on idling enemies

From oil – as in crude oil, sweet crude, oil wells, and the British Petroleum / Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill of 2011 – we make gasoline. From oil we also get plastics, which are used to make water bottles, baby toys, toothbrushes, car seats, laptop cases, lampshades, bottle-caps, pens, linoleum flooring, clothing, and shoes, to name a few examples. Oil is a precious, strategic national resource of the United States of America, one every citizen is duty-bound to protect and conserve. Therefore, the patriotic citizen rarely allows his gasoline-powered automobile to idle for longer than 30 seconds, since idling past 30 seconds compared to turning off and later restarting the vehicle wastes gasoline (according to new information), and gasoline, as it is a derivative of oil, is a strategic national resource that must be protected and conserved. (Idling while stuck in traffic may seem unavoidable until one remembers the existence of gasoline-electric hybrid engines and sees bicyclists riding by freely and exuberantly.)

The patriotic citizen educates himself about his use of this precious national resource – he does not waste oil, because wasting it would require us to send America's brave men and women to fight more wars of aggression against more oil-rich nations (such as Iran). If a person wanted to harm the United States of America and to make her less able to provide for the common defense and the general Welfare, that person would drive an unnecessarily large, gas-guzzling vehicle. The person who drives a vehicle disproportionate to his supposed need to get around (such as an unaccompanied person driving a king-sized pickup truck) is effectively an enemy of the state: he burns more gas moving himself around than he might if he were to make a minor personal sacrifice and drive a smaller car with a smaller engine. (Today's Ynki accepts readily the lie that he might drive his car to work, drive his car to the store, drive his car to the gym, and drive his car to school, all without consequence; we Americans, however, can no longer afford to be lazy, worthless people who fucking drive everywhere.) In order to protect his nation's future (and to make sure the troopers fighting this nation's wars have enough gasoline for their military vehicles), the true American patriot bicycles whenever possible.

Life requires water; without water, there is no life; without water, humans die. Because it is a component essential to maintaining the general Welfare, and since it is needed to effect the Safety and Happiness of the American citizen (which, according to the Declaration of Independence, is the primary purpose of government), water is one of this nation's precious national resources. Businesses that waste water are enemies of the state, companies that deliberately poison aquifers are enemies of the state, and persons who throw water away are enemies of the state. Persons who allow the faucet to run while they brush their teeth; who run the tap while shaving; who let a shower fun for twenty minutes for it to warm up; who hose down a driveway instead of sweeping it with a fucking broom; who maintain lawns in the desert (instead of planting drought-resistant, native species); who toss cigarette butts into lakes; these persons are all enemies of the state. Please, dear reader, if you consider yourself a patriot, please examine your use of Earth's precious resources, and adjust your habits so as to reduce the risk of future suffering. He who sacrifices for the common good can rightly call himself a patriot, unlike the person who desecrates the American flag by gluing it to his clothing or pasting it to the door of his car. Liberty frowns upon they who idle wastefully.

場黑麥 ioanni elymucampus fecit

on protocols

A person who follows daily routines chooses a certain set of protocols to regulate her life. Protocols can bring about either positive or negative change, but rarely both. To clarify, the author provides two scenarios. First, a man skips breakfast, drives to work in a motorized vehicle, sits at a desk all day without regular movement breaks, eats a large lunch, drives home, eats a large dinner, and then watches television until he checks the time and forces himself to go to sleep. Second, a woman arises before dawn, does an hour of yoga, eats a moderately-sized breakfast, bicycles to work, gets up once every couple of hours simply to walk around, eats a moderately-sized lunch, bicycles home, eats at least one fruit and one vegetable with her dinner, spends an hour being creative (writing, drawing, molding with clay, etc.), reads for an hour or two from four different books on unrelated subjects, watches half of a feature film, and collapses into her bed a few hours after sunset.

In my experience, the first scenario plays itself out too often in America, today. So many of us drive everywhere we go, eat more than we would need to satisfy our hunger, and spend our time staring mindlessly at flickering, fancy boxes. The protocols followed by the first person are likely to lead to diseases associated with overeating and lack of exercise; after a few decades, the creative parts of his mind will rebel against his refusal so do anything more productive with his life than simply working to eat, drive, and watch TV. He will suffer from a debilitating mid-life crisis, during which he will scramble to lead a healthier and happier life. His attempts, however, will become fouled up in the old protocols; he will falter, fail, and retreat into his bad old habits. In contrast, the person in the second scenario leads a life she knows will satisfy her inner need for enduring personal meaningfulness while keeping her digestive system healthy and her muscles sharp and twitching. Her protocols celebrate the majesty of the human spirit and glorify the fathomless might of both mind and body. By having studied for decades, she is bursting with knowledge but clever enough not to force it upon others; by having disciplined herself in terms of consumption, she needs little food, less gasoline, and almost no commercialized content to keep herself happy.

