Synergy is a too much thing sometimes. I had been stuck on holding pattern, with this the next song to write about, and had all these "crooked ass world spinning awkwardly" type things in my brain, but nothing forced itself out forever. But last week after I had hauled my two pigs into a rural butcherman to slaughter and slice into appropriate parts, I just kinda got stuck on sore and beaten by this world. Friday afternoon, I cut out of work early to go down to Buckingham County and get my animal parts. This butcherman dude was a real kook, so we talked shit around the bed of my truck for a while, including about how some of the ridiculously wealthy in our general area of the world were actually solid people, just rich as fuck. He said at one point, "He ain't nothin' but an ol' shoe like me or you." I had never been called an old shoe before.
So I had three full-sized coolers full of pig in the bed of my truck, two whole produce boxes full of it behind the seats in the cab, and two more produce boxes in the passenger seat, all of it wrapped up in butcherman paper, except the top box, which was the pork bellies for making bacon and the belly fat. I'd have to salt and sugar the bellies myself to baconify them, and the fat was gonna get cooked down to medicinal lard. (I like saying that because apparently there is such a thing as "medicinal lard" which my wife can sell for $15 a pint.) But riding back north 20 to Scottsville, with a giant box of meat seating directly and openly beside me, in fact from animals I had taken care of for the past 8 months, it was odd yet felt good. Then I plugged in the gaypod and hit play and "Synthetic World" came on. Perfect.
Then, yesterday as I waste my life with a job that does not feed me spiritually or creatively even slightly, I was poking around the interwebs and went to the Wigger Mortis blog, and C.T. there mentioned this very song and having discovered Swamp Dogg on my blog. Strange coincidences, as I'd been waiting to write about this stupid song for two weeks.
It also, however, reaffirmed something in my purranoid ass brain. There's a lot about the butcherman, as well as taking the pigs down there with the help of my neighbor, that I didn't feel like sharing with the interwebs, because this is a fake ass place (the interwebs) where people find salvation from their own social shortcomings. Except of course, this shortcoming philosophy becomes the mainstream and shit changes. You have Comic-con become part of regular news, and shit like that. For me though, I am still old school enough in that I think if it is something you could not stand around the back of a truck and proudly talk about to solid bros of your's, then you should never take pride in it. This means the 7 Real Dolls or collection of 4000 Japanese wrestling DVDs or having digital files of every New Orleans rap tape ever made, none of this is a prideful thing. And the internet is the opposite where those are wonderful things, where your freak flag can fly with as many off-kilter colors as possible, and that only makes it better.
I think in my brain I too often assume the internet is the homeland for that, which it is, but without the presence of real people anymore who do real shit like kill pigs and talk to weird dudes who call people "an ol' shoe" and just have general real life experiences. It feels like more of a synthetic world than ever to me. I actually can feel electromagnetic frequencies weakening the sharpness of brain's creativity lately. I've been experimenting with taking yarrow tincture internally to try and slow this effect, but there's no doubt it's a synthetic world. (Side note: the "tinfoil hat" thing was misinformation, because the aluminum foil actually increases the effect, as opposed to blocking.)
But there's still plenty of real shit, too. Real shit never goes away, although you can't easily find it on a smart phone app. You are better just wandering around aimlessly, because there's real shit around every corner if you wander far enough off the electronic path.
STEAL "Synthetic World"
NEXT UP: A warbled down ass whiteboy classic!
2 comments:
I'm not sure how all this fits into the whole internets vs. real life/which is more evil discussion, but I feel the need to point out that CT is one of my oldest and best friends, and not in an internet sense (though that's how we keep in touch these days most of the time) but for real. When I moved to Richmond in 1995, he was still in high school and lived 2 blocks from my ridiculous apartment crammed full of too many punk kids. Both of us did zines and were clearly going to be moving around a lot for the next 5 or 10 years at least, so we got a PO Box together over at Saunders Station on Broad St (which was just around the block from Chris's parents' house). He lives in Chicago now, but I still have that PO Box, and still get promo records in the mail there, though now I'm doing it in my function as music editor for RVA Magazine instead of as a random kid with a xeroxed zine. Movin' on up.
But yeah, it's funny, because to you, both CT and I are just internet dudes, but in actual real life he and I are totally tight bros who still get together when he's in town to sit on porches at parties and talk shit.
I didn't know yall were boys but I knew we had mad mutual real life friends and it makes him seem less internetty to me because of that.
Post a Comment