SONG OF THE DAY: Come to Mama

 

Need more feel good, less run over by life times.

B4R3LY TR34D1NG W4T3R WH1L3...

barely treading water while 
also feeling like retread 
myself… at least not balding 

SONG OF THE DAY: The Great Northern Coal Company

Most afternoons I day dream about walking through empty coal train yards, scribbling nothing prayers to float across nowhere, back and forth from mountains to ocean as earth’s guts get scraped out to keep all these screens feeling lit. A post-industrial late American empire message in a bottle of sorts, except there’s all sorts of other messages in bottles stuffed onto the coal trains too, in every open spot sometimes, and you sit there when blessed by one rolling past and look for people you know, or wish you knew, or folks you love, and some you don’t like at all because you know they’re full of shit and fake as fuck. It all floats past.
Most nights I lay in the bed, staying up too late, worrying about how I’m gonna do everything that needs to be done, plus the shit I wanna do, and have enough time for family, for friends, much less my solitary pilgrimages along the tracks, “silver blazing” as the great American wandering poet Marcher Arrant calls it; and I don’t get enough sleep, and I wake up tomorrow even more rest-deprived, with the need-to-dos stacking higher, and you shovel as much of that shit out of the way as you can on the weekends, which means the weeks never really end… just the responsibilities you get paid by some fuckers for bleed into the responsibilities you squeeze around bleed into each other and all over any dreams you once had, which is why you can’t sleep. You don’t dream anymore… you just keep trying to shovel the needs down as fast as you can, but they’re piling up even faster, and it’s a fucking nightmare, but this is how it will probably be until it all collapses.

4B4ND0N3D C0MMVN1TY...

abandoned community 
center with lace curtains left 
behind, exposed to weather 

SONG OF THE DAY: My 2600

I’m not sure what the correct term for the hat is but those weird Scottish boxer boy selling newspapers hats, where it’s like floppy but with a brim, and not really floppy, and one loose part comes to the brim part? I have never trusted anybody who wears one of those in the modern day. Those people are not to be trusted, ever. Even if going for ironic style, you’re ironically trying to look like an asshole, and I’m not sure why you’d want to do that, unless you’re an asshole, but trying to temper it with humor. I don’t know.
I’ve been trying not to be a hater on shit as much lately, but goddamn, living in a “culture” where identity is more often than not purchased, and where people either change their identities regularly or become these strange piecemeal hybrid identities of the various phases of consumption they’ve indulged in, it’s hard not to hate. I guess I’m not hating the players though – I’m hating the game.

4 TH0VS4ND SH4D3S 0F GR3Y BLVR...

a thousand shades of grey blur 
my half-dazed gaze into not 
much more than bare minimum 

SONG OF THE DAY: Slow Flow

 

the newness of nostalgia

a decade beyond my own cultural relevance

reminiscing over you (old shit)

cursing the unrecognizable ways of now

praise being that old shit

one more time

old as fuck

my nicest sunday afternoon fit

for the back yard is straight

off the goodwill racks

my metaphysical pockets

are flat

not fat

fuck it

there’s still majesty

in a grey beard

because it

signifies

survival

CHR1STM4S L1GHTS 1N TH3 L1V1NG...

christmas lights in the living 
room, set to constant since the 
twinkle mode gives me headache 

Monday Night Rumble of The Discourse - Episode 10

Made it to 10 episodes of this ridiculousness. We've expanded the field to 25, because there's too many people that deserve to be up in this bitch. Be sure to consider supporting my patreon (which supports this project).

SONG OF THE DAY: N30N M00N (chopped and screwed)

