I went old school and held actual printed paper in my actual human hands last night. The digital revolution is not a revolution at all but merely the television program they put on trying to prove Gil Scott-Heron wrong in being all like, "See? The revolution was televised. We have so much power in our hands!" Bitch please, you got a goddamn all-the-time commercial in your hands. Now go click refresh on your soap operas.
TAO TE CHING translation by Burton Watson
I've actually had this copy of this book since college a thousand years ago, and love the translation. Also this dude Stephen Addiss who used to run a haiku group in Richmond did the brush stroke art, which adds a nice layer to this copy. I was sitting in the woods yesterday, stalking a fox who had been stalking my chickens (and pretty much killed off my flock) because I was gonna suplex that motherfucker then DDT him (or her... I am not above violence towards fox women, especially when they kill my chickens), and just sitting in the woods got a lot of the Tao Te Ching poking around my head. We live in a time of a myriad of explanations for a lot of shit that doesn't really need to be explained. It might seem like I'm just talking yin-yang when I was doing that "truth-free pamphlet" bit in that one youtube video but I actually meant it. There is no explaining everything, figuring it all out, putting a checkmate move on existence. It ain't gonna happen, for you or me or anyone. So I figured I needed to contemplate on the Tao Te Ching a little more, although I found it somewhat boring and contemplated making my own translation of the various translations I have. Perhaps that will be a thing this fall, or perhaps it will not.
RAILROAD SEMANTICS #2 by Aaron Dactyl
Trains been calling me, meaningless travel's been calling me - and not travel like flying somewhere because I look at flying to some destination like having an epidural child birth - it's not natural, and you are removing yourself from the actual experience. Obviously I'm a dude, not a woman, so my opinions on child birth mean nothing, but from watching a few and what I've learned with my ol' lady, there's some connection within the mother to the passage of child into this world from that incubation state. Post-partum depression is less common in women who have natural child births and feel that passage, which also would make sense because under epidural you're coached to travel that passage as opposed to feeling the natural urge. Travel is like that too - the act of getting somewhere is more than just going to the beach - it's the trek to the beach, and the roads you travel, places you stop, weird shit you see along the way. The more obscure your travel path can be means the less bullshit ads and strip malls and crap like that are in your way fouling up the trip.
Aaron Dactyl's Railroad Semantics has its limitations, as all zines do, but I enjoy the fuck out of it. It's not great writing like you'd recommend it to everyone you saw, but it's good writing about good subject matter that's more than worth your time if you are feeling the call of freight trains but have to lay in a fucking bed at 10:30 at night so you can get up at 4:30 and go deliver coffee for a bunch of cancer doctors.
Which brings me to the issue at hand - how to find nourishment in an malnourishing employment situation? I am malnourished socially, as I am surrounded by the pear-shaped bureaucrat people who tend to look like chickens. (I think the lizard people use the chicken people to keep things in order - the chicken people are a buffer against wild domesticated humans who may or may not go wild again.) Socially, a lot of the people I became an adult with as well as the influential social factors in the area I live, they've all become bougienati (bourgeoisie illuminati) who think an independent restaurant with wacky decor and a good microbrew selection is the greatest achievement that can be made in life post-age 30. Neither of these are things that feed me, at all, even slightly. The internet seems to be a snarky place where the bougienati sort of hone their social skills as internet heavyweights are social lightweights in real life. So that doesn't feed me either. So what feeds me? I don't fucking know. I think I need a face tattoo, like hobo crusty punk fuck-ups like Aaron Dactyl, but I guess my childhood wasn't fucked enough to quite put me over that edge. If I ever hit some sort of lick and end up to where I don't have to have a regular job, I'm going to celebrate by giving myself a face tattoo though - probably a tiny star outside my left eye.
By the way, I'm not sure if anybody is ever here - by deactivating my Facebook and Twitter I sort of cut myself off from being like, "HEY! LOOK AT THIS NEW MEANINGLESS SCREAMING INTO THE VOID I DID AT MY OBSCURE BLOGSPOT WEBSITE!" so I'm not sure if anybody realizes this exists outside the fog, albeit still inside the fog, but if you were thinking to yourself, "Man, that Raven Mack is great, I'd like to get him a present as a token of my enjoyment for all the dumb shit he does inside the internet," you could purchase me any Railroad Semantics issue from issue 3 through 7. Plus it'd support Aaron Dactyl. Or you could just buy a prescription to One Thousand Feathers, and I could support him myself, although I'd probably just funnel that paypal money into printing more One Thousand Feathers. But if I've learned anything thus far with my various projects the last few years it's that very few people give a fuck. They all want to be entertained, through methods that are convenient enough to them they don't have to exert themselves. And they only really want to spend money on microbrews at restaurants for the most part. Eventually America will be nothing but restaurants, with a hierarchy of places to eat where restaurant workers at high end places will afford to eat at mid-level places, and so on down the line, and the poor service industry people will eat shitty fast food, and shitty fast food workers will get food stamps and eat processed foods from Wal-Mart and this will be seen as a pure form of survival in an America completely gentrified by the bougienati.
Goddamn, I need to just turn my family into hobos or something. This shit is getting trifling to keep pretending is worth the effort - this site, this job, this country, the whole overly-complicated bullshit that we call civilization and culture and right and progression from a primitive state.
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