SONG OF THE DAY: Rock the Beat (kudzu'd)

The tip top of the cap on the gold spray paint can I had left in the shed broke off, so I had to push it down with a railroad spike to get it to spray halfway right, thus I got gold speckle splatters on my glasses. It’s improved my outlook immensely. Also got a bunch of it on my charcoal Dickie’s pants, which is good, because I ain’t had a real job in decades. Gonna take a nap on the back porch now, but I sleep with an agogo bells and stick like they're my teddy bear, so I can wake up (which I do often times due to sleep apnea) and bang out a couple measures worth of metronome bells, then doze back off. I truly believe this helps my dreams have better rhythm.

SONG OF THE DAY: Ke Suene Machin (kudzu'd)

I’ve had a pretty giant HO scale large town/maybe even corner of a small city scene set up, and it had been pretty nice for a while. I got a large number of little 1/87 size plastic figures from eBay in bulk – like a giant set of 300 workers, city figures, etc. These folks had populated the city for a while, and things seemed to be fine. I don’t get to go down there and run the train that often, but I hadn’t noticed any problems, with these Chinese manufactured migrants to my basement HO city.
The problem came up when I got some higher-priced Woodland Scenics hobos. I specifically wanted some hobos, and though it did seem counterintuitive economically that I could get like 300 figures for $10, but a set of 5 hobos was $19, what can I say, I wanted some hobos. There were two sitting hobos you could put in an open box car, but I put them on a bench in front of the corner store. And then three more meant to sit around a fire I guess, as one of them is cooking something on a stick, another is sitting on a crate, holding a can, and the last guy is standing there with a stick and bindle over his shoulder. But I hadn’t taken into consideration the differing economic status of these fancy Woodland Scenics hobos, as compared to all the plastic proles I’d gotten off eBay. And I hadn’t been running the train enough, I guess. When I came back one times a few weeks ago, there were all these little mailers about wanting to tear out the rail line on the far end of town, and change it to a biking and hiking trail, to try and attract tourism. The little mailer mentioned how the factories and offices on the far edge of town had been closed down for as long as anybody can remember. But these aren’t even full HO buildings, but just a façade I have set up against the wall. You can’t even get in these places; it’s just decorative background! Nonetheless, it seems someone was trying to initiate tearing out the tracks for tourism. And I’d noticed the bindle standing hobo was outside the one government building I had built, with the two sitting dudes now sitting on a bench beside him (with, for some reason, EVERY SINGLE police officer from the bulk package off eBay, even though I’d purposefully never put those in my little city). Thus, I suspected these guys as being the ringleaders of whatever was going on. But I hadn’t gone into the basement to get involved in HO scale politics, or tinker with my city… only to retrieve a couple milk crates of Easyriders from the 1970s, for a project.
Well, when I went back to put the milk crates full of old ass Easyriders back down there, half the train tracks were gone. I have no idea where they are. And like little brown sand/pebble trails are in the place. The track doesn’t even connect anymore, which means I don’t have a closed circuit for the train to run I wanted to run it. And I can’t find the fuckin’ track. Not only did these little assholes tear out track, but they destroyed the possibility of it ever working again, unless I find what’s been taken away, or figure out a way to replace it.
Those three dudes were there again, at a little gazebo they’d moved from a park across town to by the new hiking paths, and being I figured the bindle guy was the leader, I plucked him out the city, and took him upstairs and tucked him into a drawer in my desk, without thought. But then, he ended up back in the city again, which I only knew because I happened to see one of the police figures in my hallway, which made me go check the desk drawer again, confirming he was gone from there, and then going to the basement to confirm he was back in HO town. So I took him again, and this time snapped him inside an empty Altoids container which I store my thumb drives of scanned naked Polaroids. I figured the little plastic police officers couldn’t open the Altoids tin, so I had him trapped this time.
But then, of course, I saw TWO little police figures in the hall, plus one in the kitchen. I ran to the Altoids tin in my desk drawer, and not only was the bindle figure gone, but so were the three flash drives full of naked Polaroids. But here’s where it got fucked up. I went immediately to the basement, and looked for the bindle asshole Woodland Scenics fucker, and he was over by the weird little slummy hotel I built, which is my favorite piece in the whole city. I spent so much time on it to make it look perfectly fucked. But this bindle leader guy was standing over there, by the tracks that still existed, and a gondola was sitting alone there, which I love because I did a graffiti piece that says PONYO because I like to pretend my cat Ponyo is a graffiti artist in this HO town. Well, the gondola had two of the missing flash drives, but not the third, which has scans of a lot of naked Polaroids of me with previous lovers, all taken with consent, but not something either I or they would want shared openly. It was lime green, which I knew had the best (wildest) stuff on it. And there was that little asshole, with his nonchalant stare, knowing damn well he’d taken these, and was withholding the most sensitive one. And to what purposes? Like, I assume I’m being blackmailed by this little fucker, but how do I know? And what does he want exactly? No idea, but I’ve let him have the run of HO town for now, until we can figure this out.
Anyways, the whole thing sucks, because normally having little magical people would seem to be a blessing. But instead it’s just caused me worry and anxiety, and I can’t even play with my damn HO scale town anymore. And I’m afraid to rip the thing apart because then they might leak this flash drive onto the internet. Not sure why I admit all of this to you, other than to say, be careful of the magic you conjure in your life. That shit’s way more complicated than you realize oftentimes.