It may seem difficult to live a life similar to the person in the second example, but, with a few small adjustment to one's daily protocols, anything but the most absurd is possible. (Unassisted human flight, for example, is out). Via the epigenetic superstructure, both we and the environments we inhabit affect which of our genes are read and to what degree they are expressed. By changing the parameters of our daily lives and gradually adopting healthier routines, we can fortify the foundations of the deep and abiding Happiness that yearns to hover at the center of our every act, our every decision, our every breath. To examine one's daily protocols is to take the first step in making sure they are worthwhile, wholesome, and good. A saying from the business world comes to mind: They who are not evolving are dying. Plant the seeds of tomorrow's joy by turning off your television, today. Mahalo.

mentiri factorem fecit © 場黑麥

what I'm missing

Over Thanksgiving, I took time to watch some TV, something I rarely do. I did this in part because I was invited to by my host, who wanted to kill some time before our feast of turkey and gravy and butternut squash, and in part to see what life is like for the tens of millions of average Americans who make it their habit. As part of my efforts to make myself a better and wiser person, I have been reading books on a wide range of topics and generally avoiding wasteful and IQ-diminishing activities such as the mindless consumption of packaged content, so I was excited to run with the crowd for a moment and check out what TV had to offer. My host and I watched a show about tattoo artists competing to see who could perform best under pressure, best on camera, best before a panel of judges. Thankfully, the show had been taped, so we could fast-forward over the commercials; thankfully, dinner was served before any of us had to suffer through too much of it.

Since taking the first steps toward self-sufficiency by running most of my household from a bank of 4 deep-cycle marine batteries fed by 6 solar panels, I have restricted my personal viewing time to but a few hours a week – I hook up the 750 watt inverter to watch only one movie at a time, whereupon I detach it from the battery, thus shutting everything down. I do not veg regularly on the couch flipping through channels; I follow neither show nor series, episode nor finale, nor do I bring up watching TV in conversation or stick around if someone else does. In short, at the mere mention of television, I become a butt-hurt curmudgeon. And so I was shocked at how stressful watching the boob-tube has become, how stupid I felt afterward, and how many more commercials there seemed to be now than when I watched it regularly just a few years ago. It is as if producers, studios, and networks had baited the viewing public into watching compelling and interesting shows and then switched formats to reflect their ultimate goal, that being to trick the American people into thinking they were having fun when they were in actuality being force-fed one advertisement after the next in bewilderingly frequent intervals, minds rotting while waist-lines expanded, ambition draining away while creativity was crushed under the jack-boot of rerun content.

Before this thankfully brief exposure, I had begun to wonder if I was missing something important, if I had erred in canceling my cable TV service, if I were somehow worse off for swimming against the crowd by not succumbing to TV's mind-numbing allure. Today, however, my curiosity is stilled, my wonder has abated, and I am confident in one thing: I am better off for having avoided television these past few years. As a person who has glimpsed the eternal silence of the Great Vast Crushing Nothingness and lived to tell the tale, I have a decent understanding of the preciousness of human existence; therefore, my decision to try to better myself as a person, as a scholar, as a linguist, and as a writer rather than waste my short life glued to a self-illuminated, talking rectangle appears to be bearing fruit, if only slowly. By no amount of talking, warning, cajoling, begging, demanding, nagging, or urging will I ever convince anyone else whom I care about to join me in ceasing to watch TV, in preserving a shred of self-respect and personal dignity, or in saving the self by switching off the tube; all forms of salvation – even ones that are so simply accomplished – come from the realization that there are always better ways than the current path, that nothing worth its while is easy, and that the hardest things are the most rewarding. So, please, cancel your cable subscriptions, dust off a book, and start living well again. Mahalo.

mentiri factorem fecit © 場黑麥

on the proxy identity

The American citizen is lost, floundering in a sea of substitute identities. It is not really his fault, however – he has learned it from his parents, from television, from his great aunts, step-uncles, and distant neighbors. We lack in this nation even a loose consensus on What It Means To Be An Upstanding And Self-Respecting Individual; no organization has stoop up and said, If you do this and that you will be different from everyone else and not walk around wearing the same shirt bought at the same giant discount retailer as everyone else. Our unique national character is being watered down by those goods as are sold at only a handful of retail locations that can be found in nearly every city, town, and village from coast to shining coast; our individual taste, our very ability to be one-in-a-million, has been substituted for faceless homogenization by corporate marketing committees who make hefty profits by paying overseas manufacturers to mass-produce cheap products featuring pictures of the hottest movies and books and then convincing us through a ceaseless avalanche of advertising to buy them (while lobbying to keep it illegal for the American people to ourselves make our own products printed with the same pictures).

