Sandy boon or bust

Without doubt, both major-party political candidates will try to use the devastation and damage caused by erstwhile hurricane Sandy to their advantage. The incumbent Barack Obama will likely point to the rapid response time and widespread preparedness of thousands of emergency personnel as proof of his competency, as an indication of the methods by which he will tackle the nation's less immediate issues such as high unemployment, growing national debt, and our crumbling infrastructure. The challenger Mitt Romney will likely point to the sluggish federal response and lack of adequate leadership by the current administration as proof that our sitting president must be replaced, that he has a tendency to sit around lackadaisically while America drifts rudderless through the shoals of catastrophe, that his policies have failed, and that he is the greatest threat to the Safety of the People since redcoat placed boot on our soil.

I listened to NPR and checked the news regularly in the days and hours before Sandy made landfall, and, to my knowledge, Mr. Obama analyzed and calculated and fact-checked the storm as much and as thoroughly as he did his primary opponent in their third debate together. (Glaringly omitted from this debate were a couple of the other persons contending for the presidency, among them Dr. Jill Stein and former governor Gary Johnson, who were barred from attending the event and from sparring with their super-slick counterparts by the sinister and undemocratic machinations of the Commission on Electoral Debates a freedom-hating organization controlled jointly by the Democrat and Republican parties.) In all likelihood, Mr. Romney will blame his foe for failing to have prevented every tree from falling and every transistor from shorting out, for not acting quickly enough in his efforts to warn us sodden souls hardest hit by this frankenstorm of its exact path and true destructiveness, for worrying more about controlling the narrative and looking good on camera than visiting shelters and keeping hope alive. Hopefully, however, this time around, Mitt won't blame the few score deaths on the president (as he did following the tragic events in Benghazi) or insinuate that they would not have occurred under his watch, although if were to make such claims, he might alienate a few more swing voters and put himself out of the race altogether, which, in the long run, would work out just fine for liberty and equality here in America.

There is a chance that while he is out smiling condescendingly and surveying the shattered hovels of commoners the Republican challenger will fall into a ditch filled with sewage-mixed seawater and catch such a nasty cold that he will be bedridden for these last few days before the election, sparing us the torture of listening to his pitying smarm and of having to puzzle through the mounting mysteries of his constantly-shifting viewpoints. We shall see how things shake out once the storm of the century has passed. If you are interested in avoiding such disasters in the future, vote Green Party! Mahalo.

© mentiri factorem fecit (場黑麥)

no superior state

America's system of elections is broken. Instead of all citizens of voting age sharing equal responsibility and enjoying equal privilege in the selection of their president, certain battleground states have emerged (Ohio and Florida are two examples), states in which political parties and their candidates spend disproportionately large amounts of time and treasure, states that have been granted greater power than their neighbors and fellow members of this oh-so-precious Union. If we elect to the presidency a person willing and able to fix this system, we might all be once again be treated equally; if we elect to the presidency a person with a proven track-record of beating back the ever-creeping tendrils of government, one who will veto unnecessary and wasteful laws and fight the influence of deep-pocketed corporations, we might once again look at ourselves in our mirrors with pride, basking in the knowledge that we are all equal under the law, that not ass nor pachyderm meddles in the Peoples' affairs, that the opinions of not Buckeye nor Cornhusker are valued greater than the political views of Blue Mountaineer or Big Skywatcher. We need a president who will make things better, not worse. We need a president who will sacrifice his chances of re-election so as to battle entrenched corruption and the stranglehold of the war-mongering lobbyist.

For the aforementioned reasons, in hopes of breaking the gridlock of power in Washington D.C., and desiring to throw off the mantle of federal oppression, I endorse governor Gary Johnson for president. For too long have we considered votes for third-party candidates wasted votes; for too long have we tried to choose between the lesser of two evils instead of casting our ballots for that person who we know will reinstate the Constitution's tender grasp, who we know will end our illegal wars of aggression, who we know will restore the Liberty granted us by the Declaration of Independence. Please, dear reader, fight the choke hold of business-as-usual, smash your television-set to bits, and vote for the only man who will revoke both the Patriot Act and NDAA 2012, pieces of legislation passed by both Republican and Democrat that continue to desecrate the Constitution and destroy the freedom and equality for which this nation was once known. No state is more important than the next, no segment of the population more valuable than its neighbor. Only by fighting for Liberty can we secure for ourselves her Blessings; only by joining together as twigs in a bundle can we guarantee for ourselves the peace and happiness upon which our country was founded. Stand up – speak out – vanquish injustice – vote Libertarian!

