Commons, constitutional Right

The preamble to the U.S. Constitution states that the role of government is to provide for the general Welfare. We the people, together with local, state, and federal governments, can only accomplish this if we properly protect the Commons, something which neither our system of quasi-free-market capitalism nor today's re-election-focused politicians deem important. The average, hard-working American, however, relies daily on things that make up the Commons, including roads, bridges, radio waves, wi-fi, seams of coal, deposits of natural gas, clean and smog-free air (vital to the health of all persons), clean and potable water (vital to the health of all persons), and national and local parks. Where once, however, a person suffering cold had the right to walk into the woods and collect for herself a few armfuls of wood, now those trees belong to individuals who sell that wood for profit. When something that belongs equally to everyone is sold by one just person, for no other purpose than his or her personal gain, the beauty of the Commons is shattered, Nature's bounty serving not the interests of all persons equally but only the interests of a few, specifically.

Among the gravest dangers facing America today is our loss of appreciation for things that have intrinsic value, that have worth beyond the merely monetary; our system of Me-First capitalism has so infiltrated and poisoned our minds that we think that everything comes with a price-tag, that everything is for sale. If we just admitted to being a nation of whores, a nation focused on the accumulation of personal wealth, if we just fessed up to selling ourselves into wage-slavery in order to maintain our electricity-dependent, non-self-sufficient lifestyles, then our estimation in the opinions of mankind might not be so low; but, as things stand, we come across as childish and hypocritical assholes who complain about the poor state of our lives while sitting around all day watching TV and shoveling food processed by other downtrodden corporate wage-slaves into our ever-expanding stomachs. The notion of the Commons relies on communal sacrifice, on inter-personal sharing, and on the idea that some aspects of our lives – love, mercy, humility, equality, and generosity – cannot be pigeonholed but must remain beyond the realm of definition, classification, and exploitation. To bring about this state of affairs and to rescue our tender humanity from the ever-grasping paws of profit-hungry corporate interests and the greed of unscrupulous men, we must stand together, protecting what belongs to us all with Life, Fortune, and sacred Honor.

The Declaration of Independence defines government as that body which brings about the Safety and Happiness of the people. Furthermore, it grants us the right to alter or to abolish our government should it become destructive of our Safety and Happiness. Friends, Yankis, fellow patriots, we demand that our governments protect the Commons diligently, since clean air, pure soil, clear water, and guaranteed civil rights make us Happy and Safe and poisoned air, barren soil, polluted water, and preferential treatment for avaricious, self-interested individuals makes us Unsafe and Unhappy. The government of the United States of America does not exist to pay $400 billion to defense contractors, to cut taxes for wealthy corporations and rich individuals, to stop funding education, to stop funding programs that assist the poor and the elderly, to attack and kill persons merely suspected of committing grave crimes (such as Al-Awlaki, Osama Bin Laden), to subjugate foreign peoples in order to gain access to their mineral and fuel resources, or to restrict the ability of its own people to consume whichever drugs they decide best; the government of the U.S.A. exists to insure domestic tranquility and to secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, which it does best by protecting the Commons and making sure they stay free to all who may require their bounty. As long as we remain undisciplined and look the other way, however, and as long as we participate in the travesty of conspicuous consumption, we shall remain the enemies of the Commons, blind to the fragile truths which can save us from ourselves. To free the person, free her mind. Mahalo.

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the worst drugs

The meanest, sloppiest, most physically damaging, most noisome, and least classiest of drugs legal in America today are booze and smokes. Alcohol is among this nation's leading causes of liver disease, heartbreak, headaches, loneliness, spousal aggression, child abuse, wet beds, ruined lives, and sadness; alcohol is involved in the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans every year, and alcohol helps persons to enter mind-sets that help them to harm each other, to maim their kids, and to kill their spouses. Remember ten years ago how the airwaves hummed when a few thousand Americans died in a terrorist attack perpetrated supposedly by a Saudi Arabian man named Osama Bin Laden? Those selfsame airwaves stay silent when, year in and year out, a thousand Americans die each month from drinking the swill manufactured by Messieurs Beam, Bush, and Belvedere.

Few addictive substances pair as well with alcohol as does tobacco. That blue, toxic smoke! That throaty, rasping cough! Those two packs a-day incinerated and filtered through the lungs to the tune of two hundred dollars a month! Since quitting smoking at the end of last year, this author has had trouble fathoming how he smoked for so long, how he was able to stay reasonably healthy while shoving one cancer-stick after another into his raw and abused mouth, his chapped and reddened tongue lashing out to reposition the charlie between cracked and cankered lips, his throat tight and hurting from the constant and ceaseless abuse. Now, this author looks at smokers as one would look at slaves – as pitiable, lost souls clinging to a way of life that they known deep down is killing them, who are always coming up with excuses and reasons for not quitting, always patting themselves down and bumming loosies off of strangers, constantly suffering at the nicotine-stained hands of Messieurs Benson, Hedges, and Marlboro.

