Looking for danger

Earlier we learned how auntie Angela imposes austerity on the boy shelter because the coal merchant can't make it through the snow, when suddenly there is Barack who promises fracking.

Many things were happening in the boy shelter on the plain. It all started with the return of Barack Hussein. He immediately noticed the boys hadn't dug a single hole during his absence.

How can I help if you boys are hanging round?

He quickly put them back to work again. Winter had not waned but the sun was much stronger in late February, so at least during the afternoon they were able to make inroads. There was a new lad in the shelter, Alexis, a poor and unhappy looking type whom Auntie Angela had taken a dislike at right from the start. She put him on extra meagre rations and quietly requested Barack to give the newcomer the dirtiest job. Barack didn't especially mind so he put Alex to digging at the bottom of the pit. Barack never seemed to mind much.

And then one day Vladimir Vladimirovitsj was back.

Who is he, Barack demanded to know.

He's our uncle Vlad, the boys told. Vlad Vladimirovitsj, the coal merchant.

The two men looked each other in the eye and instantly felt mutual distrust.  

I've come to make you a good deal, Angela, offered Vlad with that tiny smile of his. I'm going to send you monthly deliveries from now on. We have more capacity this year, see?

I think that's just hollow talk, intervened Barack Hussein. I mean, monthly deliveries, it's hard to believe. Anyway, there's no one like us, everybody knows that.

And who are you sir, informed Vladimir Vladimirovitsj with as shallow an interest as he could muster.

Barack is the name, fracking my game.

Vladimirovitsj nodded. You're from the other side, right? The speed drill boys. I tell you, we have our own business here, mister. I've come to be helping auntie and the boys over the years and we are currently in a pleasant arrangement. So please, go home.

You tell me what I do?

Hussein's laid back posture was suddenly all gone. You think you can call us, right? He straightened his back and measured up his size to the sturdier Vlad Vla, who seemed equally surprised and disgusted at Barack's behaviour.

Quiet now, uncle Vladimir, came Angela's voice. We don't want to make Barry here angry. It'd be best if you went home and I'll be in touch when the time comes.

After the slightest of hesitation Vladimir Vladimirovitsj accepted her verdict. Who's the little kid, he asked, nodding at the skinny creature down in the pit.

O, that's Alexis, he's new, blurted a boy from Scandinavia.

Vlad Vladimirovitsj bent over the hole in the ground. Come up, my boy. Let me help you. Will you learn to drive for the coal merchant?

Sure will, sir, came a tiny voice.

Not so fast, Barack broke in once again. There's no one going anywhere here. He pointed his long finger on a long arm at Vlad. I don't get your story, mister, and I think you are a liar and a thief, like all you guys out here. If you move as much as a finger to my side of the table, I'm mean Angela's side, I will kill you. Have you got that clear? I'm going to find you and I'm going to bomb your house.

No you don't, because you know I would do the same to you, Vladimir Vladimirovitsj looking better than he was feeling. I'm not bluffing.

Barry shaking his head, shook it long as in a Clint Eastwood movie, and blurting: I don't know what to say to this shit, man. Angela, please help me out here.

Let Vlad take little Lexi home, pleaded auntie. I don't trust the kid anyway.

But Barack Hussein once more was quickly back on his feet again.

I'm afraid it won't happen. You see, where I come from we never lose. We simply don't. So it's not a matter of you making your own choices, it's us calling the shots.

Vlad go now, called out some big boys. We will see us again. For now we must stay with Barack the frackerman.

Vladimir Vlad dropped his shoulders for as much as his well-kept body allowed.

There's no reasoning with you, is there? Well, if you must, I shall leave you to it. He turned his sleigh on the retreating snow, broken and wet. And you, Barack, have a break. We don't need that kind of madness here.

And so uncle Vlad Vladimirovistj for the second time left their lives and this time the boys understood there were few last times left.

Aunt Angela stayed on the road until she no longer believed she was seeing the last of him, then she turned and asked: when is the fracking starting?

That's all not quickly going, Barack admitted. But as I was telling you, I think we should take out Vlad first.

Vladimirovitsj? You really want him dead?

Just to make sure he's not going to get back at us. You know, he may be wanting to do us all harm.

I find that highly unlikely, big François unexpectedly entered the arena. Uncle Vlad is not an aggressive person.

Not aggressive? screamed Barack Hussein. That man Vlad of yours used to be a professional killer before he got into the carbon business.

That's all a long time ago, countered Matteo, bolstered by the sudden mood swing.