Instead of delving into the nether-regions of our souls, and finding therein peace, or enlightenment, today's American busies himself with memorizing football statistics and with discussing those statistics with others; instead of making sketches or painting a picture of the bright and verdant out-of-doors, he watches hour upon hour of television while his latent artistic ability sits dormant, and unused; instead of educating and understanding himself to the extent that he can make intelligent, non-sports related conversation about a breadth of topics, he purchases – at a significant mark-up – a name-brand motorcycle and the name-brand clothing to go with it. But, it seems, people will choose the path of least resistance every time, doing whatever everyone else is doing and getting really, really mad when someone points out that they are acting as if they were sheep being led to the slaughter. And a slaughter it is – more like a sacrifice – with our best talents wasted on leisure, our best minds ruined by TV, our best personalities crushed by the petty demands of consumption-driven capitalism, our best bodies ridden to oblivion on the backs of terrorism-supporting motorcycles. We may have once been a proud and shining People, but, today, we are little more than clones bought and sold by our avaricious corporate slave-masters; America delenda est.

場黑麥 mentiri factorem fecit

on idling enemies

From oil (as in crude oil, sweet crude, Big Oil, oil wells, the British Petroleum Gulf Disaster of 2011, and the like) we get gasoline. From oil we also get plastics (which are used to make water bottles, baby toys, toothbrushes, car seats, laptop cases, lampshades, bottlecaps, pens, linoleum, clothing, shoes, and the like). Oil is a precious and a strategic national resource of the United States of America, and it is the duty of each and every citizen to protect his nation's precious resources. Therefore, the patriotic citizen never allows his gasoline-powered vehicle to idle for longer than 30 seconds, since idling past 30 seconds compared to turning off and later restarting the vehicle wastes gasoline, and gasoline, as it is a derivative of oil, is a strategic national resource. (Idling while stuck in traffic may seem unavoidable until one sees bicyclists flying exuberantly by, unopposed.)

The patriotic citizen educates himself about his use of this precious national resource – he does not waste it, because wasting it would mean that the brave men and women fighting America's war would perhaps not have enough gasoline to complete their missions. If a person were to wish to harm the United States of America and to make her less able to provide for the common defence and the general Welfare, that person would drive an unnecessarily large, gas-guzzling vehicle. The person who drives a vehicle disproportionate to his “need” to get around (such as a lone person driving a Ford 350 or a Dodge 3500) is an enemy of the state, because he burns more gas moving himself around than he might if he were to make a small personal sacrifice and drive a smaller car with a smaller engine. (Today's homo non-sapient accepts readily the lie that she might commute to her job by car, drive her car to the store, drive her car to the gym, drive her car to school, all without consequence; at least in America, we can no longer afford to be lazy, worthless people who drive our cars fucking everywhere.) In order to protect his nation's future (and to make sure the troopers fighting our wars have enough gasoline for their military vehicles), the true American patriot rides a bicycle whenever possible.

Life requires water. Without water, there is no life. Without water, humans die. Because it is a component essential to maintaining the general Welfare, and since it is needed to effect the Safety and Happiness of the American citizen, water is one of this nation's precious and strategic national resources. Businesses that waste water are enemies of the state. Persons who waste water are enemies of the state. Persons who allow the faucet to run while they brush their teeth; who run the tap while shaving; who hose down a driveway instead of sweeping it with a motherfucking Broom; who maintain lawns in the desert (instead of planting drought-resistant, native species); who toss cigarette butts into lakes; these persons are all enemies of the state. Please, dear reader, if you consider yourself a patriot, please examine your use of America's precious resources, and adjust your habits so as to improve this country's ability to survive in the future and to fulfill the parameters of the Constitution.

場黑麥 ioanni elymucampus fecit

on velocipedal locomotion

  Moving your body from place to place on a velocipede has many advantages over using a motor vehicle, or walking. To ride bicycle, to mash velocipede, is to issue a clear and open declaration of your physical exuberance, hurtling, sweaty proof that you are in both good health and high spirits. During your travels, you shall learn the rhythm and character of your region's unique micro-climates (so that you might weather the noon-time heat in a cool and shaded grove). You shall search without pause for routes lacking in car traffic, those newly paved, or routes superior in similar ways; your city will reward you with unique views of treasures previously overlooked. You will see and be able to explore more secret places more conveniently than if you were driving in a car, while covering far more ground than if you were on foot. Your iron horse requires no large metered parking space, nor will you have to pay someone to watch it while you are away. The only exhaust vapor you create is your own vital breath, and the only waste heat you produce drips as sweat from your ruddy and pliant skin. You will sleep well at night knowing that you dragged yourself across the phaltscape burning only the fuel found in your own tender guts.

  As a silent propulsion system, bicycling is similar to the Russian caterpillar drive of myth, identical to it in all ways but that the Commie bastards were fusion-powered. To move your body from place to place without a nuclear reactor takes time and effort, and bicycling is effort simple, honest, and pure. Dust off your old bicycle, you lazy carbuncle, and help us give those stinking Reds what for.

  Spes Mea In Ratio Est - 場黑麥 John Paul Roggenkamp