sabbath

this evening has an apple-cider-sunday sort of peace to it. it's slow flowing: my childhood sundays were meandering affairs, curled up in a blue comfy chair reading or playing chess or slowly watching castles and spaceships take shape from the lego bricks that formed the building blocks of my playground. all was quiet, for mom and dad were napping after our formal sunday meals, and all was slow, for our chauffers were taking us nowhere and we had no work or school to occupy our days. sunshine poured in through the silence and warmth bathed our solitude, our creativity, our joy.

today, the sunlight is already gone, but the warmth persists in my scratchy wool sweater and battered easy chair. i woke a few hours before sunset, to the stillness left unmolested by alarm clocks and phones and their ilk--i woke to smile and relax and ponder the strange dreams that filled my daytime slumber. i took idle note of some imposing restlessness: i worked almost eighty hours this week, six overnights straight with little time but to sleep and eat breakfast and hit the road in between. in two days i will work at least four more, and my larder is as empty as my laundry basket and email inbox are full. my bike my only vehicle, needs maintenance and there is also the pressing impulse to justify my recent library additions by actually reading them. the wasted time was beginning to pile in on me.

but, graciously, my baser instincts asserted themselves, and i curled up in my sleeping bag and with a cheerful grin acknowledged the day's unfettered potential for procrastination and thought about breakfast. breakfast. i decided to forego breakfast as i was out of syrup, eggs, and bread, and had been subsisting for entirely too long on cereal. if Cheerios lose their inherent joy, i shall truly be in for a long string of morning drudgery.

well. that left beans and rice. i was uninspired. i wandered downstairs, past the tragic empty spaces on my food shelves, clinging to my shabby hiking shorts and scratchy wool armor (manfully worn with no intervening t-shirt) for warmth and comfort and memories of mornings on the trail. i sadly shook a box of swiss cake rolls, knowing from yesterday's shake that ther would be no reassuring thump of one last happy little package tucked in the back. granola bars and canned green beans simply wouldn't do. the box pile of odds and ends salvaged from my brother's relocation to Africa yielded crackers, a novelty for my palate these days. not bad. lima beans, stuffing and turkey helper? uninspiring.

but the fridge yielded gold: the remnants of a half-gallon of apple cider that Mike and I split on a whim a week or so ago. suddenly rice and crackers and beans didn't sound so simple. apple cider is exciting, in an expectant sort of way. you cannot drink apple cider in a hurry--it's disarming presence gracefuly disallows action. like sundays at home, it must meander in gentle sips, cradled in both hands, to be enjoyed in solitude and peace or the glowing warmth of fireplaces and fellowship. it is a drink for warming the hands while coming in from the cold, to share with friends when the day's business is done and there is to be no hustling, bustling, or voices raised in anything but laughter. it is for sprawling on couches or huddling on logs or being tucked into scratchy old sweaters and curling up in comforters. it proclaims evenings settled in, boots tucked away and ignored, and the anticipation of trekking no father from the living room than the kitchen, the den, or where two or more are gathered in unpurpose-driven fellowship.

it is, in short, an excellent excuse to postpone foraging forays and any quest or duty reeking of importance--as long as it was still good. i had yet to actually drink any: i hadn't found the time on my 4 p.m. "morning" dash out the door find and clean a proper cup in order to partake. the old empty plastic gatorade bottles and glass beer bottles that carry fauceted water to my hydration needs simply will not do for cider: it's too tough to pour cider into the beer bottles and drinking cider from plastic nears blasphemy for lack of proper ceremony.

a sniff from the jug provided enough hope to scour the cupboards for glass, to be thoroughly cleaned for taste's sake and thoroughly rinsed in cold water to preserve coolness. the cider poured as it should. it looked as it should, in simple unassuming brown. it tasted as it should. i read a little, of the beauty of Oregon and the change of seasons and the cycle of births and deaths, leavetakings and homecomings, and how all things grow and change and return. soon Jake joined me from the cellar where he dwells, and i ate my rice while he cooked his. we talked about the outdoors and wand'ring and friends who have hitch-hiked or train-hopped or bicycled their ways across vast distances, great oceans of beauty. i sat and sipped cider. after a long week's labor and stress and isolation, i was still and at home, my day for cooking a slow meal and sipping cider and for rest.

and then i remembered. today is sunday. apple-cider sunday.

shabbat shalom!

a transcontinental, one-sided conversation :)

Hey bro -
Like the link about "thoughts dear to you." I've heard a lot of McLaren secondhand, but not read any directly.

I take exception with one point. I agree with the first list of things God hates: sin, selfish arrogance, indifference and hate. And we ought to be for what God is for and against what He is against. But the second list: God being against exclusion and suffering, I am not so sure about. Is God really against suffering? Perhaps, but it seems he is against sin more, it pleasing Him to have Jesus suffer too for sin. Having God be primarily concerned with suffering and exclusion seems like an attempt to remake God in a "sensitive 90's guy" definition of God and love - which I don't buy. Just ruminated on love in church Sunday - perhaps love means causing "suffering" in the short run for someone's better in the long run? Perhaps it is more loving and merciful for God to cause me to suffer and change rather than leave me in my pitiful, pathetic current state...

