a series of skies

Railroad tracks behind the Goco where they have the second best fried chicken around. The best is at E.W. Thomas, US 15 just south of Palmyra. I just got a ticket from a state troop there the other week. Fuckin' pigs.

Just an old raggedy hotel sign across from the gay thrift store in Richmond. Gay thrift stores are cool and all, but kind of expensive. Usually a gay thrift store is an early sign of coming gentrification.

Protector oak hovering over my house. As you can see this chimney got shot up by my enemies. That's like mountain folks version of crossing through a gang tag. Haha, not really, but I read that in a Chris Offutt story one time, where a dude shot another dude's chimney as a warning, like that was a thing in the hills of Kentucky. Where I grew up, if you wanted to shoot a dude, you shot him. Fuck the bullshit.

a muthafuckin family style blogpost

muthafuckin baby dolls piled up in the bathroom

a muthafuckin owlcraft emblem on our muthafuckin minivan

my muthafuckin kid is unimpressed by these punk ass pumpkins

it is raining on my camper dreams

I guess for the time being this is the new style of posting here, where I put a few of my pictures up that I tooked with my old ass digital camera that looks like a homemade bomb of some sort, and then I rimble ramble in between them.

I am okay with that. This site has existed in about 19 different incarnations, and my eldest offspring has started a siteblog herself, and I've tried to sell her on the fact all your crazy shit collected in one place over time is a good thing. But ain't nobody believing that on the interwebs. We spread it out like mayonnaise.

I want to live in this thing. No joke. Or at least write inside it. I can tell it's got spirit.

parade of things

I can has a haikus that says "creosote footsteps" from this day crossing some raggedy creosote tye bridge somewhere in Buckingham. I made weird WorkingMan logos with found spikes all over the place and got high with a lost old Buddha black man in a literal cave. (Note: caves are actually cool as fuck. Don't believe the haters.)

The more mellow Motorhead version of "Ironhorse/Born to Lose" is pretty much the shit. The community my bird tribe wanders is cool I guess (not much) but not enough chicks rock tank tops with frilly edges and expose themselves during drunkenness. Hippie chicks expose themselves sure enough, but there's something beautiful about the recklessness of the redneck biker chick that I find more alluring. (lolol I guess redneck recklessness is a more organic nakedness to me.)

My child River is tapped into some things beyond this earth. First time I took her to Raven's Roost (a personal power spot, obviously) she did this pose very seriously along the ledge, and called it her "Thanksgiving statue". Then she flew off to the moon and came back with her hair more golden than before. It was a chill day.

bzzzzbots in the 3rd dimension

I WEAR BARBED WIRE BRACELETS IN BATTLES WITH DEMONS BEYOND THE REALMS OF REALITY VISION, THOUGH ALL THINGS SEEN THRU THE PRISM OF THE MIND ARE REAL AS FUCK, YOU BEST BELIEVE THAT BRUTHA

SUN SHINES MADLY FROM OVER THE SHOULDER OF BZZZZZBOT OVERLORDS LURKING UPON THE RIDGELINE, STARING DOWN WITH THEIR INVISIBLE FOG MACHINES THAT CLOUD MY DAYS/YEARS/LIVES INTO REGRET AND COULD'VE BEENS

AT THE END OF THE DAY I WILL BE NOTHING BUT TWO-DIMENSIONAL MEMORIES TACKED UPON THE DILAPIDATED WALLS OF THOSE I LEFT BEHIND, SUCH A SAD FATE FOR A THREE-DIMENSIONAL BEING WITH FOURTH- AND EVEN SOME FIFTH-DIMENSIONAL ASPIRATIONS, THOUGH TRIPS INTO THOSE REALMS ARE DIFFICULT TO NAVIGATE, WHAT WITH ME BEING LIMITED BY MY X- AND Y- AND Z-AXIS LIMITATIONS. (WHY DID WE MAKE THOSE THE THREE, AS IF ZETA-AXIS WAS THE BE-ALL END-ALL? HOW SELF-INDULGENT OF US. I SHALL HEREFORTH MAKE MY HOMESCHOOLED CHILDREN GEOMETRICALLY REFER TO THEM AS THE A-AXIS, BE-AXIS, AND SEE-AXIS.)

