Corey Eno Ruffin (2025)

11/07/2025

From my Vietnam trip in March, trying tropical fruits and food and DURIAN!! Although the one in this vid was rather bland, I will tell you that durian is absolutely my number one favorite fruit in the world. If you ever have a chance to try fresh durian, do it. Ignore the smell, wolf it down. Magic.

25/06/2025

PEOPLE! Go subscribe to my youtube, mad 4 mounds, and learn about american history. Stop the doomscrolling for a bit and enjoy original content created for you 4 freeeeeeeee (unless you subscribed to my patreon and already watched this stuff)
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17/02/2025

Japan travel diary part 2; STILL NOT IN JAPAN:

My rideshare driver to the San Francisco airport was from Afghanistan.

He asked me where i was from. Michigan, I replied.

“Michigan? The greatest man i have ever known is from Michigan. My squadron commander, the strongest and most amazing man I have ever met. I love him, he is both a brother and a mentor to me.”

I asked him why, then, hasnt he visited the guy in Michigan yet, now that he is living in the states, and he said because it is winter and the guy told him there’s no point in visiting during the winter and to wait until summer.

“Yeah, Michigan winters suck,” i replied; ready to go into my regular scripted autopilot small talk about the weather in my state oh gosh its cold but really its that there’s no sun you see we have this thing called lake effect yes lake effect and you get this cold air coming down from Canada and it hits the temperate waters of Lake Michigan and it creates cloud cover and we don’t see the sun for 5 months straight and did you know Grand Rapids has the highest rates of depression in the US and on and on- it was only a 20 minute ride and we must keep the talk small so stick to the script, yes?

“Yes, that is what he told me. But let me tell you, we have experienced cold together like nothing else; i can handle this Michigan gold. In Afghanistan’s, with my brother, this is the only time i have seen that strong and powerful man say ‘f**k this, Im done!” And give up, and show weakness. He replied, laughing.

He told me that he was embedded with navy seals as a translator. He emphasized that seals are the best of the best, the strongest, and the most tolerable of pain. I understood, for sure, this is without question. He laughed and laughed as he belched out explaining how cold it would get in the mountains, how they were stationed for 3 nights outside at high altitude and in the snow, in the utter and bitter cold, just in their fatigues, and how that was the only time he’d seen these powerful men pushed past their limit. I already understood, solely at “navy seals expressing pain”, that it must have been fu***ng COLD.

They were waiting for an enemy caravan. These were high profile targets who had been living in nearby caves, who the US government had been looking for for a long time. Local villagers had called the military base for help as taliban aligned terrorists were attacking their villages at random and killing children; classic military game of breaking peoples morale to the point of giving up all hope, the classic nasty stuff that happens in war. Intelligence revealed that this particular terror group terrorizing these particular villages was indeed the group that the government had been looking for for quite some time, some very high profile targets, and they, the afghan translator and the powerful Michigan man and their squad, had been sent, in the cover of darkness, to find them and kill them.

3 nights in; three days and nights of living outside and sneaking around the mountains and doing recon and getting information; they were stationed by a bridge, waiting for the caravan. They had gotten information, they knew that sometime in the next couple nights that a caravan containing these men, these bad men the US government wanted dead, would cross this bridge in the dead of night. They had to wait, they had to wait in secrecy and darkness for these men and kill them.

He said he was young then, early 20s, and he smoked like the devil; and in fact still does.

“I love ci******es, I can’t help it. My brother (this is what he called the seal, I never got the mans name), he would give me such a hard time about it. Any time he saw me with a cigarette he would pull it out of my mouth and break it in half. He’d tell me over and over that i must quit, and he did help me cut back. But this night, i was so fu***ng pi**ed. We were all so fu***ng pi**ed. I can’t tell you this cold, i cannot properly explain how cold this was. I told him ‘f**k you, I don’t care if you don’t like my smoking i am fu***ng pi**ed off and i need a cigarette’. I’d brought 12 packs with me on this mission, because i knew we might be gone a long time, and that the other men might want them. We couldn’t light a fire, a flashlight, a match; nothing. There is no electricity in these places, these villages up in the mountains and no lights at night that would not draw attention- a lit cigarette would draw attention, they would see us. So I smoked in a Red Bull can. I cut one end off of it and i would put the can around the cigarette and the torch, that would hide the glow. The men who didn’t smoke, they saw me doing this and wanted one. They all wanted one. Anything to take our minds off the cold. We passed the Red Bull can around and we smoked in it and we hid the glow of the cigarette.

