JIMMY VALIANT vs. OX BAKER
I am going to blaze through this group of eight match-ups, because I feel like blazing. This is a pair of wrestlers who were awesome when I was a kid. Jimmy Valiant was the greatest wrestler ever because he looked and talked and acted like one of the dudes that would be getting drunk and stoned with my dad, playing poker on Friday and Saturday nights. Ox Baker was the biggest, scariest dude ever.
As it stands, Jimmy Valiant is still a crazy dude, has a wrestling school in southwest Virginia, and drives weird bengali striped stationwagons, plus still rocks long hair, plus has ridiculous tattoos like pink roses in his ear and "COME TO PAPA" on his belly. Shit man, there's too many pluses to even list. For most of my life, if you could pick a famous person to be your fake dad, Jimmy Valiant would be my choice.
Advantage: Jimmy Valiant.
JOHN WATERS vs. ROBERT CRUMB
A pair of artistic freaky-dekes. I do not like John Waters' movies too much, because they are either shocking just to be shocking, or slightly pretentious. But I have never really seen anything John Waters has cosigned that hasn't been at least worth my while. Robert Crumb is a perverted old comic strip maker, born from the '60s, but pretty up-to-date with modern fetishes throughout his time putting ink to paper. If I was picking a guy to lead a tour of retarded shit scattered throughout a strange city on a bus tour, it'd be Waters. But if I was going to pick a guy to kick it in the minds of my teenage Rojonekku trainees for the rest of their lives, I'd want Robert Crumb's thumbprint in there.
Advantage: Robert Crumb.
AFRIKA BAMBAATAA vs. KOOL DJ HERC
Two of the three founding fathers Fly Trinity of hip hop (along with Grandmaster Flash), yet two very different dudes. Kool DJ Herc was a guy that liked it loud, carrying a big ass Jamaican-inspired sound system in his late model convertible to blast cats with back in the early days. He was a party rocker. Meanwhile, Afrika Bambaataa was on some other shit, somehow morphing from gang leader back when NYC still had old school The Warriors-style gangs into a space commander making strange danceable cybertronic musics from the future. And really for me, it all boils down to the fact that Herc, though a pioneer, lacks the post-pioneer days resume of retarded shit that Bambaataa has, starting the Zulu Nation (of which you can fill out an application form online, though their website is like a geocities website or some shit), and leading the charge to turn the housing projects he lived in and used to rock jams in the basement of into a historic marker and a sort of temple to hip hop, although most likely it will be torn down and turned into a condominium like the rest of New York City.
Advantage: Afrika Bambaataa.
BILL MURRAY vs. ROBERT DUVAL
A pair of actors, neither of which I imagine will make it even close to the Final 5. Bill Murray has always been one funny motherfucker, and still regularly does wacky shit like get DUIs while driving a golf cart. Robert Duval is a great actor, but more of a serious business actor. Plus, I'm watching Lonesome Dove the last couple nights, and the special effects on that thing are so goddamned stupid looking, it's actually leaving a bad taste in my mouth for all the actors involved, regardless of how good they are. Also, so far as I know, Duval never did a movie with Rodney Dangerfield.
Advantage: Bill Murray.
DAVID MANN vs. SONNY BARGER
This is a battle between American outlaw biker influences. David Mann is the artist who drew all the crazy white trash centerfolds that were in Easyriders magazine throughout the '70s and '80s. Sonny Barger was President of the Hell's Angels. Having had an uncle who rode in the Pagans back in the day, plus all the crazy fuckers my old man knew, who would actually have Easyriders laying around for me to just thumb through when no one was looking, biker shit is a small thread in the bizarre fabric of my life. I actually remember seeing David Mann centerfolds stapled to walls back in the day. And the drawings are so goofy, like it raining on a biker dude and his old lady taking off for the road to catch a ride with a trucker, or a giant close-up of a pair of freaked out eyeballs in a sideview mirror with four burly motorcycle dudes riding up behind him. Quality art.
Meanwhile Sonny Barger took outlaw biker and made it sort of corporate, although still criminal. And as much as I enjoy the whole sub-culture of proud dirtbags on motorcycles, I am more for the shitty yet wonderful art that would come from such a sub-culture than the intellectual property ownership or whatever stupid shit has happened ever since the Hells Angels trademarked and copyrighted all their shit. That does not mean I want you guys to fuck me up though, because I know there's crazy biker shit going on in Virginia right now. My uncle was called Littlejohn. I also spent a week in the hospital with a dude named Smurf who knows you guys too. We both got our faces caved in at the same time fifteen years ago or so, mine by a concrete stairwell after a gallon of wine, his by a 2x4 after a riverside bonfire party fight.
Advantage: David Mann.
ATSUSHI ONITA vs. EL HIJO DEL SANTO
More wrestling bullshit, but of an international variety. Atsushi Onita is a Japanese hardcore legend who got blowed up, wrapped in barbed wire, and generally mangled for years, and long before anybody else did it to quite the extent he did it. Also he became a successful politician in Japan, and wrestled in Afghanistan after 9/11, for the children. He truly is an amazing human being.
El Hijo Del Santo is the offspring of the most famous Mexican wrestler ever, and has carried that tradition on almost exactly, except just not quite so much. I don't think 100,000 people will line the streets of Mexico City when he dies like they did his father. Yet lucha libre is one of the most bizarre and wonderful sub-cultures on this blessed Earth. Still though, El Hijo Del Santo never got elected to Mexican Congress.
Advantage: Atsushi Onita.
COLONEL BO GRITZ vs. TED KACZYNSKI
Ahh, yes, a pair of anti-American influences, from the right and left wings. Colonel Bo Gritz was involved in trying to go back to Vietnam and recover POWs, and it is said the character of Hannibal on the A-Team was based on him (although he sold the rights to his life story to William Shatner back in the '80s). He was the go-to man when it was negotiation time with Randy Weaver or the Montana Freemen, and I think he ran for President a couple of times. He was connected to Ross Perot somehow. And the best thing is he was never even an actual colonel.
Ted Kaczynski is the infamous Unabomber, a super smart Ivy League genius who wanted to disappear into the wilds of Montana to live a simple and unseen life. But motherfuckers had to go and start building shit into the wilderness, and just generally wreak their "let's make order out of all the chaos with our dominion over the earth" bullshit on everything. We destroy everything. So he started mailing bombs to select motherfuckers.
Now I do not endorse killing motherfuckers, not at all, but I do endorse abandoning society completely and getting pissed at them if they won't let you alone and growing your beard long and hair shaggy and writing long-winded explanations about everything that's happened to have ready once the authorities finally close in on you.
Advantage: Ted Kaczynski.
BILLY JOE SHAVER vs. WILLIE NELSON
In the process of filling out the field of 80, just like with March Madness, there's going to be some mismatches in the beginning. Billy Joe Shaver is a crazy fucker, and an outlaw country original, and shot his wife like so many country people dream about doing. But he is not Willie Nelson.
Advantage: Willie Nelson.
Tuesday, August 31
J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - July '10 #12: "Take It Easy" by Yelawolf
Man, ever since that Trunk Muzik mixtape came out, I've listened to way too much Yelawolf music, riding around in my fucked up truck with the two tone fenders from where I hit that deer last year and fixed it all myself using genuine fake ass Estonian parts I got off some sketchy car part website. Sometimes it just makes sense, riding around like a dirtbag piece of shit, listening to some dirtbag rapper, aiming it between the ditches, drunk as fuck riding home, hoping that goddamned state trooper ain't going out on some oddball shift while I'm creeping back to the compound.
Early Yelawolf, or at least this one tape he did with this song, uses a lot of classic rock samples, and some of it is great and some not so great. I wouldn't necessarily vouch for this song were you to ask me about it, but I enjoy it. It's kinda like a Kid Rock song, just without all the shitty feelings that come along with something being a Kid Rock song. I mean, that formula makes sense, because there's a ton of pieces of shit out there who grew up while their uncles were smoking joints and taking shots in the front yard with Skynyrd pumping, but they grew up under the spell of hip hop. I think music has moved too far away from catering to all the pieces of shit that tend to enjoy music all day long. The internet's fucked everything up where people think if blogs or full of shit music sites like Pitchfork or Fader love something, then it's like popular with real live human beings. Which it is, to an extent, because we be sheeple. But that new shit that turns the world on its ass, it tends to come from nowhere and get all the pieces of shit behind it in mass and then the safer fringe sheeple (aka college town types) get into it, and eventually cartoon Colonel Sanders is drinking syzzurp in commercials. That's how it's supposed to work, in a natural world. But this is no natural world no more.
STEAL "Take It Easy"
NEXT UP: Like most pieces of shit from crappy places, I've got a lot of pride in where I come from, even though no one has any choice in where they're born!
Monday, August 30
L.E.o.R. - Fall ’10 - 80 to 40 - 2 of 5
BIZ MARKIE vs. TOO SHORT
A pair of elder rap legends, who came from a different angle. The Biz (whom allegedly cannot be beat) was a big, goofy fucker and Too Short came from the wrong end of the country and was doing lower class anthropological dissertations on the culture of pimps and prostitutes. I met Biz Markie once, at the Marriott in Richmond, while Jay-Z was surrounded by a hundred Mennonite kids getting his autograph (no shit, one of the most surreal moments of my life) and Biz was over by the bathrooms so I said, "What's up," and he looked like he was pregnant with a watermelon in his belly.
Too Short, although not the cultural icon that Biz is, is definitely something I still listen to regularly. When he gets onto his "I'm gonna make a comment about some shit other than pussy" kicks, there really ain't nothing like a Too Short song. And I guess if I was forced to get high and play Mario Kart Wii with one of them, I'd pick Biz, but in every other way, life is Too Short.
Advantage: Too Short.
ANGELA DAVIS vs. LEONARD PELTIER
And now a pair of "I'm going to college and really like Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky a lot" legendary types. And being I don't want to waste my life writing long in-depth analysis of all these match-ups that ultimately don't mean anything, even within the retarded parameters of what I'm doing here in this little microcosmic corner of the interwebs, I will simply say frybread is fucking awesome.
Advantage: Leonard Peltier.
DIEGO MARADONA vs. GAYLORD PERRY
Cokehead world soccer star who did not lead his native Argentina to World Cup glory again as a coach like he did as a player, matching up against a wiley old baseball white dude who pretty much made his name off cheating, pitching baseballs with all sorts of imported illegal substances. And while the intriguing nature of being a spitball pitcher in Major League Baseball is one of the few wonderful snippets of baseball lore, and for me far different than dudes taking steroids, because there's so much more trickery and deceit involved in having vaseline hidden inside your zipper and somehow rubbing it on the baseball while nobody sees you while you are standing in the most obvious and watched place in the entire fucking stadium, it's hard not to appreciate Diego Maradona's eccentricity, which is what you call a stone cold crazy fucker when he's richer than everybody else around him.
Advantage: Diego Maradona.
PHYLLIS LIGHT vs. STEPHEN HARROD BUHNER
These are a pair of herbalist types that come through my brain via my wife's influence, who has studied under both of these people. I am sure if she were picking, it'd be Phyllis Light in a heartbeat. She is an older Alabama woman who practices the old mountain folklore ways of herbalism, and unlike a lot of modern new agey herbalist types, is not afraid to mix in some real world shit like, "Drink a Coke, just a regular old every day Coke." Her son is apparently an MMA fighter of some sort, and she has some crazy herbal farm in rural Alabama that we have apparently been invited to visit if we'd like. I'd like. I feel I haven't had a thick infusion of deep South craziness in my life for far too long, too mired down in this watered down pretend Virginia south where everybody loves bagels and lox and the New York Yankees.
Stephen Harrod Buhner has written a book called Sacred and Herbal Healing Beers, which is a must-have if you are into the homebrewing shit, because he can guide you into the realm of mildly psychotropic beers. Also, I met this dude one time, painting a lady's house, and we hit it off, and he told me how happy the house was to have a guy like me painting it. I was like, "No doubt," because all houses liked me. It's just their stupid owners that made it hard to survive self-employment, not to mention the overall decline of the American economy. Plus, Buhner cold kicks it with two partners, which I guess new agey types call "polyamorism" to make it sound more impossible to deny than just admitting you got two ol' ladies in the same house. On one hand, I can dig that, and it makes sense physiologically in a lot of ways, not to mention when it comes to the companionship make-up of men's and women's minds. But I also am pretty good with my one ol' lady, which, even as good as we have it, is hard to navigate at times. Having two ol' ladies, that I'm mentally saying I'm lifelong committed to, and them saying the same, and to each other, I don't know, I can see it getting oddball as hell emotionally and filling that hunk of soul right above my intestines with a clenched fist.
Advantage: Phyllis Light.
