the cross on my back

or "tatoo pt. II"

twilighttreader:

"The ironic thing is that you can turn on the TV and see any number of celebrities and such who are patently not Christians sporting the iconography, be it with tattoos or "bling" or whatever. Why this girl things that inking a cross on her shoulder is making such a bold statement is really beyond me."

well, "this girl" was once upon a time a good friend of mine, so I should preface with a dear affection for an old friend. but. I also have pretensions towards being an intellectual. and i think ideas are important. so here's what I think.

Why? because trendy things entail a safe and easy form of "meaningful" self-expression when one leaves college and enters law/grad/hard knocks school and discovers the sheer difficulty of actually doing anything even minutely creative or important--of simply surviving in a system of pragmatic acquiesence to forces beyond your control.

It's a cog in a wheel in a transmission in a factory "sticking it to the man" without actually losing it's coveted little coggish place or recognizing its utter dependence on the system. Refuge through empty symbolism which you convince yourself is important. a lot of religious fervor works like that. Self-convincing action to artificially enliven a disappointing futility and rescue the self-concept from the oppression of being considered pretty insignificant by forces like nature and macroeconomic systems and socialized mass behavior.

Identity through contrived spiritual experiences. A coping mechanism in the place of humility.

Of course, I'm probably reading my own experiences and psychology right on top of hers. She may be validly experiencing something very spiritual, something she chose to express from deep conviction of its importance. For her sake I sincerely hope so. Because if not, she's compensating around an important bit of reality rather than facing it. And as we learn in the medical profession, compensation without action to address a threat is a losing game.

And for my sake, I hope she never reads this :)

myspace blues

So I have an old friend who I rediscovered last week (through myspace--go figure--and I just got an account so that I could comment on my little bro'sspace) who happened to just be finishing the process of getting a tattoo--an outline of a cute cross on the right shoulderblade to be precise.

But--for all of you more interested in the tawdrier details of my romantic life rather than the higher world of philosophy...skip to "Part II" below, where someone propositions me on mySpace, and quandries ensue.

Now this tattooing is a pretty serious move from a conservative, Christian homeschooled girl, whether or not she's in law school. I mean, we weren't just reading "I Kissed Dating Goodbye" in high school--we were mad hardcore Eric Ludy fans. "When God Writes Your Love Story." Which, if I may digress, absolutely blows. He doesn't. He doesn't write anything. He just kind of sits there waiting for you to do something, and there you are waiting for him to do something, and there's this awkward silence...

Well. Anyway. She's got this tattoo now, against the advice of her parents, etc, etc., and decided to explain it. On Myspace. I for one, am thinking she'd better not have any serious agnostic or faith-shaking experiences for the rest of her life, because, hey, you've got this permanent tattoo, and people will always be asking, and you'll be either bitter or ashamed. And carrying a cross of bitterness on your back is probably a bad idea. Unhealthy psychologically.

At any rate. "I sincerely wanted to permanently and publicly identify myself as a Christian. It's a personal thing - I've struggled in the past with being ashamed of my faith, and this is my way of telling myself and the rest of the world that I am no longer, and will never again be ashamed of my relationship with Jesus."

Well. Okay. This helped me finally resolve some of my ambivalence about calling myself a Christian. I am not ashamed of my faith. But I am pretty ashamed of a lot of other peoples'. The church across the street is advertising on that little church-sign of theirs a "Christian" coffeehouse. Which pretty much guarantees that it will be lousy, contrived and uncomfortable. Quite frankly, if I could go through life without ever again being called Christian, I would be quite happy. I would actually be free to live the life my creator made me to live and the mysterious, often vaguely ominous but always fiercly beautiful, holy ghost calls me to. The last group to publically and permanently take up the cross as part of their bodily attire was during the Crusades, and we all know how that went. You will never see a tattoo of the cross on my body because I would rather cut off my right hand than identify myself with what passes for "Christianity" today. I will take up the cross in my lifestyle, thank you, since I have tried enough to avoid it to know that such a feat is impossible anyway.

well. that gets that off my chest.

Part II.

