"A logistics nightmare", Tyson foods plant closure fallout

BREAKING: Economy SEIZES! Alex Jones FALLS APART; Rogan’s INSANE Vaxx L...

Why Working-Class Americans Vote for Billionaires: Shame, Status, and th...

Mornings Making Life Worth the Trouble

A modest indtroduction into the brain followed by Zoe Keating and her cello and the quilted cats, coffee and a pickled egg, errant co-defendant co-dependants breathing bad bread on my blanket, purring, trilling and well lapped, mixed with my own weirdly intoxicating and slowly rising wafts of "thick, lipid-rich sweet sweat," which reminds me of my grandmother in her house dress doing dishes and humming. The gas unit hums out its own warmth for me and the my three vented tres panochas. We have no need nor desire for travel.

Teddybears - Punkrocker (feat. Iggy Pop) [Official Video]

Getting Old

I told a dude today that I'm driving my last car and feeding my last cat, the youngest of three. He gave me one of those looks that signaled his receipt of vexing commentary. I've always had a knack for reading facial epressions, having learned from the master at exhibiting them. His perplexed eyes and telling facial shape-shifts assured me that he, like seemingly all people in Appalachia proper, suffered from what I call striaght-pipe mentality, which infected them as small children from sectarian agencies such as VBS, fuelled by the lies told by preachers. It has become axiomatic that whenever I am faced with what used to be be exasperating angern at the insanity of life here, I returned to both my AA instruction and especially the dharma, which calms internal storms. And I went on my way carrying none of it as I went. I am irreverant concerning most all of human traditions and cultural practices, especially those that have become expected. I'll spare the inventory. But there are at least two that are impervious to my skepticism; the law and the dharma. With emphasis on the latter, I cannot say that I've read any significant measure of the suttras. I don't necessarily belive that the Buddha wasn't myth. I don't even buy that the man beneath the the boddha tree came up with the suttras; they're too perfect for human invention. In any event, in my fourth year of meditation, which now comes quite natural to me, I have realized that the greatest challenge is in the first of the noble eight fold path to eventual escape from the wheel of Samsari: Right View. RV has two parts -- honest view, which is absolutely no problem for me as I have been witnessing the unfolding of pure, oftentimes, wicked fact for decades now, and what Thich Nhat Hanh referred to as inter-being. Therein lies my inability to connect.

Motorama — Livestream / Noonchorus. September 22, 2020

Rone - Bye Bye Macadam (Official Video)

PIECE 1 (Étoile)

ETOILE

Thich Nhat Hanh: Get away from being narrow-minded [Buddha's way 10]

Fetch Me My Pistol

It's in the wardrobe, honey. Careful, it's loaded. Goddamn, Daddy, it's heavy,too! A pistol is a serious thing, girl. The weight is a good measure of its ability to inflict immediate and irreparable changes in people, places, and things, all depending on the hand that holds it. Never touch the metal if you can help it, honey. My uncle Billy Joe bragged on me once for handling a 357 magnum correctly. By the handle, perfectly fetched from a remote place in Deer Lodge, Tennessee. That compliment still hangs in my periphery, like a curtain. My pride is pure 'cause my Uncle Billy Joe didn't brag on people much at all. I miss him badly. I miss his amazing stash, too. Okay, time to put it up, honey. Well what you wanted me to fetch if for? I just wanted to look at it and remember the secrets it keeps silent.

Cold Souls (2009) Official Trailer # 1 - Paul Giamatti

This misleading trailer does the film, which is deep and dangerous, a violent injustice. It has to do, perhaps, with poetry and fluoxitine. But it has to do with so much more.

Paul Giamatti Being Re-Fitted

Pentangle - Willy O Winsbury (Set Of Six ITV, 27.06.1972)

Richard Burton on Dylan Thomas (1982 interview)

What is the right view? [Buddha's way 9]

The Lord of the Lord of the Flies

She Rides Shotgun (2025) Official Trailer - Taron Egerton, Ana Sophia Heger

Ana Sophia Heger's performance rivals Tatum O'Neal's Oscar winning role in Paper Moon. Excellent film.

Dancing Conservatives and their Republican Muscle Memories

I can spot 'em from a mile out. Karl Rove's passionless dance. George W. Bush Donald Trump:

The Competing Interests Between Evolutionary Biology and Unbearable Guilt

Nineteen year old girl cheated on her fiance and could not live with the grinding guilt that resulted, so she jumped from 30 Rock."

Pixies - Monkey Gone to Heaven [1989]

Favourite

Lady MacBeth

Religious and Patriotic Adherents are Plato's Contemporary Cave Dwellers

The dancing shadows from the puppeteers are seen as absolutes.

Legal Positivism - the dominant theory in jurisprudence (Natural Law - What the Law Ought to Be)

Legal positivism versus natural law

Justice for Hedgehogs - Ronald Dworkin (2011)

The Power of the Dog: A Review

Jane Campion won an Oscar for best director for a movie that had a great score.

Be Like Water

Be like water and freeze so your enemies will slip and fall and crack their fuckin' skulls.