LOUIS FARRAKHAN vs. MIKE TYSON
When I still lived in Richmond, I used to love buying Final Calls, although a few of those dudes wouldn't even sell them to me, what with me being a white devil and all. The dietary column alone was worth the couple dollar donation. There are some really great philosophical aspects to the Nation of Islam, bus pigeons, which give him some meditative moments, and just generally tries to continue navigating his way through life, like we all do, with as little a clue as anybody, but a much thicker publicly known history. There are shady industries like boxing all over - pro wrestling, porn, the music industry - that create these pop cultural monsters, squeeze every dollar they can out of them, let them burn through their small cut of it, and then dump them on the side of the road as a celebrity has-been. I just can't help but feel like Tyson's story ain't over, and some pretty crazy (in both good and bad ways) shit is still gonna develop out of this man, especially now that he's older and realizes he can't knock out the world.
Advantage: Mike Tyson.
LARRY FLYNT vs. RON JEREMY
Larry Flynt made magazines, where you actually got to see an open vagina, plus a dick beside it. And he gave us the Chester the Molester cartoon, not to mention Beaver Hunt, which pretty much helped inspire a large corner of the interweb's naked parts.
Ron Jeremy is a porn dude who did it far longer than anybody else, and with a tongue-in-cheek style. Even as porn moved far away from having people actually act anymore, he still made a living at it. But that's about it.
Flynt fought, no matter how ridiculously his arguments were, the government. I've always had a soft spot in my heart for people who fight the government over their God-given right to express their retarded perversions publicly. Plus, he's a Kentucky hillbilly who became a millionaire. Ron Jeremy's probably from like Reno or Arizona or something.
Advantage: Larry Flynt.
CHAZ BOJORQUEZ vs. SEEN
A pair of graffiti legends, both of which I'd love to have a piece by hanging up in my living room. Seen is a NYC legend of the first order, and you can actually contact him through his website to deal straight with the guy about buying some art. He's straight graffiti style though. Chaz Bojorquez, being an L.A. legend, has this weird style of script that's very obviously cholo-influenced, yet artsy as fuck. And I don't want this to seem like an east coast vs. west coast thing, but the wild styles that NY graffiti developed into is cool to look at, but it doesn't speak to me like seeing actual letters that are just barely legible do. Bojorquez's stuff is crazy as fuck, like any wild style, but still there's something that keeps it a written word with a message, even if it buried behind stylistic bedazzlement. The thing that sets him apart, for me, is how just with black and white, he can make something strong. Most graffiti relies on an abundance of color, and I've always been attracted to simple black-and-white. That's why I never have and never will get any colored tattoos on my body. Basic is solid. And then you take that solid basicness and wild style the fuck out of it.
Advantage: Chaz Bojorquez.
GRADY STILES III vs. OXANA MALAYA
Kind of an odd pairing, in that Grady Stiles III is a seventh generation lobster boy, and the heir apparent to a living as a freak show superstar, except his dad was an abusive alcoholic, and got his self killed by a hitman hired by his then wife, and Grady the III's mom. Thus, the long run of playing the Lobster family in the carnivals ended, as Grady III didn't want to follow in those footsteps. So he's a stay-at-home lobster boy (technically, it's called ectrodactyly), and even though his fingers and toes are fused together into something resembling claws, he has that head full of a carnie ass family and living on the freak show circuit as a kid to get him through life. Last I heard, like many children of severely abusive alcoholics, he doesn't drink at all either, which means he will probably mire away in obscurity in Gibtown, Florida, where the freaks are dying off, and they are building condos in their place.
Oxana Malaya is the Ukrainian dog child. More so than carnival freaks, I have always been fascinated with feral children, because we have these grand notions of what it means to be human, even if we don't subscribe to Christian dogma, most scientifically-minded people still believe in man's dominion over the earth. So I find it interesting when a child who has not yet formed into a solid thing is left to the wild. Malaya's parents were also terrible alcoholics, and sort of just kicked her out when she was 3. So she started roaming the streets, and ended up tagging along with wild dogs, who took care of her and taught her basically everything she knew when she was discovered in 1991 at age 8. Ever since that point, she's been in a government joint for the mentally disabled, being she behaved and acted like a dog for the most part, and she's slowly learned many human things, most notably language and what is considered somewhat normal behavior. But she is not connected to humanity at all, and has expressed this, saying she is most comfortable when she is hanging out with dogs. She is now 26 and takes care of the cows at the clinic's she's been in since being found.
Honestly, I think looking up to something like that is a good thing, because it challenges the whole dominion over the earth thing anyways. To be a simple dog person who takes care of cows, what the fuck is wrong with that? Personally, I think we need more feral children, not less, and I am proud of the fact that I've abandoned two of my five children in the woods.
Advantage: Oxana Malaya.
A pair of elder rap legends, who came from a different angle. The Biz (whom allegedly cannot be beat) was a big, goofy fucker and Too Short came from the wrong end of the country and was doing lower class anthropological dissertations on the culture of pimps and prostitutes. I met Biz Markie once, at the Marriott in Richmond, while Jay-Z was surrounded by a hundred Mennonite kids getting his autograph (no shit, one of the most surreal moments of my life) and Biz was over by the bathrooms so I said, "What's up," and he looked like he was pregnant with a watermelon in his belly.
Too Short, although not the cultural icon that Biz is, is definitely something I still listen to regularly. When he gets onto his "I'm gonna make a comment about some shit other than pussy" kicks, there really ain't nothing like a Too Short song. And I guess if I was forced to get high and play Mario Kart Wii with one of them, I'd pick Biz, but in every other way, life is Too Short.
Advantage: Too Short.
ANGELA DAVIS vs. LEONARD PELTIER
And now a pair of "I'm going to college and really like Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky a lot" legendary types. And being I don't want to waste my life writing long in-depth analysis of all these match-ups that ultimately don't mean anything, even within the retarded parameters of what I'm doing here in this little microcosmic corner of the interwebs, I will simply say frybread is fucking awesome.
Advantage: Leonard Peltier.
DIEGO MARADONA vs. GAYLORD PERRY
Cokehead world soccer star who did not lead his native Argentina to World Cup glory again as a coach like he did as a player, matching up against a wiley old baseball white dude who pretty much made his name off cheating, pitching baseballs with all sorts of imported illegal substances. And while the intriguing nature of being a spitball pitcher in Major League Baseball is one of the few wonderful snippets of baseball lore, and for me far different than dudes taking steroids, because there's so much more trickery and deceit involved in having vaseline hidden inside your zipper and somehow rubbing it on the baseball while nobody sees you while you are standing in the most obvious and watched place in the entire fucking stadium, it's hard not to appreciate Diego Maradona's eccentricity, which is what you call a stone cold crazy fucker when he's richer than everybody else around him.
Advantage: Diego Maradona.
PHYLLIS LIGHT vs. STEPHEN HARROD BUHNER
These are a pair of herbalist types that come through my brain via my wife's influence, who has studied under both of these people. I am sure if she were picking, it'd be Phyllis Light in a heartbeat. She is an older Alabama woman who practices the old mountain folklore ways of herbalism, and unlike a lot of modern new agey herbalist types, is not afraid to mix in some real world shit like, "Drink a Coke, just a regular old every day Coke." Her son is apparently an MMA fighter of some sort, and she has some crazy herbal farm in rural Alabama that we have apparently been invited to visit if we'd like. I'd like. I feel I haven't had a thick infusion of deep South craziness in my life for far too long, too mired down in this watered down pretend Virginia south where everybody loves bagels and lox and the New York Yankees.
Stephen Harrod Buhner has written a book called Sacred and Herbal Healing Beers, which is a must-have if you are into the homebrewing shit, because he can guide you into the realm of mildly psychotropic beers. Also, I met this dude one time, painting a lady's house, and we hit it off, and he told me how happy the house was to have a guy like me painting it. I was like, "No doubt," because all houses liked me. It's just their stupid owners that made it hard to survive self-employment, not to mention the overall decline of the American economy. Plus, Buhner cold kicks it with two partners, which I guess new agey types call "polyamorism" to make it sound more impossible to deny than just admitting you got two ol' ladies in the same house. On one hand, I can dig that, and it makes sense physiologically in a lot of ways, not to mention when it comes to the companionship make-up of men's and women's minds. But I also am pretty good with my one ol' lady, which, even as good as we have it, is hard to navigate at times. Having two ol' ladies, that I'm mentally saying I'm lifelong committed to, and them saying the same, and to each other, I don't know, I can see it getting oddball as hell emotionally and filling that hunk of soul right above my intestines with a clenched fist.
Advantage: Phyllis Light.
LOUIS FARRAKHAN vs. MIKE TYSON
When I still lived in Richmond, I used to love buying Final Calls, although a few of those dudes wouldn't even sell them to me, what with me being a white devil and all. The dietary column alone was worth the couple dollar donation. There are some really great philosophical aspects to the Nation of Islam, bus pigeons, which give him some meditative moments, and just generally tries to continue navigating his way through life, like we all do, with as little a clue as anybody, but a much thicker publicly known history. There are shady industries like boxing all over - pro wrestling, porn, the music industry - that create these pop cultural monsters, squeeze every dollar they can out of them, let them burn through their small cut of it, and then dump them on the side of the road as a celebrity has-been. I just can't help but feel like Tyson's story ain't over, and some pretty crazy (in both good and bad ways) shit is still gonna develop out of this man, especially now that he's older and realizes he can't knock out the world.
Advantage: Mike Tyson.
LARRY FLYNT vs. RON JEREMY
Larry Flynt made magazines, where you actually got to see an open vagina, plus a dick beside it. And he gave us the Chester the Molester cartoon, not to mention Beaver Hunt, which pretty much helped inspire a large corner of the interweb's naked parts.
Ron Jeremy is a porn dude who did it far longer than anybody else, and with a tongue-in-cheek style. Even as porn moved far away from having people actually act anymore, he still made a living at it. But that's about it.
Flynt fought, no matter how ridiculously his arguments were, the government. I've always had a soft spot in my heart for people who fight the government over their God-given right to express their retarded perversions publicly. Plus, he's a Kentucky hillbilly who became a millionaire. Ron Jeremy's probably from like Reno or Arizona or something.
Advantage: Larry Flynt.
CHAZ BOJORQUEZ vs. SEEN
A pair of graffiti legends, both of which I'd love to have a piece by hanging up in my living room. Seen is a NYC legend of the first order, and you can actually contact him through his website to deal straight with the guy about buying some art. He's straight graffiti style though. Chaz Bojorquez, being an L.A. legend, has this weird style of script that's very obviously cholo-influenced, yet artsy as fuck. And I don't want this to seem like an east coast vs. west coast thing, but the wild styles that NY graffiti developed into is cool to look at, but it doesn't speak to me like seeing actual letters that are just barely legible do. Bojorquez's stuff is crazy as fuck, like any wild style, but still there's something that keeps it a written word with a message, even if it buried behind stylistic bedazzlement. The thing that sets him apart, for me, is how just with black and white, he can make something strong. Most graffiti relies on an abundance of color, and I've always been attracted to simple black-and-white. That's why I never have and never will get any colored tattoos on my body. Basic is solid. And then you take that solid basicness and wild style the fuck out of it.
Advantage: Chaz Bojorquez.
GRADY STILES III vs. OXANA MALAYA
Kind of an odd pairing, in that Grady Stiles III is a seventh generation lobster boy, and the heir apparent to a living as a freak show superstar, except his dad was an abusive alcoholic, and got his self killed by a hitman hired by his then wife, and Grady the III's mom. Thus, the long run of playing the Lobster family in the carnivals ended, as Grady III didn't want to follow in those footsteps. So he's a stay-at-home lobster boy (technically, it's called ectrodactyly), and even though his fingers and toes are fused together into something resembling claws, he has that head full of a carnie ass family and living on the freak show circuit as a kid to get him through life. Last I heard, like many children of severely abusive alcoholics, he doesn't drink at all either, which means he will probably mire away in obscurity in Gibtown, Florida, where the freaks are dying off, and they are building condos in their place.
Oxana Malaya is the Ukrainian dog child. More so than carnival freaks, I have always been fascinated with feral children, because we have these grand notions of what it means to be human, even if we don't subscribe to Christian dogma, most scientifically-minded people still believe in man's dominion over the earth. So I find it interesting when a child who has not yet formed into a solid thing is left to the wild. Malaya's parents were also terrible alcoholics, and sort of just kicked her out when she was 3. So she started roaming the streets, and ended up tagging along with wild dogs, who took care of her and taught her basically everything she knew when she was discovered in 1991 at age 8. Ever since that point, she's been in a government joint for the mentally disabled, being she behaved and acted like a dog for the most part, and she's slowly learned many human things, most notably language and what is considered somewhat normal behavior. But she is not connected to humanity at all, and has expressed this, saying she is most comfortable when she is hanging out with dogs. She is now 26 and takes care of the cows at the clinic's she's been in since being found.