Later on, we decided to move across the bridge to the other side so as to get a better view down the mountain and to anticipate the caravan. But once halfway across the bridge, we saw a shepherd approaching the bridge from the other side. this was very unusual for this time at night; this man walking alone on this bridge. We could not be seen or identified, this man was most likely aligned with the enemy and would be alarmed to see us, so we had to do the unthinkable; we had to slide down the legs of the bridge and into the water. There was no other choice, he was right in front of us and would see us quickly. We had to sit in that water, in that cold, while he crossed the bridge and had to wait for him to get out of sight before we could leave. My brother, that was it for him. ‘Thats it, i am done!” He shouted. I had never heard him say that, i had never heard any of these men complain and they certainly never quit. It had been three days. We were all so cold, i swear we were dying. He got on the phone and called back to base, where all those fu***rs were sleeping in their houses and in their beds in their warm warm beds and he told them we were done. They told us we’d be in so much trouble if we left, that we’d be court marshalled, that this was an important target. He was like “f**k you in your warm fu***ng beds we are done” they had to connect him to higher ups, to the general. The general was begging him not to quit. He was saying “its chain of command” and that he would be in so much trouble with his higher ups if this mission failed. My brother didn’t care, he yelled at him and told him to f**k off. i tell you, this went all the way up to president Obama; that’s how high up they transferred these calls. We were done, we were released, we went back to base. We slept for days. We had heaters in our beds and still could not get warm. Our skin was dry and cracked and peeling for a month after, i tell you i have never ever in my life been so cold”

“Hahah,” i responded, “i bet you never ever want to have to do something like that again.

“I would do it in a SECOND.” If i am asked, i will go. Our company, we all pledged to each other that if any one of us got the call to go back, all of us would go. I tell you man, this was serious s**t; what we did. Any time we went out, one or two of us died. Every day was chaos, every day was the hardest work ever. And it was the best work.”

I told him i kind of understood, to have that bond or sense of purpose.

“I was young, just out of high school. To participate in this, this was a life i could have never imagined. I know that it was death and dying and killing and so much risk and fear but i tell you i enjoyed every second of it and i was happy all the time. I don’t know if it was because i was a stupid kid or because I didn’t know any better but it was so fun. Any time a mission came up, any time volunteers were asked for; we were the first to stand. We wanted this, this is why we were there.”

“Why, why is it you were there?”

“Because I felt like we were making a difference. We knew who the enemy were, the Taliban. These are bad people, they do horrible things. We were the only help to so many people, so many common people living in small villages or farms or in the mountains with no recourse and no help. I had purpose, i knew who the enemy was. I would go back in a second. I am married now and i have children. My brother, he got me here. He sponsored me and now i live in the US and am a citizen. But we promised each other that if one was called we would all go. And i wait for that call, i want to go back. I tell you, man, there is nothing like it.”

“Yeah,” I mused, “it must be that you just have to always be on, right? Always active, always thinking, always ready; it must be adrenaline all the time”

“Yes, kind of like that. But we were stupid, too. The things we did for fun. We rode the hood of a jeep so fast, so very very fast, through a destroyed town. Laughing and having fun and sitting on the hood of this vehicle with no seatbelt and nothing, had i fell off or he crashed i would have died. It was so much fun, it was the best time of my life.”

“What do you think here, then? To come from that and to now live in the states, in San Francisco?? You’re driving us around and catering to locals, all these folks who probably haven’t seen poverty or war”

“Ohh these tech people (let me interject here; tech people are the folks ruining cities. They come in and have their high paying digital jobs and move into cities like sf or Austin or Bozeman or Boise and they pay high rents and use up the property and resources and drive up prices; they are the forefront of gentrification in the US and in places like San Francisco everyone calls them “those tech people”) , they complain and complain and complain. When i give them rides they complain about the price or the traffic or that i am going to slow and i just tell them i fought in the war and they shut right up. “

And there we were, arrived at the airport, our 20 minute allotted time for small talk used up.

