Some days, I’m a beetle in an ant mound. My rugged shell battling the colonists. Hundreds of colonists. I march down and down as my eyes become a snack, my legs chip away and snap and my body is consumed. My armor useless, my diligence for nothing, the colony the victor. I just thought there might be some shit at the bottom of this hole I could enjoy.
Let it be known that on this day, Wednesday, June 23rd, 2010, that I, Josie Gallows have penned the immortal quote that no man hath quoted before:
Mankind, you may now use this as your new “goodbye!” or your new “Sincerely, (blank)”.
This is my epic contribution to the world of poetry for I am brilliant.
Godspeed,
Josie Gallows
A Call for American Nationalism
The American is being sold-out by his own country. Because Americans have come to expect certain pay and certain rights, because his culture evolved towards certain more advanced sensibilities, his opportunities and his resources have been stripped of him and sent to foreign lands where clear and apparent exploitation and slave wages are the rule. This can no longer be allowed to continue and it is now time we demand immediate cessation of American trade with oppressive regimes in the middle-east or Asia.
We, as a people, must demand embargo on trade with China. We must demand it with no negotiation, no compromise and no sympathy. We must demand an immediate end to all trade which allows more goods that we use to be manufactured or harvested in another land than in our own land. If we are to thrive as a people, we must do so with our own labor and with our own resources.
We shall not, as a people, ignore the shortcomings of another nation for the sake of allowing a small percentage of our own people to profit enormously. If we are to import goods, we should only allow imports from nations that actually share our values and we must do so in small amounts with higher regard to the productivity of the American worker than towards the productivity of the foreign laborer.
We will no longer allow the continual pouring of American resources into foreign lands and neither shall we sacrifice the opportunities of our American people to a foreign people, immigrant or otherwise. Enemy or ally, our stance on trade should be American victory and welfare first and foremost.
This state of affairs is no surprise as large governments have always treated their citizenry as a peasantry that should be exploited and expended as the aristocracy sees fit. Because of this, the people have always eventually revolted and while certain things have never changed we have had a series of improvements because of revolution.
It is time for a revolt. Our country is now more Chinese than American, more middle-eastern than northern or southern, more criminal than just. Gather your axes and pitch forks, your torches and your bravery and fight back as a sovereign people should. You, the American people, do not have much longer to do so until your entire way of life is outsourced by your supposed leaders and turned into an abomination by a foreign power that neither cares for or respects you.
You know in your heart of hearts what you should be doing. Do it. Fight tooth and claw to do it. Make your voices louder than that of any peoples revolt ever heard. Disavow any institution that does not agree that it’s time for an American Nationalism; do not buy their goods and do not support their endeavors.
Something that I can’t stress enough is that the world of corporate funded art is ending and it’s ending quickly. The model of trusting people to actually buy something when they have the option to not do is as flawed if not more so than the previous industry.
This is why it’s more important than ever to buy independent. If people don’t do this there will be no more funding for the musical world beyond material that has no heart, no soul and is simply a corporate electric light show at your local amphitheater.
It isn’t just an ethic for kids that are so rad they won’t buy mainstream. Not anymore.
Those that buy independent release are going to be the only funding for musical arts in the future. Shelling out five to ten dollars a couple of times a year isn’t a major investment.
I’m not even saying buy my art.
I’m saying, buy someones art – even if you can get it for free.
Would you feel like an asshole for not tipping fantastic service at a restaurant? The same applies to the musicians that are serving up good music.
However, musicians are going to have to struggle with a new means of making their art worth paying for. People generally feel it’s a better investment to buy a material object than it is to donate for something they get for free.
This means a new approach to the material product as a piece of art all its own.
Later this year or early next year, I will be working on a method of turning canvas art or prints into art packaging for music. These pieces will actually be compatible with your computer in a way that I won’t divulge just yet, but it’s an example of creative approach to music distribution and giving people something that is actually relevant to how they listen to music these days.
Enjoying my summer break and working for the Feds at the moment raking in obscene amounts of cash by my standards. I’m excited about relaunching this website with the amount of content I had hoped for it in the beginning, which brings me to what I’m doing and what I’m about to add:
1. Working on the Black Psalms album, which will incorporate a lot of what I had planned for Guilty Sunrise Volume Two.
2. There will be a lot more new art available.
3. A section dedicated to the book I’m writing about Memphis, TN which will be informative, infuriating and funny.
4. Experimental comic strips
5. Video. Lots of video.
David Allen Vernon July 8th 1957 - March 19th 2010
There are many people in your life that shape who you are whether you like it or not. My father was one of those people that helped shape me, but in ways that couldn’t be foreseen. He was a person that helped me to understand that despite how much you may disagree with something you still have to find those parts in everything that you can actually work with in life. This is an integral part of me, it’s how I view the world, it’s how I appease it and often offend it as well.