Honestly, I think looking up to something like that is a good thing, because it challenges the whole dominion over the earth thing anyways. To be a simple dog person who takes care of cows, what the fuck is wrong with that? Personally, I think we need more feral children, not less, and I am proud of the fact that I've abandoned two of my five children in the woods.
Advantage: Oxana Malaya.
J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - July '10 #13: "Sponger Money" by The Junkanoo Band
I spent some time the other week at St. Pete Beach in Florida, old retro kitschy beachfront, but not on purpose, just old, reminiscing on when Joe Dimaggio and Marilyn Monroe would kick it. I dug it, although I was there for an army combat casualty health medical neurosurgery meeting. Crazy shit, and yet again I often wonder how the hell I get into the situations I get into. Like how do I sit inside one of those seminars and then a week later I'm drinking vodka outside a bus station? What happened to me to make me straddle these worlds so easily and feel too much comfort in doing so, until it all hits me with lucidity and I freak out and hide from the world amidst my five acre bird tribe compound?
This song is some old island shit from way back in the day, taken from the After the End of the World blog (should be in the sidebar). The problem with this song is in my head, instead of singing what they sing, I just chant "Tap that ass! Tap that ass! Tap that ass!" to the rhythm. That's still pretty solid, although repetitive, but you know, some for real people beating on things and blowing on things and four-part harmonizing on things, even if repetitive, is three thousand worlds better than digital DJ looping a wav file repetitive. Sometimes I feel myself lulled into a monotonous muzak 4/4 pseudo-hip hop lobotomy that occasionally switches into double time right about the time I'm given the pitch and in that moment of euphoria, I'm like, "Yeah, I would like to taste that or own that or drive that." So it works.
Sponger Money never dies though. Ain't that the goddamned truth old fucking song from some music blog.
STEAL "Sponger Money"
NEXT UP: Going back to Allah Bama again!
Sunday, August 29
J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - July '10 Intro
I am very confident that even though it is the very tail end of August and I'm just throwing out the intro of the July J.J. Krupert and I have this self-mandated parameter of only one post per theme per day, that I will catch up to myself and what I listen to. One way I enforce this is I don't listen to as much music in the truck when I'm this far behind, so I'm stuck with AM sports radio or NPR, both of which become annoyingly repetitive and will make you crazy and/or misguided.
Meanwhile, at home, I take all the songs that are on my gaypod and create extensively massive playlists on the home computer Itunes and just play it, eliminating one of every two songs, to drum up play counts for the shit that's awesome and weed out the weak shit. This is complete ridiculousness in itself, but factor in my hand-me-down PC's internal fan is fucked (standard on that model apparently) so I have a house fan tilted sideways pointed at the back end of this thing, but a few big ass speakers I found running from the computer, including one with an immense bass factor. But the problem is if I play the Itunes and there's too much bass, something about that one speaker heating up underneath the desk overheats everything else and the computer crashes and I have to wait for it to cool down to restart it and it's all like, "Do you want me to scan for fucked up shit?" and I'm like, "Nah, it's all good, I know what happened," and it takes forever to start, with the little sliding Windows bar thing for loading getting stuck, then moving, then getting stuck, and you walk away from it all and eventually walk through the room and see the blue login screen and think, "Oh shit, the computer's back up. Let me look on Facebook." So you look on Facebook and there's nothing there but a bunch of dumb shit but you still look at it for about 45 minutes and then you should probably be going to bed but Family Guy is coming on, except it's an episode you've already seen too many times, so you try to beat your all-time high score on Wii Golf, and that last hole fucks you up yet again, so you just go to bed. And tomorrow you wake up and waste that one too and that's one day closer until they carve your name in a goddamned piece of stone and a bunch of people come around reminiscing and shit.
But I will catch up. Perhaps by the end of September, I will actually be doing a September list, and then that would mean hopefully by October I could be caught up, just in time to start listening to outlaw country like I always do once it gets cold and I have to cut wood all the goddamned time on Sunday mornings and then root for a shitty Washington Redskins team on Sunday afternoons. These are patterns in my life, ripples that make the same circle unless they bounce off of something else completely in the way, and even then the pattern is only altered directionally, not stopped.
But yes, we shall start talking about the musics I were pumping in the month of July. It was a hot month, and it was boring. I didn't do much as far as I can remember. Bought some chickens and beat on some dogs that killed some chickens. I kept the grass cut better than most years, mostly because we haven't had much rain so it hasn't grown. Still though, that's something.
Look, it's a full moon and the silhouette of my house against the skyline is tight looking. I'm sitting at the picnic table in the back yard at like midnight typing a bunch of gibberish. I really should just shut the top of this laptop to kill the self-imposed HAARP beams, smoke a bowl, and stare at the silhouette of the house holding my family and my life together into one unit, and be about to fall out on the picnic table, but it's kinda cool tonight, so I'd be afraid to just sleep, being I'm naked as well, so I'll go inside, rinse my feet off in the shower, and go to bed, thinking me and the ol' lady might get something going. But she'll be asleep and I'll be too tired to have to break through her "we have three kids and there's too much to do all the time" defense mechanisms and I'll make sure the alarm is set for the wrong time a little too late and I'll turn it to face the wall so that bright green false aura doesn't blind me in my sleep and cause me to grow breasts before I hit puberty, and I'll sleep an uncomfortable and dreamless sleep that rests me just enough to get me through another tomorrow. If it ain't broke, why fix it?
FIRST UP: Wacky island nonsense from decades ago, once again thanks to Dave Quam!
f e n d i
crisscrossed christmas lights and rust,
plus mildew stains, black duct tape,
and flat tires - my old datsun
Saturday, August 28
L.E.o.R. - Fall ’10 - 80 to 40 - 1 of 5
ESTEVAN ORIOL vs. MIROSLAV TICHY
Estevan Oriol was the manager of Cypress Hill back in the day, and somehow stumbled through this into becoming a photographer of hip hop acts, but then took pictures of gang members in L.A. because he was considered an insider and not some asshole coming to take pictures of gang members.
Miroslav Tichy is some reclusive dude in eastern Europe who built these homemade cameras from scraps he found and went around taking pictures of women for years and years. A lot of times, they posed in ways they never would have had they known the chunk of trash he was holding actually took pictures. A pair of photographers, but far from normal photography.
I will admit that if there was one piece of art I could be given from my wife for a birthday or Christmas or something, it would be a print of this one picture that Oriol took of a Bloods dudes flannel shirts on hangers hanging on a clothesline in the back yard, with some rusty building behind it. It’s an amazing picture. But Tichy is a recluse who has suddenly found fame from his homemade camera photography of sexy women, and doesn’t even want the fame. He just wants to be left fucking alone. Meanwhile, or as chill a dude Estevan Oriol is, he’s trying to sell you t-shirts.
Advantage: Miroslav Tichy.
PRINCE PAUL vs. R.A. THE RUGGED MAN
Prince Paul has been involved in all sorts of great moments in hip hop history - the explosion of De La Soul (which had black dudes in my high school wearing their hair all sorts of off kilter), the Gravediggaz (ahh... the blending of boom bap and horror movies), Handsome Boy Modeling School, The Dino 5 (greatest kid rap album ever made)... he’s just a rock solid voice of hip hop that’s been around from the old school until the now.
R.A. the Rugged Man is just an obscure white rapper for most people, yet within hip hop, he’s an underground legend, whom Biggie Smalls himself glossed as one of the greatest he’d ever been in a booth with. He also does a good bit of freelance writing, for magazines like Mass Appeal (R.I.P.) and Vibe (god, what a terrible magazine), and has a book on boxing coming out at some point in the next year. His style, both in rhyme and written word, is wide open without restraint, and he tends to go for shock value over egotistical boasting. He’s a straight up dirt bag.
And while Prince Paul is one of only a handful of dudes you could say make up the spinal cord of hip hop, and one of the only people whose music I would steal from the internet without question because you know it's going to be at least interesting, R.A. is not limited by genre. The dude is a legend for being banned from playing clubs, and his knowledge of cinematic trash is amazing. I'm very interested to see what a scumbag Long Island white boy roughly my age makes of boxing in book format. And he has the single greatest verse in the past fifteen years of hip hip with his contribution to the Jedi Mind Tricks "Uncommon Valor" track.
Advantage: R.A. the Rugged Man.
DON CHERRY vs. TIGER WILLIAMS
A showdown between hockey legends. Hockey is a sport I never was witness to as a kid growing up, and while in college, had a friend who was the mascot for the minor league Richmond team, so we got comped in a lot of times, and I fell in love. Not too long after, I lucked into like two years of free NHL Pass on a satellite system, which was during the years of the Avs/Red Wings hate epitomized by that epic fight/game they had where the goalies were squaring up at center ice at one point. Fucking classic game.
I am a sort of Washington Capitals fan, although I'm no die-hard, but the Alexander Ovechkin era has really made it easy. Don't think I'd be into it so much if they had Sydney Crosby instead, but it's hard not to like Ovie. He's a knucklehead, and that's basically my favorite part of hockey - the whole "I'm just a big fucking bearded longhaired lunkhead from somewhere far off your normal 3rd grade American history class map" aspect. Plus, they are not afraid to get physical and throw some 'bows if need be.
Don Cherry is a color commentator who often says stupid things and is very entertaining, sort of like Bob Uecker just punch drunker. Tiger Williams is an old dude who holds the all-time NHL record for penalty minutes. He got in more shit than anybody ever, and was proud of it, and is still around to tell ice war stories.
And while I cannot deny that Don Cherry is a great ambassador for his sport to drunken degenerates like myself, when I first got into hockey watching those Richmond Renegades, one of the main reasons was Trevor Senn, who was their team enforcer. Watching an enforcer on the ice instead of simply following the puck like they do on TV is a great joy, especially with a 16 ounce beer in your hand, and maybe a touch of psilocybin in your brain. So really, it is that type of player I am impressed by more than anything else.
Advantage: Tiger Williams (though I think it goes without saying that had Bob Probert not died this year, he would've smoked both of these dudes and pretty much anybody else in my stupid little Learned Elders internet hall of fame nonsense).
FIDEL CASTRO vs. KIM JONG IL
I have always been intrigued by dictators and fascists. The ability to have a cult of personality over a large group of people is quite an accomplishment in itself, but to then parlay that into a ruling position which shifts into authoritative domination that stifles all dissent, that's a serious ass parlay. You think about America and as fucked as we've been with our last few Presidents, all of whom have had the cult of personality, but no matter how much they secretly shift towards the authoritarian role, it never quite takes over. There's nothing special about America, except maybe we are a very diverse crop of humans, making it hard to get enough people in deified awe of someone to install them in absolute power over everybody else, fuck them if they disagree.
I think it is sad Kim Jong Il is not more hyped as some sort of alternative demented genius. I mean, I now the whole Might Could Start a Nuclear Confrontation thing is a drawback, and liberal hipster types, for as contrarian as they tend to be, don't necessarily like to endorse dictators. But the whole Kim Jong Il (and his father before him) saga in North Korea is crazy, regardless of the propaganda machine that might prop it. (Which can we trust that anyways since it is our propaganda machine that tells us this happens?) But the guy has giant stadium performances with thousands upon thousands of people, just for him. Like the seats are full of performers who turn over cards at the appropriate time to create giant pictures. And he kidnaps actresses and actors to force them to make films for him. I don't know if there has ever been an evil dictator type with such an artphag bent before, and frankly, I find it very very impressive.
Ol' Fidel on the other hand, is old school. He's a baseball player who decided to overthrow a government, and has never really stepped down ever since. A simple guy, no one can accuse him of squandering his country's wealth, as he's not kicking it in gold necklaces on yachts. Dude has worn nothing but olive drab military gear for decades, ever since he hung up the baseball spikes. He's rocked the utilitarian communist beard for that time as well, and although yeah, communism is evil, whatever, there are some things that make it not seem so bad. Cuba has the lowest illiteracy rate in the world (well it did at one time when I read that, so it just stays true in my brain) as well as a very low infant mortality rate. It's a beautiful Caribbean country, and no one I've ever read about going there outside of the tourist areas has not been overwhelmed with what a beautiful and simple place it is. Making lemonade out of lemons. They can't get new cars from America (embargoing assholes) so all those old 1950s bombers are still puttering down the streets.
Who's to say simple is bad? Think about the high tech modernization going on at Guatanamo, where American authorities have taken the Arabs they've kidnapped to torture and detain until they reveal whatever it is they are supposed to know. Not to mention the fact the U.S. government beams constant propaganda via radio waves from that little corner of Cuba as well at the Cuban people.
