haiku 29 Mar 2018

Tiny beast herders
Fermenters of chewed plant pulp
Small yet quite weighty

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

wood stacks itself

Contrary to all previous experience showing that chopping, splitting, hauling, and stacking firewood requires hard work, foresight, and dedication, new evidence points to wood's tendency to stack itself. Said Gorden James Preitschard, hardy-looking outdoors man and survivor of many a cold-snap: “I was going to get into that heap of logs over there this weekend, sawing it and splitting it and stacking it, so as to be a tiny bit more ready for winter, but it looks like the logs have sloughed themselves into foot-long segments, un-merged themselves from their core in nice even slabs, waltzed over to the shed unassisted, and laid themselves down in criss-cross formations so as to season properly. What joy – now all I have to do is distribute them to any beautiful teenage girls living nearby who, one of these evenings, might want to get a wee backyard fire going with their friends.” During our interview, several tall trees dropped in Mr. Preitschard's forest as if by magic, shedding their leaves and smaller branches as they rolled into position parallel to broad footpaths leading into and out of the shaded groves. “Yup,” the middle-aged man said while sipping gingerly from a steaming cup of self-ground, self-picked, and self-transported coffee. “There go a couple more mighty maples. Look at them shake off their own bark. Fascinating! I used to have to work so hard to do all of that. Now, though, my list of chores runs merely to jack, and shit.”

場黑麥 mentiri manufactorem fecit

on easy living

Attention, citizens of America: keep doing that to which you are accustomed; do not alter your ways; do not conserve resources; do not research and implement in your own lives methods for sustainable or self-sufficient living. Let not your minds be filled with worry, nor pay any heed to the fear-mongers spreading false intelligence about environmental degradation, the worldwide depletion of nutrients from the soil, the rapid extinction of species large and small, massive crop failures, algal blooms that suffocate all other sea-life, or reports of a garbage patch the size of continental Europe floating in the Pacific Ocean. You must do nothing to save fair Columbia – she who is our common, tender motherland – or to rejuvenate her paved-over soil, her once-clean rivers, her now-contaminated lakes, her exploited meadows, her clear-cut forests, her mono-cultured fields, or her cities that creep and sprawl like fungi out into their once-abundant surroundings.

Do not plant your own victory garden, do not ride a bicycle, do not turn off lights when they are not needed, do not entertain yourselves, do not criticize your elected officials, do not reduce, reuse, or recycle, do not turn off your car's engine if it should idle longer than thirty seconds, do not close your house's windows when running the air-conditioning, do not gather electricity from the sun, do not mow your lawn using muscle-power, and do not put on a sweater instead of turning on your furnace. All you must do – and all that is expected of you – is to buy food made by someone you shall never meet, to cast your ballot in elections that you are powerless to truly sway, to wave a plastic, Chinese-made American flag when you are told to wave it, to watch TV for more than an hour a day, to shop at stores (the big discount retailers) that cut costs by supporting slavery in Africa, Asia, and South America, to fear foreigners, immigrants, and the phantom threat of terrorism, to relinquish your rights by continuing to support the anti-patriotic, freedom-destroying Patriot Act, to fill your car's tank with terrorism-funding, war-necessitating gasoline, to contract diabetes and other diseases by eating too much food, and to lead a generally leisure-filled, comfortable life that amounts to little more than sloth.

Please, do not worry, citizens of America – because your pastor tells you not to, because your politician tells you not to, because advertisers tell you not to. Do not even try to break the chains and shackles of your self-imposed slavery to conspicuous consumption, to the hollow notion of convenience, and to the idea that someone else is going to fix your problems for you. Do nothing, please, but kick back in your foreign-made recliner, wearing your Bangladeshi-sweatshop-made clothes, sipping from an imported plastic cup a brew of artificial colors mixed with refined corn sugar, and watch as the world burns around you.

場黑麥 mentiri factorem fecit