“I don’t know why i said all this stuff, man, usually I don’t tell those stories to strangers.”

I told him thank you, emphatically thanked him, and it was a fist bump and we went our separate ways.

04/02/2025

Japan travel diary, day negative 2, san francisco:
resh off the California Zephyr, Chicago to San Francisco in 62 hours, and settling into my hostel after a delectable (and much needed after the gas station burrito level quality foodstuffs offered on the Amtrak) Georgian meal of traditional lamb stew with tarragon and green plum paired with a chilled glass of amber wine (skin contact, as in aged in clay pots, as it has been done since 300BC, with the skin still attached to the grape,making a wine that is altogether amber and altogether not red or white); I meet Hakeem.

I tell him that I don’t know if Im wired and need to stay up another day to spin off all this energy I’ve suddenly got after being freed up to stand free and walk around or if my body needs to pass out after such a lengthy journey and all the extremes it entails; and he responds with “well, if you want to take it all night i have a spare ticket to the mayors’ inauguration party!”

And, with my tradition of making bad and sudden choices on first days of trips, so as to get bad choices wrung out of my system quick in order to make way for good ones (like not blowing tons of dough on high level sushi in back alley Tokyo fish markets); i reply with a “hell yeah, lets do it!” And im following him through Chinatown telling this man I’ve just met what my name is and why im here and im asking him who he is.

He’s from LA and got laid off from his interior design job and now hes living at the hostel; renting a bed in an 8 bed dorm.

The hostel is wonderfully low rent, the exact kind of homeless chic place i was looking for. It’s the girl at the front desks’ first day on the job. The door code to the front door doesn’t work. “Yeah,” says the manager, “the door is being a little moody today;” which is an altogether ‘im not going to deal with it’ passing of the buck kind of response one would expect from the numb and distanced millennial that is filling this joint to the seams. “I work here, this thing should be my problem, but I’ve decided to make it your problem,” was the end result. The door code doesn’t work, you’ve got to hope someone is here to let you in cuz i have no idea how to fix it and my shift is over in an hour and I’ve got to go get drunk and cancel people on social media. She didn’t even show me where my room was or how to find the bathroom. “The rooms are back there,” she says as she waves her hands around her head in a circle while staring down at her phone, “and there’s some bathrooms down here if the ones upstairs are full,” followed by a second hand wave that was obviously developed and perfected as a child at annual princess parties paid for by her millionaire father before she decided f**k it, hes not gonna buy me that pony, and decided to take the requisite gap year as all trust fund babies do ‘slumming it’ at a San Francisco hostel. God, I love it.

Hakeem was the right choice, over the anti socials and the tech nomads and the first time backpackers and the lifetime backpackers; all treading water and in a kind of stasis of never wanting to make choices or to settle down or to choose a direction, all in the hostel and waiting, waiting, for something to happen that they can latch onto instead of making something happen, all not talking and staring at their phones and waiting for that first beer to crack open so they can finally feed into that nascent alcoholism all young pre professionals are developing far better, far purer, than they are social skills; so i chose Hakeem.

“How is it that i show up to this hostel and right away a guy offers me a ticket to a mayoral inauguration?” I ask him.

“Well, my friends are all moody and i called a bunch of them to go with me but they all said no and so here you are,” was the answer. He wasn’t getting the philisophical bent to my query but it’s all good, sufficient response.

