"Exhibit C" by Jay Electronica

[mediafire/sharebee/sendspace/rapidshare]
Zines were my thing, now I'm in the blogosphere constantly clicking on refresh, hoping the end is near. Feeling the microwave whisper buzzing behind my ear, but the alcohol intake inhibits my fear. Afraid of a world spinning crooked so I'm rural, where the words clog my head painting picture perfect murals, but my fingers and tongue get stuck on specifics, like the proper positioning and my broke ass linguistics. Minutes turn to hours turn to days turn to waste, and I wonder how I got stuck in this cluttered up space called myself. Hits and clicks and ones and zeros, world spinning through wi-fi behind fifteen minute heroes. What the fuck am I? A goddamned fool.
I heard the hum but deprive myself of sleep to the point I haven't dreamed in eight years. Sometimes with the punched clock demands and caffeine energy, you can ignore the real, and stagger through the days, keeping the creditors from leaving computer-generated messages on your voicebox while-you're-away machine. Except you're not away, just hiding from the hole you've been digging around yourself since the moment you got born by pure chance where you landed in the waiting hands of a dude (or woman) waiting to get paid. That's how it works. Slice the skin off my dick and point me off into the goddamned world and my body will float along with power, with strength, with amusement. But I'm a sinking and swimming ass fool, at the same time, one arm flailing and the other one numb. Hydrocodone Yuengling tag team double dropkick coming out the locker room with my theme music at -13 pitch shift - playing old 45s on a shitty ass turntable at 33 rpms. 33 and a third more precisely, and the opposite of this is hyper-crank style with three turntables rigged together with wires and cables and flea market equipment and stuff stored in stacked milk crates inside the camper behind the house, and they all spin at once to go 100 mph, so to speak, so to hear. Yin and yang, it all balances out to not much, and tomorrow it's supposed to snow and the puppies will bounce like crackheads and the kids will bundle up like satellite TV packages that end up costing $20 more than you expected and I'll look out the back window and be like, "Yep, this is my World."

(7s) Should Be On DVD Easier #3 - Louie Theroux's Weird Weekend

Haha, I’m listing like an all-star cable TV shows from 1999 list, with this and Iron Chef. Louie Theroux was a writer for some fucking well-respected humor magazine that I can’t be bothered to remember, and he’s some sort of limey, which I’m always afraid to say “British” because the dude might be one of those very anti-British flavors like Scottish or Irish or Welsh or gay and get all angry and start on some long-winded rant that really I don’t care about. I was born in Virginia, growed in Virginia, and will die in Virginia. You, to me, are the American-style people from Europe that talk like Saturday night PBS sitcoms. And you have only three black people in your country, yet amazingly enough, Seal, Dizzee Rascal, and Lennox Lewis all became famous, but only in music and sports because you are inherently racist.
Anyways, Weird Weekend was a show where this Louie Theroux dude would immerse himself in some fringe culture, like southern rap or wrestling or UFO cults or muscle worshippers, and it was always really great fringe cultures that I was interested in. And Louie was so interested and innocent seeming, and he got away with asking questions normal reporter types wouldn’t because he did it with a British accent. Actually, now that I think about it, this show, although not over-the-top and trying to make fun of people, was a definite precursor to the whole Baron Sacha Cohen Borat/Bruno/Ali G thing, although it’s more obvious if you’ve seen the Ali G Show Ali G stuff than it is with Borat or Bruno. I haven’t actually watched Bruno, mostly because I doubt it could be as funny as the Borat movie, and the Borat movie wasn’t really as funny as the Ali G show, which was just as funny just in different ways than the British version of the show. (See what I did there? Hipster contrarian bylaws demand that the less someone has seen something, the better it must be, since I have seen it; and I trumped that with seeing the original British show, which are always superior because limey people aren’t expected to be pretty so they can let their humor fly without worrying about smiling handsomely in the process. Although, a word of warning, the British Ali G movie is maybe the worst piece of shit ever, and you should avoid that at all costs. Don’t even be like, “Hahaha, I’ve got to see this to see how bad it is now,” because it’s not bad in an enjoyable way, not even slightly.) And you could tell that Thieroux was geniunely interested too. It allowed the people he was asking questions at to let their guard down and let him inside their bizarre little corner of the world, which to them, was the Center of It All.
One time a guy gave me a DVD with some of these taken from torrents, but it was all screwy, like two episodes played on my actual DVD machine, and then I could watch parts of three other episodes on my Windows Media Player, but not more than like ten minutes, and then there were a bunch of other episodes that didn’t do anything except shoot time detonated cyber-cooties into my motherboard without me knowing or being able to stop it. That’s how the world works now. Remember how in old fighting The Man movies, some dude would say he was gonna take it down from the inside? The Man’s turned that around and is taking us all down from our insides. Silent weapons for quiet wars. Novus Orzo Decorum.

(7s) Women Singers That Tricked Me Into Loving On Them #7 - Sharon Jones

Sharon Jones can sing like a motherfucker, and is crazy as hell. Apparently, there's a female ODB aspect to her in real life, which makes sense because how else could she be so damned awesome if she wasn't a drunkard or had too many concussions or something to warp her into perfection. When it comes to sanging, she's the best, and it was always bothersome to my cracker ass that Amy Winehouse got pushed so hard as a musically talented scrawny tattooed white chick, with Sharon Jones band backing her up, while Sharon Jones was just sitting around in relative obscurity the whole time. Is our music industry that goddamned superficial that it decided to pass on a crazy 40-something black chick from Brooklyn who can sing her ass off to make a few extra dollars off of a younger white woman who could have her junkie arms and black eyes airbrushed away long enough to sell a bunch of records and get a Grammy or two? It's always sad to realize music hasn't been about music for a few decades now.
Oh well, I shall cue up "This Land is Your Land" by Sharon Jones and pretend we don't all collectively suck.

(7s) Should Be On DVD Easier #2 - The Classics of Nollywood

Recently watched a documentary on the Nigerian film industry called Welcome To Nollywood, and those dudes crank out feature length regular people flicks as often as porn people in America crank out porns. Like seriously, they are in the streets of Lagos making 19 different movies right now, on the fly, and as fast as possible, yet with an attention to artistic flair that separates it somehow at the city market where stacks upon stacks of DVD burns sit in multi-colored plastic cases every week. I've had a fascination with Nollywood flicks for a while now, and actually coming back from Richmond one time, the Kenyan dude who runs the Columbia Country Market in downtrodden Columbia, Virginia, was watching African flicks in the store. He told me you had to go all the way to DC to get Nollywood stuff, which I've meant to do at some point, but never have, partially because I've been broke and partially because living inside my simple ass brain makes me wary of large urban clusters a whole lot more now that I'm older.
But Nollywood, which is the third largest film industry on Earth, behind L.A. and Bollywood, is completely independent, not funded by American money, not even really helped by the Nigerian government, although the films are a huge source of pride for Nigeria. It's a completely grass roots and independent industry that has blown up, and any figures it claims it pulls in has to be considered faulty at best considering a majority of its business is done hand to hand and in cash only marketplaces.
From what I understand, the flicks combine a larger worldliness with native (usually from rural areas) aspects. There's lots of supernatural shit going on, being religion is a mixed up mess over there (and actually in the news this week with Christians and Muslims killing each other) with the major religions mixing with indigenous beliefs into voodoo-riffic material for on-the-fly moviemakers. It seems to me that, by now, somebody would have set up a system where they have someone on the streets in Lagos who buys the new flicks up every week, sends them to America, where the legal ownership of already sketchily owned in Africa movies, would probably fly under the radar, and release twin bills of the more crazy or decent of these movies. It seems so obvious, and maybe if I rode up to D.C. to hit the internationally flavored part of town, this is happening already. But it needs to happen more, before Quentin Tarantino puts Joe Iko in a movie and acts like he blew up the whole Nollywood genre for America.
It's also amusing to me that it's a big thing here, what with filmmakers being very serious about their very serious business of making movies, to have guerrilla film contests where people make an entire movie, from idea to final cut, in a few days. That's pretty much how Nollywood works regularly. One of the Nigerian producers in the Welcome To Nollywood documentary was straight up saying if they wanted to get more out of their money in American movies, they should hire some Nigerians. That's an industry that could use some international outsourcing anyways.

(7s) Women Singers That Tricked Me Into Loving On Them #6 - Jewel

Oddly enough, a lot of these listings are attached at my memories of my wife, and the first time we dated, I screwed things all up with my cheating ass drunken ways, and around the same time that stupid Jewel song about "who will save your soul" was circulating on the video TV airwaves at the places I'd be couch crashing upon. Something about Jewel's Americanized Scandinavian heritage looks, crooked teeth, living in a van in Alaska back story, singing about some sucky ass dude but still loving on him in a sad way, it felt like it was me. It made me love Jewel. Of course, since then, she wrote poetry and did a bunch of shitty music (at least obviously shitty, which that other soul saving song probably was to most people not in the midst of alcoholic delusions) and got all normal celebrity looking in shiny dresses. But man, some singing ass chick with nice tits and crooked teeth living in a van in Alaska... that's like 17-year-old Raven dream world right there.

