SONG OF THE DAY: Young Old Filipino Man

I put birdseed out for the birds because it snowed, and as I was walking down the road enjoying the forced solitude of snow day shutting everybody down to more my speed, I was watching the birds bounce around, looking for scraps, and thinking to myself how they don't have any essential workers. They just forage for life. There are no essential workers in the wild. What a strange thing to be human, where we've somehow conquered our own susceptibility to the natural order, so that we can help humans survive. Originally this would've meant the weak or vulnerable or marginalized, keeping them alive despite the fact in the wild they would've died. Somewhere along the way we factored in economics, and rather than the weak or vulnerable or marginalized not having to ensure their own survival, it turned into the hoarding of abstract wealth, and the wealthy not having to do shit to survive, because they just dole out little pieces of their hoarded abstract wealth for others to do it for them. And it got so unbalanced that now we have hoarding to an extreme level, to where the hoarders of abstract wealth feel its justified for the weak or vulnerable or marginalized to just fucking die rather than spread survival mechanisms and safety nets against death and disease around to all humans. Thus, grocery store workers got considered "essential" because without them, the logistics of food distribution, which is already hugely wasteful, would've fallen apart even further. And it's not that people would've starved, because people are already starving, even though literal tons of food is tossed in the dumpster every day, because people didn't buy it or it was perishing and the stores don't want to risk the litigation of lawsuits if somebody gets sick. But those with the abstraction of wealth hoarded to a high enough degree wouldn't have been able to get their groceries still, without the essential workers. Same with restaurants. Nobody needs to eat in a fucking restaurant during a global pandemic. But they're open, and people are sitting at tables, enjoying their expensive meals, wait staff be damned. "What an absolutely fucked system of existence," I thunk to myself as I walked along in the snow, watching the birds. A pileated woodpecker flew out in front of me at one point, very beautifully, and that reminded me I had like a third of a bag of birdseed in the closet in the laundry room, so when I got home I scattered it. I don't have hoarded abstract wealth, but I had some birdseed, so I threw it out there in the snow, and spent most of the afternoon watching the cardinals and others, but most notably those big fat red cardinals, eating it.

FL4GS W3R3 N3V3R FL0WN VNT1L...

flags were never flown until 
ships set sail across the Earth, 
looking for fresh lands to claim 

SONG OF THE DAY: Time Is Never On Our Side

When I got a house last summer through fall, there were only like three I could afford that had enough room for my kids to make sense. The only one I liked luckily ended up being the one I got – a big old ass house beside a quarry whose best years were a century ago. Supervising people used to live up in this house. Anyways, most folks don’t seem to want old shit, because the American Empire has promised an endless parade of newness, which of course is unsustainable and expensive, both short term and longer in terms of human survival. Nonetheless, that made it so I ended up being the dude that fell into this house, and it’s been happy with me ever since I got here. Very little problems, until this last week, but still minor all things considered.
Being my first year here, just moving in back in September, I have to get the feel for the seasons. My water line was frozen this morning, even though I’ve got public water, and the house was relatively warm. Discovered the weak link in the line, got it thawed without incident by pointed a space heater into the closet. Ran up to the hardware store to get some pipe wrap and hopefully some insulation, but they were out of the insulation. One of the drawbacks of being new to a house is it’s not a true southern gothic futurist compound yet, and full of all sorts of hoarded and collected odds and ends that you need. Luckily, this place had a good bit of left as is in the rough basement and sheds, so I started poking around to find something to work like insulation around the pipe wrap around the two feet of water line in a wooden box outside the house relatively exposed to the cold air. No insulation but I did find a scrap roll of foam carpet matting, that shit you put under carpets, and I sliced it up with a buck knife and tucked it all around the pipe, and it looked cozy as fuck. I was ready to climb down in there and sleep too. Ready for winter, for now. But while digging around for insulation, in one of the metal sheds, I found a whole box of mason jars, including two wide mouth quarter jars. I only had one, because wide mouth jars are a commodity, and my ex-wife is a herbalist so made sure to keep most all of them in the separation. I had one, which I used for my drinking glass. But now I got three, all because I live in a country ass house with a bunch of shit laying around. Pipes froze, but they thawed nicedly, and I found some wide mouth jars. Country blessings, baby, country blessings. I celebrated with a long walk nowhere. Nowhere is always the best place to walk.