Yet I don't believe this is the right time for change, sounded high pitched Mariano. We must stick to our beliefs if we want to honour our parents.

Barack smiled at Mariano's words. He was the finest example of a useful idiot the boy shelter had on offer.

Also Wolfgang, auntie Angela's compatriot who had one day shown up at the door, walking badly on his crippled foot but with a strong will to have things go his way, applauded Mariano. We must and we shall hurt the ones who fail to compromise, he spouted.

Yes, we hurt, Barack raised his voice. We're going to give Vlad a bad time and when he exposes himself we'll kill him.

Kill, echoed Wolf.

The other runaway boys, each of them having left home for fame and fortune and all of them ended up here in this dump, this poorest of roofs in the endless plain surrounding, were too afraid not to trust Barack. Young David, who wasn't so young at all, of course was all smiles with everything Barack wanted, as he had originally brought him in on that bitter cold night he had meant to escape from the shelter. Now he was trying to become Barack's favourite helper, the one who was directly under his command and not through auntie, like François. Wolf though was giving him a hard time. Since Hussein's first arrival many boys had started questioning auntie Angela's rule over their minds. They felt they were allowed their own opinions. But in the whirl of the moment most chose to follow Barack's word. No time for change, they echoed Mariano, stay the course till the end.

Yes, we hurt.

The boys applauding in unison.

And so Vlad Vladimirovitsj was gone and the excitement was over and nobody knew what would come next. But they all loved Vlad and felt bad about their weakness.

Will Barack Hussein really hurt Vladimir Vladimirovitsj, or is it in the end all but a game? Find out in our third entry of life in the boy shelter, expected soon.

No time to hate

Paris was nice last summer

The subterranean traveller and Trandi Romantic had a jolly good time in Paris late August last year, where the mood was gentle and people had clever ways of avoiding undesired outcomes. Don't like my face? Just look the other way. This is what multiculturalism is all about, isn't it? Not get worked up about any differences one might sense, rather concentrate on similarities. The ridiculous prohibition on headscarves and veils of course adds to the sense of equalness. How to tell the difference when the obvious signs are lacking? The traveller and Trandi neatly fit in, as is their style, and happily started roaming the streets, being stupid sometimes but cast with luck, as the holiday mood so often has it. Whenever they met the tourist trail they just rushed straight through, get it done with quickly style. There were fewer chemtrails overhead than in their hometown that time of year, with even a clean day in between, so no need to get bogged down by ugly realities. Just have fun while it lasts.

Inside the many museums they visited the subterranean had dozens of beautiful women to admire, women all so gorgeous-looking these days. Trandi would drag him before paintings she had to tell him about and the subterranean listened carefully while leaving another shot at some piece for in between pictures, doing the by and large same route, same room, opposite walls style routine, then returning to art's take on beauty for a while and so forth. They went to more outlandish galleries as well where visitors were scarce and where it was them and the painting, more often the thingy, getting it off on being in flow together. The one thing they didn't particularly like was the food. It was expensive and hastily made, to their taste. They settled for salads and asian snack bars, eating marmalade and cheese in their rent apartment for supper.

Not everybody lives quite as nicely as the nicely living. They occupy a large swath around the tourist trail and carefully shielded streets of extreme wealth where the sheer amount of money breathes might, plus all the tiers in between. In this better world, the world we know from television and have been told to admire, the city's various cultures are not evenly represented. It's the young and handsome who are invited into the realms of power and it's always on an individual base. If you've got what it takes to make money from, you're in. And you're even allowed to pretend you are you, to gimmick the rebel inside. So you will see people of all colours and stripes join the party, but children and pensioners are still mostly white.

Outside this inner ring life quickly became ordinary, though it never seemed anywhere worse than scrappy yet not hopeless, pretty much what Trandi and the traveller were used to at home. Of course from their point of view signs of stress were filtered out, not to be discovered in merely a week's time that is. They stayed behind Nation in an early mix-up zone just inside Paris Férique and often passed République into town, checking out on fashion and style, more of the latter they found, then split up to go separate ways and meet again later. They did everything their budget allowed for that week, spending on people in a city that seemed very much at ease with itself, a city which had lost a lot of previously felt rudeness (now even with pedestrian zones), before taking the train home to a thriftier lifestyle.

