...movers and shakers and one eyed undertakers...

We had to evade a flood. So we swung wide around Memphis, detouring through the countryside passing through towns like Moscow and DeSoto. Tractors, trucks, Caprices on 24s, handlebar riding on weathered bicycles, boots, sneakers, barefeet. Blacktop winding through rising streams, nobody else on the road, a small pick up loaded down, boxes, books, clothing, people, animals, assault rifles, whatever. Strange histories breath heavy in the South, the humidity only emphasizes these thoughts. Caffeine dream, AM radio, Welcome to Mississippi. "Ya'll know where I can get an abortion around here?"

I was helping an old, dear friend, her dog and a cat, move back to California from a holler in the middle of Tennessee. I flew out to assist, got picked up in a small pick up in Nashville, headed West the next morning. By all accounts, the river would flood Memphis, rising higher than it had in a hundred years or something. The media seemed to put exclamation points on every claim, the people we talked to at gas stations and bbq joints were a little easier about it, shit happened and they were dealing with it. No punctuation, graphic design or clever headline titles. It wouldn't be too bad but it was best to avoid Memphis and its tributaries in Eastern Arkansas. The skies were clear, it was 95 degrees, driving south downriver seemed just fine. A trucker assured me, "Bypassin' Arkansas? Aw, you won't be missin' shit, ya heard me? Go on down the 55, ya'll be just fine."

We turned west at Jackson and crossed the Mississippi at Vicksburg, somewhere the air conditioner had stopped working and morale was low. But we moved on into Louisiana, driving all day, eleventh hour down and the sun setting over the Pines and lush plains, growing dark around Monroe we decided we would stop driving around Shreveport and thoughts of grandeur, Northern Louisiana style, flourished and we had our night planned out, something to look forward to, moving toward another short term goal at 85 mph.

This is where a plain and decent thing turns to shit with assistance from modern technology. Road trippin' ain't what it used to be. You have travel centers, corprate highway robbery, metastasized police states, too many cars and not enough road, mindless construction, and small computers, connected to satellites and a billion strands of stupid information, attached to everybody's hip. It's a fucked up time out there and the said internet attached to the hip of my friend and co-pilot would be used, we decided, to fuel a secure and comfortable environment to drink countless beers and probably eat something fried in. Anything would go once we got to Shreveport, the next great metropolis in Northern Louisiana. With the assistance of this modern technology, we planned to stay in a cheap motel with a swimming pool, near houses of sin, gambling, bourbon, pills, dope, anything, moving on forever, the sun bidding its final farewell and the sky at its darkest shade of blue. Flying creatures moved about psychotically while our destination for the night lied 42 miles ahead.

The plan was to drive to the motel, putting our trust in GPS, it seemed that there was a place for drive thru daquiris(a Louisiana staple and for an outsider, a phenomenon,) and some kind of casino buffet, all on the Red River that snaked its way South through downtown. We arrived to the semi-bright lights of what had become for the last hour of driving a beacon of all that's still salvageable in this sinkhole we're all living in and currently driving through, booze and a bed and a goddamn swimming pool, drenched in sweat, broke and road weary, why the fuck not?

Then our friends at Google conspired to send us through a maze of commerce leading us to a dead end and the clock ticking and the gas gauge tumbling, waiting for the satellites to reconfigure while sitting in the darkened, dirt lot outside a tire shop in Bossier City wondering why I ever trusted the bastards in the first place.

