Hivemind Times Issue #94

Welcome To The Hivemind Times!

Good morning psychos. It's your pal Graydon here to deliver you the 94th issue of the HIVEMIND TIMES.

 Happy holiday weekend. As much as you can celebrate it I hope you do. As much as you can reject it please do. 

Any who, I hoped you all enjoyed a new ep of Jeopardy that came out Wednesday. Patreon and Youtube members were treated to an old school match of samples yesterday. I hope you enjoy this bizarre weekend of summer fun. Sink your teeth in on a playlist and some odd reading. 

Be safe, don't blow your hand off with a firework.

- Graydon

WEEKLY PLAYLIST

Something for the weekend!

WHAT IS THE BEST FIREWORK?

ROZEY UPDATE

Rozey’s daily schedule for self improvement

4:30 pm

Wake up like a corpse yanked from the grave, eyes burning, skull full of wet cement. Didn’t sleep. Just blacked out for a few hours and the void spat me back out worse. Total exhaustion that feels like my bones are dissolving.

Lay there for forty minutes staring at the same water stain on the ceiling, trying to convince myself it’s moving. It doesn’t. Brain is pure static. Thoughts of death and failure loom around me

Finally muster the courage (or whatever broken survival instinct is left) to swing my legs off the bed. The floor feels like it wants me dead. Shuffle out. Tommy and John are already glued to the couch like they’ve been there for three days straight. Mumble “hey” in a voice that sounds like a dying animal. They grunt back. Nobody looks at each other. The air is thick with stale weed and the smell of my unspoken failure.

Grab a cup of water. It tastes like warm plastic. Drag myself to the porch, sit on the rotting lawn chair, and immediately spiral. Every thought turns into a razor. “You’re cringe and everything you do sucks” reverberates in the dark dilapidated corners of my skull.

Waltz back inside like a ghost with a grudge. Collapse on the couch between them. We talk for an hour about nothing, soccer, old memes, how the world is ending. How I need to stop being so negative and drop music again.

Eventually drag myself back to the room. Open FL. Try to work on the track that’s been killing me for weeks. The mix sounds like garbage. Tweak one EQ and it gets worse. Undo. Redo. Undo. Rage quit after thirty minutes, slamming the laptop shut so hard I’m scared I broke it.

6:15 pm

Pace the room like a caged animal. Pick up the guitar, play three notes, throw it on the bed. 

8:00 pm

Force myself to eat something. Frozen pizza that tastes like cardboard and shame. 

10:30 pm

Back on the porch. Chain smoke until my throat burns. Stare at the dark street watching cars go by like they all have somewhere to be. I don’t. Start muttering to myself. “Why the fuck are you like this?” Neighbors might hear. Don’t care anymore.

12:45 am

Couch again. Tommy and John went up and passed out. I’m wide awake, heart palpations brought on by years of stress and hatred. Put on a documentary about the Vietnam war and feel a weird kinship to the soldiers in the trudging through the jungle.

2:10 am

Back in the room. Try music again. This time I’m unhinged screaming lyrics into my shitty mic, distorting everything, crying midway through a take because it still sounds like trash. Delete the files in a fit. Sit on the floor hugging my knees wishing i was someone else

3:40 am

Pacing the house now. Open the fridge for the tenth time. Nothing good. Drink more water like it’ll fix the hole in my chest. Go outside, sit on the curb. The quiet is deafening. Skunks and coyotes fucking everywhere

4:50 am

Back inside. Lie on my thin $80 ikea mattress staring at the ceiling again. Same water stain, different hour. Start doom scrolling conspiracy theories and ancient suicide notes on obscure forums. Relate too much. Close the app. Open it again.

5:30 am

Try to sleep. Can’t. Brain won’t shut up. Replaying every mistake I’ve ever made on loop. The sun’s starting to come up. I hate it. Another day I’m not ready for.

6:15 am

Standing in the bathroom staring at my reflection. I look like a circus rat that lost a fight with a truck. Whisper “you’re never gonna make it” to the mirror like a curse. 

6:50 am

Back on the porch watching the sky turn that disgusting optimistic blue. Light another smoke with shaking hands. Tommy wakes up, sees me, just shakes his head and goes back inside.

7:00 am

Drag this aching body back into the room like a dying dog crawling into its shitty little death hole to fucking whimper and shit on itself and die. Grab that blanket, the one from her (a nice reminder)  and hang it up over the window with shaking hands. One night we stayed up so late at her apartment, laughing until our stomachs hurt, tangled up in each other on that tiny couch while her cat went absolutely feral, zooming around like a dust demon. The sunrise started creeping in and blinding us, so we threw all our shit in the car and drove to my Hollywood apartment because I had those blackout curtains. But I only had one blanket for me. I only had one pillow for me. She didn’t care. She saw that I was more than a shitty homemaker and brought a part of her to comfort me. She brought this blanket so we could share it and wrap ourselves up like idiots in love.

