SONG OF THE DAY: Elephant Pants

I try to write the things for the songs but it feels useless. Everything is channeled into social mediums now, and those also feel hollow and dull, like a drum with a torn head, or driver side door speaker in aging vehicle that is blown out, and if you can’t fix the clutch no way you’re gonna fix the stereo, so you ride it out. That is the internet right now – riding it out until it dies, or somebody gives you a new one.

Try to write my thoughts to share here but it feels useless as do people still read? Is reading a privilege at this point? Even now, today, co-worker asked me “do you listen to podcasts?” as if this was intelligentsia in the today world, because she drove from Ohio to here and listened to a crime podcast. I don’t know y’all, everything feels fucked and all I’m interested in is scattering art, and at one point this method of scattering art was fulfilling (using the internet, on this very site, to the tune of thousands of posts, as is the case) but now it feels performative and like a waste of time. The drumhead has been torn. The door side door speaker is blown, but nobody has given me a new ride, so I’m still pumping out the hits in this thing where the bass is warbled fuzz and nobody gives a fuck. These are dark times of being told a void is not a void so we all scream into the void, never hearing each other because we are all screaming so loud ourselves, hoping to hear ourselves reverberate back from someone else, but it doesn’t happen. The diminishing returns of intellectual property in the colonial experiment called America.

They shot teargas across the border and folks are shocked at Trumpian America, as if Obama America didn’t hose down Standing Rock protesters, and as if Clinton wouldn’t have turned away this migrant caravan as well, albeit probably in a less heavy-handed way, although one never knows. These are selfish and crude beasts who are in charge of the empire’s coffers, and they don’t give a fuck about regular people any more. And this holiday season is more about you and I spending money on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Monday, Tuesday, forever, than anything else. I have no money though. The metaphor of the blown speaker and failing clutch is no metaphor. The diminishing returns of class transition are closing in. There’s no inherited wealth to bail me out, only me, and I am fine, but also I am doomed.

Wonderful art comes from being fine but doomed. I looked at wonderful art this weekend and am hoping to channel myself into inspired over the course of the coming hours. I don’t share that stuff here as much. It is useless. We all know that, but we are pretending otherwise, that this is a wonderful means of staying engaged, instead of fogged out and distorted of view.