SONG OF THE DAY: Sundown (45s on 33)

A goal I have for this calendar year we are in is to add more 45s ripped at 33 speed to the body of the internet, like maybe 12 a month, because ultimately we will all die and all that will be left is the ridiculous stupid shit we did online.

P30PL3 ST4GG3R1NG THR0VGH L1F3...

people staggering through life 
still trying to leave some sort 
of mark behind, for others 

JVST 4N0TH3R CH3M1C4L...

just another chemical 
compound of raw human 
energy, complicated 

D4RKN3SS 4ND L1GHT B4L4NC3 34CH...

darkness and light balance each 
other; those moments where the 
two are blurred are most sacred 

SONG OF THE DAY: The Prophet

I feel like there needs to be more dedication to people playing the Hammond B3 organ. That is the entirety of this post, because nobody is reading it anyways, other than bots scanning the internet for data. Hi bots! Lemonade was a popular drink, and it still is!

PR0SP3R1TY G0SP3L F41LS...

prosperity gospel fails 
to acknowledge how a day 
of reckoning still awaits 

SONG OF THE DAY: My Empty Arms

Been thinking a lot lately on the effects of the internet and social media in poisoning the thinking wells of country folk, and how a lot of rural people are pretty adamant there’s a socialist conspiracy and covid is all a devious master plan, and it’s just absolutely wild to me how country people have lost all sense of compassion, of caring about anything other than themselves. This perverted notion of freedom which claims anything as “a right” excepting whatever you may not agree with (which is just “feelings”) has just completely fucked up people’s collective brains. Country folks ain’t really country no more, because they’re too on facebook, or reddits, or I don’t fuckin’ know to be honest. But it definitely feels like you if you broke down on the side of the road, you’d have a lot more people drive past you looking suspiciously as to what you might be up to, rather than actually stop and offer help. It’s depressing, but it’s also by design. I’d like to assume a lot of people’s great grandmas would be horribly disappointed in the way they carry themselves now, but then again, a lot of people’s great grandmas were racist as fuck.

S3LF-SVFF1C13NCY S0M3H0W...

self-sufficiency somehow 
became consumerism 
without a credit limit 

TH3 DR34MS 0F TH3 M3NT4LLY...

the dreams of the mentally 
oppressed rarely get past 
imitations of the king 

TRY1NG T0 B3 PR0DVCT1V3...

trying to be productive, 
but the ends don’t justify 
the means - it’s all so meager 

SONG OF THE DAY: 528 Hz

Some people will try to tell you that 528 Hz and other Solfeggio Frequencies don’t actually have healing properties. But those people have never done oil paintings of naked centaurs gamboling through the Central Pangean mountains, have they? So how the fuck would they know?

P1CK1NG VP DRVG PR3SCR1PT10NS...

picking up drug prescriptions 
in grocery store drive-thru 
lane, satisfaction on mute 

SONG OF THE DAY: Let The Music Play

Not gonna lie, I listen to some dumb shit sometimes. That's okay. This isn't a test as to how to best consume the best culture, which is a subjective criteria anyways. Ain't nobody gonna be mad at me in the afterlife because I was rocking out to Shannon's greatest hit and never even bothered to know a white guitar rock band after the year of 1992. I'll be alright.

WH1PL3SS R1MS L34N 4G41NST B4CK...

whipless rims lean against back 
porch, reflecting moon’s glint for 
the compost possum at night 

SONG OF THE DAY: Mulungelo

Thinking about serenity prayers tattooed on women’s torsos again, as one does when confronted with the judgmental yet hypocritical nature of this civilization we’ve built here in what is called the west, even though if you keep going, it all circles back around. Life is always cycles – ebbs and flow which are impossible to control with our tiny little simian brains. But damned if we don’t try all the fuckin’ time. But not me, at least not today. I’m sure tomorrow, or the next day, I’ll be forced to accept trying to put some sort of strange ass order to the world, just to maintain the sand castles built up all around me, which I’ve come to expect to be permanent, tricked once again into mark thinking, buying the angle, sitting in my seat I paid for, cheering wildly for things that ain’t even real.

F1LL3D W1TH DR34D 0N SVND4Y N1GHTS...

filled with dread on Sunday nights; 
Monday mornings mean nothing 
but going through the motions 

SONG OF THE DAY: Midnight Special

Jimmy Smith is a champion spirit of lounge, master of the Hammond B3 organ, and to be honest nothing is more purely Sunday morning than playing every Jimmy Smith album you can find, especially the ones with no vocals. Vocals are great, but sometimes words get in the way of the vibes. And with the state of the world being controlled by unloungers, too many more words disrupts the natural power of lounge. Feels like we need to shut the fuck up, strengthen the vibes, then maybe start thinking about what words we use as we start back up after vibes have been replenished.