To be honest, I'd rather sit around a picnic table and listen to old men play guitars and we all drive ratty old cars and we all drink cheap gutrot liquor and we are poor but we are happy and all our wives have big asses that bounce in the moonlight when we do it from behind on our simple beds with no screens in the open windows so you might get a mosquito bite or two than fucking think about torture and detainment and idealogical wars and all that crap. I mean, we're storing prisoners of our current idealogical war on a carjacked corner of an island that we've had a long-running idealogical war with. It's fucking crazy. And I know I'm simplifying things somewhat, but still. The motherfuckers shooting the propaganda at me and you through Time magazine and the cable news and Executive Orders, they simplify it all far worse than I do.
Advantage: Fidel Castro.
VINCENTE PIERRE vs. WHITEY BULGER
A battle between the criminal element, though very different types.
Vincente Pierre is an accused black Muslim terrorist who started an Islamic trailer park community in Charlotte County, Virginia, not too far from where I grew up - between where my mom lives in Meherrin and my one sister lives in Clarksville. They got busted for some sort of weapons violations, and it turned out that Pierre had multiple wives, most likely, in his rural southside Virginia trailer park compound, plus underground tunnels and all sorts of other crazy militiaman stuff that would make my dead daddy proud, except that it was black Muslims. The crazy thing is right down the road from my mom's house, and actually now on land that I used to wander as a kid and was once owned by my grandfather, a second community linked to this first one has sprouted up. They first started building it when I was in high school, but now it's full-blown, and they have some weird security force with a website that provides bodyguard services and computer security and all sorts of nefarious shit that you normally don't associate with a bunch of people that live in a trailer park in the middle of nowhere.
Whitey Bulger was a former boss of an Irish-American mob in Boston, and made hella money in all the normal mob ways - gambling, pussy, guns, and drugs. The thing that makes Whitey Bulger so awesome is he bolted in the mid-'90s when the DEA was about to come down on him, and has been a successful fugitive ever since. He's been on America's Most Wanted 15 times, and has often been seen around the world, though those sightings are not always verified. The last verified time anyone saw him was in London in 2002, though the FBI has chased after leads in Uruguay, Italy, and elsewhere since then. He is assumed to be alive and breathing still though, coming up on his 81st birthday next week. He is also considered the inspiration for Jack Nicholson's character in The Departed.
This is a hard one for me to choose. Pierre is more of a "protect your own" kind of guy who is building his own community separate from the world at large, while Bulger had that classic successful criminal Robin Hood element that had the poor people of Boston loving on him for how he protected the hood and gave out turkeys on Thanksgiving. And frankly, you have to wonder if Bulger is still alive, although I doubt the FBI would still be putting resources towards him if he weren't.
At the same time, I've been reading the 120 Questions from Fard Muhammad and Elijah Muhammad a lot lately, although mostly to lead myself back to Clarence 13X and the Nations of Gods and Earths more than to get into Islam. The Nations of Gods and Earths really jibe me more than most religions, other than maybe Taoism, with a lot of mathematically based new age science and general wackiness that fucks with language and reality. I've been working on rewriting some texts to incorporate whiteys like myself into the whole 5% philosophy, because if you dig into what they're saying, and even a bit of what Clarence 13X preached, it wasn't black man as in literal black man so much as a black and white where the roles of good and evil were flipped off the standard Christian color scheme. You can be a black man in that sense but not have dark skin. But shit, in America we've complicated racial matters so goddamned much, I'd probably get stabbed if I tried to pull off some shit like that. Plus, Vincente Pierre and the other black Islamic trailer park down the road from my mom's, they're not Nation of Gods and Earths people, but straight up militant Muslim who are part of an Al-Fuqra anti-America campaign. Although I'm as anti-governmentarianism as anyone, so that's not an automatic x.
Advantage: Vincente Pierre (South Side Virginia, represent... and it is odd how Clarence 13X the founder of Nations of Gods and Earths was born in Danville, and this other stuff is happening in Charlotte and Prince Edward county... not to mention the first free black community in America was a place called Israel Hill just outside of Farmville; who knew I was born in the lap of so much culture? I thought it was just a rundown place where everybody became addicted to or sold different illicit things and had a hopeless outlook on the world).
DAVID SCHULTZ vs. TERRY FUNK
Ahh...the stupid professional wrestling. I got caught up in this nonsense too much as a kid, to the point now that I can have completely separate work and home personnas and it's not a problem for me compartmentalize it because it makes sense. That's been a big influence on my writing styles over the years too because I can very easily add a complete lie to something that's otherwise completely truthful so that there are people to this day who think I let a guy suck my dick in the bus station in St. Louis, Missouri, because I felt sorry for him.
David Schultz was basically Stone Cold Steve Austin back in the 1980s - a foul-minded, beer-drinking redneck dude who took no shit. Problem is, he was also an enforcer, and when John Stossel was doing a feature for 20/20 on how wrestling was fake (hard to believe that was actually a story, isn't it?), Vince McMahon told Schultz to rough him up or scare him or something, so Schultz, being the loveable guy he was, when asked if wrestling was fake, slapped the shit out of Stossel, asking him, "Does that feel fake?" Ultimately, John Stossel ended up deaf in that ear, sued WWF, and Schultz got blamed for it to cover their asses, fired, and blacklisted from wrestling. (Looking back though, what's really more sleazy - TV news programs like what Stossel does or pro wrestling? They're both so fucking nasty, and at least wrestling admits it's fake now. Having suffered through more than a few John Stossel pieces over the years where he throws out fear-inducing propaganda under the guise of actual information, I can't say I mind the fact he got deafened by David Schultz.) Post-wrestling, Schultz was a truck driver and then a bounty hunter, which when you think about some completely bad ass blonde afro having redneck dude from the '80s disappearing and then filling out his life through long hauling and hunting fugitives, that's a pretty tight storyline.
Terry Funk, on the other hand, may be the most amazingly fucked up yet beautiful professional wrestler there ever was. He dabbled in Hollywood for a while, both acting and doing stunts, after his first run as a World champion wrestler was winding down in the 1980s, yet came back as an old man who would bloody himself up in barbed wire matches. And listening to the guy talk, he is an amazing man. And crazy as fucking bat shit. Really, I just wanted to expound a little bit more on David Schultz before I just chose the Funker.
Advantage: Terry Funk.
GLEN STEWART GODWIN vs. NAZARIO MORENO
A cocaine criminal element showdown this time. Glen Stewart Godwin is a guy who in the early 1980s had absolutely no criminal history whatsoever. But it is believed he and a friend had planned to rob a drug dealer, and ended up killing the guy and burning the body in a truck to try and hide the evidence. He got sent to Folsom Prison, where he escaped in 1987, never to be caught. He ended up in Mexico, where he started selling cocaine, as a white guy, and got put in Mexican jail. American authorities were working to extradite him when Godwin stabbed and killed a Mexican cartel member in jail, which slowed down extradition proceedings. During this time, he escaped Mexican jail. Sadly, I do not know of any narcocorridos about Glen Stewart Godwin, although I guess it's only a matter of time before a white rapper takes that name as his own. The FBI put him on their most wanted list in 1996, and he's believed to still be active in the drug trade somewhere in Latin America. Or he might be at the bottom of a Mexican well. Hard to say.
Speaking of Mexican drug cartels, Nazario Moreno is the leader of La Familia, which is the cartel that has members carry the Bible with them, although Moreno has made his own translations of many parts. Basically they are a Christian cult drug cartel that murders motherfuckers in the process of selling drugs. The thing is, when they first started up, it was more as a protection against other drug cartels as a sort of vigilante police force for the poor, and they actually have more control over many of the cities in the Michoacan state than the government does. Moreno preaches that they have divine right to kill their enemies, and no member of the cartel is allowed to use drugs. Their philosophy is part evangelism and part up-with-the-people sloganeering, and Moreno gives out books as required reading to cartel members and even pays rural school teachers and government agencies to teach those books in schools in Michoacan. (Really, Mexico is straight fucked.) His nickname is Mas Loco, and La Familia trained alongside Los Zetas to be the paramilitary branches of drug cartels in the '90s, although both of have split off to become their own, mega-violent cartels.
And while I am interested in both of these guys, I can't help but think Godwin hasn't bitten it somewhere and no one will ever know because his body's been decomposed in a vat of acid by now. Plus, the mixing of religion and organized criminal activity has always seemed really intriguing to me. Religion is some serious shit, and yet we always fall for it as humans, even if the falling for it is that there is none and science is the one true answer for science is the only true religion.
Advantage: Nazario Moreno.
BLOWFLY vs. GABRIEL DUENEZ
Boy, I had not expected to write 3500 words on this shit today, but here I am. This last match-up for today is between a pair of fringe musical influences. Blowfly was an R&B singer and made adult-oriented party tapes wearing crazy costumes. Basically, he was the Ol' Dirty Bastard before there was one, just he wasn't addicted to crack, so far as I know. To be honest, I've never really listened to too much Blowfly because it's novelty music and you can't really get into it. There's plenty of music that I can dig on for real and not just to be like, "haha, check out what I'm listening to."
Gabriel Duenez, at this point in his life, is an air conditioner repairman in Houston, Texas. But back in the day, he used to make slowed down cumbia mixes he sold at the flea market in Monterrey, single-handedly creating cumbia rebajada, which is essentially screwed and chopped cumbia music, which sounds fucking fresh as shit. I love screwed music, and the percussion of cumbia music screwed is so perfectly tweaked, and the bass gets down to a nice steady hum, with ghostly spic vocals... man I wish this shit was on 7-inches and my jukebox was fixed because I'd just sit in the dark drinking cough medicine listening to that shit all night long.
But beyond that, a guy creating a musical genre that in the internet age would have gotten him a lot of non-moneyed blogospheric love, who did the same in the 1960s and sold a bunch of mixtapes at the Monterrey flea market, but now is a broke ass old man fixing air conditioners. There's something noble and pure about that. And perfect.
Advantage: Gabriel Duenez.
Estevan Oriol was the manager of Cypress Hill back in the day, and somehow stumbled through this into becoming a photographer of hip hop acts, but then took pictures of gang members in L.A. because he was considered an insider and not some asshole coming to take pictures of gang members.
Miroslav Tichy is some reclusive dude in eastern Europe who built these homemade cameras from scraps he found and went around taking pictures of women for years and years. A lot of times, they posed in ways they never would have had they known the chunk of trash he was holding actually took pictures. A pair of photographers, but far from normal photography.
I will admit that if there was one piece of art I could be given from my wife for a birthday or Christmas or something, it would be a print of this one picture that Oriol took of a Bloods dudes flannel shirts on hangers hanging on a clothesline in the back yard, with some rusty building behind it. It’s an amazing picture. But Tichy is a recluse who has suddenly found fame from his homemade camera photography of sexy women, and doesn’t even want the fame. He just wants to be left fucking alone. Meanwhile, or as chill a dude Estevan Oriol is, he’s trying to sell you t-shirts.
Advantage: Miroslav Tichy.
PRINCE PAUL vs. R.A. THE RUGGED MAN
Prince Paul has been involved in all sorts of great moments in hip hop history - the explosion of De La Soul (which had black dudes in my high school wearing their hair all sorts of off kilter), the Gravediggaz (ahh... the blending of boom bap and horror movies), Handsome Boy Modeling School, The Dino 5 (greatest kid rap album ever made)... he’s just a rock solid voice of hip hop that’s been around from the old school until the now.
R.A. the Rugged Man is just an obscure white rapper for most people, yet within hip hop, he’s an underground legend, whom Biggie Smalls himself glossed as one of the greatest he’d ever been in a booth with. He also does a good bit of freelance writing, for magazines like Mass Appeal (R.I.P.) and Vibe (god, what a terrible magazine), and has a book on boxing coming out at some point in the next year. His style, both in rhyme and written word, is wide open without restraint, and he tends to go for shock value over egotistical boasting. He’s a straight up dirt bag.
And while Prince Paul is one of only a handful of dudes you could say make up the spinal cord of hip hop, and one of the only people whose music I would steal from the internet without question because you know it's going to be at least interesting, R.A. is not limited by genre. The dude is a legend for being banned from playing clubs, and his knowledge of cinematic trash is amazing. I'm very interested to see what a scumbag Long Island white boy roughly my age makes of boxing in book format. And he has the single greatest verse in the past fifteen years of hip hip with his contribution to the Jedi Mind Tricks "Uncommon Valor" track.
Advantage: R.A. the Rugged Man.
DON CHERRY vs. TIGER WILLIAMS
A showdown between hockey legends. Hockey is a sport I never was witness to as a kid growing up, and while in college, had a friend who was the mascot for the minor league Richmond team, so we got comped in a lot of times, and I fell in love. Not too long after, I lucked into like two years of free NHL Pass on a satellite system, which was during the years of the Avs/Red Wings hate epitomized by that epic fight/game they had where the goalies were squaring up at center ice at one point. Fucking classic game.
I am a sort of Washington Capitals fan, although I'm no die-hard, but the Alexander Ovechkin era has really made it easy. Don't think I'd be into it so much if they had Sydney Crosby instead, but it's hard not to like Ovie. He's a knucklehead, and that's basically my favorite part of hockey - the whole "I'm just a big fucking bearded longhaired lunkhead from somewhere far off your normal 3rd grade American history class map" aspect. Plus, they are not afraid to get physical and throw some 'bows if need be.