To clip a dull story down, we got fucked with the directions, ended up driving around, past all the pretty sites and dirty casinos, bars with names like the Tip- Top and Rulon's Place, establishments we couldn't wait to frequent until dawn, on past them now, out of downtown and into the dim lights and thick shrubbery where we could see no motels, no liquor stores, no street lights and our personal quest for broke-ass luxury was fading. I was tired, still sweating, driving. Finally we got outta there, found some daquiris despite the wrong address but then the rerouting had us driving ten miles west. We complied and found the motel. But it was different than the original one it was supposed to lead us to. The motel did not have a pool, was next to an empty lot and a diner that had apparently closed down in 1982 but sat as a monument to what once was. Across the Interstate was a truck stop and a small, sketchy Casino/Bar. At this point, it didn't matter. I felt like shit about relying on some pocket gadget fueled by the internet, all paths diverted by the owners of the world, our perpetual enemy, I'm complying, knowing its the wrong way. We should have just rolled with it, found out for ourselves but with a panting dog and comatose cat, we cut our losses with dull pocket knives and laughed at the way it all turned out. It wasn't too late for loitering and knife fights but my body collapsed as soon as I killed the engine in the parking lot.
We had our 32 ounce barrels of liquor and corn syrup, a couple tall cans. We ate chicken fingers from the truck stop. I looked for a souvenir for my mom and couldn't find shit. I substituted a cool shower for the swimming pool and then watched cable TV. I fell asleep to the air conditioning roaring full blast, 80s sitcoms drowning the sounds of a couple arguing in the parking lot, the man saying to the woman, "Well if you weren't with him, how come you been parked outside then?" I'll never know what happened with all of that.


Morning came and we drove to Austin, found a swimming pool at another cheap motel. The pool was cool and clean and seemingly never used by the guests. There were hookers and johns and families and cops called and some commotion around back but it couldn't phase our life of luxury. We swam in the cool, chemically clean water, floated around with bottle of beer, life can't touch you sometimes.
We ate good food and drank a 12 pack of Lone Star. A beautiful town if there ever was one. It rained real hard and we left in the morning after some breakfast tacos.

Then we crawled across Texas. It's different now. Less mythical but no less exciting than when you're young and think about driving across these vast landscapes that persist and remain. Hill Country is a beautiful thing.
The sky opens up and runs off in every direction forever, the air and vegetation and natural sense of place in the world transitions from one region to another, unfolding into the arid, familiar Southwest. The scent changes and stays the same for a thousand more miles, always deceiving when you're trying to make it home. It begins to smell like the California Desert when you still have a couple days to go. Through the windshield scattered with the insides of a thousand different insects and one tiny bird, I can see they haven't completely killed the world. It's a pure, simple experience that I'll always need to survive. No words out of any mouth on earth can compare.

It's intangible and inexplicable and the answers I pretend to seek just keep running, an abysmal world away, 12 beers waiting, another tale told, trying so goddamn hard to cling to your mind, to wrap itself into a ball and lie inside your chest, can't let it get away but it always gets away. Now I have to find some bullshit to do, some work, some task, something to scream in one direction or another. Something to stay awake until it all comes back again.

Florida will be given back to the swamps, Megachurches become homeless shelters/dinosaur museums. God smiles.

All I can really say about religion right now, this early in the day, is that it sucks. Spirituality and faith and what the shit does it all mean? That's a little different I guess. I think there aren't enough people who respect the great big mystery in all its awe and glory and gut wrenching horror, interminable bullshit, no one knows shit. Some people go one way and spend their life yelling out loud about nonsense and throw their coin purses at some loser with a fist full of gold rings. Motherfuckers with spirals in their eyes. Forking over cashflow, however meager, voting this way, allowing the realest evils around into their homes and saying, "Loot away, God."
Others go another way and don't think about it at all. Life comes out of the ground like a flower and eventually wilts and becomes the soil again. Other people, most people I believe, don't know which way to look. They're too busy working and living and their victimization is often a result of this. All's I can say is that the hatemongering Rapture crowd is teleporting to heaven tomorrow or something, I'm not sure. I haven't been paying attention but if what they mean is that this tattered bitchmother called Earth will be expunging these losers and their insanity, their stupidity and their lame music, then I'm fucking down with the Rapture.


Some questions remain though. Nobody's gonna be around to listen to or even record those wonderful Arena-Christian songs, somehow the most soulless music alive. Gospel lives. That shit can disappear to wherever you dickfaces say.
Also, does this mean that all the athletes I can't stand, the Jesusjocks, will be gone as well. I guess they better move the Orlando Magic somewhere else. Baltimore would be cool.

Since there are so many wealthy landownders, businessmen and pedophiles that subscribe to this bullshit, they will leave a void in the world they created and kept in tact. What will we do without them?
And,
Since these wealthy shitmongers won't be using them, can we turn all the megachurches into homeless shelters/Dinosaur museums? Everyone would be warm and fed and would have jobs as curators, mechanics, guides and robot engineers. One thing's for sure, there will be no work as early humans alongside the dinosaurs because it didn't fucking happen.