TH3R3'S 1NF1N1T3 VNKN0WN S41NTS...

 

there's infinite unknown saints 
of fractal geometry 
inside this vast universe 

SONG OF THE DAY: When I Grow Up

Saw Michelle Shocked perform years ago, and always loved her older stuff. At that show, my wife bought a pair of Michelle Shocked underwear from the merch table. Now that wife is my ex, not attracted to men, and Michelle Shocked is homophobic. Life sure is something, ain’t it?
Also strangely, there used to be a video for this, made back in the day, that existed on youtube. But then it was gone, and only available on Michelle Shocked's Vimeo page. But now that is gone as well. Which means in the past few months, Michelle Shocked has taken all the time necessary to scrub the internet of the official video of this song that was done back in 1989. She does have an official youtube page, with a "YouSteal" logo in her banner, and the few videos she's posted are about god being real and how you should respect artists and their creations. It's all kinda sad to be honest. I mean, I try to post songs that I actually play on my little physical device the most, as often as possible, and try to have a video to share too so you can see it and enjoy it, maybe support the artist too, or maybe not do shit because fuck it, the Earth's capitalist world-system is all fucked up and useless right now. But she's taken herself out of that equation. I can respect that, I guess, but she's also still online. So what the fuck?

4N VNVS3D M3NN0N1T3 CHVRCH...

an unused Mennonite church 
which I cut through the woods to, 
dhikr clicking tiny beads 

SONG OF THE DAY: Stare Directly Into The Sun

[a freestyle sonnet] 
Staring directly into the sun, 
establishing eye contact with solar flare, 
watching those who lust after gold dreams spun 
through manmade pyramid schemes pretend it's square 
to be crooked in alternative ways. 
Rays of sun in day plus moon's reflection 
at night, combined with maps the stars make blaze 
the path for me to follow; deception 
is the rule rather than exception here 
in this empire of greed where we all pretend 
want is need, while keeping our focus clear 
of seeing those who actually depend 
upon aid from others for survival; 
the wave of change needed remains tidal. 

0PP0RTVN1TY 1SL4NDS...

opportunity islands 
in far off cities, across 
the metaphysical seas 

SONG OF THE DAY: Good Day

This song is a classic. Nappy Roots might be better known for "Aw Naw" but this is the absolute seventeen star jam. Fuck that Greg Nice remix where he ad-libs all over the beginning. Just rock the old and simple "Good Day" with the kids singing, which my own kids know from their mom playing it in the minivan on the way to homeschool collective, where we did our best to not let the poisons of church and state get sown into their brains. In some ways, we were successful, and in others, we were not. It's impossible to be perfect in this world, so sometimes you gotta just settle for a good day. An underrated all time lyric is "last night, hit the pick three, bought some Air Force Ones." Shit, makes me want to go play 634 again, for old times sake.

TH1NK T4NKS D3T3RM1N3 WH1CH ST0N3S...

think tanks determine which stones 
the collective Sisyphus 
should push first to get things right 

SONG OF THE DAY: Cumbia Del Organito

I lack the mentoring influence of solid elder influences, and in recent years, as metaphysical battles have happened on the psychic plain, I’ve realized how much this has limited me in life. I’ve done well to be unmentored, by my true universal abilities are largely unmassaged from the raw potential dirtgod nature I began as. Because of this, I’ve been talking to a few trees a lot more lately. This began one time on the hill behind my girlfriend’s compound, where I wrote a haiku in my head about leaving some haiku unwritten for humans so that they could float up for the oak trees to enjoy instead. The trees seemed to flaunt in the golden hour light in that moment, and it seemed that rather than just writing my narrow-minded human word poems for the trees, I should ask them questions. I’ve found it helpful, but it’s also pretty limited because the Monacan language was spoken around the trees around me for thousands and thousands of years. That language is a dead tongue for the most part now, sterilized from its speakers by missionaries and “Indian” schools. It’s been mostly English spake here the past couple hundred years, so most of the young trees recognize my human words. But the really old trees are only one generation removed from a much longer history of Monacan language, which they understand much more deeply at a root level. None of our root words speaking English in these woods I wander actually match the roots of the trees, geographically. This is one of the great limitations of this American experiment - that colonists came and conquered, decimating the cultures that existed here already, and filling those spaces with selectively curated immigration influxes. So though I don’t speak the trees’ native language, I talk at them, asking questions, sharing poems that blossom in my mind that don’t feel too stupid to share. Telling the old trees deep off the beaten and clear cut path is the most intimidating open mic environment possible. You know your words are self-important, because you’ve known not even a fraction of what those elder beacons of old knowledge contain. So I don’t share poems as often, instead asking questions to them, leaving them quartz crystals at their base as an offering, to show my gratitude and hopefully unlock their advice. I wish I had an old human who knew their words better than me, who could help me hear it more easily. But lacking that humane elder, I’ll just keep looking up to these handful of old trees tucked away in the semi-wild, and soak up as much wisdom as my dumb ass can.