SONG OF THE DAY: Queen of My Double Wide Trailer (kudzu'd)

I dedicate this song to every big strong woman caked in dirt and mud wearing raggedy ass jeans, but then cleans up real nice in a beautiful sundress, and doesn’t dry off after their shower, so the dress is clinging to their cleavage just right. C’mon girl, let’s go listen to them spring peepers, and stare up at the stars, and if we’re lucky, go try to knock the master bedroom end of our Clayton home two-piece off its foundation blocks just a little bit more.

SONG OF THE DAY: Neon Moon (kudzu'd)

We always long for a past that was once a shitty future. As a young drunken adult, Garth Brooks & Jimmy Dunn were hated by me (as well as my pops) as False Country. And now here we are 30 years later (300 in digital years), and “Neon Moon” sparks nostalgia. “These guys aren’t all stupid like shitty ass Coy Caldwell and Austin Brody” and whoever else is the cyborgian Wal-Martinized suburban cosplayer of rural identity flavor of the month. The enshittification of our culture (which has been primarily consumer-based for well over half a century) has been going on long before some dork claims he created the term “enshittification”. Plus, you know damn well that was a joke term in a groupchat, and somewhere there’s 7 other people going, “Damn, can you believe Cory (Doctorow) acts like he came up with that? We all saw Sara using that before he was even in the Discord?” But that’s the reality now… a nostalgia for an earlier shittiness we have somehow strayed even further from.

SONG OF THE DAY: Tired of Being Alone (kudzu'd)

I’ve taken up playing Torricelli’s trumpet, an old acute truncated hyperbolic solid brass one, but so far all I’ve learned is Al Green’s “Tired of Being Alone”. It’s hard to get used to, because of the finite volume, so no matter how hard I try to blow (which is hard for me, due to my advanced age and sleep apnea half-choking in the middle of the night ass). But mostly, all my neighbors are frustrated by it, not due to the noise, but because of the infinitely long shape. It’s not so bad in the woods behind the house, but by the time you get to the end of Schuyler Road, it’s a few hundred feet high I reckon. Ultimately, I’d like to be able to make cosmic cumbia music if I can find some like-minded people, or even non-people to be honest. Not robots though. I ain’t making no new-fangled mathematically nonsensical space funk with no goddamned robots. Well, at least not Earth robots as designed by humans here. Maybe there’s more soulful robots designed by other intergalactic species in other systems, but I’ve seen nothing with a copper heart that has the fingerprint of homo sapiens upon it. I heard tell, talking to an old dude on the Greyhound riding between Dayton, OH, and Charleston, WV, one time, that there were space robots who could play the horn really well. But this dude told me that like how on Earth, fleshly humans play brass instruments, there were robotic creatures with brass veins (aka wires) who played horns made of a flesh-like material, so it wasn’t rigid, but they were. At first, I was like, “Whatever, weird old dude I’m stuck beside on the bus for a long time,” but when I gave him a look like that, he jumped right into talking about bagpipes from Scotland and how they were made from sheep intestines originally, and it all started making sense. That’s how the Greyhound used to be… it was a podcast before podcasts existed, and you couldn’t change the channel until the next stop either one of you got off on. Or sometimes, a new guest would show up and enter your podcast (Greyhound conversation). Late at night, at the back of the bus? Man, those were some of the best podcasts I ever heard in my life. Crazy shit. Anyways, what was I talking about? Oh yeah, the Torricelli’s trumpet I got at Motleys in Farmville.