Now they hear there's a mass shooting at an editor's in Paris, television talking about the area they had come to scramble, lots of bodies, very professional, then they lose an ID, how convenient, where have we heard that one before? Of course, all suspected perpetrators are killed before they can speak. Opposing minds conveniently commit suicide. One photo by the way was apparently enough to identify two brothers. Modern life is full of such miracles, have you noticed? Many dark fairy tales are spun around us, like the mad stories people see in the movies. Better not notice as much, seems healthier you'd say, but that's the 24 7 experience for you.

When people fall for the meme and politicians take up the front row of mourning and protest, the ones we loath and despise for selling our souls to the war machine, then it's time to set the alarm bells ringing. When apparent coincidences are fruitful and new laws curbing our rights and liberties are passed swiftly, then you know everything was well-planned. How did they pull it off this time, eh? And who pulled what? Wanting to know the answer is where you go wrong, because nobody will provide you, yet the question needs being asked all the time. The powers that be really seem hell-bent for havoc (not a metal band) and every next round more of our strength is required, more of our desire to maintain the society we believed we had built. Most people want to live together peacefully, make friendship where it feels good and keep a respectful distance where it doesn't. Some are trying to break the peace, but some are always breaking the peace, whatever the source. We have learned to bear their burden, you know the type, the managers, the bankers, the common assholes. Recently though, our governments have entered the fight. Through their own secret agencies and those of friendly nations they are willing to kill us to further an agenda. We thought this only happened in America. Now it's coming here. Our governments are going rogue on us. Think back to 3.11, 7.7, 3.11, MH17, now 7.1. Think of the Ukraine in general and the vast world behind it that we are now going to say goodbye to because some hotshot decided so. The people of Europe really need to confront this threat. We have many serious problems, environmental problems foremost, and this is no time to hate. If we give in to this shit, we know we are not going to save the world. Instead we will be joining the worldwide civil war, spreading soon to a country near you, the third world war which will completely destroy our societies, destroy the world we grew up in. I always thought we could easily live it out a good other century, find some cure in the meantime, but that was before the mad killer machine went into overdrive. If we don't stop this, if we don't resist to partake any longer in this suicidal ritual, then we will see it all slip away from under us. I wrote a poem about this a long time ago, in dutch, De Aarde scheurt onder je voeten, a nightmarish dream about ultimate survival in climate chaos, put on a nervous rhyme. I quite liked it myself, I read it sometimes before public. I hadn't thought it would come true so quickly, though.

Thinking that the not quite there yet meme is wearing thin, it's time to go green on a massive scale. If worldwide we start taking care of ourselves and our neighbours, grow as much food as we can and save as much on feeding the beast, saving not just money but economic input as well, slowly minimizing its impact through the force of our common will, then we might have something interesting going, something worth living for.

Now that would be nice.

Above us only smog

Sky of the year 2014

2014 was definitely the year of the sky, so it's only fair to present the sky of the year 2014 award. Skies started getting odd late January and they have been quite embarrassing throughout the year. July had windy spells which blew some blue back and November saw almost natural circumstances for most days, but that was about it. Last weeks have been daily madness all over again.

Early skies were scary yet beautiful, later they became more depressing, with growing difficulty to enjoy the show, not in the least through the ever thickening smog over our heads. Patterns have changed. In the beginning it was all long lines widening out and creating the famed Milky Veil. After summer short fat lines which quickly dissolved but filled the sky with filth nonetheless, certainly nothing like ordinary planes produce, started appearing. On coinciding days they would manage to block the sun out of a cloudfree sky. Those skies have certainly earned their égards for growing into the new normal, but since we are entering a new year, we now may expect to see it happen once more, a year in which a lot of our strength and wisdom will be needed, I propose a beauty contest. Which skies have most awed us? Do you remember? I took pictures to help me. I started in January and took a lot in summer, autumn skies were flatter with the ingreying doing damage. Some are quite dramatic, clouds building a theatre stage high up over the land, enormous spectacles of Dalí inspired sculpture, on the other hand a veil fighting it out with the sun. Yet nothing was done with them. Nobody talked about this daily circus in our skies. I altered some of these pictures, looking for the colours beneath the inevitable grey tones, and made a couple T-shirts with them. The photos presented in my top five are mostly in their original state.

5 Catalunya

Our summer was handsomely wrecked by all the spraying from airplanes and early August felt like November, not in the least considering how dark it sometimes was. These skies are totally fake and they were taking away our sun. For skin protection, they told us in autumn.

4 Through the heart

Milky veil with struggling sun and a fresh chemtrail stabbing it straight through the heart in late afternoon, now there is a classic picture we have seen way too often this year. This one is from June, near Castelldefels. I really like its dreamlike quality.