Monday morning coming down

I shall never come unhinged, too viking for these bitches

sun shines down on my grimy soul, cleanfaces can't see me

Sunday night dissatisfaction

I have not written much inside the robot box lately because I think like the Big Chief used to say, they've turned up the fog to high.

The train is still on the tracks but it sits idle. America is on freedom duct tape life support. Yall bitches better learn how to scavenge.

You can climb your way up the socioeconomic ladder and see that you've really gotten nowhere, as the ladder is dilapidated and rusty and fucked up. That's because it's not a ladder at all but just some piles of shit you play around on and try to convince yourself you're getting somewhere when the whole time you're going nowhere. Our collective journey to nowhere. Word to Maharidge & Williamson.

Refractions on a Broken Window

This my Kickstarter bitches - ONE THOUSAND FEATHERS - so git on up with the git down, brother. (By the way, I call people "brother" all the time now, but am very careful to say "brother" like a middle-aged black dude and not like an "I only eat organic" white dude. Those guys are very in-organic. Brother.)

One Thousand Feathers zine support

Yo, I set up a Kickstarter thing because I am starting a new phase to whatever it is I do called One Thousand Feathers. First off, here is the kickstarter link - One Thousand Feathers first firecracker - and that explains what is going on in their detail. But let me lay it on you like this here on my interweb homebase - my plan at this point is to do 1000 of these zines, which are only a single 11x17 sheet, double-sided, with traditional Raven Mack microfont, so that each issue will probably be somewhere from 4000 to 7000 words. But fuck a word count. Each issue will be thick with content that'll get your mind pregnant with thought. In fact, repeat that with me: EACH ISSUE WILL BE THICK WITH CONTENT THAT'LL GET YOUR MIND PREGNANT WITH THOUGHT. That's my promise.
As you'll see on the Kickstarter page, there are multiple levels of support, and with the first level you get the zines. Really at this point I don't want to guarantee a way for someone to get every possible issue, meaning there probably will be no subscriptions. There will be a Big Cartel page for ordering the zines as they come out, so I guess you could get them that way. But with that first level of support, you will get the first six issues guaranteed. With second level of support, you get that plus a gambleraku graffiti scroll (as seen by picture link in the sidebar). And with the third high level of support, which are limited as fuck, you'll get a spyku, which is my railroad spike haiku I've been doing lately. Here are some pictures.

Each is a one-of-a-kind haiku straight off the free dome of the wildbird lounger (aka me), ground the fuck into a wild harvested railroad spike. I'm doing these bamas for an art show next month, and basically would like my life to be just hanging around in my back yard grinding on metal all day long every day.
Now the plan for the zine is hopefully I will do one to fourteen a month. The first five will be funded by your support. The next ten will be supported by selling off those first five. Then next twenty after that will be supported by selling off those ten. And like a string of firecrackers, they light each other up to enable me to spread my nonsense in physical form that can be left inside somebody's car or beside their toilet or at the Greyhound station. That is important to me.
If you are tied to the robot world, no sweat. Eventually, down the road, I'm sure I'll compile some of this shit into e-books. I mean I guess I will. Seems like robots have more money than real people nowadays, so I don't want to cut myself off to robot wealth because the electric company accepts that shit just as quick as my gunnysack full of dimes, in fact quicker, because the electric company lady - god bless her heart - she hates that I don't wrap my dimes up. But I'll never wrap my dimes up, takes all the feeling out of it.
So there you have it. You can get on board now or catch up later. I have felt a powerful shift in my world in the past two months, and shit is happening. The hawks fly over my head as if on schedule, the red fox waits for my truck to dance in the ditch alongside the back road home, and the magic has become strong. Shit is real. The struggle is real, and always will be, but I've found a lot of beauty in that struggle because it shows us our true strength. I love real, more than anything. And these One Thousand Feathers will be real as fuck.

the decline of American "civilization"