© mentiri factorem fecit (場黑麥)

themed, useless crap

A cold war is being waged in this rural Pennsylvania town between the agents of two trumped-up organizations: the Steelers and the Ravens. From Pittsburgh and Baltimore respectively, the televised efforts of these two professional sports teams have so ensnared the imaginations – and, more importantly, the purse-strings – of the hard-working, blue-collar, middle-class denizens of this sad little place as to have hijacked the identities of people who spend what little free time they get eating potato chips, drinking cheap beer, and staring at self-illuminated boxes.

I imagine that the inner monologue of a fan of one of the many over-hyped national football league (NFL) teams goes something like this: “Do I donate to charity and help feed over three million starving American children or do I spend a hundred and fifty dollars on a ten-foot-high flag bearing the logo of my team? Do I perpetuate obesity and sloth within my family by stuffing cheese-doodles into my mouth as I sit on my financed couch with my eyes glued to an enormous television it will take me the next fifteen months to pay off? Do I send my check to an organization fighting poverty in this country's rust-belt or to a cluster of distant Chinamen cranking out solar-powered pathway lights emblazoned with an image of a highly stylized scavenger-bird designed by a wealthy corporation? You know what… fuck the poor, and fuck the kids – I need this overpriced bullshit so I can put it out in my yard and show my neighbor that I favor a different squad of men-in-tights than he does.”

I waste neither time nor money watching professional sports, preferring instead to read books on different and unrelated subjects, preferring instead to expand my mind by teaching myself languages and learning about organic gardening; I memorize neither statistics nor the success-rate of special trick plays, preferring instead to stay silent during useless NFL-related conversations, preferring instead to plumb the depths of my dark and twisted ego in order to bend it to my will, driving addiction and need from my life; I choose not to look on as angry fat dudes run into each other, preferring the freedom of a vigorous bicycle ride over sedentary slavery to a season of two minute warnings. I admit to puffing myself up here, to hoisting myself aloft in an attempt to differentiate myself from pig-skin-loving simpletons; as a Son of the American Revolution, however, and as a self-respecting and productive artist, I cannot afford to waste any more of my precious life on foolhardy pursuits than I have already wasted trying and failing to satisfy the root of mankind's evil, the ego. This, in my humble opinion, is part of the attraction of professional sports: they very often serve as proxy identities for persons too lazy or weak-of-will to do something unique with their lives worth talking about; they give pack-runners whose existence revolves around the act of consumption a topic to discuss that does not have to do with kids, jobs, or failing health. It is wrong of me to judge and to ridicule people for paying top dollar for jerseys or pennants or banners proclaiming that, “This Is Giants Country,” or something similarly absurd; the words I have written here are just as much driven by a darkly thrusting ego as are the shouted cries of thirty thousand star-struck fans. I am a worthless cunt for spending time crafting this article, but these thoughts well up inside me when I am shredding through town on my velocipede, and I know not where else to turn for release. On some level, I don't give a flying fuck (IDGAFF) what other people do, although I wish sometimes they wouldn't be so fucking flagrantly lame. Oh brother.

© mentiri factorem fecit (場黑麥)

no third candidate

Occasionally, while at home or in my car, I listen to NPR, to catch the news and maybe an interesting show or two. In the weeks leading up to the period in this year of 2012 when the electoral collage shall again appoint someone to be president of these United States of America, my local public radio station, WITF, has been focusing much of its attention on this impending appointment, analyzing debates, reporting on the results of different polls, and airing interviews of average citizens and government officials alike. During one segment, this news outlet asked political scientists, pollsters, and focus groups to craft a third-party candidate who might stand a chance of liberating our electoral process from the chains of our current two-party political duopoly (which is effectively a single-party-monopoly, since the asses and the pachyderms are so similar to one another as to be two sides of the same coin). I admit that I only caught the first segment of this show, and part of the second; I did not hear the opinions of the focus groups, only a brief summary thereof; but I fully agreed with the political scientists, who conjured up a candidate bent on freeing America from under the weight of her massively overgrown federal government, a person dedicated to the idea that all persons of legal age should have the right to decide what substances to put into their bodies, be those substances alcohol, hashish, cocaine, tobacco, heroin, or caffeine.