The Photo That Ignited WWI: 9 Kings, One Shot! (The Power of a Photograph)

Nine kings at Trump's Inauguration, too.

Solar Image That Appeared on my Bathroom Floor Purely by Accident

Frankie's Cultural Observations: performative males: a cultural analysis

Texas megachurch founder Robert Morris pleads guilty to child sex abuse ...

I Have Considered the Lilies

Connie Converse - Talkin' Like You (Two Tall Mountains)

An Ugly Truth About the Law

A client recently told me about his father, who had retained me to help the client a while back. Said his dad was in rehab in a distant state, where he resides. Dad was caught with a large amount of cocaine. The client reported that he dad got a gentle wagging of the judge's finger and was sent to rehab as punishment. I remarked that he must have had a very good attorney. He responded that the attorney, who charges ridiculously high retainers, is one who plays golf with the DA and judges, attending mutual social gatherings, and effectively using these contacts to short cut the system vis a vis blatant corruption. This reminded me of a case I undertook many years ago. My client was in deep shit as the result of an FBI interdiction, which exposed his narcotics conspiracy. He was indicted in federal court. During the pendency of that case, the client, who was on Tennessee state probation at the time of his federal arrest for an earlier narcotics conviction, was served with a probation violation warrant relating to a felony drug offense in East Tennessee which was based upon the recent federal indictment. He was on probation for a drug conviction when he was busted for another felony drug case by the DEA. He asked me to represent him in front of the criminal court judge on the probation violation. I had not appeared before this judge before. When the hearing was concluded, which left me with absolute certainty that my client would be remanded to custody, the Judge dismissed the warrant. I was stunned. Some time afterward I learned that $10,000.00 was delivered to a bondsman, who was the judge's bag man in order to bribe this judge to dismiss the probation violation warrant. The same judge who had given him probation in a state narcotics conviction that should have sent him back to prison, (he has spent half his life in prison), then gave him yet another improbable break of the probation violation. It was highly unusual, to say the least. Perhaps two years later, and With my client's permission I met with a very senior FBI agent and spilled the beans. Nothing was done. This judge continued to preside for about twenty more years until he retired from the bench. Fact.

Benjamin Netanyahu at UN General Assembly (Zionist Mass Murderer)

⚡️Powerful SPEECH by ZELENSKYY at the UN General Assembly! The hall ERUP...

POWERFUL SPEECH: Finland President Speaks Out on Ukraine, Gaza, & Urgent...

A bizarre gift I received this morning from one of my former clients

Found a Purpose: The Anti-Fascist Gardner

Tilda's Baptism

The Psychology of The Hated Child

Banjo

Beauty Matters

Little Wing on Chapman Stick – I Can’t Believe I Pulled This Off

Judge J. Wayne "Mouse" Wolfenbarger

One of my favorite people in the world.  Judge J. Wayne "Mouse" Wolfenbarger has died.  I cut my baby teeth practicing in his court.  One of the best people I've ever known.  He's way up on the list of my surrogates.  I just cannot believe I'll never see him again.  This picture stabs me in the heart, especially as I listen to Agnes Obel.

June Carter Carter - Ring of Fire (She wrote it, not Johnny Cash)

Hill Street Shade of Blue

Michael Paul Smith: Fast Forward

My heart breaks for you, Michael.  When I look at this picture of you, my eyes try to play tricks on me.  They conspire with my consciousness to create the ostensible lie that whispers to me that you're always sad, constantly depressed, and steeped in continuous loathing, all based upon this almost incomprehensible visage of the countenance that prison has heaped upon you.  I have to remind myself that you probably smile, or laugh even, and that this photograph is a spark that was pitifully, sadly captured nanoseconds before you grinned out its proper opposite. I've heard the joy of prisoners as they discuss their retarded anecdotes, while coughing out loud.  It's what J.D. Salinger meant when he wrote of  the rocking back and forth "between the grief and the high delight."  I, too, am intimately familiar with both extremes, one more than the other. So we share that, and a cruel father and that's about it.

Aunt Debbie Sexton was the Dead Baby in the Dynamite Box.

