haiku 25 Sep 2018

Eight weeks lost at sea

Burning his boat to survive

Brave Adilang lives!

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

haiku 11 Jan 2018

An uncarved wood-block
Faultless, calm, and unchanging
Formless but quite real

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

leisurely summer, “satisfying”

Choosing to lounge around in his boxer-shorts instead of going about his wood-chopping, garden-tending, and home-maintenance chores, 29 year-old Maryland native Frederick Rillenhof said just this morning that his summer of abject, sun-soaked leisure was far more satisfying than performing any of the duties he admitted were necessary to keep him alive through the upcoming winter. “I hope to have a job by fall,” the home-owner said while trying to find a way to make his window-mounted air-conditioning unit produce more cool air. ”And I'm going to need one to pay for all this electricity I'm using, and for all the heating oil I'll have to buy in order to keep this damn place warm when it starts to snow.”

Sitting by an open, southward-facing screen door of his four-bedroom home, Frederick, who lives alone, said he enjoyed feeling the cold air stream past him, because it cooled him off a bit before escaping into the blast-furnace heat outside. “I just love that,” he said while poking at a brand-new, touch-screen-equipped tablet computer. “Feeling the breeze that the A-C is making, knowing that I have a fridge full of food just waiting for me to eat. I got a call from my credit card company this morning asking for payment on last month's bill, but what are they going to do, cut me off? I pay my mortgage with that platinum card, bitches.”

While poking around in the tall weeds behind the house (after being shooed outside to pee unless we, “Wanted to go all the way up to the third floor to use that bathroom, since all the other ones are clogged”), this news team discovered a discarded ax and a decrepit bow-saw, both of which were rusting away atop a woodsman's sawhorse. Next to these forgotten tools was a large mound of good lumber, the ends of which were however beginning to show signs of rot. When we asked him about the wood wasting away in the backyard, Mr. Rillenhof declared that he was too busy watching a marathon session of a popular reality-television series that focuses on crab-fishing off the coast of Alaska to get to sawing or splitting anytime soon, and that he would handle it once the weather turned a bit cooler. He declined to comment on his vegetable garden, however, which was in a sorry state, indeed.

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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 my loss of faith

  My parents were both Lutherans. My father was a pastor, my mother a devout follower of the same religion. From birth until my fourteenth birthday (at which point I rebelled more openly) I was for most of my life either in a church, on my way to a church, or otherwise engaged in some sort of churchly activity. Among my earliest memories outside of wild animal encounters as a toddler take place in churches. I sang my first public solo, (at the age of ten years) on Christmas Eve, to a packed house, at a church in Shamokin, Pennsylvania.

  All around me were devout and loyal Lutherans who all sang the same songs in the same fashion at the same times of year, their practices unchanging from one decade to the next. While I, in general, have no problem with people engaging in religious practice, I realized recently (after deep and introspective thought) that I had abandoned my own faith at a very young age. My belief in an invisible god, as well as any respect I might have had for the doctrine of the Lutheran church, those things faltered as early as the age of six or seven; by my teens, they were long gone. It is well that I was a shy and quiet child – if I had told anyone about my doubting, they would likely have forced me into re-education classes, so as to keep me enslaved to The Church. (I have never believed that thinking “bad” thoughts, doubtful thoughts, would get me in trouble with a godhead whose main message is love, forgiveness and compassion; thankfully, I recognized at a comparatively young age my fellow Lutherans' fear of eternal damnation for what it truly is: a thinly-veiled effort by the church hierarchy to keep the people in the pews hating themselves for sinning, and begging the pastor to do something about it.)

  I was a young boy standing in a front-row pew watching my father perform the service. I can remember looking at all the people around me, their heads bowed, their lips moving in unison, and I thought they were all going to look up at some point to spring the joke and laugh. I can recall looking at those docile individuals standing in that wood-paneled church, looking at them and bouncing the backs of my legs against the dark wood of the church's benches while laughing to myself quietly. I have since that time not stopped laughing at and mocking any organized religion that happens to cross my path. The complexity and self-contradictory nature of the thousands of different teachings found in the Christian bible had become overwhelmingly foreign to me at that young age, so foreign and confusing that I knew, in my deepest of knowing-places, that they could not all be true. At that young age, for some reason, I was able to see through the smoke-screen of canon and verse, and pluck from the brambles of dogma the few tender fruits of pure and honest meaning. In time, I have been able to utilize these fruits outside of the framework of the artificial, and inherently corrupted, structure of organized religion. (I wish sometimes that I had not lost faith, that I could somehow become faithful again, and believing, that I could abandon perpetual doubt, that I could once again with impotent fury shake a fist at the sky and curse the god who made me, but I do not believe in an external god, only in the Majesty of the Human Spirit – I hold myself responsible for my place in the world; I fix my problems instead of bitching about them.)

  Of course, standing in that church and doubting quietly, I feared Yahweh, that terrible and jealous god whom I had been taught from birth to fear with abject and abiding terror. Once I had in my own mind mocked him and laughed at him and shown him my young and tender behind, however, I realized that the might of His Wrath (an emphasis on paternalism pervades the Christian bible to the point that I am shocked that any woman would practice that faith willingly) existed only in myth, or in the tales of old. I knew at the age of seven years that religious indoctrination was very much a form of mental slavery, and I was abhorred by the fear-mongery and intimidation used by most organized religions to perpetuate their existence.

  Now, many years later, I am so very happy with my young self for his brave and clandestine decision to rebel quietly against the culture within which he had been so enmeshed. That seemingly simple act of doubt, along with Lao Tzu's Tao Teh Ching, has helped me to find the path to inner peace, to primal simplicity, to a life without need for self-aggrandizement or self-justification; now, the action is the goal. I let the chips fall where they may, no longer constrained by the stultifying and stagnant framework of a desperate and failing religious organization. Now, my mind is free and elastic, while my heart is empty and still.

  Three cheers for doubt, and for quiet and patient rebellion.

Spes Mea In Ratio Est - 場黑麥 John Paul Roggenkamp