“Well then,” you are surely asking yourself at this juncture. “Oh-so-wise and teetotaling whorphan, if we are not to drink booze or smoke c-times, how the deuce are we supposed to dull the painful monotony of our wage-slaving, high-fructose-corn-syrup-eating, TV-watching lives?” There is but one answer, friend, to this question: reorganize your life so that its every aspect serves to celebrate the tender human spirit burning deep within your loins. (Practicing yoga daily is one of the most effective ways to accomplish this feat.) This author feels bad that he gets on peoples' cases and gives them shit for popping bronzes and toasting coffin-nails; he should be putting more pressure on members of the Senate and Congress, and on the president in the White House, for their shared refusal to protect the health and Happiness of the American people by outlawing and punishing users of alcohol and nicotine with a righteous fury similar to that with which they outlaw and punish users of cannabis. It is clear, however, that our elected officials have abandoned us in their haste to kowtow to their corporate bosses and other such super-rich bastards who keep money flowing into the campaign-coffers of dishonest and upstanding politicians alike. No, friend, we shall likely continue to suffer at the hands of the Marlboros and the Belvederes of this world as long as alcohol and tobacco companies keep bribing our supposed representatives with enough cash to convince them to keep deadly drugs legal while persecuting persons seeking to heal themselves the Natural way – by smoking weed. Oh, how have we allowed things to become so backward, and our leaders so corrupt? Surely, we have only ourselves to blame, though, we who ruin our lives and the lives of our children with alcohol and nicotine. Sighing, I remain, your most humble and loyal servant. Mahalo.

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president, not king

When the Revolutionary War had ended, and America had gained her freedom, the people of this land were so grateful to George Washington that they wished to make him King For Life. Cognizant of the corrupting effects of power and knowing the dangers inherent to autocratic rule, Mr. Washington turned down the offer, pushing for and succeeding in establishing a presidency limited in its power, an office that once balanced, and that was once balanced by, our other pillars of government, the legislature and the judiciary. And the system worked for a few hundred years, until the 20th Century, most notably during World War Two, during which conflict the president of this Union of American States began to issue great numbers of executive orders, thereby circumventing the balances designed into our system of government, changing our society in vast and lasting ways and effectively ruling the people by whim.

The American system of government is set forth in our founding documents, those being the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Nowhere therein is made mention of the executive order, and neither document grants the president any right to issue or to rule by executive order. All presidents since the Great Patriotic War have used the executive order, including George Walker Bush and Barack Hussein Obama; all presidents since the Allies beat the Axis have brushed aside legally crafted procedures carefully and specifically designed to keep too much power out of the hands of just one person, fundamentally changing the way our government works and destroying the efforts of our founding persons to protect us from tyrannical and despotic rule. Democracy in America is long dead, steamrolled into nothingness by the Patriot Act, which did away with protections contained in the U.S. Constitution; Liberty lies crushed under the smothering mass of the Controlled Substances Act of 1970, which made it illegal to consume any drug other than drugs sold by pharmaceutical corporations, beer distributors, and cigarette retailers. With a few, simple pen-strokes, our president could do away with these injustices, which are heaped upon the people daily, just as the president could issue an executive order to cancel all subsequent executive orders, declaring them null and void.

I fear, however, that things have not changed much, here, and that the American people still wish for, pine for, and long to wallow under kingly rule. (Fuck the British queen, by the way, and fuck her jubilee.) Why else do we continue to allow the president to rule as his or her whim and fancy should dictate? Perhaps we let this mockery continue because we deserve not freedom nor Liberty nor a balanced and democratic system of government, only the carbon-copy lives of wage-slaves yolked to materialism and convinced of the inevitability of constant and conspicuous consumption. As long as the blood is warm in our veins, though, it is our duty to fight for Liberty, to reinstate her, and to share her comforting effect with the sovereign peoples of the world. To prove to mankind, however, that our systems are worth emulating, we must reign in presidential power, re-balancing it to the other branches of government, and outlaw such undemocratic and unconstitutional means as the executive order. So stand up, speak out, & fight injustice. Mahalo.

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mirrors – mirrors everywhere

Look around you. That's right, take a good look around you. Unless you are visually-impaired or you lead a rugged, comfort-less existence out in the woods somewhere, then, while just looking around, you probably looked at a mirrored surface, something in which you perhaps saw a reflection of yourself having a look around. Many things with which we surround ourselves these days are high-gloss, shiny, or mirrored, including our laptops, automobiles, mobile phones, tablet computers, windows, watch-faces, doors, door-handles, hubcaps, handlebars, plates, pots, utensils, and eyeglasses, to name but a few. Oh the many mirrors one can gaze longingly into, losing oneself in the strangely hypnotic activity of making eye-contact with oneself. So is its profusion, and such is its commonality, that we modern persons can hardly imagine life without the mirror.

Consider, however, that just a few thousand years ago the primary reflective material was a calm surface of water, which only reflects well under optimal conditions and which requires one to lean or suspend oneself over said water to the point that objects start falling from pockets and fluids start dripping from the face. The ancients, it appears, understood the dangers of self-observation, telling a cautionary tale about a young man named Narcissus who so loved looking at his own reflection that he dove into a pond after it, where he was promptly ensnared and drowned by pond-nymphs, who had been lying in wait. (Similar to other old stories, I believe that the tale of Narcissus is meant to be taken as a warning of the dangers of emulating his foolish ways and getting caught in the tractor-beam of one's own reflection.) It wasn't until the Industrial Revolution that many people could afford mirrors or, for that matter, glass; before the 18th century, the only persons who could afford mirrors were fantastically rich individuals so corrupt and so cruel that one wishes they'd have stared at their own reflections more often instead of eradicating villages and enslaving and torturing their own subjects. (I believe that the myth about seven years of bad luck resulting from a broken mirror dates to before the Industrial Revolution, when hand-portable reflective objects were prohibitively expensive.)

