, although maybe ominous, when slowed down. I make all these videos, grabbing clips from the wayback archives of one sort or another, then slapping them together with my favorite slowed down colors, and putting the music over top. Because it technically violates the copyright of the music owner, I don’t get no yakubian youtube play credits – all rights reserved by whoever ripped off the musicians back in the day. But art is not about profit, unless you are a born asshole. Anyways, we live in a great time of easy evil, so I hope you are still fighting the good fight, on all fronts, and in all metaphysical planes. If you have powers beyond the three dimensions, I humbly request you ask the Universe to smile upon me. I know I will encounter a thousand robot skims, at the minimum, before even one set of real eyeballs reads this whole paragraph. And likely millions of web trawlers, scraping the net for data, before an actual bona fide beyond-the-earthly realm power type sees this. But I like to put it out there. I feel fairly blessed in life already, but Universal sunshine is not like abstract human wealth – you can’t hoard it and it doesn’t pile up and become a burden. It’ll be like an extra half ounce of sunshine on an already sunny day. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

SONG OF THE DAY: Los Borrachoes Son Uds. (kudzu'd)

I have a passport now, and really the only thing stopping me from going to Peru and scooping up the dopest cumbia 45s possible to come back and stunt on the haters with is the fact I can’t afford any of that at all. Not only is money the root of all evil, but it’s also the root of all “you ain’t doing that shit” as well. Oh well. I got plenty, so let’s cut it up, and turn the heat up to 63 because we’re feeling froggy, and dance with the cats until they are all freaked out and shit.

By the way, this video is of Diego Maradona, the true all-time greatest footballer ever. I'm very excited for the World Cup to not happen in the United States, even though we'll be denied the comedy of every host match being an away one, because unless the USA is playing like Thailand, it always has more folks supporting the visitors than the USMNT. The US will never be good at soccer, until we embrace socialism, and make reparations to the black and indigenous. Until then it will always be some "white dudes drinking IPAs" cosplay ass shit.

SONG OF THE DAY: I Don't Want to be a Freak (But I Can't Help Myself) (kudzu'd)

In all my slowing down 45s to 33 speed years, never have I come across a song I love as much as this one, that I had no knowledge of at all beforehand. This is a 45 that I’m up to 4 or 5 copies, of varying qualities, and honestly, I can never have too many. I stockpile Dynasty 45s like dry beans for the apocalypse. Anyways, I don’t have anything clever to say today, in fact, my brain has become quite foggy. It’s too cold, or I’m too old, or it’s a time of year that runs me down, or I don’t know. But I know the mantra of this song is still true, and one day this will be our national anthem, played at the wrong speed (which is the correct one), as we realize we don’t need a flag because we don’t have borders that aren’t already present in nature.

SONG OF THE DAY: More Bounce to The Ounce Part 1 (kudzu'd)

A friend was sharing videos from a Myanmar field sound system, and I'm always looking at the homemade futuristic hyper DJ set-ups from Africa. It's weird how we have access to all this shit as Americans, but nobody builds a fuckin' sound system like that. I guess it's because you spend all this money, and you're afraid of your abstract wealth getting stolen, so you lock it all up in your house, rather than have a mobile giant ass sound system. I think about this a lot with regards to Roger Troutman vocals, too, because everybody will think autotune or vocoder, but nah man, he had a talkbox rigged to a keyboard. I feel complicit in this because I google how to build shit sometimes, but like my dad's friend Tank used to say about auto repair manuals, "If you need a manual, then you don't know how to do it." You can't google how to build a mobile sound system out of scraps; you just have to know how to do it, by the life you've lived. We've lost so much with our cluttered blessings of Americanness.

SONG OF THE DAY: Super Freak (Part 1) (kudzu'd)

We seemed to have lost our cultural pride in freakiness. This bums me out, mostly because I’m freaky as hell. And also there’s a sort of collective performative quirkiness that’s don’t feel like authentic freakiness. Like, really weird appearing people who are basic and, to be honest, somewhat bland. The truly freaky have often looked normal enough, which is helpful, because you can’t be freaky in the weirdest places possible if somebody identifies you as “freaky looking” before you get there. Gotta have a little freak camouflage, to not call attention to yourself. Anyways, please feel free to be freakier, and take militant pride in your freakiness. Don’t let nobody tell you what you shouldn’t be doing. They don’t know you.

SONG OF THE DAY: Mundian To Bach Ke (kudzu'd)

I have compiled 99 Problems With Jay-Z (because I am a bitch), and one of them is the remix of this song which Jay-Z polluted with weak ass ad-libs and his lethargic “clever guy who had a stroke” lyricism. He was always a biter of styles, and then later a co-opter of flavors, which of course makes sense he would become a billionaire capitalist for exploiting the creative labor of others into his own impossibly vast abstract wealth. Please note, he did not become a billionaire for his own record sales, so don’t act like pointing out a wack ass throwback jam or two from your younger days is meritocratic proof of his billionairessness. If that was the case, Big Daddy Kane would be rich as Musk right now.
Anyways, with this song specifically, it’s good to have the 45 to play slow, because even crawling, this beat is bonkers. And Panjabi MC rides it appropriately, like on a barely holding together motorbike, pushing the limits of the throttle, but slowing down for dirt road curves, sliding into the next stretch… there is a psychology to this shit that Jay-Z missed entirely. He was just excited to stumble down the same beat and pretend he had something to do with it, like all fat pocketed empty soul successful capitalists. You know this motherfucker has a Basquiat painting nobody ever saw, and he bragged about it? Why would you brag about that shit? I hope the ghost of Rammellzee torments him every night in this sleep, and has him seeing the Shadow People hovering over his triple king bed.