Peace,
Jeff


broski,
it's a pity you are far away and we cannot share this "baada ya kazi" style over Tusker. i have a section of my budget labeled "Africa" and it's growing, albeit way too slowly. so sometime we will fellowship again in this lovely realm of ideas.

I do not see how God could be more against sin than suffering--staring into the eyes of someone starving or lonely or suicidal or just plain bored and saying, no, what's really important is to follow these rules; because you broke these rules, I'm sorry, I'm not allowed to have anything to do with you and you're going to have to suffer forever when you die. It's really your fault: you broke the rules.

I used to think that the Seven Deadly Sins were a list of things you didn't do because if you did, Jesus would kill you. Then, for a while, I became more enlightened and realized that no, you wouldn't die now, you'd die the second death and never get to be happy in heaven.

Then I met Mike Walters, a theology prof at Houghton, who convinced me that the whole idea started with a dude named Evagrius, who lived with a bunch of other dudes in one of the first monastic communities; he came up with the Eight Bad Thoughts, or something like that, to explain all the pain and sorrow and suffering that each member of the community inflicted on each other and themselves. Later a pope with a flair for the dramatic and a little knowledge of numbers trimmed it down to seven and added the flashy title and wrote a bestselling book about the Seven Deadly Sins.

The Big Secret behind the seven deadly sins isn't some law code, where you break them and the judge in the wig says, "sorry son, but you broke the rules. you lose. go to hell. do not pass go, do not collect any celestial goodies that are saved up for good people who make me happy by following rules..."

The Big Secret is that they Seven Deadly Sins are Deadly. They kill you. Then they kill people around you. They start with your soul, Greed and Envy stealing your happiness and your purpose, and then Gluttony and Sloth destroys your body and mind while Rage and Lust and Pride wreak havoc in your relationships. You end up a miserable, lonely, angry, fear-filled, hollow, disappointed whining person. These things, when they run your soul, destroy it. This is a place I have been. Sin, in truth, destroys you. It makes you miserable, it turns you into a pathetically vicious and self-centered monster.

Forget far-off pond'rings about heaven and hell--I want to be saved right now from becoming any more of a soul-sucked zombie than I already am. I want good relationships with people; I don't want to spend my days being disappointed by fame, material posessions, my own impressive self, mind-numbingly lonely sex, and my slowly decaying body and mind. I've looked around the world and seen nothing but miserable people deluding themselves about their own importance and happiness--crumbling monuments built on slavery and oppression and suffering.

Why then, would people sin? My guess is suffering. People have suffered so much that they do not, in G.K. Chesterton's words, know how to be human anymore. All they know how to be is monsters, tearing at each other and themselves in an frenzied orgy of destructive attempts at living. Love is painful and doomed to failure or betrayal or both; lust is a safer option for the short-term, and all we know for no one has shown us what love looks like. Sharing is dangerous, hoarding is safe--for the short term. As life becomes increasingly more meaningless, people turn to whatever they can get for the ailment in their souls. And find only disappointment.

It helps to look at human society as the combined result of the worst natural disaster and most horrifying act of war ever perpetrated (Donald Miller's idea, not mine). Bloody, wounded, and scared, they will do anything to survive--even if it ensures their prolonged misery. They strike out at each other in fear and blindness. They band together in little communities for survival. They submit to abusive power structures because they fear that they cannot survive on their own. They are always edgy and uncertain of their place within the community, reflexively attempting to prove their importance at every chance.

Then Robert Jervis' security dilemma pops up, as communities run into each other. They know that other groups can threaten them, so each one becomes a threat to the others by amassing power out of fear. Ideology is used to strengthen the community and ensure "our" safety; us verse them becomes more and more tense. Fragmentation and war ensue.

The thing is, no one knows how to live anymore. All we know how to do is lust and die alone. No one knows what it's like not to be ruled by fear, or have relationships untainted by envy, greed, and lust. We all suffer, and we all cause ourselves and others to suffer and slowly die inside--if we ever even knew life at all.

The exciting thing about Jesus is--He was the first to suffer, but not sin. He was the first to grow up in a world that specializes in breeding miserable monsters out of babies without becoming a monster himself. He showed us the way out of our miserable, self-destructive lives that didn't involve avoiding the everyday suffering of living with everyone else's sin.

He was sinned against, but did not sin. And if we follow his example, we discover that the way of life we are used to--the diseased and self-destructive habits we've picked up from those around us unconsciously or used to cope with the suffering in our lives--is soul suicide. But His way--the way of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, faithfulness, goodness, self-control--is the way of life. Our lives, day by day, become what they were meant to be: glorious, full of life and joy and creativity and community.

Christ did not avoid the suffering inherent in living in our world--but he was no slave to its destructive and debilitating patterns. Our challenge and calling is to likewise belong in this world, to taste of its suffering and joy deeply, and to become part of the Restoration--the Redemption.

But I am off-topic. We were talking about sin verses suffering, and which is more important to god.