TH3 B0RN WR3TCH3D L1K3 T0 CL41M...

 

the born wretched like to claim 
royalty in our blood lines; 
there's no monarchs in the wild 

SONG OF THE DAY: #KingButch

I miss doing haiku slams, and being around actual people. I wonder if we’ll ever have that shit again. Used to do them at Balliceaux in Richmond years back, which was a decent environment, before it went down in metaphysical online flames. Often we were the early show, and there was at least once that I think Butcher Brown was the late show. They put out an album last year that’s absolutely wonderful, which is what this track is off of. It’s weird funk/hip hop/all over music art, which is something I miss about Richmond so much – how there’s all these different flavors that are rubbing up against each other in a very weird way, creating new flavors in the process. It’s like cultural seasoning I guess. Charlottesville, which is where I’ve lived for a while now, has never impressed me artistically. A lot of overinflated senses of self, often propped up by unacknowledged privilege. Any art I’ve seen or experienced or been part of was done completely outside the arts scenes, and usually goes somewhere else as soon as it can. Anything within the arts scene tends to be unseasoned, so to speak, and thus sort of bland, even when intelligent or competent or skilled. That’s a hard thing to admit to be honest, because for better or worse, I’m going to be in this area the rest of my life. But I don’t find that much inspiration here, and usually have to go looking elsewhere. I guess that’s why I miss the haiku slams right now – I’m getting older, and don’t want to be completely insular, inspiring myself all the time. I need outside inspirations, other people doing wild shit that challenges and pushes. And I’m not getting it, which means I do stupider shit in the process too, because now I’m working off the diminishing returns of past inspiration.

R3FL3CT1NG 0N TH3 PL4C3S...

reflecting on the places 
I've been, I realize that I 
rarely planned my direction 

W0RSH1PP1NG 1D0LS, L0ST 1N...

worshipping idols, lost in 
distraction, anti-idle 
grind mentality stunts growth 

0PP0RTVN1TY 34CH D4Y...

opportunity each day 
to consult your own heart when 
stumbling across this damned Earth  

SONG OF THE DAY: Calm Mall

Abandoned malls a place of tranquility, perfect locations for encampments and illegal flea markets and food distribution and machete shops and oh man the potential for permanent taco trucks driven into the middle of the abandoned just sitting there, lengua tacos for days. The sun still comes through the skylights, and we like to sit on milk crates in the old Foot Locker where the security gate is stuck halfway down so we put some milk crates in there and we sit and discuss nothing at all but also everything all at once. Where there used to be some sort of shitty Starbucks kiosk, we have a slew of big two gallon coffee dispensers, and all the hazelnut creamer a man could ever want. I have been dragging shelving from the old JC Penney to the main concourse by the now-free coffee kiosk, and I’m building a labyrinth of shelving, and asking everybody to donate the five most important books they think should be part of our super library. The goal is to have a library labyrinth that you can walk until you find the perfect book. I tested it out and ended up reading Mary Oliver in the vacant Gamestop for four days.

TH3 VN1V3RS3 1S W4TCH1NG...

 

the universe is watching 
whether you feel it or not; 
every moment's a test 

SONG OF THE DAY: Marquillos Colombia (rebajada)

Google purple hoodie velour. Google lavender hoodie velour. Google lavender velour track suit. Google imaginary football clubs space. Google no white people in space. Google elon musk accidentally leads to white genocide on mars. Google how to spell elon musk's grandson's name. Google elon musk granddaughter first martian emperor. Google gender non-binary word for ruler of space colonies. Google false progress. Google lavender velour track suit with purple bedazzled letters that say false progress. Google dirtgod wikipedia. No results, alhamdulillah.

4B4ND0N3D H0M3 PL4C3 C4RC4SS...

