L0NG H1ST0RY 0F JVGGL1NG...

long history of juggling 
bills like a civilized clown, 
late American empire 

BLVRR1NG TH3 L1N3S B3TW33N WH4T...

 

blurring the lines between what 
I remember and what my 
dumb ass actually did 

Y3ST3RD4Y'S PR0GR3SS T0RN D0WN...

yesterday's progress torn down 
so that a new impotent 
progress can be erected 

SONG OF THE DAY: Rascal

Is a mysterious dude in a ski mask and gold grilles, flashing weapons and re-contextualizing Rascal Flatts' songs into an ode of mean-spirited women and fucking the police the song of 2020? I don't know, but it might as well be. Fuck calendars anyways.

SC13NT1F1C D0M1N10N...

scientific dominion 
helped to make this heartless world 
more difficult to breathe in 

SONG OF THE DAY: Do Ya Think I'm Sexy (Rebajada)

Lately I’ve been wearing overalls and silk boxers a lot. It feels like a good look for cold ass winter in this cold ass country house. I’m cultivating a good space heater orgone arrangement combined with heavy blankets nailed up in doorways to section off a part of the house to not waste heat on. A good country house is solidly built, and all sorts of inefficient and fucked up. And yet it doesn’t fall, like the stubborn mule-headed people who once built it. It is difficult to be both mule-headed and sexy, but I’m pretty sure my bushy blackberry beard hiding fully ripe dimple fruit in overalls and silk boxers is navigating that fine line quite nicely, at least judging by the way the rural mail carrier lady’s eyes twinkle as she stuffs ebay packages and cut-off notices into my mailbox. That’s not a euphemism. That would be a gross fucking euphemism, to be honest.

3C0N0M1C S4V1NG S33N...

economic saving seen 
as spiritual practice, which 
is not innate to heart's thoughts 

PR0D1G4L S0NS 4ND D4VGHT3RS...

prodigal sons and daughters 
left emptied by consumer 
frenzies - embrace a new sun 

 

1NCR3D1BLY 34SY T0...

incredibly easy to 
get tangled up in darkness - 
long, dark solstice of the soul 

 

TH3 3L3G4NT ST0N3 CHVRCH 4...

 

the elegant stone church a 
short walk from my house has been 
abandoned for some time now 

M3M0R13S 0F 4BVND4NC3...

memories of abundance 
of free time, green blossoms, blue 
skies, and shit-talking river 

P41NT ST1LL 1N PR3TTY GR34T SH4P3...

paint still in pretty great shape 
on the outside of my tomb; 
next time, gonna do purple 

PR0P3RTY CL41MS P41NT3D 0N...

 

property claims painted on 
pine trees, middle of nowhere - 
perverse progress, even here 

H1GHW4YS H0V3R1NG 0V3R...

highways hovering over 
my head, threatening me with 
endless possibilities 

4 F1NG3RN41L SL1V3R 0F...

a fingernail sliver of 
crescent moon peeking around 
buzzing demon's left shoulder 

ST4ND1NG B3S1D3 TH3 R1V3R...

standing beside the river, 
listening to the ripples 
preach about power of lounge  

0VR CVLTVR3 41N'T 3V3R ST0PP3D...

our culture ain't ever stopped 
manufacturing self-doubt, or 
drama, or shit I don't need 

CHR0N0L0G1C4L 0VTL1N3S...

chronological outlines 
of wrong turns on slow looping 
replay inside my own mind 

TH3Y C4LL 1T M1D-L1F3 CR1S1S...

they call it mid-life crisis, 
but this is the same age my 
dad and grandfather both died 

W0N'T 3V3R G3T H4VL3D 4W4Y...

 

won't ever get hauled away 
in a casket; burn me up, then 
scatter my ashes trackside 

MY DR34MS 0F B31NG WH4T 1...

 

my dreams of being what I 
wanted to be got hauled off 
by responsibility 

H0W M4NY S34S0NS D03S TH3...

how many seasons does the 
average person get to 
blossom into beautiful? 

F0R S4K3 0F TR4NSP4R3NCY...

for sake of transparency - 
I'm a flawed person with poor 
past choices; but I'm trying 

 

TH3 M0RN1NG M1RR0R L00KS B4CK...

the morning mirror looks back 
wearily, as if to say, 
"are we still doing this shit?" 

F0RC1NG PR0F3SS10N4L GR1N...

forcing professional grin 
at most minimal level 
as I navigate slow death 

TH3 SL0W 4SS1M1L4T10N...