And then I checked my mySpace mail. Now, keeping in mind that I started this whole mySpace thing as a fun way to get back in touch with a bunch of old friends who, I happened to discover, were using said electronic forum, know (O gentle reader) that I whimsically chose to make a good time of it and not reveal my identity easily.

So the myspace space lacks my actual name, and the picture I used on my profile is from a certain Shakespeare play in which I was topless, clad in yellow harem pants, with flowing black hair and a "Dark Egyptian" complexion courtesy of a ridiculously brown, liberally applied sponge. And I had a beard. And I was attempting to imitate Ben Stiller, of the Derek Zoolander "Blue Steel" fashion.

Suffice to say, it's not a very...representative...picture of me. and I'm flexing what little bulk Iwas in posession of as well. I still had abs back then...or so I like to think.

So I check my mySpace mail, to see if said old friends have written me back with confused queries as to my identity yet, and some lady in Albany, (blonde, young and attractive, with a healthy social self, if the picture tells any truth), pops up in my Inbox. she is, as mentioned, cute and presumably in posession of a healthy enough social existence to not be an internet obsessed mySpace stalker mind-job. the subject line reads: "heyyyy buddy..." which is precisely the sort of thing I'm well known to say. I'm sure you're all quite aware of my little fondness for elipses.

so I open the letter.

"Hey there buster brown...

"So i guess the time has arrived for me to start using this site. I can resist no longer...Let the games begin! I took a look at your page and well, I liked what I saw... ;p"

"So, my name is C-----, and I'm from Albany, New York. I think us crazy kids should be friends. Cause you seem pretty nice, and smart, and possibly cute! (it's so tough to tell in this cruel digital world.. :)

And so on. Now, as many of you know, I am completely vain and ridiculously vulnerable to flattery. Especially when topless. But, quandries (and insecurity) begin striking me immediately. They always do. I no longer have flashing black hair flowing like sheep down the mountains (the sheep being black, and the mountains being my masculine shoulders except that it was never that long...more's the pity) I have a self-buzzed crop of red hair with a sparse, rather mundane goatee.

And, if I get her greeting right, I also am no longer "Buster Brown." More apt perhaps would be Wanker White, or Poppa Paleface. I am, after all, the child known for a rare ability to blind airline pilots at will by merely wearing a bare-midriff t-shirt (not that I have ever committed such an abomination...but think about it.) (on second thought, no, please don't.) (for the sake of your sanity and your bright future, I implore you, stop. the effort will leave you a broken man.) (or woman.)

And please to not even be mentioning my "EMS tummy" which has become much more...comfortable with its "lounging by the fireside in a dressing gown with wine and a quiet, self-satisfied belching and tummy-scratching" self. At least I don't have "EMS ass" yet.

hmmm...caught under false pretences, and I wasn't even trying. I guesss the lesson to take away from this is...

I'm that good. [polishes fingernails on shirt] can't fight the moonlight, baby...

[addendum and disclaimer] This has nothing to do with the previous two posts, and the firestorm on controversy surrounding the mysterious identity of the lady Nissa. just got this mySpace thing this morning. Amazing things can happen in my life and have nothing to do with women. Truly! I know it is hard to believe, but there is life without estrogen! And it's quite good!

my fair lady

well.

okay.

i give.

there is a new lady in my life. and though it pains my stoic pride to admit it, she has inspired sheepish grins, unabashed rejoicing, and even little fits of giggling lately. Dr. Gallman introduced me to her the other night; it was a serendipitous meeting, completely unplanned...I'd almost decided not to go the International Banquet.

almost. it's a good thing I did.

funny enough, I'd just talked to my dad the other day, musing a littley amusingly about "the list"--attributes I didn't want to compromise on, traits I'd always admired.

