J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown – October ’10 #7: “Syrup Thighs” by Roach Gigz

Before I switched my itunes over to the new computer, this was about to hit #1 with a bullet on the J.J. Krupert listdown, because seriously, whenever it came upon my shuffle, I’d play it like 7 times straight. Roach Gigz was the flavor of the moment in the rap blogosphere there for a long minute – San Fran whiteboy fuck-up rapping about fucked up drug abuse and general hopelessness. To be honest, this is the only song by him I’ve really pumped heavily, though rap blog nerds would try to convince you he’s like the next Eminem or some shit. I just love songs about drinking cough syrup to be honest with you. Trying to be non-drinking has been odd at times because most of the time it’s nothing. Like you know you’re better off not doing it, even if I wasn’t as bad as most people who need to quit. Really not bad at all. But like last week, when I had a five-day holiday and money in the bank and everything was peaches and cream, it was like a clenched fist underneath my heart in my gut, that’s how bad I just wanted to get fucked up. Not drink a few beers but plow through a 12-pack and just wobble myself up right good, underneath the big moon, feeling good to the world. Why would I want to do that though? It’s like we’ve been trained to fuck ourselves up when things are good, cultural conditioning to keep us where we came from I guess. I don’t know. All I know is that shit was hard last week, hard to the point I thought about being like “fuck it” but also hard enough that I realized even though I didn’t have a real problem with things, it was probably more than I originally thought, if it had a hold inside of me like that.
I actually contemplated taking halves of some hydrocodone with a cup of tea for half a second as well, and then was like, “yeah, whatever, that’s a brilliant move.” Talk about lateral moves. It’s been 30 days, which ain’t shit really, and it’s not like I was ever drinking to the point I was a bad Hollywood movie character, because I swore off liquor years and years ago, kinda like realizing you don’t know how to slow yourself down so you put an intake manifold on your personal carburetor. But still, I realized that Christmas Day will be 50 days perfect, and if I get that far, that’s probably the most days straight without drinking I’ve had since I was like 13 or 14. That’s pretty fucking sad.
And on the other hand, most things in life I do not completely understand how to navigate this way. Friday nights? Very confusing now. First day of a 5-day weekend? Pain in my gut for a refrigerator full of beer. Like even typing this stupid shit right now has me tensed up inside to the point I think I’d be better off just going outside and walking around the yard a few times.
That’s also the thing – I don’t want anything to be a crutch or a key. I don’t want to think that I need to be loosy goosey to write until 3 in the morning, or I don’t need porn or pills to make my dick hard, or I don’t need anything to make anything else happen. It all should be inside my goddamned mind, to unlock and open up and all other things. But I’ve been telling myself I haven’t been writing as much (and I haven’t) and that it doesn’t meander the way I’d like it to when I do. My ol’ lady says it’s more focused but still my meandering style, and she says I’m much more interesting with the shit I talk about now. In my mind though, I’m far less fun to be around, far less creative, and just a general everyday asshole who goes to work and comes home and does normal people shit and then goes to bed to get up and do it all again. I can’t go out like that, so it’s like I’m trying to justify to myself (of course this is all different parts working against each other for control of the whole) that I need to be fucked up, so as to not be like the rest of this crooked ass world.
It is very funny when you deep down to your heart believe some total bullshit to be true, and you know it’s bullshit but still believe it. I would assume this is why most alcoholics recover themselves by falling head over heels for Jesus. One crutch for another. I am thankful holy rolling ain’t inside of me so that even while not doing thangs to alter my outlook, I can appreciate a guy rapping about having sex with two different types of cough syrup, as if they were women.
STEAL “Syrup Thighs”
NEXT UP: Good fucking rock music from the nowadays!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown – October ’10 #8: “Tuesday’s Gone (demo version)” by Lynyrd Skynyrd

Today is Tuesday. Somewhere on this earth ball, something that still calls itself Lynyrd Skynyrd is going to mindlessly muddle their way through an extensive catalog of songs. And outside behind my house in the camper trailer that I use as a studio, for writing for songing and for breathing creativity into my skullfucked brain, there is a copy of the Street Survivors LP with Steve Gaines in flames from before the plane wreck tacked up onto the wall. There is also a Zodiac Mindwarp LP cover tacked up. Those are the only two album covers I display. I know they sell those frames that you can put your favorite album covers inside of and get all upwardly mobile hipster asshole and act like it’s high art, but I can’t do that. Like seriously, I would feel stupid paying more than $2 for a frame like that, and I would feel stupider putting an album cover in a frame on purpose. That is why I am not a member of Lynyrd Skynyrd in 2010, because I am aware of what makes me a fucking dumbass.
This song is a demo version, which means it has an extra meander to the piano part in the beginning, before the regular thing that we all know and recognize cranks up. To this day, I feel like Ronnie Van Zant was one of the great pop cultural philosophers of the past 40 years. I am thankful he did not live long enough to lose his hunger and become a fat soul sloth living off his former glories. So very few of us are lucky enough to hear our inner-prophet’s voice that is really sad when those that have unlocked that ability then become corrupted by earthly treasures and the emotional control of other humans.
STEAL “Tuesday’s Gone”
NEXT UP: An ode to cough syrup, but not from Houston!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown – October ’10 #9: “El Asesino (screwed & chopped)” by Los Cadetes de Linares

I have been deep in the mental mud lately, as changes are at hand, and the unpeeling of the layers has been far more immense than I ever realized while dancing foolishly along the cliff’s edge. There is so much I should be doing, yet all I can do is meander my way through the day-to-day, hoping to not stray too far into the wasteland of a freshly unself-polluted mind, but still bombarded by the electronic clutter. Honestly, I have not felt this clear in a long time, but that’s not necessarily a good thing. I can actually feel the ache of too many devices and too many monitors in my parietal lobes now, but I’ve been listening to a lot more Wu-Tang b-team instrumentals, specifically Bronze Nazareth and the 4th Disciple, so it’s working itself out.
The strange thing is somehow, even with a lack of drug or drank abuse, screwed and chopped norteno music sounds as perfect as possible. At one point during a backyard conversation at the picnic table with some friends who spent years in Northern California, I talked of my love for norteno music, and how I wish there was more screwed and chopped of it. This eventually led to some interweb pilfering, which led to a lot of complete crap for the most part. But somewhere along the way I found a pair of mixes called Raza Hits by a DJ Dreemz. The shit is enjoyable as fuck.
Oddly enough, this song is called “El Asesino” which the whole etymology of assassins has been on my mind a lot lately, thinking of Hassan I Sabbah and his hashshishin cult that the term originally comes from, smoking themselves into a spiritual frenzy to go out and publicly stab someone out of their life. This started right about the time me and my friend D-Mo hiked this abandoned railroad tunnel outside of Waynesboro that cuts through Afton Mountain. The night of that, I started having these dreams about an underground world where me and D-Mo were sort of commandeered by this group that basically drank codeine cough syrup and wanted to train us to murder this guy that was running for underground President. I guess in underground society of my dreams, there’s like 20 candidates, and over half of them get killed before the election. Also, the underground network runs from just west of Richmond all the way to Charleston, West Virginia, and up to nearly Pennsylvania through that sliver western part of Maryland, all of it built with nuclear armageddon in mind, because around the late 1970s, the earthly elite mastered space travel enough to realize they could relocate elsewhere if necessary (hence the Space Shuttle program). So all of these tunnels are left abandoned for the pretend dead to live, and I guess in my subconscious, that tunnel near Waynesboro is a portal to it, because every night since then, these dreams hit me, and unfortunately, now that I’m not drinking or drugging, I dream every night. I’m not used to having dreams, nor used to being clearheaded enough of self-inflicted brain wounds in the morning to be able to perceive the electronic pollution.
The guy who grabbed us the first time in my dreams, he looked like Oscar Zeta Acosta. So it all intertwines in my mind – underground cults based on cough syrup abuse, screwed and chopped norteno music, assassin cults. Good fucking god, if this is what’s been bubbling beneath the substance abuse all this time and I’m just know digging through the muck to find it, what the fuck is my brain going to be throwing my way in a year if I stay this course?
STEAL “El Asesino”
NEXT UP: L – I – V – I – N, man!

