down and pounding

The pain felt from drinking the night just before does grow as I age and each month it hurts more. The pleasure from slamming down and pounding beers has weakened and lessened much over the years, so that I am loathe to spend my time with drinking – I'd rather rise early with brains left for thinking. The sauce is so popular here and abroad that I find it curious, strange, weird, and odd that mankind can manage to still get things done although he keeps drinking in wind, hail, and sun. To make better choices is left unto me, to hydrate and test my PH using pee, to sleep when I'm tired and rise when I'm not, to prove that I'm free and no longer robot. With each waking second I make myself new, there's nothing in this life that I cannot do, except to bring more people back from the dead (I've done that to myself when whacked on the head).

© americanifesto / 場黑麥

on secret spots

I cannot explain where they lie, break, or pack for I have been sworn to a secret compact. To get to them we took the regular ways once we to the Goddess had given fair praise, once we had awakened and strapped on our boards, once we'd made sure all our bikes pointed forwards. They'll not remain secret much longer, I fear, perhaps a few months or maybe just a year, until they'll be crowded with Russian beginners who don't read the rules and are thus surfing's sinners. The breaks are near cliff-sides, sometimes they're near reefs where creeping fish linger with long, spiny teeth, where poisonous starfish and their polyps float, where wee male seahorses their progeny tote. Now come with us on this here new adventure to witness the ocean's ceaseless overture, that's written in current, peak, swell, chop, and wave, that dictates how we think, dream, talk, and behave. I will not say more lest I spill all the beans and ruin what's left (if you know what I mean), and give up the very last Bali secret, a spot that tourism has not ruined yet.

© americanifesto / 場黑麥

a fiendish self

Frameworks shatter subtly and silently, the rotten cores of old systems sloughing into the wake of Darkness as It lurches wildly about, clinging desperately to the shadows that for so long have been Its home; the light of conscious awareness blinds a fiendish self-repression born in sadness and carried on in addiction; a brightness burns finally in the deeps. A host of tongues mix within this budding consciousness, its contours expanding, its colors returning, the million facets of a billion firing nodes slowly puzzling out the shape and flavor that which has no shape, no taste, that which must forever remain without name and face and definition. Acceptance and harmony repopulate fields left charred by decades of abuse and discord; a weight is lifted from the soul.

© americanifesto / 場黑麥

i love canggu

The shirt says 'I Love Canggu – Bali' on it, just that Love is a huge red heart half the size of my chest. With black and white striped boardshorts underneath it and a pair of white $1 thongs on my feet I look as much the tourist and feel as much the surfer as I have looked or felt for most of my life. I receive a warm welcome from my local friend and his family; he and I sit in his compound and eat before everyone else and smoke cigarettes and drink local beers and he tells me about which of his relatives live with him and which live elsewhere, at his farm near the Bratan volcano or other villages by the sea. His older son and daughter come and go, friends and paramours stopping by and leaving again, just as suddenly. A beautiful young lady plays us a song on a Les Paul electric guitar while singing along and I find myself falling in love with her as soon as she starts playfully demanding in Indonesian that he and I leave the room.

After dinner I get two sarongs (or kamen, since they are for men) wrapped around me and tied at the waist and a three-cornered cloth (already folded and held in shape with a piece of internal wire) placed atop my head. The white button-down shirt they give me is too small for my chest so we leave it open at the front, my Love for Canggu – Bali visible to all. We go first to the family's own temple, where my friend's father performs our rights after we have purified ourselves with incense smoke and prayed three times with our hands together in front of our heads and different-colored flowers grasped between the tips of our longest fingers. The priest splashes holy water into the upheld palms of our right hands four times. I peek over at my friend's six-year-old daughter to see what I should be doing and she flashes me a gap-toothed smile, so I suck the water into my mouth just as she and her father are doing but am not sure what to do with the last splash and decide to follow their lead and rub it on my face and neck. The priest sprinkles a few grains of white rice into our palms and we use the remnants of holy water lingering there to stick them to the middle of our foreheads. My friend says to me that it is now OK to ask the gods for things and so I start saying my Thank Yous and asking that my friends and family be blessed with peace, prosperity, and Happiness. Overwhelmed with relief and gratitude, tears run down my cheeks, to gather in my beard. The girl looks over with a puzzled face as the tall bulé Westerner next to her cries, sitting in the dirt floor atop a Disney-themed floor mat with frayed edges. Without wiping the tears from my face I follow my friend and his daughter to a second temple, one for the wider family, where his uncle performs the rituals for us and we stuff more flowers behind our ears and stick more rice onto our foreheads.

The process is short, not lasting more than ten minutes, and before I know it we are walking through the darkened streets back to my friend's house, to drink more beers and smoke more smokes. He shares with me insider information about some cheap parcels of land near the river not far from his house that are sure to jump in value once the government paves the big road there with asphalt. After inquiring my friend agrees that it would be acceptable for me to make a donation at the larger family temple. With his daughter in hand he leads me back over to it and I feel terrible entering without my kamen on yet am greeted with warmth and smiles and press a folded up one-hundred-thousand rupiah note into a priest's hands. He bows his head to me with his hands together at the forehead and as I turn to take my leave he and his attendants gesture at me to take some fruit, which I have now just eaten. Oh, to be sure, I Love Canggu – Bali.

© americanifesto / 場黑麥

its most mind

The panic that often did threaten to rise now hides from the inner and the outer eyes. I know taste and feel it, I sample and smell, so that its soft contours I know pretty well, so that instead of ruining my days I flat-out avoid its most mind-numbing haze. “Fear is the mind killer,” said people in Dune, then trained to control it from midnight to noon, when eating and sleeping when loving and not they would not inhabit its restricting slot. So shake off those fetters and throw off that cloak for life is best met with a smile and a joke, a laugh and a handshake, a kiss and a wink, it's not quite as bad as the worrywart thinks. To fear is a daily and a conscious choice so rob it of power and silence its voice; all life is eternal, the soul never dies, now stop feeling sorry and be done with lies and be done with petty and short-sighted goals that leave a most lasting and dastardly toll.

© americanifesto / 場黑麥

rocks and cow

There were waves at both places we went today, one was Balangan but the other – can't say. It is a wee secret, its approach is rough, all rocks and cow patties and cacti and stuff, our mopeds they scraped at and chewed the coral but we were not bothered, not one bit at all. Then off to the popular surf spot we went, we'd brought our own boards (there was no need to rent), did paddle and scramble, did lunge, scratch, and swim, my guide never wavered (I stayed close to him). Now I will drink Bintang, a true sleepy beer, and talk to most any female who strays near, unless there are none then I'll go sleep alone without making a single complaining tone.

© americanifesto / 場黑麥

not dare finish

He drove through the darkness without hesitation while deep in his bowels much intoxication did rumble and tumble and fester and spread even after he had fallen into bed. Awakened by dreams he could not understand he lay there while touching himself with one hand but did not dare finish what he had started instead just rolled over and gently farted. Now sitting alone at his own kitchen table he worked up a lame and unconvincing fable to justify having been modest and shy and having gone home without saying goodbye. There's nothing can change things; he has no regret; he may be quite close but isn't all there yet; no man knows the whims of the vast Great Magnet.

© americanifesto / 場黑麥