haiku 15 Jun 2018

Endless happy strength
Slobbered toys dropped at our feet
Dogs are man’s best mate

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

haiku 21 May 2018

Like grapes on the vine
Plump with juice and clustered close
Does man live life best

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

haiku 7 Mar 2018

Fernab der Wärme
Von Armut dicht umgeben
Ist man trotzdem frei

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

dreamstate writing 28 Feb 2018

[This dream occurred at roughly 7am, after I had crawled back into bed following completion of all twelve steps of my morning qigong meditation.]

We were driving down a steep hill in a grey vehicle. I was in the passenger seat greatly concerned that we would crash into the debris that dotted the grassy hill - beams and bars of steel, piles of sandstone blocks, and stacks of cut wood. At the top of a rise we stopped, where I voiced my concerns to the driver, who merely stared forward, his face an unreadable mien. Below the rise stood the first tee of a disc-golf course next to a dead tree, but my companion turned and walked back up the way we’d come. I followed him back upward onto a dirt path that lead along a ridge covered in snow, from which we surveyed the surrounding countryside of cultivated fields, scattered woods, and distant farm houses.

Walking back down to the tee, we came upon a half dozen other persons kitted out for disc golf. Somewhere nearby but out of sight a person was screaming with horrible urgency, which scared me enough that I ran for shelter. The formerly dead tree had grown tremendously, great reaching tendrils of a hardened, textured, grey plastic that dug back into the ground, forming a wall. Finding my exit blocked, I turned to find the others standing close by, a massive newcomer in their midst. (He reminded me of a figure from my childhood, a giant scotsman dressed in battle fatigues.) The newcomer apologized for the screaming in a way that took my fear away, at which point the dream changed radically.

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

haiku 5 Feb 2018

Its exploding guts
Contain strength to transport man
And all his produce

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

haiku 2 Feb 2018

Firm yet yielding too
The wellspring of man, and joy
Oh to plumb its depths

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

haiku 22 Jan 2018

The thick new lake-ice
Strong enough to bear man’s weight
Will be liquid soon

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

decks grip shipping by @worshipskateboards

sticker graffiti street art [by artists @worshipskateboards] found 2016 in Boston, MA, that depicts a man wearing a gas mask, an aiming reticle, and these decipherable alphanumerics: worship skateboards dot com decks free grip free shipping
[ americanifesto / 場黑麥 / jpr / urbanartopia / whorphan ]

haiku 6 Oct 2017

Blowing winds fly birds;
Earth, on its hurtling orbits,
Carries man starward

americanifesto / 場黑麥 / jpr / urbanartopia / whorphan

on getting news

The man got his news from one source, and one source only. He didn’t need to diversify his sources, because “This is America, daggonit, and as an American in America I’m allowed to do as I please.” The talking heads appearing on his favorite conservative-leaning television station told him everything he needed to know, and he liked it that way.

He also listened to his wife, of course, who sometimes passed along knowledge and advice gained from her circle of friends and family. Which meant he got news from at least two sources. He also listened to the pastor of his church, of course, and read such bible verses as appeared on the mobile application a grandchild had installed on his phone. Which meant he got news from at least four sources. He also listed to some of his conservative-leaning friends, whose opinions tended, at times, to match his. Which meant he got news from at least eight sources.

And yet, when pressed, he insisted that he got his news from one source, and one source only. The man was fearful, you see, and stubborn. He had learned to stick to his guns no matter what. Even if it meant being wrong, and lying to himself, and riding roughshod over the gut-knowledge that he was acting foolishly. Even if it meant being cruel to others, and attacking them personally because of their views. Because, in America, where the gentle nonconformist gets steamrolled daily by ten million angry yes-men, corporations don’t profit when people are open-minded or learn from mistakes.

americanifesto / 場黑麥 / jpr / urbanartopia / whorphan

dreamstate writing 3 April 2017

(After my pre-dawn qigong practice I had crawled back into bed, at which point these dreams occurred. It had had been a difficult, trying practice, the right side of my brain raging and intrusive.)

