haiku 13 Jun 2018

Ebullient play

Followed by exquisite rest; 

Hear dog Garmr roar

[ americanifesto / 場黑麥 / jpr / urbanartopia / whorphan ]

haiku 5 Jan 2018

Surf crashes nearby
A rooster crows, a dog barks
The sounds of Gods’ Island

[ americanifesto / 場黑麥 / jpr / urbanartopia / whorphan ]

on reprogramming memories

Under the guidance the Embodying Enoughness series by Turbo Dog Yoga Chicago, I am learning how to change the null-loops that infest my brains. The process is simple; it is honest; to borrow from the language of the computer, it uses the basic technique of writing over old memories with new data. After a thorough yoga session, one lies in corpse pose and delves deeply into the psyche, rooting around for stuck or toxic patterns. Then, once one has selected a memory and it is playing before the mind's eye, one re-imagines it as if it had had the best of possible outcomes, as if all the bad things that happened were instead good things, as if pain and suffering had instead been relaxation and joy. It is liberating to be able to change one's personal perception of the past in this way; it is a salubrious activity to step back from daily self-flagellation and free oneself from attachment to past events, lost hopes, and broken dreams. To walk this path requires guts, and determination; it is not for the weak of heart, or for those people who are not yet ready to heal. But once begun, addictive is a fitting term for the process of exhuming one's buried skeletons and snipping loose the threads of thought that tend to tether one to events and people reachable only within the time machine we call the mind. Chest up, breathe hugely, self-liberate! Aho.

© americanifesto / 場黑麥

on false compassion

On Tuesday night, the dog came back from the veterinarian's office, with droopy eyes and a ridiculously large cone around her neck. For the fourth time in less than two weeks, the poor beast – a two-hundred pound English mastiff – had undergone surgery to have her tail shortened, or, better said, to have the open mess of flesh and bone sewn back shut after she had chewed out the sutures. Why, you must be asking yourself, was she allowed to even get her mouth anywhere close to the freshly-closed wound? The answer, dear friends, is because of false compassion.

Her primary owner – a housewife in her forties with children of high-school age – had left the large, hurting bitch unsupervised on a number of occasions without properly restricting her ability to access the source of her pain. The woman had said repeatedly that she felt sorry because the dog had trouble getting around the house, bumping into things constantly with her plastic cone of shameful ridicule. Given her puffy eyes and despondent mood, oh, wouldn't it be nice to lift her suffering a bit by removing said shameful device and letting her lounge around, outside, by herself, next to her favorite tree. This woman's actions, of course, only added to the dog's suffering; her compassion proved false, harmful to her pet's well-being, dangerous, even, to its very life. The mastiff came within inches of death; had her owner not decided to spend another one-and-a-half thousand dollars to get the tail sewn back shut for the fourth time, the big bitch would have either been put down and cremated or taken into a nearby field, shot, and buried.

False compassion is similar to such false economy as is very often practiced by today's emotion-driven Americans, we who have been told to go with whatever our hearts tell us and that we can always buy whatever we want to buy in order to placate our slightest impulsive craving at our local convenience store, which is sure to open even at this time of night. Rather than practicing a bit of self-denial and self-control, we bash around and do what we think our gut is telling us to do rather than having a nice quiet sit and thinking about things for a while before acting. It was no better at the emergency room for pets, where I witnessed dozens of people fork over thousands of dollars for teeth cleaning, to buy a chemotherapy session for a fucking cat, and to try and save the life of a fourteen-year-old blind dog that was in its death throes, its body rigid and locked in seizure.

This is a touchy subject, one regarding which, I find while writing this article, I am in a sort of inner turmoil. At which point does one allow a giant dog into one's house, a dog recently rescued, a dog that shits and pisses on the floor every night for weeks, a dog that whacks her tail against the walls so badly when her new mistress returns from even the most brief trip outside that she develops a festering open wound that sprays droplets of blood with every wag? At which point does the damage caused to inter-human relationships by all the urine and blood and feces covering the inside of one's home compel one to give the dog away, to install a fenced-in kennel in the back yard, or to put the dog down quickly and quietly? The answers to these questions are hard to come by, but one question – whether to leave on the cone of shame or to let the dog waltz around a bit without it – has an easy answer: to reduce the bitch's overall suffering, one must leave the damn thing on, no matter her crocodile tears or pitiable whimpering.