I’ve been finding a lot of abandoned trailers lately – doublewides and old singles. They’re not as glamorous for the internet-minded urban exploration crowd, who eat up taking posed pictures of dilapidated old farmhouses. They’re just shitty fucking trailers that aren’t worth shit once somebody got sick and moved away or went to live with relatives or whatever. I found one the other week where the driveway to it had literally been ripped up too, so it was just sitting up in the woods, not shit around. Only reason I could tell it was there was a bunch of daffodils and other flowers in a planned cluster in the woods up above the railroad tracks I was walking, which is usually a sign that somebody had once planted them there in that fashion. So I hacked my way through the blackberry tangles to get there.
I’ve lived in a trailer before, multiple times in my life actually, and almost bought one brand new when my marriage dissolved, which felt like a horrible idea so thankfully fell apart before it came into full reality. Trailers are rip-offs, basically applying credit scams to people who can’t afford a whole house, and making them feel like they’ve done something rich people could never do because they live in a trailer. And there’s some inadvertent truth to that, because there’s a hardened psychology that comes from living in a trailer that’s unlike any other thing, because you’re really cramped in, but separate from everything else, like out in the country or even in semi-urban trailer parks. But you also never feel all that super protected from the world outside to be honest. So you get a weird psychology to yourself.
Anyways, due to the expansion of trailer marketing (as supported by famed wealthy investor Warren Buffet, who’s basically the driving force between the growth of new mobile home sales in America, through his fake-binary of Clayton and Oakwhood Homes, both of which use the same installation and credit companies, and manufacturing base, so are essentially the same company pretending to be two competing ones), there’s a lot more abandoned trailers. There’s also a lot more abandoned malls, and as the JC Penney’s nearby were all closing, I kept circling back trying to catch mannequins on sale at closeout prices towards the end. They never got as cheap as I wanted, but in all my obsessive searching, I did figure out a couple places where mannequins were getting dumped. They weren’t as nice as the shiny JC Penney ones, but they served my purpose, and for a while I had a pile of mannequins under the house I moved into last fall. It never occurred to me to do anything other than keep them on my compound until recently when they were relaying all the tracks on both the local CSX and Norfolk Southern lines. There was a piece where they cut off the old track, piece of track about 18 inches long, which I wanted to put in my yard. But that bitch was heavy, so I couldn’t carry it the mile and a half to my car in one trip. Thus it took me five or six trips, carrying the fucking thing as far as I could before my arms started cramping up, and then tossing it into the bushes in case the railroad workers came through to collect all the pieces for scrap before I got it out of there.
This heavy duty endeavor made me realize how far I could probably carry a mannequin, especially if just walking along railroad tracks like I mostly am. So I started putting mannequins up in the abandoned trailers I’d found, generally two but sometimes three or four if the dilapidated scene in the abandoned trailer demanded it. For example, in the one without the driveway, there’s a kitchen table with chairs still but also a really big couch, all in the big open main area with insulation and raccoon shit everywhere. So I put two folks on the couch and one at the kitchen table looking towards them. But there was also a queen sized mattress and box spring still in the master bedroom at the back of the house, and I figure I should always put a mannequin in a bed, just out of general lounge principles, so I did. So that one trailer took four mannequins, which I can only fit two at a time in the trunk of my car, and that trailer was like a half mile hike from the closest car parking point. So I had to make two trips by car, both times carrying two mannequins, which then required a trip with each one, because you can’t go walking down the railroad tracks with two mannequins. A short train spraying pesticides along the tracks actually came by while I was carrying one on the second trip, and you should’ve saw the worker’s face who was spraying the chemicals out the window when he was some bearded dude with a buck naked mannequin slung over his shoulder standing beside the tracks in the middle of nowhere.
All told, I think I’ve scattered about 17 mannequins in 7 different abandoned trailers at this point. It’s exciting to think of some other weirdo out looking for shit in the middle of nowhere, who sees a trailer and thinks, “Oh cool, let me go see what’s up with that shit,” and then they get there and THERE’S FUCKING MANNEQUINS SET UP EVERYWHERE, IN THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE. That’s gonna freak somebody the fuck out.
Sadly, I imagine eventually somebody who does it for the clout will find one of my scenes, and take a bunch of pictures, and go semi-viral on Instagram or some shit, for the mannequins in an abandoned trailer shit. Gentrifiers ruin everything, even out in the middle of nowhere. I don’t do it for the clout though; I do it for the art.

3V3N1NGS W4ST3D G4Z1NG 4T...

evenings wasted gazing at 
events beyond my control, 
as the atrophy creeps in 

ST1LL 34S13R T0 G3T L0ST...

still easier to get lost 
than most folks realize; I try 
at least seven times a week 

SONG OF THE DAY: Black Frost

Nobody cares. Nobody gives a damn, for sure.