(7s) Should Be On DVD Easier #1 - Iron Chef

It makes no reason that the actual translated Iron Chef that was the most awesome thing on cable television for years is not on DVD. You can get the stupid fucking American Iron Chef thing, but none of the great wonderful actual Iron Chefs that made competitive cooking awesome. I was watching Anthony Bourdain the other week, and he actually met up with Chef Morimoto in Tokyo, and Morimoto had a ponytail and looked like a chill ass dude. I was like, “Whoa? That’s Chef Morimoto now?” And it just made me wish the show was still on. It also made me wonder what happened to the dude who wore the yellow. That guy was my favorite. Chef Chen maybe? Theme ingredients Iron Chef shows probably added more dishes to my daily diet than if I watched a billion hours of Emeril or Rachel Ray or whatever faggy white people cooking shows you people watch. I am so awesome because I only learn from outlandish nonsense.
Seriously though, I know this is the internet, and I see what keywords lead to this blog, so if one of you internet fruits has torrent downloaded all the Iron Chefs to burn to DVD, hit me up because I’d like to work a trade for that shit.

Samuel Adams Winter Lager

AFFORDABILITY: It is winter and Samuel Adams, like anybody that is not a body but a corporation, is trying to conquer the collapsing economy with budget 12-packs. Thusly, affordable. Of course this is relatively speaking, because really, for a 12-pack of this, I could've bought a case of Miller. But Miller would cause my head to revolt the next day like Liberian child soldiers. 4 out of 5.
DESTROYABILITY: Just like snow, if you keep adding enough of it, everything slows down to a crawl. Then if you add even more, you get to sleep in late tomorrow morning. 4 out of 5.
LABEL AESTHETIC: I am bored with Samuel Adams. Immensely. Everything about them is starting to seem stupid to me, and I may never drink them again, with again meaning nine months or so. Sampler packs can be blessings or banes, and the Sam Adams winter variety seems to be a bane. I think it's because the different brands could use a little more individual personality. I mean, we all know that all this shit comes out the same pipes at the beer factory, so at least make the labels very obviously different to make us feel like our life is actually getting a little bit of that proverbial variety spice. 1 out of 5.
CORPORATE MASTER: Living history re-enactors are the best. Being both living history and pornography tend to employ people with limited acting abilities who become, for better or worse, completely immersed in their work, it just makes sense the two things should be crossed. Why does no one make good quality intellectual porn? Living history porn would be the biggest thing ever, because most everybody in America is secretly a pervert of some sort, but not an outright crazy pervert like the lackluster porn industry caters to. They need to aim higher, go for that Jaguar money. Samuel L. Adams was a historical figure, and since I’ve talked about this stupid company far too much already because I bought a winter sampler pack and ended up reviewing all the beers, I am using the living history porn idea to take the place of their corporate write-up. If you are a pornographer and end up making living history porn after getting this brilliant idea from me, all I ask is that you send me complimentary copies of your films. Feel free to hire me on as a story consultant as well. I know you don’t actually pay people for that type of thing, but shit man, who pays for anything anywhere nowadays anyways? Just send me some old DVDs that I can in turn sell at the flea market for gas money. I’ve always wanted to be a flea market porn movie salesman, at least for a day, just to see who opens the “ADULT ONLY” plastic bins to thumb around in there. 1 out of 5.
OVERALL AMBIANCE: Well, wintertime is a time to appreciate living like a New Englander in the regular old middle South, and I can appreciate it with their fool ass yankee beers as well, although I'd much rather have some for-real gangsta ass microbrews that crusty punks and minor league hockey thugs alike can get down with. Samuel Adams seems like fake bourgoisie beer to me, like the piece of shit white trash dude who manages a cell phone store and wears button down shirts over his tribal tattoos and times his haircuts and shavings with his week of vacation so that the second weekend of his full week off he looks like Seth Rogen, if only for a couple of days, before getting it tightened back up late afternoon on Sunday, then back to work. That guy drinks mad Samuel Adams, and has an untrustable smile. 1 out of 5.
TOTAL RATING: 2 & 1/5 STARS!

(7s) Women Singers That Tricked Me Into Loving On Them #5 - Ani DiFranco

Ani DiFranco entered my life when me and the ol' lady were dating the first time and we would have dates that were basically buy an 18-pack and drive her Jeep Cherokee into the country in Cumberland County and sit in a hay field along a gravel road with a bonfire. Sometimes, I would've been fucking up or fucked up and passing out from a pill or three and she'd have to drive us back into the city at daybreak, by herself with me in Lala-land in the passenger seat, drooling all over my shoulder, and she'd pump the Ani DiFranco, singing along with it. I never really liked the Ani back then, mostly because I think it plucked my sore nerves of being a shithead. Now, we're settled into a happy wacky household with multiple offsprings, and I'm doing right by her and she's doing right by me, and honestly I probably listen to Ani DiFranco more than my wife does. I'm not sure why. The angry ass woman part of it doesn't override how good it is, some simple ass bus-riding chick banging on an acoustic guitar with the anger of a pussy stabbed by evil dicks a few times too many. I know how them evil dicks think, because I possess one, and they are a crazy thing, and many dudes never learn how to control hearing the evil things it'll speak into your brain, on direct connect mode. Ani herself isn't the most beautiful chick in the world, conventionally speaking, but that bus station-savvy smile with those little dreadlocks, man, that's the type of girl I'd be all up in the health food store buying cous cous and collard greens with, hoping we could be sharing a couch part-time in full nudity by the end of the month.

