on baking cookies

This morning, I ate some of the cookies my housemates had baked. Not the cookies they’d decorated laboriously, of course, but the bastard plain ones, those misshaped and odd.

There’s more dough in the fridge that I intend to bake up into more cookies - to replace the ones I ate this morning. I’d bought the dough yesterday, you see, because someone had been reduced to tears after learning that the last of the first batch of cookies made a couple of days ago had disappeared down my gaping maw at breakfast time.
I’m trying something where I make an effort to fix the grief and heartbreak I cause in this world instead of ignoring it until it subsides. The dough for making sugar cookies sells for fewer than three dollars, which is more expensive than necessary considering one can buy a container of eight sugar cookies perfectly formed and professionally baked for only a single dollar. The extra dollar and a half, it seems, are the price one pays for adding an egg and a stick of butter and then forming and baking the dough oneself, waiting for it to rise, hovering near the oven, and being disappointed when the cookies don’t come out right.

Next time, maybe I’ll buy the cheaper cookies, microwave them for thirty-odd seconds, then announce that I baked cookies and does anyone want to help decorate them?

americanifesto / 場黑麥 / jpr / urbanartopia / whorphan

on the proxy identity

The American citizen is lost, floundering in a sea of substitute identities. It is not really his fault, however – he has learned it from his parents, from television, from his great aunts, step-uncles, and distant neighbors. We lack in this nation even a loose consensus on What It Means To Be An Upstanding And Self-Respecting Individual; no organization has stoop up and said, If you do this and that you will be different from everyone else and not walk around wearing the same shirt bought at the same giant discount retailer as everyone else. Our unique national character is being watered down by those goods as are sold at only a handful of retail locations that can be found in nearly every city, town, and village from coast to shining coast; our individual taste, our very ability to be one-in-a-million, has been substituted for faceless homogenization by corporate marketing committees who make hefty profits by paying overseas manufacturers to mass-produce cheap products featuring pictures of the hottest movies and books and then convincing us through a ceaseless avalanche of advertising to buy them (while lobbying to keep it illegal for the American people to ourselves make our own products printed with the same pictures).

Instead of delving into the nether-regions of our souls, and finding therein peace, or enlightenment, today's American busies himself with memorizing football statistics and with discussing those statistics with others; instead of making sketches or painting a picture of the bright and verdant out-of-doors, he watches hour upon hour of television while his latent artistic ability sits dormant, and unused; instead of educating and understanding himself to the extent that he can make intelligent, non-sports related conversation about a breadth of topics, he purchases – at a significant mark-up – a name-brand motorcycle and the name-brand clothing to go with it. But, it seems, people will choose the path of least resistance every time, doing whatever everyone else is doing and getting really, really mad when someone points out that they are acting as if they were sheep being led to the slaughter. And a slaughter it is – more like a sacrifice – with our best talents wasted on leisure, our best minds ruined by TV, our best personalities crushed by the petty demands of consumption-driven capitalism, our best bodies ridden to oblivion on the backs of terrorism-supporting motorcycles. We may have once been a proud and shining People, but, today, we are little more than clones bought and sold by our avaricious corporate slave-masters; America delenda est.

場黑麥 mentiri factorem fecit

on surviving major catastrophe

  Today's rugged man-beast, that brave individual who wishes to survive the upcoming zombie apocalypse, he (or, for the lady-beast, of course, she) will be self-reliant, self-sufficient, and capable of extreme action in dire circumstances.

  Whether you at some point see yourself making the post-apocalyptic wasteland your bitch, or if you merely desire to prove to yourself and to your species how rabidly you cherish life, your first step is to distance yourself from the mindless and continuously occurring buying-shit-for-the-sake-of-buying-shit ritual of consumption-oriented capitalism. Then, learn how to feed yourself cheaply. Reuse items that are in reusable shape. Cancel your contracts to receive broadcast television, and discover the excitement of story-telling. Become disciplined in your use of electricity and water. Learn how to read a map, to hunt, to make fire, to build shelter, and to do any other thing that might keep you alive when the lights go off and the undead come to bang upon ​your doors.

  In order to consider yourself even remotely ready to perform all the tasks necessary to make it through the impending breakdown of civilization, read books often, discipline your mind by delving always into its innermost depths (where you shall face reward and punishment both), and soothe and settle your mental state until its baseline is a serene quietude. As with the mind so you shall discipline the body, by exercising every single day from now until the day of your death. In order to stay alive while the other people around you are losing their heads and dying in stupid and unnecessary ways, you must be ready at any moment to commence with survival. Tens of thousands of city-dwellers have already abandoned their shiny condos and comfortable couches to live the shiftless life of the tough-and-rumble nomad way out at that spot where twilight turns to fog; they are waiting for you to join them.

  Before I commence, there are two more items to add to the never-ending Checklist-Of-Things-To-Do-Before-The-Global-Meltdown (the COTTDBTGM of yore). First is a readiness to abandon the persons you love the most to save your own life. Second is the willingness and audacity to stand tall in the face of grave danger to protect the persons you love the most. The decision which of these to choose will, of course, be up to you.

  Ultima Ratio Regum - 場黑麥 John Paul Roggenkamp

encylopediamericanifesto: panem et circenses

  Beyond its propensity for outright hostility against citizens loyal to the rightfully elected government of the United States, the military-industrial complex and its cohorts in the rapacious plutocracy has done injustice to the fed and to the American people alike in that instead of clever or devious tactics it prefers as the tool to craft for the ages a new order an ancient Roman method called panem et circenses.

  A ruling body exercises panem et circenses, or bread and circuses, by attempting to control the rage of an urban population using compelling, addictive entertainment and delicious, cheap food. The typical city dweller in ancient Rome resembled the modern homeless person in appearance and in morals both – by all accounts, he was as likely to be sexually promiscuous as he was to binge drink, and if he could drink and fuck while watching gladiators fight to the death, he was contented. But the modern urbanite is rich, and so he pays good money to watch the circuses on TV at his home, where he will eat from paper bags a meal of fast food suffused with fat and sugar that was prepared for him by silently desperate wage-slaves. The urbanite does these things because he is a good boy, and because good boys follow the rules – he watches the commercials and he buys all the useless and superfluous crap, and he does not mind that his conspicuous and incessant consumption (and that of his semi-affluent cohorts) makes only 0.05% of the US population wealthy beyond imagining. The richest of the rich, this group is comprised of those individuals who own television companies and fast food chains: it stacks chips like a boss while the remainder of the population, the 99.5%, descends into orca-fat obesity and chronic laziness.

  But it is not enough for the Point Oh Five to control the messages you hear and see or to dictate which foods you eat – these Rapacious Plutocrats have wrested the shaping of a new order for the ages from the federal government of the United States of America (which is the agent selected by Destiny to be the perpetrator of the whole Shaping a New Order for the Ages business). The people who own the TV stations and the fast food shacks become rich beyond reckoning upon the backs of the wretched citizens who fork over their meager wages to keep themselves sated of food and to spend their time staring at images dancing on a magic box.

  While the fed has at times acted foolishly, I place more of my trust in it than in a cadre of individuals whose minds are so twisted with the pulsing whorish thrust of money that their balance-sheets matter more than the vitality and diversity of the American people.

  Spes Mea In Ratio Est - 場黑麥 John Paul Roggenkamp