So, today, are we better off having all these mirrors everywhere, or can mirrors be blamed in part for our rational-selfishness (i.e. avarice), that wasteful, ego-centric, quasi-capitalistic economic system that drains our lives of intrinsic value and imprisons our hearts in shells of self-serving egotism, rendering us incapable of respecting ourselves, each other, and Nature? I find it logical to assume that staring constantly at one's own reflection reinforces the notion that we must first look out for ourselves, for number one, before sacrificing our precious time or hard-won greenbacks on others. Since thinking about these questions, I have tried to look into mirrors only when necessary, such as when shaving my face or checking for ticks, avoiding even looking at my own reflection when typing; when I do stop to look, I am often shocked to see the image which I have come to associate with myself staring back at me, an image which correspond but poorly to the ebullient spirit that burns deep within my loins. Which, I think, is the crux of the matter: mirrors disassociate one from one's tender humanity, from one's intrinsic goodness, fueling one's ego and facilitating the ego's hijacking of the soul, which results in greedy, self-righteous, and short-sighted behavior such as conspicuous consumption and self-banishment into wage-slavery. Therefore, dear friends, avoid a mirror today, and rescue the soul from the ego's sticky clutches. Mahalo.

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occupy the commons

Roads, meadows, highways, bridges, seams of coal and ore, airwaves, forests, streams – all these things and more make up the Commons, meaning that they belong to each person equally, and that persons have the inalienable right to access them in times of need. Under the capitalism-driven corporatization that has of late transformed America into a sterile and desolate place hostile to individuality and intangible value alike, however, these things that were once the common property of all persons are now harvested, packaged, and sold with the purpose of making just a few hundred thousand of the hundreds of millions of citizens who live here rich beyond reckoning.

Fellow lovers of liberty, if we aim to free our common property from the stranglehold of money-lust, making it accessible to all, the way it used to be, we must occupy it with our bodies. Camp out on your local bridge! Ride your bicycle in out in the street, right next to the pitiable fools trapped inside their cars! Fill the radio with static, and jam the television signals! Only by making our presence known can we even begin to effect change, and only by putting our bodies in harm's way can we ever prove to a candid world that we deserve freedom, equality, and justice. Do we we have the guts to stand up in the face of inequality and injustice and demand that things change? Do we dare put down our tablet computers and switch off our cellphones and look around for the first time in a decade and marvel at just how bad things have become for persons who choose not to live the cookie-cutter, debt-fueled, consumption-oriented life?

Recent legislation is turning America into a police state (the Patriot Act, NDAA 2012), and I suspect that talking as I am talking here and examining ways to reclaim the Commons will be viewed by law enforcement as a crime, and that the federal and local police will try to paint me as a rabble-rouser and a corrupter of the minds of the youth. If, however, a love for Nature and an interest in the happiness and well-being of my fellow homo sapiens is a crime, then I am a criminal of the worst and most dastardly sort! Let us fight to keep the Commons the property of all persons equally, reminding the gullible and the television-addled people of this world that they do not have to live their lives under the cruel lash of wage-slavery, a lash that never ceases to strike. If we do not fight, if we do not bring our struggle out into plain view, then the capitalists and their cronies in the world's national banks and national legislatures will have won. They are already effecting their subjugation of liberty, equality, and justice, enveloping average persons in the false comfort of a mass-produced, corporate-designed culture of conspicuous and continuous consumption that rewards executive officers and majority shareholders for exploiting the Commons and selling back to us that which was already ours, all along.

Dear friends, we are not subjects, and we are not slaves – we are proud and self-sufficient people who work hard without complaining much, who come up with new ways to do and to make things, who protect Nature and care for our neighbors, and who know when things have gone too far. And gone too far they have – too far, certainly, to be remedied without massive societal upheaval and lots of bloodshed. If we must reclaim the Commons by force, then let us do just that, take matters into our own hands, and fight. Strassenkampf, Strassenkampf, alle auf die Barrikaden. Mahalo.

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no more BofA

It is done, friends: this lowly whorphan closed his last account with Bank of America (BofA), telling them in the cancellation letter that my reasons for termination included their involvement in causing the ongoing world economic crisis known by some as the Great Recession. The air of freedom is sweet, I tell you, and tinged with victory's acerbic bite; oh how I fill my lungs with it, though, expressing my joy through the majesty of song. While I cannot remember where exactly I read it or from whom I poached the idea – whether it was a sign held by an Occupier or an article on truth-out.org – but somebody was calling upon members of the general public to close their accounts with BofA in order to punish that bank for its rapacious and greed-based policies. Having active accounts with BofA has bugged me day in and day out since seeing that sign; how good it is to have stopped funding one of the most despicable institutions that has ever dared claim to be Of this fine and shining land and Of this industrious and upstanding people. In short, Bank of America is not of us, for us, or by us, but of the shareholder, for the shareholder, by the shareholder; it behooves us to do our business with financial institutions other than one that operates for the benefit of wealthy people-in-the-know.