SONG OF THE DAY: Is This The Future? (kudzu'd)

I got a lottery ticket at the robot kiosk the other night at the grocery store and tucked it into my wallet and forgot about it. I like to forget about them, because you have the moment of getting the ticket where you can briefly imagine not being crushed by a thousand minor debts all at once and then the big one comes along and bankrupts/homelesses you… that’s normal. But forgetting about it is great, because then I’ll remember, and for a few days I can be like, “Oh shit, what if I won?” and go back to that fantasy of not slowly being hustled and ground to death by capitalism. And there’s no need to rush off to my robot phone and check the ticket… let that bitch simmer with possibility in my wallet for a while longer. Eventually I’ll check it, and so far, I’ve never won anything more than a few dollars (which actually, the tickets I got the other night were cashing in a pair of old $4 winners from last fall), but it’s a good distraction from regular affairs. And sure, the lottery is an ignorance tax on people who don’t understand odds, I know that Smart Guy; but also, for I never spend more than $10, and the fantasy of not being stretched fuckin’ thin like a peasant on a medieval torture rack but one made of modern economic abstractions is a pretty fun fantasy, and way better than any movie I’ve seen in the past decade of my life, and those fuckin’ tickets are more than $10 these days, to watch some goddamn boring ass predictable movie. So being I have an imagination that gets bored with the basic predictability of movies, it’s a better use of my meager extra dollars to let that imagination run wild on escaping the reality of American economics. Anyways, I just remembered those lottery tickets I got from cashing in the old lottery tickets, just sitting in my wallet, while I was washing dishes just now, and I got excited about telling everybody at work to fuck off, and being able to finally afford that militia of orangutans armed with Kalashnikovs led by three rhesus monkeys with gold-plated 9mms. Their names will be Thought, Memory, and Corpus Callosum, and anytime there’s an important decision, I’ll consult with them, and we’ll do what Thought and Memory decide, unless there’s a tie, and then Corpus Callosum breaks the tie.

SONG OF THE DAY: Let The Music Play (kudzu'd)

If you wanted to know what 45 I own the most duplicates if, it’s this one. I love this beat slowed down so damn much, that I tend to purchase every cheap copy I can find that lacks scuffs. I know I got at least 7 copies, but probably have more lost in the stacks (since my sorting method is chaos).

SONG OF THE DAY: Down Low (Nobody Has To Know) (kudzu'd)

The perfect Easter song!

SONG OF THE DAY: Get On Down (kudzu'd)

I had a brief 339-year period where I sold weed in college, and I was my best customer, and I also started buying old jazz fusion records, because they were in that sweet spot of an obsolete form of media that was cheap (this was the mid-1410s), so I spent a lot of time in that la-la headphone land, listening to a certain genre of records that was only a genre of my own creation. Eddie Harris was the world champion of this genre. Thus, I love this damn 45 slowed down to 33. WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON WITH THE SCAT ASS SINGING? It’s truly amazing, even to my 73-year sober ears.

SONG OF THE DAY: Bounce, Rock, Skate, Roll (kudzu'd)

I never could skate well because I never learned how to push off with both of my feet (hardcore leftist from birth). And while I do not mean to unnecessarily objectify anybody out there, with all due respect, I gotta say a big woman who can roller skate is a genre of human I tend to adore. But to be clear, not nearly as much as I adore creeping phlox or daffodils (especially the yellow ones with the orange center). I think sometimes when a guy says something like “I adore big women who roller skate,” it gets equated with our systemic inherent patriarchal norms of oppression, when in actuality I’d much rather hang out in a junkyard with daffodils than worry a big woman on roller skates with small talk. I get why it’s equated with all that… I mean, most of our skating rinks are now owned by Christian Nationalists and are called something like “Wildman’s Radical Skate Center!” but they won’t play music with rapping in it, so I get it. We live in such a horribly performative time where people are being contrary to their own true desires just to keep up the performance they’ve been trapped in. Shit man, we might get performatively armageddoned by these faux macho dipshits in charge. But even if we do, somebody has to be stubborn enough to outlive them, and I hope that is me, sitting in a junkyard with the daffodils, wishing there were still big women who could roller skate as I attempt to extend human evolution by mating with a hella thicc grey birch tree.