So more than anything I would like to be doing what I was doing this weekend, which is carving one-off haiku into wild harvested railroad spikes. Thing is I burned through all my burrs, and am having a hard ass time finding more. No place, online or in real life, has more than a couple, which is a manufacturing issue I've seen at work as well. It seems we don't have actual manufactured shit in stock any more. I mean you can buy all the presswood shelves and rinky-dink handy homeowner cheap ass tools you want, but for actual tough-as-fuck gonna-last more than three uses manufactured shit, it's gone.
But whatever. Let this festering pyramid scheme colored with freedom crash in on itself. I feel it's very fitting to carve haiku into spikes, to have my written word in a form where I can actually stab people with it, literally, and for it to involve sparks and vise grips and toxic dust and make my back hurt and scare children and be loud and nasty. That is my ultimate work here, to turn the toxic into something beautiful. It is what I have done in my own personal life (two years sober this past Halloween) and it is what I do with my work. I do not call myself a writer any more because I have sat amongst those people and they are not my people. They are pussies, for lack of a better term. (I actually hate that term, because the yoni is a powerful thing, and I am in awe of the nature of the mother, but I haven't thought of a better term yet that would make someone reading my words understand my meaning.) Weak people with weak stories. Even the alleged bourbon-drinking gritty noir guys are just charlatans and Martha Stewart stereotypes but with cuss words. Fuck all these people.
So yeah, America is fucked, and shit will get realer before it gets all champagne bubbly and American dreamed out again. But as chaos unfolds, look along the tracks you hike between hidden clusters of civilization... maybe one of my haiku will be on that railroad spike you find. Actually in the process of working on these over the weekend I realized how many haiku I've written in the past decade. Lately, I've been doing at least five a day, and being my beerbox haiku project was a definite 1000 I wrote, and there's four or five other notebooks from other projects full of haiku, not to mention when I decided on this site to write gamblerakus that were 7-7-7 syllable structure because I felt stifled by the rhythm of 5-7-5, I've easily written thousands upon thousands of these things. Not collected, not even organized. There are stacks of notecards with haiku in my house that we use for scrap paper so my children will doodle drawings or phone numbers of my youngest has learned to write her name and it will be on the back of an index card with a haiku on it. You cannot collect everything you do - internet or otherwise - and you most likely, if you are born from the bloodlines I am born from, not going to find it easy to monetize the things you do either. No one gives a fuck about what I say unless I turn my southside Virginia memories into gritty sell-out rural noir that makes all my beautiful people look like bastards and scumfucks. Screw that, because of all the bastards and scumfucks I have known in my life, they all are better than these people I walk amongst now - these of the brick facade faces who if they have known struggle have plastered over the scars with their better credit scores or stocks or I don't know. I seriously don't know how people get to where they have gotten, or become successful. It's not part of my frame of reference. Grinding shit into steel, that I can understand. It's a shame this ain't a country of people like me no more, just a bunch of scam asses trying to cash in quick.

Dear Blogsitewebinard

Let this be the reset with us. I do not know what that means other
than I need space, which obviously I've taken. I'm not sure if our
relationship really fulfills me like it once did. And I'm not sure if
that fulfillment back then was real or me just falling in love with my
own reflection in your eyes. I mean, I really appreciate how you let
everybody know what I'm up to all the time, as that can be helpful.
But I'm not sure if anybody really listens to you and shit, because
you're always talking, a thousand things at once, kinda chickenheady.
Anyways, I can't spend the time like I once did with you, though I
enjoy your company and love looking back on our time together. I think
I'm just gonna send you these notes from now on time to time, maybe
come back and add a picture later. I don't know really. I'm trying to
be in love with something I do again and it's hard because most of
what I do is not what I love. Job is a job - not bad but not
fulfilling and just kind of eats up the hours of my life, on the large
scale but also on the daily scale so that when I come home and want to
carve haiku into railroad spikes, it's already dark and cold outside.
So I try to write some bullshit inside but the house is a clutter of
large personalities that billow out in five directions - all members
of the Bird Tribe have large psychic wingspans. Ultimately the house
doesn't work until everybody is down to sleep. And yet I'm getting to
be an older man than I once was, and I am very often down to sleep
before everybody and sometimes anybody.
I don't know. What I'm saying is obviously there's bullshit with me
going on. I'm tired, and don't have the fuckin' energy any more. And I
look back on all the time I spent with our relationship and can't help
but think maybe I should've spent it with someone who gave something
back a little more substantially, a little more fulfilling. I know
that's not your fault necessarily - you're just a fucking thing.
Shit, I don't know what I know or what I don't know. I'll get at you.
And give me back my fuckin' grey hoodie with the fuzzy lining if you
think about it.

Love,
Raven