on Trump’s win

To all of my non-American friends around the world: I did not vote for Donald Trump, nor do I support him now. I think Donald will make a terrible president. A proto-fascist with little regard for either the opinions of mankind or the notions of kindness and respect for others, Donald is the one person (out of nearly 330 millions!) whom the American people should never have elected. Riding to power on a wave of hatred-for-others and buoyed by a strong fervor of Eurocentric racism (that was brought to this land by Christopher Columbus in the year 1492), Donald in one sense embodies the idea that Americans of Northern European Descent are alone entitled to the promise and possibility of the American dream. In another sense, Donald is a genius for capturing the mood of the moment and exploiting the fears of working-class citizens to get himself elected to this nation’s highest post. He will not protect or uphold the Constitution, for he has apparently never read it and definitely does not understand what it is designed to do. He will likely trample upon the hard-won rights and privileges of the following communities: Latino; African-American; Muslim; Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, & Curious (LGBTQC); living women of childbearing age; as well as free-thinking and independent writers and other artists such as this author himself.

To my brothers and sisters of the Muslim faith - when Donald’s Death Squads come for you, I will do my best to keep you from harm. To my brothers and sisters of Latino descent - when Donald’s Deportation Squads come for you, I will do my best to keep you in this country. Do not despair, fellow lovers of liberty, for if history is any guide, fascist dictators such as Donald Trump cannot hold onto power for much longer than a decade and a half before the weight of their crimes drags them down into the abyss. Do not give up hope, but let love shine in your hearts, for love is eternal and immutable, the one act we can do for ourselves and our misguided neighbors that will prove that a shred of humanity still exists within the American experiment. Now is not the end of our struggles but the beginning. Hold fast and stay frosty.

© JPR / whorphan / americanifesto / 場

prayer and guns

No matter their flavor or doctrine or creed, religious extremists clearly feel the need to tell other people how to lead their lives, how to raise their children, how to dress their wives. This happens not only in the Fertile Crescent but also among American Protestants who claim that their nation is a Christian one then try to enforce it with prayer and guns. To us who've kept thinking it is hard to see the forces of ISIS, of Christianity, parading and boasting and spreading by might the teachings and habits that they see as Right. To live life in freedom by my chosen rules to me is worth more than a mountain of jewels; to live life in constant, perpetual fear that there maybe could be an extremist near just takes the wind out of my billowing sails and makes me weep buckets and flagons and pails. So stand up and fight for your right to choose to wear pretty dresses or to drink some booze, to worship in this house or nowhere at all, to stay down or get up right after a fall. This here call to action may not be too loud, it may not much rile up the masses and crowds, it is though a call for more pure anarchy and for less of religious insanity.

© americanifesto / 場黑麥

on bicycling cuffs

Inspect closely the hose of any hardcore and regular velocipedist and you will find his ankle cuffed. Held firmly in place by clasp or tie or tiny bent teeth the leg-cuff serves one main purpose: to keep the pant-leg from fouling in and being soiled by crank or gear or spoke. In the course of their duty the parts of a bicycle that spin accumulate grit and grime and soot and dirt, which swim in a soup of chain-grease that upon contact instantly impregnates clothing with tenacious and tar-black patterns removable only by excision. Furthermore, when a loose pant-leg catches on the teeth of a gear-wheel it can bring the rider's legs to such a sudden stop that their momentum unbalances and unships him, an undesirable event that results in bruised egos, skinned elbows, and cracked skulls. During his life this author used to laugh upon seeing individuals wearing the bicycling cuff, until he himself ruined a few pairs of pants and nearly crashed more than once due to his clothing getting caught on protrusion, nub, or gear-wheel. Now, he cuffs both legs. (The cuff on his right leg he sewed together using a discarded Velcro clasp and the reflective tape from a bloody safety vest he found in the woods during hunting season; the cuff on his left leg is battery-operated and at night flashes a bright red light.) The only disadvantage to cuffing the pants while riding is that people will laugh and point and wonder what the balls one is up to, which is a small price to pay for improved safety and the knowledge that one will arrive in pants soiled only by the tears of the traffic-jammed drivers one passed along the way. Huzzah.

