on reducing stress

There’s a disc golf course in Montebello Park, Baltimore City, MD. I go there at 5pm, after a day’s work, to throw plastic. I find disc golf to be a cheap way to get exercise, hone my skills, challenge myself, and practice patience.

Until the past weekend, however, the path I took to bicycle there lead through gang-controlled neighborhoods and busy intersections. I’d arrive at the park agitated and stressed out from not only trying to avoid aggressive, distracted, and inconsiderate drivers but also worrying about drug-dealer hostility. Hence, my disc golf game suffered, and my peace of mind was compromised.

After consulting with a psychiatrist, I have decided to take a new route, one that skirts the rough areas and the hurtling, gasoline-powered, one-ton, steel battering rams driven by people ignoring their surroundings in favor of looking at their mobile phones. In terms of distance travelled, the new route is actually shorter than the old one, with fewer hills. Now, when I step up to tee off, my my anxiety levels low and I can disco stress-free, and contented.

americanifesto / 場黑麥 / jpr / urbanartopia / whorphan

on abandoning cars

Another Bucephalus has fallen victim to neglect, spendthrift, and procrastination. The car, a red Subaru Forester, the author's stout and loyal steed for the past 4 years, died in northern New Jersey on Saturday evening, something within it giving way with a sickening series of uncharacteristic crunching and groaning, screeching and banging. “At least $800 to repair what we think is wrong with it,” the woman at the repair shop told him once the mechanics had had a look at it on Monday morning. “But it could also be the water pump, or something else – we won't really know the total cost until we open it up and take a look inside.”

And so he consigned to the junk heap his faithful Sleipnir of night and fog, brave mount of a dark and fallen prince, choosing to wash his hands of it rather than invest more than the roughly $7000 already in. Bought out of necessity and a luxurious bauble stuck in the otherwise coarse and simple cloak of his life, his old friend will soon be torn apart, raided for parts, chopped, shopped, or simply put outside and left to rot. If he'd have had an extra $2000 lying around he might have had the recent ruptures repaired and a new serpentine belt installed; sacrifices must be made and expectations must be altered to reflect new realities, however, and, so, he'd signed the back of the car's title and put it in with the rest of Tuesday's mail. Requiescat in pacem, dear friend – you shall be missed.

His new mount, a gray and blue landshark-style bicycle that had sat under the front porch for nearly a decade, is once again working well: he has been riding it regularly for the past year. With new tires and brake pads fore and aft, fresh shifter cables, and rear spokes properly tuned, the velocipede allows him to go everywhere he needs to go around town and haul everything he might need to haul silently and without producing more exhaust than his own breath, more waste than that already gurgling in his guts. If he had but sold the car before it exploded, he might have recouped some of its value, but at least no one was injured when the automobile system failed, and he now has one less albatross dangling from his neck. At the end of the day, none can know what the Universe intends, and, so, the author accepts his new reality with a silent word of thanks to the shifting winds of Fortune for forcing him to make a difficult decision.

mentiri factorem fecit – 場黑麥

science & faith

People today who self-proclaim as faithful seem to be hypocrites. Instead of relying on their god to provide them with nourishment, for example, they go shopping at grocery stores and fill their larders with food; instead of trusting in their god's ability to heal them of sickness, they go to doctors and wash their hands with soap; instead of allowing themselves to waste away so as to reach their promised land that much sooner, they brush their teeth and go for walks and care for their own health. If these people were truly faithful, they would not even think of gathering food for themselves but would only eat what happened to fall dead within earshot, trusting that the Great Magnet would fell enough for their bodies to keep on living; if they truly believed, they would let their physical shells rot, caring not for tooth-ache nor for compound fracture nor for the deepest laceration, in the knowledge that all healing comes from that mystical power that cannot ever be named; if they were wholly pure of heart, they would sit quietly with neither attachment nor aversion as the leaves piled up around their feet and the stars wheeled by, high overhead, upon the vast and inky firmament.

I am among the greatest of offenders in these matters, a humble and worthless whorphan too full of ego and malice to still his soul of greed, too wrapped up in life's shiny trappings to focus on the gentle spirit bursting within his loins, blinded to the subtle majesty of the Universe by desire, selfishness, and discontentment. Some day, I hope to shed myself of this peripheral clutter and bask in the glowing rays of god's own pulsating sphincter, but not today, old boy, and certainly not anytime soon, for my faith is too weak, my ambition is too strong, and my adherence to the false parameters of life and death is greater than my capacity for Total Emptiness, known to the Chinese as wu.