 

abandoned home place carcass 
rotting in the scrub pines, caked 
with memories of lives gone 

SONG OF THE DAY: Th3 R

My biggest problem with politics is all politicians probably have somebody cooking for them, or at the very least it's like a PBS cooking show where somebody is just standing to stage right to clean up after them or prep things, and they don't have to cook bowtie noodles and then not want to use the colander because fuck man, I'm so tired of washing all these goddamn dishes all the time, so you just pour the pot through the slotted spoon at an angle, using the spoon to hold the noodles in the pot, trying to get as much boiling water out as possible, running cold water down the drain too so the hot water doesn't explode your cheap ass pipes, and then like three noodles fall over the edge of the spoon because you're fighting gravity the whole time, and you go GODDAMMIT but as quiet as possible so the kids, who are upstairs waiting for some bowtie noodles, don't think you're mad about some dumb shit. Then you stir in some butter and pretend all the water still in there is just butter too, and there's dinner, with maybe some shredded parmesan, the $2 a bag store brand kind, not no fancy parmesan that comes in shapes or chunks, you want that raw shit that's got pine tree in it that probably got transported on an open hopper freight train before they processed it down to whatever nine syllable ingredient it is as an additive to prevent the cheese caking, because everybody knows if you trying to not make a cheesecake, just put some wood chips in it. So all of that is to say fuck politicians, with their colander-using, real-parmesan-eating, not-only-can-afford-a-plumber-but-can-afford-to-have-somebody-else-on-payroll-who-actually-calls-the-plumber-so-they-don't-ever-actually-even-talk-to-a-plumber-that's-how-much-they-can-afford-one asses.

N0N3 0F VS 4R3 V1CT1MS S0...

none of us are victims, so 
much as trapped in this system 
which never gave half a fuck 

4S 4 K1D, 1 G0T BR41NW4SH3D...

as a kid, I got brainwashed 
to believe if I worked hard, 
I'd find financial freedom 

H0L3 1N TH3 W4LL PL4C3S RVST...

hole in the wall places rust 
along hole in town highways 
forgotten by interstates 

SONG OF THE DAY: Lestkal

Sadly there is no freebird synth culture to speak of, at least not yet. You’d think with our abundance of excess junk and born again thrift stores, more back roads weirdos would have taken the electronic Hasil Adkins path in life, but that does not to appear to be the case so far as I can tell. Imagine how great opioid fog greater Appalachian synth wails would be, synthgrass through the foxfire fog, demented gospel synthelations about hellfire upon earth, or just good ol’ base instinct 200 proof synthshine, autotune howling the full moon rising over the mountains like fire. There’s enough junk Honda Civics laying around these nether regions of the American wasteland that somebody’s had to think of how to turn it into a giant Sun Ra-esque Casio creation of madness. Where’s our great American degenerate ingenuity? Is everybody just scrolling memes? What the fuck is going on here?

0BV10VSLY 4B4ND0N3D...

 

obviously abandoned 
physical spaces not as 
prevalent as mental ones 

S33K1NG MY S0L1TVD3 1N...

 

seeking my solitude in 
three hour doses, wandering 
railroad tracks mostly idle 

W1TH0VT V1G1L4NC3 4ND DV3...