Don Cherry is a color commentator who often says stupid things and is very entertaining, sort of like Bob Uecker just punch drunker. Tiger Williams is an old dude who holds the all-time NHL record for penalty minutes. He got in more shit than anybody ever, and was proud of it, and is still around to tell ice war stories.
And while I cannot deny that Don Cherry is a great ambassador for his sport to drunken degenerates like myself, when I first got into hockey watching those Richmond Renegades, one of the main reasons was Trevor Senn, who was their team enforcer. Watching an enforcer on the ice instead of simply following the puck like they do on TV is a great joy, especially with a 16 ounce beer in your hand, and maybe a touch of psilocybin in your brain. So really, it is that type of player I am impressed by more than anything else.
Advantage: Tiger Williams (though I think it goes without saying that had Bob Probert not died this year, he would've smoked both of these dudes and pretty much anybody else in my stupid little Learned Elders internet hall of fame nonsense).
FIDEL CASTRO vs. KIM JONG IL
I have always been intrigued by dictators and fascists. The ability to have a cult of personality over a large group of people is quite an accomplishment in itself, but to then parlay that into a ruling position which shifts into authoritative domination that stifles all dissent, that's a serious ass parlay. You think about America and as fucked as we've been with our last few Presidents, all of whom have had the cult of personality, but no matter how much they secretly shift towards the authoritarian role, it never quite takes over. There's nothing special about America, except maybe we are a very diverse crop of humans, making it hard to get enough people in deified awe of someone to install them in absolute power over everybody else, fuck them if they disagree.
I think it is sad Kim Jong Il is not more hyped as some sort of alternative demented genius. I mean, I now the whole Might Could Start a Nuclear Confrontation thing is a drawback, and liberal hipster types, for as contrarian as they tend to be, don't necessarily like to endorse dictators. But the whole Kim Jong Il (and his father before him) saga in North Korea is crazy, regardless of the propaganda machine that might prop it. (Which can we trust that anyways since it is our propaganda machine that tells us this happens?) But the guy has giant stadium performances with thousands upon thousands of people, just for him. Like the seats are full of performers who turn over cards at the appropriate time to create giant pictures. And he kidnaps actresses and actors to force them to make films for him. I don't know if there has ever been an evil dictator type with such an artphag bent before, and frankly, I find it very very impressive.
Ol' Fidel on the other hand, is old school. He's a baseball player who decided to overthrow a government, and has never really stepped down ever since. A simple guy, no one can accuse him of squandering his country's wealth, as he's not kicking it in gold necklaces on yachts. Dude has worn nothing but olive drab military gear for decades, ever since he hung up the baseball spikes. He's rocked the utilitarian communist beard for that time as well, and although yeah, communism is evil, whatever, there are some things that make it not seem so bad. Cuba has the lowest illiteracy rate in the world (well it did at one time when I read that, so it just stays true in my brain) as well as a very low infant mortality rate. It's a beautiful Caribbean country, and no one I've ever read about going there outside of the tourist areas has not been overwhelmed with what a beautiful and simple place it is. Making lemonade out of lemons. They can't get new cars from America (embargoing assholes) so all those old 1950s bombers are still puttering down the streets.
Who's to say simple is bad? Think about the high tech modernization going on at Guatanamo, where American authorities have taken the Arabs they've kidnapped to torture and detain until they reveal whatever it is they are supposed to know. Not to mention the fact the U.S. government beams constant propaganda via radio waves from that little corner of Cuba as well at the Cuban people.
To be honest, I'd rather sit around a picnic table and listen to old men play guitars and we all drive ratty old cars and we all drink cheap gutrot liquor and we are poor but we are happy and all our wives have big asses that bounce in the moonlight when we do it from behind on our simple beds with no screens in the open windows so you might get a mosquito bite or two than fucking think about torture and detainment and idealogical wars and all that crap. I mean, we're storing prisoners of our current idealogical war on a carjacked corner of an island that we've had a long-running idealogical war with. It's fucking crazy. And I know I'm simplifying things somewhat, but still. The motherfuckers shooting the propaganda at me and you through Time magazine and the cable news and Executive Orders, they simplify it all far worse than I do.
Advantage: Fidel Castro.
VINCENTE PIERRE vs. WHITEY BULGER
A battle between the criminal element, though very different types.
Vincente Pierre is an accused black Muslim terrorist who started an Islamic trailer park community in Charlotte County, Virginia, not too far from where I grew up - between where my mom lives in Meherrin and my one sister lives in Clarksville. They got busted for some sort of weapons violations, and it turned out that Pierre had multiple wives, most likely, in his rural southside Virginia trailer park compound, plus underground tunnels and all sorts of other crazy militiaman stuff that would make my dead daddy proud, except that it was black Muslims. The crazy thing is right down the road from my mom's house, and actually now on land that I used to wander as a kid and was once owned by my grandfather, a second community linked to this first one has sprouted up. They first started building it when I was in high school, but now it's full-blown, and they have some weird security force with a website that provides bodyguard services and computer security and all sorts of nefarious shit that you normally don't associate with a bunch of people that live in a trailer park in the middle of nowhere.
Whitey Bulger was a former boss of an Irish-American mob in Boston, and made hella money in all the normal mob ways - gambling, pussy, guns, and drugs. The thing that makes Whitey Bulger so awesome is he bolted in the mid-'90s when the DEA was about to come down on him, and has been a successful fugitive ever since. He's been on America's Most Wanted 15 times, and has often been seen around the world, though those sightings are not always verified. The last verified time anyone saw him was in London in 2002, though the FBI has chased after leads in Uruguay, Italy, and elsewhere since then. He is assumed to be alive and breathing still though, coming up on his 81st birthday next week. He is also considered the inspiration for Jack Nicholson's character in The Departed.
This is a hard one for me to choose. Pierre is more of a "protect your own" kind of guy who is building his own community separate from the world at large, while Bulger had that classic successful criminal Robin Hood element that had the poor people of Boston loving on him for how he protected the hood and gave out turkeys on Thanksgiving. And frankly, you have to wonder if Bulger is still alive, although I doubt the FBI would still be putting resources towards him if he weren't.
At the same time, I've been reading the 120 Questions from Fard Muhammad and Elijah Muhammad a lot lately, although mostly to lead myself back to Clarence 13X and the Nations of Gods and Earths more than to get into Islam. The Nations of Gods and Earths really jibe me more than most religions, other than maybe Taoism, with a lot of mathematically based new age science and general wackiness that fucks with language and reality. I've been working on rewriting some texts to incorporate whiteys like myself into the whole 5% philosophy, because if you dig into what they're saying, and even a bit of what Clarence 13X preached, it wasn't black man as in literal black man so much as a black and white where the roles of good and evil were flipped off the standard Christian color scheme. You can be a black man in that sense but not have dark skin. But shit, in America we've complicated racial matters so goddamned much, I'd probably get stabbed if I tried to pull off some shit like that. Plus, Vincente Pierre and the other black Islamic trailer park down the road from my mom's, they're not Nation of Gods and Earths people, but straight up militant Muslim who are part of an Al-Fuqra anti-America campaign. Although I'm as anti-governmentarianism as anyone, so that's not an automatic x.
Advantage: Vincente Pierre (South Side Virginia, represent... and it is odd how Clarence 13X the founder of Nations of Gods and Earths was born in Danville, and this other stuff is happening in Charlotte and Prince Edward county... not to mention the first free black community in America was a place called Israel Hill just outside of Farmville; who knew I was born in the lap of so much culture? I thought it was just a rundown place where everybody became addicted to or sold different illicit things and had a hopeless outlook on the world).
DAVID SCHULTZ vs. TERRY FUNK
Ahh...the stupid professional wrestling. I got caught up in this nonsense too much as a kid, to the point now that I can have completely separate work and home personnas and it's not a problem for me compartmentalize it because it makes sense. That's been a big influence on my writing styles over the years too because I can very easily add a complete lie to something that's otherwise completely truthful so that there are people to this day who think I let a guy suck my dick in the bus station in St. Louis, Missouri, because I felt sorry for him.
David Schultz was basically Stone Cold Steve Austin back in the 1980s - a foul-minded, beer-drinking redneck dude who took no shit. Problem is, he was also an enforcer, and when John Stossel was doing a feature for 20/20 on how wrestling was fake (hard to believe that was actually a story, isn't it?), Vince McMahon told Schultz to rough him up or scare him or something, so Schultz, being the loveable guy he was, when asked if wrestling was fake, slapped the shit out of Stossel, asking him, "Does that feel fake?" Ultimately, John Stossel ended up deaf in that ear, sued WWF, and Schultz got blamed for it to cover their asses, fired, and blacklisted from wrestling. (Looking back though, what's really more sleazy - TV news programs like what Stossel does or pro wrestling? They're both so fucking nasty, and at least wrestling admits it's fake now. Having suffered through more than a few John Stossel pieces over the years where he throws out fear-inducing propaganda under the guise of actual information, I can't say I mind the fact he got deafened by David Schultz.) Post-wrestling, Schultz was a truck driver and then a bounty hunter, which when you think about some completely bad ass blonde afro having redneck dude from the '80s disappearing and then filling out his life through long hauling and hunting fugitives, that's a pretty tight storyline.
Terry Funk, on the other hand, may be the most amazingly fucked up yet beautiful professional wrestler there ever was. He dabbled in Hollywood for a while, both acting and doing stunts, after his first run as a World champion wrestler was winding down in the 1980s, yet came back as an old man who would bloody himself up in barbed wire matches. And listening to the guy talk, he is an amazing man. And crazy as fucking bat shit. Really, I just wanted to expound a little bit more on David Schultz before I just chose the Funker.
Advantage: Terry Funk.
GLEN STEWART GODWIN vs. NAZARIO MORENO
A cocaine criminal element showdown this time. Glen Stewart Godwin is a guy who in the early 1980s had absolutely no criminal history whatsoever. But it is believed he and a friend had planned to rob a drug dealer, and ended up killing the guy and burning the body in a truck to try and hide the evidence. He got sent to Folsom Prison, where he escaped in 1987, never to be caught. He ended up in Mexico, where he started selling cocaine, as a white guy, and got put in Mexican jail. American authorities were working to extradite him when Godwin stabbed and killed a Mexican cartel member in jail, which slowed down extradition proceedings. During this time, he escaped Mexican jail. Sadly, I do not know of any narcocorridos about Glen Stewart Godwin, although I guess it's only a matter of time before a white rapper takes that name as his own. The FBI put him on their most wanted list in 1996, and he's believed to still be active in the drug trade somewhere in Latin America. Or he might be at the bottom of a Mexican well. Hard to say.
Speaking of Mexican drug cartels, Nazario Moreno is the leader of La Familia, which is the cartel that has members carry the Bible with them, although Moreno has made his own translations of many parts. Basically they are a Christian cult drug cartel that murders motherfuckers in the process of selling drugs. The thing is, when they first started up, it was more as a protection against other drug cartels as a sort of vigilante police force for the poor, and they actually have more control over many of the cities in the Michoacan state than the government does. Moreno preaches that they have divine right to kill their enemies, and no member of the cartel is allowed to use drugs. Their philosophy is part evangelism and part up-with-the-people sloganeering, and Moreno gives out books as required reading to cartel members and even pays rural school teachers and government agencies to teach those books in schools in Michoacan. (Really, Mexico is straight fucked.) His nickname is Mas Loco, and La Familia trained alongside Los Zetas to be the paramilitary branches of drug cartels in the '90s, although both of have split off to become their own, mega-violent cartels.
And while I am interested in both of these guys, I can't help but think Godwin hasn't bitten it somewhere and no one will ever know because his body's been decomposed in a vat of acid by now. Plus, the mixing of religion and organized criminal activity has always seemed really intriguing to me. Religion is some serious shit, and yet we always fall for it as humans, even if the falling for it is that there is none and science is the one true answer for science is the only true religion.
Advantage: Nazario Moreno.
BLOWFLY vs. GABRIEL DUENEZ
Boy, I had not expected to write 3500 words on this shit today, but here I am. This last match-up for today is between a pair of fringe musical influences. Blowfly was an R&B singer and made adult-oriented party tapes wearing crazy costumes. Basically, he was the Ol' Dirty Bastard before there was one, just he wasn't addicted to crack, so far as I know. To be honest, I've never really listened to too much Blowfly because it's novelty music and you can't really get into it. There's plenty of music that I can dig on for real and not just to be like, "haha, check out what I'm listening to."