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - January '10

Being it is the first month of a new year, and I list this bullshit every month, let us recap the entire project and parameters that entail the J.J. Krupert gaypod nonsense. First off, J.J. Krupert is the name of my gaypod, because a while back, when we first had a shuffle gaypod in this household, my middle kid, who was about 4 at the time, loved playing the DJ Z-Trip Uneasy Listening Volume 2 CD, which had a big hand in starting the mash-up genre. She didn't quite know how to say DJ. Z-Trip though, so she called it J.J. Krupert. I have taken that name and held onto it. I've actually "had" a homebirth kid already under that name, and am working on getting a social security number, and then eventually a passport for him. Even with Homeland Security and all that, you'd be surprised how easy that is to do. Through three aliases, I've had a total of 10 children born at home, 8 of which I have social security numbers for already. I've dragged my feet on J.J. though because he's so special to my heart with his fake ass. It should probably be pointed out that "gaypod" is my disaffectionate term for an Ipod shuffle, as I refuse to carry a full-sized Ipod, nor an Iphone, so I rock the little shuffle style, which is of course mad gay. With it being a Shuffle, there's only so much room, so it's survival of the fittest for songs. I started with a 1 gig shuffle, but then handed that down to my daughter and got a 2 gig shuffle right before they got rid of the old style of shuffle and replaced them with those retarded looking ones where the volume control is on the headphones.
How the monthly countdown works is very simple. I have my gaypod stats set up to keep track of play count and times skipped and all that, so that I can fully enforce the survival of the fittest, even when I'm drunk and don't remember what I heard, and knock stuff off the thing or let them be. At some point each month, I give the songs the old hockey plus/minus treatment, where you subtract times skipped from times played, to find the top played songs on the J.J. Krupert gaypod. Individual versions of a song can only be listed in the stupid countdown once, and additionally, I only allow one song per artist each month, so that if I'm just geeking all over one new CD forever, it's not just a list of all the songs from that dude. This usually means a slow climb towards a listing by songs I enjoy a ton, because it being a straight up shuffle, I can't really pick out songs, although this past month I have started using my Itunes on my computer a bit more to listen at while working at the kitchen table/home office at night.
So that's how the fuck this works. Now here are the things that I've been hearing with these things this last collected page of day block squares of time on the calendar at the hall door this month...
#1: "Popular Demand (Popeyes)" by The Clipse featuring Cam'ron - I'm from Virginia, where ain't shit to do but lounge, and honestly the only thing we've had to come from this state to make us proud in the hip hop world is The Clipse. Sure, Madd Skillz busts out his year-end wrap-up every December and makes gimmicky noise, but mostly what we're well-known for is crappy radio bullshit like Timbaland, Missy Elliott, and The Neptunes. But The Clipse has been a long-time successful, pseudo-underground, criminal element in hip hop, that's never quite blown up and never quite fallen off. I didn't even bother getting their last CD, not even from the everything-is-free rap blogosphere, but then I was reading some year-end Best Songs of '09 lists, and this one came up a bunch of times. I can dig on The Clipse, when I'm in the mood, and Cam'ron is like three-legged dogs fighting in that you just can't get enough of it but you also can't overload on it or it loses it's awesomeness. This song, even with stupid Pharrell on the hook, is a great goddamned song, and enters my The Clipse pantheon of under ten songs that I'll pump constantly in those rare times that I'm all about some The Clipse. Plus, it talks about Popeyes, which is a chicken joint that is considered great, but if you're from Richmond and not Hampton like these guys, you know the Lee's Fried Chicken by Pleasant's Hardware on Broad Street is the fucking jam and a half.
#2: "Exhibit C" by Jay Electronica - Erykah Badu's latest baby daddy has been getting the hip hop blogospheric hype job for some time now, which usually means absolutely nothing, because said internet darling gets lost in the midst of 300 other "true hip hop spirit" rappers and collectives with cybertronic comic book generated names. But this song by Jay from last year, produced very mainstreamily by Just Blaze, fucking bangs, and I actually heard it on regular people radio in Richmond last week. It's actually got me all tweaked out that maybe, just maybe, in 2010, an actual good rapper could be successful in the American music industry. Then again, who the fuck's gonna buy his shit, because everybody like me will just download it for free just like it was the mixtape he just released. I guess that's why only shitty hip hop things have vast mainstream sales success anymore, because only stupid people actually buy music. Still though, Jay Electronica, despite the wack name, gives me hope that rappers can still be tight as fuck, and smart at the same time. Plus dude is from New Orleans. He and Andre 3000 should do a tag team mixtape with a bunch of obvious samples from Erykah Badu's live album and call it Menage-a-Trois. Also, I can't remember, but Jay's kid with Badu has an even crazier name than the one she had with Andre 3000. Can he achieve financial success in 2010? Or will the poison pussy disease of Erykah Badu cripple his ill styles like it has so many before him (Andre briefly, Common, that dude from Dead Prez)? Only time will tell. But you can bump the fuck out of this (as well as "Trolley Stop") while you wait and see.
#3: "Codeine Fiend Flow" by Big Moe - This is a brief freestyle Big Moe did about dranking lean over top that "I'll Be Missing You" beat by Puff Daddy which was basically just that old The Police song anyways. But it's awesome as fuck. The whole Screwed Up Click, if they could've all lived, could've been like the Wu-Tang of the South if everything had lined up just right at some point. I mean, DJ Screw, Fat Pat, Hawk, Big Moe, Lil Keke, Lil Flip, it could've been amazing. Instead they all went their own ways to either die or whither on the vine. This came off a mix called I Ride On Guilded Spinners I got at the After The End Of The World blog that's in the links to your right somewhere. It is my favorite blog, and if there were four more like it inside the internets, the internets wouldn't be so goddamned useless. Rest in Peace Big Moe. I bet you sing screwed naturally in Heaven, because Heaven is perfect. I bet dudes in Ghetto Heaven where old Screwed Up Click members go are inebriated off codeine all day every day, naturally, and there's a secret black market drug trade in sobriety pills where you buy them and it makes you not be fucked up on codeine for a few hours, and dudes are secretly doing that all the time and making music at regular speed for fringe Ghetto Heaven cultural elements. Man, I can't wait to die to see what type of Heaven I get to go to. I'm also excited to choose my body outfit, because I assume it's like the baseball Hall of Fame, and those dudes pick one team they go in as, so in Heaven, you pick the body you were rocking at some point in your life. I might actually go with my long dreadlocks look from a few years back, although if you get to keep your brain like it is, it might be a tight style to rock the 5-year-old Raven golden blonde hair dimple smile style like I was on the Bad News Bears, and yet my brain would already know what it knows now. Would I still smile so brightly? I don't know; I'm not sure on the scientific mechanics behind emotion and whether your brain having different corners full of bullshit in it would alter that or not. Maybe genetic engineering can help us study that - whether a 5-year-old boy would smile so happily if you could inject a billion non-innocent thoughts into his skull.
#4: "Hands On The Wheel" by Willie Nelson - My folks used to play the Redheaded Stranger album all the time as a kid, so I knew this one by heart before I even knew it consciously, and to this day I’d say this is the most beautiful love song ever recorded. I mean, for real love, not wacky slow dance at the end of a movie make believe love. This is a love song with a healthy swipe of grime, just like real life is. The bride doesn’t have perfect curly golden locks in real life - she’s pregnant already. But even when you accidentally get somebody pregnant, sometimes the universe breaks just right and you can find that perfect once-in-a-lifetime love. That’s this song.
#5: "Mighty One" by Memory Man - If you are a fan of “real” hip hop as every thirtysomething white-ish boy likes to call it, and you haven’t yet heard this Wu Tang Clan vs. The D.I.T.C. mixtape that Memory Man did last year, go google it right now and dl that bitch. It’s the best post-mixtapes-mean-free-shit-on-the-internet age mixtape that’s been made thus far. Basically, it’s a mash-up that alternates between Wu verses over D.I.T.C. beats and D.I.T.C. verses over Wu beats. This is Ghostface’s “Mighty Healthy” verses over a D.I.T.C. beat that I recognize the fuck out of but can’t tell you what it is at this moment. As much as I jock Ghostface Killah as the best MC alive right now, I never really pumped Supreme Clientele too much in my lifetime. The lyrics here are new to me because of that, and it’s classic Ghost, mixing pseudo-sciences with religion with swagger with big dick boastings. I will probably continue to not really listen to Supreme Clientele, because I can’t imagine the beat behind the song making sense to me now that Memory Man brainwashed me with this mix.
#6: "Purple Rain (screwed & chopped)" by Prince - Nobody, for the most part, since DJ Screw died really highlighted the chopped part of screwed and chopped. Yeah, people have slowed a ton of music down over the years, but the chopping that Screw did was a tight ass aspect to his music. The simple repetition of notable pairs of song lines, the extra BAP BAP he had with the drumbeat just slightly off and ahead, it all added to a whole lot more than simply slowing down records. Michael 5000 Watts of Swisha House gained some fame post-Screwmously as the notable S&C expert, but right there beside him in the beginning of Swisha House was a DJ far more attuned to the spirit of screwed music than 5000 Watts money-hungry ass, in the form of OG Ron C. OG Ron C’s most notable contribution to the world has been his Fuck Action series of mixtapes, which are screwed and chopped R&B jams, and being it’s often new R&B, this means it can a lot of the times suck. Not from his effort though, just that new school R&B doesn’t hit me that hard. But he’ll throw in old school jams now and then, and this “Purple Rain” slow-mowed fiesta is awesome as fuck. I don’t even like Prince, but OG Ron C made me wanna throw the ol’ lady down on the living room floor (after spreading out a lambskin and building a fire of course) and put a baby inside her belly that we name & or an upside down ! which my gringo keyboard won’t even let me type.
#7: "Going Down" by Ani DiFranco - Every month, I think I’ve hit the wall on enjoying Ani DiFranco, and I’m gonna dump all the songs off the gaypod by her; but then when I’m looking at Itunes, I actually still like to hear those songs. At this point, I’m tired of the idea of listening to Ani DiFranco, as it’s lost it’s hipster contrarianism; but I actually still enjoy her music. I guess maybe deep down inside I’m a disillusioned lesbian.
#8: "Deep In The Mud" by Those Poor Bastards - Those Poor Bastards are the group that originally did the “Pills I Took” song that Hank Williams III spiced up and perfected on his Straight to Hell LP. I downloaded almost all their shit to give it a listen, since it’s supposed to be dark, broody country music. Well it is. It’s like gothic kids did some acid and had a bad trip watching Andy Griffith reruns. I am not sure they are that great, because basically it’s music to suicide yourself to, but there are moments where I am in the right mood and I can tolerate ten minutes of them. This “Deep In The Mud” song seems to be the one I go back to the most. But honestly, if you go out looking for this shit after reading this, it’s basically Appalachian funeral dirge music, except for-real Appalachians would pick themselves up emotionally with some bluegrass music about God. This is like there’s an alternate reality where instead, at an Appalachian funeral they wanted to just deeply immerse themselves in how shitty the world is, like basically if it rained all the time year-round in the Appalachian mountains, this is what they’d listen to in between crushing and snorting oxycontins.
#9: "Senga Abele" by Manu Dibango featuring MC Mell'o' - A couple months back, I was on a kick where I downloaded all these Rough Guide to... world music mixes, in protest against the Putamayo world music machine, but also to check out some obscure genres that I thought I might like. This was off of the Rough Guide to African Rap, which all in all is not that great a CD. I think since black people have mastered (haha, no pun intended) the rap music from the beginning, and were originally dragged to America from Africa, we’d all like to open-mindedly hope that bonafide Africans could tear it up with the hip hop music. But it’s a cultural thing, and you kinda have to be fucked in America in one way or another to kick the deep hip hop. But nonetheless, some of the stuff on this CD that moves further away from trying to be real hip hop and has a heavy African music flavor to it, that stuff gets play. And I actually have a few Manu Dibango LPs from my old crate-digging days, so I’m probably biased to check this track out more than the others. Also, my old roommate used to always say, “Man, you da bango!” when one of those records were laying out. Anyways, this is a not song I’d say you should go out immediately and try to find, but if you’re an experimental ass fool, look up the Rough Guide to African Rap, and it’ll probably make you appreciate Gucci Mane a little more.
#10: "Steeplechase Lane" by Chet Atkins - Not only is Chet Atkins awesome and a certified guitar picker/professional lounger, but this song, being an instrumental with Chet Atkins super clean guitar style, makes me feel like I’m Jed Clampett getting Jethro to drive me down to Mr. Drysdale’s bank every time I hear it.
#11: "Sunny Side Of The Mountain" by The Stanley Brothers - They played this at my dad’s funeral. Bluegrass has become so polluted with bullshit newgrass wacky side tangents that it’s diluted the inherent awesomeness of the genre with both weak ass spiritual music and hipster bullshit. The Stanley Brothers is always gonna be some straight up good to your soul bluegrass though. There is an obvious dichotomy in broke ass people’s lives of the hard partying Saturday nights and the hard praying Sunday mornings. Every now and then, like songs like this, the two are brought together, which is convenient, because sometimes it’s hard to get to sleep as Saturday night turns into Sunday morning.
#12: "Muchachita Del Oriente" by Los Mirlos - This is another song from that The Roots of Chicha: the Psychedelic Cumbias of Peru CD that I stole from inside the internet a while back. It is good shit, and makes me wish I still had lengthy moments of irresponsibility enough to get lost in the woods at night while under the influence of hallucinogenics.
#13: "On With The Show" by Motley Crue - With age, it has become apparent to me that the only good Motley Crue album is Too Fast For Love and anybody who would try to convince you otherwise is trying to have gay sex with you.