without vigilance and due 
diligence, the fabric of 
any society frays 

SONG OF THE DAY: Dead Confederate

There was a dude from Charlottesville, Virginia, who got rich as fuck working with the stock exchange in the early 1900s, named Paul Goodloe McIntire. Towards the latter part of his life, like most people who got obscenely rich, who started being a “philanthropist” to throw everybody off the fact he shouldn’t have ever gotten that rich off stock market speculation. Large chunks of his money were given to University of Virginia, which he attended for a single year before leaving to go to New York and get paid. He also gave a good bit to the city of Charlottesville, most notably in parks and statues, including the giant park that still bears his name right on 250, with a relatively new skate park in there. But the place where his statues and parks came together was what was once known as Lee Park, and now has some other name that I can’t remember but is either Justice or Progress or Biden 2024 or something like that.
The statues he commissioned bear mentioning as a whole, since the entire lot of them have not stood the test of time. The one most folks probably see easiest is the Lewis and Clark monument, where Main and Ridge Streets intersect, which famously (for local activists and concerned folk) has Sacagawea cowered down behind them in a less than honorific fashion, which the recontextualizing of history has taught us them dudes might’ve been fucked out there in the western “wilderness” indigenous nations without her guidance. Similarly, a half dozen blocks to the west, there’s one just to George Rogers Clark, which similarly is kinda fucked, depicting dude standing over top a lot of other folks, including some cowering beneath his great white greatness and whiteness. This one is near where my office used to be so I used to walk up there and sit sometime, but to be honest, this was not an early pick for lunchtime fuck-off bench within walking distance of the office back then. Lots of gardens tucked away on a major full of itself university like UVA. I wouldn’t put the Clark statue park on my draft board, it’s a walk-on that might play special teams, at best. But it’s a problematic statue in retrospect.
The other two statues commissioned by McIntire are far more obviously fucked – a Stonewall Jackson one put right outside the courthouse in 1921, with a giant dedication where folks were flying the Confederate battle flag (as popularized by stubborn idiots to this day). A couple dudes allegedly smashed the angels at the foot of this sculpture, but I don’t believe the charges at all. I bet it was Q Anon folks who did it, but tried to make it look like anti-fascist activists did.
And of course that last statue is the most well-known – the Robert E. Lee monument erected in a park right by the downtown library, where McIntire bought up that block back in the day, demolished everything on it, and turned it into a public park, with a lost cause statue, nearly four decades after the Civil War was over. A local teen activist named Zyahna Bryant led the call to have the monument removed, and other activists began rallying around that. Eventually, self-serving politicians got involved to make a cause of it as well, and the whole thing became a culture wars flashpoint to cause the park to be chosen as the site for a Unite the Right rally in August of 2017. (A month before this, a Ku Klux Klan rally was held at the Stonewall Jackson monument, with strong police protection for the Klan, and anti-racist protesters getting tear gassed and arrested. I’ve got a thing I wrote about that day here.) Unite the Right became known to most of the world as “Charlottesville” because of the bullshit we got to experience here firsthand, which was namely a bunch of nazi racists and fascists openly meeting hoping to at the least intimidate people, but more likely kill a lot of people. They were armed for assault. Luckily, with no help from the government or police – both of which chose to use the “ignore them” tactic, which included police standing down the day of the event – local and regional antifascists organized a resistance to their presence, which likely saved a lot of lives. The day will be known though for Heather Heyer being murdered by a racist in a Dodge Charger, but anyone who was there that day knows many people who were affected by that vehicular rampage, jumped out the way, got hit, or were involved. (Shout out to Tim Sauce, local rapper, who was on the streets that day, and in July, and when he got locked up on separate charges briefly after all this, got to hold a little one-on-one session with the driver of that Dodge Charger on the inside. Tim Sauce is a hero.)