F0R TH0S3 WH0 D3S1R3 DR4M4...

for those who desire drama, 
it’s easy to find; as for 
peace, that’s far more difficult 

SONG OF THE DAY: Minuit

I listen to shit like this a lot to be honest, a real digital era “world” music dork connoisseur, wearing the post-modern traditional African garb of secondhand track pants and a soccer jersey for a club I don’t even support. For pretend white American Ramadan, I’ve been trying to read more, but my brain’s all fucked up from the internet, so mostly I just sit here wondering if my brain is fucked up because I’m getting older, or technology, or covid, or all of it, or none of it. Then I go into my basement and lift weights briefly, but the basement is outside the house and unfinished so it’s soapstone foundation with gravel floor and a bunch of old windows but a screen door I can shut, and do a few reps in a space I can’t even stand upright in, and it all feels okay ever so briefly, but also doesn’t, like not at all. Somehow simultaneously absolutely blessed and absolutely fucked at the same time – the yin and yang of 21st century life as a human being in the slowly dying American Empire.

MY M1ND F33LS L1K3 4N 0LD SH3D...

my mind feels like an old shed - 
cluttered with archaic tools, 
filled up with cobwebs, useless 

SONG OF THE DAY: Madre Cumbia (rebajada)

just a song today

no writing

not even this 

4LL TH0S3 M0M3NTS W4ST3D WH1L3...

all those moments wasted while 
waiting in strip mall drive thrus 
never get returned to you 

M4K1NG M1N1SCVL3 M4RKS 0N...

making minuscule marks on 
industrial behemoths, 
to feel larger than my life 

SONG OF THE DAY: Stubborn Woman

 

I hit the Megaball number on Saturday night, but hadn’t even looked at my ticket to see what I won. When I get them, I only get 3 or 5 tickets, and memorize my Megaball numbers. Generally, I let the computer pick all the numbers, but occasionally I’ll pick my Megaballs. I know nobody hit the big jackpot, so I just let that shit percolate on the shelf. Maybe it’s $40K sitting on the dresser, but it might just be a free ticket. I ain’t stressing. Ain’t like I’m gonna be able to quit my job, or even escape the slow death of American existence. So thinking about it from time to time, letting a little dopamine slip into the brain juices, that’ll do just fine for now. The balance of the dying empire is getting just enough dopamine to ignore the overwhelming cost of being alive, and postpone cousin death for one more calendar box.

W3 4R3 4LL JVST PR1S0N3RS...

“we are all just prisoners 
here, of our own device” blasts 
from coin laundry parking lot  

S4M3 SKY MY 4NC3ST0RS G4WK3D...

same sky my ancestors gawked 
at, walking across spaces 
nowhere near where I am 

SM4SH1NG TH3 W1ND0WS 0VT 0LD...

smashing the windows out old 
abandoned buildings because 
I ain’t got shit else to do  

P33P1NG TH3 3LD3R KN0WL3DG3...

peeping the elder knowledge 
dropped by primordial frogs 
from the muck at humane edge 

SONG OF THE DAY: First Place Ribbon

 

Gillian Welch is on the short list of women I sometimes fantasize about sharing a trailer with somewhere near Roxboro, North Carolina, probably have one of those vintage tables in the kitchen, wake up naked together on the weekends and not even think about putting on clothes  until 2 in the afternoon, maybe, cooking pancakes with chopped walnuts in them bamas and drinking like four French presses of coffee, not doing shit, talking about Mary Oliver poetry and how great creeping phlox is and wondering if there were any new collections of VHS tapes at the Goodwill to dig through to add to the collection, even though we hadn’t hooked the VCR back up since I had them both in the middle in the room trying to do some VHS mixtapes with an old computer monitor. But then these fantasies always get fucked up because usually I’m laying on the couch reading an old magazine or some shit, and she walks through from the back bedroom to the kitchen, and I notice her really really nice full-color plant tattoo from her left shoulder all the way down to her elbow, like $1200 worth of tattoo, and I start to lay there on that couch in my fantastical mind, thinking about all the vehicles I bought that cost less than that (most of them, to be honest), or how much I could use that $1200 not in fantasy mind life but to pay off medical debt that just keeps trickling along in the real life, on the wrong side of the fantasy. Sometimes I just wake up from the fantasy and realize I’m zoning out while at work, in front of a computer screen, pretending to do shit that matters my whole goddamned wasted life. Other times I was half asleep, and I pick up my iphone to check my IG notifications. But sometimes I just get mad in the fantasy, at Gillian Lucinda Welch Williams Jr. there, except I don’t say nothing, because lolol I hadn’t worked in my fantasy in 9 months, and she pays all the bills. But I’m gonna log into OKCupid after she goes to bed tonight, and flirt with women that don’t exist on multiple levels.