"the ability to head off into the wilderness and carry her own weight is a plus...you know me, pop, so high-maintenance frills and frippery aren't important. I want a girl who just kills you grinning there, mud splattered on her face, miles from the beaten track, and doesn't need to be showered and shaved and tucked into bed every night...doesn't need a lot of coddling, doesn't need new accessories every payday...the kind where scratches and scars just add character and make you love her more."

and then a day later I was talking to Doc Gallman at the International Banquet. Wham. Bam. Slam. She hit everything on the list. And more.

she's just as old as I am--born in 1983, just hitting her prime. she grew up in America, but she's Japanese by birth and Japanese by family. That makes me excited more than anything--I've always gotten along best with cross-cultural sojourners, and I admire the reliability, practicality, durability, economy and grace of her Japanese heritage. Of course, maybe it's just the closest I'll ever get to being a samurai...

sure, other people may not think she's much to look at--but I find beauty in her simply graceful lines. she is elegant without being ostentatious--solid and durable where it counts, not plastic or a sporting a quick-fading faddish style.

and she's only got 90,000 miles on the engine--her people are well renowned for living well into their second or third hundred thousand miles. best of all, she's not only got the manual transmission, but the four-wheel drive as well, and the super-gas efficient, super-long lasting 4 cylinder engine. everything I've been looking for for over three months now, right under my nose, and for a lot cheaper than anything else out there.

here she is with the gracious and kind Dr. Gallman, last fall. isn't she lovely? I couldn't be happier. hongera for me!





ps--I have the next eleven days off of work...so I'll be alive during normal waking hours. and probably bored. and super-drugged up, because my wisdom teeth are getting pulled Tuesday. so you should call me. 716.698.4358. now you have no excuse.

amazing things

are happening.

indeed.


-------------
[edit]

a) wow. a thousand impassioned cries for justice, equality, and the kingdom of heaven, and what does it take to get you all to talk to me? someone to drop the "msichana" bomb. blood in the water...

b) some of us have real jobs, and we can't log in every five minutes to keep up with the latest gossip.

c) yes. sure. my meaningless and pathetically miserable existence, hunched in a darkened upper room with only my books and the meagre light of candles to keep me warm, could only be brightened by the advent of civilizing femininity. How have I borne the awful cares and toils of this world without the tender hands of a woman to lift me up from my cares and sorrows and make me complete? O, John Eldredge, I am the man without woman, without captivating romance and adventures, without hope in the world! Deliver me from my boredom, my listlessness, the vanity of my existence, for the bane of the single man is to know nothing but sorrow and a chasing after the wind...

d) yah know, i must have been so eagerly awaiting the joys of miscommunication, excruciating sexual tension, a strained and broken budget, differing mores and expecations, clashing gender roles, mood swings, emotional firestorms, blind mistakes with horrifying consequences, polite-relationships-with-her-obnoxious-friends, failed expectations, more miscommunication, isolation from friends, agonizing weeks of breaking up and getting back together only to break up again, not to mention something to do with all of my overabundant spare time!

e) I must be longing to escape the hell of singleness, with its mild stresses, cordial relationships, time for reading and laughing and watching movies, casual wardrobe, open and flexible schedule, freedom of expression, freedom to go and do without fear of offending some arcane and twisted feminine logic...

ya'll are hilarious.

except.

y'all are kinda right...

but I really have to go to work now. it's a twenty minute bikeride and I have twenty minutes to get there and I don't have my boots on yet.

I shall write more...baadaye.

:)

yeeeah killing time so's i don't fall asleep

triads

books i just bought:
-Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
-Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi
-How Soccer Explains the World by Franklin Foer

groceries i just bought:
-fresh hummous
-hummous mix in boxes
-six pack of Pete's Wicked Wanderlust Cream Beer

books i just finished:
-Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
-Snow Leopard by Peter Mathiessen
-Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden

firsts this week:
-pub crawl on St. Patty's day
-buzzed by red-tailed hawk in cemetary on the way home from work yesterday morning in the middle of the city!
-got paid to watch a troupe from Mexico perform various ethnic (and awesomely rhythmic) regional dances.

books i'm halfway through:
-King Lear
-Bread and Wine by Plough Press
-A Season in Mecca by Abdellah Hammoudi

cool grown up accomplishments:
-clean, orderly room with visible floor for over a week now
-set up serious appointment to inspect/possibly buy a truck to live out of for a year
-planning schedule for summer w/multiple engagements BEFORE the first day of spring

excellent new tunes on miPod:
-Wayfaring Stranger by 16 horsepower
-Sunday Bloody Sunday covered by Pillar
-It's Too Late by The Streets