d a s h c

big sky piedmont scenes stretch out

through my late model windshield –

blessed are those that back road

p e r f b

sunset explosions outside

old house’s kitchen window –

washing dishes, kids playing

r i v z x

shadow toddler swaggering

behind mama owl’s psychic

leash – umbilical females

m m a a b

trying too hard to be hard –

muscle mooks missing the old

school bare knuckles big picture

f o o l a

spotty spray paint defaces

cheap vinyl siding on tar

paper and plywood patterns

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown – October ’10 #10: “Doobie Ashtray” by Devin the Dude

Sometimes you have to go analog. One of the great underrated production teams in hip hop history has been the house ensemble for Rap-a-Lot Records, who made some banging ass perfect to ride to beats. “Wood Wheels” or “Ever So Clear” could play for hours and not get old. Pitch shift it down and it’s even better. Only dude I remember is John Bido, but they had a slew of dudes involved, sampling, recreating funk bass lines with live musicians, and it’s some solid shit. Yet you can’t find nice instrumental collections of Rap-a-Lot Records hits anywhere inside the internet. You can find instrumental packages of every goddamned J. Dilla-wannabe with some sci-fi comic book name that’s out there today, but no Rap-a-Lot.
So I’ve gone back to the record collection, the one that is separated between about 1000 in the house on an unfinished bookshelf, and the other 1000 or so out in the camper, digging through the vinyl and getting the original singles I had, ones I collected fresh out the box back in the days, as well as the secret gems dug out the dollar bins in the basement of Plan 9 Carytown, trying to say ahead of hipster dorkism record store pricing. But like I said, there’s no Rap-a-Lot instrumentals clogging up mediafire links right now, so I could probably stroll into the basement this Saturday and find a stack of old shit that they don’t even know about.
Not Devin the Dude though. He has crossed over from simple Rap-a-Lot artist to Something Hipsters Know About, probably because being high is part of his schtick and because he’s not a scary black guy. Devin has some all-time classics, usually about one or two per album; but he also suffers from the Rap-a-Lot disease, which is there’s usually about three or four songs that should’ve just not been included at all. That’s also kinda what makes Rap-a-Lot so great, because it never was a major label where you had long-time record industry insiders steering the final product. It’s an underground street label where drug money was most likely laundered into a legitimate business. It was either this or a rim shop (or both, if you a true baller). And there’s something beautiful about those underground joints, stupid songs that never should’ve been made, or crews with names that sound like they made them up in 8th grade gym class, or album covers done on a computer rented at Kinko’s for about an hour and a half one Thursday afternoon. It’s fucking perfect.
This is a Devin the Dude song about getting high and about being poor, both staples of Devin’s appeal. It also is a good fucking song. I would like to think I could find the 12-inch of this in the basement of Plan 9 for a dollar, but more than likely I would not, and if I looked on ebay, it would be Buy It Now for $9.99, which goes against both getting high and being poor in general principle, therefore does not make sense. Instead I can just dig out “Wood Wheel” or maybe “Cadillac on 22s” and put it on my USB turntable (which marries analog to digilog) and rip it into Audacity so that I can just repeat it for about four hours straight. (This reminds me I have a bootleg version of ProTools to install, but at the same time, the full extent of my desire to record and make homemade music is to loop some stupid shit, slow it down in Audacity, record some hobo rap nonsense, warping the vocals, and exporting it as an MP3.)
In fact, I think I’m gonna go plug in the USB turntable (it’s in the camper) and play some old ass The Band records right now. It just makes better sense. It is Thanksgiving and I was gonna buy “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree” at the Itunes store, but they only sold it as part of the full album for $9.99, and not as a single song. Thus I realize stealing music is more appropriate, because I’m not paying $10 for an Arlo Guthrie digital purchase. And then I figured why even bother stealing it and have those brain waves of evil shoot through my house? I’ll just play “Up On Cripple Creek” instead.
STEAL “Doobie Ashtray”
NEXT UP: My wife’s favorite – screwed and chopped norteno music!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown – October ’10 #11: “Wi-Fi” by Yung Clova

Alabama rap, specifically the Huntsville scene, has been hyped the fuck out of itself inside the interwebs in the past year, and yet there’s still tons of shit I find every other week that’s better at its high points than anything else going. I am more amped for the G-Side CD coming out in January than probably anything else that has been virally marketed in the past year. And really, the immense popularity of Kanye West’s retard style was kind of the straw that broke the camel’s back and made me realized that I am an old man, out of touch with what the world deems awesome nowadays. It’s funny being on this end of old manliness and not the other side like I once was, you realize that the world has gradual changes that make something pop cultural so perfect for young folks. I don’t understand Kanye’s popularity at all, but I also don’t think lolcats is all that hilarious or conjure up in my head images of Disney stores and bright lights when I think of NYC. But that’s what’s going on in this world now. The grime has been polished or run off like rats to where you don’t see it no more, everything’s so goddamned cleaned up like a mall, pre-planned and orderly and the wildest thing you see is a Buster & Dave’s closing at 1 am.
But you can still find your inner-grime in this sterilized world, and Alabama rap is the perfect example of that fact, this song in particular. Yung Clova is one-half of G-Side along with ST 2 Lettaz, and his The Koolest Kid mixtape that came out this year is gooder than fuck. “Wi-Fi” seems like that normal sterilized style of modern synth-heavy rap music, and yet there’s something different and great about it. Huntsville is a town that used to build rockets, and that space age mentality is tinged throughout Clova’s mixtape (as well as G-Side, as well the whole Slow Motion Soundz movement, probably from growing up in the shadow of rocket statues). This song is a great early morning transition into another shitty day on this earth’s surface, struggling and juggling and trying to find a month full of Friday nights in your life at some point, yet getting dealt nothing but a steady string of Tuesday mornings. Oh well, breath deep the reefer smoke and get yourself wi-fi.
STEAL “Wi-Fi”
NEXT UP: The King of Stoner Rap (or maybe the Stoner King of Rap)!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown – October ’10 #12: “Broken Van (Thinking of You)” by CunninLynguists