© americanifesto / 場黑麥

on avoiding traffic

Recently, I wrote an article about sponging anger, and how when I am bicycling I would often get angry for reasons I could not place. After carefully analyzing this hatred and noting when it tended to arise I have concluded that I am allowing myself to be controlled by the mostly negative emotions of the drivers I come into contact with while out on the road. Oh how they must hate me for daring to ride on the sliver of pavement that runs to the right of the single white line and to the left of the edge of the road, as witnessed by a recent increase in the number of cowards who shout out of their windows at me as they speed by, often saying things such as, “Get out of the road,” and, “Move over.” (Soon, I hope to find the courage to stop responding by telling drivers to go fuck themselves.) I have taken to occupying the entire lane while climbing a particular hill on the last stretch of byway before the last turn toward my house, as in the past on this short rise people tended to floor their engines and squeeze daringly between me and opposing traffic as we were all trying to squeeze up a blind, sharp incline. During this maneuver the transference of hatred and loathing from the drivers to me is particularly strong, as I take up the entire lane for fifteen whole seconds while powering my way up to the top of the rise, dragging myself across the asphalt landscape silently and without belching noxious fumes from a metal tailpipe. Once I reach the top I immediately vacate the lane to allow the vehicle that has been tailgating me to roar past toward business that – I am certain – has to do with curing cancer and saving a stranded kitten and eliminating hunger in the Global South. I am happy to be doing my part to honor and conserve the mineral resources of this our only Earth, and to be saving hundreds of dollars a year on car maintenance and fuel and registrations and fees and taxes and fines. I have been lucky up to now, for which I thank the gods of the traveler, among them Legba and Ganesha and Christopher and Hermes, lifting my supplications to the heavens and saying: “Please guard these travelers along their path, keep them this day from Fate's patient wrath.” Aho.

© americanifesto / 場黑麥

our enemy – television

Television is the creative person's bane, a threat greater than most others are. Watching TV feeds the human need for companionship without ever really satisfying it and crushes creative capacity by tricking the brain into thinking it is doing something and being productive when it is just sitting idle. Creativity, power, assuredness, and passion all reside in the 2nd and 3rd chakras, the lower half of the torso that extends from the breastbone to the genitals. Look down at your own belly for a moment. Can you see your belt-buckle or waistband as it sits atop the pelvic bone? Can you feel and move the abdominus erectus, that muscle that runs from the bottom of the breastbone to attach to the top of the pelvis? If you cannot, you are not alone – more than a third of all Americans are obese, and many of these individuals carry a large portion of this additional weight in the lower halves of their torsos. The decision to sit down and watch television has disastrous consequences on the 2nd and 3rd chakras – it numbs and dulls them, confusing and stifling the free flow of energy through the regions of the core, an area central to living the best of possible human lives. Man is a gullible animal; after seeing just a few commercials related to food he will get food from his kitchen and eat that food (without focusing on what he is eating) while staring longingly into the beautiful bright lights of his TV set. If he repeats this sequence often enough he will get fat, and his increased girth will further stifle the free flow of energy through the region of his core and exacerbate the unhealthiness that stems from a lack of regular exercise and from a preference for prepackaged foods ready to eat over meals carefully and consciously crafted. Persons who wish to lead lives full of creativity and passion avoid watching television; they know that there are more constructive ways to fill their time than by staring at an electric light-box; they paint, draw, dance, or write; they make educated and intelligent decisions about what to eat and what to put through their orifices of eye and mouth and ear instead of numbing out the intestines by shoveling in as much sugary and salty and fatty foods as the gut can handle without bursting; they lead happy lives untethered from groomed and glossy but ultimately vacuous material. Downtrodden and passionless masses of the world, awake! Turn off your television sets! Humanity, and Mother Nature, need you now more than ever. Aho.

© americanifesto / 場黑麥

bare and spill

Having spent the past year experimenting on his friends and family (without their consent, of course) and probing just how far he could push an ego until it fought back, this liesmith finds that many Americans have grown accustomed to a person baring his soul and spilling his guts at the drop of a hat, and that baring and spilling is now so commonplace that it causes a stir if does not occur as expected. Instead of being a rare, cathartic event during which one party helps the other deal with or process a traumatic or important event, baring and spilling has become as routine as saying Thank You to a door held open out of politeness – if it does not occur, the person who refuses to bare and spill is looked upon with contempt, and treated with disdain. (This bad habit has an evil twin: that of saying “I Love You" 70 times a day to persons one doesn't really love quite enough to merit saying it to them constantly.) Taking his experiment one step further, the author has stopped baring and spilling to persons to whom he had previously talked unfettered about everything, which has lead to a variety of changes in a number of relationships.

In part, he blames daytime television shows for this overall shift in American habits; their tendency to thrust behavior previously reserved for the therapist's office before the eyes of emotionally-repressed Ynki housewives seems to have helped convince these women to search for the same kind of emotional release in their relationships with girlfriend and husband. (Rarely if ever do the daytime hosts warn of or outline the risks associated with undertaking psychological counseling on one's own.) Guests to these talk shows would routinely break down, releasing their pent-up angers and fears and joys and proclaiming how wonderfully purified they felt after having bared their souls. Housewives whose lives are often ruled by routine soon became addicted to the idea of release and emotional excitement without fully understanding the dangers associated with unassisted, amateur psychology. Some stones are best left unturned, and some secrets were never intended to leave the mental closets in which they reside, but the addiction to backyard pseudo-psychology grew, and spread; it has become so intricately enmeshed in our current society as to be one of its more common features. Today, we seldom accept statements at face value or respect the right of our counterpart to his modicum of privacy, preferring rather to keep prying and peeling back the layers until – for good or ill – we have peered into the tenderest folds of our victim's most dark and dismal core. (The author is guilty of this behavior, just like most other Americans.)