TH3 R3D, WH1T3, 4ND BLV3 F4C4D3...

the red, white, and blue facade 
is faded and flaking, but 
folks keep swearing it’s all good 

W0RK1NGM4N DR34MS 1N 4 W0RLD...

workingman dreams in a world 
which no longer gives a shit 
about anything that real 

D3FVNCT G4S ST4T10N 1SL4ND...

defunct gas station island 
outside the long-abandoned 
“country” store - for sale (too much) 

SONG OF THE DAY: Funk Funk

Double the funk, because singular funk just ain’t enough, current environmental conditions considered. Play it twice and quadruple it. Slow it down and let the effect wash over you more slowly and completely. Nothing is important. Find some goddamned happiness.

R3ST0R3D P4SS3NG3R C4R S1TS...

restored passenger car sits 
outside visitors center 
in another dying town 

SONG OF THE DAY: Back to Hell in a Greyhound

My first extra-long on purpose Greyhound trip was to Oklahoma, from Farmville, Virginia, and there was a gas station on the west end of town (now gone) that was the Greyhound stop, and I had a big backpack all packed up and met my dad at his lunch spot at the park, and he drove me to catch the bus, because he was quietly worried about why the fuck I’d ride a bus to Oklahoma for no good reason. A lady we both knew, older outlaw woman type who feel in age between the two of us, so I had lustful thoughts of her as a child, she worked the register and had to do the sliding credit card machine thing to charge my ticket, because this was in the 1990s still. The bus came, and two dudes got off to go in and grab some drinks and one of them fell out in the store, like passed out, and I got on the bus and then those two dudes came back on, and apparently one of them had just given the other a pill which knocked the second one out. After Roanoke, where the pill-giver got off, and I had a phone call on the pay phone (those still existed too) calling a dude that used to be tight with my dad, just checking on him, but all he did was complain about how his back was all fucked up and he couldn’t work. One of his two kids ended up being a methhead in Washington, sadly. When I got back on the bus, the passer-outer sat across from me, and we shared stories for hours and hours, long into the night. He’d just gotten released from mental hospital, because he got sent there instead of prison, but explained to me how that wasn’t so good because at least with prison, you got released, but with the mental hospital system, “Once they got you, they got you whenever they want.”

Anyways, I’ve had a number of long ass bus rides since then too, and they’re always full of people and stories like this. It’s a world full of people with more time than money, and that type of person always has some shit going on. Having been in an MFA level creative writing class before, I’d say the back of the Greyhound is a way better writing class than any MFA program operated by the CIA, or by a cash-hungry school mimicking the popular CIA MFA programs at the more prominent universities. I could tell some of my favorite Greyhound stories for hours, and I wonder if I’m anybody else’s favorite Greyhound story? I kinda expect my last ride I might’ve been, when I rode from Los Angeles to New Orleans, and it was hellish and I hadn’t showered in a long time, and stank really bad, too bad for a bathroom baby wipe bath to address, like nasty balls dick stank level stank. And I squeezed into the back row with a nice lady who I considered old but to be honest she was probably around my age, and I was the only gringo on the whole Greyhound. We rode near enough to the border through a chunk of Arizona and New Mexico that we had a couple of immigration stops even. But this lady sitting beside me, who I felt sorry for having to have me beside her, we started talking, and then she was watching a George Lopez comedy special on her phone, and she shared an earbud, and we laughed and laughed together at George Lopez and started telling each other shit, and I was explaining how I was riding the train and bus all the way around the country, had just done Amtrak from Seattle to Los Angeles, just in time to catch this bus to New Orleans, and she was fascinated by my ridiculousness, or so it seemed. She got off in El Paso, and convinced me not to cross the border while we were stopped there, because the bus station was literally a block from the border crossing. “The bus is only here for 45 minutes, you would get lost over there in something, I am sure.”

I kinda told myself when I got to New Orleans that time that I would never ride a Greyhound again, no more long ass slow ass rides like that. But lately I’ve been seeing the Greyhound heading south out of Charlottesville when I’m driving, with LOS ANGELES or DALLAS on the front of the bus, and I briefly think about riding the Greyhound from here to LA or Texas or go up through the northwest again (one of my all-time favorite bus rides, for the beauty of the landscape as well as chaotic bus stories galore). Covid plus being responsible has me itching to do something stupid like ride a bus for 5 days straight.