Leon Russell’s Carney LP is an all-time favorite. My dad used to play it, but usually just the first side with “Tight Rope” and “Out in the Woods”, and I ended up having about four copies of it at one time when I was buying every record possible. Plus, when Boogie Brown gave me a pair of turntables and mixer to fuck with, which I did but never got any good of note, one of the best routines I came up with was juggling the beginning two measures of “Out in the Woods” between two turntables, and then letting it play, but blending into a live version of the song from Leon Live 3xLP where he explained how he asked a Zulu dude what the words for lost were in Zulu and the guy was like, “There is no word for lost in Zulu,” and then his back-up singers go into some Zulu singing in a wild-assed manner. Good shit.
Leon Russell has an extensive catalog of music, but also is a white dude who married a non-white lady, so he suffers from the same thing white dudes do to this day – thinking they can get down with the black musics in ways they probably shouldn’t. Leon Russell has made some really terrible lovey R&B wannabe music over the years. But he’s also made some amazing ass grimy Okie rock-funk tinged with just enough hillbilly to make it perfect on a hungover Sunday morning in rural Southside Virginia, which is probably why my dad used to pump it.
This song by the CunninLynguists is not a song I’d go to the wall for, cosigning, to blogospherically tell you it’s the best shit ever, because it’s not. In fact, there’s not much by this group that is non-instrumental or not a remix featuring Khujo and Killer Mike (as in the remix of “Georgia”). Plus, I hate their name because I used to rock that as well, although I’m sure any early ‘90s college educated down ass whiteboy thought “cunning linguist” was the most cleverest shit ever. (I had some wack ass self-deprecating style back then with one song that was all “ignored cunning linguist, running my fingers up and down my penis all ten centimeters” and so on and so forth.) And even in the mini-genre of rap songs about broke down vehicles, this is not that great a track, although enjoyable. But just the presence of a beat built off of a Leon Russell sample makes me love it. Still though, as much as I have pumped this track in recent months, it still will probably get overshadowed by the actual Carney LP that I stole from the interwebs the other day, and the original source of this sample, “Manhattan Island Serenade”.
Leon Russell still tours regularly, and I’ve wanted to see him, but his shows are always like double-priced and in that small type of serious music fan club that has microbrews on tap and organic sustainable mini-portions of $12 entrees, and makes me feel uncomfortable like I’m gonna break something, because although I am white for the most part, I am composed of trash genetics that can’t have nothing good. That makes me feel good for Leon Russell, some Okie pokey hick with an inclination to grow his hair long for his entire life and get all convoluted by Hollywood living to think marrying outside his race is okay back in 1974, and here he is now getting $40 a pop to watch him bang on a piano and sang sang sang. The Okie dream is not dead, though there still is no semi-famous Okie rapper.
STEAL “Broken Van”
NEXT UP: Alabama spaceship muzak!

m i n i b

minimized balsa wood world

watching grown folks wobble past

from windowsill vantage point

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown – October ’10 #13: “The Cover of Rolling Stone” by Dr. Hook

I am southside Virginia, Willis Mountain, getting blowed the fuck away little by little, to where there’s an enormous earth scar you can see during the stretched out drive down 15 south rider between Dillwyn, Buckingham, USA, and Farmville, Prince Edward, USA. That’s me up there, chipped away into heat resistant countertops and furnace linings. I am one of a kind, nothing like me on this half of the earth, and the best use for that is exploitation, blow it up and stretch out how we can profiteer off it.
This is the dream, to be exploited and feel useful to the world. You die and there’s bank accounts attached to your name, that your offspring can withdraw from and live a life not like the one you lived, halfheartedly. I am southside Virginia, fucked from birth, potential buried beneath the surface, and somebody will probably come along and blast it out of me, make a dollar, especially now that I’ve stopped poisoning myself lately. Mellow drama, trying to find fake energies to get my braindick hard until four in the morning every night. Mellow ass drama.
I still dream of hype tours and book deals and having enough money to buy a goddamned piece of art instead of stapling pages torn from a magazine onto the wall. And shit, honestly I don’t literally dream. I barely sleep, and if I do dream for real, it’s usually something traumatic and I wake up freaked out about what has happened, but hasn’t really happened. I also babble, but at this point it seems I have to force some babble out to get down to whatever is below the surface, that digs into the reality of this fake ass world. I’m as fake as it all, overwhelmed by the mellow drama, not used to this day-to-day where I’m not soaking myself away. How to reshift thinking? That’s why Willis Mountain is gonna keep getting scraped away down to nothing, a single beautiful green monadnock popping up from nowhere, shaved the fuck into oblivion. Self-righteous motherfuckers watch PBS about Kentucky or West Virginia and mountaintop removal, but judge upon rednecks and can’t even see through their organic halos right down the fucking road, 20 minutes south of Charlottesville.
Fuck it, I’m gonna blow some shit up myself.
And instead of all this shit, I should've just talked about how when I was a kid I thought Dr. Hook was that band on The Muppets with the dude with the gold tooth. That was the first gold tooth I ever saw, and it made me want one. Plus that band gave me a Bo Derek furry fetish.
STEAL “The Cover of Rolling Stone”
NEXT UP: Leon Russell but rappitty music!

t o n k a

sandbox industry slowed down

when backyard economy

went to cat shit and crabgrass

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown – October ’10 Intro

Starting to feel my natural swagger again, had it all buried underneath the poisons that had become my day-to-day. Quit drinking a few weeks ago, not permanently, but I figured a good philosophy from now on is quit the poisons, write a book, then drink during an off-period, repeat as necessary. This way I figure I can have 2 or 3 National Write a Novel Months every year. Also quit sodas, shit food for lunch, etc. Gotta say, from the research papers I’ve seen in the works being I am inside the Belly of the Great Beast right now, the corn syrups seem more destructive to our innards than the alcohol. Still though, I could feel the haze cobra clutching my brain in the mornings, and I wanna be free, you dig?
But all this occurred last month, realizing I was wandering the same tired dead end circles I’d been wandering for ten years. It is odd how such a paradigm shift will affect your immediate surroundings, but I have felt the ripple of “what the fuck”ness from those I am involved with on the regular. That’s what happens. I have to be honest though, fuck the world. I gotta do me, and me is whatever it happens to be, so long as nothing roadblocks my ultimate goals, and I feel like I was spinning my wheels in muddy ruts there for a while. Shit, I ain’t even gotten good traction to escape that yet, but I can see I’m getting it all in place.
So the music on this October J.J. Krupert was the first list to come off the new Itunes set-up on my new (to me) home computer, so it was a rebirth so to speak, which is interesting considering all of that hooha I just talked up above. Seems that being reborn is all around. And I want to make one thing absolutely goddamned clear – there is no false piety in this talk I talk. I do not give a fuck what anyone else does, nor do I think you should do what I do or not do what I do. I encourage you to do drugs, have sex, wander wild circles, break laws, do things of which you can never tell anyone, and survive. You will be the better person for it in the long run. I am very sick of two types of people that unfortunately have populated my world more than any others lately – the falsely pious who feel they know what is right for the world and best for everyone else and if you disagree than it is sad the ignorance you have to not see the obvious truth they see; or the overwhelmingly ironic where nothing can be serious or sacred and it is all just things you lololol about or pretend you like in the off-chance someone seriously thinks that’s stupid you are not married to it. That’s it.
Fuck all that. I am a soldier of righteousness, yet my righteousness cannot be held in place since it changes daily. What I deem good today may be evil tomorrow, and that is fine. That is natural. I am also, I am proud to say, just as much of a degenerate sober as I was as a drunkard. I think too often the excuse of losing control of one’s self due to other substances is used, when really that’s just the vehicle we choose to carry our naturally chaotic mind. I am natural chaos, with an underlying chill that sees the world as one, yet recognizes the perversions of our alleged progresses. Perversions and degeneracy are two entirely different things. Perversions are steps in an unnatural direction, while degeneracy just tears shit back down to its more feral state. I am a proud degenerate, without a perverted thought in my mind. Motherfucker.
So these are the first batch of songs from a new computer set-up, rebirth of play counts, rebirth of subtracting skip counts, rebirth of me as a hollow-point bullet of my old standard shell self. And as usual, all of this could change before you read this. I refuse to be shackled to a single word I’ve ever written.