 

the slow assimilation 
of half-feral serf into 
thirty-year mortgage vassal 

TH3 SL0W 4CCVMVL4T10N...

the slow accumulation 
of signs of "progress" on back 
of mostly vacant strip mall 

TH3 SKY R3M41NS W1D3 0P3N...

the sky remains wide open; 
we've only cluttered the ground 
with our demented progress 

N0 M4TT3R H0W W1D3 Y0V K33P...

 

no matter how wide you keep 
the windows open, the four 
walls of home might still close in 

SONG OF THE DAY: Paying The Cost To Be The Boss

 

It's Friday but not payday which sometimes I think is even better than payday because when it all dissipates away so quickly as you pay your damn bills that you can, and put off the ones you can’t, it’s depressing. But the days that aren’t Fridays, when you know you’re already broke, but no broker than before, and there’s nothing you can do about it, at least not for the next couple days, so you just dig into a deep and cathartic “fuck it” philosophy, and make the most of what you got. What’s for supper? Stone soup. What are we gonna do? Sit right here and watch the sun go to sleep then see how the stars decide to dance tonight. Isn’t it cold? Yeah, it is. Let’s burn some shit. We can use my dried up dreams for kindling.

F1ND MYS3LF F33L1NG TH3 M0ST...

 

find myself feeling the most 
solitude when seemingly 
lost amidst the detritus 

SONG OF THE DAY: Where'd You Come From

I don’t use streaming services like Spotify so I have no Spotify wrap-up for you. I’m not acting like I’m better than you, or worse; I just don’t stream shit. I have an innate distrust of algorithms because their artificial intelligence is most likely programmed by the same people who have always suggested to me how much I would love the Drive-by Truckers, whom I hate, even though I’ve tried multiple times because even people I respect tell me how much I’d love them. Same thing with The Mountain Goats. Also, which should be obvious, streaming rips the fuck off artists, so if you’re going to stream, I’d suggest Bandcamp. I’ve been making an effort this past year to support more and more Bandcamp artists, because I know from experience they actually get that money. One Bandcamp purchase goes a lot further than streaming your favorite artist’s album on Spotify. If I bought an album on Bandcamp that the artist got an $8 cut from, I’d have to stream songs from that album over two thousand times to equal that payout for them. I know even y’all’s number one artist on your social media-friendly image post about Spotify wrap-up probably ain’t got two thousand streams. Even if it does, think how much work it takes in terms of time to stream that shit two thousand times as opposed to buying it once on Bandcamp? Nonetheless, so that I don’t sound like an old man yelling get off my lawn full of external hard drives containing mp3s gotten from Mega links in old blogs, I figured I’d share my song of the year for 2020.
It’s “Where'd You Come From” by Psalm One, from 2004. I love this fucking song. Simple tales of writing on trains, riding on trains, getting high in the yard, and freestyling. It’s a dirtgod heaven anthem, and it’s my song of 2020. I’ve played it at least three dozen times. The best was when I bumped it right after wandering for a couple of hours in a CSX yard on the Potomac River on the West Virginia side, with the tiniest sliver of Maryland across the way so that if you rode the bridge across, then through the tiny town there, you were in Pennsylvania before you ran out of town completely. This shit sounded extra good that day, seeing all the Trump signs and a slow death small town called Hancock after having just baptized myself for a while in giant idling freight cars covered in the homemade tattoos of a buffet of vagrants and vandals.

a reminder that I have a Patreon

Scope the link to the right or click this, but I've been running a Patreon for a few years now, which is somehow full of just as much content as this constant ass blog has. I assume folks know, but I'm not sure they do, and I don't know that folks that support my Patreon even know this blog exists. Who knows? The daily photograph/gambleraku I post here actually compose sets of thirty that I post all together on my Patreon. Other things that go on there:

• shard tanka with tanka poems written with google street view screenshots
• fairly regular haiku batches
• a Dollarstore Tournament Fighting tournament set in an unreal town called Dirtrock (where I actually live)
• random sonnets or commentary
• just started a thing called The Maradona which is a soccer-related list thing in memory of Diego Maradona

Anyways, just throwing this in here in case anybody sees this that didn't know about that, and vice versa. I create a myriad of shit all across multiple media, both digital and physical, all of it accessible in different ways but none of it entirely connected. It's more like tendrils wandering wherever rather than a well-organized English garden. It's a beautiful mess, just like me, which makes sense.