my wicked awesome drinking vessels
-handmade Paul Christensen awesomely-massive pottery drinking mug
-pink nalgene with flower and pink lid
-stolen cafeteria cup with "I was stolen by a sinner" written on it in black magic marker by the indescribably profound Ben Howard

ladies i thought were really cool but turned out to be elsewhere enamored:
-girl i never asked out, and it was way too late
-girl i finally made up my mind to ask out only to discover that i had made my mind up...too late
-girl i was just about to ask out, but discovered i was: just too late

films recently watched:
-Pulp Fiction
-Hero
-Blackhawk Down

excellent articles:
-living with constant wireless interaction: "Continuous Partial Attention"
-Zakaria on Iraq: "Apalling but not Hopeless"
-William Jennings Bryan: when a promising leftist Christian populist social movement was nipped in the bud in favor of the urbane secularists, setting the ground for today's culture wars...possibly.

great conversations this week:
-Elinor Ostrom-ish analysis of potential incentive programs for EMS workers and difficulties posed by current Computer Aided Dispatch system with new (my new) supervisor; also perverse corporate shareholder-driven cost-cutting incentives in the absence of market-driven quality control due to the nature of EMS work and public contracts in the urban/suburban economic divide
-Surprise reacquaintance with old Paramedic friend Geoff Boone from Houghton Volunteer Fire Department days, over patients at the ECMC of a random.
-Inanely cheerful banter and rediscovery of The Streets with friend who only last week was sailing (metaphorically) through rough waters under iron skies.

quotes:
-Voltaire:

"Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd."

-Stephen Levy:

"A live BlackBerry or even a switched-on mobile phone is an admission that your commitment to your current activity is as fickle as Renée Zellweger's wedding vows. Your world turns into a never-ending cocktail party where you're always looking over your virtual shoulder for a better conversation partner. The anxiety is contagious: anyone who winds up talking to a person infected with CPA feels like he or she is accepting an Oscar, and at any moment the music might stop the speech."

-The Streets:

"We first met through a shared view/she loved me and i did too."

notes to self:

-there is an infinite supply of irresistably great deals on tantalizingly clever books, cds, and dvds, which are capable, if not carefully monitored, of making swiss cheese of drastically finite budgetary resources.

-ask out the next encountered "fly bird" without the customary four or eighty weeks of introspection, uncertainty, tentative get-to-know-you-first thing. absolutely no mandatory 40-day waiting periods, homeschool inexperience be darned!

-eat cheese! and hummous! listen to crazy apocalyptic gothic folk music while chatting aimlessly with friends! listen to backlogged NPR podcasts while doing nothing really productive! and do it more often! life is bueno!

places i would still rather be right now
-Tanzania with my brother
-Tanzania with my sister-in-law
-Tanzania with my darling neices

pictures that keep me happy in my exile

-neices playing in the Indian Ocean

-yeah, it really does get that green and beautiful and warm, and good people actually sit outside for the fun of it and don't get frostbite. and birds sing too.

-just look at those crazy people!

enjoy!

my day!

it must have been my day!

a) i like drizzling rain

b) it was gospel choir day at the Catholic church down the street

c) the ladies in front of me at Tops were foreign so I politely asked them if they were speaking Kiswahili (in Kiswahili) and we had a pleasant conversation. in Kiswahili. and they were impressed. so was I. still decently functional...

ooofff

there are so many forces arrayed against human happiness--I wonder if I will leave this place alive. so many people are crumpling. the light in their eyes dies and they are just flesh walking around. the harsh winter bores right through their souls and consumes them--heartless they tread the earth neither seeing nor knowing until their bodies stop.

it's like we are in a fight with great violence for the survival of ourselves, our souls, and we are reeling and blinded and if that is not enough, all around us those who have succumbed to the disaster have become agents of its brutality. they reach out with cold eyes and decaying limbs and teach cruelty to the next generation.

it's a good thing I have a balcony. I think I'm renaming naming my (relatively) new room from the Stronghold of Solitude to the Stronghold of Refuge. it has an attached balcony (half of which is something of a bog) which has recently become the place to sit, drink beer, bundle up against the cold and hurt communally. disappointment, loneliness, emptiness, the silence of God, the cruelty of people--strike right at the will to live. you feel yourself getting bitter, harsh, apathetic, like the very people who wound you and use you and look you in the face afterwards and expect nothing from life but cynical laughter and whatever can be had by manipulation, trickery and power.

so, we've been taking refuge on the balcony, hunched against the frigid wee hours of the morning, waiting for the sunrise. it's a sacred place, set aside with no other purpose than communing. symbolically, it gives us a place in the harsh elements but removed above them--a safe place but not a hiding place, a strategic vantage point but not a retreat. gather, regroup, commit, tend to the wounded, never give up. without committment, without community, we will not make it out of here alive.

yeah, i like my balcony.

huh...