The stories tell of a god who walked the earth, suffering and laughing and teaching monsters how to become people, who spent a great deal of time at parties with drunk people and strippers and prostitutes and he wasn't sad for them because they were breaking the rules--he was sad for them because after the drugs and sex and the thrill of money and power and toys and prestige wore off they were still miserable, hurt and alone. Life, in the unforgettable words of Thomas Hobbes, was solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short, and they were making the best way of it that they could. He was happy that they knew that there was a fundamental problem with the earth--they were ready for an answer that way.

The stories tell of god walking the earth, and getting angry when the churchgoers and pastors and dignified, successful, upstanding community members didn't realize that their lives, too, were full of misery and loneliness. They, too, were simply making the best of it they could, except they thought that their best was a lot better than everyone else's best and Divinely Ispired and Purpose Driven and Morally Superior and all that drivel. They denied their common plight, their common wounds, their common needs, expressed in different forms but fundamentally the same illness that they shared with the pimps and car thieves and loose women and child molesters and hookers and tax collectors and politicians and Pharisees.

When they denied their common plight, their common lost-ness and their common human experience of suffering and confusion, they cut their hearts off from compassion. Compassion is not pity, bemused or otherwise, bestowed from the better position. It is literally suffering great emotion with. The religious made no effort to understand their neighbors, much less to love and fellowship with them. Instead of glorying in the image of God in everyone, they began judging people through a rubric: good and bad, right and wrong, Christian and non-Christian, acceptable behavior and unacceptable behavior. The people became judged by the behavior, instead of the behavior by the people. The story of the individual went out the window with fellowship and compassion.

I think that if I believe anything, I believe that what Christ is doing is not setting up some cosmic contest where the holier or those with better doctrine are rewarded and those who are more screwed up or less intellectual and punished. God does not institute suffering to correct sin: he corrects sin to end suffering. Kids in a fight will often try to get Mom or Dad to prove them right, or at least more right. The point is not that some will say "Ah-Hah! We told you so!" while others hang their heads. The point is not to reward the good kids and make sure the bad ones feel ashamed.

The point is to keep surprising all of them by bringing them face-to-face with themselves and all the evil and distortion that is there, and then to surprise them even more with grace and redemption until they laugh at the notion that they ever called each other "good" or "bad" or any other names but those which they were called by Christ.

I don't know if this is about sin or suffering anymore--but it is much easier to isolate sin and define yourself out of it when you isolate it from suffering. Sin without suffering becomes someone else's problem, then someone else's fault, and soon those people are bad and we are good. Sin without suffering ends blaming without understanding, accusation without compassion, blame without involvement. Then it can be individual, it can belong to someone else and not be our whole, messed up common heritage as human beings. If sin were divorced from suffering, and the two could be weighed in the balance, what kind of god would find sin more important than suffering, the proper formalities more important that the lifesaving measures?

Sin alone seems detatched, academic, as simple as an individual choice, something we've overcome, why haven't they? Suffering, that has meat to it. You see it in people's eyes, you know it when it haunts you, you feel its pangs when you find yourself embroiled in it, causing it in your neighbors without even realizing it, discovering it raw and open in your heart in places you thought were all right. And usually, you can follow it, track it by the blood and body parts in its wake, right to the evil in your own heart. And then you can pick up your cross and join the war on suffering, the Redemption War, the only one worth fighting, reclaiming this tortured battleground one injured heart at a time.

well, as usual brother, i've wandered off topic almost immediately and stayed there despite all attempts to remain within the scope of the question. but i think that's the problem--we're asking different questions, trying to feel each other out from different definitions, different passions, different emphases. i hope that this serves as not as a challenge, but as a chance to feel with me some emotions, and explore with me some ideas in the way that i am exploring them.

cheers!
dan

yeah. boo - yah baby.

boo yah baby. the high for the day was 54 Fahrenheit, not counting a stiff wind off the water. it was down to 42 Fahrenheit by the time we got back to my place, again not counting the stiff breeze, six hours later (three and a half solid pedaling, two and a half split between a pastry shop and Becca's house). it rained the entire time. our breath made fog, our tires made spray, our heroism made family history. we bicycled 31 miles in all, northeast to pick up the Amherst Conservation trail, west and north along the Erie Canal to the Niagara River, south along the waterfront downtown to the the pier, east through a new trail along the Scajaquada/Hoyt Lake/Delaware Park, up the final stretch of Hertel.

by the power of Gore-Tex, Under-Armor and courage bordering on the foolhardy, compelled by a strange notion to do something completely nonsensical in a name of stiff upper lips and manly determination and the bold tradition of "because it's there!", we lived the day laughing at the silly mortals cowering in their four-wheeled boxes.

they hide from glory that shun mother nature's wild embrace.

then we drank hot chocolate and took warm showers and did inherently manly bike maintenance and ate mom's homemade cinnamon rolls.

what can i say--my dad's cool. i'm cooking up an even doozier ride for next time...

courtesy of the other dan holcomb

quick thought of the day

if you have more time, courtesy of Aram Mitchell:

i have had these ideas, but not so clearly, and they are dear to me. so read them. please.

and, for fun, some other fruits of the day:
yeah, I know the guy who wrote the first two

wishin' on a star

wow

read this! be joyful!

in other news, i have become a creature of the night: i work from five p.m. to five a.m. every night, in the city, four days on followed by four days off. so basically, for four days i work all night and sleep all day, rise, breakfast and repeat.