On the eastern slope of the Cumberland Plateau there sits a bundle of mountainous topography that tries to hide places like Wartburg, Frozen Head State Park, the Obed, Emory, and New Rivers, and two prisons; the Morgan County Correctional Complex, and Brushy Mountain Penetentiary. From town the Gobey Road descended all the way across the foot of Wiley Arms Mountain to Lancing and the Emory River, which fed the Obed. My grandparents' "home place" was just outside Wartburg on the Gobey Road. My two uncles, Tom and Tim were older than me but just barely. So we boys would venture out in the mountains and stay gone all day sometimes. On that fateful day, they told me to follow then down deep into one of the hollers, that they had something "really special" to show me. I followed right along, worshiping my two uncles as always, who might as well have been slightly older brothers. These were my mother's little brothers. The Sexton family. Grandparents Bart and Edna, Billy Joe, Mary Sue, Betty Lou, John Paul, Ralph, Tom and Tim. Mary Sue was my mother. She used to leave me there for long periods of time. So off they went and well I followed. We left the road in a hair pin curve and descended into a unnamed hollow that was thick with Rosebay and Mountain Laurel. A little, clear branch followed the footpath. After delving deeper into the woods we came upon an old Model T cab of a truck turned upside down beneath which was a wooden dynamite box lodged between it and the earth. What's that? The boys stared deeply into my face and grimly announced that there was a dead baby in the box and turned and ran as fast as they could, leaving me and the dead baby behind to work things out. Terrified, (I was about 5), I ran, too, imagining that that the ghost of that dead baby was gaining on me. Eventually I found my way back to the house where Tom and Tim were eating apples laughing out loud at me. As it turned out, my uncle Johnny has stolen the box of blasting caps from the mines and hid it under the cab of the old truck. Years later, while contemplating these events from my youth, I realized that the "dead baby," was possibly a trope. See, my grandmother had fallen into another unwanted pregnancy late in her life and given birth to Debbie, a few years earlier. Tom and Tim would have remembered their baby sister, who had disappeared. Debbie was congenetally ill and died at home, shortly after her birth. Probably for the best.

Bout des doigts

Hunting Island

Fully clothed I sank into the Atlantic ocean among the roots protruding from the banks of Hunting Island South Carolina and could not understand why I didn't run away from home when I was a boy.

NENA | 99 Luftballons (Live 2018) (HD)

California's Inhumane Prison Isolation Units

Electrelane - To the East

Nick Drake - Cello Song

The Marcus Twins, Chang and Eng, and David

"Chang and Eng, they were joined at the chest. Chang died of a stroke in the middle of the night. He was always the sickly one. He was always the one who drank too much. When Eng woke up beside him and found that his brother was dead, he died of fright. Right there in the bed." Dead Ringers. I knew a dead ringer. His name was David. His identical twin died before I met him, so I only knew the man who had fallen apart on that account. Later on he would run out into the highway and smack into his own death.

The Cruel and Inhumane Execution of Clayton Lockett

Nick Drake - River Man (Video)

Arguably the most beautiful and complex song of all.

The Gossamer Blouse

The breeze barely noticed piercing puffs through the tiny interspacial loose little rectangular voids within the mantle between the spidery strands but blew through anyway, encircling his erecting nipples. Wait. He grew up when boys weren't supposed to like cats. Weren't suppose to try on their mother's clothes. Weren't supposed to tell the truth.

Daft Punk Lose Yourself To Dance

When I was a kid I could not wait until the Soul Train arrived, every Saturday. The absolute corporial freedom of dance.

This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody) (2003 Remaster)

Devo - Girl U Want

Horsegirl - "Anti-glory" (Official Music Video)

King Krule ~ Forever Dolphin Love (remastered)

Connan Mockasin - It's Choade My Dear - Closely Approaching the Epitome of the Artform

Tune-Yards - hold yourself. (Official Video)

The Dandy Warhols - Bohemian Like You (Official Video)

Over and over Again (Lost and Found)

Idyles - Pop, Pop, Pop

July 1, 2025

The only rationale that I can come up with for such a nightmarishly hellish such experience is that it must somehow be necessary for my overall psyche to be thrown violently down to the concrete and broken glass, face first, as a reminder of the everpresence the concrete and broken glass.

The Acid - Basic Instinct (Official Video)

darwinian doll parts

the boy got serial glimpses of his mother's perfect doll parts, highlighted by tan lines and animated by her movements. He saw it all and it stayed inside the brain inside the space behind his eyes such that, for the balance of his long life, he would measure all subsequent doll parts against those days when she ran around the house, perfectly naked.

Dry Cleaning - Scratchcard Lanyard (Official Video)

The apogee of the artform. Absolutely and poetically brilliant.

Wolf Alice - How Can I Make It Ok? (Live - The Pool Sessions)

Tune-Yards - Heartbreak (Official Video)

Southern Culture On The Skids - Camel Walk (A Song About Fucking Little Debbie)

As a Boy, I Was There for the Live Performances

Patti Smith - Gloria: In Excelsis Deo

Electioneering

Wolf Alice - How Can I Make It Ok?

The Notch in My Dream Belt

Notch No. 1 - Daniel Pantoleo, NYPD. Murderer of Eric Garner;

Tune-Yards - hypnotized (Live) - Merrill Garbus, Queen of Musical Abstractions

Dwig - Orange Evening

Sylvia Esso

Shabazz Palaces - Bop Hard (Unhappy Juneteenth)

Compliments of KEXP Seattle

When Daniel Plainview Planted Wildflowers

Daniel Plainview was consumed by seething hatred since he "slithered from his mother's filth." His words. On sage advice, and wishing to become a better man, Daniel planted wildflowers in his East Tennessee retirement haven, just out back in his field, attenuating his generalized hatred by cultivating a share of beauty. He tended the seedlings and little sprouts, experiencing for the first time in his dark life the glory of god almighty in the process. "The glory of the flower." But thanks to confederate Coloniel William Johnson of Alabama, his eponymous Johnson Grass squeezed from the earth, choking and strangling Daniel's enterprise to death, leaving thick bladed Camboian jungles in the wake. And on account of that predation, Daniel returned to his default setting, which was compounded by these events. Drunken, he swore to stalk as many of Johnson's descendants as he could locate and rape them all to death. This was the nature of Daniel's condition.