FIRST UP: Fraggle rock!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown – September '10 #1: “Lowlands” by Ozark Mountain Daredevils

It is strange how these things come together because I plan on writing every night of my life, but some nights are controlled by life and some are controlled by passion and some are controlled by obligation or preparations for the next day or whatever. But I had been getting to this number one song from two months ago, thinking in my head how this was off an album my folks used to play all the time – It’ll Shine When It Shines – probably one of my favorite albums to this day. The cover is a play on that famous plate motif that everybody had (or we did at least) that I thought was just some shit my mom got from Winn Dixie but I guess is some famous ass old plate design. And my oldest kid has actually added most of the songs off this album onto her little tiny ass ipod, digging the music as well, probably like I did too with the added benefit of Sunday mornings and bacon cooking and this being in the background.
Then tonight, me and the ol’ lady watched The True Meaning of Pictures, a documentary about the photographs and subjects of Shelby Lee Adams, who takes black and white pics of Appalachian people, that dying breed of holler dwellers that are being faded into oblivion by progress. And it was funny to me hearing the art critics complain about Adams being involved in engineering the pics he takes, like buying the hog that is slaughtered in one of his more famous pics of a smiling ass mountain goat family sitting around the hanging carcass of a huge hog. But then you hear the stories, and the guy knows these people for a long time, and gets involved in their lives. And it seems the biggest complaint critics had was how his pictures made them think of a stereotype that was in their brain already. And I’ll admit there’s probably a couple shades of bullshit to Shelby Lee Adams’ indignant defenses, but I don’t fault the dude. Fuck being a documentarian watching people like zoo animals. You have to interact with the world you are trying to shine a light on.
Mostly though it got me to thinking about the place I came from, both literally and figuratively. My folks were high school dropouts, neither of which was 18 the day I was born, and it was a rural life when there wasn’t a little evil portal monitor into everything on earth in every living room. I mean, it wasn’t Appalachia rural by any means, we didn’t have chickens, but I had to cut wood my whole life and it was an hour ride on the schoolbus to get to school. And I feel like a fucking piece of shit for even pretending it was hard, because it wasn’t, though it probably would’ve looked like it to some. It was what it was, and I’m good by that.
Shit is dying man. The real ways of doing things are going away. I went to Lowes the other weekend looking for metal fence stakes to hold down some raggedy ass wire fencing to keep my new little pigs penned in, but they didn’t have anything. They had tons of Christmas displays, and all sorts of goofy little weekend warrior projects you could knock out that didn’t really accomplish anything except for put something plastic in place that looked like copper or made someone who can follow numbers have a construction worker fantasy for four hours one Saturday afternoon. But that’s what we’ve become. We don’t actually do things anymore; we just pretend we do things. And I’m as guilty of that as anybody, with this blog, with my day-to-day, with how I carry myself, feigning torment by words when my natural mental illnesses are not all that bad at all. I wish I was crazier with uncontrolled spirit.
The whole “dying breed” thing always plays out in my head the same way, thick with questions of mortality and mark upon this world, with me thinking back to about 18 months of my teenage years when my folks split up and my dad moved into a trailer at the end of the road and I would stay there, and my uncle Ricky would always be around. Even though he was my uncle, he was only about 6 or 7 years older than me, and about 10 younger than my dad, but the three of us kicked it, indulging in various personal addictions, small ass trailer fitting three huge personalities, although to be honest mine was just starting to incubate into what it is now. But that’s normal. Those were some great times, and really shaped the fuck out of who I am and how I think, in a lot of ways, a lot more than I care to get into before this turns into a livejournal post circa 2002.
Both my uncle Ricky and my dad Charlie “Tuna” McMillian are dead, been years on both of them. My dad had a massive stroke at like age 47 (about the same age my grandfather died, for reasons unknown to me because I was little, but he was a pretty heavy drunkard from what I understand, and tormented by memories of both the Korean War and World War II), and Ricky killed himself behind the pop-up camper my dad was living in behind my grandmother’s trailer, the Saturday evening/Sunday morning before Father’s Day. My step-grandfather Bob was the one who heard the shot and went out to find him, too.
I was in my second year of college when that happened, living in my first real life grown folks apartment, with a crazy bitch of a girlfriend on a slummy ass block of Richmond, Virginia, well-known for decades for the transvestite prostitutes walking up and down it and congregating on the corner of Broad and Lombardy. My uncle Ricky was one of the few ever in the family who had an actual life insurance policy, so my grandparents got the cash, paid for the funeral, gave money to my other uncle to help finish building the race car Ricky and him were working on, helped pay some restitution to keep another family member in the good graces of the law, and my grandmother bought me a word processor – a shitty old Brother that only showed five lines of text at a time, and not even the whole line when you had it at 15 pica. But I used the fuck out of that word processor, for a solid decade, so much so that when it died, I actually bought a replacement off of Ebay. But it didn’t work out too well compared to a computer, although computers are full of the digital distractions that help me be one of all of us who don’t really do things so much as pretend we do things. I still had a good bit of one project on there that just recently I’ve been trying to move over, which pretty much was such a pain in the ass that I decided to just start over rather than try to retype and correct what came out of the old Brother.
My dad and my uncle Ricky are buried beside each other, a chainsaw image on my dad’s grave marker, and a funny car doing a burnout on my uncle Ricky’s. And I often wonder what the fuck is gonna be splurged on for my grave marker, what will the family I leave behind identify as a solid symbol of Raven?
But I think about my kids growing up in a house where we blast music and are cooking up bacon on a Sunday morning, and it’s bacon from our own hogs, and there’s chickens in the back yard and stupid ass hound dogs and the ol’ lady’s got a herb garden and it still probably looks kind of fucked up from the distance, but it is what it is, and we’re good by it. And my kids are coming up with at least a bit of that in their goddamned brains and souls, to try and make something real out of what this world has become. Bird Tribe – a little flock born from the raven and the owl. And I ain’t gonna be a punk and pretend we’re saving the old ways or got it all figured out. But we’re doing something, and it feels like a goddamned fight sometimes, but I know it feels better than not fighting.
STEAL “Lowlands”
NEXT MONTH: A rebirth in the form of the first J.J. Krupert list from the new computer’s Itunes!

b l j n k

shed-side staggering around

accumulated clutter,

looking for one lost item

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown – September '10 #2: “Carmelita” by G.G. Allin