and for the other four? i'm about to find out. but i think it involves a lot of slept-through days and a lot of long nights reading, writing, and watching Lost. and by the way, madame diercks: playing golf while struggling verse the elements to survive and overcoming obstacles like polar bears and strange frenchwomen is a sophisticated portrayal of the paradox between surviving and living, and the human need to find fulfillment instead of just getting by with food, shelter, and all the other mundane realities of life. it's brilliant in fact. Seinfeld? Swinefilled. Pshaw! Rubbish! other British slang and idiom!



ps--if you find yourself stricken by insomnia (or dinner) between the hours of five pm and five am next Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday nights...call me. I'm awake. and quite possibly bored.

wiki endi

ahhhhhhhhhh...
yes, as a matter of fact:
i am typing snazzily to the jazzy and ever-hip soundtrack of Ocean's Twelve.

[several points of clarification, in the name of accuracy, make themselves necessary]
-it's been a...fine weekend.
-my battered, Houghton-issue $96,000 laptop has been upgraded in the name of frugality and well-connected housemates to become a DVD player.
-by "weekend"--call it four and a half days off between the end of an old rotation and the beginning of a new one. an October Break for the working class.
-by Fine...lets say it involved--karaoke, a dash of rum, off-road biking citified style with uber-fast wingman Jake, pancakes with Kilpats and Mighty Taco with Mr. Lilley back home from Asbury. and an evening's stroll along the waterfront with Kat'n'Amy and, of course, Paul and Dave.

but I must confess that such speaks only for half the weekend. the other half--rests in the makeshift DVD player.

you see, last weekend Blockbuster informed me that while they have had an entire wall devoted to the Lost television series first season DVDs for the past month, they have yet to recieve the first DVD in the set.

well. i hadn't the time for full-length movies. i hadn't the creativity for anything else but dinner and TV. i hadn't cable. so i went for Desperate Housewives in the name of culture critique and evaluation. and at the time, i was happy with it...i thought it was pretty decent. for TV.

that, you see-- that was before this weekend. for Friday, i discovered that they had, yes, finally--after a month of sloth exceptional even for a national chain with accompanying bureaucracy--they had recieved such first four episodes.

those--i rented. those--i watched, over a lovely dinner of hot pockets with dr. pepper. i was enchanted. i was delightfully surprised by twists and turns and characters i'd never imagined. i finished them and sat in my five-dollar rummage-sale armchair pondering. it just past midnight. perhaps Danny Ocean and his folks would term it "O-Dark-Fifteen". it was precisely at said time when, in typical half-timed flashback action, i remembered an overheard snippet, one of those little pieces of conversation that clicks into place only hours later. it had occurred as i breezed out the blockbuster door, zipping up my ever-fashionable rouguish softshell jaquet, and pulling on my of-questionable-taste bright yellow SPAM took.

"we're open until one a.m."

enter snazzy, percussive, Latin dancing music. and, my own flip-flopped feet flip-flopping down stairs half-balanced, throwing earlier mentioned softshell on and my elbow into the windowframe halfway down the stairs. and nothing but the velvety cushion of my newly shorn auburn locks between my head and the overly low arch finishing off the staircase.

DVD number two, after a short nighttime bicycle rain with a dash of ride...took me until a bit later in the evening. morning. it doesn't matter, i'm on break, and i'm working overnights for the forseeable future. i am considering getting cable. it's that good. Housewives...hah. whatever. tramps meandering about suburbia getting flustered when the toilet clogs. try being charged by a wild boar, or learning to sew up wounds, track a lost friend, or sleep at night with the jungle howling at your ear.

so, for the time being, if you see me perhaps, mind wandering--i'm marvelling at how much fun it would be to combine two pursuits that I already dabble in: transportation disasters with medical emergencies and wilderness living. and leadership in a diverse group under stress. so that's three pursuits. oh, and philosophy, themes of redemption in people's lives, and mysteries. that's six. looking incredibly good with a tan? oh, make that a round seven!

well. at any rate. the show's about surviving on a desert island after a freak plane crash, and about the people on that island sorting through who they were and who they are and who they are becoming. in a blatant attempt to lend myself some legitimacy: a great monastic (I think Evagrius) once said that the world after the Fall was a collection of the survivors of a sinking ship, bearing whatever wounds and treasures they collected among the wreckage. Lost is the entire world in a nutshell: all sorts of people bouncing off each other's idiosycracies, wounds, fears, miracles and histories, and if that were not enough...

there's a polar bear. in the middle of the south pacific...

and a bald dude who sounds like a zen monk, throws knives, tracks, hunts, and smiles with the beautiful look of peace on his face whenever the rain washes over it. then he maintains that the island that everyone else is terrified of and wants to get off is a place of miracles and beauty.

basically, exactly the kind of guy i want to be if i grow up.

most excellently put

wow. way to go dan and henri. heart-stirring: truth and beauty.

[a recent heart-leaping moment]

I have always felt a dear spot in my heart for Catholics. I have always felt a vomitously wretched ulcer in my gut for church signs and their ability to pack arrogance and ignorance so efficiently and effectively into the noses of all who stand outside their walls.