I was sitting with a blonde-haired girl on a concrete sidewalk next to an asphalted motorway. We were on the top of a low hill. It was bright, daytime; the sky was blue. Brick structures stood across the road to our front left and farther down the rise to our right rear. Walking paths had been worn into the scrub grasses that covered the now-empty lots around us where buildings had once stood. My bicycle lay in the grass behind us, and some part me remembers having just left a cluster of abandoned and crumbling single-storey buildings somewhere nearby.

A person drove past in a rocket-powered sled of some sort, gunning the engine to maintain speed. Though it was a warm spring day there was still enough snow on the motorway to allow the the sled to slide along quickly, without its steel skis kicking up sparks. I pointed it out to my companion, who seemed nonplussed, saying something like “Oh yeah, that’s a...” (I forget the name she used for the contraption.)

The next thing I remember was being in a house with colorful walls, watching a couple - a man and woman I knew well - getting ready to venture forth on an outing. They bustled back and forth within the large kitchen where I too stood, gathering things and talking to each other in quiet, friendly tones. Bright, golden light streamed into their abode from windows set into its thick outer walls to my left, warming the parquet flooring and wooden kitchen furniture. To my right was an inner wall painted an earthy red. The two were dressed in mismatched but colorful clothing, leggings and long-sleeved undershirts under shorts and t-shirts. Both wore what appeared to be straw hats with bandanas tied around their chins to keep the hats in place. They vacated the structure through a door to my rear, leaving me behind. I went to a cupboard at the far end of the room where I knew I would find a vacuum-sealed coffee thermos and a rolled up yoga-mat. The items were indeed there. I spoke with a companion, the blonde-haired girl perhaps, explaining something to her as I took out the items. I remembered, then, that I had similar items elsewhere, and put them carefully back into the cupboard.

Realizing that I had other places to be, I exited into an inner courtyard with red walls. Rectangular stones paved the courtyard, which was littered with wheeled contraptions, ancient wooden pushcarts perhaps. As I was walking toward the gate that led to the outside, I passed under a broad arch that led to the exit. In the adobe above my head, directly in the center of the arch, was an opening that appeared to have been hastily-patched with a rusted ventilation register, into which I peered, finding however little of interest.

americanifesto / JPR / whorphan / 場黑

my inner thighs

​The old Muslim man at the end of our street liked to massage my inner thighs. He owned a warung, a combination of general store and roadside eatery, that served Halal foods and traditional beverages such as sweet iced tea and hot orange juice. A few blocks away sat the Canggu Permai local mosque, and on Sundays his restaurant would be filled with pious eaters still decked out in their sarongs and cylindrical black hats.

On a Thursday, I walked to the corner from my small efficiency apartment down the gang, saying hello to him on my way past. I got a take-away portion of rice, tofu, and vegetables and was headed back out when he padded the seat next to him, smiling invitingly. Uncomfortable with his physical intimacy, I had been avoiding him for many weeks, always claiming to be busy, but that day I decided to humor him. The left side of his body had been lamed by stroke, but his right arm was strong, the fingernails on that hand long, and sharp.

As soon as I sat down he leaned over and got to work. “No good, no good,” he said as he was digging his nails into the varicose veins that run up the inside of my right thigh. “You must come to me for massage, more often.” Wincing from the pain caused by his sharp nails digging into the tender flesh of my inner thighs, I looked up and made eye-contact with a group of Javanese construction workers building a house across the street. All four of them had ceased their labors to stare at the uncommon sight of a tall, blond, Ynki surfer getting his sensitives rubbed by an elderly, partially paralyzed, Balinese-Muslim restaurateur. A couple of hijab-clad young ladies perched atop a motorized scooter rode past, their eyebrows rising in apparent wonderment. The absurdity of the situation overwhelmed me; I started laughing. Such was my outpouring joy that Bapak Resto was soon laughing with me, our deep belly laughs shaking the makeshift bamboo bench upon which we sat.