The Crowbar Lunch

June 9, 2025 with my first and only employer, Lionel R. Barrett, Jr. for a Mexican lunch in Hartsville, Tennessee after I returned from the worst place in the world, complete with radioactivity from the site of a former nuclear facility upon which a private prison was bulit . Trousdale Turner Correctional Complex. A prominent "Radiation Notice" met its entrants at the Administion Annex. Anyway, Lionel has probably defended more murder cases than any attorney in this state. So many, in fact, that it was hard for him to keep track of them all. The crowbar case arose out of Bell Meade, where the daughter of a rich couple (everone's rich in Bell Meade) signed up for a compassion project to assist homeless people in and around Nashville, whereupon she met a lost soul within a young man who would then kill her with blunt force trauma with a crowbar. Lionel represented its handler, who turned out to be seriously brain diseased. May I take your order, hermanos?

Beck - Beercan

Pixies - All Over the World

Mormons on Ketamine

Special K's in the Kool Aid kids.

Fugazi - Waiting Room

Sentences from Inside - "I don't have an address for Jesus."

"I know of two pictures where I'm asleep, no shirt, camo jacket on, asleep. Alley also asleep with pink summer dress on and she is holding me while I'm laying her in the back of the Pathfinder. I'd like have these and a couple or four more. I don't have an address for Jesus. If I ever get on a phone I'm calling Daddy and then y'all. When I'm able to I am willing to go to work at Arby's, Wendy's, anything what so ever to get money an help my family. I was fortunate to speak with my daddy. Gangs control each phone except one outside. They have moved me to 24A pod where I sit waiting to be sent to Nashville-Only-Knows, but hopefully Morgan County Correctional Complex in Wartburg." WRL

DEADLY Tennessee Prison: A Look at Trousdale Turner Correctional Center

Leon Russell - Tight Rope - A Perfect Song, Seems to get everything right

The National - Bloodbuzz Ohio (Official Video)

Sharon Van Etten: NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert

Big Thief: NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert

Waxahatchee - "Right Back To It" (Recorded Live for World Cafe)

Draws tears.

Waxahatchee: Tiny Desk Concert

Sierra Ferrell: Tiny Desk Concert

Émile Bilodeau - Ça va [official audio]

Émile Bilodeau - J'en ai plein mon cass [official audio]

Fred Fortin chante Oiseau

Fred Fortin - Grippe [Official version]

Proof of Life

tUnE-yArDs - Bizness (Official Video)

tUnE-yArDs - Gangsta (Official Video)

tUnE-yArDs - My Country (Official Video)

Hole - Doll Parts (Live from Big Day Out 1999)

Tori Amos - Cornflake Girl - Oxygen Concert 2003

Zero 7 - Take My Hand Ft. Lou Stone (Live Session)

Joanna Newsom - Have One On Me

Hell is Pop Country

Musical taste perfectly sets us further apart from each other, and for good reason.

The Third Act

The narrowing of life in the third act shrinks the outer flesh of supposed reality while emboldening the bones of honesty so that all comes clear as death draws near. The narcotic assumptions about supposed reality gradually wear off, revealing the utter insanity of the human species and the wars created by the underpinnings of wars fully chambered awaiting their waging to tribal flags flapping. How the species cling to definitions through patriotism, religion and neo-materialism (like ordering shit from Amazon), hoarding and consumption, silly tradition and assumption, which assumes so much so utterly, so errantly, and so ridiculously. How human interaction fuels egocentric lofts among even loftier regions out of reach, which intensifies the pangs of the desire that distance us from the beautiful simplicity of salvation. These truths are revealed through observation, intense, longstanding suffering, and the concommittant narrowing in act three. I'm dying most days to leave the god damned theatre because the human performances were inane, empty, and hellishly stupid.

"Be not like dumb driven cattle." H.W. Longfellow

Alone by Edgar Allan Poe, read by Tom o' Bedlam

Sufjan Stevens - Fourth Of July

Joanna Newsom the Book of Right-ON

Joanna Newsom - Peach Plum Pear

Joanna Newsom Austin City Limits 2012 (Full HD Episode)

The poetess' hands her fingers the talents of two writing spiders dancing across the networks.

Architecture Secrets of the Swiss Re Building (Gherkin) City of London

I have marveled at this structure for years and years, created by what R.G. refers to as "chimps with heads the size of planets," specifically the architectual firm of Foster and Partners.

From So Human An Animal, by Rene Dubos

"Environmental ugliness and the rape of nature can be forgiven when they result from poverty, but not when they occur in the midst of plenty and indeed are produced by wealth."

Timbuk 3 - Just Another Movie

"Now my freedom's bought and paid for,

lights up my living room."