Anyhow, these kinds of things always fornicate, abort then fornicate again and finally give birth to a big, raised Ford truck full of questions concerning the world and what it all means. It should be like this all the time. But it isn't. To be on par with their way of thinking, I should stop writing, buy an automatic assault rifle at Wal-Mart, (out of state and definitely not at a mom n' pop gunstore) and go open fire at the worksite.

Luckily I'm not them. I'll be drowning in hellfire with the rest of you listening to Morbid Angel and other tight jamz, excavating a fine time out of a shit situation. Just like it's always been.

Partytime!

I've been living my entire adult life inside the confines and amongst the ignorance of the post 9/11 world. Just about a decade of endless wars, perpetual earthrape and the calculated exacerbation of poverty apparently erased by some covert maneuver, gun shots and a dead Saudi who dies plenty paid, like Dick Cheney money, nothing learned from the belligerent fanaticism of before. Too many people on September 12th said take my wallet, keys and kids, whatever it takes to bullshit me. An empty gesture, an empire on life support, pigs raiding the trough, licking it clean, bleeding your grandmother, the erasure of any possible future for the next generation.
Frat-chant "USA !" all you want, Braden and Tyler. Your team fumbled the ball a long time ago. The wealthy mutants whose names and addresses you'll never learn have aborted your children far more thoroughly than Planned Parenthood ever could. Get a six foot sub and a three liter of Shasta Cola. It's gonna be a good one.

Emigrant

I've made so many trips from North to South and back up, mostly driving or riding, big rigs, Dodge vans, hitched one in a BMW once, 100 mph, 55 mph, sometimes by bus or rail, SF to LA, Stockton to San Bernardino, Oakland to Riverside, Richmond to Redlands, drug running, family shit, births and deaths, pit bulls, chihuahuas, marijuana, LSD, counterfeit bills, cop dodging, imagination wild like the past rumbling under your feet, six hours, ten hours, same gas station in Kettleman or Fresno or Paso Robles or Bakersfield or Mojave, interstate, highway, backroads, boulevards, clinging to the coast, higher than the mountain tops, through the bloodletting desert, malls and subdivisions, empty and angry, books, radio, spanish, english, vietnamese, bobby womack, husker du, buck owens, los tigres, infest, galeano read out loud by a half Peruvian woman a long ways back, blacktop, blown tires, engine dead, idle, roar, repeat.

Tonight will be no different. It's the same trip sometimes, ain't it? Driving down the state of California. Upon arrival, it can differ. This time will find me playing music with old friends and a big party to celebrate what's left of us, everyone and everything. The bullshit in the dark is unspoken and drowned in light beer, vision blurred from smoke in the eyes and whatever else. Excitement looms quietly until I'm there, until the radio picks up a familiar song, before it's all successfully one gargantuan advertisement for slow death. I'm still alive, motherfucker. Let the cucarachas scatter, pass the bottle and let me know what the fuck is up.

Not even sure how I'm getting back up but even the long walk's been done before. And that kind of thing doesn't matter as much as they say. They're always talking and I suppose these migrations I create for myself or the ones I'm dealt and have to handle, are to drown all that talking, the mindless noise, the dissonance of nonsense and stupidity, to murder it the best I can.
You know it takes a lot longer to get away than it used to. In a brief lifetime, I've seen the desert get farther away, the ocean become less sacred, the things we barely have be swindled out of our hands by the same old culprits, fattened and leisured and perpetually my enemy. But I still have to make the trip, work through, no thoughts, so that when I'm there, even for the crumb I'm offered, I can drink the swill and not be alone and know all that numb travel was worth something. Looking for my own noise. And if it don't sit well, nothing sticks, just empty breaths and hopeful that whatever engine it is, it don't break down. It's colder than a motherfucker, I'll take any ride.
Maybe Lalo knows a dude in Lodi who owes him money for a '73 El Camino, this was ten years ago but that asshole hasn't moved. He's been clean for years, he's good for it, just stop by, see if he has it, man. I can't leave, my P.O. would flip.

Anything to make the road warm up.

Notez.