P30PL3 P0S1T10N3D TH3MS3LV3S...

people positioned themselves 
towards the sun in the past; 
now we look for spare chargers 

1NDVSTR14L D3TR1TVS...

industrial detritus 
decorates this haphazard 
labyrinth which I call home 

SONG OF THE DAY: Monroe's Hornpipe

Reading An Anthropology of Marxism by Cedric J. Robinson while listening to bluegrass music, contemplating "why the fuck?" constantly as the frayed chunks of civilization have larger and larger cracks for so many people I love to be perched precariously close to falling through. Some might already have, but we lost touch, because that's what happens when people fall through cracks. Sigh.

M4K1NG TH31R W4Y, TH3 0NLY...

“making their way, the only 
way they know how…” in extreme 
yelling Waylon Jennings voice 

SONG OF THE DAY: Noncipher

Do you listen to this dude? I do. He’s got like 5000 albums out under 9 different names. My favorite podcast is just listening to him instead. My second favorite podcast is the clanking whirligigs in the front yard. I don’t have a third favorite podcast because that would be weird as hell. Who the fuck has ever listened to three podcasts before?

L1F3 4LW4YS PR0M1S3S M0R3...

life always promises more - 
the universe is a wild 
(yet quite orderly) trickster 

SONG OF THE DAY: She's Got Papers On Me

This is such a wonderful jam, made all the better by Betty Wright lighting up his ass in the end. Has this new era of open relationships ruined awesome cheating jams like this forever though? I hope not.

MY ST41RW4Y T0 H34V3N G0T...

my stairway to heaven got 
mangled before I got to 
it; swear I didn’t touch it 

SONG OF THE DAY: I Betcha Heaven's On a Dirt Road

When I was a kid, I grew up on a dirt road and drank from the garden hose in the summer and if I saved up enough nickels drank a Pepsi from the country store and rode in the back of a pick-up truck and walked barefoot through a yard that wasn’t cut all nice like a cop’s head and I say “yes ma’am” and “nah bro” and “fuck yeah” and I grew up just fine LIKE IF YOU AGREE!
When I was a kid I didn’t wear a seat belt and rode in the back seat on the floorboard as my dad drove drunk home from playing poker at Tip’s house a thousand miles an hour and then my folks split up and my dad and me lived in a trailer and I ate fried duck eggs from the old lady’s farm down the road because her son was in prison and I did chores for the eggs and my dad and me would drive to stash empty beer cans with little bags of weed in them for that dude to stuff up his ass because he was on a road crew and he’d take the weed into jail and live like a king and we got thick sliced baloney from the country market down the road on credit until they cut my dad off because he never paid his tab and we’d have fried duck egg and fried baloney sandwiches for supper five nights out the week because that was all we had and I grew up just fine SHARE IF YOU AGREE!
When I was a kid I couldn’t wait to go away to college and then my dad was briefly kinda homeless but in the country so moved his pop-up camper behind my grandma’s trailer and that’s where he lived even in winter until he started sleeping with this woman that he started staying with regularly and they ended up getting married but she ain’t never really like me and I ain’t like her and then my uncle shot himself in the head the early morning hours before Father’s Day one year telling my grandma and step-grandpa Bob “I love you” in the middle of the night in the trailer before going behind my dad’s pop-up camper and shooting himself so my dad burned the pop-up camper because shouldn’t nobody be staying in it after that and he lived with that other woman the whole time but was never really happy so his drug problems got worse and sometimes we’d talk and he’d say “I think your uncle is gonna visit you” and he’d be right but then he got too lost in the vodka and meth and then he had a stroke and bled out on the bedroom floor before they could get him to a hospital and I ain’t but 48 but he was younger than that when he died and his dad before that was even younger than him when he died and that’s my country paternal lineage but I grew up just fine SHOOT AT THE SKY IF YOU AGREE!

DR34M1NG 4B0VT 4 M0NTH FVLL...

dreaming about a life full 
of Sundays where alarm clocks 
make irrelevant noises 

JVST 4N0TH3R B4NT4M W31GHT...

just another bantam weight 
crowing at the world about 
an end which never arrives 

SONG OF THE DAY: Genius of Love (chopped & screwed)

I belong to a secret society called PurpLife which elevates and reveres the chopped and screwed culture. A high-ranking 69th degree PurpLife Scientist I know well has always said Screw chopping “Genius of Love” was one of his favorite examples of how amazing chopped and screwed music can be. You can find more information about chopped and screwed music, and DJ Screw, by consulting your local library.