Thom Yorke - Has Ended

My client's water broke from behind the lectern

May it please the Court: "Your honor, my client just sprang a leak." She was wearing blue jeans that would have to be thrown out. I smelled it. The filthy portent of another baby who would would slide from her mother's ninety pound body and require detox before her tiny life begins beneath the canopy of the Tennessee Department of Child Protective Services. My client's wafting filth, her fifth such enterprise. This is Appalachian American Ennui.

Lightning in the Bottleneck

Bottleneck Holler held the Bottleneck creekbed, fed by branches cascading in crevices from coldwater springs inside the Cumberland Mountains rising and falling in East Tennessee. No one dared live in the Bottleneck proper, which consisted of two tapered mountains that formed a killer squeeze, or bottleneck, which formed one of the deadliest places in the woods where we played when we was boys. Legends, (plural), held that the many "episodes" were signaled by an early purr of soon-coming floodwaters that would wash away what progress might have been made by the Scotty settler families in the deadly cove. Above the below rained down unionized waterdrops that washed the babies away as the purr rose to the sound of a thousand freight trains pulling ten thousand empty coal hoppers, drowning out their mommys' muffled howling.

Prison Tourism

Maybe I'm too subjective on account of my chosen profession, but I've vexed at what drives subhumans into the world of prison tourism? Prison tourism has to be some kind of indicator of the decline of humanity. I mean people pay money to enter penitentiaries. Exactly who are these people? No doubt they're the gas guzzuling, brain-crippled phat set fixated on serial killers and sick mysteries. But why? Is my astonishment the result of having known too many of these ghosts and their old homes. These are the worst places in the world, for god's sake. I keep coming back to the Why of it.

Ecclesiastes 5:3 - A fool's voice is known by its multitude of words; Ecc 1:18 - For in much wisdom is much grief; and he that increases knowledge increases sorrow.

Excerpt from Conan O'Brien's Mark Twain Prize Acceptance Speech

Wiley Arms Mountain, Wartburg, Tennessee

In the Appalachian region that is defined, not by grant writers or statisticians, but by topography, the vertical becomes the rule, with horizontal the tempering exception.  The rises and falls in the Appalachian nation follow the rise and fall and rise of its denizens.
And, in my youth, Wiley Arms Mountain was a colossal sight from below.
My mommy let me dip my head into the icy mountain water when I was a baby boy and it has kept me nearby.  The smell of dying apples on the ground.  The smell of coal smoke.  My grandmother's intoxicating wafts from the frock folds of her plain and sleeveless house dresses that revealed the black hairs she did not shave beneath her arms on goddamn purpose.  Pork meat.  Creasy Greens from the Emory Riverbed.  Highway 27.  The Cord House.  Coal trucks.  Hollers.  Deep ones.  Mountain Laurel.  That odd sensation that rose when we passed the garage and junk yard just south of town.  My Daddy.  The word, "PENITENTIARY" that I learned so early on.  Shotguns and pistols and more cash money that I have ever seen.  Secrets.  There were secrets in every closet and beneath every made bed.  We mined the hollers to find that dead baby in an empty dynamite box.  These were the tickets torn in two -- I was illegally admitted to an NC-17 cinematic masterpiece that still haunts my many musings.

So now, post modern, post mumblecore, I spend the nanoseconds and half hours reflecting upon "why things came to be this way."  I now conclude that I cannot ignore the hollers and the shotgun blasts of my youth.  The thrill of the fall.  Clouds came down and misted up the mysterious people who hung tight to the bluffsteep sides of tectonic rises.  I did not then know that I was deep inside the belly of Appalachia.

I would eventually dare to open my eyes under the icy water and look to the rounded creekstones for some meaning.  I would eventually realize that I, too, was in a state of constant change, constant flow.  From whence came the icy water.  I would learn to question the etiology of the flow.  The mountains.  Wiley Arms mountain in particular was my focus.  I remember climbing to a point near the top and being chased away by a large dog with a chain looped around its neck.  What was it guarding?

FORCE MAJEURE by Ruben Östlund (2014) – Official international trailer

Hilarious. At first.

Sufjan Stevens, "Should Have Known Better" (Official Audio)

It's May Day - International Workers' Day

Today is May Day, also known as International Workers' Day.  Celebrate labor.  Celebrate workers' rights.  Celebrate international efforts to create safe working conditions, living wages, and solidarity among the rank and file.  Reinvigorate the Occupy movement so that Americans will never, ever forget how the gamblers on Wall Street gambled with our economy and came up craps, and shrugged, like their anthropomorphic icon, Atlas.  So, celebrate the hybrid socialist programs that saved our automobile and finance industries.  Celebrate Barack Obama, a champion of labor despite the grueling adversity he faces from the right wing of Congress.  Celebrate American workers.  Celebrate those who produce and do not take.  Embrace this elegant statement:  "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs."  Karl Marx

Zero 7 - The Garden - Full Album - a Masterpiece

Zero 7 - Seeing Things (Such a thing as a perfect instrumental)

Eating the poison cows of the Sun God

"I killed my dinner with a rock, hit him in the face, taste the body, shallow work is the work that I do." Joanna Newsom. When I was faced with what I was doing I simply had to quit eating animals of any kind, and that knowlege, though attenuating harm, has made me touch upon madness.