Anyways, the actual removal of the Lee monument seemed more important after all that, but has never happened. It got covered for a while with giant tarp, but rednecks kept coming to tear it open. It’s surrounded by orange fencing and signs saying you’ll be prosecuted, and has been the site of multiple incidents since 2017, that I can’t even begin getting into. Shit, I even had a giant fucking Nazi fuming at the mouth as he was being detained by police on the one year anniversary, yelling at me that he had the duty to dispatch of anyone who went against the Constitution, with a confederate flag dangling out his pocket. An activist poet I know had confronted him in that park, very bravely, up in this giant racist’s face, putting herself at risk. She got a stiffer sentence than he did, by the way. He also was walking free a couple hours later after his arrest, a few blocks from my apartment at the time, after telling me aggressively how he had a duty to kill people who thought like me. Probably relevant is that apartment was one block from where the local shithead who invited Unite the Right to Charlottesville in the first place once lived, and did a lot of the organizing for it. So the shit is all around us, and has been ever since August 2017. That’s just the sediments of history since 2017. The monument itself, not erected until 1924. Lost cause statues were erected in abundance around that time, throughout the south, not in remembrance of southern history so much as to work in tandem with Jim Crow laws and the legalized repression of black people as opposed to outright slavery. The monuments were ominous warnings that ain’t shit changed. So even before 2017’s events locally, those monuments are not meant as a symbol of pride, but as one of foreboding.
Of course, pro-southern “heritage not hate” people have laundered the immorality of slavery in the south’s plantation system through all sorts of means, so that the Civil War was somehow about the freedom to go bass fishing without a license, or some shit completely unrelated shit that pretends slavery had nothing to do with it.
Many places have rightfully, since 2017, tore these statues down. Some were taken down by the people themselves. But the Lee monument in downtown Charlottesville, Virginia, remains – a giant middle finger of stubborn resistance to accepting all people as equally worthy of the basic human rights of life, liberty, and a pursuit of happiness.
After the dumb shit that happened in Washington, DC, the other week, a lot of pundit types have written “the lessons from Charlottesville” and how what we experienced should have been a warning to everybody else. The idiot mayor of Charlottesville at the time, Mike Signer, has even used it to ramp up his media appearances to sell self-serving books and try to further his political career, even though he was entirely useless in fighting Unite the Right, despite activists telling him exactly what was likely to happen. Basically, the political establishment doesn’t hear the people, much less serve them, but also the ragtag pack of clueless nitwits who raided the Capitol building, allegedly as self-described patriots, also don’t serve the people, as a whole, but instead their propagandized core of those who have mutated white supremacy from its foundation into some strange more diverse white supremacy based on the benefits of western civilization, which basically means capitalism, along with believing all the American exceptionalism mythologies. Of course, just like the Lee monument and its claims of being there to honor a great historical figure, these belief systems can give the surface appearance of being honest, but their built on a far more flawed and fucked up foundation.
I say all this as a man who grew up in the rural south, wore shirts with confederate flags on them as a kid, even did a zine for a number of years called The Confederate Mack during my younger edgelord days, in an attempt at that time to “own the libs” or shock the hypocritical suburban kids I found myself surrounded by as a first gen college student. “Own the libs” didn’t exist then, as it was a decade before the internet got poppin’, thank god, because my digital footprint would be a fucking train wreck. (I mean, it already is, but this is after great personal growth and maturity and breaking of cycles.) But I can also say, as a 47-year-old white male who still lives in the rural south, fuck those statues, and fuck that flag. They serve no purpose of good whatsoever, and all these motherfuckers saying “We have to remember our history” the loudest tended to not be the best students of any sort back in school.
The dimwit kid across the road from where I lived for two decades, where my family still lives, he grew from a dumb kid who loved horses to a grown man-child who has a confederate flag in the front yard with a spotlight on it. And when I’ve talked to him, he has that blank look in his eyes of those who have digested far too much nutritionless information, the online equivalent of McDonalds drive-through intelligence, where you think you’re learning new and truthful facts, but actually just getting fed a bunch of shit that’s not healthy for you in any way and doesn’t contain the building blocks for actual truth, just simulations to give the taste and appearance. There’s a growing army of these types, as was evidenced by what happened, and I’m not really sure how you fix it. You can’t just simply “educate” people who already feel like they’ve been educated in a bold and more correct way than you offer. They’ve been brainwashed, for lack of a better term, and unfortunately America’s rugged individualism means folks automatically look at deprogramming themselves of the brainwashing as a type of brainwashing itself. You know, like how actual news is now fake news, and how anti-fascists are known by most old people, including your grandparents and parents and aunts and uncles, as the fascists. Erecting monuments to confederate heroes happened a century ago. They’ve got far more complex tools building their armies of blank-gazed supporters now. And we’re not going to be able to reach a lot of these people, because it’s a century later, AND WE STILL HAVEN’T EVEN TAKEN DOWN THESE STUPID FUCKING RACIST MONUMENTS.