(7s) Should Be On DVD Easier Intro

I tend to fight entertainment technology advances, partially due to systemic poverty along my lifeline's fractured meanderings, but also because I tend to like the finer stupid things in life, and they can be accumulated more abundantly in ancient formats. But I've been brought into the DVD age for a while now, but with an old ass 32 inch TV that had to have an RF Modulator to play the DVD machine. But my brother-in-law, who is our family gadget enabler, such a huge gadget man himself that he will visit and feel almost offended by the fact we don't have modern conveniences that he sees as a natural right for any free born semi-successful American. Thinking like that causes him to do things like he did the end of last year where he bought us a giant high def flat screen (don't know the dimensions, but it's bigger than the old 32 was), and a blue-ray player (which we've only watched like three actual blue-ray movies on, and honestly, I didn't notice a big enough difference between that and regular DVD to pay double for shit, although coming from a shitty cable-ready 32-inch to the wide screen probably means my attention to definition is by nature minimal), and a Wii set-up (which doesn't get used as much anymore after I schooled the fuck out of everybody on Mario Kart and the other games were too complicated to even figure out).
For the wildly fluctuating brain patterns of a guy like me, the Netflix has been a goddesssend, because I can think something like, "Hey, I'd like to watch every Charles Bronson movie I've never heard of," and I can set it up to do it. Or I can watch The Wire, beginning to end, more than once, and overindulge myself to ridiculous levels where I'm sleeping at night, dreaming about going to a Chinese buffet with Bunk and McNulty meets us there and he's all sorts of fucked up and he keeps pushing my shoulder really hard with his finger, and Bunk keeps shrugging at me like "Sorry man, Jimmy's an asshole."
But why the fuck isn't everything ever on DVD now? It seems incredible to me that anything anybody might've ever wanted, obviously other than brand new TV series or some shit, should be on DVD. I mean, you can hit the bootleg man for DVDs of new release movies the same week they come out in theaters. So why isn't everything fucking ever put into a rentable DVD format for easy public consumption?
I know there's probably legitimate business reasons behind a lot of that, and illegitimate business reasons as well (like Disney's refusal to have shit for sale but every so often to drive up the price of it like assholes who don't have three daughters in the house). I also know that the type of crap I tend to like, it's usually made by semi-degenerates, and that type of person tends to lose ambition at times or fall into dark muddy places in life and not be able to follow through on everything they might want to. Nonetheless, here bestarts a list of some things I wish I could get on the digital video disc format more easily, and preferably through Netflix so I didn't even have to pay for it like normal style but could just rent it, burn it, and send it back, like my type of free born semi-successful Americans naturally do.

Dominion Baltic Porter

AFFORDABILITY: I did not buy this six-pack, but the process of buying it was quite stylish. My boy D and his ol' lady Stace were at the house for my middle kid's birthday party, and they ended up hanging. I ordered pizza from town and D drove, in a big ass but clean hooptie sitting on some shiny 20-inch rims that made me feel gangsta as fuck sipping on my beer in the wide vinyl passenger seat, with plenty of legroom for even a big, long dude like myself. At the store, like a solid bro would be like, D offered to chip in on the pizza. I says, "Just buy some more beer, I got the pizza," and he does so. This is what he got, although basically his ol' lady technically pays for it all, since D is a dreamer, which doesn't always equal a whole lot of punched clocks. 5 out of 5.
DESTROYABILITY: Well, it's been almost a year since I swore off east European porters because of the impending double bass drum effect they put on your brain. It is no coincidence that berserkers and death metal dudes who make necklaces of their best friends shatttered skulls come from that part of the earthball. But like I said, my girl Stace bought this, through the actions of her man D, so we drank it. I like Dominion beers, I do, partially because when I first got into homebrewing, they were the most affordable 12-packs you could get locally that had pop top bottles instead of screw top. Alas, Dominion kicks the screw caps nowadays. And this Baltic Porter did not fill me with the joy their other beers used to. This seemed to fringe-y for the sake of being fringe-y. Not enough chocolate taste, and lacking the chocolate is fine if you can kick the 8.0% or so that the for-real Eurotrash porters offer up. But none of that either. Oh well, I didn't buy it. 2 out of 5.
LABEL AESTHETIC: The Dominion Baltic Porter label is actually a swank label, with a central seaside image, almost like a Bob Ross painting, in a snazzy bordered frame with all the brand details on the outside. Dominion usually has a tight style. Their other beers I used to drink just have the outline of a deer on their caps, no name or nothing. Plus, like I said, they used to hook us up with some good homebrewing bottles. And they’re located in Ashburn, where the Redskins are located. These are all things I can get behind, which makes me wonder if maybe they don’t really exist and it’s a set-up. It’s hard for me to trust the real world, much less cyberworld, because everything is a result of our own brain processing it, and I’m sure if they can shoot people to other planets and split atoms apart, then they’ve figured out how to tweak brains to process things that aren’t there. And we drink beer to alter reality, which may already be altered anyways. Probably is, in fact. We’ve been having some issues with a faulty damper on our woodstove, which I need to fix two days from now when it’s really warm that morning so I can let the fire burn completely out and open up the pipe and get it straight. But last night, from somewhere inside the stove, it started humming. And it didn’t sound like wind coming through the chimney either because there were strange, barely legible melodies bouncing around, like some sort of carnival music was playing somewhere inside the woodstove’s firebox. Open the door to the stove and it was gone though. Shut it and it came back. I wondered if it could be HAARP beams, but that wouldn’t be so recognizeable, no matter how hyper-aware you make yourself. I figured it was some targeted electronic chatter. They put me to sleep and inserted metal into my face years ago, and I’ve never been comfortable with the fact I didn’t have someone observing the whole process to make sure they didn’t do no shady shit. Because they do mad shady shit on this earth, especially on the scientifically advanced side of the fence. 4 out of 5.
CORPORATE MASTER: I could look up the Dominion Brewing Company, located in soul devoid Northern Virginia, but then that would just learn me things that would ruin the joy. I'm sure it's a company started like seven years ago by a couple of guys who worked for the federal government in some sort of barely appreciable role. And they were part of a homebrewing club, but then saw an opportunity to make money make money money while doing something they enjoy, so they made a power move into some strip mall building that probably used to be where The Spaghetti Warehouse was, and they started making their beers. In my time of having run across them, usually at first in the Giant super grocery markets, but eventually many places including the local Country Blessings store where the dude is all about some state of Virginia brew doggies. They have not disappointed me, in beer, in price, in style, so why would I look it up to find out they're a bunch of assholes of one sort or another, like all beer company ownership types end up being? It's like finding a girl you date, nothing serious, and you have tons of fun, living out fantasies, pulling positions most women are uncomfortable opening up to, and you ruin it by asking her her sexual history. Why bother? Let it go, and don't ruin the joy. 4 out of 5.
OVERALL AMBIANCE: I am confused as to how Baltic style porters suddenly became a microbrew craze. It was last fall, 2008, that I first came to know of the Okocims and the Zwykiecs (or whatever it was), and they were good and head pounding, which is what I'd expect from those Slavic types. The long history combined with the Soviet years seems to have been the perfect environment for about as berserker as a modern white man can be born. But there's been three or four fauntleroy beer companies of America that I've seen offer up seasonal holiday "Baltic porters" this past year. Being the great grandson of Polish immigrants, I don't necessarily mind this, but at the same time, these sudden consumer memes kinda creep me out. That being said, I fully support Dominion in their quests to make beer that more people drink. I don't think this was their best beer, and this is nothing compared to an actual 24 ounce bottle of Okocim, but in the lightweight world of American fancy lad beer companies trying to rock a fake ass Polish lunkhead porter style, I guess they win. That's like winning the special ed spelling bee, I know, but somebody has to win it, and get that HP Inkjet certificate with the fading color cartridge making the border look semi-opaque with your teacher's name signed in some sweet ass cursive. Cursive handwriting on a line in American society, even in 2010, still means that it's some serious ass official shit going on. 4 out of 5.
TOTAL RATING: 3 & 4/5 STARS!

(7s) Women Singers That Tricked Me Into Loving On Them #4 - Margo Timmins

There was a time when the slow, mournful, almost painful empty church building moaning of Margo Timmins of the Cowboy Junkies would've made me leave everything behind to marry her and make ugly half-Canadian/half-southern children together, especially under the influence of nice strychniney acid that was slow flowing and not too hallucinogenic but would make you think and think and think and think and scratch at your thumb joints because they were really fucking achey, and then she made perfect sense to me. I saw them live one time, years and years ago, back when my wife bought me the "Misguided Angel" 12-inch single because that was kinda my song and shit, and after seeing them, Margo Timmins just seemed like a woman who would drive a brand new silver Volvo stationwagon to Whole Foods to buy a 19 things, including three different types of Chai, for $93. But at one time, what we had together, when she moaned her way into my heart and I didn't know she looked like a renegade eugenics professor crossbred Sarah Jessica Parker with an MFA Creative Writing candidate, those were good times inside my drug-addled brain.