W1R3S W0V3N THR0VGH W1LD3RN3SS...

 

wires woven through wilderness, 
vibrating with civilized 
mythologies to consume 

SONG OF THE DAY: Somebody's Gone

Brother Theotis Taylor is a nonagenarian (dude in his 90s) down in south Georgia, who apparently for decades has had a piano and an old reel-to-reel tape recorder set up, so that when the mood struck him, he’d record some sounds. He toured as a gospel singers, even played the Apollo, and with Sam Cooke for a while. But mostly he’s just been living his life down in Georgia, feeling the creative spirit as it hit him, and making his art as a conduit from wherever it comes from for whoever might hear it. Even if they don’t hear it, it’s more about a relationship with creation than an end result of consumption. People lose sight of that too often. I lose sight of that too often. (My kids are always like, “why are you saying ‘people’ when you mean us?”) Creation existed long before consumption did, and will continue to exist long after this system of mass consumption – which has poisoned every possible creative outlet you could think of – is dead and gone. Anyways, this song is pretty fuckin’ great.

TH3 D1STR4CT10NS 0F DY1NG...

the distractions of dying 
empire have been digitized 
to seemingly endless scroll 

SONG OF THE DAY: b4R3F00T1n'

I wanted to look fresh when I’m walking around through the yard and river and great American industrial wasteland barefoot, so I got Adidas stripes tattooed on the outside of both my feet, except I couldn’t afford an actual tattoo artist because the gentrification of tattooing the past couple decades means those fuckers charge exorbitant Mercedes Benz prices when I’m very much a Ford Taurus at heart (and wallet, but even when not at wallet, still at heart, which means I ignore my wallet because I know the wallet is generally lying anyways). So I did it myself, which is fine, but much like most DIY projects, it’s kinda raggedy, because we’re all pretty shitty at doing things ourselves that we’ve never done before but watched a couple youtubes so figured, “fuck it, I can rebuild the transmission on my daughter’s car”. Plus doing my right foot was harder than my left foot, because I’m right-handed, and I kept switching between using my left and right hand for my right foot, with it bent behind me sideways, which brings up a second issue in that I did the shit with my foot at a weird angle, so it looks halfway normal Adidas striping to my eyeballs’ vantage point, but my girlfriend looked at them and said, “What the fuck did you do?” Nonetheless, I remain undeterred, and am working on Adidas stripes down my left leg – got three to about my mid-thigh, and the center stripe all the way down to beside my knee so far. It takes a lot of time because I’m using sewing machine needles, manually, old school stick and poke style, which I never called “stick and poke” in my life until the internet made that the way you say it; it was always “homemade” or “jailhouse” tattoos. But just like what I used to call a “short and long” got homogenized by popular culture into a “mullet” haircut, “stick and poke” has become the phrase you use for doing fucked up homemade tattoos now, even though I literally never heard it called that the first largest chunk of my life, as I acquired a plethora of horrible stick and pokes. Sometimes people ask me if I’d ever get any of them covered up, but first off like I already told you, legitimate tattoo artists are expensive as fuck; but also, no need to cover up what I had before, I mean I might put a line through it like graffiti on a wall suggesting somebody should die, but I don’t have any of my horrible tattoos that are that horribly offensive to who I am now that I’d want to do that. To be honest, I expect people to have growth as a human being, but if you had some shit that you find horribly offensive to who you are now that you thought was good enough to get tattooed on your body earlier in life, I don’t know if I trust that person, because they’re likely to rewrite themselves again in the future. You can’t rewrite yourself, just accumulate more shit that makes the entirety of who you are now. Nonetheless, I got some fucked up stripes on my feet now and am working on stripes on my legs. Probably won’t do my arms though, because even if I’m creating the illusion of my naked body being Adidas brand nudity, I still wouldn’t be wearing a shirt in the illusion.

L4T3LY, MY M1ND H4S F3LT L1K3...

lately, my mind has felt like 
an abandoned factory, 
with outsourced entertainment 

SONG OF THE DAY: Is It My Body

I still listen to Alice Cooper, though to be honest, it's the Alice Cooper Band. The real decline in Alice Cooper music happened when it became just the guy Alice Cooper as opposed to the Alice Cooper Band. I bet the guy Alice Cooper is a flat earther or Covid hoaxer or some crazy shit, so I'm not gonna look it up. Nobody comment either. Ever again. Nobody ever comment on anything online ever again, for all our sake.