Woke up this morning, feeling good had to thank god, because yesterday was funky. Funky inside my mind, in my heart, and outside was drizzle cold rains all day long, constant. Heart has been racing sometimes at night, like it’s going to explode, and I have to close my eyes and concentrate on settling my pulse. Mind was stuck in the muck all day, about what has not come to be and what seems like it never will. But this morning, riding in to work, it was bright and clouds were layered across the sky, had that dark blue bottom shading to them, white on top, none of it puffy so much as fresh smears of non-rain across a crisp soft blue background. Trees are flashing color right now, and I’ve been making it out of bed early as fuck to catch the newborn edge of the day, and sitting around at home at night trying to force a few thousand words out even when fatigue is hammerlocking my eyebrows together.
I realized riding in to work this morning though, that what I need more than anything is shelter from the shelter. Looking at the tree colors in the distance, panty shot skyline wide open, I didn’t want to be in no buildings or cities or towns or not even inside fences that barely barbed wire wrapped around immense acreages of semi-wildness. We build all these shelters from the outside world, create air conditioned creature comfort for ourselves, have hyberboosted the technological distractions of our lives in the past decade, and really at the end of all that braided copper wires like a noose around our necks, all we fucking need is to be outside of it all again.
I was explaining to the oldest kid tonight about feral children, and Oxana Malaya who still prefers to run with the dogs than stay with the humans, and my kid was like, “If I found a kid in the wild, I’d leave them, so that they could be happy.” I didn’t have the heart to tell her that you’d get in trouble for doing even that, just leaving it all alone and degenerate back into perfect wildness. She’s only 11, and full of all those idealistic views of the world that any pre-teen girl would be. You can’t be wild anymore, or it’s hard as fuck. So many goddamned shelters sheltering ourselves from us. Sometimes, at the end of the day, when I’m not seeing the sky and mountains and semi-wild horizon to run off into like a naked penis, and I look around and see the complexes and interstate on-ramps and all the other cars, I can understand how pyromania starts. De-sterilize it all with raw fire.
When G.G. Allin went acoustic, that’s about all I can stomach from him. The outlaw scumfuck stuff was shock value, trying to scream at the bricks stacked into imprisoning shelters. It’s his acoustic shit that sounds to me like the true feral music, to be played beside pallet fires along railroad tracks. Too much music that is supposed to be crazy as fuck is just more bricks and mortar and stifling ass premeditated orderliness. Wild feels good, not angry. Angry is smashing your head against all the walls hoping to see a glimpse of what I saw this morning.
And still I just went to work and sat around, “working”. Should’ve left all this shit behind me, carving idle words into underpass concrete with railroad spikes. But here I am, tethered to myself, talking some bullshit inside the robots.
STEAL “Carmelita”
NEXT UP: Tapdancing on plywood!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown – September '10 #3: “Ball And Chain” by David Allan Coe

I got a pair of jeans that I wear every day at night now, because they feel good. I refuse to wash them, though eventually I’ll probably leave them laying somewhere where the kids or the ol’ lady throws them in the wash because of how they look. There is a pride in that one pair of jeans you wear every day, doing anything and everything, including tending to farm animals, cleaning out chicken coops, kneeling in mud, moving a bunch of dirty shit out the shed to the dump, standing around a bonfire soaking in the smoke, spilling beer, wiping pork chop greasy hands on, all of it, stained into a single pair of jeans. They become a badge of honor. This is also a rebellion on my part because I have to wear clean clothes every day to work, including underwear, and it’s all very stifling to my inner-self. I would rather wear the same old nasty shit I’ve been wearing since four states ago, and of course no drawers. (I would not call it “going commando” because I imagine the type of dude who says shit like that is afraid to not wear underwear.)
Often times I realize there is a ton of that old 1970s outlaw biker longhaired country boy bullshit built deep into my DNA, just from how I grew up. It don’t bother me, because as I navigate this 2010 world, I realize that’s something to be proud of. The rednecks where I live are weaselly and weak, sterilized by the Wal-Mart soul autoclave. Plus hip hop has made them even weirder. Like I was behind some skinny young redneck dude the other week at the hardware store, with his camo baseball hat turned sort of sideways, and jeans on his skinny ass, and the way he kind of wobble swaggered, I wasn’t sure if he was mildly retarded or not. Seriously.
But shit man, I didn’t mean to talk shit. I have a big ass beard now and look forward to this bridge of a job I have now moving back to where I can grow the hair back out, rock my dirty jeans, whatever they may be by then, because nothing lasts. I’ve got this jacket covered in patches that I would never rock when I was working for myself, slum dogging it through life, but now that I’ve got the steady paycheck sucking at the government’s sour teat, that jacket feels good as fuck. Grass always seems greener.
Anyways, I am trying to encourage my inner-outlaw more, junkyard schoolbuses and homemade tattoos and David Allan Coe lyrics come to life. In fact, I gave myself my first homemade tattoo in a few years the other night, putting WORK in scrawly sketchy letters, because I decided to put it underneath my right arm up top near my armpit, so I had to use my left hand, which ain’t my alpha hand at all. Still, it adds feng shui to the warped temple that is my body. I should have a good thick coat of grime to my jeans by springtime when the scrawly black ink becomes exposed to this goddamned straight ass world again.
STEAL “Ball And Chain”
NEXT UP: Outlaw scumfuckery!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown – September '10 #4: “Dealing” by Jay Electronica

So Jay Electronica has signed with some sort of Jay-Z affiliated label thing, which is supposed to be some sort of big affair, but probably means nothing. First off, I have never understood nor recognized the alleged greatness of Jay-Z. And at this point, he’s like adult contemporary rap at best. Like how long before he’s on American Idol or doing a duet with Rod Stewart? But secondly, I don’t understand why record label things still think in 2010 you can sign an artist, have years of hype, and then be successful. Shit is so immediate now. Somebody should’ve signed Jay Electronica last summer and has an album out with “Exhibit C” as the main single before that hype had died down. Shit man, dudes are recording 30,000 songs a week nowadays anyways. Record labels are on some weird shit. And yes, I guess dudes learn all the Jew trickery to making songs that are catchy even if they are forgettable (of which Eminem is a master at this point, a true craftsman of songs that sound like they are good but really are just like the last 19 songs he did, the Aerosmith of rap; Kanye is also excellent at this) and they run through pop channels and I guess somebody still makes money. I mean the redneck dude who lives in his mom’s basement next door to me (meaning across the field), he came home one time drunk as fuck pumping that Soulja Boy song. So shit transcends, if you’re lucky.
Still though, I feel bad for Jay Electronica, because dude is on some other shit, yet here he is in a world where music has become what it has become. Not to be a music blog blowhard on the standard stereotypical music blog blowhard tip, but you listen to some of his shit, and it’s like a Rakim for a new generation (okay, maybe not that strong) and you want him to be successful. But honestly, how long has it been since some real shit blew up massively in hip hop? Early ‘90s? It’s all disco synths and big money pretender, shiny suit syndrome gullied up a little bit. In fact, it immediately struck me as odd that the first song from this new era of Jay Electronica would be called “Shiny Suit Theory” because well just because. I haven’t listened to it, and probably won’t, because hearing Jay on a track with that other Jay dude is gonna bum me out, not so much because someone sold out, because god bless a motherfucker making money off his passion in this day and age, but because the soul gets squeezed out of shit a lot of times as it tries to find a profitable way to get paid off of passion. Look at all the dead souls who are hollow shells of what they once were, just to get a rep.
I struggle with this shit all the time too, as I try to refocus myself into cranking out a couple books a year. But on what? Fiction seems stupid to me, and a waste of real life time. I read what other people write (you know, the shit at the library) and it all seems so goddamned fake (which it is). And even if you power through and you do you, if it becomes something, then there is that hanging in front of you and everything you do.
Whatever though. Jay Electronica has been the shit the past couple years. He’s got a big face and is on some street intelligentsia awesomeness. Hopefully that soul shines through the grime of the world of the shiny suits instead of that world slowly smothering him into cameos on Rihanna songs.
STEAL “Dealing”
NEXT UP: Blue jean blues type shit, to be played with old drunk white people at an outdoor party around things that are on fire but not necessarily a bonfire!

f l g a a

wedding ceremony six

years ago – only signs left

are neglected adornments

r i v z z

solar hair strands dangle drip

golden aura; river beams,

counting the wild styles she kicks

p a l a e

wide open, chasing western

horizons, smiling inside,

chrome grill pointed ev’rywhere

g r f a d

abandoned country store turned

to roadside canvas for free

thinking drunken delinquents

r i n g c

five pieces of metal cling

and clang in backyard pits, five

point throws followed by hollers

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown – September '10 #5: “Inside Peanut Butter, Outside Jelly” by Cadillac Don