Curiously, however, I did not hear mention of governor Gary Johnson, the candidate for the Libertarian Party in America, who, with a few exceptions, is (with a capital I) the physical embodiment of the the third-party candidate dreamed up by WITF's political scientists. Furthermore, this once-dependable medium failed to mention Dr. Jill Stein, the candidate for America's Green Party, who made such a strong showing at last night's third-party candidates' debate that she has all but won my vote. Pollsters and focus-groups aside (poll numbers are so easily skewed as to make them all but useless, and focus-grouping is for rich people and big corporations that are too risk-averse to make up their own minds), I found it shameful that a public radio group would prove itself so deeply entrenched in the political status-quo as to not even consider mentioning the Libertarian or Green Parties as valid third options for voters sick and tired of America's twin big-business political juggernauts. (It is inconceivable, undemocratic, and unjust that in a land of more than 150,000,000 persons of voting age just 2 political parties have all the power.)

When the wealth of a nation is on the table, the few persons holding the purse-strings will rarely let them go; when the long-term future of a nation is at stake, the fools who got it into the mess in the first place will say anything to shift the blame onto someone else's shoulders. I cannot truly fault WITF, or NPR, for staying with the herd and pretending that debates between but two of the half-dozen candidates contending for the electoral college's appointment to the presidency could in any way change the outcome of the farce that will occur this November 6th. The only hope for America, the only way for us to strip the bloated political machines of their power, is to reshape the entire fabric of this nation; we start by saying, aloud: “This bullshit has gone on for too long”; we start by demanding that the ideals set forth in our Declaration of Independence and Constitution are secured for us diligently and without further waffling; we start by standing out in the cold and in the rain and forcing the slumbering among us back into wakefulness. We can have Liberty, equality, and justice in this land, but only if we are willing to fight for them, every day of our lives. Mahalo.

© mentiri factorem fecit (場黑麥)

on composting poop

A few weeks ago, the poorly-installed plumbing in this modest little home sprung another leak. Not the first but the third dripping section of pipe so far this year, the holes appeared inches from a major and intricate intersection of copper tubing a few feet past the hot water heater. Having already performed two other repair jobs and feeling more than up to the task, I took it upon myself to cut out the entire intersection and replace it with plastic tubing and push-on compression fittings. Naturally, my local home-improvement stores did not have in stock the parts I required, and I am still waiting for the correct parts to be shipped to me from the Internet retailer that sent me the wrong parts two weeks ago and has since been dragging its feet correcting his error. (Seriously, how hard is it to tell a 3/8” compression fitting from a 1/2” one?)

Living without faucet-borne water has forced me to make a number of changes in my life: I now import drinking water in from the outside at a cost considerably greater than that of pumping it up from the well; I now wash my dishes using rain-water collected in a 25-gallon cistern with the same water I use for clothes-washing (which I have been doing by hand in a collection of specially-designed buckets since the beginning of summer, anyway); and, most drastically, I have begun to defecate outside and to compost my feces rather than filling my toilet's reservoir with water from the stream twice or thrice a day (I have begun also to collect my urine instead of just pissing off of the balcony, spreading it over the growing mounds of leaves so as to speed their transformation back into dirt). I have not shit outside regularly for some years now, but beyond my feet getting wet walking through the frigid dew and having to assemble a nest of leaves upon which to catch my soft-serve excrement and with which to carry it over to the nearest composting sites, I find it nearly as enjoyable and not much less convenient than dropping deuces on the porcelain throne.

What, you may be wondering, are some of the benefits of shitting outside and composting one's turds? For one, as I am squatting and hugging my knees I can watch all the little critters as they move about in the grass, which trumps staring at a tile floor or re-reading old copies of Popular Science magazine, any day. A second benefit is the return of all of the unprocessed nutrients and trace elements contained in my shit to Nature's own growth cycle (I will be applying the compost to my gardens, come springtime). A third benefit is that I do not have to haul thirty-pound buckets of muddy water up from the stream multiple times a day, drag those buckets across the living-room carpet, or clean up the spills I make at the toilet's base when trying to pour their contents into a gap a few inches wide that sits four feet up off of the floor. Will I continue this practice once the proper fittings arrive and I can turn my jet-pump back on? I might. Will I choose to believe John Seymour's Guide to Self-Sufficiency, which urges the reader to compost his solid wastes rather than pumping them into subterranean holding tanks filled with bacteria, or will I revert to the old and tired ways and deprive the land of that which it needs, coaxing from it a lessened harvest? Handling feces is not the most pleasant of tasks, but when using a proper nest of fallen leaves or freshly-cut grasses and basking in the knowledge of just how good it is for making things grow, I may, someday, think it OK.

© mentiri factorem fecit (場黑麥)

keeping out friends

Every door in this hunting-shack that leads to the outside has a lock; every night, as I practice my tactile awarenesses by stepping gingerly throughout this hovel with the lights off, in pitch-blackness, I activate these locks one after the other, with a few flicks of my fingers locking out the dark, the cold, and all things unforeseeable. And yet, every night, after basking briefly in the fleeting surety of my false security, I laugh out loud at myself for ever having believed such nonsense in the first place.