Returning to my original point: To live in a house and to drive a car is to rely on science; a car runs on a liquid called gasoline, which burns at a certain rate if the pressure in an engine's combustion chamber is just right; a house keeps the pounding rain and the slanting sleet of off one's head because it has a sloped roof and see-through windows made of glass and wood. To bathe regularly with soap and to refrigerate food is to believe that science works, that its lessons and warnings are true; soap cleans because it is a mildly caustic mixture of animal fats and lye, and food spoils less quickly when it is stored within an air-tight box and blasted with frigid winds. To wear a coat in winter, moreover, is proof of doubt in the Supreme Deity's ability to keep a body from freezing to death, irrefutable evidence that a down-filled covering trumps the warming knowledge of a personal savior, any day. Therefore, the next time you see someone mount a high horse and start squawking about how pure and righteous is his god, remind him that his house, his cellphone, his car, and his clothes, are all proof of the failure of his personal faith; but beware, for religious fanatics – regardless of their faith, be they Christian, Muslim, or Hindu – are dangerous people best avoided. Mahalo.

© mentiri factorem fecit (場黑麥)

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

on signaling turns & lane changes

As one who velocipedes in a rural area, a town not at all designed with bicyclists in mind, I find myself adhering more strictly to the rules of the road than most of the automobile drivers with whom I share it. While I admit to running the occasional stop-sign – when no one else is within my fields of vision – and while I flagrantly violate the local law that states that pedal-mashers must ride on, of all places, the sidewalk (which is, one would think, intended only for foot-bound pedestrian traffic), I follow the law in one instance more than most others: signaling turns and lane changes.

Signaling one's lane changes and turns indicates a number of things. First, and foremost, it is a courtesy to the other drivers, a simple yet effective way to let them know that their location is known, that their existence on the road has been noted, and that the person making the lane change will do so, if at all possible, without slamming into any other cars that happen to be in his or her vicinity. Second, it gives the other persons on the road some small bit of warning that one's conveyance is about to undergo a series of sudden and likely violent maneuvers intended to change its direction and that of the people riding within or on top of it. Third, and perhaps most importantly, it shows that, as someone operating a vehicle on the road, one has one's shit together to the point that one knows just which route to take to get to where one am going, that one is taking the most direct and efficient path toward one's goal, and that one is paying attention to what is going on on the road rather than browsing the interwebs or clicking through a friend's tropical vacation pictures on facebook.

If you, dear friend, like to prove your worth to society at large, if you strive to be respectful not only of the property but also of the opinions of others, if you think that America would be a better place if everyone simply respected the life-threateningly dangerous activity that we call driving, please consider signaling your own lane changes, turns, and merges – every time and everywhere – even if it does not appear that anyone else is around who might benefit from such courtesy. With a bit of concerted effort, and a simple flick of the wrist, we can, each one of us, help to make this nation a better place for all who live here. Thanks, and mahalo.

場黑麥 menterefecterem fecit

on keeping limbs in cars

Among this worthless whorphan's many driving-related pet peeves – drivers who do not signal turns or lane-changes, who try to multi-task while at the wheel, who drift across double yellow lines, who allow passengers to put feet up on the dashboard – few, if any, trump his frustration with persons who endanger otherwise healthy body parts by hanging them out of car windows. (As pointed out in previous posts, since my personal Life, Liberty, & Property is not directly affected by such foolhardy decisions made by others, I should not have reason to be as upset as I apparently am; perhaps it is the sheer foolish audacity of it, however, that chaps my buns.) Moreover, this piece would not have been written if I had not, just the other day, seen a local high-school driving instructor dangling his hand casually in the breeze while in the company of a young, female student-driver. (I was of a mind to drag him out of the car and beat him senseless for teaching a minor such a bad and dangerous habit, but his charge was exceeding the speed limit in a 25 mile-per-hour zone, and I could not catch them up.)

Attention, good upstanding Americans: if you put hand, foot, head, elbow, knee, leg, or arm outside of a car's window while that car is in motion, the likelihood is greater than 50% that that hand, elbow, foot, head, arm, or leg will be ripped off (whereas if you keep all of your limbs inside the vehicle, the likelihood they will be ripped off approaches 0%). Any piece of flesh – human, canine, or otherwise – that sticks out of a car while that car is in motion can, and more than likely will, hit or get snagged on, and remain stuck to, stationary objects such as street-signs, bushes, mail boxes, fence posts, parked cars, dumpsters, self-service newspaper kiosks, telephone poles, and anything else that the car might happen to be passing at the time. When moving flesh hits resting metal at forty miles-per-hour, that flesh deforms and becomes a pulp-like substance that easily separates from the body proper and stays stuck to stationary objects, where it will dangle and dance in the passing breezes.