My decision to close these accounts was founded on more than just a whimsical moral fancy or the passing desire to distance myself from one of the foundational pillars of our equality-destroying, Nature-ravaging, un-American system of consumption-oriented capitalism: I was sick of paying seven dollars in maintenance fees – per month, per account – for the privilege of having a check-book, and I had paid enough overdraft fees and account penalties to finance a brief South Asian border war. Comparatively, my accounts at USAA incur few penalties, and I do not feel guilty for banking with that institution because it takes care of its own without getting too heavily involved in credit-default-swaps or high stakes stock-market gambling. On some level, of course, it is impossible to fully distance oneself from the banks that caused the Great Recession, unless one is dead or 100% self sufficient. Therefore, I am partly to blame for this whole Recession business, because I banked with BofA and because I cannot yet grow all of the food and harvest all of the electricity I need to live and work without undue stress or worry. Guilty with me in this is Congress, the Senate, and the White House, for not punishing the multi-millionaire executive officers of TARP-fund-receiving banks and for allowing the statute of limitations for punishing them to lapse, which means that these crooks stay free and rich while millions of honest and hard-working Americans sit around poor and in debt, their savings and hopes and dreams having vanished into the silken pockets of fat-cat, too-big-to-fail bankers.

Regardless, however, of my complicity in these matters, I feel a great relief that I never have to enter another BofA branch or use another BofA ATM ever again for the rest of my life; now that I am no longer part of the problem, I can become part of the solution. Huzzah for liberty, victory, and justice! Mahalo.

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perspective - it matters

Time, age, tiredness, joy, sadness, loss, gain – these hard-to-define concepts are aspects of the human condition, not iron-clad rules of law but rather matters of perspective that change with one's outlook on life. What is to one person a grave insult is to another as a joyous and welcome gift. A few days ago, a family friend was telling me about growing up Jewish in a Christian town, and how the other kids would throw pennies at her and call her a penny-pinching kike, and other bad names, and how she would pick up those pennies and use them to buy herself cartons of milk and boxes of cookies, which cost about five cents a-piece. And then there is my longtime partner-in-crime, Mr. P, a friend from my childhood in Germany, who makes over a hundred-and-fifty-thousand dollars a year, who lives in the new W residences near the World Trade Center site in New York City, and who is so upset with his former boss in Thailand for that man firing him and forcing him to leave that country that his heart has become swamped with hatred, keeping him from seeing his life as blessed, the kind of life that people kill for.

I spoke with Mr. P a fortnight ago, trying to help him see things from a different perspective so that he might come to enjoy his time Stateside and not be so miserable and mopey all the time, but changes in perspective are achieved only by each person individually and are not easily forced, or coerced. So subtle is perspective, and at once so powerful, that entire industries exist to shape and to mold the views of persons who consume media (which accounts for any person who has ever watched TV or listened to the radio). Even as far back as the 1930s, American advertising was so effective and so quick to control and to shape the perspectives of millions of far-flung and unrelated citizens that the National Socialists in Germany, the Nazis, adopted Yankee-pioneered advertising and propaganda techniques and used them to brainwash tens of millions of good, honest Teutons into acquiescing to the invasion of sovereign foreign nations and the eradication of train-loads of men, women, and children. The power of the American advertising machine persists – so great is it that an imbecile such as the political puppet Sarah Palin can be packaged and sold in such cunning fashion that otherwise intelligent individuals come to see her as a desirable candidate for the second-highest office in the land.

You may be asking yourself right about now, “Well then, oh-so-clever LyeSmythe, how can I avoid being brainwashed, and how can I craft for myself a pure and honest view of the world?” Persons who change their perspectives begin by turning off and throwing out their television sets, they refuse to watch junk-TV (think reality- and talk-shows), they get news from sources located in different countries around the world, and they read news in languages other than English. In this manner, self-respecting people avoid the snare of America's propaganda juggernaut, giving their minds enough unique views of news-worthy events that their opinions are not shaped or dominated by just one brand of crazy.

Beyond the political sphere, however, one's perspective of something on the order to time itself – time-keeping via clock or watch, being on or off schedule, on time or off it, early or late – is shaped by society and by the consensual, Western hallucination that time is a rigid temporal plane extending in a straight line from the past into the future. Which is all well and good until one runs into the article entitled the Rebirth of a Sioux Nation in the August 2012 edition of National Geographic in which the author talks about the way the people of the Oglala Sioux view time – as a cyclical maelstrom in which past and present, life and death, and the spirit and waking worlds are shadows of one another, not strictly separate realms. Seeing the world from a point of view so foreign to the cookie-cutter, pre-packaged perception drilled endlessly into the heads of average Americans is a nice way to blow one's mind on a rainy Tuesday afternoon; such adventures into the curious minds of wise and ancient peoples are good ways to keep one's perspectives loose, and flexible. Therefore, on the next occasion that someone complains that you were not on time, you, dear reader, can claim to be changing your views on the nature of the universe, and that the clocks were wrong, not you. Give the gift of cognitive insecurity – change your mind frequently, adopt new points of view as often as you are able, and keep that dome-piece of a swivel. Mahalo.

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yoga – its power

Self-healing, discipline, inner peace, awakening the animal spirit – all these things yoga brings, and more, so many more that I struggle to find words simple enough to describe its endless benefits. An ancient method for keeping the body limber by stretching out its limbs, yoga is practiced by millions of people around the world, every day. A boon to all aspects of this clumsy and poorly-executed stab at being human, since doing yoga daily my life has improved considerably.