Locks only keep out friends and people who might desire to enter one's home but who are too nice to smash in one of its windows. Robbers and thieves are not deterred by locks – they never have been; they never will be; and there is nothing one could ever do, short of encasing one's entire home in a shell of steel-reinforced concrete twenty feet thick and never leaving, that would be able to prevent a dedicated and determined person from gaining access to its dusty interior. (I doubt that even such measures would keep out someone with time, a cutting torch, and a pneumatic jackhammer on his side.) Locking one's doors at night is a good idea, especially where I live out in the sticks where there is really no one else around to watch my door or to keep an eye on things regularly; and few insurance companies are likely to compensate for stolen goods if they discover that exterior doors had been left unlocked; for the most part,however, leaving doors unlocked is a sign of one's abiding faith in the goodness of mankind, a beacon of love to one's neighbors, proof of one's detachment from material goods, and a strong indication of how little value one places on the trappings of the harsh outer world and how greatly one cherishes the tender peace within.

A better writer than I once urged us to invite in anyone who knocks on our doors, to grant entry to any person coming to call – be that person angry or joyful, bearing arms or bringing gifts – into the shadowy recesses of our homes, and, thereby, to allow him to plumb the deepest depths of our buoyant and exuberant souls. I struggle to follow this saying, preferring too often the calm of safety to the excitement of risk, trying too often to erect walls against the messy Great Unknown instead of welcoming it in with open arms. If I have learned anything during the past three-and-a-half decades, however, it is that, no matter how tightly I shut my eyes or stop up my ears, the Universe always finds a way to access those areas I would prefer to keep hidden, and to pierce such veils as my ego tells me I need to keep in place. Slowly, then, and only with considerable effort, am I learning to let go of my fears and to drink as deeply as I can of the horrible beauty of this wonderful thing we call life. Mahalo.

© mentiri factorem fecit (場黑麥)

science & faith

People today who self-proclaim as faithful seem to be hypocrites. Instead of relying on their god to provide them with nourishment, for example, they go shopping at grocery stores and fill their larders with food; instead of trusting in their god's ability to heal them of sickness, they go to doctors and wash their hands with soap; instead of allowing themselves to waste away so as to reach their promised land that much sooner, they brush their teeth and go for walks and care for their own health. If these people were truly faithful, they would not even think of gathering food for themselves but would only eat what happened to fall dead within earshot, trusting that the Great Magnet would fell enough for their bodies to keep on living; if they truly believed, they would let their physical shells rot, caring not for tooth-ache nor for compound fracture nor for the deepest laceration, in the knowledge that all healing comes from that mystical power that cannot ever be named; if they were wholly pure of heart, they would sit quietly with neither attachment nor aversion as the leaves piled up around their feet and the stars wheeled by, high overhead, upon the vast and inky firmament.

I am among the greatest of offenders in these matters, a humble and worthless whorphan too full of ego and malice to still his soul of greed, too wrapped up in life's shiny trappings to focus on the gentle spirit bursting within his loins, blinded to the subtle majesty of the Universe by desire, selfishness, and discontentment. Some day, I hope to shed myself of this peripheral clutter and bask in the glowing rays of god's own pulsating sphincter, but not today, old boy, and certainly not anytime soon, for my faith is too weak, my ambition is too strong, and my adherence to the false parameters of life and death is greater than my capacity for Total Emptiness, known to the Chinese as wu.

Returning to my original point: To live in a house and to drive a car is to rely on science; a car runs on a liquid called gasoline, which burns at a certain rate if the pressure in an engine's combustion chamber is just right; a house keeps the pounding rain and the slanting sleet of off one's head because it has a sloped roof and see-through windows made of glass and wood. To bathe regularly with soap and to refrigerate food is to believe that science works, that its lessons and warnings are true; soap cleans because it is a mildly caustic mixture of animal fats and lye, and food spoils less quickly when it is stored within an air-tight box and blasted with frigid winds. To wear a coat in winter, moreover, is proof of doubt in the Supreme Deity's ability to keep a body from freezing to death, irrefutable evidence that a down-filled covering trumps the warming knowledge of a personal savior, any day. Therefore, the next time you see someone mount a high horse and start squawking about how pure and righteous is his god, remind him that his house, his cellphone, his car, and his clothes, are all proof of the failure of his personal faith; but beware, for religious fanatics – regardless of their faith, be they Christian, Muslim, or Hindu – are dangerous people best avoided. Mahalo.

© mentiri factorem fecit (場黑麥)