場黑麥 mentiri manufactorem fecit

on NOMB

Are you tired of using the oh-so-2009 acronym TMI to tell others that they are sharing Too Much Information? Do you yearn for a new acronym, one capable of expressing your complete lack of interest in whatever your counterpart is saying? Do you find yourself searching in vain for the perfect set of letters that will best communicate your complete and total indifference to anything but whatever is going on in your own life?

If you have answered yes to any of these questions, the acronym NOMB is for you! This hot new buzzword – which stands for None Of My Business – is sweeping airwaves and cellular text-message transmission pathways alike. Get on board with the cool cats of the NOMB crowd and start telling everyone you know to go fuck themselves in the most tactful and nicest possible way – by stating that anything, and everything, is None Of My Business. Is your girlfriend having a rough menstrual cycle? NOMB. Did your dad just lose his job? NOMB. Has your second cousin just lost his home to a freakish spate of massive, killer tornadoes? NOMB.

It is just that simple to NOMB the balls off of just about anyone moaning like a gut-shot deer mule about how shitty his life is. Don't stay stuck in the dreary old Aughts – join the up-to-the-minute, Totally-Twenty-Twelve set by NOMBing (i.e. NOMB-bombing) everyone, everything, everywhere, and every time. Is your teacher in your face about that homework assignment? NOMB. Have you failed to cast a ballot in any of the last four presidential elections? NOMB. Did your dog just kill a toddler? NOMB. If you are as cool of a cat as you claim to be, you should be catching on to the awesome power of NOMB, so limber up your texting thumbs, and start carpet-NOMBing, today.

場黑麥 mentiri factorem fecit

on fliers and vandalism

America's cities are waging war against those of their citizens who beautify with graffiti the visually sterile urban environment. Deemed a nuisance and incarcerated frequently on charges of vandalism, today's street artist is treated with revulsion and disdain and badgered incessantly by city councils and police forces alike. These brave and selfless individuals venture forth constantly in their efforts to bring color and joy to the bland and unadorned phaltscape. Yet beyond these fearless individuals, there are others who do much as graffiti artists do, but who act without fear of repercussion or punishment – those people who put up fliers for lost and missing cats or dogs, to offer home cleaning or grooming services, and to guerrilla-advertise goods and services somewhere other than in a penny publication.

The self-advertising city dweller will tape her message to her neighborhood telephone pole with many turns from a roll of clear packaging tape, or she will staple it to her local tree enough times to keep it affixed even in gale-force winds. But unlike the graffiti artist, this city dweller will go about her business in full daylight without being talked to, approached by, or otherwise harassed by John Law. To harness this new and liberating reality, and to prove to the world that they are not ashamed of their actions, SDUBS (self-directed urban beautification specialists) in major metropolitan areas across America are setting up websites that parallel the messages they apply to physical sites in order to justify their beautification efforts as those of self-promotion (should such justification be necessary, which it rarely is, as SDUBS go about their business with cat-like stealth and formidable deliberation).

Beyond the positive effect of making bland cities more colorful, these newest, cross-genre efforts by America's SDUBS increase the number of people visiting their respective cities by showcasing the artwork they have labored so hard to produce, artwork which they apply freely and without demanding recompense. And unlike his self-promoting, guerrilla-advertising, house-cleaning-while-hair-cutting neighbor, the street artist is not trying to sell anything – he wishes only to pursue his Happiness without restriction, and to beautify his drab surroundings in peace.

場黑麥 ioanni elymucampus fecit

as dogs do, so shall I do

  A woman is out walking her dog and the beast urinates on the sidewalk ahead of me. I step accidentally in the stream of piss spreading toward the gutter, but instead of reacting angrily I tell myself: The poor beast has to piss somewhere – why not right here in front of me? If the woman had curbed her dog, I would not have stepped in its bowel movement, but since she did not, I must scrape its shit off of the bottom of my shoe.

 I have no problem with the animal doing any of this so long as I might also piss freely into the gutter whenever I want to. As a member of the species homo sapiens and a bowel-moving, food-digesting animal, I shall make water into any nearby gutter if the urge to pee should hit me unexpectedly. Just now, I made water in the street near LAPD headquarters, at two thirty on a Wednesday afternoon, and no persons complained or looked at me funny. (I suspect that people do not confront me because I am tall, and because I look like I could be a mentally insane homeless person.)

  City-dwellers of the world, fight species-based discrimination by curbing yourself and pissing in the street. Do not risk injuring or killing yourself because there was no socially acceptable toilet nearby – celebrate your animal nature by watering the phaltscape with your golden showers, today.

  場黑麥 ioanni elymucampus fecit