Gabriel Duenez, at this point in his life, is an air conditioner repairman in Houston, Texas. But back in the day, he used to make slowed down cumbia mixes he sold at the flea market in Monterrey, single-handedly creating cumbia rebajada, which is essentially screwed and chopped cumbia music, which sounds fucking fresh as shit. I love screwed music, and the percussion of cumbia music screwed is so perfectly tweaked, and the bass gets down to a nice steady hum, with ghostly spic vocals... man I wish this shit was on 7-inches and my jukebox was fixed because I'd just sit in the dark drinking cough medicine listening to that shit all night long.
But beyond that, a guy creating a musical genre that in the internet age would have gotten him a lot of non-moneyed blogospheric love, who did the same in the 1960s and sold a bunch of mixtapes at the Monterrey flea market, but now is a broke ass old man fixing air conditioners. There's something noble and pure about that. And perfect.
Advantage: Gabriel Duenez.
Weekly Recap
I haven't had anything to recap the past week or so, but this week I got back into the swing of football opinions for you. Namely, over at Armchair Linebacker, I had a lengthy and personalize write-up about the Albert Haynesworth/Mike Shanahan thing going on with the Redskins. Additionally, starting next week, I'll be covering the NFL at Heavy, which has some questionable content, which means I'll probably fit in well there.
Additionally, the Florida Heat Wave collection of which I have a story in is actually available now (here it is at Amazon, or direct from the publisher).
Additionally, the Florida Heat Wave collection of which I have a story in is actually available now (here it is at Amazon, or direct from the publisher).
J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - June '10 #1: "Grown Man" by Jhi Ali
Huntsville, Alabama's rap scene is much hyped as the next big thing, which is ridiculous on two fronts. First off, if you haven't been paying attention, there is no such thing as a next big thing in the music industry anymore. Dudes are lucky to sell 50,000 CDs/downloads anymore. The game has simply changed. Secondly, Huntsville, Alabama's rap scene is already big, like huge, full of all sorts of quality artists, usually revolving around the Slow Motion Soundz studio, and them motherfuckers are already getting to do things like go to Norway for tours or constantly book shows throughout what's left of the Chitlin Circuit that hasn't been shut down by the cops. Plus, the internet jocks the fuck out of them, which I'm sure means mad college girl punani.
Most of the hype started with the Paper Route Gangstaz when that Diplo dude "remixed" their Fear & Loathing in Hunts Vegas mixtape, although if you hear a lot of the originals, there wasn't a whole ton of remixing being done. They already had a weird old pop music sample-based sound going on that was kind of like screwed music but more for pillheads. As the internet jocking of PRGz spread, there are always those down ass expert whiteboys who have to be ahead of the curve, and know more about something than anyone else, and those types have been jocking G-Side, especially ST 2 Lettaz and the Huntsville International mixtape. This is fine, because it's good music, and I'll be honest, I still bump the fuck out of that Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas mixtape, which I consider to be one of the best shits to come out in years... way better than this Lil Wayne or Drake bullshit people act like is great. Then again I'm more of a take a pill, crack a double deuce, and ride around in an old car for about four hours straight type of guy, so it fits my stroll.
The thing I've noticed though is, by far, my favorite rapper from the Huntsville scene is Jhi Ali. That "Alabama" song off the Hunts Vegas tape is The Fucking Shit. Plus, he drops a tight verse on the "Rollin'" song by Jackie Chain (best Azn rapper alive!), and generally just has a fucked up voice like Lil Boosie, but raps about way different shit... basically being a country ass black dude who loves pussy and money and the country. I'm not black, but goddamnit ain't no doubt I love the country and I love pussy and I really don't mind money, though I don't want it to rule my life, even though it do.
This song is off a Slow Motion Sounds comp called V.S.O.P. III, and it's the greatest motherfucking inspirational self-motivation song to ever be made in the rap music. Seriously. Forget those corny ass old school '80s songs or that fucking Nas song where the kindergarteners were all talking about knowing they can. This is the type of shit you can wake up with in the morning, pump on the shitty boom box in the bathroom as you brush your teeth with the same ratty fucking toothbrush you've had for a year and a half, look in the mirror, seeing the cracks in the wall behind you and the mildewed shower curtain and the uneven paint job, and be like, "Yeah, I'm gonna be the bestest Raven Mack that I can be." And then you go out and do what you do.
Seriously, self help too often is out of touch with those that need help. I ain't trying to hear about no Jesus bullshit or learn how frybread and pork chops is going to kill me. Self-helping other types are starting by trying to hit a half court skyhook when they need to start with lay-ups. Roll up to dudes and be chill and be like, "Be what you can. Shit is fucked, no doubt. Try to make it a little less fucked every now and then. Can I hold a dollar, bro?" Often times the reality of life is all too real, and when outsiders roll in with these This Is How You Fix It mantras, it just pisses everybody off. Hell, that's why Africa is so fucked up to this day. People don't think, "Hey, let's try to make Africa not so fucked up a little bit." They think, "Oh they got AIDS and they got genocide, let's sell a bunch of goddamned red clothes at the mall and throw money into the air and feel better about ourselves."
I am veering off the point of "Grown Man" pretty far, but I would like to brag upon the fact that my 11-year-old daughter's favorite rap song has been this song for a while too. She also likes that "Alabama" song a lot, though "Stuntastic" was her jam off Fear & Loathing in Hunts Vegas mixtape. Man, one day she's going to read Hunter S. Thompson and have friends who smoke weed and just become more hip to it all and she's going to figure me out. Shall I deny it like most parents, or act like it was different when I did it because I did it, not her? I don't know. Fuck it. Parenting is more about figuring it out as you go than knowing what's right or wrong to do. Most of those fuckers who know what's right or wrong to do are the same types buying red sweat shirts thinking it will help Africa not have AIDS no more.
So basically it's a world full of fuckers, and I enjoy the fact Huntsville, Alabama, is making so much goddamned good music nowadays, to where if you've never heard of it, there's seriously an entire back catalog of awesome music you could dig into for months and months. And nobody knows about it. Which is good. Because if it became the Next Big Thing as in opening for Lady Gaga and Kanye West and eventually headlining their own stadium brouhahas, it would no longer be what it is - which is pure and organic as fuck (organic meaning it came about naturally, not it's sterilized of pesticides, because there's crazy pesticidal homicidal suicidal bullshit in nature) and perfect just the way it is. Were my two turntables and mixer and USB connector and 4-track not in a pile in the camper trailer underneath some stuff we moved out the front room of the house, I'd do a Huntsville sampler for your ass. But as it is, the clutter of my life will force me to share my words and this single link of a song that I think is the motherfuckin' shit for you to pilfer from inside the robot race and try to find some human soul twinkle in your very own personal all too real life. God bless you bros and sisses.
STEAL "Grown Man"
NEXT MONTH: Last month!
Friday, August 27
The Learned Elders of Rojonekku Process Initiation
There are plenty of Halls of Fame in this world, where someone or some entity decides who is the absolute ultimate of some sort of specific genre of human being, and there will be plenty more, especially with the internet age, where everyone is an expert on everything. When I had my old Confederate Mack website, there was a Hall of Fame on there, and the funny thing is, about half the people that ended up being in it, I probably don't even think half as highly of anymore. But being I am full of shit, and inside the internet, I can't stop myself from trying to make something similar, with my own crooked bend to it.
A few years back, I had conjured up this plan to have a panel of people whose opinions I didn't hate to build a list of the 500 Most Aweswome (although awesome isn't the best word for it) Living Human Beings on the Earth, with them all having to still be alive. And I actually started the process a number of times, but it'd always get hung up on whatever method I established with all my nonsense parameters because something would go wrong. It was too much to try and do. I still find stacks of notecards every now and then with names of famous people and oddballs and freaks and strangers listed on them. I keep all my old notecards to use the backsides, and then the empty spaces, and it ends up like a graffiti wall just with one bad handwriting tagging it all up.
Well, in that time since the Confederate Mack site died, I started taking in delinquent and wayward teenagers and teaching them bullshit I had gleaned from older redneck dudes back in southside Virginia as well as from reading way too many used book store kung fu ninja manuals. That's actually what the Rojonekku name came from, as I dreamed about a handwritten manual with that on the top of every page that had detailed notes of all the kids who had come through my back roads training camp, years upon years of this shit. And it was just a dream, but about half of what I saw written has come to be.
What this has all built up to is I wanted to create a collection of humans to look up to, the Learned Elders of Rojonekku, for these kids, some of whom still under my thumb but many have ridden Greyhound buses to strange places in Arizona, Montana, southern Indiana, New Hampshire, three of them outside of Cornelia, Georgia, two in the Flomaton, Alabama/Century, Florida area, plus assorted others who went this place or that but ain't heard from but every so often, and usually they're another four or five states in an opposite direction from the last time I heard from them. Hell, one of them lives in some place in Canada called Medicine Hat. But we keep in touch, usually through post office boxes, and I've wanted to create a collection of living human beings to be considered a sort of Hall of Fame of Humanity, but only comprised of the living.
Well, what I've decided to do - and let me just say up front that this is a completely ridiculous and overblown notion of mine - is slowly build up through my standard convoluted mathematically stifled process, a collection of the Learned Elders of Rojonekku, ultimately consisting of 100 people.
But of course, knowing that my impressions and opinions change like anything of a natural order does, I can't just pick out 100 people and leave it at that. So what I've decided to do is every six months, go through a long-winded and unnecessary process of elimination where 80 hand-picked individuals are whittled down to a final five that go into the Learned Elders of Rojonekku. I do this every six months for ten years, and if no one dies (highly unlikely), then I have my list of 100. And of course people will die, so after that point, I'll just repeat the process every six months to fill at the most five empty spots. Hopefully, at some point, I can hand this project off to one of the past kids who've come through Rojonekku training, either here in the camper or over in Schuyler where we have four trailers back in the woods on some property a friend of my dad's has access to that nobody really claims otherwise in his family, yet somehow somebody's paying the taxes on it.
So just to lay it all out, here's how the process will go each time through. I'll start with 80 individuals of various types, and face them off, one-on-one, matching up people with similar backgrounds or infamies or whatever. Those will go down to 40, which will be rematched up in one-on-one semi-appropriate match-ups, to go down to 20; and then 20 to 10. Those final ten will match-up again to go down to a final five, all of whom will be inducted into the list of Learned Elders of Rojonekku. Will it mean anything to them? Of course not. Most likely none of them will ever know. Most likely nobody else will care. But I'm gonna do it, just because.
Those that get inducted into the list, I'll try to write up some sort of small biography of them to throw together on this here useless ass blog, as well as to print in a zine format to mail out to all the Rojonekku boys. Those are the ones that I really want to entertain with all this anyways. Hopefully all those boys in all those far-flung places they settled will start their own little back roads training camps, and it'll spread, little by little. And all the unwanted teenage kids who end up under these various training regimens will have our list of Learned Elders, and a handful of crinkled little zines to hand around and read and brainwash themselves with in emulation. Kids need great elders to emulate. We don't respect those who have conquered cultural quandaries before us like we should.
Why do I feel compelled to do such things? Only God knows why, yet I am God manifest upon this Earth, not a sign of self-deification but we all have that potential and all too often choose to cloud it up with electronic muck and material chains. Let these Learned Elders we eventually cipher from the billions of beings scampering across the surface of this Earth rock be representatives of the Godliness inside us all.
A few years back, I had conjured up this plan to have a panel of people whose opinions I didn't hate to build a list of the 500 Most Aweswome (although awesome isn't the best word for it) Living Human Beings on the Earth, with them all having to still be alive. And I actually started the process a number of times, but it'd always get hung up on whatever method I established with all my nonsense parameters because something would go wrong. It was too much to try and do. I still find stacks of notecards every now and then with names of famous people and oddballs and freaks and strangers listed on them. I keep all my old notecards to use the backsides, and then the empty spaces, and it ends up like a graffiti wall just with one bad handwriting tagging it all up.
Well, in that time since the Confederate Mack site died, I started taking in delinquent and wayward teenagers and teaching them bullshit I had gleaned from older redneck dudes back in southside Virginia as well as from reading way too many used book store kung fu ninja manuals. That's actually what the Rojonekku name came from, as I dreamed about a handwritten manual with that on the top of every page that had detailed notes of all the kids who had come through my back roads training camp, years upon years of this shit. And it was just a dream, but about half of what I saw written has come to be.
What this has all built up to is I wanted to create a collection of humans to look up to, the Learned Elders of Rojonekku, for these kids, some of whom still under my thumb but many have ridden Greyhound buses to strange places in Arizona, Montana, southern Indiana, New Hampshire, three of them outside of Cornelia, Georgia, two in the Flomaton, Alabama/Century, Florida area, plus assorted others who went this place or that but ain't heard from but every so often, and usually they're another four or five states in an opposite direction from the last time I heard from them. Hell, one of them lives in some place in Canada called Medicine Hat. But we keep in touch, usually through post office boxes, and I've wanted to create a collection of living human beings to be considered a sort of Hall of Fame of Humanity, but only comprised of the living.