I'm losing Lent this year. I can't think of anything I can really fast--I need my meagre strength and focus for work, so I can't do anything that jeopardizes food and sleep. I guess I could give up beer--but I think it plays a really important part of my social life right now, and my social life is more than a luxury--it's part of my duty, my calling. I want to give up my bike--the discipline of walking everywhere would be phenomenally awesome. It would slow me down, I'd discipline myself to plan more, and I'd experience so much more of the world around me instead of just flying by. I'd also walk through a lot of shady neighborhoods after dark, and I wouldn't be able to get to the classes I kind of need to take in order to keep my EMT certification. So, scratch that.

I can't think of anything else that could be profitably fasted--anything that is unbalanced or unhealthy or in need of perspective and discipline. Except, maybe, my solitude--I spend too much time alone, too much time on the nocturnal schedule (it's been four months now) by myself. I need to fast being alone--I must be the only person in America who doesn't have a deficit of quiet solitude and reflection.

What I really am sad about, though, is missing Ash Wednesday. I just finished six twelve-hour overnights in a row, went to an employee meeting on my night off, and today I'll start another five straight. The whole entrance to the season just got lost. I wanted to go to St. Joes, I wanted the priest to take the ashes of last Palm Sunday's branches and mark with the sign of execution. I wanted to know, wanted to remember and kneel and ponder in stillness, that "dust you are, and to dust you shall return."

I can say it and write it a thousand times and still not know it. The death is in me; I am decaying, and today or tomorrow or another tomorrow I will finish decaying and return to the earth and be forgotten. It is certain, and when I knell in that quiet place and hear those words, I know that certainty and it is a part of my life, and I will keep somber celebration of my mortality until ignoring my impending death is no longer a part of the pattern of my day to day life.

This is why I love prayer and ritual. Ignoring my place in the world--my smallness and my impending death--is a frantic and sickeningly empty way. On Ash Wednesday I bear that truth on my forehead and for a moment, in the quiet of that cathedral, in my life. And with luck and repetition, I will begin to laugh at myself and my self-importance later when I catch myself living out some myth of my own importance and significance of business for impressing others, or ignoring some person's humanity because it feels inconvenient. And maybe some day the grace of a thousand Ash Wednesdays will transform my life until I carry that certain truth about myself around with me every day as a part of me.

Yeah. I missed Ash Wednesday. I guess I'll have to celebrate it on a Friday instead...

i'm sorry the bliss of your existence...

was interrupted by poor quality coffee. whether or not your coffee is laced with blood should always be a secondary concern to consumer quality, not to mention your miserly power-hungry pursuit of near-extortionate market prices.

read the provocation

a) Vive Hugo! his country has a long history of being pushed around ("dictated to?") by the United States. he donated millions of dollars worth of oil to New Orleans poor in the wake of Katrina. And it's pronounced "Ooh-Go," by the way.

b) Adam Carman has now joined Jason Schambach on my list of Houghton people who strain out gnats while swallowing camels, pleased to play around as if they had big ideas and important causes while playing havoc in others' lives over inconsequential and oversimplified, overpompous pontification. There are more important things in life than chapel scanning and paying a few extra cents for gas. I am generally tolerant of childish idiots--until they begin running amok, frustrating others, destroying communities, and making life rougher for people for whom life is difficult and unbuffered already.

c) people at Houghton live such wealthy f*****g existences that they are completely removed from complicated things like earning honest bread, sustaining spiritual lives independent of a church-camp-like structure, or dealing with people and things who do not fit into neat little good guy/bad guy perfect-individualistic-capitalist black and white worlds.