SONG OF THE DAY: Wagamama

I swear by getting a flu shot every year, because (knock on wood) I hadn’t gotten the flu in a long while. Even when it’s running through those around me, I seem to come out okay. I do miss the side effects though, like laying on the couch feeling like shit and watching Blood In Blood Out and Mi Vida Loca back-to-back off the youtube bootlegs. I ain’t done that in years now. Don’t get me wrong, I still lay around fuckin’ off on the couch a lot. But it’s just not the same as feeling half-paralyzed with nauseous all-body disgustingness, and just laying there as a long ass movie plays all the way out, without a break or looking at anything else. And then the next movie just comes on and you keep going, laying there, hoping you don’t have to vomit in the little plastic trash can with the triple layer of two Food Lion plastic bags (the blue cold items ones) inside of an outer layer yellow Dollar General bag. When I was a kid, my mom used to give us the big spaghetti pot to vomit in, which always seemed fucked up to me. I’d be sick and shit thinking, “Damn, she’s gonna make spaghetti in this fuckin’ thing next week.”
Anyways, this world is sick as hell. Vaccinate yourself with a little bit of love. Although scientifically speaking, if the world was sick because it’s full of hate, true vaccination principles would mean you have a tiny bit of hate to get it out of your system and build the proper antibodies, but I don’t think hate and love work like that. But what do I know? I’m just some guy who ain’t had the flu in a while.

SONG OF THE DAY: Rock 'n Roll Mouzone (kudzu'd)

The ancient Greek avatar wearing mirrored sunglasses Western Man of the post-post-modern extremely online variety hates with great haterism a belly on a woman. Obviously, this makes no sensible sense, is not practical with the sucracide glyphosate foods we have at the store (no maha), and just ain't what a Real Man would think. The extremely online Western Man is not Real though, just an algorithmic conscious set of 0s and 1s ragebaiting serotonin for so long that they actually start to believe their gimmick. Personally, I love a belly, and love when a woman not only doesn't give a fuck about it but shakes that thang (said in Hasil Adkins voice, FYI). My people come from the mountains, so curves are appreciated, and in fact make us wanna holler (the good way). So eat a dick, Western Man. You'll feel better.

SONG OF THE DAY: The Duke Ya Love To Hate (kudzu'd)

Ain't no doubt about it, we live in a world full of haters. And I like to keep thinking that the power of love and lounge will eventually win out, of stubborn heart, I gotta admit I have my doubts sometimes. Seems like the haters got so abundant that now we got reactionary haters of haters who don't even realize they're perpetuating the bullshit by accidental reflection while thinking they're fighting the good fight. But win and lose is not a binary; it's a spectrum. And even though all us who was born to lose might look like we're lost, we can still thrive in the shadows. The spotlight only shines on us if it thinks there's something worthwhile to apprehend. So even though I practice "fuck the haters" in my daily meditations of mind body and whole ass existence, I don't let 'em know, because I ain't getting tricked into getting stuck in their psychic tar.

SONG OF THE DAY: Black Hole Bop (kudzu'd)

There is a meticulous form of avoiding doing something that is involved in digging through two baskets of unfolded clean laundry, to specifically find a certain colored pair of socks, of which the first one comes easy, but the second is a stubborn trick from the Universe, and you sort through sheets and towels and track pants and shirts and a thousand other socks that easily pair themselves but in the wrong perfect color for today, as a test to your ability to avoid folding the goddamned clothes that have been accumulating here in the living room in your last two laundry baskets for the past couple weeks. The first time through is a rough sort, because you know the sediments, and which layer of load the sock should be in. But it hides, and the initial search turns into a more meticulous second search, where everything is piled into one basket and moved haphazardly into the second, on top of that little pile of clothes you actually have folded but not put away. But it still doesn’t show up, and you contemplate just wearing a different pair of socks, except you’re already wearing a garishly orange t-shirt, and your garishly orange socks are really the only correct choice here. So you go back in for a third deep dive, touching each piece of clean laundry, which at this point is already accumulating a stray animal hair or two, and testing the definition of “clean” before it even got folded and put away. Not only do you touch each piece, but you shake it, to make sure the perfect missing sock is not tucked into a crevice of sheet or ankle zipper of track pant. And still nothing. But just as you are about to give up, there it is, a sliver of blaze orange salvation, which you tug, and surprisingly this time is not the same Adidas GK top you thought might be the sock 17 times before, but is the actual sock. So you are finally set, and you promise the piles of laundry you have neglected, which serves you so well, and makes you appear fresh when out in public even though they know the secrets of your dilapidated raggediness you hide within your home, so you promise those piles of laundry you will fold them tomorrow, in nice ordered stacks, and return them to their beds in your dresser drawers and closets. But secretly you are also thinking about going for a drive tomorrow and taking pictures of the half-abandoned downtown storefronts of nearby towns, since it’s going to be a beautiful day. That would be pretty fucked up though. So I hope you get up early enough to give the unfolded laundry its due.