Steven Wilson - Porcupine Tree - Sentimental

FDR's Insight in Troubled Times

"The test of our progress is not whether we add to the abundance of those who have too much. It is whether we provide enough to those who have too little." If civilation is to survive, we must cultivate the science of human relationships -- the ability of all peoples, of all kinds, to live together and work in the same world, at peace."

Elliott Smith - Waltz #2 (Strange Parallel)

Jesse Welles - The Poor

Can't You Hear Me Knocking (Live)

Spring 2025 Out Back and the Clusters of Love

Hunter S. Thompson Nailed It

"Every man is the sum total of his reaction to experience. As your experiences differ and multiply, you become a different man, and hence your perspective changes. This goes on and on. Every reaction is a learning process; every significant experience alters your persepective." Hunter S. Thompson

Nashville Bar Association Oral History | Lionel Barrett | September 19, 2023

My mentor, Lionel R. Barrett, Jr., Attorney. We tried two death penalty cases together: State v. Donald Givens, and State v. Millard Curnutt.

Noir Desir - Le vent nous portera

The Tin Drum - Die Blechtrommel (Tin Drum)

The Hair Dresser's Husband - Danse de Jean Rochefort dans Le mari de la coiffeuse

The story a woman who is terrified of time.

Alex G - Sarah

Mitsune - Roku Go (Live on KEXP)

Porcupine Tree - Anesthetize (from Anesthetize Live in Tilburg)

Elephant Revival - Petals

Calistan

Elephant Revival Performs "Birds and Stars" with The Colorado Symphony

Dinosauria We - Charles Bukowski

The Lillelid Murders and Appalachian American Ennui (Exactly 28 Years Ago - April 6, 1997)

NPR did a piece called "This I Believe" a few years back.  Listeners were invited to recite their core beliefs about anything they chose; love, life, children, work, recovery, and the like.  The encapsulations were recorded for all of posterity.   I remember posting my own account, which dealt with my recovery, as they say, from the ravages of drugs and alcohol.  I wrote that "I believe that there was hope in the passing air of a free fall."  I was wrong.  There isn't.

Anyway, selected entries were broadcast by NPR.  I had heard a range of "beliefs" during the programmings.  All were positive and full of "hope" of some kind of another.  However, Newt Gingrich was invited to recite his core feelings.  I was startled to hear his opening statement:  "I believe the world is a dangerous place."  Newt, who is dangerous in and of himself, then expounded well upon his radical thesis.  It got my attention.  It was the truth.  From the God-damnedest people of all we oftentimes hear the truth.  I've learned this the hard way.

April 6 is the anniversary of the Lillelid murders. 

The world is a very dangerous place indeed.  Apparently Vidar Lillelid either did not know this, consciously chose to ignore it, or, more likely, had fallen under the influence of a very recent indoctrination from the Jehovah's Witness Church.  Vidar and his wife, Delfina, and their two children Tabatha and Peter, were en route from a Jehovah's Witness convention in upper east Tennessee when they opted to stop at the rest area,  accessible from the southbound lane of Interstate 81, near Exit 36.

Vidar was inebriated with the dogma that had been broadcast to and absorbed by the sheepish congregants at the Jehoviah Witness convention.  So, when he saw a group of teenagers, who appeared "lost" in their Gothic appearances and sullen countenances, he foolishly opted to "witness to them," and in so doing put his family in mortal danger.  He ignored the safety of his family by approaching six strangers who appeared, as Newt Gingrich would agree, to be "dangerous."  His sense of judgment had been impaired through the dangerous amalgam created when the weak minded, sheepish congregants are drawn into the vortex of  a powerful cult, such as Jehoviah's Witness.

These possible converts ended up kidnapping Vidar Lillelid and his family in order to steal their van so they could continue on their ill-conceived exodus from Appalachia to Mexico.

 The six youths fled from eastern Kentucky, where they had been indoctrinated with fatuous Biblical chapter and verse from time immemorial.  Which was, in fact, the enabling force-field behind their flight from Appalachian Ennui.

Little blond Tabitha was shot behind the ear.  Peter was shot in the face.  Delfina was shot multiple times after witnessing the murders of her husband and daughter, and assassination attempt of her baby boy, and then run over with an automobile, pictured aft. I have the exhibits in bankers box and within my cranium. Corrupt Judge James E. Beckner and a "hand selected" group of incompetent lawyers then massacred due process of law, otherwise available to these lost souls from Eastern Kentucky, two of whom were teenagers. See, Jason Blake Bryant v. State of Tennessee, No. E2002-00907-CCA-R3-PC (Tenn. Crim. App 2002).
This may seem sexist, even misogynistic, but I hold firm to the belief that the man is primarily responsible for the safety of his family.  Vidar Lillelid failed in his duty to protect his family.  His sense of discretion had been fatally retarded by the cult of religious fanaticism at a coalition of Jehovah's Witness followers.  "The world is a dangerous place."  It is indeed.

This is Appalachian American Ennui.