He got laid off, got rid of his $3k a month apartment, was now homeless and living in the hostel and running a start up postcard business. He took all his severance pay, five figures of severance pay, and designed and printed and packaged 200,000 San Francisco themed post card sets that he’s sure are going to sell. No one has bought them bulk yet but someone will, he talked to Amoeba music and they seemed interested, “someone needs to buy like 10k of these cuz im selling them on the street for $2 a pack, man, and it is not exactly making me the money i expected…”

“Oh really?!” I exclaim, “im a traveling artist, i work the fair and festival circuit. I feel like there’s some overlap here.” And i start to ask him questions about overhead and what the market is like and that a friend of mine is asking me to produce stickers for his roving festival booth; trying here to get some real information and trying to offer up information in return and Hakeem says. “I don’t know man, I just started this two weeks ago.” He’s entirely uninterested in giving me the info i want, and also entirely unimpressed that im doing what he does but somewhat succeeding at it; as in later on in this very evening he’ll be complaining about the people who make the kind of money i do while also wanting to be making that money himself. It’s all good, i really like the guy. This disinterest and this spur of the moment; its all coming out of a positivity. He’s having fun and exploring and in a good moood and doesn’t want to get into the bulls**t details and i can respect that.

We reach Chinatown and it is PACKED. “What is this?” He exclaims. We’ve got a ticket to an event, an indoor event, but it is at the center of the outdoor event. Some very very very famous DJ is doing an outdoor set as part of the inauguration celebration and he is EXACTLY the kind of dude that all these SF techies, these millennial kids with disposable income, are wiling to get trampled in a crowd for.

This is exactly the kind of place id never be, the kind of place i would never freely choose to enter because danger danger danger is in crowds crowds crowds, but now im following Hakeem and his green super Mario kart beanie and using it as a beacon, while he pushes his way through a sardine packed crowd wall to wall in Chinatown that is of the kind i can just NOT properly explain. This was packed, serious packed. We were squeezing our way through one of those 1000 piece wheels of Chinese firecrackers. Packed tight, right up against the other, wrapped in wax paper, rigid, unmoving; but Hakeem is determined to get to this party and he is pushing his way through the crowd and i am staying on him. Gosh i hope that pack of Chinese firecrackers don’t get neared to a spark.

Surprisingly, we are almost to the stage. We are dead center. Every direction i look in; people. Firecracker roll of people. No way out through these people. He sees some people he knows, a Brazilian guy. They’re holding up their cel phone, “hey Hakeem, say hi to Brazil!!” “Hi Brazil!!” “Thanks man, im filming content for my YouTube channel.” Ambitious youth suddenly climbs a streetlight, the tens of thousands all reach for their cel phones to get their video of the moment, the boy is a hero; the boy for one fleeting moment has the attention of everyone. The DJ stops his set DEAD. “Im not playing one second more until you get down!!” He shouts.

The DJ is dressed like a low rent Asian Neo from the matrix. a 3rd tier imitation Asian imitating a guy who was a white WASP imitating the best of asian cinema. He can’t sing, hes out of tune with his track. Rory, who’s hiding in a restaurant alcove with me, whom i bought a beer and told him to remember that beer i bought him when the stampede starts, to save my life, to remember the beer, tells me “this is his hit song, this is what everyone is here for!!”’

It’s not impressive.

Hakeem grabs me by the shoulder.

“Look at this, this is the San Francisco tech scene.”

“What?” I ask. I think hes meaning techno, as in these are the electronic music makers and fans.

“No, this is the fu***ng tech scene. These are all the young people making $150k a year to work on their laptops from home. This is what they want, they just want to think they’re cool and drink s**tty beer and see a DJ and they think they are the best, that this is the best it can ever be”.

Suddenly the crowd starts pushing. Violently. Not the whole crowd, just our corner. People are shouting, “stop pushing, people are going to get hurt!” A friend group that should have never come to this thing, who especially shouldn’t have made their way to the center want OUT NOW and they are showing no respect and they are pushing their way to get out.

