dreamstate writing 27 February 2017

My memories of the dream start with me intending to visit an Australian bloke, a friend from Bali. I met him within the footprint of a run-down structure in a valley sheltered by sand-dunes. The walls of the single-storey house were largely ruined, in some places completely gone, in others still intact. Wind-borne piles of sand sat here and there, heaps and drifts aplenty. The scene was lit as if by a golden light, but I was not aware of its source. I couldn’t see my friend but knew he was sitting just out of view on the other side of a partition. The top of his head alone was visible at times. No matter to which part of the structure I moved, however, I could not ever fully glimpse his face.

We spoke, he and I, but the exact words of our exchange now elude me. I remember sensing trepidation on his part, a reluctance to step fully into view, and addressing it. “This is just a dream,” I told him at some point, my full upper-level consciousness flaring briefly into the landscape of the dream. Near the house grew tall palm trees. Low bushes crowded a neighboring oasis, a growing puddle of clear water seeping from cracks in the long-barren earth.

At some point, he fled using what looked to be a gasoline powered four-wheeler. After his departure I exited the house, at which point my memories of the dream end.

americanifesto / JPR / whorphan / 場黑麥

his ignorance of

The People should be happy that their sitting president has apparently not read The Prince, by Niccolo Machiavelli. If he had studied repeatedly the contents of this masterpiece of political subterfuge, he would be sending out willing lackeys to do his dirty work and then publicly distancing himself from them (or letting the enraged masses rip them to shreds) once they’d performed their wanton duties.

If our luck holds, he will also not read The Art of War by Lao Tzu or the U.S. Constitution. His ignorance of the former will hinder the swift implementation of his sinister agendas; his ignorance of the latter will speed the collapse of his faltering administration. Should he continue to stumble along in the dark, blind to the immorality of his actions, oblivious of the damage he is doing do the frayed fabric of this Union of American States, the pillars of its civilized branches of government will have no choice but to stymie his transgressions at every turn.

The American experiment is now akin to a sick man drawing his last, painful breaths. Sometimes, it’s best to just let things die. Sic semper tyrannis.

americanifesto / JPR / whorphan / 場黑麥

on required reading

In order to see the world through as clear a lense as possible, it is necessary for each person to expose himself to a variety of conflicting sources. Educated in this fashion he learns to read between the lines, thereby “distilling truth from the essense of nuance,” to quote from Neal Stephenson in his work entitled Snow Crash.

Anyone interested in expanding his mind and broadening his heart might consider reading the following books, which are blowing my mind own right now:
A People’s History of the United States, by Howard Zinn
Living Like You Mean It, by Ronald Frederick, Ph.D.
Man’s Search for Meaning, by Viktor Frankl


There are other books I am reading, but they shall remained unnamed. The two books listed above will be difficult for most Americans to digest; they fly in the face of various misinformation campaigns that have, over the past few generations, sullied and perverted our collective national consciousness. Time is short, so get reading. Aho, mahalo, and om swastiastu.

americanifesto / JPR / whorphan / 場黑麥

in China, briefly

In the winter of 2014, on a late-evening domestic flight from Beijing to Shanghai, I sit next to the deputy mayor of Taicang, a city in Jiangsu province. Excited to practice his English but not confident in his skills, he calls over his assistant, to translate. Over the next few hours we talk about families and cultures, politics and religion. They invite me come spend the night in their town. I accept.

We disembark at Shanghai’s domestic airport and squeeze into a minivan for a more than hourlong drive through the darkened Chinese countryside. Along the way, I realize that I have no idea who these people are, where I am, or where I am going, but the boisterous mood and smiling faces of my new bureaucratic friends calm any lingering worries. With the help of the assistant, a bespectacled, skinny man who speaks English well, I check into a Western-owned hotel near the modern center of town. We make plans to meet the next morning so he can show me around. Jetlagged and in unfamiliar settings, I get little sleep, watching reruns of classic Chinese movies subtitled for hearing-impaired locals.

I awake early, have a light breakfast, check out, and wander the surrounding area until the assistant arrives. On a Saturday morning, in an official Chinese government car - complete with driver. As we are making our way over to Zhouzhuang, an older town not far away, the assistant explains that the 15th Century explorer Zheng He was based out of the area, hence its enduring fame. We tour the ancient city, a wonder to behold, tidy wooden structures standing shoulder to shoulder, cunningly crafted stone bridges spanning narrow canals.

The assistant takes his leave, saying he wants to spend time with his children. I am deeply ashamed upon realizing that he has used his day off to show me around, and that I didn’t buy anything in the artisanal stores we entered. The driver heads for the highway. We smoke cigarettes and speak little. As we are approaching downtown Shanghai, I catch people in the cars around us staring, apparently trying to figure out who I might be, a Westerner riding alone in a chauffeured official vehicle.