I ruined it a few weeks later. Of course I did. Ruined everything else too. She never even wanted the blanket back or anything to do with me again. Just left it here like evidence. If you’re a nosey little prick and just have to know what I did to ruin things I have the tendency to become entranced in a self destructive delusion because I feel unworthy of people’s love so almost out of the blue so I just pull the plug on things. Very pathetic. The light can't reach me inside. Still here. Still exhausted. Still hopeless. Still here. All to be recycled in 8 and a half hours if I’m lucky. If I’m not… well. I’ll still be here. Fuck all of you.

- Rozey

POEM OF THE WEEK

Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997)

America

America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing.
America two dollars and twentyseven cents January 17, 1956.   
I can’t stand my own mind.
America when will we end the human war?
Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb.
I don’t feel good don’t bother me.
I won’t write my poem till I’m in my right mind.
America when will you be angelic?
When will you take off your clothes?
When will you look at yourself through the grave?
When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites?
America why are your libraries full of tears?
America when will you send your eggs to India?
I’m sick of your insane demands.
When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?
America after all it is you and I who are perfect not the next world.   
Your machinery is too much for me.
You made me want to be a saint.
There must be some other way to settle this argument.   
Burroughs is in Tangiers I don’t think he’ll come back it’s sinister.   
Are you being sinister or is this some form of practical joke?   
I’m trying to come to the point.
I refuse to give up my obsession.
America stop pushing I know what I’m doing.
America the plum blossoms are falling.
I haven’t read the newspapers for months, everyday somebody goes on trial for murder.
America I feel sentimental about the Wobblies.
America I used to be a communist when I was a kid I’m not sorry.   
I smoke marijuana every chance I get.
I sit in my house for days on end and stare at the roses in the closet.   
When I go to Chinatown I get drunk and never get laid.   
My mind is made up there’s going to be trouble.
You should have seen me reading Marx.
My psychoanalyst thinks I’m perfectly right.
I won’t say the Lord’s Prayer.
I have mystical visions and cosmic vibrations.
America I still haven’t told you what you did to Uncle Max after he came over from Russia.
I’m addressing you.
Are you going to let your emotional life be run by Time Magazine?   
I’m obsessed by Time Magazine.
I read it every week.
Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner candystore.   
I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library.
It’s always telling me about responsibility. Businessmen are serious. Movie producers are serious. Everybody’s serious but me.   
It occurs to me that I am America.

I am talking to myself again.
Asia is rising against me.
I haven’t got a chinaman’s chance.
I’d better consider my national resources.
My national resources consist of two joints of marijuana millions of genitals an unpublishable private literature that jetplanes 1400 miles an hour and twentyfive-thousand mental institutions.
I say nothing about my prisons nor the millions of underprivileged who live in my flowerpots under the light of five hundred suns.
I have abolished the whorehouses of France, Tangiers is the next to go.

My ambition is to be President despite the fact that I’m a Catholic.
America how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood?
I will continue like Henry Ford my strophes are as individual as his automobiles more so they’re all different sexes.
America I will sell you strophes $2500 apiece $500 down on your old strophe
America free Tom Mooney
America save the Spanish Loyalists
America Sacco & Vanzetti must not die
America I am the Scottsboro boys.
America when I was seven momma took me to Communist Cell meetings they sold us garbanzos a handful per ticket a ticket costs a nickel and the speeches were free everybody was angelic and sentimental about the workers it was all so sincere you have no idea what a good thing the party was in 1835 Scott Nearing was a grand old man a real mensch Mother Bloor the Silk-strikers’ Ewig-Weibliche made me cry I once saw the Yiddish orator Israel Amter plain. Everybody must have been a spy.
America you don’t really want to go to war.
America its them bad Russians.
Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen. And them Russians.   
The Russia wants to eat us alive. The Russia’s power mad. She wants to take our cars from out our garages.
Her wants to grab Chicago. Her needs a Red Reader’s Digest. Her wants our auto plants in Siberia. Him big bureaucracy running our fillingstations.
That no good. Ugh. Him make Indians learn read. Him need big black niggers. Hah. Her make us all work sixteen hours a day. Help.   
America this is quite serious.
America this is the impression I get from looking in the television set.   
America is this correct?
I’d better get right down to the job.
It’s true I don’t want to join the Army or turn lathes in precision parts factories, I’m nearsighted and psychopathic anyway.
America I’m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.

MERCH