You know, I don’t think I could ever pay to completely pimp out a car. Like, I always have warped ideas of doing pimp/rat hybrids, where you get candyflake paint put over top of busted up fenders, so the shit is tight as fuck paintjob-wise, but still all crushed and crumpled. Or ugly colors. There’s an ugly Impala on route 20 south of where I live that I would totally buy and put like 39 coats of clear on it to preserve it’s ugly glory. I stop every now and then and look at it, and the insides are dismantled. I could never spend big money on pimping the guts of a car out because I’m too nasty. Like if it was still stock and clean, I’d keep it clean, but fuck hiring somebody to put diamond stitched fabric all over the seats or redo the vinyl in a different color. I might get a woodgrain wheel, and probably would be tempted to buy a digital dash for an old school bomber, just because that would be funny to me.
Lately, my dream car has been an early ‘80s Jaguar that I paint up that pastel kinda green color they come in, but I’d get the suspension lifted to put giant rims on it, because I’m not sure I’ve ever seen somebody lift and wheel out some fine Euro engineering, and it would be such an abomination to white sports car people. “The handling… you ruined the sporty handling!” I’d also have a three times larger Jaguar emblem fabricated to replace the smaller on on the front hood.
Mostly though I still want to get another boxy as hell ’91 Volvo stationwagon, put mirror tint any and all windows, leave the paint fucked up however it is, probably with two busted taillights like all early ‘90s Volvo stationwagons, and then jack it up and put giant 26-inch chrome rims with more chrome than empty space, so that when combined with the mirror tint, it would just look like this ridiculous space cubicle floating down the street on spinning slabs of silver. And then it would stop at the Wawa to fill up and get a tallboy of Miller High Life and people would be like, “What the fuck?” and out would step me, a goddamned mountain hobbit looking ass 30-something dude.
Except I wouldn’t buy a tall can because I’m not drinking right now, so I’d probably get a hazlenut coffee with lots of half-n-half and plenty of sugar, and I wouldn’t drive the car so much as have it drive me, except it wouldn’t drive me because I’d think about how stupid the whole thing was and I’d give it to my cousin or something and buy myself something else not so goddamn hipster dumbass-looking.
I’ve been looking at government auction sites a lot lately, trying to find a pair of schoolbuses to back up against each other, weld the back doors together with a little tunnel, and have a work studio for both me and my wife, her’s on the left, mine on the right, at an angle so we could build a deck and use it as a stage when we have parties. That’s really my goal for 2011, more than anything else, to make that happen. I actually saw a woodstove for sale on the side of the road the other day, a little pot bellied all metal stove like a hobo would cook on inside an abandoned shack in western Iowa, and I almost stopped to see if it was less than $20 because I was gonna need it for one of the bus studios most likely.
There was an old school half-sized school bus from like the early ‘70s that had been turned into a library truck and then into a mobile police command unit I saw on one government auction site. It was all black and grey painted and had screens still inside it, although I doubt they were hooked up to anything. It was one of the nicest things I’d seen in forever, and if I had $1200 I would’ve bought it, because now that I’m not drinking beer, I’d really like a 1970s mobile police command unit bus to drive to sketchy places in the small towns I live near, and just park and sit there for a while, writing rojonekku haiku.
STEAL “Inside Peanut Butter, Outside Jelly”
NEXT UP: I listen to too much rap music!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown – September '10 #6: “Groovin’ On A Sunday (screwed & chopped)” by C-Bo

One of my biggest peeves about music dorkery in the age of the internet is those dudes who make what they assume are awesome as fuck mixes of obscure shit that is like a collection of Nigerian lesbian funk from 1978 or all early ‘90s hip hop songs done by midgets who eventually became addicted to crack or songs written by Steve Earle that he never got publishing credits for because he traded them for heroin or whatever, and they make these wonderful mixes for you to freely download and enjoy on your own, except they make them one long fucking mp3 track. Now I understand the thinking is, it is a mix, like old school mixtape days. Except people don’t make old school mixes anymore. It is just other digital files slid into place on a gridlock with little wav files clipping and peaking and dipping and tweaking. I think this is part of the reason why to this day I still enjoy fucking Screw tapes so damned much, because he was a dude with two turntables and a 4-track (or whatever) and a mic and a living room with his shit set up against the far wall, and he picked out slabs of vinyl to make his tapes with, and if you got #132 after #131, he might have used the same song or played the instrumental again or something. That was the shit that was bumping in his life.
For me, that was the beauty of making mixes, and I have never done this with a digital mix (in fact, I’m not sure I’ve done one before; or if I have, I’ve tried to block it from my brain). I would dig out a milk crate or two of possibilities, and then you pick the shit that was most bumping in your current day-to-day, or most appropriate to the thematic mix you were making, and as that song spun round and round on the turntable, you’d be thinking about the next song. The shit had time to incubate and connect and grow organically (“organically” is my favorite chump-ass word to use, because it makes sense a lot of times, but is so perverted by Nu Age Whole Foods Aren’t Obama Awesome? types that it makes me laugh to myself every time I use that word for something like this), and that makes the mix stronger. Shit, I think so at least. When I would do it, there’d be a constant shuffle of albums in the milk crate, and if a slab was used it was left outside, because I’d never take more than one song off the same shit, ever. Pausing to stop the tape player so it didn’t have a hard cut at the end of the song, then hitting stop and twirling it back like a tiny turn with your finger, so that the two songs would blend… this was all simple mad science that was common knowledge if you got into making mixes, and nobody held ownership of it. Sure, everybody knew some music nerd dumbass who would make his mixes that were numbered and you weren’t supposed to dub for anybody and it was some sign of you being special for him to give you one, even though half the time those types of mixes were far worse than weed-induced mindframes made the guy who made them think.
But inside the interwebs, music nerds carry their musical ownership as a source of pride. “I have all this wonderful obscure funk gospel music, because I spent the time and energy collecting and filtering it, and now I am going to make one giant long ass version of this shit for you to see how awesome I am, but not with any easy format where you can dump the 17 songs I picked that fucking sucked and keep the 2 kinda cool ones and 2 really fucking great ones. Because I did this, not you.”
The worst is when that guy moves onto starting an indy record label to release collections of Peruvian chicha music he crate dug for himself or Ghanaian high life music or whatever the fuck. I mean, you’re serving a purpose, but damn, this whole form of making music without actually making music, it bums me out. And yet it is very American.
Anyways, this is a track from the Codeine Fiend Screw tape, which lately has been my second favorite (Syrup & Soda always the best), and I know nothing about C-Bo other than he is west coast gangsta, maybe. I don’t know, maybe he’s a pen & pixelated dude. I don’t really care. Music nerdery goes too far in trying to know every goddamned thing there is to know about something. Fuck that noise. This is a fun goddamned screwed song by some dude I don’t know shit about and it makes me want to stop and buy blunt papers. I wonder if there are organic blunt papers out there somewhere? I always thought it would be great to do vegetarian chicken gizzards or something like that that normal holier-than-thou organictarians would never actually want to eat. Organic blunt papers kinda rolls along with that, because your Democratically-inclined zen Buddhist non-confrontational tai chi master probably never would ever roll their precious reefer up in a blunt. One day I will be rich, and then will go broke trying to make things like organic vegetarian chicken gizzard dinners and organic blunt papers for the world, because it is funny to me.
STEAL “Groovin’ On A Sunday”
NEXT UP: Catchy catchy jingles about ign’ant shit!