SONG OF THE DAY: If You Wanna Get To Heaven (kudzu'd)

My wishes are to be cremated, and have my ashes stored in a Timberlands box which is accidentally donated to the thrift store, as has been the way of my people since the beginning of time.

TH3 P4TH W3 C0LL3CT1V3LY...

the path we collectively 
walk never ends with one; we 
build a future together 

0VR PR1M0RD14L D3S1R3...

our primordial desire 
to walk our way to better 
tomorrows cannot be damned 

TH3 D14SP0R4 0F H0P3...

the diaspora of hope 
sows itself in untended 
margins, for future harvest 

SONG OF THE DAY: Oye Como Va (kudzu'd)

We shall dance on the ashes of ICE to cumbia rebajadas. 

B0X1NG 0VRS3LV3S 1NT0 TH3...

boxing ourselves into the 
reality built around 
us does not lead to escape 

SONG OF THE DAY: El Brujo (kudzu'd)

Last year, I bought a few hundred machetes, in bulk, from a strange bearded man in a purple cape at a flea market somewhere between Huntington and Charleston, West Virginia. He also had milk crates full of Easyriders magazines for a dollar each, and these cool walking sticks with pool balls as the handle. The ol’ boy didn’t say he was a wizard outright, but he had that vibe. I picked out a few Easyriders, and wanted a walking stick, but couldn’t afford it after spending all my cash money on a PT Cruiser’s rear end amount of machetes. (You’d be surprised how many secret wizards drive PT Cruisers, which I never would’ve expected. But we all have to find ways to thrive in the world we’re condemned to, even wizards.) As I was waiting to talk to the guy, some other dude was low-balling him on one of the walking sticks, and he sort of was pissing me off vicariously. When he finally gave up and waddled off in his Trump hat, I told the ol’ dude, “That guy was kind of an asshole.” The old guy looked at me and said, “Yeah, I was gonna curse him, but let’s be honest… he’s already cursed, by his own thinking.”
This was how my Machetes For Poets program began, as I’d like to consider myself a budding wizard, though I know I’ve got a long ways to go. I’ve been working with familiars a lot lately, and realizing the limitations of even an awesome cat familiar, like I have with Ponyo, because cats only cover a certain amount of land. I definitely see the practical benefits in shapeshifters. Also, in working with familiars, I’ve really come to think less of dogs. They’re so ruled by their own biases and desires, and are useless to magic. Don’t get me wrong, they’re still great for just regular ol’ pet type shit, and having this goofy animal that is dependent on you in comedic ways (especially hounds). But this post is not about cultivating relationships with familiars, or even politics, but about my Machetes For Poets initiative to help me in my budding wizardry. I figure giving machetes to poets is symbolically great (“the pen is mightier than the sword, but I got both motherfucker!), and also cultivates linguistic familiars out there for me. Having hundreds of poets think of you in the positive context of, “Oh, he’s that weird old bearded poet freak who gave me a machete!” This is helping lay the groundwork for the type of life I want to be leading when I’m in my 140s (Earth years).

M4NVF4CTVR3D D1V1S10NS...

manufactured divisions 
easily poison weak brains, 
so seek out the true-hearted 

SONG OF THE DAY: Scorpio (kudzu'd)

As I’ve come to dabble in cartomancy, two of the closest people to me in my life are both 5 of Diamonds. It’s a Pisces and a Leo, so I wonder about the other 5 of Diamonds out there. Scorpio 5 of Diamonds would be born on November 2, but I can’t think of anybody with that birth date. Of course, since I quit Facebook, I don’t know nobody’s birthdays. Facebook was only good for two things – remembering people’s birthdays, and destroying western civilization via propagandizing people lacking in digital critical thinking skills. As society has gotten more destroyed, I worry less about remembering folks birthdays. But it’d be great to know if Scorpio 5 of Diamonds could also be part of my apocalypse team or not.

THE 4DM1N1STR4T1V3 W31GHT...

the administrative weight 
of repression moves slowly; 
collectively, we're nimble 

C0NTR0L 1S N3V3R M41NT41N3D...

control is never maintained 
around the clock, even in 
digital surveillance age 

F1LL1NG 4LL 4V41L4BL3...

filling all available 
cracks in our days' routines with 
a creative resistance 

SONG OF THE DAY: Do It (kudzu'd)

This song goes out to all organic thomas crooks out there. Not the sports entertainment ones, but the real ones. Do it for my boy Larry King.