First, my digestive system is functioning regularly and with little discomfort, and I can feel layers of muscle in the area of my core that I have not felt since childhood. Second, my injured shoulders are moving in ways that allow me to perform hours of hard labor every day, activities such as taking down trees and sawing and splitting wood that, without yoga, would be difficult and painful; with yoga, however, the arm-joints are loose and ready for work, popping and creaking nicely as I wind them through my sun salutations. Third, I am bringing my left leg back into such alignment with hip and spine it had before I crashed while snowboarding with improperly-adjusted bindings, tearing its Achilles-tendon. Fourth, yoga gives me something to do that I myself must do, and to which I must give my full concentration, something that must be done correctly and that cannot be cheated, short-cut, or jury-rigged, something that is honest, simple, and pure. And, finally, for the first time since my mother died a dozen years ago, I am building positive connections with that mysterious inner power that some people call god, others the soul, and others the voice of the ancestors, but, lacking a more appropriate term, that I style Tao, that tiny inner voice that is all too easily lost in the avalanche of sensory input coming from tablet, cellphone, listening device, billboard, bus-ad, HD television, and satellite radio.

The individual seeking to lay aside the artificial concerns and demands of this fascinating modern age in which we live clears herself and her mind of self-interested materialism and the need to be speaking constantly by doing yoga. This peaceful martial art reveals within her heaving bosom the very secrets of the universe itself, helping her to live a virtuous life replete with non-acts of selfless honor and enduring goodness, giving her the tools she needs to delve into her hidden deeps and to clear her mind of torment and woe. So broad is its reach, so uncomplicated are its moves, that one can do yoga anywhere and at any time; so great are its benefits that I can hardly imagine how I managed to lead a decent life before I doing yoga daily. (I realize in retrospect that I was living a less than decent life.) As with any activity, avoid charlatans merely seeking financial gain, and learn either from an instructional video or from a teacher whose stated goal is the student's personal betterment, not her own, personal wealth. With yoga, dear friend, life's little torments lose their sting, life's little joys are magnified tenfold, and the secrets of eternity blossom from deep within the glittering folds of mankind's everlasting and indomitable spirit. So quit your bitching, get to stretching, and, as always, keep a song in your heart and your head on a fucking swivel. Mahalo.

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routine – its power

Following a daily routine for the first time in many years, this poor, worthless whorphan has noticed his life improving. At the baseline of my routine are yoga exercises at dawn, noon, and sunset, three sessions of ten minutes each that have changed my life by bridging the gaps in the mind-body-interface, a deficiency common to Westerners. Then, I am losing weight and getting into shape by bicycling and by performing roughly four hours of yard or garden duty daily, including the hand-watering of three separate gardens. Thirdly but by no means less importantly, I am, even now, abiding by what I call EBOS, which stands for Entire Battery Operating Session, which means that every day after breaking my fast I use this netbook to write, to process pictures, and to edit graphics until its battery drains to about 15% capacity, at which time I turn it off because it starts to complain about needing juice. Fourth, I maintain and monitor a 45-watt, three panel battery array that charges a 12-volt, deep-cycle marine battery, from which I can charge headlamp and netbook and cellphone batteries and watch DVD movies occasionally, thus avoiding high electricity bills. Fifth, I allot a certain period of time each day to reading, to learning languages (I am currently learning Netherlandish), and to perusing various periodical, spiritual, and educational texts, so as to store in my brains as much as I possibly can of the information they contain (in order to know how to do many different things during the upcoming complete societal collapse commonly referred to as the Zombie Apocalypse).

I have not always followed routines – in fact, I avoided them for most of my life, preferring to shoot from the hip and to frustrate my potential by not exploring it or employing it effectively. One of the main reasons that I have begun to follow them now is that I discovered that a daily yoga routine helps me control my attention-deficit-disorder and its associated lesser maladies such as depression, binge-eating, and sloth. Another reason that I now follow routines is that I read somewhere that doctors who follow routines and maintain checklists are less likely to make mistakes when treating patients and more likely to operate efficiently and with less undue stress. While I am not a doctor, I try to emulate those fine and intelligent people when possible, trusting them to puzzle out the most effective methods and poaching their most effective and simple methods for success.

Please understand that I am not trying to boast about all the things that I am getting done, merely that I am exploring how I came to act instead of thinking and what methods I have used to bring my life back under my control and to deal with my illness, which is also called minor brain dysfunction. In routine, dear friend, I have found some salvation from the jumbled stew that is my mind; in yoga, dear friend, I have found an effective means of getting back in touch with the deep and subtle feelings, with the foul and the blessed urges, and with the abiding glory that is my inner animal. Thanks for reading, and mahalo.

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plumbing problems solved

For years now, I have been living with two separate leaky joins in the copper pipes that distribute water from the well-pump to the kitchen and bathroom. Decades ago, it appears that someone other than I treated the leaking t-joint by wrapping a roll of electrical tape around it, and the leaking elbow-joint by simply reapplying plaster to the wall below it when such coverings got wet and fell off; therefore, I did as the Romans do, worrying about this problem while racking my brains constantly for a way to stop these two separate joints from constantly moistening the things stored in the basement and causing strange mushrooms to grow from the soaked and sodden concrete floor.