d r i c a

late model metal molded

when america was proud,

not just plastic patriots

b i k e d

shine spokes spinning like this world –

off axis slightly, but straight

enough to keep on getting

d a s h a

the road I live along, the

truck I ride inside – southside

by birth, by breath, until death

g r f a c

a woman’s curves and drunkard’s

swerves is the siren song that

crashes bad relationships

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown – September '10 #7: “International Player’s Anthem” by U.G.K. featuring Outkast

I have not drank alcohol in seven days, and soda in six, but have been drinking coffee a lot more at night, mostly to find something other than water to put in my body. I am actually bored with liquids. But the additional caffeine at night has had me up late, but I can feel the fatigue inside my body underneath the fake alertness buzzing through my bloodstream, so there’s a sort of zombie-like removal from what my body is doing, similar to alcohol but very different, because with alcohol your body starts to have minor revolts against the authoritarian rule of the brain, so then the brain starts throwing wacky new rulings out to the body to entertain the masses of molecules, and then it just spirals away from that until hopefully something shuts down the entire process and you wake up safely at home the next day.
I am trying to train my brain to sleep upon command when I lay down, but caffeine harshes that out. I experimented with wild lettuce tincture to counter off the caffeine of coffee, but that leaves me feeling goopy-minded in the bed wide awake, looking on the other side of the pillow for a cold spot nineteen times, shaking the bed all around, bothering the ol’ lady, so on and so forth.
I’ve also tried drinking tea, like cups of warm tea, to take the place of other liquid indulgences, but when you are 37 and realizing you shouldn’t be drinking like you once did, and you are sitting there at 10:30 on a Thursday night in your goddamned Christmas tree pajamas drinking a warm cup of chocolate hazlenut tea, everything inside you will scream at you for being a goddamned old fucker, especially when you always have in the back of your head that if there were time machines, old school you would kill now you if they met you, or at least laugh at you and steal something while you weren’t looking. Seems like most of the time when it comes to time travel people conjure up traveling backwards, but if I was me and had a time machine, I’d go to the future to see when I died, and then I’d just keep going into the future to kill a future me from every year possible, just to create as much chaos in the holographic universe as possible, because if we have time machines then we must have four dimensions not just three. I actually have an entire novel based on that concept I’ve been outlining from time to time, and I hope to flesh it out and actually write it before young me from the olden days with his Chevy Nova junkyard time machine gets around to killing the me that is the me in this experience with this blog right now. Although I guess there’s a bunch of mes with this blog scattered throughout, except I’m only one of them. That’s the problem with being a 3-dimensional being in a 4-dimensional universe. Talk about not seeing the big picture.
You know what I hate about universal health care? That shit ain’t universal, only American. Them dudes are always lying, probably because they are in on the big picture of the 4th dimension. Fuckers. I think I’m gonna wind down this caffeine buzz doing some leisurely reading through The Poor Man’s James Bond again.
STEAL “International Player’s Anthem”
NEXT UP: It wouldn’t be a J.J. Krupert countdown without some obscure ass west coast track from an old Screwtape!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown – September '10 #8: “The Body Of An American” by The Pogues

I was never a The Pogues fan really, because all alternative stuff fell into the trench coat private school white people styles of the shit town I grew up around. In fact, I’ve recently been downloading a lot of the old thrash metal records I used to love back in the day, except I had them dubbed onto yellow Certron tapes, one per side of a 90-minute. Actually, two CDs I downloaded this week were the two sides of one of the tapes I wore the fuck out, Side A had Pleasure to Kill by Kreator, and Side B had Bonded by Blood by Exodus. That was more my speed. There was a dude I was tight with back then, and we’d hang out behind the Big Star smoking weed and drinking wine and wander around Farmville, sitting on the wall around the corner from the arcade where we could catch people going past, even though we were 13 or 14. The whole thing was very Dazed & Confusedy, because this was before the interwebs so rural towns were still in the ‘70s until like 1986 or ’87. That dude I was tight with, he’s inside that giant social network that is eventually gonna be exposed as a scam to us all, and he’s got a JESUS tattoo on his arm, like the letters not the dude, and lifts weights all the time and talks about making the middle “S” bigger because it’s on his bicep. And he talks about testifying to people at the Wal-Mart.
The thing is, god bless that dude. We’ve all done things and took turns the wrong way and it got us to where we are. The internet acts like it’s better than every goddamned thing (like I did at the beginning of this passage), but fuck man, we all suck in very own special way. If my old school metalhead homeboy has flipped teams and wants to talk up his slice Jesus to random bystanders at a godforsaken Wal-Mart Supercenter, then so be it. It’s not really that much different than me throwing my retard-drunken-nutjob-philosophical-cosmic-karmic-comeup nonsense into your cyberbot for you to see.
So this The Pogues song, basically it became the only The Pogues song I really ever rocked because I dug when they all sang that shit in The Wire when McNulty was pretend dead after fucking everything up in the end. I still think I prefer them fake cops act-drunk-singing it more than The Pogues. I’m a contrarian though, and too many pasty fuckers behind computer screens have told me how The Wire is the best thing ever, and I oftentimes imagine these are the same types who were into The Pogues when I was not trying to hear that when getting high which is why I was driven from getting high in comfortable bedrooms in 2-story houses to getting high through crushed beer cans behind grocery stores while sitting on milk crates. We cannot change our destiny; it is born into us like hair color and penis size.
STEAL “The Body Of An American”
NEXT UP: I will probably use the word “trill” ironically to make fun of something!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown – September '10 #9: “You Make Me Die” by Thee Mighty Caesars

I almost grew my hair out, happened just the other day. You see, I do not cut hair well, and still have never paid money to cut my hair, but it gets this weird short-hair length that’s too long for regular shorthairs but seems sell-out length to me still. But it gets Kenny Powers curls at the back edges and shags out on the sides and if I touched one of those frizzle balls from the Science Museum, it’d all stick out like crazy.
But this is the world I navigate currently, taking a break from the life of a guy who does not give a fuck, to pretend to give a fuck just enough to hold down a regular job and keep the mortgage people from making us homeless again (although if I find a good schoolbus on the government auction site somebody hipped me to for under $1200, we outta here anyways! Fuck y’all bitches! Enjoy your own slow death!). I am immersed in bureaucracy, where you have to fill out four pieces of paper to move one things three feet, or you can build relationships with actual other people and circumnavigate all that bullshit as much as possible. That’s how I try to roll, both in employment and in my every day life. Rules are for assholes. Seriously. Assholes have no idea how to behave amongst other people, and screw it up for all the rest of us, so much so that you have things like the past week’s election where people actually think all that nonsense makes a difference, and actual friends of mine (so I think) who otherwise seem like normal outside the box individuals get all hung up on whichever flavor of white guy in a suit they’ve come to identify as government jesus for theyselves. I don’t get it. I mean, I vote every year, more for the experience than because I care about the outcome (I try to throw my vote away as often as possible).
But I digress. These are fucked times where people are fucked but we have somehow mastered this ability to put a nice façade on everything and act like it’s all good. I had some line to an old Solaris Earth Pipeline song (R.I.P. S.E.P.) called “Minimum Payments” where it went “I’m staggering through life making minimum payments, drinking beer popping pills hoping my mind stays bent, because that’s the only time this crooked ass world even makes sense” and really, that shit is probably more true now than it was when I wrote it, because it’s minimum payments until I die. Get rich or try dying, from womb to tomb.
That’s what gives me hope – the words that come out my goddamned brain. I don’t plan it, and haven’t really learned at this point how to organize it that well, but it comes, constantly, like a curse from beyond. If I don’t poke it into a machine or paper or dremel it into the backside of guardrails at night, it clogs up inside my brain and makes me crazy and self-destructive. And even at my advancing age, I have faith in my destiny that these clusterfucks of words are one day going to bring me enough security to make my minimum payments without having to chop my hair off like Samson under Delilah’s vagina spell.
I watched Honeysuckle Rose the other night, and the whole reason I chopped off my dreads a few years back was because I missed having regular longhair that I could put in Willie Nelson braids. (Also, the dreadlocks were literally locking my dread next to my head, clogging up my personal aura, turning my natural purples and lime greens into greys and mustard yellows.) Watching Willie rock Willie style in that flick, and everybody standing around drinking all the damned time, it made me stoked to get back outside the gridlock and get my hair stupid looking, now with Karl Marx whiteness to my hillbilly beard, and rock them damn braids again.
It also made me want to drink beer watching that movie, but I held off. I’ve got to finish this one book, final draft, before I drink another goddamned time-wasting beer. That might be a couple years away, but fuck it, carrots make muleheads move faster through the ruts of their daily life. I hope.
STEAL “You Make Me Die”
NEXT UP: Shit white people like!