So on the way back from Houghton, it was a moving and rather religious experience to witness a church that has finally, possibly, got the whole church-nonchurch relationship sorted out. It made my day:



Now, with due credit to Mr Brautigam for making the connection: the message of the gospel is a Pedro the Lion lyric from the song "Of Minor Prophets and their Prostitute Wives:"

"Come home, darlin'/All is forgiven/Please come home quickly."

And so Catholics in Arcade caught on...

[a recent update letter to my fellow Tanzania students]

Hello, fellow wanderers.

Allow me to reintroduce myself, for I have not seen some of you since a certain springishly-April day seventeen months ago when I waved and watched goodbye as a charmingly beautiful green monstrosity of a Mercedes military truck bounced away on a dusty red doubletrack with all Tanzania's scrubby pretentious little acacias-pretending-at-trees and a million rocky hillsides for a backdrop.

So our seasonal migrations too different routes, and the young wildebeest with the wildy explosive morning hair and wildly electric manskirt set off on an odd journey of his own: a journey replete with expansive everything: subtly unveiled sunrises melding into sunny expanses of daytime over vast expanses of scrubby bushes, tall grasses, massive boulders and hills that would be mountains; and those expanses bathed in massive sunshine or draped in deluges of gentle never-too-cold rain, and all flowing into sunsets shot or settled across that massive expanse of Africa sky. I think I miss that the most about Africa: standing still in front of something so very big and slow and beautiful even while walking or driving or running or sitting at a kopje-top bar and sipping Stoney Tangowizi.

That journey led to more journeys less restful and contemplative, and those led to more journeys, and this is email, not autobigraphy. Yesterday I was taking some shut-eye in the passenger seat on the return trip from Jamestown because it was the end of a long work week and I was tired of western New York and the monotonous emptiness of gainful employment. Patrick looked over at me and said "Holcomb [this is part of the reintroduction thing--pay attention now], where are you? off kayaking somewhere?" I startled awake and told him no--I was on top of the Green Bomber, on the long red road to the Ruaha that stretches out and downhill and away and empty for ten or twenty or a hundred kilometers through the acacias and baobabs until the road becomes just a point. The wind was in my hair and the sun was on my face and the hali was nzuri in a way it only is in Tanzania.

A way that it is distinctly not in the mundane or oppresively exaggerated climes of Buffalo, New York, to which we were returning in a rusty, particularly loud and unrefined ambulance, painted poorly in a sick-emergency-neon-green and white. A poor match for the Green Bomber, may she roll on cheerfully in her happy, refined German way for as long as students need classy conveyance in Tanzania. A poor match, too, in drivers, for Ejedi was always good for interesting conversation, pole commentary on passers-by, good cheer and good will and good common sense. My current partner is somewhat lacking.

Which is a pity because we are both rookie EMTs (that's Emergency Medical Technicians for those of you not endowed with that blessed gift of parsing out acronyms from scratch) and we spend more time with each other than...well, than he spends with his spouse and I would spend with my spouse were I so inclined/endowed.

My heart returns often to Africa of late. Last month my brother and his budding family relocated to Moshi, TZ to teach at an international school. He wrote about the excitement and fear and exhaustion and exhiliration and shock of it all: the pain of leaving the familiar and the tears his little daughters shed at the airport and the excitement of driving Land Cruisers and running barefoot and teaching the little ones to count to ten in Swahili.

Last week I saw a tall, slender man at Children's Hospital who must have some Masai blood in him. Yesterday I watched The Constant Gardner. My flatmate Mike and I spent an evening over Yuenling and Pizza and The Postal Service sharing feelings of displacement as he readjusts from a year in Paris and I readjust from twenty-two years of irresponsibility and four years of Houghton into a real job and a real checkbook and real bills and the complete and utter unimportance of my feelings on the beauty of people and cultures and art movies.

So, here I am in an upstairs room in Buffalo, with a battered old Houghton computer and Iron & Wine in my headphones, thinking of Africa. My flatmates are puttering around, and the smell of cigarette smoke is in the air. It's odd that that scent is beginning to smell like home to me. It's odder to feel a sense of satisfaction at mundane things I used to scorn, like renting my own room, shopping for my own groceries, paying my own phone bills and balancing my own checkbook. I'm supporting myself--the hunter-gatherer equivelent of leaping out of a tree and wrestling my first waterbuffalo to the death and the outdoor-rec equivalent of starting a fire without matches. Unfortunately for me, there is no waterbuffalohide skin with which to make a cape and commemorate this accomplishment. Pity.

The first thing I did to the empty walls of my room was to put up a world map and my blue "I-climbed-Mt.-Uhambingetu" bandanna. It reminds me of the bigger world. I often feel like I'm killing time, punching in and punching out, going to movies by myself in a strange town full of strange people who I do not understand and to whom I am an unimportant enigma. It reminds me of travels past, and travels to come, and six billion people living in their tiny communities and tending maize or watching cows or driving ambulances so they can come home at night and have a beer with their neighbor and laugh with their children and dream about tomorrow.