Please, people who value their hands, who like their feet, who desire to have five fingers for as long as possible, who wish to avoid trips to the emergency room, painful surgeries, long bouts of rehabilitation, the life-long stigma of being a cripple, and phantom-limb syndrome, please keep all parts of your body on the inside of a moving vehicle at all times. This article may sound alarmist, and I may come across as a curmudgeonly fuck-wad who refuses to mind his own business, but the Second Sons of Liberty need everyone to be whole, healthy, and physically fit who shall be participating in our rekindling of the white-hot flame that is the True American Dream. So please, dear friends, be smart, stay alert, and do not risk your limbs for nothing – save that sacrifice for when it will truly count.

場黑麥 mentiri factorem fecit

on balls on cars

Living in rural south-central Pennsylvania, I see many different things. A number of these things are strange; others, unusual; and some, even, are downright sad. Among the most sad of the things I see are pairs of plastic (or metal) testicles hanging from the undercarriages of cars. When I see such a Ride With Balls, my first reaction is to assume that the testicles of the person driving the vehicle are so small, inadequate, and insignificant that he had little choice but to go out and attach fake balls to his vehicle in the invariably unsuccessful attempt to compensate for his glaring male deficiency. More often than not, such fake testicles are attached to the rear struts of modified, raised pickup-trucks, vehicles sure to be driven by men with massive inferiority complexes, insignificantly-sized balls, and length- or girth-challenged penises. Occasionally, however, I see fake balls attached to the bottoms of beat-up sedans driven by scruffy, thuggish-looking persons with poorly executed prison tattoos who, since they seem to be always slumped into their seats in the same awkward fashion, apparently suffer commonly from a certain type of spinal injury.

One reason for hanging artificial testicles from the back of one's car could be to signify to other persons that the car – possessing as it does of massive, brass-coated fake bull's balls – is so powerful, so souped up, and so very fast off the mark that to even dream of challenging it to a race would be to beg for swift defeat and assured disappointment. However, since serious racecar drivers work diligently to shave as much unnecessary weight off their vehicles as possible, this argument does not favor the person who feels the need to hang a four pound, cast-iron scrotum from his car. Perhaps the artificial-sack-danglers act in this fashion out of a deep, unconscious yearning for the Olden Days, back when conveyances ate straw, shit manure, and actually had balls that they used to inseminate their species' females, but, given that most of males I see overcompensating for their shriveled, tiny nuts in this way are under the age of thirty, they cannot possibly have been alive during the time of horse and buggy. A final reason for a person to hang with a bent coat-hanger from his automobile's bumper a lump of plastic shaped like a set of well-veined testicles could be that he is a funny-man, a laugh-riot, the kind of guy who comes into a room and has everyone in stitches with the first phrase out of his mouth. As I have spoken briefly with but a few persons who owned a Ride With Balls, I cannot speak to the extent of their comedic craft, to the well-honed delivery of their witty, sardonic comments, or to their overall side-splitting hilarity, but I doubt that anyone who would pay good money to have his truck jacked up so that it sticks up in the air and wastes precious fuel because of its horrible aerodynamics, I doubt that any such person would have much of a sense of humor, let alone humility, self-loathing, or tact.

Please, fine citizens of America, good readers of these posts, please try not to mock too badly persons who dangle fake nuts from their cars, for they appear to be simple-minded, foolish individuals whose own testicles are so awesomely small that they need to hang a Real Pair from, of all things, their cars. Perhaps we should all just mock them later on, quietly, and in private, together.

場黑麥 mentiri factorem fecit

on the slave's chariot

Oh, how much we Americans suffer for our petty conveniences, and how terribly we abuse the Earth to maintain them. It is not entirely our fault, perhaps, that we lock ourselves in shiny metal boxes whose insides are constantly exploding – in part, our opinions have been shaped by a century of false intelligence that touts the benefits of the automobile and its socialist highway network while obfuscating the true cost of motor-vehicle ownership. Imagine someone today describing the car's negative effects – suburban sprawl, pollution, high maintenance costs, the alienation of the individual from society – and imagine your reaction. Would you jump for joy? Would you sign up at your local dealership in order to spend a year's salary on a combustion-driven steel battering-ram that is lined with miles of tiny wires and sensitive rubber hoses? Would you say, “Of course, Mr. Ford, Toyota-San, Herr Benz, of course I shall take on that second job so that I can drive to work, to school, to the store, to the post office, back to the store, to school a second time, perhaps to a publick-house, and then to my home?” If you are an clear-thinking and self-respecting American living today, your answer may not be the resounding Yes issued by previous generations.