R34L1ST1C 3XP3CT4T10NS...

realistic expectations 
don't appear to be common - 
chained to the impossible 

T0RN4D03S 0F N3G4T1V3...

 

tornadoes of negative 
energy swirling through life, 
crashing from all directions 

JVST 4N0TH3R 1D10T...

just another idiot 
human being, slip sliding 
through a short life, drunk off self 

 

T4NGL3D VP W1TH1N 0VR 0WN...

tangled up within our own 
creation, tethered to thinking 
which never admits mistake 

SONG OF THE DAY: Slow Down

I was gonna write something super clever and poignant, maybe about current events but maybe just about life in general – that timeless prose that’s not attached to the moment, which we get trained to worship constantly being connected. But I didn’t write nothing. I ain’t do shit. Fuck it. And I ain’t gotta do shit. Y’all ain’t paying for this shit. Most of y’all don’t even read it. Keep telling myself “slow down”. I got nowhere to go and nowhere to be, except right here, now. Fuck it.

SH4R1NG D3C0L0N1Z3 Y0VR...

sharing "decolonize your 
mind" memes while imagining 
how humans will live on Mars 

4 RVST1NG WH1T3 L1NC0LN...

a rusting white Lincoln 
Continental - symbolic 
of American Empire 

SONG OF THE DAY: Lost You

the wailing of the unheard 
herded through autotune filters 
fed back to the consumer masses 
as a tonic of faux understanding 
of what it means to struggle 
against the rising tide 
of economic-based white American pride 
which always allows the other side 
so long as you ascribe to the right mythology 

disinformation wants to be free 
so that it can fence me in these filter bubbles 
that fuck up my real world outlook 
plus 
them with blue checks by their names 
who have consumed it all from the 
urban wailing of the disaffected to the 
rural moaning of the dissatisfied 
who mistakenly think they understand it all 
because they’ve spent their lives consuming 
all these things from the comfort of safety nets 
make judgements based on their consumption of data 
which got filtered through their bubble from the beginning 

red pills and blue checks ain’t got shit to do 
with my simple goddamned stubborn but pure heart 
don’t know shit about my 
heart still beating anxiously fast 
because it’s nothing but hills to climb 
and you never know if that cop that just passed 
is gonna but a u-turn and start asking questions 
because you’ve been dirty since the day you were born 

for your information fuck y’all fake mother fuckers
for your information fuck y’all fake mother fuckers 
heartless bastards always thinking you know shit you don’t  

T3CHN0L0GY 4PPL13D T0...

technology applied to 
building more secure fences; 
meanwhile, some folks got no house 

SONG OF THE DAY: La Raza

Apparently, La Raza Cosmica is now problematic too, because in the process of seeing the combination of all the main human racial types, you’re eliminating the originals. The term was coined by Jose Vasconcelos in 1925, reacting to white supremacist thinking being sent out to the world from the USA and Europe, which argued that the mestizos of the Americas were a combination of the four dominant races on the Earth, creating a fifth, unifying and conglomerate cosmic race. And I can see that complaint against it, because it’s not a huge jump from chosen race to say a super mix of all races is the actual chosen race. Everything is problematic nowadays. But you know why though? Everything was built on a problematic foundation. Shit’s all fucked up. When that woman got shot in the Capitol shit, it was interesting to me how cops called everybody off, called in paramedics, the people storming shit backed off – the reality of what had happened sobered everybody present up right away. Traumas are supposed to do that, to shock you into sheltering and surviving. All the conflict that had been manufactured came to a pause, because a human life was fucked up all of a sudden.
And yet, that’s exactly the problem with racism. When George Floyd was killed, everybody present should’ve been like “Whoa… what the fuck, everybody back up, call 911.” But time after time, that’s not been the response. So it’s when dehumanization goes beyond just thinking your race is some extra special shit to thinking other races don’t deserve to exist. Death of a human being should be shocking to you, to some extent, because you’re a human, and self-preservation is part of your natural make-up. Once you get to a point where you’re deciding some humans don’t deserve preservation and others do, then you’ve gotten to that point where your brain has been educated beyond your heart’s intelligence. There’s a lot of that going around now, in both the obvious and not so obvious ways. I hope we all sober the fuck up.

S0M3T1M3S 1 JVST L4Y D0WN 1N...

 

sometimes I just lay down in 
the strip mall parking lot, and 
stare up at the sky, in awe 

SONG OF THE DAY: Graffiti Blues (45s on 33)