Well, what I've decided to do - and let me just say up front that this is a completely ridiculous and overblown notion of mine - is slowly build up through my standard convoluted mathematically stifled process, a collection of the Learned Elders of Rojonekku, ultimately consisting of 100 people.
But of course, knowing that my impressions and opinions change like anything of a natural order does, I can't just pick out 100 people and leave it at that. So what I've decided to do is every six months, go through a long-winded and unnecessary process of elimination where 80 hand-picked individuals are whittled down to a final five that go into the Learned Elders of Rojonekku. I do this every six months for ten years, and if no one dies (highly unlikely), then I have my list of 100. And of course people will die, so after that point, I'll just repeat the process every six months to fill at the most five empty spots. Hopefully, at some point, I can hand this project off to one of the past kids who've come through Rojonekku training, either here in the camper or over in Schuyler where we have four trailers back in the woods on some property a friend of my dad's has access to that nobody really claims otherwise in his family, yet somehow somebody's paying the taxes on it.
So just to lay it all out, here's how the process will go each time through. I'll start with 80 individuals of various types, and face them off, one-on-one, matching up people with similar backgrounds or infamies or whatever. Those will go down to 40, which will be rematched up in one-on-one semi-appropriate match-ups, to go down to 20; and then 20 to 10. Those final ten will match-up again to go down to a final five, all of whom will be inducted into the list of Learned Elders of Rojonekku. Will it mean anything to them? Of course not. Most likely none of them will ever know. Most likely nobody else will care. But I'm gonna do it, just because.
Those that get inducted into the list, I'll try to write up some sort of small biography of them to throw together on this here useless ass blog, as well as to print in a zine format to mail out to all the Rojonekku boys. Those are the ones that I really want to entertain with all this anyways. Hopefully all those boys in all those far-flung places they settled will start their own little back roads training camps, and it'll spread, little by little. And all the unwanted teenage kids who end up under these various training regimens will have our list of Learned Elders, and a handful of crinkled little zines to hand around and read and brainwash themselves with in emulation. Kids need great elders to emulate. We don't respect those who have conquered cultural quandaries before us like we should.
Why do I feel compelled to do such things? Only God knows why, yet I am God manifest upon this Earth, not a sign of self-deification but we all have that potential and all too often choose to cloud it up with electronic muck and material chains. Let these Learned Elders we eventually cipher from the billions of beings scampering across the surface of this Earth rock be representatives of the Godliness inside us all.
J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - June '10 #2: "Should I Stay Or Should I Go" by The Clash
It is perhaps a testament to the type of person I somehow grew up to be that my absolute favorite thing to do is sort through the bags of dumpster produce to put into various five-gallon buckets for my pigs and chickens. The Chinese restaurant beside the Food Lion I used to hit hard has been closed, which means their back kitchen door is not open, exposing my dumpster digging ass to to the skinny China kid washing dishes who probably could give half a fuck anyways. But I prefer to not be seen.
But with the back door shut, the dumpsters have been prime territory, to where I didn't even take all I could the past two days because yesterday I felt guilty and today a fat chick who works at the Subway came out to smoke a cigarette. In the Food Lion itself was a funny scene because the assistant manager is very obviously an aging (around my age) wigger dude who settled down into a job. He has the haircut and demeanor of a guy that loves black chicks and probably still plays pick-up basketball weekly, at least during basketball season, and I always worry about him catching me in the dumpsters because he's like the only person I've ever seen working at a grocery store I think could kick my ass. Today, I get in a line, and two spots in front of me is a sister with two kids buying a whole shitload of groceries, and the wigger assistant manager dude comes over to help her get stuff out, making small talk. She's got both her kids names tattooed down her arms in really ghetto ass india ink style, and he's just talking away, loading her groceries. "You need help taking these out to the car?" and she's like, "No," and he's like, "I'm a big boy, I can help," but she's having none of it. He walks off and the girl behind the register rolls her eyes and rings me up and I go outside and pilfer their dumpsters.
But at home, truck bed full of produce, most all of it about 90% fresh, with like one bad spot, sorting it out, giving it to our pigs or the cantaloupes and some grapes and some lettuces to the chickens, my youngest two like to get in the back of the truck and help sort through the shit. I usually won't take them with when I'm dumpster diving because, I mean, fuck. I guess societal norms weight too heavily on me and make me feel like it's a bad move. My oldest goes, but she's getting near 12 and is on that her-own-thing trip, although she ain't.
This song made my countdown not because I give half a fuck about it, but because my oldest - Gypsy - loves The Clash, and she plays the fuck out of this song, and we share an Itunes for our gaypods, though I do not technically know if her's is a gaypod yet. She asked me to put it on mine long enough for it to make my stupid monthly list, because she knows I write about the top 13 songs each month. She doesn't know where, or what I write, but she knows I do it, and she enjoys tinkering with my madness and forcing me to recognize "Should I Stay or Should I Go". Personally, The Clash has never spoken to me like it does some people, and I could probably whittle my whole desire to listen to them down to about six or seven songs, most of which would come from London Calling, but I'm biased because I read a Penthouse Letter when I was like 14 where some dude hooked up with two chicks listening to that and it having perfect timing with the fucking.
Anyways, my oldest has an email and is going to set up a facebook account, and on one hand that shit creeps me the fuck out because I know how the internet be, but on the other hand, what the fuck can I do? Probably one of the most shocking things she'll come across at some point is the endless amounts of ridiculous nonsense I've written over the years.
Well Gypsy, if you make it to this, you are a damn chill kid. And yes, your father is a ridiculous freak. Which is why you will be too. Sorry about that. The quicker you embrace it, the quicker you can fine tune it to your liking or try to minimize the damage done and go to college to learn physics and master time travel.
STEAL "Should I Stay Or Should I Go"
NEXT UP: My most favoritest of all Hunstville rap songs!
Thursday, August 26
Wednesday, August 25
Tuesday, August 24
d o d g b
my dad's old work truck, liftgate
like magic for my five-year-old
mind, rusts away on third street
Monday, August 23
Friday, August 20
Thursday, August 19
b o x b b
plywood caboose trapped in grass;
steel wheels that crossed many roads
buried five fading inches
Wednesday, August 18
Tuesday, August 17
Monday, August 16
Sunday, August 15
J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - June '10 #3: "Virginia Back Roads" by Prolo
This is a Prolo song that would be on a new collection of songs if we ever did a new collection of song, that is nothing but the instrumental to “Cadillac on 22s” slowed down with me and Mike Gee freestyling about family life on it. Boogie Brown laced it with the bluegrass two-part harmonics on the chorus, and oddly enough, I heard of some country ass dudes somewhere or another in rural Virginia who were like, “This is how this beat was meant to be done.” I love shit like that. I’ve heard of dudes who play horseshoes in the Shenandoah mountains or hillbilly ass redneck hippie types down around West Virginia or the hopeless but loveable lifetime stoners of my hometown rocking the Prolo. I don’t know why I’m all wrapped up in this cyber-bullshit. I should just be drinking beer with anybody and everybody from Amelia County to Buggs Island, from where I-85 near Emporia slices the right end of southside of Virginia from the soulless flypaper of Tidewater all the way down to the southwest jut of the Old Dominion spooning up against wild and wonderful West Virginia, from 15 south of Charlottesville to 5 miles north of Danville, and just freestyling my whole fucking life away. I was getting ready to type, “wouldn’t nobody know me,” thinking in the larger sense of the whole wide world, but actually a whole lot more people would know me. In real life is underrated.
STEAL "Virginia Back Roads"
NEXT UP: My daughter’s ipod makes a power move!
Saturday, August 14
J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - June '10 #4: "Workin' At The Car Wash Blues" by Jim Croce
My folks played Jim Croce. I pretended to read a book that didn't exist for an autobiography book report in high school about Jim Croce. He is played regularly in my house as a grown folk to this day. That is one chill ass dude who made some real ass music, even if it was folksy and AM radio-ey. I sometimes wonder what went wrong with us as a people to where kids don't have blonde hair like used to did in the '70s, and guys can't grow bushy mustaches like back then either. It is said that humans have a lot of the immunity inside their hair follicles, thus the story of Samson (as well as that bitch Delilah) is not so far-fetched. We wear strange hair nowadays, with dudes purposely rocking cybertronic close cut beard designs and women shaving their cooches bare. Hell, even dudes shave themselves. Seems we are reverting to our childhood, like any lost ass adult with mental issues. Right now, we have ebay to buy all the dumb shit from our childhood and fill those empty gaps, but our kids, they won’t grow up with the same shit to look back on. What are they gonna buy? Obsolete smartphones? Old gaming systems? Lolcat emails?
Whenever I ride by the car wash, whatever car wash, I see those dudes working and I real that there’s some real dudes. They are not fucking around online and they ain’t checking their emails twice an hour much less having them zapped directly at them through their robot phones to where they are playing space invaders all the goddamned time, putting callouses on their thumbs from rubbing across their tiny button pads too furiously. At times, I feel like, “fuck it, I’m getting ahead in life,” and other times I feel like life is getting ahead of me. But it’s like a long distance trip where you’re four states from home on the way back in your daily car, and maybe you can sense you’re low on oil or something. Something’s not quite right, you can feel it, even though there’s no obvious light saying, “Yo, shit ain’t right, homeslice.” And you know something’s not right; but you don’t know what. So you just try to make it home. That’s where I’m at, waiting to figure out what the problem might be, riding along on cruise control, thinking I might’ve took the wrong exit 60 miles back, but I don’t have a map. How the fuck does everybody get to where they’re going? Seems like everybody else got given a map but I didn’t.
Eventually, I figure, something will either get completely fucked in my ride, like I’ll get skin cancer or shot in the shoulder or something, and it’s like the car breaking down on the side of the road. You know everything’s screwed for sure at that point so there’s nothing left to do but call AAA and hope your alzheimer’s ridden mother-in-law accidentally renewed your membership. Or you limp home, and it still doesn’t feel right in the car, it’s just not going the way you feel it should, and nothing happens but then it breaks down on the side of the road on like a Tuesday afternoon. You figure out the problem and hitchhike home and fix it on Wednesday morning, or at least get it running again, and life goes on.
I don’t really know what the fuck my point is other than I feel like about 200,000 miles without an oil change for the last 15,000. Sometimes I can sit there and understand how people flip out and stab motherfuckers in batches or dive off the top of buildings with a half-gainer into concrete wasteland ten stories below. Jim Croce is like a goddamned tincture that eases my chronic internal struggle. He’s working at the car wash, and it sucks, because he wants an office with a desk and a secretary, but he’s just working at the goddamned piece of shit car wash. But hey, fuck it you know. Everybody’s got a struggle in they brain of one variety or another.
That’s the goddamned beauty of music - you can be sure emotionally of whatever it is that is overriding your every waking thought, but then just the right song will come on and twist it all - the whole wide earth and everything that happened to you, today and forever - into a completely different angle, and it’s okay. You drink a beer and figure tomorrow’s gonna be another day, and you can get up and catch a ride to where the car is broken down on the side of the road, and you’ll figure out with the help of your Haynes manual how the fuck to replace the starter solenoid, which for some reason is behind the engine block. And then you’ll be moving along again, maybe looking like more of a piece of shit than everything else moving along, with your busted grill and dented passenger side and one fender a different color than the rest. But you’re still moving, and though you probably won’t ever get to where you thought you were gonna go when young and smooth-skinned and with big wide eyes full of trust and optimism, you’re still moving. You piece of shit.
STEAL "Workin' At The Car Wash Blues"
NEXT UP: Me and Mike Gee getting down in the camper!
Friday, August 13
Weekly Recap
So I contribute to a couple of other blogs sporadically, and kinda realize I'm a piece of shit who doesn't have the focus or mind freedom to contribute anything better to this world than half-retarded well-worded ridiculous opinions, most likely featuring some sort of libel or conjecture or outright lie, and I figured a good thing to do, rather than copy all those posts here, would be to - on Friday mornings - bust a post with links to all that other dumb shit. This would be the first one, and perhaps the last knowing my moody ass.
From the new TV Makes You Retarded blog - a recap/mind meander of The Corner miniseries' first episode
and the second episode
From Armchair Linebacker pro football blog (where I write about the Washington Redskins) - A New Season Dawns
Plus, there is the Florida Heat Wave anthology of short stories I am in that will be coming out this month. You can get that inside the internets or even win an unedited preview copy in this thing.
From the new TV Makes You Retarded blog - a recap/mind meander of The Corner miniseries' first episode
and the second episode
From Armchair Linebacker pro football blog (where I write about the Washington Redskins) - A New Season Dawns
Plus, there is the Florida Heat Wave anthology of short stories I am in that will be coming out this month. You can get that inside the internets or even win an unedited preview copy in this thing.