JVST FL04T1NG 4L0NG WH1L3 TH3...

just floating along while the 
cracks in the world grow larger 
and larger… more to fall through 

R3TR34D1NG W4T3R S0 L0NG...

retreading water so long 
that I feel guilty now that 
I pay all my bills on time 

SONG OF THE DAY: No Scrubs

Somewhere at some point on this American Earth, somebody has been rushing to get ready for work taking care of others in some sort of fringe health care capacity which is simultaneously entirely necessary but disrespected (you know, all those “essential” workers), and they didn’t have any clean scrubs to wear so they went digging through either the laundry pile or maybe there was that chair in the corner of the bedroom where you put the clothes that technically aren’t washing machine clean but really ain’t dirty enough to go in the dirty clothes yet, and they were singing “No Scrubs” loud as fuck, because why the fuck not? Life’s too short to be giving a fuck about all this fake bullshit which just keeps getting shown to be more and more pointless.
Also, I still love T-Boz. Tell her if you see her.

GR3W ST0R13S L1K3 KVDZV FR0M...

grew stories like kudzu from 
a very young age, attempting 
to cover up all the holes 

L0V3D ST4R1NG 4T TH3 C4LL0VS3D...

loved staring at the calloused 
finger pointing at the moon 
as much as the moon itself 

Y0V L34RN T0 F1ND C0MF0RT 1N...

you learn to find comfort in 
hardscrabble spaces; some folks 
was born to pick through rubble 

SONG OF THE DAY: Temporal Control of Light Echoes

The calendar flipped, and to be honest everything feels as if it’s breaking, slowly. And it’s been breaking, the past couple years more obviously, essentially we were all in a car together as a culture, and the check engine light came on five years ago, maybe longer to be honest, and we were told to ignore it, no worries, but then the past couple years, the car started making a horrible clanking sound, and it’s really worrisome. But we’re speeding along the highway of human progress like everything’s fine, keep it moving. Though a new year according to Gregorian calendars, it’s still the same winter, and the second one since covid came. A smaller parallel is I lost my power this week, and the first night, I was like, “well, it’s cold as fuck, but I’ll bundle up, do a little reading by flashlight, write some thoughts on cards, this is great.” And it was cold as fuck but it was great… everything had shutdown and it felt good to have the break from all the mundane buzzing vibrating bullshit boring holes through my consciousness every moment of every day.
But then the second night came, and it wasn’t even as cold – still below freezing but a good 15 degrees warmer – and I was miserable. It fucking sucked, and I kept waking up in my seven layers, wondering how long before the sun came up, even though it’d still be freezing, I could at least soak up some sun and mark the passing of another night. That’s the second winter of covid to be honest – we are expected to be as back to normal as possible, even though things aren’t full power, and it’s all fucked up, and so many people are so fucking miserable right now, just barely holding their shit together. Makes me wonder what Dark Night of the Soul, Night 2 would’ve been if St. John of the Cross had been forced to go further. Like you get to the end of the dark night of the soul, find your union with the Universe/Creator/God, but then it goes away and you have a second night right away, just as fucked up and melodramatic. Harder to find that hope.
Anyways, back to the original metaphor of the clanking car rumbling full speed down the highway of time called civilization. I find it concerning that it feels as if everything is about to break apart, and nobody who is in charge of driving this thing really seems to give even half a fuck. The whole thing is going to break, and they don’t even seem willing to acknowledge it might be broken, much less able to figure out how to fix it once we are all stranded. And I think that concerns me too – where will I be stranded, or you? Will we make it ‘til it all falls apart in a gnashing of pieces exploding from too much friction, causing the mechanisms of production to destroy itself into a thousand pieces? Will we all be there to stand around the mangled parts and try to figure out how to get it running again? Or figure out a different way to get where we want to go? Or even agree on which way to go? Or will some of us – me, you – be tossed out while it’s falling apart, to lighten the load, because that’s what’s causing the clanking – not the engine itself but the people complaining about the engine clanking? I find it all very concerning and depressing right now to be honest, but also, there’s nothing I can do but continue. Like, there literally ain’t shit I can do about existence except keep existing. But fuck if it doesn’t feel overwhelming right now.

F0LKS 4LW4YS S41D 1 W4S 4N...

folks always said I was an 
old soul, but mostly I just 
saw way too much too early 

DY1NG L00KS 34SY, DR1FT1NG...

“dying looks easy, drifting 
gets harder… I don’t know which 
one to do,” that old song sang 

BY L0S1NG MYS3LF 4T TH3...

by losing myself at the 
fractured edges, I begin 
to find little bits of peace 

R3N0V4T10NS R3QV1R3 FR3SH...

renovations require fresh 
abstractions envisioned; I’d 
rather demolish desire 

C0MM0N D3N0M1N4T0R...

common denominator 
in most of my best days is 
being lost, without purpose