Finally, just days ago, I took action, shutting off power to the water pump and using a borrowed miniature tube cutter to slowly cut out the two offending connectors. Upon closer inspection, it turns out that whoever had originally installed the copper pipes had done a poor job sealing the terminals, mangling the pipe-ends badly and failing to seat them properly. Such was the damage to one of the pipes leading into the t-joint that it pulled away from its housing effortlessly, paper-thin metal crumbling to the touch.

Luckily for fools such as me, a local home-improvement retailer sells (nearly) fool-proof replacement connectors of the push-fit, compression type, with which I am able to solve my problems without setting the basement on fire trying to sweat a line that sits within the house's wooden superstructure. I say nearly because I have proven myself to be a fool, not following directions and erring in the installation of one of the new joints, which I must now remove, and replace. This time, however, I shall double-check things and take my time, as I should have done in the first place, worthless and impatient blockhead that I am. While it is not so bad urinating off of the rear deck and washing the dishes using rain-water, I am loathe to let solid wastes sit for too long in the toilet bowl, since they stink quickly and must be flushed with creek-water, which is a bitch to haul. Soon enough, however, fellow fault fixers, I shall rectify this plumbing problem, celebrating my return to the ranks of the modern and the civilized person by having a nice, leisurely dump, inside.

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painted whores, praying

On Sundays, because the public library shuts its doors and turns off its wireless router, I buy a hot tea and blog from a chain eatery that provides Internet access at no additional cost. This week, while re-posting the shit out of tumblr and tweeting POTUS beseechingly, I got a real treat when a skinny girl with an attractively-muscled upper back and shapely legs who was wearing a low-cut halter top and skin-tight shortshorts sauntered past me on laced-up high heels to sit at a booth a few down from my own. While I frequent this eatery primarily to feast my eyes upon the tight bodies of such dolled-up professional women and attention-hungry milfs who regularly grace its nonslip tiled floors, this girl and her twenty-something companion seemed worthy of more than just a few perverted and sidelong glances. An equally skinny girl wearing a similarly revealing upper and shortshorts that left little to the imagination, the companion's eyes were made up a bright aquamarine blue to offset the relatively subdued paint-job on the rest of her face, with a clunky necklace and a pair of reflective metal discs shoved into her perforated lobes rounding out her ensemble.

Having observed whores at work in Berlin, Bangkok, and Tijuana, I have scrutinized done-up street walkers and down-and-out alley rats alike, and upon seeing these two young ladies, my first thoughts were, “Oh brother, these ladies-of-the-night are out during the day and not even trying to hide the nature of their business.' Regardless of my tendency to avoid buying sexual favors, I was mulling over the prospect of getting a Billy Joel in one of the bathroom's stalls, or paying for a Howard Johnson in the back of the one girl's car, when the girl facing me – the one with the painfully-bright, aquamarine-tinted eyelids – set a tray of food onto the table, distributed the various dishes, bowed her head, crossed her hands, and prayed for a good thirty seconds before digging in.

This is a religiously-conservative area, one in which the local Catholics stand out on the square in the center of town for five weeks at a time protesting abortion and birth-control and generally trying to revoke a woman's right to her own body. Therefore, I was not expecting – early on a Sunday afternoon at just about the time when churches here let out – to see two girls dressed in the manner of prostitutes praying over some hastily-constructed panini sandwiches and meager cups of chicken tortilla soup. I even feared for their safety, since the Old Testament of the Christian bible instructs true believers to kill or at the very least banish and persecute persons painted in the manner of whores (Psalm 51:4). I have seen Thai girls stop to pray at alters to their god, asking Buddha to send them a man who will support them financially; I have no problem with prostitution, even supporting its legalization here in America; I wonder, though, if those girls had dressed up in the manner of cheap sluts in order to make a statement, as a reflection of the latest trends in mainstream fashion, or out of a misguided effort to make themselves look pretty. However things shook out for them that day, though, at least they supplicated to their god in a socially acceptable way, praying quietly and otherwise keeping their opinions to themselves, unlike the anti-abortionists and their nuns and priests, who make a terrible stink any time anybody even looks like they might be going into Planned Parenthood.

場黑麥 mentiri factorem fecit

on privileged protesting

In these United States, different types of people protest differently. On the one hand are wealth-backed lobbyists and representatives of special-interests who are invited into the personal chambers of Congresspersons and Senators where they voice their concerns, bitch, moan, and explain their reasons for being aggrieved after having handed over a check for many tens of thousands of dollars. On the other hand are citizens who cannot afford to give elected officials envelopes filled with cash on a monthly or weekly basis and who therefore must stand outside in the elements, holding signs in their chapped and blistered hands and perhaps telephoning once or twice a day with their state representative's personal secretary in the hope that she might allow them to speak – even if only briefly – to the person who is supposed to be their go-to-guy in Washington. Furthermore, in this, our Corporate Republic of America, certain fabulously-rich individuals can hire slick-tongued, crafty motherfuckers to set up vacations at ski lodges in posh resorts, to which Senators and Congresspersons are invited and where they are wined and dined, harangued and harassed, and bought and sold to such an extent that when they return to Capitol Hill they initiate and support legislation favoring the narrow interests of their new corporate overlords rather than pursuing with single purpose the diverse interests of three hundred millions of common and average citizens. This is how things go in America today, a country whose government was once slightly representative but which now exists merely to increase and to protect the profits of a military-industrial complex that demands constant war and corporations that have been allowed to grow so large that they get away with not paying taxes, degrading and destroying our commonly-shared environmental, stealing and mismanaging the investments of millions of hard-working persons, and brainwashing the public via ubiquitous and constant television, radio, and billboard advertising into thinking that all is well with the world.