Within moments, the old man’s son came running out, wide-eyed with terror. Apparently, he thought his father was having another stroke. At that, I took my leave, shaking hands with and bowing deeply toward my ailing masseuse, whom I visited at least once a week, thereafter.

americanifesto / JPR / whorphan / 場黑麥

men make moans

Recently, while out disc-golfing in a nearby state park, some friends and I came across a guy and his gal being professionally photographed. The couple would walk a few paces, fall into each others' arms, kiss, hug, and lean, generally acting in the manner of drunken fools with smiles plastered on their faces. Then, as we were kicking through the dry leaves trying to find our discs, the man got down on one knee, took the girl's left hand in his, and pretended to slide a ring onto her finger. I have never been married, I do not plan to ever get married, and I don't think much of the ordeal; therefore, I put my head down, kept walking, and ignored the love-fest going on up the hill. Two of my companions, however, an overweight man in his late thirties and his overweight son, upon seeing the man drop to one knee, began to moan and coo and aw, punctuating their girlish behavior by stopping in their tracks and applauding. The love-struck man then stood up and made it clear through a few brief words and hand gestures that he was not in the act of proposing and that he and his betrothed lass were merely having their pictures taken as if they were, which dampened my companions' spirits considerably. When, later, I asked the man and his son why they had applauded the lovers' actions, they said because they thought it was “Nice.”

At sometime in the past, I fell for the lie that I had to express my emotions out loud and show everyone my sensitive side, that my feelings were things that had to be expressed and talked about, that vulnerability was a masculine virtue. I have found the exact opposite to be true: the more I have tried to express my feelings, the less control I've had over them, and the more I've tried to show my sensitive side, the sooner my past girlfriends have left me. In part, I blame modern Western society's lack of manhood rituals for teaching boys how to become men, rituals in which their role in society is explained to them and the dos and don'ts of the self-respecting male are spelled out. I've had to try to figure these rules out for myself, stumbling blindly down one dead-end after the next; I wouldn't have minded being suspended from a tree by hooks looped under my pectoral muscles and beaten with buffalo femurs so long as, afterwards, my uncles had told me what was up. As far as why Western men have begun to act in the manner of women, research points, in part, to our increased exposure to plastics: we eat off them, heat them in microwaves, wear them, sleep in them, and add them to our soaps, poisoning our bodies in subtle yet powerful ways and causing our boy children's genitalia to shrink. In part I also blame our society's obesity rates, with expanding waistlines signaling men's bodies to increase estrogen production, Mother Nature cursing pear-shaped dudes to act as if they were women. (I have no problem with women, or with women acting womanly, only when men do the same.)

Whenever I see couples acting romantically and looking at each other with stars in their eyes, with hands tightly intertwined and cheeks flushing with excitement, I immediately think of Doug Stanhope's bit regarding the ultimate conclusion to every single such instance of foreplay, that being male ejaculation. All the chocolates in the world, and all the bunches of roses, all the time spent talking on the phone, and all the pronouncements such as “I miss you” and “I love you” lead to one thing: the man shooting his sperms into or onto the girl's body. (I am neither gay nor lesbian, and so I cannot really speak to homosexual liaisons.) Since getting in shape, simplifying my life, and putting myself through a number of manhood rituals, I have found it easier to reject the old ways and to replace them with ones that play to my inherent masculine strengths; next time, then, I'll skip the foreplay and go straight to sleep. Mahalo.

mentiri factorem fecit © 場黑麥

images from L.A.

on holding grudges

Since moving to this small, blue-collar town and making friends with such few open-minded people as here live, I have had the good fortune of making the acquaintance of someone who holds grudges. I say Making The Acquaintance Of instead of Befriend because, just yesterday, this individual chose to respond to my pointing out, in jest, a typo he had made on a popular social-networking-site by compounding this slight jab on top of all of the other confrontations we have had in the last six months and letting the cauldron of hatred that seems to burn within his chest boil over.