Neural Flora Neural Fauna - Spring 2025

The bumble bees have been flirting with me in succession on my front porch again. The annual spring tease. I look them straight into their black faces, invisible black eyes. These reconnaisaance missions are becoming predictable. The lead bee enters my intimate space, but does offend, and probably doesn't know that the landing area on my hands has been pre-approved since five or six springs ago. They charge within a foot of me and see I do not flinch, then retreat, which signals the next in queue to do the same, but it's never the same. Ever. I saw one take a hovering shit yesterday. They have faces stained with mustardy Springtime circumstance. They make their way into the house. I quit caring long ago. Wherever they ingress is their business, not mine. Porchwise, the succssion continues with one after another observing me. They know how to look into my face like they might actually like me and then bore holes in my deck.

Andrew Bird - "A Nervous Tic Motion..." - Live at Bonnaroo

Gregory Alan Isakov - Before the Sun (Official Lyric Video)

Gregory Alan Isakov - Full Performance (Live on KEXP)

Milly Raccoon - Marijuana in the Morning

Lunch

She inveigled me as best she could to meet her for lunch, but I immediately declined, explaining, with fake apologetics, that "I don't do lunch." The word,"lunch" itself has an unplesant aftersound. Anyway, when she asked why, it elicited my objection to the global idea of macro-restaurant-lunchmeet culture, describing it in honest terms as two people sitting opposite at tables too small in a buzzing public place, facing each other, jealously muffling their already guarded banter, at my insistence, in order to scramble our pedestrian discourse from peripheral lunch-people, who probably know who I am and want to know more. Where pariticipants briefly read lunch selections from the lamenated lunch menus, filthy with fingerprints, and swallow tap water while having to uncomfortably endure the other's visage from a distance of two or so feet and engage in inane platitudes that matter to me absolutely goddamn not at all. All to the cancer of static noise, and clinking plates and saucers immersed in humish bird-like plastic speech-like noise sprinkled with mostly fake laughter, while some facebook fone woman in the corner giggles like a fucking bird as she contemplates taking a picture postcard of her spring salad, whereupon we then receive plates of lunch for review, scanning for beard hairs while the underpaid and struggling server says, "enjoy," as my forward facing lunchmate lifts the top of her hard bun to examine dead chicken that she'll soon masticate which will require me to occasionally watch her stupid face contort with each x-ray of chomping gooey lunch, while I envision the heavy ceiling collapsing, killing us all.

The Red Shoes

Embedded in this, one of the best films ever, is the Red Shoes Ballet, and should truly be appreciated when filtered through psilocybic contact lenses and tempanic membranes on a wide screen in Dolby with the lights off.

The Night of the Hunter (1955) - A Brilliant Film Classic

The screeplay was written by none-other than Knoxville's James Agee. This thing should be mandatory viewing for all divinity students, wannabe preachers, and church congregants. While this is loosely based upon the crimes of Harry Powers, "a Dutch-born serial killer," who lured women through "lonley hearts club" advertisements from the early 20th century, progenetors of sites like Match.com and eharmony. Powers would then murder them for their money. James Agee'smuted screenplay from these events, formed the basis for the film, directed by Charles Laughton. At the time I was watching this, bearing in mind that I live in Appalachia where preachers are rarely second-guessed by their ignorant congregants, I thought that this was the best film I've ever seen. I still do. The Night of the Hunter is absolutely dark, Gothic, honest, and purely wonderful.

Thelonious Monk - Underground (1968) (Full Album)

Cliff Cash - How I Found Joy Becoming Spiritually Un-f*ckwithable

Rocks

Malformed Deformed Daffodils, Spring 2025

I've seen several of these malformed daffodils, all wadded up in perversion of form this Spring in the field behind my home. There's something worrysome about this. See, I know these flowers. The subterranian bulbs squeeze up these flowers every Spring in roughly the same form and in the same spots in the field. Heretofore the daffodils have been traditional every single year, for decades. So these are alarming in some respects, yet might have a reasonable scientific etiology. A house used to sit, many decades ago, on this piece of land.

Introducing Cliff Cash, Zen Comedian

Vernal Equinox 2025 in Occupied AMERIKA.

In occupied Amerika the clocks strike Springtime to the early morning spit of Thursday's scattered showers. This is the inaugural, first official Spring in occupied Amerika. Cherry blossoms fail to hide the devils in D.C.

Hancock County, Tennessee - On my way to work

How to Know You Are In A Cult (1953)

The Lives of Others

The Lives of Others masterfully explores the intersection of form infecting art, and art infecting a single Stazi human form. Authoritarianism and the arts. Easily one of the greatest artforms ever created. The Lives of Others.

Sonic Youth - Incinerate

Porno for Pyros - Pets

Me Floating Bad Branch Kentucky and Gregory Alan Isakov - San Luis (OFFICIAL VIDEO)

An act of letting go.  Ironic that it took addiction and its evisceration of self-control for me to act like I was letting go, like a dog's dream of slipping its lead and running to the riverbed .  Today there's no need to act like I'm letting go with silly antics like this.  Today, I don't have as much to prove.  This news is almost all good. I realized that I have to take care of myself by forgiving myself and all the others, despite the insanity of so doing.

