haiku 30 May 2017

Dear hacker-spammers:
Pleas target corporations.
Leave small fry alone.

americanifesto / JPR / whorphan / 場黑麥

haiku 28 May 2017

Surrounding oneself
With friends who do not practice
Will lead one astray.

americanifesto / JPR / whorphan / 場黑麥

haiku 25 May 2017

Encourage an act
And it will soon become set
As if in concrete.

americanifesto / JPR / whorphan / 場黑麥

haiku 23 May 2017

As knowledge widened
Upon a new foundation
Confusion vanished .

americanifesto / JPR / whorphan / 場黑麥

haiku 18 May 2017

Is it, then, just a
Random coincidence that
We would meet at all?

americanifesto / JPR / whorphan / 場黑麥

haiku 16 May 2017

Squirrels live in the walls.
Or are big rats nesting there?
Something moves, unseen...

americanifesto / JPR / whorphan / 場黑麥

logs of milk

The elephants paused to drink, ripping bark off of nearby trees. Men with guns had been chasing them for days, and the giants could not afford to dally.

The male’s tusks gleamed in the moonlight, meters-long logs of milk-white ivory. With a look of his weeping eye he conveyed his plan; with a flick of his trunk he caressed the face of his young calf before charging back, the way they had come. His mate lifted her trunk in farewell, then trotted off along a path of hard-baked clay.

The calf watched until its father’s shadow melded into the background of night, then turned to follow its mother. Soon - too soon - the mother heard the sounds of angry trumpeting, and sustained gunfire.

americanifesto / JPR / whorphan / 場黑麥

on taxing horses

In keeping with efforts to make up for taxes that are no longer being collected due to technological innovation, the U.S. Congress is debating a novel solution. Colloquially known as Horse Obsolescence Recovery Sequester Enactment, or H.O.R.S.E., HR-23.9947 (F) will require motor-vehicle-owners to pay a tax on each ‘horse’ of ‘horsepower’ their car or truck can muster.

“Not that long ago,” said Thorsten Hilddebrandt, congressman from New York (D), “one would have needed to employ scores of groomsmen and stable-boys to keep two hundred horses healthy, strong, and ready to go at a moment’s notice. With modern automobiles, however, all of those jobs and tax revenues vanish.” An apparently bipartisan issue, H.O.R.S.E. seems to be gaining traction on both sides of the aisle. “The tax burden must fall equally, no matter if people choose to drive a car or ride a horse,” said Barbara D. Geirhoff-Ferd, a Republican congresswoman from Florida. “Taking care of horses was a good, taxable job for many unskilled and lower-class individuals. America can no longer afford to let people who drive cars not shoulder their fair share of society’s burdens.”

Unsubstantiated rumors indicate that laws will soon be passed to steeply tax a wide array of cell-phone applications that take taxable jobs away from human calculators, map-makers, telephone-switchboard personnel, camera operators, board-game makers, notepad and pencil manufacturers, FM radio broadcasters, astronomers, filmmakers, and many others.

americanifesto / JPR / whorphan / 場黑

dreamstate writing 09 May 2017

This dream happened before I woke up to meditate:

I was touring the site of an ancient settlement. Giant, grass-covered earthworks covered the mountainside plateau upon which I and the others in my tour-group were walking. Man-sized stone stelae stood about, here and there. We came upon what seemed to be an inhabitant of the place who was wearing a poncho and a wide-brimmed hat. As we watched, he bent down and used a dustpan to scoop up bits of colored stone that had fragmented off a nearby stela. The monolith was roughly square in shape, its corners and top slope-cut in the manner of an Asscher or radiant diamond. The fragments were painted in dark colors, red and ochre.

I looked closer and saw that the rock seemed to have expanded from within, its entire outer layer covered with tiny cracks through which shone a sublayer of brilliant white. To me, it looked as if the rock were an animal shedding its skin, that the painted bits which littered the ground around it had served their purpose and were being discarded.

The local man was trying to sell the bits of rock to us, to which I chose to respond in anger. As I berated him verbally, I became aware that I and the other people in my group were sitting at long tables in a roofless laboratory of some kind. A wall at the front of the room was made of glass, one to our right was painted light grey. The hawker was doing chemical experiments of some sort on the fragments while still trying to convince me and the others to buy them. All of the other people in our group had their backs turned toward me and appeared to be staring at the glass wall. The way the others were not looking at me gave me the feeling that my efforts to yell at and berate the man in the wide-brimmed hat were a waste of time, a counterproductive effort.