It all started about six months ago, when he and I and a few others would go out for friendly disc-golf matches and he began to curse out any other person who made a good throw while also being verbally self-abusive every time he threw poorly, which accounted perhaps for 85% of his attempts. After a couple of afternoons of getting told to go fuck myself and that I was a bastard and a fucking asshole for having thrown a circular piece of plastic through the air in such a was as to have it land close to an upright, basket-equipped metal pole, I told this man – let us call him Wilson – that his negativity was poisoning the group's fun, leading to an overall dampening of of the collective mood, and would he not please keep his anger and resentment to himself and not keep cursing at everybody all the time? Wilson, who claims to be a follower of the One Love mentality espoused by such musicians as Bob Marley, instantly went on the defensive, causing everyone so much grief for the next few days that the others in our disc-golfing group and I decided it best not to invite him to our friendly matches anymore, given his proclivity to whine, moan, and belly-ache every time someone did well or he did not.

The second major confrontation between this worthless whorphan and Mr. Wilson came about two months ago, when, after he had been telling a story to me and a number of other people during a weekend bout of drinking, I cautioned him to wear sunblock if he should happen to be out in the sun for the amount of time he had claimed to be in his story. Being from Western Africa and having relatively dark skin, Wilson became once again defensive, immediately and with great passion calling into doubt my knowledge of What It Means To Be Black (whatever that means), even asking me if I, in my life, had ever been black, or if I had ever seen the masses of his fellow Africans all out perambulating in the sun lacking hats or long-sleeved shirts, in far more words telling me that I did not know what the fuck it was I was talking about. Never backing down from my position, I pointed out to Wilson that, since he is a human being and since all human skin can suffer skin cancer if exposed too long to solar radiation, he would do well to protect his skin from the sun so as to lead a long and healthy life, whereupon he began to curse me and to call me many bad names, puffing up his chest and treating me with much disdain for a number of weeks after that.

Having pondered my actions and deciding it best for me to keep my dumb fucking mouth shut, I have done just that, staying quiet and not seeking fault with the man, letting him espouse whatever strange and nonsensical views he, a grown adult, should wish to espouse. Sensing that Wilson seemed to be doing the same – generally ignoring me and not spending too much time in my presence – and seeing that we had sat together amiably during a get-together on the 4th of July, I figured that, just as I had done, he had laid aside any past grievances and gotten over any latent animosity toward this corn-fed white boy. In response, however, to a jab, a pointing out of a word he had misspelled on-line, that word being “the,” he launched into a litany of hatred against me, saying to an intermediary that I would get what I deserved for being so know-it-all and smarmy toward him, and that this my latest latest slight was simply too much, one of too many twigs thrown atop the teetering stack of hate-sticks he seems to have been carrying around with him since that one fateful day of disc-golfing.

While I do not fear the man physically, I have come to fear the human ego in general, and to keep a sharp eye out for a bruised ego, which is prone to extraordinary violence, to stabbing persons in the back and letting the air out of their bicycle tires. In the wake of Wilson un-friending of me on Facebook over the weekend, I could perhaps try to arrange a sit-down with him, a having-it-out session during which he might be able to call me all the names he wants to and, perhaps by letting go of his hatred and allowing it to flow from himself mightily, to dislodge some of the sand that has become trapped in his vagina; I might as well do nothing, however, since I cannot in any way control how Wilson reacts to my words or presence. He is a big boy, and he has the power to decide for himself when to be angry and when to be contented, when to fill his being with hatred, and when to let One Love infect every ounce of his soul. Three cheers for keeping quiet! Mahalo.

場黑麥 mentiri manufactorem fecit