3V3N TH3 M0ST B4S1C F0LKS...

even the most basic folks 
got artistic gibberish 
inside them; it gets stifled 

SONG OF THE DAY: Breaking Up Somebody's Home

Another anthem to poor choices, which sometimes are our only choices. We all must play the cards dealt to us, even if we know we're doomed. One can't fold when they were born already all-in. (Also, let this be yet another example of how Hi Records from back in the day did not fuck around.)

WH3N3V3R 1'M S1TT1NG 0N...

whenever I'm sitting on 
back porch, it's in purple light; 
chop and screw environments 

SONG OF THE DAY: I Like It (Soul Synopsis Mix)

Black Friday is a cruel joke when you're flat broke. Y'all can extend the once in a lifetime deals all you want, this man living this lifetime is irrelevant to your messaging. It'd be nice if I could block it or cut y'all off, but I can't, because our system is one of incessant messaging causing neurological damage which makes one consume an identity of self. Well fuck y'all. I'm putting on some chill music and going the fuck outside.

C3LLVL4R M3M0R13S 0F...

cellular memories of 
self-medication to aid 
fade into oblivion 

S4D H0W TH3Y T1LL3D 1 N33D T0...

 

sad how they tilled "I need to 
be more productive" thinking 
into the back of my brain 

SONG OF THE DAY: Listen To My Song

Darondo makes me want to fuck. Not creepy power fucking or weird collecting Pokemons fucking but good ol' greasy fucking in purple lights, everybody involved being all about it, no hidden agendas or hang-ups, everything out. It's a fucked up world right now, although maybe it's always been this fucked up, here or there, and it's all relative. Either way, there's enough art to make us feel like shit, to make us feel hopeless, to make us feel inspired to aspire to motivationally inspirate. Good ol' fucking art gets left out the conversation, which is unfortunate, because damn if we don't all need some serotonin still. And if you're out there not getting that serotonin release, stuck in a situation where it doesn't happen, or you accidentally ended up in a routine where the other side of the bed realized they don't like your type no more, recognize it's a big ol' world out here. Somebody wants to fuck you, in a most wonderful way.

C0NT1NV0VSLY P3RPL3X3D...

 

continuously perplexed 
by how we stacked all these bricks 
into boxes we don't like 

SONG OF THE DAY: Loc'in On The Shaw

Tone Loc's tape gets overlooked a lot because he's seen as a one hit wonder by our fickle ass culture, even though he was still making music, voicing cartoon dogs, and getting into shootouts with the Boo-Yaa Tribe years later. Before The Dust Brothers got famous helping hone that wild ass Paul's Boutique sound for the Beastie Boys, they worked on Tone Loc's first album, which means there's all these amazing but forgotten beats. "Loc'in On The Shaw" is exactly that too, one of those "let's ride forever" beats that a person can freestyle to for at least 7000 miles before getting tired. I once woke up in Charlottesville, Virginia, and my alarm clock ipod randomly played this to wake me up, so I called in sick, and took a leisurely drive west, ending up in Montevideo, Uruguay, thirty-seven years later, having lived three lives along the way, in eastern Kentucky, the borderlands near McAllen, Texas, and finally in Montevideo, walking to see matches played at Estadio Cenentario when possible, sight of the first World Cup, spray painting haiku on alley walls in my horrible mangled Spanglish. Finally, I had to work on Monday, so I drove back home, playing the beat almost the entire way back as well, but deciding when near Texas to play DJ Screw's Syrup & Soda mixtape instead. When I got to Virginia though, I was worried my racist ancestors would be mad, so I put on some Willie Nelson for the last stretch. All of that happened in 2018, which shows you the timelessness of these beats lost on a Tone Loc album nobody will listen to because they think all he did was "Wild Thing".

FR33D0M'S JVST 4N0TH3R W0RD...

 

"freedom's just another word 
for nothing left to lose" tat 
across my pineal gland 

SONG OF THE DAY: Angel From Montgomery

I ain’t much on Sturgill Simpson, on the surface because his music felt like that forced “I’m different than regular country music” style anti-country music. “Even a black sheep is still a sheep” is a saying that has stuck with me about being too reactionary forces you to be attached to that which you’re reacting to. But beyond the surface level, he wears a cop mustache, which I never trust, even ironically, but especially in his case because his dad was actually a narcotics officer in the mountains of eastern Kentucky. You should not ironically be looking like a cop when your dad was an actual cop, and one of the most dishonest and deceitful sort. But Sturgill Simpson does, and I’m supposed to trust that. What my father taught me might’ve been discombobulated, chaotic, and filtered through the haze of drugs and alcohol, but one thing I remember clearly is DON’T TRUST COPS, OR PEOPLE WHO TRUST COPS.