(7s) Women Singers That Tricked Me Into Loving On Them #3 - This High School Chick

In high school, my long term planning included a lot of trust in things working out somehow, which often times would leave me incredibly inebriated in places quite a trek away from my home bed and with no personal form of transportation to get there with. I actually used to hitchhike a bit, and got picked up one time by the railroad tracks in downtown Keysville by a cop, who gave me a ride and made me sit up front, me already partly drunk and with a backpack full of beer and about 16 or 17. He played it cool at first, but then he started asking me about an old couple that got murdered. Like no shit, I don't even remember hearing about that, but the cop was seriously asking me if I knew anything about a double murder. In retrospect, I have to assume he was on a Superbad/Super Troopers kick, just trying to fuck with me, and I was already too fucked up to realize it. Even if I wasn't though, I would've been too nervous to ask a cop if he was fucking with me.
Nonetheless, even after cutting back on hitchhiking after the cop ride, I would end up way away from home in a crooked ass state of affairs. One night, mega-crooked, I bummed a ride home from a homeboy's girlfriend, who I had secretly had a crush on forever, even though she seemed pretty high maintenance. She was still a decent looking girl who did drugs and had sex, and came from a family with more money than mine, judging by the house they had and the car she drove. But she was my boy's girl, so I wouldn't ever fuck with that, because as degenerate and out of control as I've been in my life, I'm still a loyal ass motherfucker, to a fault. So she's giving me a ride home, like 20 miles, and I probably pass out close to right away (she knew where I lived already). She had put in The Steve Miller Band's Greatest Hits, and was singing full voice along with every song. I was passed out, but in that halfway state where you're catching a ride home with someone so you try to keep yourself halfway cognizant to make sure they know the back roads well or are prepared for sketchy spots where cops lurk at night. I laid there in the passenger seat, head all tilted sideways, stuffed between the head rest and seat belt strap and window, listening to her sing really loud because she figured I was out, or was trying to wake me up, or something. Man, I straight up fell in love with that chick that night. Straight up, one of those strong fleeting loves that only happens like once every six months instead of that normal three times a day fleeting love. Of course, it never would've worked out between us, but it was nice while it lasted, once I got home and stumbled upstairs to my bedroom. And oddly enough, that high school chick sort of looked like Edie Brickell, in a way. Or it's just the jumbled sexual singing desires of me all lumped together back then.

Left Hand Polestar Pilsner

AFFORDABILITY: The only Left Hand beer I'd previously drunken on purpose was their Porter, which is a fine fine beer that I fully endorse if cost is no cost to you. But the Left Hand beers tend to be pricey, and this Polestar Pilsner was no deviation from that. I just started a new job where I wear slacks with a crease and a button down shirt all day long, even keeping it tucked in, but I'm gonna have to be working a white ass tight ass job like this for the next decade to make Left Hand beer prices seem completely acceptable. I'll give it a try though. At least I was born white and can cut my hair and get a good job. I feel bad for the non-whites of this world who have to get by on their actual merit. 0 out of 5.
DESTROYABILITY: I do not pretend that this is a scientific evaluation. It's been a while since I even drank these beers. And is the purpose of "good" beer just to destroy you? If getting super destroyed was the ultimate point, wouldn't investing in a good ball peen hammer and just concussing myself enough to be slightly stupid for the rest of my life do the trick? If not life debilitating brain injuries, then is the purpose is to slightly simulate this, slowly but surely, over the course of time, to make your brain not work entirely correctly but not destroy it completely right away either way? Does that mean you want to tax your brain slowly enough to alter reality, but not so bad you destroy reality, so that you can get the most life out of your brain, but at an altered angle as convenient? See, once you try to break down the science of it, too many variables come up. There are other places that pretend they review beer in a more scientific fashion, but they don't know shit about science. I do. That's why I'm here to just outright fess up this process, whether by me or anyone else, ain't scientific. There are too many mitigating factors, always, so don't even pretend. But I can tell you, with a somewhat solid memory, that I did not enjoy drinking this stupid Polestar Pilsner at all. Well, not much. I think I pretended myself into enjoying the first two, just because I used to love their Left Hand Blackjack Porter so much, but by the time I got around to the third beer, reality was too painfully obvious on my tastebuds to be ignored enough to hope for the alterations to take over. 0 out of 5.
LABEL AESTHETIC: I will give the Left Handers props in one department - they make a nice label. The black background combined with color-popping diamond shaped graphics box is nice, and what they throw in there usually looks like the type of thing some dumbass would be willing to get tattooed on their back at some point. That's a compliment. The Polestar Pilsner is no exception, and combined with such a name, it just adds to how frustrated I ended up being by this. So much promise, so much set-up, squandered. 4 out of 5.
CORPORATE MASTER: Left Hand was started up in the '90s by some homebrewing dudes in Colorado, which means they probably worked for defense contractors. I do not know what it is about military industrial complex government employees and high dollar elaborate beermaking that goes hand in hand, but it certainly does. Maybe it's being immersed in the bureaucratic mess that complicates even the simplest of things, like moving a desk, into forms and coordinating times between multiple people on a certain date. Maybe it's because everybody wants to get fucked up, but the hardest thing a military industrial complex dude can do is drink, which would also explain why a lot of homebrewers have bushy mustaches but well groomed hair. 2 out of 5.
OVERALL AMBIANCE: I found the Polestar Pilsner experience to be a letdown, and will never revisit it, unless they figure out flat panel technology well enough to turn beer labels into simplified flat screens that can handle as much information as old Ataris did, and Polestar Pilsner realizes that in consumer testing, meaning me, people 100% of the time somehow associate the name “Polestar Pilsner” with the video game Pole Position, and they make it a Pole Position game you can play while you hold your beer. 1 out of 5.
TOTAL RATING: 1 & 2/5 STARS!

(7s) Women Singers That Tricked Me Into Loving On Them #2 - Lucinda Williams

There is nothing attractive about Lucinda Williams in a sexual sense. She is a haggard-looking woman who drinks too much. Yet at her best, which for me (and most dork critical types) is Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, she puts in me a strong desire to share a queen bed in a shitty hotel for a holiday weekend along a road that used to be a main thoroughfare before Eisenhower built the stupid interstate system. We would drink beer and play Spades or maybe some dice and have lots of sex, sometimes sweet and sometimes nasty, looking for multi-orgasmic stretches of sexes. And we'd end up fighting, probably over something stupid like how I didn't talk to her right in front of the checkout dude at the Food Lion or something.
I heard Lucinda Williams on an NPR show this week, and she's crazy, you can tell by her tone of voice. And now that she's apparently found love and doesn't drink like she once did, her songs sound basically like shitty bar music. The thing that made her great when she was great was how it was pure drunken angel music, perfect for shitty bars where people don't even know that a term called "alt.country" exists, or why it would have a chunk of punctuation in the middle of it, and now that seems to have faded. But she's a critical success, so she can live off her past. And man, I used to love her, a whole lot, before I even saw her two-packs-a-day face in a magazine article.

Samuel Adams Boston Lager

AFFORDABILITY: I watched the NHL Winter Classic from Fenway Park because with no cable and only antennae TV there's not a lot of college football games anymore on New Year's Day, and the Bruins jerseys in that old school yellow (or maybe that's what they wear now) was some tight shit. I switched it off and didn't watch forever. We were making food as a family or something, and I plopped down in the living room couch that rides like a low rider, cut on the TV, and seriously, I saw it was overtime and then the one dude scored the winning goal. It was that perfectly timed. That little moment of karma, combined with no college football of note on my TV on a day sitting around drinking beer, combined with the Redskins being suck for a decade now, combined with Alex Ovechkin being the most awesome ever, is slowly shifting my molecular structure into hockey fan. The fact we got two feet of snow halfway through December and it hasn't been above freezing in like four days has helped as well, as my molecules be chilly and more apt to electron charge polarity shifting, which will change your personality. That's what's happening now. It's scientific. 4 out of 5.
DESTROYABILITY: Wicked destroyable if you drink enough of them. I'm still so thoroughly enjoyed by what little of the NHL Winter Classic game that I saw that I'm like, "Boston Lager's the best," even though I know Massachusetts people are a strange inbred mix of dirt trash and snooty that creates a whole race of white guys who like Boston sports teams. Maybe if the Patriots accidentally make it to the AFC Championship game I can listen to plenty of sports radio and re-evaluate my like of the Boston Lager then. But for now, 3 out of 5.
LABEL AESTHETIC: The Boston Lager label is an old ass President dude in a Red Sox hat, alternate style, old school charcoal grey with a slightly red-hued black B, like it was made of flannel. The guy has two buxom lasses with the ties to their upper corset exposed at the low cut line of their chemises, one on each arm. He is holding a beer and a musket, and there's an albino squirrel riding a horse on the hill behind him, carrying a lantern with some Freemasonic looking insignia on it. Plus some old-fashioned ugly kids rolling each other in empty in barrels. 5 out of 5.
CORPORATE MASTER: So I decided to look up Samuel Adams beer inside the Wikipedias to see what they were all about, hoping for a long history or whatever to give them some new life in my Sam Adams jaded eyes. No such luck. Basically, the story is this... Some dude who is a business consultant and graduated from Harvard with all sorts of bullshit had a great grandfather who made a beer called Koch Lager. He allegedly takes the family recipe and recreates it, quits his consulting job to pursue craft beer full-time, and gets rich. Except, he's a consultant, so how can you trust that back story, as it sounds like Public Relations 102 to me. Aside from this, the company is started by him and two investors, and the main dude hires the guy who invented light beer in the 1970s to help him tinker with the family recipe to get it to where it should be. On top of all this, almost immediately, the shit was contract brewed in Pennsylvania, and now is mostly brewed contractually in Cincinnati. It's not even a fucking Boston beer, although the Boston Lager is supposed to be the direct descendant of Koch Lager. Yeah whatever. And Adam and Eve are my great grandparents. Y'all can believe crazy bullshit if you want, but I'm not down. 0 out of 5.
OVERALL AMBIANCE: Just as a longingly dream of an America that goes from globalism towards localism, and probably in an economically dictated downfall, breaks up into regional states that are more attentive to the needs of the people and not the industries, I wish that things like Budweiser and it's 17 brands of the same thing or Miller's giant umbrella of different cans for the same formula, could disintegrate into popular regional breweries like Iron City. Hell, that's mostly what Miller bought up over the years, with all the Olympias and Lone Stars and Old Styles and Rainiers and Schaefers and Schlitzes and Pearls and Black Labels and on and on and on. Break it all back down to a more organic compound, where you're within driving distance of the four-story brick building in a nearby city where they make your beer, and you can walk in the front lobby and tell the information desk lady how much you love the beer and she'll give you a couple of beer coasters, can coozie, and maybe even a t-shirt on a good day. If that was America, I'd god bless it every day; as it stands, man fuck it, I just get drunk out of depression, not patriotic fervor. Wait, I accidentally was writing about Iron City beer again. Funny how I ended with "patriotic fervor" and I was supposed to be writing about stupid Samuel Adams the revolutionary era dude's fake lager from Boston. But everything I said still stands, just Samuel Adams is none of that and probably the opposite, so they just add to my depression, both emotionally and financially. Bastards. 1 out of 5.
TOTAL RATING: 2 & 3/5 STARS!