In the meantime--I'm gainfully employed in Buffalo NY as an EMT--I drive ambulances and take blood pressures and ask where it hurts and what an infarct is and splint brooken bones and spend a lot of time in nursing homes and maybe someday I'll get to save a life. I ride a bicycle around to save money and have fun and get to explore the city, and because I don't have a car. Sometimes we get lots of downtime on ambulance shifts and I get to read Time or the Economist or the books on postmodernism that just came in the mail so I can finish that senior seminar paper and graduate. When I can, I visit Houghton, and when they can, people come up from Houghton and visit me. When I'm not studying for work and memorizing protocols, I think about how I can find a place in Africa or the Middle East or the Far East or Latin America, and whether I should go back to school for politics or sociology or Arabic or development or become a nurse or skip school altogether and become a paramedic, or even write a book or join the Coast Guard and jump out of helicopters and rescue people. I talk to flatmate Mike about travelling to Paris and Morocco and visiting my brother in Tanzania.

And I get all excited about September the 22nd, when my benefits from work kick in and I get dental insurance and I can finally get my wisdom teeth pulled and my eyes examined and not be terrified of getting sick or breaking a leg while doing something stupid. And that is definite sign that I am officially an old person, and perhaps in grave danger of becoming a responsible, old person as well. And that is the most significant aspect of me now: the transition (without even a decent euhneto ceremony) of a young reckless idealistic warrior into a young, reckless, wary, and practical businessman-warrior. Does that work?

I miss you all, and Tanzania more, and our sojourns and conversations there even more, and being served complimentary alcohol and those delicious worcestershire sauce pretzels while surfing between movies on my own personal TV screen on British Airways even more than that.

Cheers

once more...

my amazon shipment came today. last time I picked up a David Dark book, i tried to blog about it and found myself wanting to quote entire pages. lots of entire pages. i despaired. now i have to say it again. David Dark's Everyday Apocalypse and, it appears, The Gospel According to America are simply some of the best things you can read if you're into reading. if you grew up a Christian in America, then these can form a valuable part of your redemption.

and...the man writes with the vocabulary and passion of G.K. Chesteron, with a refreshing lack of consideration for restrained pacing or gentle introduction to topics. he's a literary whirlwind and completely unpredictable.

"An emotional disorder has settled upon us, a habitual anger that passes itself off as normalcy, and it isn't just directed at whatever Democrat or Republican might strike us an appropriate scapegoat for all of life's problems. We eventually feel it for people (neighbors, coworkers, relatives) whose opinions fail to coincide with our own and strangers who don't drive the way we think they should, an impatience that makes clear of generous thinking difficult...I don't want [future generations] to inherit a militant ignoracnce that confuses anger for strength of character or the momentary silencing of somebody else with victory...As the witness of the Jewish Christian tradition makes clear, the anger of human beings against what they percieve to be evil and unjust will never produce the righteousness of God (although, as anger goes, it usually feels terribly effective when it has hold of us), and confession is the only hope for minds whirling with contradictory impulses and filled with thoughts of courage and honor and freedom but increasingly incapable of connecting dots or adding two and two together...

"Like discipleship, the practice of democracy is a widening of our capacities for moral awareness and an expansion of our sphere of respect. If we have a steadily narrowing vision of people to whom we're willing to accord respect or if the company we keep is slowy diminishing to include only the folks who've learned to pretend to agree with us, we can be assured that we're in danger of developing around ourselves a kind of death cult, a frightened, trigger-happy defensiveness that is neither godly nor, in the best sense, American."

and...there's lot's more. :)

[nothing in my life is significant enough to warrant a title]

currently listening to: ben folds. melancholic and restless and lazy all wrapped into one. my new friend and housemate Mike is listening to sad French music (is there any other?) and he's in a melancholic reverie with wistfulness and nostalgia. i bike out for pizza: i don't feel like cooking. i lie on Mike's floor and we listen to Rufus Wainwright and Sigur Ros and other rainy day music and a CD Mike's friend Amanda made covering a bunch of other cool songs. we still feel sad. i think of that feeling of long road trips, when the music is playing and everyone is looking out the windows or reading a book or snoozing and drooling on their neighbor's slumbering head and somehow, without speaking, there is complete fellowship. and the sun is shining. Mike remembers how France is warmer with more sunshine and he used to walk to school every day. Mike thinks that I shouldn't let women get me down. He makes me a CD with all sorts of cool, artsier-than-the-shit-on-the-radio music. tomorrow i return to my square-peg/round-hole job. i wonder if one tomorrow-in-uniform will stack on top of another until i stop realizing that my deepest conversations during the day involve the price of donuts and which hospitals have the prettiest nurses. Mike looks forward to school this winter like doing time in Siberia. I don't think either of us wants to be here right now; I don't think either of us really knows where we do want to be.

but the music helps.

reloaded...

my dear, dear electronically connected friends, i extend my sincere apologies. in addition to having my bike stolen, the onset of pain from my wisdom teeth, twenty hours of overtime, and being threatened quite seriously with the loss of my job, the internet has been down for the last week and a half or so and Starbucks charges you to use their wireless.

so it's not my typical inability to maintain human connections at the basis of my complete absence...there are actual real reasons. i will soon be checking my email and beginning the laborious task of catching up this blog with the lightening pace of my life.

but i have returned to paper-and-pen journaling with surprising fiercefulness...

Some very good news...