This dream happened when I crawled back into bed get warm again after meditating:

I awoke to find that I had been sleeping on a wide expanse of masoned sandstone that seemed to be on top of a bridge or tall building. Beneath me was a comfortable bed piled high with blankets and pillows. Above me was the sky. I realized that my perch was not as high as I had thought and that other people were nearby, which caused me to worry about the location of my belongings. To my right behind a wall of glass were brick houses built next to a road that led up a steep hillside. One of the houses was covered with the most awesome graffiti I’d ever seen. I tried to get my phone out to take a picture of it but couldn’t bring my hands up to do so. 

In the dream, I sat up in bed, craning my neck to check on my belongings. I saw them together off to the side, lumped into a pile of clothes and bags, bundles of coat-hangers, old exercise equipment. Upon standing up to gather my things I discovered I was naked, which caused me a bit of concern. Once dressed more fully I walked over to tidy up my possessions. I was stuffing clothes into bags when I saw that some of my things were in a glass-walled room that I could only access via a short flight of stairs. As I was heading toward the room I walked past five men standing on the corner of the sandstone ledge. Standing in front of the four clad entirely in black was one wearing lighter tones and a hat, who said “Shakaloha” back to me when I passed him by and flashed him the surfer’s gesture.

After I had tidied up my things I went back to bed, concerned however that there was a pedestrian walkway just on the other side of a stone wall behind my head. A person leading a dog came down the sidewalk toward me. For some reason I wanted to hide from her, but knew I could not.

americanifesto / JPR / whorphan / 場黑麥

haiku 7 May 2017

A hard lesson to
Learn is that I’m not allowed
To Appoint myself.

americanifesto / JPR / whorphan / 場黑麥

haiku 4 May 2017

Thousands and thousands
Oh, so many written words.
What good comes of them?

americanifesto / JPR / whorphan / 場黑麥

north of Altadena

When I first reached the high-mountain campsite, it was just me and the host. He was in Ranger digs but his badge said volunteer. He was a troll, or as close to a troll as any person I’ve ever seen.

Looking up periodically from the book I was reading, I’d find him lurking behind a tree, his car, or the cinder-block outhouse, facing my way but never really making eye-contact.
He’d ignore hikers clearly in need of guidance but then harangue anyone who managed to track him down with a stump speech about his ‘hybrid’ religion, which boiled down to him mentioning, repeatedly, things like heaven, and heavenly father, and Jesus.
Talk of how all religions contain the golden rule.
Praise of a life lived in virtue, warnings about one lived in sin.
An email newsletter for his non-profit.
He’d address men as ‘brother’ in what seemed to me an unconsciously racist manner. He was an Internet troll come to life. He even looked like a troll, all chubby and red-faced, his hair so blond it was almost white.


After the first day, I learned to simply walk away from him whenever he got to talking. I felt bad about treating him like that, but I had recently started practicing being conscious and respectful of my own time - even if it meant hurting a few feelings, here and there.

The site next to mine was occupied when I crawled out of my tent on the morning of my third day.
A couple of attractive girls.
A few cool dudes.
I helped them get set up. We became friends quickly.
The drugs we’d brought soon became communal property. Except for the troll stopping by randomly every couple of hours to remind us of rules we weren’t breaking, the day progressed smoothly.
Things took a turn when one of the girl’s boyfriend showed up with a sack of cocaine in one pocket and a handgun in the other.


A bunch of us were enjoying an early evening campfire, laughing and telling stories, sparking blunts, snorting lines, sipping beers. A cellphone was playing upbeat music.
“Hey, man,” the campsite host said to me, yelling over from the road before walking uninvited toward us. Someone grabbed the bong and hid it from view. “I’d like to talk to you about what we spoke about yesterday, about the futility of existence.” I stood up and headed him off a dozen feet from the paraphernalia-strewn picnic table, enduring his sophomoric rant for long enough that my beer got warm.
He kept looking past me while talking, staring at the bikini-clad young ladies dancing near the fire. As soon as they realized he was watching, they put on shirts and sat down in a protective huddle.
I eventually removed him by backing away from him until we were standing next to his tent.

After the third such intrusion into our friendly congress, the boyfriend said, “If motherfucking Bobby Hill comes over here again for no reason, trying to creep on my girl and her friends, I’ll… fuck… I’ll kill him.” I glanced over at the troll and couldn’t help but laughing out loud - his resemblance to the son in TV’s ‘King Of The Hill’ was uncanny.
The boyfriend had arrived drunk that morning and hadn’t stopped drinking, since. During a dinner of burnt sausages and cold beans, he had placed his automatic pistol on the table in front of him.