(7s) Women Singers That Tricked Me Into Loving On Them #1 - Edie Brickell

Edie was the originator of making music that caused the blood to rush to my soul penis. I was a freak hippie drug experimentational delinquent retard back in the day, and that "What I Am" song fit the bill, as I was young enough still to be naive and not worldly enough to think I was too cool. That was some good shit for the time. You can't make simple assed pseudo-philosophical garbage white people funk like that anymore because with the world wide interwebs, nobody is allowed to be that naive and unworldly anymore. Kinda sad that such simpleness isn't possible, but every other 14-year-old in America has seen that two girls, one cup shit by now. Makes me sad, and want to read the Koran, intensely on both counts.
It's also been weird to me, back to the Edie Brickell listing, that she married old ass Paul Simon. I kind of think in my brain that Paul Simon lives in New York on the same block as Woody Allen and Billy Joel and like 300 other indistinguishable white dudes like that who know their bullshit Euro heritage of Jewish or Ukrainian or whatever to try and distinguish themselves from the wealthy white clutter they really are, and it made me sad Edie Brickell disappeared into that life, baking key lime pies with that China doll Woody Allen took from his ex-wife. Also seems fucked up to New Bohemians (who didn't have a "the" with their band name) because they got left high and dry. Whatever though. Back in the day when Edie would hit that weird hip girl twang on shit like "What I Am" or "Ghost of a Dog", it would make me want to live a long life with her, raising kids and hanging white dresses on the clothesline, ugly ass mutt dogs flopped here and there, and the grass always so green.

Iron City Beer

AFFORDABILITY: You know, the Harris Teeters locally carry Iron City sometimes for some reason. Me and Boogie Brown drank a case of it hanging out in a weird 1970s hotel outside of Pittsburgh at some point a few years back. It was the nicest hotel ever, you walked through an interior sort of hallway that was kind of open too, and they had an inside waterpark (which we didn't do), plus a bar that looked like Archie Bunker, Mike Ditka, and Killer Kowalski would all be hanging out at. Plus the Chief from that Nell Carter show, but off duty, so he didn't give a fuck how drunk you were so long as you didn't kill anybody on the ride home. I remember Iron City being a Yuengling style beer in that it wasn't dirt cheap but it wasn't expensive either. Well apparently that doesn't trickle down to Virginia from Pennsylvania, as it was like $6 for a six-pack. And it was just regular bottles, not those wacky aluminum bottles Iron City was known for well before Miller Lite started doing it. But I will average my travel Iron City drinking with my localized Iron city drinking. 3 out of 5.
DESTROYABILITY: In Pennsylvania, it got us drunk. In Virginia, I didn't have enough of it to get truly topped off on the B.A.C. tip, but it had a thick enough feel inside my blood stream that I knew if I could get more of it for cheaper, it would do a proper good job. Western Pennsylvania people seem like the most solid non-Southern people around, so I would expect nothing less. In fact, you could probably slice off the northern half of Virginia, as well as Maryland obviously, and trade it to the north for West Virginia and the western half of Pennsylvania. Those people are all hillbillies, and we assimilate well together, making ugly children and getting into hilariously retold fights with each other. God bless us. Seriously, please, if you are god and you exist and you can see everything then you’re reading my blog. Bless us, because a lot of motherfuckers look down on people like us. I don’t mean look down like you do from your microscope at Four Seasons Heaven, but look down like they be thinking they better all the time. You should’ve, when you were putting crazy stories in the heads of the prophets to write down for people to worry about forever, thrown something in there about people not being such assholes. If you did already, my bad. Maybe you should shoot them words into somebody new’s head so as to make it a little easier for us nowadays to understand. As a people, we’re not much for having to decipher shit, and when you throw in the whole “believe this or you’re fucked” aspect, it makes deciphering it even harder to get right. Personally, I like Jack Van Impe’s stage presence, and Reverend Gene Scott’s style, and it’s hard to argue with what Jack Chick’s done with his life, though he could probably tone it down a little on the hellfire aspect. More flies with sugar than shit, am I right god? 4 out of 5.
LABEL AESTHETIC: The Iron City label is an old-fashioned, simple label, like your grandpa would be looking at all night before he came home to deal with your crazy grandmother's bullshit, sleeping on a pull-out sofa bed with flannel sheets and a ratty afghan blanket. One thing that 9/11 changed forever is people don't think the same about afghan blankets. In fact, few old people even make them like they used to. Acrylic yarn is part of the problem, but 9/11 is more the culprit. I miss afghans. My legs are kinda cold right now and I wish I had one to spread across my lap with a warm cup of hazelnut coffee, watching me some Andy Griffith until the news comes on. 5 out of 5.
CORPORATE MASTER: The Iron City Brewing Company story is the type that makes you proud of shitty America and what it should be - a younger country with hard work success stories. Some German dude immigrates to the U.S., ends up in Pittsburgh, and starts making beer to be selling. This ends up being the Iron City Brewing Company, which is successful enough that it moved into a four-story brick building in a corner of Pittsburgh proper, where it sat and operated and made beer for decades and decades, becoming a large part of the neighborhood, a small part of the city, and something motherfuckers involved with it could be proud of. It wasn't a parasite, didn't suck away the neighborhood's beauty, and didn't pretend to be something it wasn't. It was responsible capitalism, something of which we are sorely lacking today. Now granted, last year, the company relocated to the old Rolling Rock facilities in Latrobe, so the beer bailed on Pittsburgh, sort of, though it still prominently claims the city its home. And if they are starting to reach down to Virginia with their swill, who can fault them for wanting to upgrade to a giant facility to mass produce more beer? And by upgrading, they move into a place that Rolling Rock abandoned, probably because it is on a more megacorporate bent and is brewed under license along with nine other beers at some megabrewery facility. Again, responsible capitalism, and a success story to boot. It's the type of thing that doesn't make me sick to my stomach, and it's not like you're going to read about Iron City Brewing Company's Super Bowl commercial campaigns costing $42 million or any bullshit like that. I just made a new batch of kimchi this past weekend, to be ready in time for my birthday, with a healthier than usual amount of red cabbage, because on birthdays in our house, you choose your birthday meal. And last year, we got a bunch of fancy sausages from the fancy butcher in town, and ate it up on buns with sauerkraut. I figured the upgrade to kimchi was necessary, but we'll repeat the fancy sausage butcher shop visit, and to honor that German dude immigrant's spirit, I might as well buy a six-pack of Iron City again as well. It seems appropriate, far more appropriate than drinking some wealthy hobbyist's high dollar microbrew attempt to launder his inherited wealth into a semi-successful return on the initial investment. 8 out of 5.
OVERALL AMBIANCE: I can tell you with a pure heart that the Iron City, though it doesn't taste as fanciful as my fauntleroy ass has become accustomed to, makes me feel good to my bone marrow. Methinks a trip back up to western Pennsylvania this summer, to see the dirt tracks that bloom in abundance in that part of the world, to catch up with some folks like Necro Butcher or Shirley Doe, to eat one of those giant sandwiches with the fries on it like my wife ate when she visited her sister but I didn't go, to look in butcher shops run by people with eastern European written all over their facial hair with display counters full of sausages that I'd love to have available to me on the regular basis, this is a thing that must happen. And since Pennsylvania has wacky alcohol laws, I guess I will have to find some dank, display-less beer store and buy the Iron City by the case, and hopefully stay again in that indoor water park hotel somewhere southeast of Pittsburgh, and hopefully pass Dusty Roads Trailer Park again. 5 out of 5.
TOTAL RATING: 5 STARS!

(7s) Women Singers That Tricked Me Into Loving On Them Intro

Ahh... the sweet siren song of the seductress female, speaking to something deep within my caveman soul, making me want to crash against better judgement and do nasty things in cheap hotel rooms under the false pretense of sensory stimulated "love". That's what this list is about, womenfolks, mostly of a pop cultural variety, who have made me think I could love them, simply with their singing voice. It has happened often in my life, and will probably happen again. I can't front, music hits me heavy and is something I'd freak out without. TV/movies/video games... you could take that away forever, and I wouldn't fret about it. But music, man, I'd be lost without it. So through the next week, I'll be talking upon seven womens types who have tricked my brain with their throat sounds...
[The pic above is of Betty Davis, who was married to Miles Davis, and is fucking great.]