Trust me when I say I didn’t agree with a lot of things he said, thought or did. Especially the things he did. Our parents are almost never as heroic as we would like them to be. They’re generally just ordinary folk that managed to procreate at just the right time, usually on accident, in order to make you. In this sense it is good to evaluate the character of your parents from two different perspectives. The perspective of them as strangers whether negative or position because you’d have no concern if they hadn’t been your parents and the perspective of them as highly relevant to you because of the fact that’s where you come from. That always helps to put things in perspective.
When I divide things up and take the good out, I get an all-right set of things. I learned how to laugh, how to charm, how to sell. Not only did I learn how to laugh but I learned how to laugh in the darkest and most abysmal of times as a band-aid. I also learned how not to be through the folly of a fool.
I wrote something about being a Big Black Splotch earlier and I think it would be short-change to leave my words at that when it comes to this matter. So ultimately, what I want to say is thank you for being an anachronism, a talker, the type of guy that could appreciate ice cold water as much as fine wine, someone that knew how to work hard when he did work and someone that knew how to walk his talk and watch his own back despite getting himself into most of his own trouble.
Through finding these things in you I can find similar things in other unexpected and hard to find places. I can find the brilliance in something so awful that you wouldn’t otherwise think to find. For this, I’m thankful.
I’d say more, but that’s too sensitive for here.
I’ve been thinking about death and religion a lot lately because as some of you may know, and I’m sick of saying it, my father just passed away. It’s something I had put out of my head for a good long time because I had done my dwellings on matters of the metaphysical and where you might go in death according to ancient peoples. It isn’t so much that I’m questioning my own ideas right at the moment because my sense of mortality has been shot back into my consciousness but rather that religion and faith was something that mattered to my father.
He was a firm believer in Jesus Christ. He was never the type of man to tell you that you’re evil, because he had enough evil to match anyone for the most part. He never spat bible verses at people but he would tell you that Jesus loved you and he’d thank the lord on a regular basis, which always made me feel uncomfortable because I felt like I was making things awkward for him by not reciprocating those feelings of religiosity. While he was slipping into the darkness his side of my family and I came together and there was also that same discomfort and sense that I’m pissing on their only hope.
Let’s talk about heaven?
Let’s not.
These are people I don’t want to hurt. With anyone else I could coldly state that I’m fairly against superstition but not with these people. I’m sure this is old hat to a lot of people I know because they have such frequent contact with family but I’m pretty unfamiliar with the concept of family, extended or not. I’ve been a lone-wolf of the highest degree and I’m a total anomaly when it comes to family history.
Point being, it got me thinking about them and their concept of heaven. I’d like to tell you what absolutely scares the hell out of me about the concept of heaven in general. Invasion of privacy! That’s right, invasion of my privacy. When people tell me that someone will be up there looking down on me I just have to think, if this were true then what exactly is the extent of this looking down?
Are there rules to this? Can this person watch me in all my petty bullshit or do they only get my profile? Personally, I’m dismayed by the concept of anyone related to me knowing what I do when I don’t want anyone to know what it is I’m doing. Is there a prayer of “Don’t watch me while I’m down” that we’re supposed to follow with “amen” in this world where people invade our privacy when we’re officially the survivors? Religion needs to include these types of things; when is the next Council of Nicaea so I can forward my suggestion?
What about omniscience? How much of this is granted to ghosts? Do they now know not just what I’m doing now but what I’ve done as well? If so, that’s no good at all. It isn’t that I’m ashamed; I’m just not comfortable with it. It’s comparable to the insecurity of a fat kid not wanting to go swimming.
I see now how this whole “looking down on us” thing works on the average religious person. I’ve never had anyone relevant to me put into that whole scenario of being dead and looking down by someone else. It’s an effectively scary thought. It’s like all of those things you don’t say to spare the feelings of another get ripped out of you by a cosmic force and put into the ear of the dearly departed and I have to think, if this were the case, that’d be no heaven.
I also have to ask myself, if people really believe this, how can they honestly continue to think and act as they do when that judgment is so all encompassing from above? I don’t think they believe it as much as they’d like to think they do otherwise they’d find it a whole lot more disconcerting than I do as a non-religious person.
Ultimately my question is why am I so different that I think about it on this level? I wish I could just take it at face value and not have fictionalized versions of the laws of universe irritating me. Even further, this is just one more barrier in my communicating anything meaningful to almost everyone I’ll ever meet because they’ll never get it and I’ll make their religiosity awkward for them.
The existentialist at a funeral is a big black splotch. I’m the big silent embodiment of negation. I’m the grim reaper of hopes and emotional solutions. This is how I feel when I’m met with the urge to be honest or to be myself.
These sayings of hope do me no good.
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