All is not well with the world, ladies and gentlemen. The economic system known as capitalism is being used to destroy Nature and to shuffle unimaginable riches into the pockets of fewer than a thousand families across the globe. Television is rotting the brains of millions of previously self-respecting and self-reliant individuals, encouraging them to kill themselves slowly by sitting around all day and not getting out for a nice walk, exposing them to the stale crumbs of televised truthiness rather than forcing them to think critically about the bullshit seeping from the mouths of their favorite painted talking heads.

We did not arrive at this state of affairs accidentally – this was engineered by precisely those individuals who run the aforementioned giant corporations. But who is protesting the downfall of democracy and the desecration of Ladies Liberty and Siblinghood? Only a few hundred thousand people are actively battling this unjust state of affairs, among them the members of Occupy, the Indignados, and the Anti-Fascists, or antifa, who are all carrying on the proud tradition of warring against injustice that started back in the late 1840s, when the members of something called the Paris Commune first took up arms against the overreaches of the state, inspiring Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels to write a short pamphlet called the Communist Manifesto. And, unlike persons who choose to bribe and to corrupt elected officials to get their way, Occupy and antifa do their protesting out in the street, for all the world to see, eschewing back-door dealings for peaceful marches through tear-gas, pepper-spray, and hails of rubber bullets so as to bring attention to the marginalization of Lady Justice, who cannot easily protect herself, as she must remain blindfolded. So, friends, by rising up, speaking out, and never taking the easy way out, you too can help make this world a better place for all people, not just for the super-rich. Mahalo.

場黑麥 mentiri factorem fecit

right of way

Recently, NPR aired a show which included mention of efforts undertaken during the first decades of the Twentieth Century to teach the American public to cowtow to the automobile, explaining that Americans had to be trained to think that roads were the domain of cars, the rightful place of automobiles, and that citizens not driving cars had no right to be on them. As a velocipedist – an avid and regular bicyclist – I suffer daily of the affects of this mis-education of my fellow upstanding Yankee, who now sees the car as an almost sacred thing, whereas persons not trapped within the stifling confines of these glass-and-metal prisons are seen as bothersome interlopers upon our tens of thousands of miles of commonly-owned bituminous track.

A car is nothing more than a hunk of steel and glass and plastic with a person or persons sitting on its plush seats and being moved around through space-time by the internal combustion of gasoline, a byproduct of oil, for which our brave brothers and sister pour out their blood and tears in distant and dusty places; oil is a poisonous thing that must be pulled from deep below the earth and refined before it can be used, whereas a bicycle is a few pounds of metal and rubber that allows a person to move himself around through space-time using little more than the muscles rippling beneath his taut and ruddy skin. And yet – daily – I am confronted by at least one person who considers his souped up, gasoline-guzzling shitbox, and his business, to be far more important than the car, conveyance, or business of anyone else.

Just two days ago, in fact, as I was approaching a blind intersection on my way to the local public library, I heard a motor behind me rev up, as if the vehicle's owner intended to pass me in the scant thirty feet that separated us from the stop sign. Putting myself squarely in the lane, I balanced for a moment, waiting for a gap in the approaching vehicles before shooting down a narrow side alley. Riding squarely in the center of the alley, the impatient driver approached to within a few feet of my bicycle's rear wheel, revving his engine and making as if to pass me where there was no room to pass. Flying into the next, two-landed road (the alley ends in a yield, not a stop, sign) and barely making it in front of an approaching car, I had moved to the far right side of the lane and was approaching my next right-hand turn when I heard that same engine rev up behind me. Turning around to see what was the matter, I made eye-contact with the impatient driver, whose vehicle – a black SUV – was so close to the silver Volvo behind me that I could see neither grill nor bumper. Passing the car in front of it, the truck screeched to a halt directly next to me, restricting all north-south traffic by completely Blocking The Box, the man within it staring at me menacingly.

Turning after having made the appropriate hand-signal (I signal all turns, and am loathe to ride at night without running-lights fore and aft), I glanced back again, laughing at the impatient man and giving him a little fare-thee-well hand flick. These egregious actions caused the man to reverse his vehicle very quickly (on a one-way street, into oncoming traffic), whereupon he, with squealing tires, raced down the road toward me, screeching to a halt next to me on the sidewalk where I had taken refuge near a tall brick building. “You're a real tough-guy, eh?” the man said, pushing his finger against some sort of box on his throat. Scrambling to keep moving, I bounced down the sidewalk and started to pedal onward, glancing back and noticing the black car had a Harley-Davidson front plate. The man pulled into a gravel lane, threw open his door, jumped out, and began to stalk toward me, chest puffed up and face fixed in the tortured rictus of a man whose heart is calcified with fearful hatred. Seeing that I had bruised his ego, and knowing the human ego to be one of the most terrifying and murderous of foul things ever to grace the planes of our fair Universe, I kept moving. “You're a real tough guy, eh?” the man said again, to which I responded with a shouted, “Slow down!” The man, of course, shouted back, “You slow down!”, touching a finger to his tracheal collar before speaking, each time.