I say all this because they had some sort of bullshit country music awards show a few weeks back, and some people had retweeted a Sturgill Simpson opinion about how disappointed he was at the fake ass country music awards show, they didn’t take a minute to mention the deaths of John Prine and Jerry Jeff Walker. Of course he positioned it in that cooler than thou light, that he only watched for a few minutes to see if they did it, not like he watched the whole fake ass thing. Of course he watched the whole thing though. But it’s also not like the fake country music industry gave a lot of love to guys like Prine, Hubbard, and Walker while they were alive, to be honest. Why would you expect different in death? Country music has always been fake as fuck, but since the ‘90s, after the rise of Garth Brooks in Nashville, it’s turned into even more of a mechanistic churning out of neurological trickery that sounds like music, behaves like music, so it must be music, when in actuality it’s just Wal-Mart muzak meant to market the American Empire. And it’s worked. The majority of people who consider themselves "country” are more likely to identify with sitting in a Wal-Mart parking lot than sitting by a creek, and they consider that to be what country means, especially when the Lowes is right there too. Wal-Mart/Lowes combination strip mall developments are a thousand times more country than a tobacco field in 2020 – ain’t no recount on that vote, because that’s how the majority feels.

So Sturgill Simpson taking his social media soapbox stance against the ever-present hypocrisy of country music industry just made me think, “lol, of course Sturgill Simpson did that.” His whole angle is positioning himself as a manufactured black sheep in opposition to the regular sheep. And he’d be played heavily at hipster breakfast restaurants in gentrifying spaces right now, if it wasn’t for the pandemic.

Anyways, John Prine died from complications related to Covid, which of course all those Wal-Mart parking lot country folk don’t think is real. All the sheep think they’re black sheep, overthrowing the wolves, but it’s just a bunch of fucking sheep, rambling around in various strip mall parking lots, lost in the buzz of late capitalist empire.

4LL TH3S3 N0 TR3SP4SS1NG S1GNS...

all these no trespassing signs 
have little authority 
with nobody else around 

SONG OF THE DAY: Colors

Stayed up too late the other night watching Boyz In Tha Hood again. My kid came down for a late night snack, and starting interrupting and asking questions, right when Tre and Ricky were in the alley and Ricky got shot. My kid’s like, “You look like you’re about to cry?” I was like, “Damn, Ricky just got shot.” I told her the basic layout of Tre, Ricky, and Doughboy, then she goes back into the kitchen. As she comes back out, they’re putting Ricky in the Impala to take home, and my kid goes, “Is that Bread?” I’m like what? She goes, “Bread? Dough? Whatever it was?” And then we talked about the plastic on the furniture at Ricky and Doughboy’s house for a few minutes before she got bored with my existence, like any tween would with their dad watching some old ass movie, and left again.

TH3 HVM4N BR41N K33PS TH1NK1NG...

the human brain keeps thinking 
it has to do something, it 
has to get somewhere - fools task 

TH3 P0W3R 0F L0VNG3 D03SN'T...

the power of lounge doesn't 
look like much, because it's not; 
somehow, that's hard to maintain 

CVLT1V4T1NG MY 1NN3R...

cultivating my inner 
weed mentality - fuck it, 
I'm gonna grow wherever 

SONG OF THE DAY: Mosquito Loco

Fuck it, no write up with this one. Just the most annoying beautiful cumbia song that was ever made (as far as I know). If you have MAGA neighbors, TURN IT UP LOUD AS FUCK, and shoot your guns into the ceiling. Or at least have a barrel fire. I've been in this new home of mine for almost three months, and still ain't got no burn barrel. Neighbors down below me by the river are burning trash, detritus, and scrap limbs every Friday night. Got the sky filled with trash fog now. And me up here, looking simple, ain't even got a burn barrel. Damn. Played myself again.

TH3 SVNS3T 4ND SVNR1S3 L00K...