TH3 C0VNTRY CHVRCH'S ST41N3D GL4SS...

the country church’s stained glass 
is just plastic film applied 
to the cheapest textured panes 

SONG OF THE DAY: Troubles of the World

 

Neighbors on both sides pay this ol’ boy to cut their grass, and so did the people that owned this one before I got it last fall. I ain’t paying to get my grass cut, sorry, it’s not that big a yard. So I got a push mower, but I ain’t cut it all yet. Fuck it, it’s just grass. I’d rather blast funk gospel, watch the kittens dive into the air trying to catch butterflies, watch the redbuds turn pinker at the edge of the woods, and just sit there in my MY GRASS IS TALL t-shirt, stacking quartz rocks on old giant metal springs I found at the railroad tracks. As long as I keep the springs upright and the quartz above the tallest grass, I’m doing good. Who the fuck heard of having grass you pay somebody to cut instead of a bunch of junk springs with giant rocks on top? What kinda fuckin’ world is this we’ve made?

SH4D0WS 0F 1NDVSTR14L...

shadows of industrial 
revolution blind us to 
blue sky’s universal truth 

TH1NGS W3'V3 B33N M34N1NG T0 F1X...

things we’ve been meaning to fix 
for years rust back into Earth; 
meanwhile, our end creeps closer 

SONG OF THE DAY: Watermelon Sugar (Slurred & Blurred)

My man dj_brilliant just sent me a whole new rar full of a concept he's cooked up, and as much as I hate the internet's effect on all our lives, I can't deny the beauty of finding long-term fringe community in certain ways. There's gotta be a fine line between finding shit on your own and having the algorithm try to push you towards shit to buy. At times I think the algorithm pushes too hard and ruins the experience, but it's a constant ebb and flow between people and mechanisms trying to pull shit back into capitalist place. Shit, I remember how it was following Ferguson on twitter before they post-BLMed the algorithms then so that organized shit like that couldn't pop off anymore. And it still pops off, in other ways. Humans adapt, always, and those adapting trying to corral us back into fences and sell us shit we don't need can never adapt as fast as those of us in need or extreme want of some shit the algorithm and structure and design is trying to refuse us. I hope you still bootleg music and torrent it and all that shit. Streaming is a trick. All of its a trick. Steal anything you can, for as long as you can. And when they don't have anything real left for you to steal, rip people off on the fake shit too.

DR34MS TR4PP3D 1NS1D3 PR4CT1C4L

dreams trapped inside practical 
thinking get lost behind walls 
full of nothing but promise 

W3 M4D3 1T S0 L1F3 1S W0RK...

we made it so life is work; 
beautify the world where you 
live, wherever you wander 

CVLT4V4T1NG 4 C0MP0VND...

cultivating a compound 
of purpose isn't easy; 
it might take generations 

D1S4PP34R1NG D0WN H1GHW4YS...

 

disappearing down highways 
might shift the scenery seen, 
but the wrong remains the same 

N0 M4TT3R H0W B1G 4LL TH3S3...

no matter how big all these 
buildings get, there's a bigger 
sky, and solid earth to boot 

BVST3D F4CT0RY BY TH3...

busted factory by the 
rail line on far end of town… 
a reminder to "fuck it" 

BVST3D T3L3V1S10N BY...

 

busted television by 
the river in the bottom… 
a reminder to “fuck it” 

Monday Night Rumble of The Discourse - episode 8

Monday Night Rumble of The Discourse was an all women's rumble this week, after last week's finish which saw the Twitter Communist beat Super Bluecheck. President Biden signed up to be special referee for this one.