COVID in the house, and astroturfed organized chaos in the Capitol. Had to ride to the store to do a contactless pick-up at the Food Lion yesterday, same one where patriotic beards walk freely without masks every time I go in there, angrily staring at anyone who dare not be just like them. There’s only like two things the kids want to eat right now, so I’m keeping it stocked, and even though I’m negative so far, I’m likely exposed, and would prefer not to fuck anybody around me’s life up if I can avoid it. My girlfriend texted me, “Have you heard the news?” so I put on the radio, and bits and pieces of what was going on in D.C. came through. I wasn’t shocked, I think anybody who’s been paying attention knew this was coming, eventually. It’s still unsettling, because all of us got fed that American meritocracy shit growing up. Hell, that’s even what empty suit ass Joe Biden said, “this is not who we are.” Please, where the fuck are you living? Where I live, this is exactly who the fuck people have been, more and more so the past few years. Reaching across any aisles and finding common ground does not take hold as fast as propaganda mechanisms do, nor work as efficiently. People’s grandmas were all telling them antifa did the Capitol raid last night, because people’s grandmas aren’t getting their news from talking to real life people, or a local newscast.
It was all deeply dystopian, having left my sick with corona kids at home to run to the grocery store to pick up foods and drinks to keep them hydrated and fed while they ride this out, also hoping I could somehow magically and meticulously avoid getting exposed myself. Motherfuckers talking about “patriots” and a civil war, and seeing an Amanda Chase sign on the back road way home. People’s brains have been broken, and unfortunately when you severely break things – as they’ve been done in the past decade – you don’t put it all back together that quickly. Usually it takes longer to repair than it did to break, and it’s not as whole as it was beforehand either. So if we’ve had five years of rapid radicalization, we’re gonna need a decade of detox and healing. But the people who think they’re patriots don’t want none of that. So I don’t know what the fuck we do. All I’m gonna do on a personal level is keep building like I’ve been building, taking care of my family first, and my community after that as much as possible, and sowing good shit wherever I can. I can’t help all the bad shit.

W3 S4Y "1C0N1C" F0R BR4NDS...

 

we say "iconic" for brands 
etched into our consciousness 
by relentless marketing 

PR1M3 C0MM3RC14L SP4C3 F3W Y34RS...

prime commercial space few years 
back, rendered to rubble to 
build brand new more of the same 

OVR M4NM4D3 BR4ND N3W BL0SS0MS...

 

our manmade brand new blossoms 
don't get reborn each spring; we 
keep chasing our abstractions 

LVN4R CYCL3S C0NT1NV3D...

lunar cycles continued 
over multiple Earthly 
epochs, with consistency 

TH3 S1L3NC1NG 0F S1R3NS...

the silencing of sirens 
will one day feel ominous, 
until the birds start singing 

SONG OF THE DAY: John Brown

I am tired, but the world doesn't stop. Here's the lyrics to John Brown.

my people are from southside by way of appalachia
vagabond spirits always seeking greener pasture
family so dysfunctional no cousins with my last name
my mother's worthless son, all I got from her is blame
so making my own way, about seventh generation
scot irish scandinavian german polish mutt caucasian
with a college education, my path away from the dirt roads
except my trust in well meaning well to do white folks constantly erodes
in this system which ain't giving shit but diminishing returns
the only dreams I'm believing in is I pray it all burns
down to ground, a place built on the backs of black folk
with me rapping in broken english, which wasn't even spoke
on this continent before prominent pyramid plans was established
but the destinies manifest for my bloodlines been tragic
so if I'm gonna think like a white man it's gonna be john brown esque

rough around the edges because I'm southern grotesque
can't be your rural noir hillbilly novelist class apologist
my thinking's too busted up can't afford all the consonants
just a colloquial country yokel with penchant for burning bridges
and walking through back alleys or hiding between blue ridges
I recognize my white privileges since ain't no cop shot me in the back
but I ain't proclaiming america's greatness since all I've seen is lack
of justice and equality from the fuck y'all I got mine philosophy
which is un-American but buried in the etymology
of United States, so I pledge allegiance to the people
this edition is overrated and we're ready for the sequel
so tear down all these monuments and these deeds of dominion
we ain't hit a wall saying end times, it's just a fenceless new beginning

PL4Y1NG C1V1L1Z4T10N...

 

playing civilization 
on a decade old iMac 
in front of a space heater 

SONG OF THE DAY: Mentou

Lately I've been practicing walking a lot more with my phone a lot less, sometimes for an hour or two down the same meandering back roads where I live. Being just after Christmas, there's a few fresh old televisions dumped off in ditches where normally just Bud Light cans live. I find myself less distracted by thinking about my walk as an experience to share or consume without the phone. And when I get home later in the day, and pick up the phone, and click it to life, it's like YOU HAVEN'T GOTTEN CLOSE TO YOUR STEPS GOAL FOR THE DAY. I just laugh to myself, thinking, "You don't know all you think you do, fuckin' smart phone." It's also great because it helps me remember to take everything the phone says with a grain of salt, because it doesn't really know shit like it acts like it does.

MVTV4L 41D R3PL4C3M3NTS...

 

mutual aid replacements 
of failed government efforts; 
might as well overthrow shit 

N3V3R N0 R34L D33P R3S3T...

never no real deep reset, 
to where the economic 
riptide ain't pulling sideways