The sun was just starting to set when the mountain above us caught fire, blocking our only exit route. We had enough water and food to last us for a couple of days, and our campsite sat near a running stream in a moist hollow. This knowledge, and the stupefying drugs, calmed our fears.
Often, when fire destroys a region’s upper vegetation, its fauna escapes the flames by heading downhill. Soon, the underbrush around us was thick with small animals, rodents fleeing and snakes crawling past us, headed for the nearby stream. Then, the animals got bigger. We saw a desert fox. A small herd of deer. A mountain goat. The rising plume of smoke caught the sun’s dying rays, scattering them downward to bathe our campsite in a fading, ethereal glow.

“I hate to break up the party, but everyone has to get ready to evacuate,” the troll called over to us from the road, adjusting the straps on his oversized hiking backpack. Pots hung from it, clanking loudly. A radio sat at his waist, crackling. Although there was still light in the sky, his headlamp was turned on full blast, causing those of us facing him to wince.
“My friend just texted me that the only road out of here is blocked, bro,” the boyfriend said, yelling drunkenly over his shoulder. “So relax. Nobody’s leaving here anytime soon.”
Bobby Hill stood there for a moment, shocked.
“I said get ready to move out,” he hissed through clenched teeth, his voice shaking with rage. He stepped over the rocks that bordered our campsite. As his light played over the ground in front of him we could see that his hands were balled into fists.

The boyfriend fluidly shifted position to face him, picking up the pistol in the same motion. He fired three shots, two of which hit the troll in the torso. Bits of cloth shot from the backpack as the rounds exited Bobby’s body and kicked up tufts of dirt on the embankment behind him.
Before any of us could speak, a brown bear came crashing through the underbrush near the cinder-block outhouse. The apex predator turned our way and focused in on the troll, who was stumbling backward, geysering blood, and making a strange, burbling, screaming sound.
Behind the bear came two cubs scampering.
She hit Bobby in the chest with a massive paw, knocking him clear out of his backpack, then pounced. As we ran for the nearby food pantries that were big enough to fit a full-grown human and strong enough to resist a bear attack (according to the manufacturer’s sticker), she started to chew his face off, throwing chunks of meat back at her mewling cubs.

In the shelter next to mine was the boyfriend. He was breathing heavily but didn’t seem too upset.
“Is everybody alright?” he shouted, once the sounds of dragging and snarling had stopped and the night had once more grown silent.
I cracked the door to my shelter and peered around carefully.
“I think we’re good,” I said. “As far as I can tell, she’s gone.”
The boyfriend crawled slowly from his own pantry.
“This shit stays between us, right?” he said, getting to his feet and wiping dust off of his pants with the hand not holding the pistol.
The troll’s backpack was still there, but his body was gone. The boyfriend followed the trail of Bobby’s blood with a tactical flashlight attached to his sidearm. It led downhill, disappearing into the stream’s gloomy, gathering shadows.
We looked at each other, then shrugged.
“All I saw was the bear attack,” I said, whereupon the boyfriend tucked the pistol into his waistband, threw his arm over my shoulder, and walked me back to the picnic bench.
“I knew you were the homie,” he said to me.
Everyone had a good laugh as we cracked open fresh beers and the boyfriend cut up thick lines of blow. Then he stood, gathered up the three spent shell casings, grabbed Bobby’s backpack, and spent the next hour carefully burning every bit of it and its contents in a distant fire-pit.

“As long as we make it out of here alive,” his girlfriend said, “you guys wanna do this again, uh, next month?”
I was the first to nod.

[This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual events or individuals is purely coincidental.]
​
© JPR / whorphan / americanifesto / 場黑麥

dreamstate writing 29 April 2017

I settled into my seat at the end of a row of stadium-like seating, near a wall. As far as I could see up and down the curving white tunnel in which I sat, the other seats were filled with people of all ages, races, shapes, and sizes, some of whom glanced at me, making eye-contact. I had the feeling that we were all waiting for a big concert to start, although I could not see a stage or screens in front of us.

At some point I stood up again and walked down the stairs to a flat surface farther below, where I performed some dance moves whilst hovering a foot off the ground. I overheard someone say that the show would be delayed, after which I walked into a massive hall filled with escalators made of dark glass lit up by neon blue lights that were transporting people every which way - sideways, longways, up into the ceiling and down through the floor.

I left the massive hall, stepping out onto a balcony and leaning over the railing in front of me. I jerked back quickly, however, for I could not see the ground below, so faint were the floors below me illuminated. With me on the balcony was a large, dark-skinned figure clad in blue who tended to stay out of my direct field of vision. After a bit of searching I found a railing that stood above a balcony one storey lower, which caused me less fear even though I could still see the many dimly lit floors below but not gauge the height of the building in general.

americanifesto / JPR / whorphan / 場黑麥