[Author’s Note: I did not create this image and forget the name of the DMT website I yoinked it from. If this is your work I’m happy to either take it down or credit you]
The bits of San Diego history I’ve been exploring over the last couple chapters, both my own experiences and things before my time, have been a super fun rabbit hole and, more relevantly to what will follow, have gotten me in touch with a handful of the covered artists. This translates most importantly into an opportunity to fact check so I thought I would repeat some sentiments that I first laid out in a little site description or bio somewhere.
Mainly that until these pupal words find their way to an instar as ink on paper everything here is a work in process. On that note I want to take an unambiguous editorial stance on the entirety of these contents: if I call you an asshole assume I’m doing it with my chest out but if I said I saw you wearing faux-snakeskin boots when they were actually the real deal then by all means set me straight.
For the first of these situations it shouldn’t be too hard to figure out where I live (and I assure you I’m as useless as scolding a cat when it comes to a physical confrontation) but for the second one it’s most fastidious to either send an e-mail or message me on any of my social medias. On that note I will be amending several details of the previous entry the moment I finish typing this diatribe.
That put’s me in mind of some other bits of housekeeping I’d like to mention. I don’t often see these installments from an end-user perspective so I’m not entirely certain how many ads there are at this point or how much of a hindrance they pose to the average reader. I’m not making any money on them. I don’t pay to use this website and as the saying goes “if it’s free – you’re the product”.
I’d love to transfer everything to more copacetic surroundings but as I can’t seem to slow down the feverish pace I continue to write at I’d probably need some assistance.
Back to the question of veracity. It is of course possible, especially when wandering outside my own personal experience, that I may become purview to conflicting reports of perceivable phenomena due to a diversity of informants. In fact this very thing has happened multiple times already – mostly in the locality of who played what on a recording or fulfilled what role in the mastering or engineering booth.
I regard these as cordial disagreements between friends and for the most part try to stay out of it as I’d hate to do anything as vulgar as hazard a conjecture on the most likely explanation based only on my opinions of those involved.
On that note I am trying my hardest to avoid cliches and empty platitudes. To my eternal shame I referred to a live performance I barely remembered as “amazing” in one of my earlier pieces. I don’t want to patronize or waste anybody’s time by throwing words at things that didn’t make an impression the first time around in which case I would have had an actual adjective.
When you hear something like “he’s got a lot of heart” what is actually being communicated is that a person is poor. Rich people have hearts too but they use their resources to obscure the actual location of them, like an evil wizard in an Arthurian legend, so that it is more difficult to stab them in them.
A better thing to say might be that a particular person is vulnerable. At least that way it doesn’t sound like a half handed apology for circumstances that most likely are the result of factors present before an individual’s birth in the first place. Nobody wants to be vulnerable but some do find their way to a certain grace concerning this state of being easily wounded – and that is actually commendable.
This vulnerability is why Poverty Culture is an Honor Culture and insults will always have consequences within a certain echelon of the general public. If your reputation is the only thing you have it makes sense to fight for it and if you have everything in the world it makes sense to be unbothered about what anyone might think about you.
On that note I won’t be talking about how anyone that’s died used to “light up a room” or “give you the shirt off their back”. The ranks of those that did not make it included multiple people that I deeply did not fuck with and I won’t be disrespecting their memories by suggesting otherwise. I’ve also been in rooms that got real dark real quick and can’t pretend the cause wasn’t good friends who are now buried.
There’s a certain irony to the now popular use of the phrase “Goodnight Sweet Prince…” that should be apparent to anyone familiar with the near-nominative tract by Machiavelli.
Because I have had the experience of living in the world I am well aware that being exposed as a user of certain hard drugs, especially heroin, will greatly reduce the regard in which a person might be held by their peers. When I expose myself it should be obvious that I am leveraging the damage I am inflicting on my own reputation against the small degree this may serve to rehabilitate the reputation of junkies in general.
It isn’t actually a crime against one’s community to be a junkie in the same way it is to be a liar and a thief and despite certain unsavory stereotypes the two are not synonymous. You don’t have to be rich to be an ethical junkie you just have to have principles that do not end at the edges of your own discomfort. Of course I’m not saying that I’ve never committed either of those cardinal sins but I certainly haven’t made either one a habit.
I used to have an expression that I would use as a kind of motto:
“Nobody wanted to be a village elder”
I made it up out of a sense of revulsion I experienced when I first spent time in the underground of Iowa City. It was a reaction to the way hordes of insufferable college kids attempted to emulate the handful of broke bohemians. It seemed like “a poor place to be held in high regard”.
Anyway it doesn’t really resonate with me anymore. I’m a lot less judgmental these days and good hearted earnest lames don’t really give me the ick the way they used to. Now that I’ve effectively aged out of the range of being a prodigy, journeyman or even hack the least I can do is try to pass on what little I’ve gleaned to whoever’s next in line.
This isn’t always easy. You don’t have to be the smartest person in any given room to feel alone or isolated – you just have to think you are. Maybe it’s an occupational hazard of spending too much time as a philosopher but lately I’ve been feeling especially susceptible.
It occurs to me that if what a person had to say was “wise” or “good” it wouldn’t have to justify it’s own existence through the application of flowery language.
On the same note if foolishness, or knavery, wasn’t well articulated what use would it be to anybody at all? Who would want to listen?
I never actually made it to the Juggalo Gathering and I’m not going to pretend to be into their music but I’ve been feeling a lot more affinity with the clown as cultural archetype. I’m glad my now dead friend who I loved Will Leffleur found his way to being the top image in the Wikipedia article of the same name.
Knavel gazing aside for once I find myself without a pithy turn of phrase to encapsulate the “thing I am getting at”.
It’s in the title – these are nothing more, or less, than a few stray musings on the wisdom of knaves…
Adventures in the Undiscovered Interior of Underground America 