One of the main reasons that we mere three hundred millions of Americans use more gasoline than billions of other people combined is that we have transformed our society into one that is wholly dependent on the automobile – we wantonly waste petroleum and wage war over oil because we choose to perpetuate self-enslavement to the notion that one's body can be moved around through space-time without expending much physical effort rather than to accommodate and promote the frugal and simple life of the bicyclist.

Compared to the slave-charioteer, the smog-rider knows how hard it is to move her body around, and that certain things take time, and that certain things take effort, and because she knows these things, she plans ahead and maintains time discipline while seeing to her own physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being. By liberating herself from the artificial demands of a lumbering blunderbox filled with volatile chemicals, she keeps her soul free of sadness, discontent, and desire. By fixing her bicycle and keeping it road-worthy for an entire year for less cost than a single oil change, she spends her resources wisely. Her mouth, not a twisted metal pipe, is her exhaust port; her beating heart, not a cast-iron maze of tubes, is the motor that drags her across the phaltscape; her legs, not a row of oil-drenched, whirling plugs, are the pistons that turn the crank that sees her on her way.

The velocipedist, her heart buoyant and her soul aroused, lives the life of honest and healthy labor, while the car driver, that poor wretch sitting in his glass prison of perpetual payment, lives the life of one enslaved to the demands of a hardwood-accented beast. His mount of choice requires specialized and costly repairs, whereas the cyclist can pinpoint and fix problems easily and while on the go; his conveyance is the nation's problem, the bicycle, it's solution. Therefore, dear reader, please consider switching from a high-cost slave's chariot to a low-cost wire horse, and rejoice as your spirits, and your savings, rise.

場黑麥 mentiri factorem fecit

on the United Slaves of America

Do you often drive to malls and to other places of direction-less shopping, only to buy something you don't really need? Do you buy the newest gadgets just as they are released, spending your hard-earned money without a second thought? Do you while speaking in polite company wax suddenly poetic about television shows, explaining their plot-lines instead of making conversation, speaking emphatically about people whom you do not know personally and who do not actually exist? If you have answered Yes to any of these questions, you are more than likely self-enslaved to conspicuous consumerism, to driving around in your car wasting gasoline without a clue as to your purpose, to accruing superfluous debt, and to staring at the compelling and intricately woven tales that emerge regularly from a flickering plastic box (which you likely bought at high price and labored diligently to mount upon your living-room wall).

Can you imagine living now, today, without electricity? Can you imagine living in a world in which electricity were in sporadic or limited supply? Can you imagine not being able to purchase, at any time of day or night, as much cheap gasoline as you to wish buy at any one of thousands of separate, well-lit retail locations? Do you consider resource-conservation, composting, and recycling to be a waste of time? Have you become so addicted to your pocket computer that your mind has lost its ability to reason, to recall important information, to think for itself, or to keep itself occupied past the setting of the sun? If you see a reflection of yourself in any of these scalding but poorly-worded questions, you are a slave to Big Oil, a slave to your own automobile, a slave to electricity, a slave to your electrical devices, a slave to the white men who own the electrical companies, a slave to the coal that makes the steam that runs the electrical plants, a slave to the railways that transport the coal, and a slave to the whims and fancies of the fat-cat fuckers on Wall Street who trade in and control the price of coal futures (and who, by fiat, trade in and control you and your ability to Pursue your Happiness).

If you are a self-respecting, happiness-loving patriotic American, you would do well to fight self-enslavement to any external thing, person, device, physical condition, and state-of-mind. The patriot is self-sufficient in order to preserve his country's limited natural and national resources and to make sure his (self-imposed) need does not affect his country's ability to provide for the common defence. The patriot does not rest her hopes and dreams on external conditions such as bandwidth speeds or back-to-school-sales – rather, she maintains a pure and loving heart into which and from which all the Blessings of Liberty flow; she keeps her heart in its nebulous state and denies herself all but the basic necessities; she is a tough and hardened operator who minds not cold, heat, nor personal privation – she focuses rather on providing for the general Welfare, on establishing Justice, and on forming a more perfect Union in her own life and, by extension, in the life of her vast and beautiful nation.

A mere one hundred and fifty years ago, we Americans went to war amongst ourselves to battle the evils of slavery (among other reasons), yet now, in 2012, we pay good money to enslave ourselves willingly to TV shows, digital gadgets, internal home lighting, pillow-top mattresses, rich and fatty foods, automobiles, shopping malls, and gyms. One of my ancestor died fighting the evils of slavery, shot by a sniper's bullet during the battle of Vicksburg; by remaining vigilant to the ever-grasping, ever-enticing tendrils of our ridiculous modern society and of their power to destroy my virtue, I shall make sure his sacrifice was not made in vain.

場黑麥 ioanni elymucampus fecit

p.s. the author would like to point that he is no less a slave in these matters than most other Americans living today