Friday Love/Hate

I love college basketball season cranking up officially in my attention span. My two regional conference allegiances are the ACC (childhood favorite) and CAA (being I went to VCU), and both are a clusterfuck of anybody can win it this year. UVA has actually jumped out to a 3-0 start in conference play, and that's wins over actual good teams and not just battling to the top of the bottom feeders, though this can't hold true long-term. Still, they've made themselves viable and worth watching, and who knows, maybe they can even earn a chance to play on Friday or Saturday in the ACC tournament this year.
The CAA, considered once again by many to be one of the best mid-major conferences, is crazy. Everybody is beating everybody, and little old white ass William & Mary for the most part has sat at the top of the heap, though they did lose this week at VCU. VCU has not performed as well as they did the past few years when Anthony Grant was head coach, but Larry Sanders still has a posse, and I may actually spring for full CAA tournament tickets this year instead of just the final two days package I got for me and my oldest kid last year. Those small conference tournaments are the best, full of energy that floats through the shitty old second-tier arenas they book for their season ending showcases, to whittle themselves down to one single team qualifying for the NCAA tournament. You gotta figure, even in a down year, the ACC is going to get at least four teams, and likely five, six, or seven into the tourney, whereas the CAA is gonna be lucky to get even one at-large team other than their conference tournament champion into the Big Dance. I am already geeked for the CAA tourney at the Richmond Coliseum, and it's not even February.
What I need to be doing, once I start getting paychecks regularly again, is take the kids to see Monika Wright play at UVA, since she's one of the best womens players in the country, and get these kids fired up about athletics a little more. My oldest is tall already, and I know she's dedicated to ballet (four hours a week of classes, and wanting more), but she need to be out there bouncing that damn ball around every now and then.

I hate the senselessness of mass murderings and news covering and all that. They had an octuple shooting scene two counties over, a few miles from where my uncle and his family live. Turns out, three of the eight victims were family of a chill dude I know here in Charlottesville. And three of the eight were high school students, around the same age as my cousin who goes to Appomattox High School with those kids. It's not that big a school, nor town, and is most famous for being where Robert E. Lee signed the I Quit papers for the Civil War PPV. Wasn't even half a year ago that they had quadruple killings in juggalo-related crime in Farmville too, and the mass media swooped in like vultures to do their "Small Town Tranquility Shattered By Violence" pieces, as if motherfuckers in central Virginia don't have internet or cell phones and we still ride buggies to work at the sawmill. Well, those types show up, see what they want to see in the senseless crime scene still taped off with yellow, then bolt out with their word counts and video of high school kids crying and hugging. But the thing that freaks me out, and I'll admit I'm way too sensitive about shit like this sometimes, is it's real people. That's a dude I know's real aunt and uncle and his high school aged cousin and her boyfriend. The news just pushes the body count, and we all go, "Wow, that's crazy, some guy killed eight people in Virginia," until next week when we go, "Wow, that's crazy, some guy killed five people in Wisconsin," and on and on until somebody ups the ante like that kid at Virginia Tech, and then everybody stops and soaks in the constant media attention because we've pulled in a big body count fish this time, let's all gawk at it for a while. The whole time, most folks, even the ones wearing stupid ribbons or putting magnets on their cars, have absolutely zero thought about the fact it's real people. Real folks stopped living and they have relatives and friends and co-workers and a town, and that shit just got fucked up seriously, leaving holes that no one is around to see or get any news coverage of by the time the people involved are able to process the fact that hole now exists. For all the fake community we claim to have built with the stupid fucking internet, we are all for the most part pretty shitty at helping or even looking at our for real neighbors. But keep laughing at lolcats, all the way to hell. If we're not gonna turn around, let's at least keep picking up the pace to accelerate our doom. Good things we have smartphones to occupy us along the way.

(7s) Goals For 2010 #7 - "Monetize" This Here Rojonekku

People still claim to make money off the internet, or try, but I don't believe any of them. It's a sham, like those paper towels that you can pour water in allegedly. But this blog plugs along, not very worthwhile content most of the time, boring ass shit a lot of times, but I keep putting boring non-worthwhile stuff up for you to waste your time with. I never ask for anything really, other than maybe you comment so I know your feelings or that you're even there. I did put that ENABLE ROJONEKKU button on the side for paypal donations a while back, and nobody but one dude's ever used it, which is fine. I'd be writing retard shit whether you read it or not, but something about the cyberworld makes people think they deserve something for nothing. I am no different. So my goal for this blog this year is to "monetize" it, as pseudo-wealth experts would call it. All this means is if you read something, and you enjoy the fuck out of it, or think it's stupid in an entertaining way, or whatever, break me off a paypal. Anything, 47 cents or two dollars or $37.50 or a quarter or whatever. I have established inside my brain a personal goal for the end of the year, and at some point will be putting a link to this post along with a nice little thermometer style "until our goal" graphic like every community library and volunteer firefighter organization since the dawn of nonprofit time has used in small towns across America. And I can also tell you that for every $10 donation, I'll wax retardedly about your special requests, but only for a few hundred words. But if you want to get buck wild, drop $100 in my paypal and you can make me do some stupid project on the blog, the amount of stupid I'm willing to undertake depending on the amount of dollars you donate to my always hungry paypal account.

Samuel Adams Cranberry Lambic

AFFORDABILITY: Part of the holiday sampler party pack supreme, so it has affordable pricing written all over it. I'm sure though, what with Samuel Adams inflated sense of they selves, if it came in individual 6-packs, it'd be more than I'd care to spend on a simple man's minded six-pack. I don't trust Samuel Adams after that whole White House picnic table beer meeting between the overly insensitive racist Irish cop and the overly sensitive racist black professor guy at the Obamas when Congressmen were lobbying for the black dude to drink a Sam Adams of one sort or another. Obama was doomed when something simple like having some arguing ass dudes over to sit down with a beer and talk it out turns into something where people not even involved firsthand turn it into reasons to get this or that involved in the photo op and how anything less would be uncapitalized. Our government just doesn't work anymore; it proves it time and time again. You want change? Set something on fire. When the woods get too much viney undergrowth going on, choking out trees from the freedom to grow tall, fire comes along, burns up everything, and it grows fresh and beautiful again. Yeah motherfucker. 3 out of 5.
DESTROYABILITY: My wife was under the initial impression that Cranberry Lambic was some good stuff, but upon tasting this bottle of stopped up toilet water, she rethunk that maybe it was the Cherry Wheat flavor. Cranberry Lambic may be the actual worst fucking beer I ever tasted in my whole life. Crude malt liquors are at least tasteless for the most part, but this went beyond tasteless headache medicine to just disgusting. Seriously, I wouldn't drink another of these ever, even for free, but probably if you paid me, because I've got bills. Lots of bills. 0 out of 5.
LABEL AESTHETIC: All Samuel Adams bottle labels just make me think of Family Guy, but even more so when it's Cranberry Lambic, which sounds like some made up shit that would be funny to a Family Guy writer. The labels on Sam Adams don't vary too far off the main style, which I always think is a ripoff. If sports teams make a killing on throwback and alternate jerseys, and the people who like that shit drink lots of beer, and you're already having to pay for a separate label, why don't they go big and make up some outlandishly noticeable awesome label with the Sam Adams guy still in there, but like an anime pornbot cartoonization of himself? I mean, come one, it ain't 1954 anymore. The whole branding thing doesn't work the same way it did on Mad Men. By the way, everybody who ever recommended that to me, you are a fool. That show sucks, is slow and boring and stupid, and sucks, and you suck for liking it. Stop being so goddamned white all the time. 0 out of 5.
CORPORATE MASTER: Samuel Adams owned slaves. This corporation is a true descendant of that, and though they are no clothing apparel company that buys Lots of southeast Asian children and picks out the best looking ones to market in the sex industry and uses the lucky ugly ones to crank out high-quality t-shirts at low-impact prices, without passing that savings on to you so much as boosting their bottom line, I would still bet Samuel Adams, were he alive, would flavor a vat of beer with three drops of blood of an Irishman or Negro or something. Hopefully they stopped doing that for real, but you can't tell with this megalopolous corporations. ("Megalopolous" is not actually a word, but I think it should be, referring to things too large to control by manmade law that, in return, make large economic gains of intangible wealth, at the expense of tangible men.) 1 out of 5.
OVERALL AMBIANCE: This was a terrible beer. Absolutely horrible. I drank it on a December Saturday afternoon and it took away my holiday spirit even more than poverty and unemployment did that day. I would not even give this beer to a workplace enemy as a passive aggressive honoring of a secret Santa obligation. It's that bad. 0 out of 5.
TOTAL RATING: 4/5 STARS!

NFL WEEK 20: Conference Championships

They will look back historically at this 2009-2010 NFL season as the year in which the NFL lost its swagger, and turned into a much more dangerous yet just as boring NBA, but with far higher commercial rates. All year long, with the abundance of terrible teams and explosion of dominant teams that really aren't that dominant, it's been lackluster as fuck. I don't know what's wrong, but something is. Maybe they need to change the salary cap rules to allow for teams to re-sign players and actually, you know, build teams, not just in the sense of a collection of players that work together long-term to have chemistry, but to have fans be able to relate to a player, and know them well. Seems like the turnover for applicable jerseys for your favorite team is about four years now, meaning out of all the commonly available replica jerseys at the store for your #1 team this year, in four years maybe, just MAYBE, one of those dudes will still be on your #1 team. As for this year's conference championships, I think I may have the least amount of excitement for it I've had my entire adult life. I don't know if it's the Redskins being so terrible, or I'm just a disdainful asshole lately, or what. I actually don't mind three of the four teams, but I don't have enough faith in their consistency to really get behind them. This bullshit of teams being mediocre but then getting on a hot run to make it to or win the Super Bowl... I don't know. It makes the NFL seem as shabby as the NBA, where you could run on autopilot all year long, turn it on, and make a run. What's the fucking point? I think that's more reprehensible than making early playoff-locking teams play their players in the last couple weeks. They can look into all the other bullshit the commissioner's office looks into all the time, but what they need to do is make this shit less boring, and quickly. Not through rules changes that turn it into Arena League scores or put the QB in a bulletproof glass shield, but just let players stay longer with a team. Shit, start a developmental league with one team per division, to create inter-division rivalries, and have young players who will hopefully end up in the same divisions build a camaraderie that will make their on-field battles on the bigger stage more exciting. Do something. Fuck man.
Okay, for this week's rankings bullshit, obviously there aren't even eight teams left, so I broke down each team into offense and defense. Then, getting all nerdtastic, I took the overall team power rating that they have under my sixth grade formula, checked the stats as to where their offense and defenses ranked in the NFL, then prorated the team rating into separate offense and defense ratings. Yeah, I know... a bunch of jibber jabber. I just wanted to make sure that, one, you knew I didn't just make this list arbitrarily, that there was some half-assed science behind it, and two, you understood what a giant fucking nerd I can often be. So here's your listings for this week...