3V3N TH0VGH W0RK1NG FR0M H0M3...

even though working from home, 
wash all my clothes on Sunday 
afternoons; start fresh each week 

SONG OF THE DAY: Pacific Highway

I'd like to drive from here to 19 theres in a row, where there is somewhere within thinking distance that "this is realistic", but then when that first there becomes here, I do it again. So this would be 19 distances that are the Raven brain equivalent of a stone's throw, which I guess would be 19 "as the raven thinks", which perhaps is close to as the crow flies, but probably not. Anyways, that's where I feel like driving today, preferably in a windbreaker track suit that was too ugly for even Sinbad in 1982. Not ugly in a bad way, but ugly in a wonderful way, that probably looks bad on me. Fuck it. I'm just breathing oxygen until I can't.

TH3 F4D3D 4LLVR3 0F MYTHS...

 

the faded allure of myths 
about great American 
opportunities to thrive 

SONG OF THE DAY: 3 Parts Per Million

Conspiracies used to be fun, when they were printed and you had to go searching for them. Now they’re mainstream and everybody’s grandma is posting conspiracy theories as DOCUMENTED REALITY YOU HAVE TO WATCH THIS YOUTUBE on social media, and it’s depressing. I liked conspiracy theories before they blew up, back in the day, Behold a Pale Horse era conspiracy theories. Eventually I gave up on them because they give humans too much credit for keeping secrets. Any conspiracy that requires more than a couple people to keep shit quiet is a lie, because human beings are notoriously fickle, and incompetent. That doesn’t mean fucked up shit doesn’t happen, often times on a grand scale. But humans aren’t nearly as clever or devious as we’re trained to believe. Mostly they’re just fucked up,greedy, and evil, so when bad shit is happening, it’s nothing more complicated than some fucked up greedy evil fucker is doing nasty shit.

D0N3 MY B3ST T0 4V01D 4LL...

 

done my best to avoid all 
the county courthouses by 
any means necessary 

SONG OF THE DAY: Khadidja

One thing I've listened to the past half year or so that I never heard of before is rai music. I think it's old pop music but I honestly don't know shit about it other than it's from Turkey and everybody who does it famously is either named Cheb or Cheba. I could look it up and learn more but I don't really give a fuck about becoming a western academic historian of Turkish pop music from the 1980s. I just enjoy some of this shit. That should be good enough. Everybody thinks they're a goddamned archivist curator all the fucking time.

H1GH3ST M0M3NTS B3C0M3 BLVRS...

 

highest moments become blurs 
in the mental memory 
bank once further down the road 

SONG OF THE DAY: For The City

 

Friday vibes, with a fresh orange polo pullover from a deep dive thrift store score to match the blaze orange polo socks from the outlet store where I splurged for 3 pairs of socks for $8. Ballin’ on a budget, since birth, from the time I first sprouted til they scatter my ashes back around the Earth. A natural born dirtgod – can’t have nothin’ nice nor keep nothin’ clean, born with fried chicken thighs grease inside my fingerprints, but a forsythia heart that stays golden this time of year.

M4N1F3ST1NG SP1R1TV4L...

manifesting spiritual 
practices to make better 
sense of this chaotic world 

SONG OF THE DAY: Bl4ck B3rry Pt 1 (45s on 33)

 

All the blossoms are popping, which is extra exciting because I just moved into this place last fall, so this is the first blossom. There’s chunks of blackberry bushes I’ve gotten tangled up in already in their naked winter state back in the woods behind the house, so looking forward to what kinda filling-up-an-old-yogurt-container blackberry action I get later this calendar year. Good lessons from nature in the springtime, notably fuck your everyday shit, put on something bright as fuck and almost ridiculous looking now and then. That’s why I’ve got the blaze orange GK top and some garish bright orange Polo socks pulled up to knees, big ass tropical camouflage cargo shorts, looking like a fuckin’ fool that ought not to be dressing themselves. In my opinion, if you’re going full natural perspective in this bullshit world, that’s the only way to dress. “Professional” or “stylish” fashion is product trying to get you to assimilate into indistinguishable likeness. Would you rather be a blackberry bush, or a redbud popping in the spring time, or part of an endless row of enslaved corn plants trapped in fucking Indiana or Ohio or some shit? (Please don’t say the enslaved corn, but I bet a bunch of folks actually think that way, that being a goddamned genetically modified unsweet corn stalk in soulless Ohio is the most patriotic freedom-minded existence possible. Y’all stupid. Go get tangled up in blackberry bushes with your narrow-minded ass.)

D0M3ST1C4T3D SP1R1TS...

domesticated spirits 
gazing longingly at the 
wilderness just out of reach