“Just get out of the way, get out of the fu***ng way!” Some moron Jersey kid is shouting as he pushes an old Asian lady out of his way. The rest of us, quite soberly and kindly, are shouting back “slow down, calm down, stop pushing, we’ll get you out.” And they are having none of it. Some 4 foot tall and 5 foot wide bald Greek guy in a paisley shirt and sunglasses that look like they cost about $1500 shouts “f**k it!” And heaves forward. I yell “stop this, people are going to get trampled!” His friend, a girl who looks to be no more than 21, and who is clutching to him like a baby koala to its mothers belly, gets in my face and yells “didn’t you take fu***ng physics class in high school you idiot?” And im utterly shocked and say, “what?!?!” In response and she says it again; “didn’t you take physics in high school you idiot” and i am just too shocked, too blown over both by the self entitlement that these people are very very willing to hurt a lot of people just so they can get out (and wont get out if they cause a stampede, they’ll die) and by the utter refutation of physics that she is expressing because all i can think about is thermo dynamics and critical mass and chain reaction and that if you push against a brick wall its not going to suddenly let you through- the physics is that if they push against a crowd and everyone falls over, people are going to get hurt. But i guess this is the state of education in the ‘ol USA cuz she’s pretty confident in her physics knowledge and she’s ready to kill us all just to get out.

I understand why part of the country hates the other part. I understand this anger.

I look at this angry group willing to kill everyone else, willing to push the people to the ground to get out. They’ve taken too much, that’s what it is. The crowd anxiety has set in. Their eyes are coal black, dialated. They’re on something and what ever they are on, it’s not mixing well with the scene. It’s a Wednesday at 7pm, a work night. It’s a working class neighborhood. It’s Chinese restaurants, old ladies and old men standing in the doorways of their restaurants and scratching their heads at the scene and their regulars sitting inside and eating their congee and ignoring the throng outside, and these kids took too much because they are privileged as s**t to party every night and treat every street like it is theirs and every crowd like it is in their way and they went to a bad place and they are in a big crowd and thank god enough of us were sane and we handled it well and we got those kids out of there before they caused a stampede. They weren’t nice, they didn’t say thank you, they yelled at us and cursed at us and were full of poison and hate as we worked our asses off to save everyone’s lives and stop a stampede and stop a trample and clear a path for them to get out. They left, they didn’t say thank you, i never encounter this kind of toxicity anywhere in the world except the USA; i understand why people hate us.

A mom, a fu***ng mom, was trying to push through the crowd with her little baby in her arms! What could have happpened to that baby had the crowd toppled? But also, why the f**k did she push herself to the center of that crowd?!?!? Why did a lady with a newborn see a packed crowd of thousands, no room to walk, and think “i will walk me and my defenseless baby to the center of it!” Idiot, no sense of self preservation.

I understand in that moment why half the country hates this half. None of this is good. It’s bad, it’s harmful. But they’re only harming themselves. Really; we should let them do it, it’s not hurting anyone. It’s dumb and its not that fun and its sad that they think this is fun but its even sadder that the rednecks and the white trash and the republicans resent these folks and are threatened by them. Myself; I don’t get it. They are harmless, as long as you don’t set them off.

“I got fired from my job cuz im a republican” Hakeem tells me as an utterly methed out and rail thin cross dresser dances on the stairs leading into the basement restaurant we’re having a quick beer in. “It was all women working this job who hated trump and they didn’t like me after I mentioned my politics. Before that, they all wanted to f**k me, but now they hate me.” He’s black, dreadlocks down to his ass, as tall as my 6’3” and with a youthful and handsome face; absolutely they wanted to f**k him. He has a super Mario beanie, hes starting a postcard business, he wants to travel the world. I told him what i do, that i have an arts business and i travel the world, but he didn’t wanna talk about that; he’s still trying to get into the party.

“They just started letting anyone in, they aren’t checking tickets anymore” says a guy pushing past us in the crowd. F**k it. There’s no way we’re’ getting through this. It’s been an hour and a half and we haven’t moved an inch past our spot by the restaurant. This was amazing, im glad i came, im glad i saw this crowd, im glad i got to see how f**ked up things can be; i gotta get out.

I tell Hakeem and Rory, whom i bought the beer, “this is too much, I gotta get out” and i push my way out, calmly and with friendly eyes and causing no problems, and i walk the streets and i listen to these young tech millennials walking these storied streets of the beat movement and the hippie movement and i see the writers and the jazz musicians and the cultural innovators in the grit and in the shadows and in the dust, their remnants kicked up in the winds making their way up here from the raging fires of Los Angeles, and in my walk i hear well over 15 separate groups of said young tech millennials saying to each other, “lets go to Vesuvius,” in reference to some popular bar or nightclub, each one of them repeating the same script in the same tone of voice and each of them boasting that they’d discovered this place and that it was their little secret and they are going to be a hero to their friends for showing it to them and i eventually walk by the place in my stroll and, surprise surprise, it’s got a line out the door and im hearing the millennials bemoan “oh s**t, we can’t get into Vesuvius tonight”.