Van Morrison - Tupelo Honey

Doobie Bros. - Another Park Another Sunday

Steely Dan - King Of The World

The abolute masterwork from a band named after a dildo.

sjowgren - seventeen

Beirut - Elephant Gun (Official Video)

Pearl Jam - Thin Air

I Am The Walrus (Remastered 2009)

The Haunting Paintings of Ken Currie

I Don't Like Dogs No Fukin More

I saw a goddamned great dane pit bull mix walking his dogman inside Home Depot in the interior soft lighting and fixtures isle. I got bit in the face by Bill Zierer's ill conceived coon hound house dog idea. Broke my glasses and I spilled faceblood all over my shirt. A Saint Bernard bit me, get this, in my side. Barney sank those canines right into my adolescent right side oblique. Dutchess bit me on the fingertip after terrifying me to the core with that stupid, contorted snarling bullshit half assed murderous grinning silent Germanic portent of her bitchy might, fully engaged to win an unfair fight. Seig heil, god dammit. I stared down four massive Great Pperennezezzes in Cloud Creek Hollow. Me and dogs. One shat near the parking lot near my office. I left work, unknowlingly stepping in it, and, get this, tracked it into the credit union lobby. Fucking dogs and me. My half-brother, swear to god, killed a man and tried to kill another over a serial piles of dogshit on his stupid landlord's lawn. That fucking sphincter muscle relaxed in the perfect spot to get a man shot to death and to get my half brother by another mother and our fucked up father sentenced to life-in-prison somewhere near Cambridge or Guernsey Ohio of all places. Look it up. State of Ohio v. Michael Paul Smith. I have no favorite breed of dog and the friendly mutt's no longer exempt. The worst thing about dogs: their owners, and now that I think about it, the fucking dogs, too. I don't like dogs no more. Here in the 21st Centry, we now have the advent of dog people. Dogs leave me asking a global all-encompassing, cosmic "why?" Follow the business end from the collar of the lesh upward to the handle loop. There's your answer.

Steely Dan - Dirty Work

Mister Organ - Official Trailer

A intriguing documentary that draws attention to one of many millions of horribles.

Bodhisattva - Steely Dan's Masterpiece

Play en route to pay the creamator.

Anora

I struggled to watch this, not because it was emotionally difficult, but because, as it turned out, there are three parts to this film, which, using a graphic metaphor, started out with spray paint on the side of a discarded dumpster, transitioning to colored comedic sharpies on drawing pads, to a master stroke of oil on an expensive canvas. I was at first disgusted, then entertained (slightly) with the comic relief, and emotionally punched by the last scene. But, all that work to get to that brief interlude was not worth it. At all. On the other hand, Yuriy Borisove's taciturn performance was deeply beautiful. He didn't have to say a word to express his perfect love for Anora. You could feel the love. The Academy Award for Best Actor in a Taciturn Role.

The Theory of STUPIDITY | Dietrich Bonhoeffer

My Appalachian Catchment

I have dear friends and clients, past and present, alive, dead, and dying, for whom I care deeply, who reside in spots with names like Owl Hole Gap, Poor Valley, Tate Springs, Rock Haven, Ni**er Hollow, Wildcat Hollow, Joppa Mountain, Washburn, Treadway, Thorn Hill, Chinqupin, Yellow Branch, Spruce Pine, Pressman's Home, Hogg Lot, Cloud Creek, Cloud Creek Hollow, Mulberry Gap, Natty Branch, Duck Creek, Snake Hollow, Newman's Ridge, Vardy, Clinch, War Creek, Stoney Fork, Cool Branch, Short Mountain, Boatman's Mountain, Stone Mountain, Devil's Nose, Treadway, Thorn Hill, Round Mountain, Grassy Fork, Kyle's Ford, Viking Mountain, Blackwater, Turkey Creek, Five Point, Three Springs, Stubblefield Creek, Morristown Mountain, and Gravel Hill, down on the southside slope, where I live. These people make mistakes, requiring at times my help, not punishment because punishment don't help. From a distance the mountains and hollows seem idyllic, but it's not so. In fact, ignorance permeates the rise and fall of my catchment and its topography. I'll only be able to change things one family at a time, introducing the ideas of neither killing nor consuming animals, mutual aid, community, and secularism. Unfortunately, upon learning that there are people who think differently, their faces blanken as if there's nothing's going on. But, in the words of my Torts professor, Hon. Bill Woods, "it ain't necessarily so."

Short Mountain in Mooresburg, Tennessee

Albert Einstein's Highly Relevant Observation on the Rise of Fascism with a Contemporary Adjustment

"The present state of affairs in Germany is a state of psychic distemper in the masses. Hitler picked up human flotsam in the streets and in the towns and organized them around himself." Contempoary Translation: The present state of affairs in America is a state of psychic distempter. Trump picked up human flotsam from the provinces, hills, and hollers, and organized them around himself.

Mountaintop Destruction in Mooresburg, Tennessee

Holler branches feed the creeks that churn the rivers. Somebody needs to tell these mother-fuckers.