Weekly Recap

The great nonsense this week is that now there are Rojonekku t-shirts available - in the below design which is Fall '10...

I am going to run a super-limited edition set of t-shirts every season of every year, mostly because I don't have any t-shirts I like to wear so this will stock my goddamned closet up. In case the pic is too tiny, front has ROJONEKKU SS VA WORD FIGHTING ARTS and the back has a line of mine from the song "True Loungers" by Prolo - "true loungers find comfort in the hardscrabble ground". You can click the ENABLE ROJONEKKU button over there on the right to get one, cost is $20 if you get it from me real life in everyday person effect, $25 through American mail, and $30 I guess internationally, although all I'm sure on that front is Australia, and I might not even be sure on that. Specify size because like I said, quantities are mad limited. You will also receive a few other assorted goodies, including a mini-zine THAT WILL NEVER SEE THE LIGHT OF INTERNET DAY with your order.
So yeah. There is also the Amphetazine site that I am on, although I never posted my own post until last night. But the dude who runs it digs through my assorted meanderings through multiple websites and zines and guardrails and whatever else and he puts up notable shit. Here is the Amphetazine output for this past week:
something about taking the kids to the science museum, which I have no recollection of writing but is the greatest thing I've read all week
talking about why Hank Williams III is better than the rest of the punk ass country music made nowadays
an old thing about Jimmy Valiant done for Clawhold zine back in the day (what up Rocco if you're still out there!)

And then there is the Armchair Linebacker NFL football blog, which even though nobody knows about it, is one of the greatest motherfucker internetted pro football places ever. Seriously. Mad love to my man Neil as well as Harpo, LPOY, Mike Dikk, and anybody else who has made that place into what it is now. This past week, not only did I do my usual Redskins shit, but I moved my weekly NFL thing from here to there because I'd like this place to not be so much the place as a launching point, so hopefully I start launching more thing. I am big on carrots in front of my eyes lately. Anyways, my ACLB contributions this past week went a little something like this:
post Redskins/Lions game metascience positives/negatives recap
laying out all the players - major and minor - in the Redskins QB drama
week 9 NFL recap/preview/NFLuminati Index

So that's it for this week. As always, I ask that you share my nonsense with others, upon the Facecrooks or Twitters or whatever the fuck you use to pretend you are in touch with real life people. If you are with me now, I will be with you then. I am loyal to a fault, so exploit that as my explosive trajectory is still low on the cultural horizon. And together we will Scud missile the world, or at least some tiny little corner of it.

d r i c c

big body pontiac beams

with supersized pride; they don’t

make real cars no goddamned more

s h e d a

scrap metal outbuildings give

the bird tribe compound that “don’t

tread on me, bitch” ambiance

d a v e a

backyard brainstorms and buckets

of second-hand paint end up

under gallery spotlights

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown – September '10 #10: “Dead Homiez” by Ice Cube

There was a weird yard sale a couple weeks ago with these people selling tons of old Easyrider magazines and weird railroad nails and awesome bullshit. Really, they had all types of nonsense that was interesting, and like 79 cats running around, and the lady of the couple was the same lady who cryptically tucked my receipt into my 12-pack of Old Milwaukee box a few years back at the IGA when it was still here when I bought Old Milwaukee and tomato juice on a Sunday morning and the total was $6.66. Can’t remember all we got, but I got a stack of biker mags, one single railroad nail (which I had just had a phone conversation about like three days before), some 5-gallon jugs for fermenting t’ej in, and other things. The wife went back the next day to try and talk them into selling us 3 of these woven oak chairs for $20, but she only came back with two. But they also had a kitten – all black – which they named Stella Crow. I had told the kids the day before no damn cats, and told the people, being we are dealing with two dogs now that are harshing our country livin’ buzz.
The kitten took to our house nicely though, and was the chillest cat I had ever met. We kinda realized the solution to our pet problem this weekend was the cat and the female dog we have, and get rid of the male one.
Well, it was getting cold at night, and when I tested the woodstove on Saturday, it was smoking some, so I had to tighten that up, clean out the chimney on Sunday morning and all. The kids had been fighting fevers, so we kept them on the couch all day to rest up for a little trick or treating at least, and we came home, and it was cold as fuck, so I hauled in wood and kindling and got ready to crank up the stove. Last trip out, I shut the chickens in and came running up the steps to the house, feeling something under my foot, and then it wobbled off without making a sound under the porch. Fuck.
Go inside and ask the ol’ lady to find Stella Crow. She ain’t around, which is a bad sign. I thought it might have been a possum, but they would’ve shrieked or something. Went back out, crawling under the porch, and eventually found Stella Crow, fucked up but alive. No wounds, but you could tell something was broke. Put the kids to bed, brought her out and me and the ol’ lady tried to help her out, feeling around to try and figure out what was wrong, using some mullein leaves as a hot compress because that’s supposed to set bones according to the mountains of yore, but damn, the kitten was fucked. She never really cried or anything though. We ain’t the affording a regular vet much less an emergency vet type people though.
Next morning, the ol’ lady and oldest kid, who was devastated, took the kid to the local country vet, luckily where a friend of our’s works, and the verdict was probably a broken neck, cat fucked, euthanasia.
It sucked. I have already been wrestling with some internal changes bullshit the past few days, but to step on a 2.5 pound black cat on Halloween night and ultimately kill it, shit sucks. I’m far too sensitive about animals too, far more than I care about people.
Anyways, the ol’ lady buried the cat outside next to a garden and built a mound of white quartz rocks over the spot using rocks I’d been hauling out of a hiking spot for a while now. I went out and took my single railroad nail, stamped “30”, and poked it into the ground in the middle of the quartz.
None of this has anything to do with “Dead Homiez” other than Stella Crow is dead. It was my fault, and I feel bad about it, but not all melodramatically or anything. Real life has plenty of bullshit in it, so fuck idealist people thinking everything is peaches and cream if you have your philosophies right.
STEAL “Dead Homiez”
NEXT UP: Garage punk epicness!