3 Music

The beauty of those plucky cotton skies is in their ability to allow extreme close ups. With the sun peeping through, the clouds look like an orchestra of barking dogs, well conducted by the voice of the light. Music in the sky, I like to call this one. 't Was on a bright June Saturday, we had a couple of those, with skies we would never see again afterwards, real early stage art live in the making.

2 Tourist spec

When people surface from their metro ride they all look upwards, just to see how far construction has progressed since the last time they trod these steps. Tourists, of course, don't leave it at that. In their well-practiced awe they stop in their stride and grab for their photo camera, with busy locals angrily urging them on. It's a classic display of mutual dislike. But is any one of these people looking beyond the spires to see what's going on further up? I thought it quite the spectacle and deserving of a top spot.

1 Elephant

For all that it represents of the year 2014, this picture receives our award. June at the beach, the water still a bit chilly but the mood uplifting. After horror May everybody was in for a funky summer. Notice how nobody seems too interested in that ridiculous cotton pattern over their heads. They rather turn their face to the oddly white sunlight. But I was lying on my back and I saw this one coming. Call that a cloud? I chose to call it the elephant in the sky. I made a T-shirt out of this picture.

The plight of the gardener (a gardener’s complaint)

An old Chinese saying goes like this. If you want to be happy for an evening, get drunk; if you want to be happy for a week, go travelling; if you want to be happy for a year, get married; if you want to be happy for the rest of your life, grow a garden. I had this in mind when in January I finally set foot on my first roof terrace. I'd had balconies before and a real garden once, but the latter didn't serve for much in the shade of surrounding buildings. This time I got what I'd been looking for. I wanted to balance my sorry life as a western consumer with shooting some green into the world. I was close a long, long time ago, but I hadn't developed any garden feelings yet at that age. The hours spent in my mother's garden still lingered fresh in my memory. I set out with a two shelf terrace, with herbs and paprika on top and carrots with zucchini and albergina below in a wooden ditch. Some more albergina and zucchini in separate boxes, all fixed from leftover wood and filled with large amounts of dirt, the cheapest stuff available at the garden super. It all had to be carried two floors up. Not bad.

Early days were good. Everything sprang from seeds and most did well. The daily chemtrailing assault by then was running its first quarter and the sky had not yet been saturated as it is today. (Every week is worse than the last, whatever the days look like. And the same goes for months and for years. It's just a descent into hell.)

Anyway, we weren't so depressed at the start. Just bewildered and angry, scared if you will. I tried to forget about the madness by concentrating on my gardener's plight. To protect the plants from the rain which had started falling and which was of course horribly filthy from whatever it was they were spraying, I had built a plexi glass roof over my little vertical garden, like a cabinet to the sun. Later I extended the roof when indeed albergina was seriously hurt by some showers, burning holes in her beautiful, thick leaves. She managed to recuperate quickly once safe, with zucchini's negro belleza not quite that lucky. May was pure horror with nonstop rain and wind, me having a hard time protecting my herd from horizontal shower attacks. June started the road downwards, away from the dying sun, dry and dirty and not even warm, let alone hot, from all the filth in the air. The layer woven on some days captured our own produce for added pleasure. Only the winds of July kept the skies clean for some weeks, the lower parts that is, where we breathe and live. Higher up you were starting to see a deep platinum veil at perhaps 6 kilometres, it's hard to say how high. In August the deepness was covered with a milky veil which kept most of the sun at bay, and in September, a month with a touch of July in it, the overall background colour had turned a plastic grey and our creator in the sky now was barely able to send us their hope and support, remedies that on the Mediterranean coast have always been abundantly available.

Over the summer, the plants suffered tremendously. Zucchini didn't make it, though she did give me some flowers for dinner. Albergina fared much better. She resisted the intermittent attacks of summer, especially the scorching levels of UV raining down when the sun stood high. That's all gone now. September has been easy and rich with produce, not bad for a first year intent considering the hardships getting them through summer. I will need more than a greenhouse for protection next year, I'll need shade. If there is going to be a next year, that is, because at the rate we are going it's starting to look like a pretty filthy winter. And how are we going to escape from that one come next spring? Will mother nature have any strength left?