I recieved some very surprising and good news last Monday: Kris, my Field Training Officer, cleared me from training rather abruptly. So I found myself in Jerry's office Tuesday, doing a miserable job on the final test as I was not prepared. Nevertheless I cleared, and now I have my own car with my very first partner, who spent today excitedly rubbernecking the various scantily clad women sprawled through the streets and Emergency Rooms of Buffalo, while providing a colorful running commentary. We're not cleared for emergency operations yet, so we do a lot of running from nursing homes to hospitals and hospitals to specialized care centers, and it's all very good for getting a handle on the city's highways, byways and hospitals--one more thing, besides the scads of detail-oriented paperwork, which I am miserably poor at.

Good Part: I don't have to get up at five a.m. anymore--my day can start at eight. Bad Part: no more morning bike rides into the sunrise. work is a two minute ride away.
Good Part: no more four-on/four-off. it's Tuesday/Wednesday/Thursday/Friday, with a three-day weekend.
Bad Part: no more four day weekends...no more automatic overtime...no more beautiful, shiny suburban ambulances.
Good Part: my battered urban ambulance has linoleum kitchen-patterend flooring in the back. Yessssss!


Terminology of the Day: "Burn and Return"--pick a patient up at the hospital, transport to the MACC for chemotherapy, and then return them to said hospital or SNF: Skilled Nursing Facility.

Interesting Sighting of the Day: the guy who, while mumbling incoherently to himself, managed to strip completely naked, climb up and over the rails of his emergency department bed, and take a stumbling leap with resounding crash through the monitors, chairs and IV racks into the curtain separating him from the guy next door. the guy next door was not terribly amused. neither were the nurses in the ED with four patients lined up waiting for admission and every bed, plus the gurneys in the hallway, packed with patients. I don't think the nurses were very packed with patience...

gotcha!

I'm very slow sometimes

Okay, okay, okay...I was tagged. Here goes:

Post five things you enjoy, even when no one around you wants to go out and play. What lowers your stress/blood pressure/anxiety level? Post it to your journal, and then tag 5 friends and ask them to post it to theirs.
1. long bicycle rides with Maroon 5 and/or Johnny Cash, etc, ad infinitum. preferably with obstacles to jump or obscenely fast downhills where I can do the "Look Ma! No Hands!"
2. eggs. meat. onions. tomatoes. tortillas. garlic. oregano. basil. assorted other italian seasonings. cheese. home cooked beans. repeat.
3. anything involving sunsets, water, foliage and silence. (must be at least two of the four). or exploring.
4. I'm a Level 8 Jam Horker
5. right now: Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog) (Jerome K. Jerome). but any good book will more than do.


alllllrightey then. Tim Watson, Ryan Alo, Ben Howard, Dan Perrine, and....ohhh...Tracy. cheers!

oooooh....

Cinnamon Danish: 25 cents
Brita-Filtered water: $5 for a new filter
Refrigeration: well, it's in the rent...
Reading my housemate's fashion magazines because I am too tired from riding my bike to move: ummm...free because she pays for the subscription?

Chuckling to myself at the inherent irony of this ad's linguistic blunder*: Priceless





* look it up here.

choices, choices....

so I have a MasterCard coming in the mail, and I'm eagerly anticipating an exciting new world of internet purchases. I'm trying to decide what to buy first...and I think I've found it!

[ta dum ta dum ta dum....]

New Underwear!!!!!! And it makes a statement, too!

bathroom warriors of mighty doomness

my new housemate and i tackle the bathroom!
[theme music]



note: i'm writing blogs on scratch paper in spare time and publishing them when i get the chance, under the dates they were written--not the dates they were posted--so check in the "old stuff" section for "old" posts that you might not have seen yet. in this case, I just posted "the streets" today but it's an entry from August 5th that had languished waiting for photo uploading, finishing touches, etc. if you're interested.

note (another): i just finished organizing my flickr photostreams, including my Foto of the Day project. you can check it out from the "Foto of the Day" link on the right sidebar, right below my name/email/etc.

public service announcement if you for any reason are traversing to Buffalo to dine upon wings or perhaps feast thine eyes upon the cinemas, there is no excuse on god's green earth (not even unwavering body odor, for i am the proud owner of old spice's mountain rush fragrance for smelly armpitjungles, and i live within fourtteen steps of the shower now, so i am actually quite clean...) for not giving me a call or dropping me an email and saying "hi!" while you're up here.

semimystical moosings

i wish that i could sever my future from my past.

i think that the phrases "how am i not myself?" and "what are you still holding on to?" have a lot to do with each other.

you have to know when to hold them and know when to fold them. when is that? when precisely, does disappointment or discouragement cease becoming an obstacle to overcome and begin to become a teacher to humbly submit to? when do you surrender your dreams and acknowledge your foolishness?

is it really meaningful to spend your life helping others to better live their meaningless ________ lives? [fill in the blank with your choice--whatever little things that seem important to them and meaningless to others--it could be materialism or outdoorism or world savers or quiet pietest monks or individualism or collective identity, ad. infinitum]

why is it that my own life seems more meaningful and beautiful when i am in motion--riding my bicycle and listening to tunes--than when i am unoccupied? unless, of course, i am unoccupied on an island in a lake in Algonquin while the sun is setting...

maybe what you do with your life is not so important as how you do it--the person you become in it. your potential as a person is not to accomplish things or attain positions or accrue honor, but the potential to accomplish, attain, and accrue whatever you manage joyously with keen eyes, open ears, grace, charity, and calloused hands.

