americanifesto: light

The dream started inside a building, which I escaped through a side door that opened onto a street paved with cobblestones. The outside was lit by a bright, white light. With me (on the right-hand side) was as always my psychopomp, as well as a female (on the left-hand side) whose face and features have faded from memory.

Together, we climbed through the open rear door into a automobile that looked like a standard, black Londonite taxicab. It was hitched via leather strapping to four-legged beasts that at first glance appeared to be cats. The driver’s perch had been mounted onto the roof, meaning that I had to climb up through the car’s open sunroof to man the reins.

We took off, rounding corners at speed, and were soon riding astride a seaside promenade made using cut blue granite and featuring an iron railing. People in Victorian-era dress strolled along the sidewalk to our right. Below and beyond them stretched the sea - deep blue and vastly calm, nary a wave or ripple. The vehicle stopped and I leaped off to see if there was a beach at the base of the cut-stone promenade. Using a nearby flight of stairs, I climbed down to its blond sands (with someone or something else in tow), and had just dipped a toe in (to check the waters) when I awoke.

americanifesto / 場黑麥 / jpr / urbanartopia / whorphan

03 March 2017

dreamstate writing 3 Mar 2017

In this morning’s dream, I was walking around outside (in an overgrown lot) looking for a place to bed down for the night. There was little ambient light, the sky above me a gray blanket trimmed with the rosy promise of dawn. Rounding the side of a one-storey brick building, I started to make my way through the trees and bushes that grew beside and behind it. Treading carefully so as not to alert to my presence the people living nearby (three-storey inhabited brick structures stood beyond a chain-link fence on a rise above the first building), I made noise nonetheless, the underbrush below my feet crackling loudly. On my way to the rear of the building I passed two makeshift blinds, one a flimsy construction of bent cardboard, the other a sturdier model made from a metal framework and some type of plastic cloth. Behind each blind was a pillow and a worn-down area where someone seemed to have slept recently.

Security lights turned on, illuminating the area brilliantly, and I became aware of what looked like many cameras watching, unblinking eyes that tracked my every move. Little red lights glowed upon them, indicating that they were recording. I attempted to lay down in an effort to avoid their gaze, but a thin beam of piercing white light shot through the chain-link fence, thwarting my efforts to escape it.

Time passed, for the sky had lightened considerably. I was standing in front of the one-storey brick building speaking to its apparent proprietress. She had dark hair, an attractive face, and the type of exaggeratedly-proportioned body normally found on girls' fashion dolls. Apparently, this woman realized I found her attractive, for she turned to one side to show me her large breasts and slender waist. Then, a different woman - this one with blond hair tucked into a tattered baseball cap and wearing a bulky coat - walked out from behind my field of vision to enter the brick building, a basket of what looked like soiled clothing in her arms. I then examined the structure in front of me more closely, leaning over to look past the dark-haired gal, and discovered it was a laundry-mat of sorts. The last thing I remember before waking up was that all of its washers appeared to be running, full steam.

Huzzah, mahalo, and om swastiastu.

americanifesto / JPR / whorphan / 場黑麥

30 September 2013

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

02 July 2012

on nature's nightly light-show

During these muggy days of summer, when the sun has set and the bats have emerged to hunt, thousands of bioluminescent insects put on a fascinating and free light-show. I do not really see it unless I stand for a while in the bowl of the valley and let my eyes adjust to the darkness; then, however, I realize that nearly every available surface – from the low grasses to the tops of the highest trees – has been taken over by lightning bugs.

Granted, the bugs do not produce the lung-thumping boom of fireworks, their lights are less bright than, say, roman candles, and they generate hardly any unnecessary light or air pollution, but for all of their apparent shortcomings these tiny insects, when occupying a stand of trees in sufficient number, are far more impressive than even the most magnificent and expensive Fourth of July fireworks display. The show they put on is so dazzling, so mesmerizing, that I must often force myself out of my trance-like state and continue on to the small tent by the creek in which I sleep most hot nights. To my knowledge, there is no rhyme or reason to these insects' flashings, no clear-cut code as far as I have been able to see, only thousands of randomly-timed pinpricks of white light winking on and off in the dark and shadowy gloom of the trees in which they sit. Concert-goers in a blacked-out sports stadium will all try to take a picture of the headlining band when it finally mounts the stage; the efforts of these little bugs have a similar visual effect, but to my knowledge their luminescent signaling is a means to the end of getting laid, while a concert-goer's flashings are little more than proof of his foolish exuberance and having forgotten to properly adjust his camera.

So, this week during which we Americans celebrate the date upon which our nation issued the most important document in the history of mankind, don't waste your money on Chinese-made fireworks – wait until it is dark and then go stare at a tree.

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20 June 2012

on Vader stains

Looking up, just now, I noticed that a board on the roof-mounted window in the western, upper room of this little house's more recent addition is stained with a trapezoidal mark that, if only slightly, resembles the head of Darth Vader (from the film series called Star Wars by Spielberg and Lucas). Then, looking at it more closely, I can make out additional watermarks, on the boards beneath it, that could be mistaken for a body and a flared-out cape, with what could be a type of sword where the right hand would be if this were an actual depiction of a lava-scorched Anakin Skywalker in his life-support suit. Can I now expect acolytes and fans of the Star Wars films to come flocking to my house to see for themselves the likeness of a Sith lord that seems to have appeared as if by magic on the sun-beaten windows of a dilapidated hunting-shack? For years, now, I have made sure to live under the watchful gaze of owls; as birds that represent wise, crafty goddess Athena, I have placed statues or pictures of owls in areas where I frequently live and work, hoping thereby to invoke the blessings, and to curry the favor, of she who once championed such legendary persons as Odysseus, and Hercules. To find suddenly that another god is blessing this humble abode's unused places lifts my heart with song, and puts a smile on my faces.

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