 

the sunset and sunrise look 
similar, just coming from 
two different perspectives 

SONG OF THE DAY: Samuri Da Yan Matan

Walking the narrow road of “holding my shit together” in a society that seems hell bent on squeezing as much literal blood from folks stoned by hopelessness. I’ve wrestled with guilt lately for having brung children into this world, who will have to survive it after I’m gone. Haha, what a swerve – previous generations looked forward to playing with their grandchildren, and I’m sitting here feeling guilty I gave life to my children. I mean, I know it’s all perspective, and maybe all those times I stood in front of people babbling about how we don’t actually get to an end, there’s no wall that says “It’s over” for humanity, but that stubborn and persistent souls keep pushing forward. I guess I don’t feel that stubborn, or persistent right now, which also is probably normal, because we’ve been living in this fucked up purgatory, hiding from potential illness, as well as medical debt in America, and I still ain’t dug out from the debt that came about years ago.
That’s what’s so depressing about life in America now – it’s a burden to be alive. Most of us are losing money every day we remain alive, with no hope of that figure ever changing, so no wonder suicides are rising and people feel guilty for procreating. I just want to sink into a cocoon for three months, be left the fuck alone, zero expectations from anybody, and come back out with the redbuds, and see how shit feels at that point. But I can’t, because in America any day you don’t at least tread water to where it’s risen, you get flooded a little bit more. I can’t wait for this country to dissolve from what it is now. It’s going to be a great relief to a lot of people, even though it feels scary since it’s all we’ve ever known. But this shit ain’t working no more.

TH3 L3SS0NS 0F GR4FF1T1...

the lessons of graffiti - 
yesterdays get covered up, 
but also builds foundation 

SONG OF THE DAY: Why Do Everything Happen To Me

The guy that puts out the vegetables at the Food Lion in Scottsville is never wearing a mask over his mouth and nose, just sort of dangling, strapped to his chin, usually with a shit-eating grin on his face. I’m not the type to snitch to a manager, and the manager there has that redneck hip hop dude from 1991 who got a woman pregnant and is gonna do right by her the rest of his life look anyways, so he probably wouldn’t even care the guy wasn’t wearing his mask, and would just do that, “Look man, people complained. You just gotta be cool about it.” And fuckface would still be wearing his mask as a chin strap a week later.
The weird thing about our culture – if you can call it that – is how proudly stupid people have become. Even smart people. Shit everybody. If our culture is anything it’s one of self-importance, where we think we have to share our goddamn idiot thoughts on every single subject on social media. And then trending topics force us to give opinions about shit we didn’t even think about or care about otherwise. And it all gets to feel so stupid and overwhelming that when I’m trying to get through the stupid fucking Food Lion during a pandemic with rising numbers, and just grab the things I need, and I see the idiot pear-shaped redneck produce man standing there looking like a goddamn cartoon warning against electrocuting yourself from 1949, setting bags of onions out, I just wanna stomp him and the whole world into pulp. But I can’t, and don’t. I just buy my useless shit and go home, like everybody else, until the credit behind my name runs out, and I’m sleeping in the cold earth again.

TH0S3 WH0 P4SS10N4T3LY GR1P...

those who passionately grip 
at the past get trapped thinking 
tomorrow won't have sunshine 

SONG OF THE DAY: I Wanna Be Where You Are (Underboss Remix)