Wednesday, August 11
J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - June '10 #5: "It's Alright In The City" by Sonny Charles
A dude I was in second grade with who played second base on my first ever little league team where I played centerfield (and rocked the pure blonde shaggy hair like a Bad News Bear, because kids still had blonde hair back then since there wasn’t so much fluoride in the public drinking water), he moved away, and we both grew up and did our things, but his thing ended up being some wacky world music with electronic influence DJ living in Brooklyn like three billion other hipster people ended up congregating upon. He made a mix of songs, including a couple of his own, and his worldwide megamix was good shit, yes indeed, like anything I’d find inside the internets where there’s some stuff I love and some stuff I could care less about and it’s all mixed together but it’s all MP3s that get cobbled together into a disorderly fashion on my desktop Itunes into a complete fucking mess because that’s the only way I can handle moving through life, with chaos and clutter and debt. Yets, my old world chaos, wanting a simpler bullshit life, hopefully pockmarked with as much idle time to imbibe my mind’s obsessions as it is with smallpox and plague, is better than new world order. My clutter is a creative junkman feng shui, and when done right gives me power. The trick is to burn the house down or move every 8 years or so, to keep it from taking over. And fuck it, mired in debt means I’m still not starving and still not dead and still not living in a trash heap (well, that one could depend on perspective) and not starving to fucking death, not even to dying. My slow death is a mental torture, and god blessed are those who have enough leisure in their life to pretend their complete mental happiness is the top order of the day.
Well, old school second grade second baseman DJ Brad Loving hooked up this megamix, and one song in particular became the greatest song I had ever heard in my whole cursed yet blessed life, and it was this song. I played in five thousand times over a month, annoyed my wife, got my oldest child to like it then hate it and made my youngest children dance to it when all they wanted to hear was “Jump Around” by House of Pain fourteen times in a row with a couple Taylor Swift songs mixed in the middle somewhere. So now I share with you. And DJ Brad Loving’s site is some wacky name, like elephantsandbeer or flightandmorningtime or something, but you could probably google him and find it. Actually it’s birdandwhale.com I think, and normally I would make a little bracketed part here to remind myself to insert the hypalink, and then forget to pay attention to the bracket, so the post would look all stupid. Or stupider. If you want to find it, you can. This is the internet; you know how shit works by now.
STEAL "It's Alright In The City"
NEXT UP: Oh man, me and Jim Croce!
Tuesday, August 10
J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - June '10 #6: "Danny's Song (live)" by Loggins & Messina
Loggins & Messina’s double live LP On Stage (double LP that was recorded live, not they cloned themselves into two Kenny Logginses and two Jim Messinas) is the stupidest, gayest, most easy listening AM radio bullshit that I swear is awesome as fuck. This is a good example of why people born before 1980 should not have the internets. Or maybe they should make separate internets for different aged people, kinda like how different countries have different shit. I work with a China lady now and I have her look things up for me in her China internet because sometimes it’s there. I mean, you’re not gonna find the soundtrack to The Warriors movie in China internet, but you can find Mexican murder magazines there that are non-existent in American internet. You’d be surprised how much stuff they don’t allow in America internets, as would I, because I don’t see it either. Makes you wonder about all the conspiracies that are allowed, as well as all the porn that’s everywhere.
By the way, I have suspected they’ve actually fired up the HAARP beam the past few months, but perhaps I will save that for tomorrow’s ramble, as I don’t want to ruin the perfect feel good groove that Jimmy Messina and Kenworth Loggins put together with their band of friends and this lovely little song for you to live with a woman and cook potatoes and eggs and bacon on a Sunday morning and go to the paper box in your boxer shorts to get the Sunday paper and you read about football and she does the crossword and you come together at the style section and goddamn it they don’t even make newspapers in this country anymore. No wonder we are all fucked.
STEAL "Danny's Song"
NEXT UP: Even obscure black people have a great sense of rhythm!
Monday, August 9
J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - June '10 #7: "Thunderstorms And Neon Signs" by Hank Williams III
It is already August and I’m still working my way through the second half of my June list. This stupid fucking blog has started to emulate how I pay my bills. Note the donation paypal bullshit in the right sidebar, if not now then never. I do not pretend I am the brokest, because I have things. They are broken and pieced back together on a regular basis, but newer than nothing, that is for sure. All in all, I know I have it good, but I also am an American so I’m not even floating water anymore financially. Ultimately, that’s probably a good thing. We’ve all been cattle, munching the fuck out of grass, and they kept giving us bigger pastures to chew on, but then all of a sudden they ran out of fertilizer so the grass is all brown and fucked up, but they’re like, “COME ON YOU STUPID FUCKING COWS! EAT! EAT!” And I just kinda stumble through my days, making minimum payments, hoping it all works out before I am dead, which it won’t, but that don’t matter because I’ll be gone. Y’all have a bonfire and throw me in the middle and tap a keg and let the backyard speaker play until Sunday morning.
Much like Tricephus, I share a name with the two previous paternal branches of the family tree. In my fam, at least up to my grandfather (who I never knew before he was dead), we shared the same first and last name and had different middle names, which is why I’ve been called Raven my whole life, because that was my middle and my dad already pissed all over the Charles to mark his territory. Both grandpa and my dad were chronic alcoholics who died before the age of 50. I am different, because I am of a generation where when someone says “chronic alcoholic” I use a cartooney stoner voice to go “ah ha ha... tha chronic,” and make light of the situation. If all you know is the stupid fucking dark, and it scares you, usually the best way to deal is to make light. Make light all the fucking time. Nothing can ever be serious, because life is too short. Literally for many of us.
STEAL "Thunderstorms And Neon Signs"
NEXT UP: Mellow AM radio sounds, because music was meant to be mono!
Sunday, August 8
J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - June '10 #8: "It'll Shine When It Shines" by Ozark Mountain Daredevils
This may be the most loungin’ ass album ever, and this song fucking rules. For those of you who dabbled in listening to Solaris Earth Pipeline, you will recognize an unslowed down vocal sample from this song. Funny this song comes up the day after “Wildwood Flower” because it is the Ozark Mountain Daredevils’ most famous song “If You Wanna Get To Heaven” that Jesco busts out 42 of his 47 flat footing moves to in that drunken hills of West Virginia documentary. Oddly enough, being a dude who has stole every fucking album the Ozark Mountain Daredevils has ever made from inside the internet’s vast vagina wasteland of pilfered products and porn viruses, I can say without a doubt, don’t fucking bother with anything else they ever did. You can get that one “If You Wanna Get To Heaven” song if you’re some sort of ironic retro PBR fuckface who needs a psych-up song to look in the mirror to while you get ready to go hang out at a co-worker’s instrumental metal for college graduates who own their own fringe construction-oriented specialty companies band’s show later tonight. But if you’re a real dude who lives in a rural place who likes to fight chickens and watch junk cars rust and fuck the ol’ lady on the picnic table under a new moon, then this song is the title song off the only album you’ll ever need, really, for the rest of your life. I’d say in a perfect world you could buy it on tape off ebay and then play it on a boombox with like 12 D batteries until they start to slow down and it warbles to about the speed that sounds right, but maybe not, so you take out the batteries and put them back in in a different order and that makes it play right for another four minutes.
STEAL "It'll Shine When It Shines"
NEXT UP: Born to get dizzy, baby; born to get dizzy!
Saturday, August 7
J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - June '10 #9: "Wildwood Flower 11" by David Grisman & Tony Rice
My chicken flock has changed drastically recently, after the new dogs ate up a few of them. I had an americauna rooster, australorp hen, buff orpington hen, and simple assed RIR hen left, so found a lady on craigslist that sold me alleged hens at $5 a pop, that were a few weeks away from laying. I got 3 white leghorns, 3 RIRs, and a buff orp for good measure, and rode to my mom's house from scenic shitty Cumberland County, Virginia, to chat up my mom, commiserate on our miserable mentality in this crooked ass world, and then ride home, putting the crate with the new hens on the freezer for the night with a dropcloth on top to keep the dogs from attacking them. Next day, mixed them in the flock, and new flock and old flock did not mix, as usual. Not even three days later though, one of the white leghorns got dragged out the coop at night, dead, trail of feathers into the woods. I patched up any noticeable holes in the fence, and went about my life. Next morning, again, another of the brand new motherfuckin’ five dollar white leghorns was dragged out, in the smallest of possible openings, making me suspect a weasel.
So I did weasel research online (which is how I ended up suspecting a weasel in the first place) and MacGyver-rigged the most ridiculous weasel trap ever, which consisted of an old vegetable box from dumpster diving with the two open handle parts, flipped over, with a tent tie-down rigged to have like three raw chicken livers hanging down, with two set rat traps (the big motherfuckin’ mouse trap things that will break your finger if you are not careful) that had chicken livers on them fuckers too, all held down with cinderblocks, figuring a weasel could only get in there, and I shut up the coop as well.
Next morning nothing, so I dismantled the weasel trap in a pair of cut-off pajama bottoms that look like a pair of desert island jamz shorts or some shit, before I took a shower to go to work, so fresh and so clean clean. That night, I realized it much easier to just CLOSE THE FUCKING COOP UP than to rig this nonsense contraption back together. So I started that method, even though it meant walking outside after dark and then as early as possible the next morning.
A few days later, my australorp was dead in the corner of the coop when I opened it up. No wounds, but in retrospect I suspect she was pecked to death. My retrospection was helped by the fact the elder buff orp was dead in the pen like two days later in the same way. I blamed my rooster, who had become sort of an asshole, and once the dogs attacked him and tore off his tail feathers, he wasn’t as cool looking, so fuck him. I found some buff orpington and cochin mixes on craigslist, in Buckingham County, for $5 a piece (everything in C-ville is like $10 a piece, because C-ville is bullshit, basically a giant country club for liberal people who can afford to feel righteous about they selves), and went to the lady’s house and dug birds out of trees, and drove them home, and then caught the rooster and put him in a crate. Next day, I gave him water, but he must have kicked it over because when I came home, he was dead. So I threw him to the pigs. Except he made a sound when he landed. I couldn’t handle the possibility of him being alive, so I bolted the fuck out of there and let what happened happen. When I went back, it was feathers strewn about and two smiling pigs rolling in mud, which reads like a metaphor for something but I’m too uninterested to figure it out.
You see, now I have ten birds, one of which is adult and laying one egg every other day, if we are lucky. The other nine are supposed to all be hens, and five of them should start laying soon, although one of the RIRs shows rooster aggression and has questionable tail feathers, and another one also has questionable tail feathers. So we will see. The buff orp/cochin gang of four usually hides out in the house because they seem to be oppressed for having feathers on their feet. Lately though they made themselves a nice dirt bath in the far corner of the pen. There are tons of cherry tomato plants around their pen from the last two runs I had their fencing up for and they spat out old cherry tomato seeds I guess, or shat them out or something, and tons of those little things rot on the vine because I’m the only one who eats them, so I toss them back in the run for the little fuckers, and they all freak out, and sometimes my lone leghorn flies out the corner of the bird netting roof and I have to spend twenty minutes herding his little dumb ass back into the coop/run.
But anyways, my whole point is I found some chicken nerd magazine at the library’s free bin, and most of it was dumb shit that had nothing to do with fighting roosters or how Sweater McGuinness first bred his gamecock sweater breeds while working on a farm in North Carolina in the 1930s, and that’s the same breed that wins a majority of cockfights in both the Philippines and Mexico to this day. But there was an aside about putting a couple tablespoons of apple cider vinegar into the water buckets of your birds, to keep it from getting all filthy, and to be healthy for they ass too. So I started doing that. Guess what? No more scrubbing pesticide run-off scum from the sides of their waterer when I have to refill it. Plus, they drink twice as much water because the apple cider touch is dope to them. I feel my flock, although not yet laying eggs, will be better than ever by the end of the month, and I fully expect seven or eight eggs a day.
Also, from researching Sweater McGuinness, I think I will utilize his breeding method with some chickens this winter with our two thousand pound chicken tractor that never gets moved. I’m gonna let some hens get broody and we’ll see what happens.
All of this has nothing to do with a song at all, of course, because my blog is all about nothing, except whatever. But this song is a different version of the one that Jesco White tells Wally to play, “With flair!” as he tap dances on plywood beside railroad tracks in that documentary you should already know about. It is a conflict in my life because I write words for plywood tapdancers alongside railroad tracks, but those people don’t read. So instead I write my dumb shit for computer people or the educated types who come from twisted angles, and it’s enjoyable enough I guess. But that ain’t my bloodstream. This is the conflict of my life. I could write 20,000 words a night, with flair, but I get caught up in the fact that who I’d be writing wouldn’t be who would read it, and ultimately I’d turn into a paperback version of those hillbilly teeth you get in gumball machines at the grocery store.
Oh well.
STEAL "Wildwood Flower 11"
NEXT UP: It’s like my mama said, you only live ‘til you’re dead!
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