I've eaten twenty tiny hot paprikas which turned sweet if you let them go red. I've had an equal number of small but wonderfully fresh tasting albergines, I had two growths of rúcula, one before it all went bad and the other in the aftermath when at least the persistent good temperatures and the much weaker sun created something of a green power ambiance which most of the plants seemed to have picked up and joined in with. One of the marías died while being away for a few days. A sudden July flash flood had seriously damaged her roots. It was all too wet and the leaves were burning. All three marías suffered heavy leave loss at some moment during summer and they sort of scraped through, but for this drowned goddess it wasn't going to be. The other two are fighting to produce enough honey before the lights go out on the season, probably come early this year.

My roof garden will celebrate its first year of the new era shortly after winter. Be it still a while away, already the contract between plant life and caretaker is feeling much like a marriage. I hadn't thought it would be quite as difficult as it turned out to be under the unforeseen circumstances. I had done smaller projects before, to the availability of space and sunshine, and they had mostly worked out to the satisfaction of both plant and man, under the sorry circumstances.

I shouldn't be whining and complaining so much, I know. When I started out, the spraying had already begun so inside I knew it was going to be a very difficult year. I understood anything I managed to get out of my garden would be seriously contaminated. I sensed I was tending a garden not so much as to help reduce the footprint as well as out of despair. Nothing in this world can balance the amounts of poison thrown out over our heads around the world. So what I have been doing up here was never more than a protest, than a cry of anger, than silent, stubborn resistance. Yet I feel betrayed. Whoever are behind the spraying programme, they could have given us a few more years. If they so desperately need to get rid of us, they might as well let us wither away, see what comes.

Unfortunately these days, America seems to be on a death trip and the whole world will go down with her if nobody steps in. There are candidates, I hear, but not all can find everybody's approval. So we'll see how long we last. Meanwhile I continue tilling the soil, squeeze out the last juices and prepare for a winter setup with onions and potatoes and some cabbage, I guess.

I hope it will last.

Funky clouds

Check out some of the pictures we took in the greater Barcelona region over the last couple months. Some have been adultered, but only colour wise. 

Don't forget to check out earlier months. Lots of interesting stuff!

laying their milky veil

this is what passes for normal in 2014

Peñiscola sunset

 

Climate Gone - surreal isms under a surreal sky

The Climate Gone trilogy (see entries for April and May) originally appeared in agitadoras.com, April to June 14 issues respectively. Check out www.agitadoras.com

As before, you're never quite sure what kind of weather to expect when you're stepping outside, especially not in this transitional season towards summer. Will it be warm, cold, dry, dripping, sunny, cloudy, overcast, harsh, mellow, windy or still? But different from when the weather still was made by what we with a mixture of fondness and awe would call the elements, these days when the elements have turned into the ones from the periodic table our choice has been severely restricted to a mere handful of standardised rain/sun types with a few funky mix-ups. As if we have changed back the pantone disc for a box of crayons.

The subterranean traveller that particular morning was offered scattered rainclouds under a high milky sky with plenty of sun shining through. He noticed how under the clouds temperatures rapidly went down a wholly ten degrees and then shot back up in the next stroke of sunshine. It made him want to evade the rain ever so fervently, nothing but danger coming from the skies these days. Not that he longed for the hot spells either. The air would get very dry and dusty under those hazy curtains, with airplanes further up busy spraying the remaining holes. The air had got so dirty it came to notably hurt his lungs and skin and bones. He recognised his fellow sufferers in growing numbers. Some days he did wish for rain, as dirty as it be. Tap water now also had begun to stink after half an hour standing, a feat best avoided when maintaining a pleasant atmosphere in the flat.

People walking the streets from having nothing else to do, spending only dimes. The shopkeepers are losing their smile. Nobody talks about the surreal weather, though it clearly affects everybody. Nobody talks about the government either, though it clearly aims to hurt the majority. The climate has been fully artificial since late January when the massive daily spraying campaign began, going into its fifth month soon. How much longer were they supposed to hang on? Would there be relieve after summer or was this meant to continue for the rest of ever? Questions people rather not dealt with when their money problems were scarcely solved.

Neus Eddict this time round firmly believed the aliens were doing it to us and it were not going to end good, the traveller carefully dodging the subject. How are the plants?

They suffer from chlorophyll shortage. Can you imagine, the sun has already lost twenty percent of her strength. They've made the air so fucking dirty the plants can't even get green. How's that for a climate change?

There are no climates any longer, just weather types, the subterranean mixed in. This crazy thing is the same everywhere you go. Hot sunshine, cold rain and those off-limits ice winds, everybody has them.

Why must they destroy everything, asked Neus, why can't they just let it rot? We're not going anywhere, in the state we're in.

