haiku 10 Sep 2018

Fierce fast and playful
Plumed slashes that crave sugar

Bright blurred humming wings

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

on baking cookies

This morning, I ate some of the cookies my housemates had baked. Not the cookies they’d decorated laboriously, of course, but the bastard plain ones, those misshaped and odd.

There’s more dough in the fridge that I intend to bake up into more cookies - to replace the ones I ate this morning. I’d bought the dough yesterday, you see, because someone had been reduced to tears after learning that the last of the first batch of cookies made a couple of days ago had disappeared down my gaping maw at breakfast time.
I’m trying something where I make an effort to fix the grief and heartbreak I cause in this world instead of ignoring it until it subsides. The dough for making sugar cookies sells for fewer than three dollars, which is more expensive than necessary considering one can buy a container of eight sugar cookies perfectly formed and professionally baked for only a single dollar. The extra dollar and a half, it seems, are the price one pays for adding an egg and a stick of butter and then forming and baking the dough oneself, waiting for it to rise, hovering near the oven, and being disappointed when the cookies don’t come out right.

Next time, maybe I’ll buy the cheaper cookies, microwave them for thirty-odd seconds, then announce that I baked cookies and does anyone want to help decorate them?

americanifesto / 場黑麥 / jpr / urbanartopia / whorphan

hydration matters

Oh, the importance of hydration – it cannot be understated! Whether bicycling, gardening, shredding, meditating, or bolting from the cops, the healthy and happy individual knows to hydrate well, and often. In cases of extreme sweating – such as when the clothes are soaked with the body's own moisture or when one is engaged in a prolonged physical activity – the body should be re-hydrated aggressively, and without delay.

Electrolyte tablets work well in such instances, supplying at a cost of roughly 50-cents-each such minerals and complex carbohydrates that the body tends to lose when sweating. It pays to spend a half-dollar on these easily-portable pills that maintain a balanced body-chemistry; dehydrated persons are more irritable than their hydrated counterparts, they tire more quickly, they quit tasks more readily, and they bitch and moan, bumming everyone else out. Less accurate hydration methods – such as making a nice salt or sugar lick in the cup of one's hand – when coupled with the ingestion of a few cups of cool, clear water, will effect hydration, but often at the risk of over-consumption of tasty mounds of unwashed, raw cane sugar, which can lead to weight-gain.

The supreme wet, that one drink which trumps all others, is the fluid of the green coconut. (Please drink only 100% pure green coconut milk, since anything less will be contaminated with refined sugars and plain water.) The primary drawback to green coconut milk is its decreased portability compared to the electrolyte tablet, the second being the relatively high cost of marketing and transporting it to persons living outside of the topics, its natural habitat. Overall, however, this fluid is truly a nectar of the gods, a supreme ally in one's struggle for personal greatness and physical fitness. If neither the electrolyte tablet nor green coconut water is available, hydrate with plain H2O until such time as the piss runs light-yellow or clear, and eat a balanced meal of vegetables, some form of pasta or rice, and protein such as that found in sardines. Dehydration is a serious condition that affects both the mind and the body in serious and debilitating ways, so learn to read your body's warning signs, moistening it regularly.

場黑麥 mentiri manufactorem fecit

on slavery as punishment

  The thirteenth amendment to the US Constitution reads, "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."

  By any measure, this amendment does not abolish slavery - it makes slavery into an acceptable, official form of punishment. If my memory serves me correctly, however, few if any convicted criminals have been sentenced recently to slavery or indentured servitude. The use of slavery as a punitive measure would be more useful in some situations, less in others. A petty thief is fairly likely to renounce his life of crime after a few hard seasons under the lash, while a corporate officer convicted of fraud and embezzlement, a white man accustomed to the finest treatment his ill-won gains could bring him, such a man might just emerge from his grueling months toiling in the hot summer sun a humble and reformed person. Similarly, a man-slaughtering cuckold is unlikely to find redemption in tall swaying fields of sugarcane (a modern industry in which slavery is still widespread today), while the bankers who were allowed to profit enormously from the sale of fraudulent mortgage-backed securities would truly understand the meaning of labor if put to task making self-guided V2 rockets in the caves of central Germany.

  Perhaps is is because so many Americans have enslaved themselves willingly to the whore-gods of small-scale capital gain and conspicuous materialism that slavery is not used more frequently as a punitive measure: the slave is already under the yoke, so allowing her to max out her credit cards and providing her with no better outlet at which to express her abounding creativity and endless potential – in her pursuit of food, shelter, and clothing, the Three Fundamental Components of Safety – no better outlet than some menial, repetitive job, her self-imposed and self-maintained slavery ensures that the fruits of her hard labor are not afforded to her but to the very few persons who sit atop America's pyramid-scheme of capitalism. The slave will be in debt until the day she dies, always struggling to make the minimal payment for things she did not truly need, and could not truly afford.

  I abhor slavery. I do not think any person should ever be put (or put themselves) in chains, but as long as our Constitution states that slavery can be utilized as a way to punish criminals, we should consider using it to bring the false princes of capitalism down a peg or two. The humble are not just the backbone of civil society, they are its savior.

  Until next time, I remain, your most humble and loyal servant, &c.

Ultima Ratio Regum - 場黑麥 John Paul Roggenkamp