I decide to hurry to my hostel, it is 10pm and im not sure if anyone will be working the front desk. The door code issue was never fixed, i may not be able to get in.

I got in.

09/12/2024

Mad For Mounds, Chapter 12!

Exciting exciting, we have now entered the realm of the effigy mound builders!! For some unknown reason, the Hopewellian spinoff cultures in the area we now call Wisconsin and Iowa were obsessed with making their mounds in the shapes of animals, a practice barely reproduced anywhere else in North America. There are tens of thousands of these puppies all over and they are best viewed from the air. Bears, lizards, birds; rows upon rows of marching animals dancing all over the landscape. Enjoy this next chapter of my entirely self indulgent travel vlog and, remember: ancient alien/ancient technology theories are the birth of BRAIN ROT in the USA- made up stories to appeal to the average uneducated bro dude or spiritual slt that have no credence, no supporting evidence, and are entirely built on assumption and fantasy thinking.

17/11/2024

Mad For Mounds, chapter 11!!! In the state of Wisconsin are HUNDREDS of cities and ceremonial centers of the Adena, Hopewell, and Mississippian cultures. This one, called Aztalan by us white folks in our ignorance, was a heavily fortified city that was quite modern and cosmopolitan for its time. Come with me to the strange strange and exotic land of WISCONSIN and examine a time in history that is not just forgotten, but actively suppressed in memory, and see the clear warnings of what will happen if we ignore climate change and let our political leaders have their way! and also, dont forget: no ancient site was built by aliens, there is no secret technology, ancient alien theories are bro dude approved right wing brain rot propaganda!!!

08/11/2024

Mad For Mounds: POVERTY POINT! Y'all probably dont realize this buck right smack dab in the middle of Louisiana is one of the oldest city building societies in the world, as well as one of the biggest pyramids in the world? What, you say? Yeah, get off yer butt and learn the history of the country you live in; it is amazing here!! The poverty point culture were a pre ceramic (didnt make pots) and pre agricultural (didnt plant crops) society that, inexplicably, built a city. this is wild because thats not something nomadic hunter gatherers really did, especially when all they had were baskets, mud, shovels, and their bare hands. This is a really really really special spot, folks, and i strongly encourage a visit.

17/10/2024

Heya, folks! It’s time for chapter 9 of my series ‘Mad For Mounds’! This time we are in the misnamed ‘Toltec Mound Group’ of southern Arkansas (thankfully recently renamed to ‘Plum Bayou Mounds’.

The incorrect naming of Toltec Mounds is great example of how little we white people know about the very land we were born on and call home. Back in the day, local white farmers and landowners, when coming across these mounds, assumed they must have been built by the Toltec people of what is now called Mexico. The reasoning behind this is because they were so sophisticated, so incredible, that there was no way the ‘savages’ of North America could have built them.

And this misnaming shows how much power is in a name, because by calling it ‘toltec’ we take away history, legacy, and agency from the ACTUAL descendants of the people who built them. We erase the plum bayou culture (the people who built them) from our minds and that leads to us erasing the relevance of their descendants, modern indigenous Americans, from our minds as well. By making the conversation about ‘toltecs’, we keep native Americans out of the conversation for a hundred years. And since you dont EVER think about the Native American, you dont think about what you’re doing with their land. Are you respecting it? Are you taking care of it? Are you prohibiting their use of it?

The question of what american history is, and how to move forward into an america that is inclusive to all, finds its answer in fascinating sites like this. Watch the vid and, remember, ancient sites were NOT built by aliens or magicians!! Also im gonna add the hashtag to all of these vids so you can have an easy way of finding them.

Corey Eno Ruffin

11/07/2025

25/06/2025

17/02/2025

04/02/2025

09/12/2024

17/11/2024

08/11/2024

17/10/2024

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