They had been called to the ballot box once again, this time by Europe. In Spain the race was nationalised and cut down to the usual two unsightly figures, offering law and crackdown the one and utterly nothing the other. Just being there apparently was regarded the alternative approach. Where the traveller lived there was the added bonus of the lately somewhat withering campaign for independence, a concept contraire to Europe's devouring manners. Now Ukraine had been taken, snatched from under the nose of Russia. Power was handed to a bunch of nazi warriors whom the talking heads of their countries quite shamelessly referred to as well-behaved liberals. They soon enough started taking liberties against their compatriots; like when in 1936 the war got going here, the subterranean speculated. It also looked a lot like Libya counting. All over the place the war machine was creating havoc. Everybody were losing from it.

A couple appeared, introduced to the subterranean as Poma Carne de los Bítel and Adamán. The woman was a soft spoken friend who automatically joined in with prevailing beliefs and inviting the traveller to embed, the man looking like he was going to want to outsmart him with unfunny witticisms.

Neus showed some clips with HAARP action, explaining how the jetstream was botched by laying chemical high pressure zones at the right altitude, causing those unseasonal temperatures, and then pointed upwards. The sky was now a metallic light blue with creamy, evenly sized clouds, much like the sky over Springfield, USA. It's the same everywhere, she said, there are no climates any longer.

Adamán is suffering terribly from these surreal skies, Poma Carne announced, sharing hands with Neus. He is losing his thoughts and can't concentrate, getting this empty head feeling.

Empty head?

And just this week he's been chased by lightning.

We had a mean storm, we're from the mountains, Adamán duly served up. I was returning from a neighbouring farm with eggs and cheese. Really nice weather, perhaps a few clouds, when suddenly one cloud grew a lot bigger and closed in on me. It started raining from just that cloud, I could see sunny patches further downhill. And then it struck several times, from that lonely cloud above my head, always very near though it never touched me. I looked up and I thought, what if there's a machine inside that cloud, and I got very scared.

The subterranean smugly smiled at the other's celebrated fear. Had you given them reason to distrust you?

Maybe I was just the odd one out, Adamán offered.

The traveller, lacking kindness here: maybe you happened to be on a similar route as the storm.

The weather surreal, nazism hailed, elections that nobody seemed to care much about, politicians telling their lies without the public listening: EU is Dead. And the skies keep filling and bodies start to respond with stress related illnesses and fatigue.

But it wasn't true.

Or so they said.

The subterranean traveller shared a smile with Poma Carne, who looked much younger than she probably was. She had beautiful hips, he noticed, round and firm, as was her smile, and she seemed to want to show him some more of herself. The traveller now feeling the heat of Adamán's downfall, who was he to give the last push when he didn't even know these people?

It was not hip to be aware of the other and it certainly brought little gains in the economic reality, yet the desire to be good was irresistible in what looked to be the dying moments of Earth's atmosphere. The traveller didn't want to go out shagging around, is what he meant. He wanted to go out on his back, conscious and comfortable. When he was young they would never bother to be good, with very few people realising where it all were heading for of course. Now the least they could do was repent their foolishness. In the end the only thing they were ever going to be able to take out of this planet was consciousness. Why would one want to interrupt such a process when not feeling personally attracted?

As always, why the damage?

The subterranean traveller must leave it here.

For weather updates, check out the HAARP report

WEAR SOME WEATHER THIS SUMMER

Here in Barcelona (Catalunya) 2014 is the year of artificial skies. Since mid January they have been chemtrailing us on a daily basis. Result: everybody is sick from the air pollution, plants won't grow and the clouds look totally fantastic - or horrible, if you are sensitive to the planet's well-being. Ever since it started we have been taking pictures and now we have turned some of those images into T-shirt designs. Why? Because nobody seems willing to discuss what is going on above their heads, so we thought we might attract people's attention by putting some weather on our chests. As weird as the pictures may look, we want to stress that all we've changed are the colours. What you see is what we get.

I made this one in late June on Mar Bella, people staring at the white sunlight while these clouds were passing overhead.

Have a look at our other shirts. If you are interested in wearing them, you can either have us produce you one and send it by mail or ask for the design and do it yourself. We know this debilitating spraying is going on around the planet. If you're feeling lousy, you're not alone. So if you'd be interested in bringing out similar T-shirts be our guest. We would like to know about it though. Anyway, time to send us an email at: jpjhamminga@gmail.com. This summer we'll all be wearing the weather on our chests. Below you'll find our first prints. More designs are in the making. Further down there is other stuff we are engaged in.

Take good care.

It's just too big not to see it.