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