SONG OF THE DAY: Feel Like Makin' Love (kudzu'd)

I don’t know how highly you think of Roberta Flack, but no matter what it is, she’s still underrated. Born in the mountains of North Carolina, steeped in life in Virginia and North Carolina, and yet another graduate of Howard University (the Harvard of Black Folks). When the Fugees used that one sample, she gained some fresh notoriety, but it still ain’t enough. Black Mountain now has a mural of her up, and I wanna go see it. I love the Thelonious Monk one in Rocky Mount… like I think about downtown Rocky Mount and that mural and the old furniture store and the trains coming and going in that big CSX yard and the wonderful pile of bricks from a torn down building my one kid used to always make us go see. I hope Black Mountain is all fucked up (in the good ways) like that, too.

SONG OF THE DAY: Jezebel of the Morning (kudzu'd)

Rail industry has been dying out in a lot of places for decades, as the major railroads bought each other up and phased out the short lines because everybody uses diesel trucking now (which, by the way, has seen fuel costs skyrocket the past month). And most all these old small towns have their old train depot, many of them renovated or turned into some other shit.
But what you don’t hear as much about is the bus industry dying out, or barely holding on, and all those immaculate beautiful old bus stations that got built in the shift to driving after the interstate highway system got built, they’re all shutting down. The one in Charlottesville has been closed down for years, with the Greyhound just picking people up at a street stop instead – no ticketing window, no staff, nobody to pay cash for a ticket to go on the run from life all of a sudden. We were just in Huntington, West Virginia, which has a beautiful old bus station, with the Greyhound signage still, and it’s used as a local public bus system depot now, so it’s surviving.
And I don’t really care about keeping capitalism alive or anything like that. But we did used to make travel in group ways more of an acceptable thing, and decorated it with these nice depots and stations that were additions to the architectural landscape. One thing I hate about America (which is actually two things) is that we don’t re-use spaces all that easily, and we also get so hung up on the prospective value of real estate that shit will just sit there going to waste rather than being opened up to some sort of functional use for the community it’s located within. I hear these white ass motherfuckers talking about “third spaces” all the time, which is kinda pretentious because it assumes you have a stable first (home) and second (job) already. But the owner class just sits on these things forever. There’s an abandoned back roads grocery store a few miles from me, and I’d love to be occupying that thing with some sort of chaos art market. Shit man, I’d even lie to myself that I could swing the rent for a minute if they made it cheap enough. But nah, it’s just sitting there, rotting back into the ground, because they “know what they’ve got”, and they’re seeing the abstract potential value instead of any actual use.
Last time I rode the Greyhound, it was from Los Angeles to New Orleans, and by the time I got to New Orleans, I told myself “never again”. But that was long enough ago, it sorta feels like a good idea to take the bus from here to 17 states away, down, over, then back again. I love having a trickster brain that even wants to self-trickster.

SONG OF THE DAY: Lookin' for a Home (kudzu'd)

This was the title of my last book of haiku, because I love this song so much, and was listening to it a lot as my life rearranged itself after a couple of decades of a previous order. I was lost for a minute, even to the point of dissociating more than I’ve ever let everyone know, and I’d be driving to Richmond where I was sleeping with a woman at the time, who was helping me feel again, and this song would be blasting on my stereo, I think a sunroof Civic I inherited from a homie for free at the time, and I was lost and drifting, through both physical and astral planes, and damn, it hit so deep. Even slowed, it remains a great track. Be sure to check out both my old and new haiku books, because it’s good shit, and was how I charted my way through the lost times. I’m still lost, just in a different place than I used to be. I feel like I’m getting somewhere, but nobody really knows, do they?

SONG OF THE DAY: Touch of Grey

I will get by… I will survive.
I know it’s considered hipster canon to hate on The Dead, but they had plenty of bangers. The major problem with The Dead is if you let people know you actually enjoy them, some dude will talk your goddamn ear off about it, every chance he gets. I miss the pre-internet obsessives, who would just randomly be like, “Oh yeah, I have over 300 shows on tape. Hold up, let me go grab my favorite three!” because you knew that dude was deep into his obsession, and had truly – through an ongoing and over-indulgent appreciation – gained insight that was worth hearing. But post-internet, folks can too easily gobble up that information from others and assume it as their own, then talk to my stuck on the same seat of a Greyhound bus ass for far too long. We’ve had artificial intelligence for as long as we’ve had a mainstream internet, to be honest.
By the way, if there are any wealthy beneficiaries out there, please bootleg RFK Stadium, June 14, 1991, and send me a copy. That was a particularly memorable event that I don’t really remember.