(but i ride a bike...)

i walk a lonely road/the only one that i have ever known/don't know where it goes/but it's home to me and i walk alone...

so the ambulance was sitting at Tim Horton's today and i was being more than happy to hear this pretty cool song. i have felt like this all my life. and then i heard Oasis, too, and I was thinking, as you most certainly are too:

what is it with emergency services personnel, ridiculously unhealthy pastries, and cheap coffee? c'mon dan--Timmy Ho's?--it's so cliched. but...it's also completely true. that every single post in the city of Cheektowaga is within a half-mile of a Tim Hortons or Krispy Kreme. Post 63 is, in fact, the Krispy Kreme parking lot--where on duty EMTs and Paramedics get free donuts and koffee (there's a very good reason the koffee is free...)

and then you thought--what's Oasis doing in a Green Day song? why do i think they're playing "Wonderwall?" i will tell you. WEDG was playing both songs, mixed seamlessly. If you can manage it, try--they fit perfectly. and the emotional power squares itself in the combination. wierd. but that was not the end.

summer has come and passed/the innocent can never last/wake me up when september ends

for those not in the know, this is the second radio-released track from american idiot, Green Day's latest album. walk alone was the first track released. my partner-in-Timmy-Horton-ing-it-up informed me that american idiot is a concept CD on which all the songs follow a theme: a critique of post-9.11 america, the american mentality, the church, the media, and the iraq war. if he had a more...specialized? arcane?...vocabulary he might have used phrases like "suburban nightmare," "consumerism," "mass culture," "politics of fear," and "mass media."

i know this because i biked to Barnes and Noble tonight and bought it. i couldn't not. the cd isn't great art, it's not a great statement, it's not amazingly technical or even really poetic, by any means. it's a raging ball of anger and frustration and a little dash of hope, like a diary of the betrayal and disappointment and disillusionment and hopelessness of the 9.11 generation.

it's stomach acid on the twisted american soul. it's a man at his wits end, reaching for a grenade to wake a warped insensate glutton sated with self-importance and power. it's a rage against complacency, inner and societal, laden with the hopeless exhaustion of commitment to an unpopular and unpretty reality.

it's almost prophetic. or it's so filled with the spirit of prophecy, the grating, burning, intrusive and rude truth about ourselves that...well...you should listen to it.



Are we we are, are we we are
the waiting unkown?
the rage and love, the story of my life
the Jesus of suburbia is a lie

the streets

it's chilly--the fan has been brining in the cool night air for hours. my cell phone chimes out Oh When the Saints for lack of a better tune while a light flashes lurid purple-red-green-white, some engineer's "clever" idea splashing all over the bare walls and sloping ceiling of my little room. it's my morning wake-up call. i am up before the sun.

I slide into shorts and wool socks and my trusty Africa-and-back hiking sweater. cornflakes. pack my uniform: shirt, pants, pager, watch, workboots, socks, black ball-point pens, shears, log book, glasses. packtowel, soap, deoderant. bike lock. breakfast is cornflakes. it looks like lunch will be apples.

I think I'll take the red bike today: the roads are smooth, and Red Fuji is built sleek and narrow for speed. It'll be the January '05 mix CD, I think.

the streets are mine. I cut into the cool breezes, breathing deep and settling into a quick cadence for warmth. I know the backroads now--their potholes, deep curves, the shortcuts through parks, the timing of the stoplights at Kensington and Wehrle. the first two miles are quick: all sidestreets with old trees and blue collar houses and a few silent cars passing quickly, almost respectfully, as if they feared to intrude.

The last leg is longer: a two-and-one-half mile straight on Wehrle, a series of flats and uphills. today I'm flying. the CD shuffles from Ben Folds to Bush to the Crows to the Beatles with a dash of Moulin Rouge's Roxanne and Johnny Cash encores "Hurt" with "When the Man Comes Around." In front of me, the stars bow out to the sun's fiery entrance--there is a determined force in the oranges and reds and yellows burning through the predawn gray and clouds and making a way for the deep, deep blue in her wake. my legs are aching but determined as well. the day is coming. I coast into Post 64 and watch the sun across the airport--the sound of engines washes everything out as the jets thunder their way over my head and into the sky for destinations unknown. it's the sound of freedom and purpose and adventure. i stand there in the middle of the parking lot and soak it in.

the nice lady in Medic 12 skips the usual good morning. "You're wierd." I smile. I know. I think about a sunset seen from an island in Algonquian. I wouldn't have it any other way.



Epilogue the day holds another treat. we work late on a pleasant old lady with chest pain. the nurses take forever to find her a bed. i hit the road at eight, moving slow, low gears, taking a few new backroads, letting the bike take the long winding curves of the meandering dusky streets. i don't really want to get off my bike. i don't want the music to stop. i share the roads and sidewalks and paths with no one. i drift through the park no hands as the sun sets. life is good.