#1: NEW ORLEANS SAINTS OFFENSE (57.60 rating) - New Orleans, as a team, is ranked #1 overall on my team bullshit dork-o-meter, and this is a team that pretty much rides their offense. It's amazing that the Chargers basically just let Drew Brees go away, right as he was entering his prime. He's not an old man, and has plenty of good years left in him, and all I can see Philip Rivers doing in the next four years is trying to get to where he's as good as Drew Brees. Last week, Reggie Bush ran roughshod all over everything, which will probably be his career highlight over the course of however many years he underperforms due to lack of motivation since he has big diamond earrings and an old lady with a huge white ass (although I think the Kardashians might be some sort of weird eastern Euro/Arab/Mediterranean hodgepodge people). You ain't gonna motivate a dude with a hot wife and diamond earrings every week, and he sure as hell ain't gonna motivate himself. Still, the Saints are high-powered as fuck with a wide variety of draft day scrap heap offensive weapons, plus Jeremy Shockey is playing with spirited hatred again. Not to mention, they re-signed Deuce McAllister before the playoffs, if for no other reason than to keep him inactive but have him on the team that he was the star of for years and years in relative obscurity. Deuce McAllister is one of the chillest dudes, and I like chillest dudes to be rewarded in life instead of exploited because they are so chill, so it'd be great to see Deuce get a ring.

#2: INDIANAPOLIS COLTS OFFENSE (44.31) - In the Secret Clubhouse message board area, I was shocked at how I'm the only person there who detests Peyton Manning and his southern private high school fratboy dickhead ass. The Colts, to me, are a thoroughly unenjoyable team, vanilla personalities collected all together to wear some vanilla ass uniforms and play in front of a bunch of vanilla Indiana retards. But we live in a country that actually thought people like George W. Bush or John Kerry or John McCain or Sarah Palin or Al Gore would make, you know, a President. We are a watered down retarded culture, so I guess the dipshit private school fratboy who probably knew his wife was the one for him because he didn't want to roofie her, though he does make her have threesomes with other women regularly, should be our Greatest Player Ever of this time period. Good fucking lord, somebody blow up the planet.

#3: INDIANAPOLIS COLTS DEFENSE (27.69) - The Colts defense scores highly because the Colts team is so highly power rated in my dork-o-meter. But the Colts defense is surprisingly and anonymously good, and as Herr Peyton adjusted this year to being the bonafide head coach, trying to find new regular go-to dudes now that Marvin Harrison has left Indy to prove all the haters that he really is black in an ignorant street sense of the word, the defense has been strong. It's that Pittsburgh steel curtain style of a vast collection of highly competent but not quite superstars dudes too, that relentlessly punish because they've got five dudes off the bench just as ready and bad ass as the guys who start. Honestly, even if the Jets defense can ratchet down the Colts offense even slightly, I just don't see the Jets offense doing too well against the Colts defense, although I guess their achilles heel has been the run game, which is the Jets strong suit. Still, if the Jets fall behind, which they will, they'll have to open up the passing plays, and that has Mark Sanchez 3 INTs written all over it against this Colts defense.

#4: MINNESOTA VIKINGS OFFENSE (26.47) - Sadly enough, and a testament to how detached I've become this year, I'm probably rooting for the Ol' Gunslinger, just because. I mean, of course he's such a douche egotistic cocksucker, basically running schoolyard plays with Sidney Rice, but he plays with such passion. Did you see him running around the field last week? Did you know he loves the game? That's why he plays. I was slightly bummed that the Cowboys lost though because I was hoping to make a joke about a Saints/Cowboys conference championship that it was a Fox Sunday night characters all grown up showdown between Ralph Wiggum (aka Wade Phillips) and Malcolm in the Middle (aka Sean Payton). Another question, is Adrian Peterson really that great? Dude seems tiny, and ends up pretty slowed down the second half of every season he's played. Seems like he's on the accelerated Terrell Davis career path, where in four years he'll be gone and a supervisor at UPS, or working on the NFL Network.

#5: NEW YORK JETS DEFENSE (26.31) - You know, Rex Ryan is pretty awesome. And I know it's been the sports nerd talking meme the past two months, but really, rarely has there been a cornerback who just took over the game as the obviously best dude ever like Darrell Revis has done. That guy is out of control. I am probably most excited this weekend just to see him vs. Peyton Fuckface.

#6: MINNESOTA VIKINGS DEFENSE (25.53) - A strange and simple realization happened last week that made me change my mind and stop hating on Jared Allen. He wears the #69. I always thought of him as some fake ass pseudo-redneck jackass millionaire guy, but realizing that he purposely chose the #69, it was like he laid his true genetics out under a microscope and his DNA was driving home-painted camouflage '88 Ford Broncos. If you've ever been to a demolition derby, the two most popular numbers are 69 and 420, and although I would bet Mr. Allen is 420-friendly, the NFL doesn't allow for three-digit jersey numbers. Haha, #69, that's great. Also, those two Williams dudes are pretty goddamned big yet still athletic. It is a shame that sumo wrestling is not more popular here, legit, and you could make money at it, because a dude like Pat Williams would be great.

#7: NEW ORLEANS SAINTS DEFENSE (14.40) - The talk all year has been how Gregggg Williams has finally got this defense playing like a championship team should play. Yet, for the most part, they've been cushiony and just stopped teams as much as they needed to not let the game get away from their offense. The last few weeks of the regular season, the Saints caught flack for not looking like they were playing all out, but honestly, their defense has looked like that off-and-on all season long. I think the Saints/Vikings game will be a lot more interesting than people expect, and not the guns-a-blazing shootout I think most folks are planning on. The Vikings defense should partially stifle the Saints scoring machine, and the Vikings offense might actually bust up this defense right smartly, but not the whole game through. I predict a Vikings victory, because the Saints are still the Saints, no matter how much they wanna be good.

#8: NEW YORK JETS OFFENSE (10.69) - When your style is strong run first, pound away, wear 'em down on defense, but you are playing a team that scores like it's Madden set on easy mode, it's not a good combo. You remember when people were like, "Man, Mark Sanchez sucks," a couple months ago? They'll be back next Monday morning.

(7s) Magazine Subscriptions Wanted #7 - Juxtapoz

The whole street art/graffiti/Japanese toy designer thing is so overblown and crappy that it's spawned a whole genre of magazines like this, and most of it is the same crappy crap that sucks. 75% of the time, Juxtapoz is no deviation from this norm, but they still drop the goodness in there, right about the time you're about to stop paying attention. They also hyped up this bullshit genre of art long before the rest of them did, like way back in the days before I had childrens and a wife and even a steady place to sleep at night and was popping pills and bumming drinks in Richmond and going to work underneath houses with guys named Phil from Tennessee who had spiderweb tattoos on their elbows and would talk, in the pitch dark underneath a house replacing rotten beams, about Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet. Then we'd go to his house in his busted ass Chrysler, and there was one room, a mattress on the floor, a flag of Tennessee on the wall, and we'd drink Evan Williams like a motherfucker, until our pores smelled like liquor the next day underneath the next house. So because Juxtapoz's glossy ass has been on bookstore shelves long enough for me to go from degenerate to productive, from hellbound to don't philosophically believe in hell but still most likely doomed, from getting drunk as fuck in one room flats with convicts to sharing a Little House on the Prairie bedroom with three upwardly mobile daughters sleeping in bunkbeds underneath Christmas lights that have been up since 2004. All that new school street art bullshit, glossy magazines with stank ass soy ink, it's a whole lot of nothing.

(7s) Goals For 2010 #6 - Finish Rojonekku Back Roads Ninja Training Manual

I’ve been letting this “book” percolate for a few years now, giving it varying amounts of attention. Now that I have a job that allows me time to think and note down what I’ve thunken, perhaps I shall start finally organizing the assorted parts into the order that I’ve created in a separate notebook flow chart. The problem I have with writing long form things is my mind is so mathematically stifled, like I build all these frameworks inside, 36 parts, with 3 themes that cover 12 parts each, plus 4 other developments that go in 9 parts each, and they intertwine, and then there’s 6 types of parts, each used 6 times each. It’s ridiculous actually, but I can’t not do it, no matter how hard I try. So as I put something together over the long term like I have with this Rojonekku training manual, it becomes not only the separate word files on the computer, but stacks of index cards wrapped up in hair tyes, and a couple dollar store composition books with sketches and layouts of the actual physical space that is supposed to be occupied. I have made it a point to never go to any type of psychologist or psychiatrist (outside of off-the-grid new age types who make you put your hands in a bowl of sand and close your eyes and draw pictures of yourself with your finger) because if they started hearing how my brain bounces all over but is held together by cobbled together half-assed parameters and an over-intake of fringe pop culture nonsense, I’d be medicated as fuck by now.