SONG OF THE DAY: The Model (kudzu'd)

My favorite genre of music now is traditional old-time sounds filtered through futuristic dystopian effects, like taking pills you don’t know what they are in a cavernous old tobacco warehouse in a dormant downtown, and the train horns blow by now and then, but it’s just intermodals these days, no stopping to pick up nary a passenger. This is mostly seen through cumbia, but I’d like to cultivate this sound using the old-time sounds of what they call mountain music, because that sound (as yet unheard) is way more authentic to our current living conditions than fake gangster landscaper rap. That’s where my mind is today, but I can’t make the sounds exist, and I’m having a hard time describing it to people who can.

SONG OF THE DAY: Me Myself and I (kudzu'd)

My original copy of the 3 Feet High & Rising tape was a bootleg bought at a truck stop near Simplicity, Virginia. The cover was a color copy with no insert. I played the fuck outta that tape. Of course, being a truck stop bootleg, playing the fuck outta it didn’t necessarily take long.
Decades later, as the white kids who latched onto Native Tongues less scary entry point into hip hop have grown old and now operate vintage boutiques, I remain firmly committed to the bootleg lifestyle. Being authentic and having authenticated items are two entirely different lanes to walk along.

SONG OF THE DAY: Funky Rubber Band (kudzu'd)

the automation of an artificial intelligence hopes to colonize the future by harvesting the entirety of what’s passed, but many important points got missed in the archiving of historical happenings because even in the moment, those that thought they knew was thinking with a brain poisoned by ego that had forgotten how heart has much deeper tendrils into what’s real.
and even with the digital reflections we presently endure, there is a distractionary result of attempting to understand what is around us by endlessly scrolling a small flat representation of reality operating upon an algorithm of doomsaying. it is the metaphorical rabbithole with which to get lost inside, losing track of where you’re actually at, and how there are birds still making strange noises, and amphibious souls being born in the murky margins that are always within earshot when hearing is attuned to the proper frequencies too low-pitched to hear over the cyber buzz.
thus one must make an effort to remain focused on not being wrongly focused, in the hopes of unfocusing into the blurred shared reality of all things, where one does not end where another begins, and the tendrils intertwine into the sublime realization that your little head full of explosions of thoughts is not the end-all be-all of the universe, but simply another fleck of stardust scattered unto existence. enjoy your blessed presence, and don’t get distracted into a future prison or too chained to pieces of what’s passed which you can’t remedy. embrace your presence, as it is, here and now.

SONG OF THE DAY: God's Goodness (kudzu'd)

My brain damaged congressman has joined some sort of reactionary “Sharia-Free America Caucus”. Little does he know (works alone as a statement, but there’s more) that Sharia Law is already recognized in the autonomous zones of the Blue Ridge Emirate. Every morel is a mosque. And there’s nothing they can do about it.

SONG OF THE DAY: Sin Control (kudzu'd)

I like to draw all black old school flash art traditional tattoos on the thighs of the women in Namio Harukawa books. I keep hoping, with the long storied prison art tradition held up as a point of pride by the Chicano community, that we one day have some great imprisoned artist who discovers Harukawa’s work and is inspired by it. But they can’t even have real books in most prisons anymore. You just get a tablet with images on it, and it’s harder to contraband digital files. And I’m sure some punchable faced cyberlibertarian type would suggest I just become a Prompt Engineer and tell artificial intelligence to combine Teen Angels magazine style prison art with Harukawa’s work. But we (the real thinking artist types) know that artificial intelligence is flawed by nature, and it would just give us an anthropomorphic ’65 Impala squatting over the face of a cowboy. We have built a stupider, more expensive, and wasteful world, when all we really need to do is sit around and think up ridiculous shit, freely.

SONG OF THE DAY: Sassy Lady (kudzu'd)

We need more lore. We have higher manufactured drama bar graphs than ever before, but not nearly enough lore. Without an abundance of lore, how does the feral meritocracy of what folks love give us authentic folklore anymore? THERE MUST BE LORE. Lore gives a much more fulfilling mind chemical reaction than the dopamine of consumerism. So I’m going to go tell stories to the beech trees. Or birches. I never remember. But they never correct me if I call them the wrong thing. I don’t even think they speak English, to be honest. Their eyes look at me pretty funny when I’m talking to them.