A number of things became clear to me during yesterday's altercation. First, the man's business was so inconsequential (even though he seemed in a terrible hurry) that he could take time out of his schedule to run down and harass a bicyclist who had dared to retain right of way. Second, the man considered himself more important than anyone else on the road, riding everyone's ass and generally being a poor sport about things. Third, seeing that his belly resembled a beer keg and that his throat was perforated with a plastic speaking-collar, the man had ruined his health and body by eating too much, smoking too much, and drinking too much, which had obviously filled his heart with such frustration and self-loathing as to make him a Danger To Others. And, finally, he had allowed himself to be brainwashed into thinking that roads were made for cars (or, at least, for vehicles with gasoline-combustible engines), and that roads were the domain of nothing else, causing him to menace persons who happened to have left their own homes a few moments before he did, putting them, unwittingly, in his hateful path, riding, of all fucking things, bicycles.

To persons who insist on driving cars everywhere they go (even though, of course, buying gasoline puts cash in the pockets of Saudi Arabians, who use our money to fund terrorist groups such as al-Qaida), please remember that bicyclists are simply persons who have freed themselves from the prison-like confines of internally-combustible vehicles, flinging off the foul fat-folds of sloth and moving their bodies around using only muscle power. So, dear friends, please give other persons the right of way, even if they are not burning as much oil as you are burning while out-and-about; and, of course, please share generously of our common roadways, byways, highways, paths, alleys, lanes, and streets; but, most importantly, keep a smile on your face, a song in your heart, and your head on a fucking swivel. Mahalo.

場黑麥 mentiri manufactorem fecit

first to go

As an inconsequential blogger with a limited readership and few people perusing my various sites (except, perhaps, those sites specific to street art), I am today still writing and kicking and living and breathing, but who knows for how long. The executive office of the United States – that run by President Barack Hussein Obama – violates regularly the rights of individuals, removing them to foreign locations and holding them prisoner without trial (in a process known as rendition), in clear violation of national and international laws (see here for a fantastic article re: the Charter of the Forest). The president and his equally-corrupt counterparts in the U.S. Congress and Senate allow large and well-financed companies – known as corporations because they have the same rights and privileges as actual persons but cannot be sent to jail for the crimes they commit – to rape the lands and seas of their vast resources, keeping the American people stupefied and misinformed via elaborate and ubiquitous advertising that allow these corporations to profit immensely from the sale of the Commons, those being things that belong to everyone equally, those being things such as the ore and metals in the ground, the chemical compounds dissolved in the air and in the soil, the clear and running water that each of us needs to stay alive, and living and growing things such as cotton, trees, soybeans, corn, oats, cows, pigs, peppers, wheat, chickens, etc.

Because I speak of these things, writing often about the overreaches and the abuses of our sitting president, his predecessors, and their well-heeled corporate cronies – they who shift from corporate officer to appointed official, and back again, in a never-ending cycle of sycophantic, avaricious nepotism – because I speak of these things, banging the dinner-gong to the tune of my own unraveling, for this reason, I will be among the first to go. When our leaders in Washington decide it is time to round up dissidents such as me and to put us in prisons and into labor and death camps for re-education and to keep the minds of the general population free of any doubt about the validity and sustainability of our current economic and political systems, then it will be clear that my bleating was not merely the bitter moaning of a spoiled little whorphan, but that my attempts to get the people of this land to think critically about their lives and about how much television they watch and about their lack of self-reliance and about their whole-scale adoption of conspicuous-consumption-oriented capitalism were more than self-righteous chest-beating.

The only problem about the previous sentence is that none of these here words will exist once I am black-bagged, detained, and murdered, because they will have been wiped away, removed from the world-wide-web, with a single mouse-click deleted from the annals of history, disappeared into the aetherless void with the swift aplomb of a South American dictator. Except, dear friends, we now have North American dictators, Enemies of Liberty such as all Congresspersons and Senators who were in office during July of the year 2012, and Mr. Obama, who signed NDAA 1540 into law, thus allowing the federal government to detain and hold indefinitely American citizens who defy marshal law. (This piece of legislation, ratified unanimously by the White House and Congress, violates the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Eighth, and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution of the United States of America and international treaties, including the Geneva Convention.)

Yes, my brothers and sisters, because I speak out, because I write on americanifesto and liesmith about the downfall of our democracy and the erosion of our constitutional protections and the rape of the Commons, I shall be among the first casualties of the wave of injustice that is even now swamping this once-fair land. It has been my pleasure to be able to write; it has been my pleasure to be able to bang away for a while on the drums of civil discontentment; but, I think things will become much darker here in America after Obama is appointed to another four years, and I think that things will become worse for people such as me far sooner than they will become better. So, my brave, silent readership, if I suddenly stop posting to my eight separate blogs, and if I stay silent for more than a week's time, it means that I was taken by the federal government of the United States of America, tortured by the federal government of the United States of America, and killed by the federal government of the United States of America, and that my lifeless corpse is rotting at the bottom of some forgotten pit at some unnamed military base in the middle of bum-fuck nowhere. C'est la vie, though, and fuck 'em, since I shall gladly die defending the last few remnants of goddesses Liberty and Justice, and I wouldn't have it any other way. Mahalo.

場黑麥 mentiri factorem fecit