I wander around near the Bund, harvesting graffiti and getting a feel for the city’s layout. Then, sensing my apparent loneliness, I attract a hanger-on, a fat and sweaty man who speaks good English. He tries to get me to buy gold at a gaudy shop. I refuse and walk out, but he’s hot on my heels. I buy trinkets at another shop he leads me to, however, a tourist trap that sells mass-produced items. Then, because the man claims he is broke, I treat him to an expensive pot of tea and the last of my Chunghwa cigarettes, which he enjoys immensely. Exhausted and out of cash, I hop the subway toward Shanghai Pudong international, and flee finally the madhouse scramble of another world city.

americanifesto / JPR / whorphan / 場黑麥

no other path

It starts in the morning, well before dawn, the breathing and the sitting. The awareness of awareness for the sake of nothing else but being aware. The sacrifice of the self to the self. The turning inward of attention to focus on the burning core from which all else springs. Things must be this way; no other path brings fruit; all other paths lead to hollow desperation. This is the straight path of yore; all other paths are shortcuts to nothingness. Mahalo; om swastiastu; and aho.

americanifesto / JPR / whorphan / 場黑麥

⚲-Ɏ.🜍Ψ₳\ⰔȣⰔ/₳Ψ🜍.Ɏ-⚲

for all of those slinky and slippery feels consider the compelling madness of eels

an initial apology

I apologize to anyone who felt targeted or hurt by the writings posted to any of the pages I manage. It has not been my intention to malign or damage any person, institution, notion, concept, or thing. The past two decades have been hard, emotionally, and it appears that I have been venting my pain through my writings. Thank you all for understanding, and for showing such guff. Mahalo, namaste, and om swastiastu.

americanifesto / JPR / whorphan / 場黑麥

dreamstate writing 2 February 2016

Click here to edit.The entire dream is lost to me. I remember though, that at one point toward the end there was a very tall and lanky man chasing me through small and cramped hallways that were lit by an ethereal glow.

Only a few times in previous dreams have I turned around to see what menace was hot on my heels. Once, I slipped from the small and cramped hallways into a filthy room, where I found an enormously fat man-beast pleasuring itself in front of a computer. Upon my intrusion it had struggled out of its rolling office chair to chase me out again, a silent howl of rage spewing from its cracked and swollen lips.

While I was in the recent dream and turning to flee from the lanky man, I made eye contact with a handful of normal-sized humans who were standing about or rushing to get out of the way. One of them was a woman holding a small child. Most of the others were adolescents who appeared to be cowering in the shadows. Each of them, however, regardless of size, had eyes that were completely black, no whites showing. Their onyx pits flashed brightly at me as I picked up my feet and fled.

JPR / whorphan / americanifesto / 場黑

on diversifying information

One way to stay sane in this topsy-turvy world is to take in a balanced diet of news from differing and unrelated sources. Personally, this author visits daily the websites of NPR, Al Jazeera, Russia Today, and the Guardian. In this manner, one is exposed to various viewpoints coming from reporters working in countries around the world.

This author likes to treat his news intake the same way he treats his food intake. By ingesting a variety of foods from the plant and animal kingdom, he hopes to take in as many as possible of the trace minerals and dietary fibres his body needs to stay healthy; by consuming a variety of stories from sources with sometimes wildly different points of view, he hopes to soak up bits of valuable information his mind and soul need to stay healthy.

Filter bubbles serve primarily to confuse the mind, isolating a person from such truths as may be discoverable only by reading between the lines of multiple different websites’ news coverage. Most Westerners prefer information that agrees with their preconceived notions, perhaps out of a desire to avoid exposure to cognitive dissonance. Venture beyond the desert of informational paucity by making the effort to take in more than one news feed, today!

JPR / whorphan / americanifesto / 場黑麥

on flaunting laws

Should President Trump be impeached because he won’t relinquish ownership of his luxury resorts and golf clubs? If the Emoluments Clause of the U.S. Constitution should be at all taken seriously, Trump must be impeached. It appears, however, that the man who recently swore to defend and uphold the Constitution in its entirety has every intention of violating his oath of office.

President Trump’s unlawful behaviors are already appearing to have trickled down in the form of Alexandre Bissonnette, a white-supremacist, Caucasian terrorist who allegedly murdered six men while they were praying at their local mosque. According to various news sources, it appears that Bissonnette was inspired by the anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant rhetoric spewing sickly from the suckholes of fascist leaders such as France’s Le Pen and America’s Trump.

With President Trump blatantly flaunting America’s bedrock legal foundation, it should come as no surprise that his followers are doing the same, expressing their Islamophobia through both hardened boot-heels and hateful words. Why should the average citizen abide by the rule of law when the weakling occupying this nation’s highest post doesn’t, either? Why should the average citizen pay his taxes when Washington’s top mendicant doesn’t, either?

Perhaps we the American People should copy Trump’s example and do the following: stop obeying laws we don’t feel like obeying anymore; call anyone who cries foul of our incivility a liar; deride any statements that contradict our own as false news; keep heaping on the bullshit without ever admitting guilt, remorse, or compassion. Such acts would require us to stoop to his level, however, and few of us, it seems, are willing to lessen themselves to such an intolerable degree.

We still have more than one thousand, four hundred, three and one half days left in Trump’s first term. Get to it!

JPR / whorphan / americanifesto / 場黑