People who pry so incessantly rarely care about helping others lessen emotional turmoil or improve mental well-being; they care more about the power they feel watching a being just as fragile as they are flounder about before he descends into a spiritual malaise of his own making. How, though, might one avoid the trap of the pseudo-psychologist and maintain a pure and honest heart? By staying quiet, politely refusing to play along, and keeping one's business to oneself. We who understand the raw and awesome power of full disclosure, therefore, sparingly spill and barely bare; some beasts are simply best left chained.

mentiri factorem fecit – 場黑麥

las tres hermanas

on planting face

Just when this author thought that he was on a virtuous path, he ran smack into the barrier of Truth. False notions that had come to commandeer his being scurried from the impact of unbridled reality as do cockroaches from sudden illumination. All is not lost – he recognizes his errors for what they are; he adjusts his modes of operation to combat the need to make claims and seek reward; he shoos that part of him that needs to self-aggrandize back into its filthy stall; he reins in those parts of his psyche that thrive on the fleeing notions of honor, pride, and satisfaction.

Months of diligent effort were ruined this past weekend when the author opened his mouth, and spoke. By speaking, he violated one of the basic tenets of the ancient texts: One who speaks does not know, and one who knows does not speak. At the time, it seemed logical to voice his opinions, as he had been in a nearby state park engaged in friendly competition with a married male friend. After listening to his friend talk about matters of concern in his life, the author thought it polite to speak on matters dear to his own heart. How quickly the addiction of his own voice took him; how soon his words turned bitter, and hateful, leeched of their goodness by the foul tug of ego and spilling from him in ever greater numbers as he tried in vain to dig himself from one hole after the next.

Later that same night, the house of cards finally collapsed when the aforementioned friend announced to an assembled host that the author was not doing what he kept saying to the family dog – “Rule #1: shut up.” One after another, the layers of malice and discontentment loosened their grip on this worthless whorphan's psyche, falling off and away in the manner of petals loosed from a dying blossom. As each foul shackle sloughed off, the author realized how much anger and frustration he has kept locked up in his bosom, negative emotions that drain life of its color, that poison its deep and abiding well of Happiness. Sometimes, he wonders how other people stand to be around him, and why so few don't outright cancel their friendship. Perhaps with a more dedicated and concerted effort, he can alienate and abuse every person in his life, and not just those closest to him. Oh, well – still warm the blood that flows through these veins (Turkish, Snatch). Time heals all wounds. Mahalo.

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)

risky political correctness

A dangerous trend has spread throughout these shakily-united States: the trend of political correctness. Damaging to honesty, truthfulness, and the very concept of Liberty itself, a person is being politically correct when, before speaking out loud, he stops to ponder whether or not what he is about to say might or might not offend someone within earshot. Rather than encouraging him to speak his mind freely in the knowledge that he has no – nada, null, zero, zilch – no control over the mental processes of other people nor the ability to control how others will react to whatever he chooses to say or do or sign or write, our society demands that he take everyone else's emotional and mental well-being into consideration and censor himself instead of just coming and saying whatever the deuce he intended to say in the first place.

Political correctness is un-American in that it forces us to be liars, to hide our prejudices and our stereotypes deep within the recesses of our souls, where hatred and malcontent tend to fester; it decreases the Safety of all Americans by allowing the bigot to mingle freely amongst open-minded people, his cruel heart filled with a resentment for people of color and a hatred for All Things Strange; it harms the Safety of all Americans by allowing bigotry and racism to build up in the mind of the sad and confused individual until he can no longer stand it, which makes him more likely to lash out physically against the object of his ire, a person with skin slightly darker than his. During more than one conversation between me, an American of European Descent, and Americans of African or Mixed African and European Descent (i.e. between a white person and brown people), I have heard these humans say that they would rather have their racist right out in public, where he can be tagged and avoided rather than for him to have to pretend to be color-blind when he really could care less if he saw a Negro being chained to a pickup truck and dragged.

Furthermore, political correctness emboldens the nitpickers and busybodies among us to wag their fingers at anyone even toeing the line of impropriety, and to say to them with self-righteous but artificial indignation: It's not nice to say this, and you shouldn't say that, because you might hurt this bunch's feelings, and cause that lot to be sad. There are many views espoused by religious extremists in this country – they who are trying to shut down Planned Parenthood and who want to amend our preciously secular Constitution to define marriage according to their and only their religious text – views I vehemently oppose and risk Life, Fortune, and sacred Honor to combat; yet while standing out in the snow counter-protesting nuns and stoking the ire of entire church parishes, I chose to speak my mind and to say hurtful and offensive things directly to them, right up in their faces, hardly flinching when they called the cops to complain about the public display of the word vagina, which is the medical term for one part of a woman's sex. I shall stop harping on the past and start encouraging the few lovers of Liberty left on these shores to end self-censorship, to encourage clear and open debate, and to fill their hearts with emptiness; together, we can conquer the scourge of political correctness, preferring honesty to deceit, choosing the Truth over lies. So stand up and speak freely – do it now, or forever scold your niece.

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

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