Yesterday, left work early to go walk through the yard and scribble my dumb shit into the industrial æther, performing such hits as "November in Railroad Earth", "Southern Inshallah", and "Nature Boy Whooo". After that, as the sun set, meandered in the direction of the new moon's silver sliver through the cybertron power lines carrying buzz over the Blue Ridge, and went to the nearly abandoned mall in Staunton, presumably to scope out old magazines at the junk book store that has overtaken the former J.C. Penney end, spreading into the concourse even. But they'd gotten rid of all the magazines, except for piles of National Geographics. I looked through the survivalism and art and photography sections, and almost bought a classic on ninja invisibility by Dr. Haha Lung, but chose not to, even though my girlfriend had store credit I could use. Is it true ninja invisibility to purchase a book on store credit in a dying American mall? I actually walked through, trying to find a bathroom. There was the inner side of the military surplus store, looking like it had cool shit inside but also that I might have to fight somebody for even considering to wear a mask. Not much else left in this mall other than a Jesus thrift store, cell phone shop, and the saddest Bath and Body Works I think I ever saw, like still hanging on but running with decor from four seasons ago maybe. My youngest loves that store so I've been in them way more than I care to admit, but fuck man, this one was doomed, beyond life support, just waiting for somebody to add the right function column to a spreadsheet in some far off building and go, "Wait! Why the fuck do we still have a store in Staunton?" and then it'll be gone too.
Nowhere to go, nothing to be, so I meandered my way back on 11, then 250, in the early evening winter night time, taking pictures of dying strip mall stores with bright lights but dead dreams. Stopped at the Sheetz, where of course covid doesn't exist for these rednecks, who aren't even rednecks anymore but some weird suburban wannabe hybrid that was steeped more deeply in the internet than back roads, and when their drunk uncle took them to the river to sit there and drink and get high, they must've been looking at social media more than the river, because these folks ain't rednecks, or country. But they also don't wear masks, and walk around like too many roosters in a chicken pen, so I wanna slit their throats, because that's how I was raised when there's too many useless fucking roosters strutting around the chicken pen, making things hard for everybody else.
Sadly, I'm probably wrong, and that is "country" in what this country is now - all of us penned up in our chicken runs, too many goddamned self-important roosters flapping around, making noise all the fucking time but got no real fight to them, and would die in the wild with the quickness. Me too. There's a dude living down below me by the river, and I walk past him and we go "hey!" at each other, but two or three nights down there in the cold November Blue Ridge foothills nights would destroy me. I'm too weak for this shit, to be dealing with all these dumbass roosters and dying malls and machetes that aren't sharp enough to cut through bone and winter in America.
Strangely, the military surplus store had lockers for rent on the concourse, with proceeds going to the Dolly Parton Literary Fund. It seemed interesting the store that appeared to believe antifa was a George Soros-funded militia, also supported Dolly Parton charities, but I have to remember not every living person gets feed the same digital stream of memes I do. They may not realize Dolly is a lesbian at heart, and rides rainbow candy-painted Harley Davidsons over the new moon every month. But also, who is going to use a locker at the mall? Only thing I could think of was nearly homeless people, who are likely not far from that mall, by the looks of things. I also tried to find a bathroom, which was at the far desolate end, by the movie theater I couldn't tell if it was actually operational or not, but also some claw machines, all by themselves. The bathrooms were blocked off with warning tape, and had OUT OF ORDER written on them. I started to walk away but a black dude popped out of some lavender bakery place and was like, "Oh you can use it, man. I was just trying to clean it up. It was fucked up in there." "Alright. I'll try not to mess it up," I answered. "Oh, you ain't got to worry 'bout it; you're good."
The floor was still wet, and my boots left black marks on the floor, and I felt horrible about it. He popped out as I was walking off and said, "Take it easy!" and I said thanks and also took it easy as best I could.
The whole thing was sad, because we're all out here still trying to feel good, still trying to survive, and I'm not sure where all the people who can afford things are. Downtown Staunton has become more gentrified, housing prices going up, pushing people into the suburban areas, which are spiraling downward, like that mall. Some lady was sitting at the desk and said over the PA that the mall was closing at six and to wrap up your shopping. I thought the book store was open til 8, but I also didn't want to find out if they were going to kick me out or not, because it gave me an excuse not to disappear like Dr. Haha Lung. So I did.
Also, I did not break up my conversation with the dude who cleaned the bathroom into multiple paragraphs, because it was all one conversation, and just like with malls, and American flags, and "country" people at the Sheetz, that 1950s shit doesn't apply anymore. Sorry, that's just how shit is.

N4T1V3 S0N 0F RVR4L S0VTH...

native son of rural south, 
but with futuristic hopes 
unfound in history books 

3X1ST3NT14L QV3ST10NS R1S3...

existential questions rise 
while realizing how mortal 
I am as winter sets in 

SONG OF THE DAY: Open the Door (Alternate Take)

Otis Redding is one of my all-time favorites. His voice has just never been matched. I'm about to light a few sticks of incense, draw a hot bath, plug in all 39 strands of purple and pink holiday lights, and vibe the fuck out.

SC4TT3R MY 4SH3S 4R0VND...

 

scatter my ashes around 
the sixty-ninth mile marker, 
between Bremo and Scottsville 

DR34M1NG 4B0VT H4V1NG SH1T...

dreaming about having shit, 
but knowing I won’t get it - 
politics of being trash 

SONG OF THE DAY: Old Firms

video 

There is no international break in the realms of the unreal.

D0M3ST1C4T3D G4M3C0CK...

 

domesticated gamecock 
of a human being, trapped 
inside fences I don’t see