The High and Outside zine #1 is finally gone through enough printing to take a break from the pressure of having enough lying around. And the second issue is written and ready to roll. This is a good deal because there are two or three other zines that have been put on hold, procrastinated into submission and lost in a black hole of bluntsmoke and beer cans. I hope the the next few months are laborious with this shit so summer time can be the bright and budding psychedelic freakout it always hopes to be.

Also, an '89 Buick Regal blasting 2pac's Run Tha Streetz cruising 11th in Oakland is a badass sight to see and hear.

R.I.P. Cutty
Uncle Lalo's best bud.
Mojave Desert is a motherfucker.

Facefucking Amerikkka, one status update at a time.

Like many people I know, "everyone" not being too steep an exaggeration, I sign into Facebook and find links to articles, music videos, find out my cousin was in town and didn't call me, etc. It took me several months to get over the science fiction freakout that social networking truly is. Once I did, I rolled with it a little. Occasionally I post some rants, music, information, things like that. I "like" certain people's status updates, talk some shit, go through the motions. But I can't help the exacerbated nausea every time I do any of this.
Anything I've ever said on the internet, this included, would have been better exclaimed on the street but that's not where we're at these days.
Could you imagine walking the streets of a major metropolitan area yelling at strangers, "Just booked tix to Vegas, girl! LOL!" or "I absolutely LOVE my little Bryce!" And how are the people on the street to know that Bryce is your ugly goddamn kid,and before they can, you pull out a hundred and fifty five photos of the asshole and shove them in people's faces, to which they shy away slowly until they can run away from this psychopath on the street who can't stop with the assault of useless, personal information. The police would be notified.
It's self-indulgent insanity that won't go over well when the apocalypse comes along. I'm just as guilty as anyone and as a hater, I always embed myself in the hatred. Maybe I just needed to scream into cyberspace and Facebook only allows so many characters.

My cynicism and frustration with all this social networking eased up a little about a month ago when I began reading Facebook and Twitter posts from Egypt, Tunisia and elsewhere. Waves of tearful solidarity washed over me and left me feeling like the world was in fact, real and palpable and not bloodless and lame.
I realized that using all this shit to burn mansions and eradicate despotic regimes, literally and figuratively, even in the face of clampdowns and increased censorship could be an inspiration, as it did set off a wildfire across the world of oppression. Left me with a kind of hope that slogans can't provide. I was really into it for awhile. But soon enough, I could see that for every post of revolutionary information, "Blinded by tear gas but we're holding it down!", there were a hundred posts like, "Tapas and Sangria in the Mission! Tizzziighht!"
I hang my head at the facts staring at me, unblinking, searing holes into my eyes. I don't give a fuck about any of this shallow, insipid bullshit. Can't trussit.
And yet, I hang on and read about the perils of waiting in line (Boo.), no bleu cheese(WTF), bad espresso(sadface), sold out Coachella tickets (Soooo bummmmmmed) and the general, shallow cuntraggery of our time.
So, I'm not above or below any of this, it's just an observation that leaves me low and lazy and fortunate for substance abuse.
Oh well.

I guess I respect the fuck out of my (real life) friends who don't go near the shit. There's about four of them. And family members who are too tired, broke or apathetic for the internet. There's still quite a few of them. And then there's my Grandma who thinks computers are the size of Buick Skylarks and strictly for military scientists in lab coats. Luckily, her brain lives in 1962 and will most likely remain there. She's the greatest woman alive.

And since Facebook is so universal, I know some people's grandmothers are very computer literate and they "like" statuses and network with loved ones. That's ok. But while Facebook is supposedly a "place for friends," I realize more and more that it's actually a place where your Grandma can discover that her grandchildren really are in fact, pot-smoking atheists.
The future keeps pulverizing us. And doesn't slow down for nobody. I find some kind of comfort in it or else I'll jump out the fucking window.

Everyday my brain is repeatedly stabbed with information I don't give a fuck about. But I read on. Because I'm bored and it's always there and I like reading words until I realize they're not real sentences and shit is misspelled.
Or maybe I hang in there out of the same masochism that inclines me to read mainstream sports journalism, watch TV or replace the Visine with LSD. Fuck it.
In between the chiseling away of the worldwide bullshit machine, I guess I'll be around with the rest of you motherfuckers.
LOL OMG 666.

Currensy (Feat. Stalley) - Address