d) speaking of people without the luxury of pompous moralizing and ideological faith in capitalism, what would the impact of a boycott on the Houghton gas station be on the local folk who work at that gas station? are you comfortable with causing them to, oh, lose their jobs or take pay cuts to add a notch to your ethical-ego-belt?

e) there's a bigger world out there, Adam. one where sixteen-year-olds OD on heroin (for the third time) and nasty corporations burn families off their lands and out of their houses and people are mainly occupied with finding a way to make it to tomorrow or next year. I don't care if you're rich and stupid--at least you contribute to the trickle-down. but when you start f*****g around with people's livelihoods and dismissing with self-congratulating laughter the hard work of people trying to make it easier for the economically poor to get just a few of the advantages you take for granted...

then you have a Jesus problem my friend, and you have a problem with me.

lazy thursday

ahhhh...
funny how it takes a whole day off of complete sloth just to get around to being able to take the second day off and get something done. cleaned my bike and listened to all the stacked-up NPR podcasts I haven't listened to of late. which is wonderful because now I want to spend a lot of money on books and movies and music. those rags behind the bike? they started off perfectly white. good, quality downtime...



interesting stuff:

blogging, marriage, and the new electronic world

dreds + violin = awesome

brokeback...to the future

king kong: children and violence

in lucia's eyes (cassanova's lost, bitterness-inducing first love)

michael w. smith in a really interesting social justice film about faith and class?

russian vampire movie grosses more in two weeks than Lord of the Rings

and, finally, the two you should delve into:

mercy killing in new orleans

recently my medic and i sat down and watched the two great ambulance movie classics of all time: Mother, Jugs and Speed (with a young Bill Cosby) and, more importantly, Bringing Out the Dead (with an excellently chosen Nicolas Cage). (yes, Mr. McSteele, I finally watched it...freaky doesn't half describe it--scary was that nothing that happened really surprised me)

working nights on the street is a different experience--very different. there are no soft covers on sharp edges, no blurring and no buffering and no carefully constructed upbeat conclusions to anything. it's a revolving door of ugly, harsh realities that you cannot alter or make pretty enough for normal society, but you will experience again and again and again without any sense of closure until you find yourself laughing at a bad joke while doing CPR on some guy who fell over dead in front of his family, wondering if you'll get the call over quick enough to get lunch before the India Gate closes.

one of the most un-American things you have to do on the job is expressed, appropriately, by the borrowed French word "triage." it's when you step into a situation where you have to decide who you try to save and who you leave to die. then you make those decisions and there's absolutely no way you can even come close to knowing for sure whether you made the right decisions or not--it's not clear cut, there's no slow-motion replays, or clever omniscient narrators. just a lot of educated guesswork and three seconds to make a choice.

it's not American because it's neither victorious nor heroic--you admit defeat, and not just defeat, but defeat due to failed systems of infrastructure, supply, and support. the outcome has everything to do with institutional and situational factors that are insurmountable by individual actors, heroic or not.

on the seventh floor of New Orleans' Memorial Hospital, choices were made to inject critical patients with enough morphine to put them to sleep forever, in the face of dwindling supplies, rising heat and floodwaters, and the chaotic uncertainty and miscommunication surrounding possible evacuation. the doctors and nurses were in a triage situation--they made decisions based on the guesswork and information they had. it's something that makes perfect sense to me--but I do not know what it sounds like to people outside the emergency healthcare system.

watch Bringing Out the Dead: its slow descent into the absolute insanity of bureaucratically institutionalized emergency management is not pleasant--but it's accurate and ungarnished. and enlightening, in a nasty fashion. visit a few city nursing homes and take in the ever-present smells of human urine and decaying people. then you can talk about the ethics of mercy killing and assisted suicide.

dada

in that vein, the dada phenomenon has once more entered my consciousness. the "Christian" worldview tends to present upturned noses to dada art, at least in my experience. to put it briefly, without rant, dada is important. it began, during the bloodshed of World War I, as a response to the absolutely blood-chilling insanity of life in a world that was assumed to be advanced, logical and modern. it was a protest against the gruesome horror and lunacy of existence in the kind of world that could produce chemical and trench warfare, the mental reduction of people and their interrelations to the cold numbers of the mechanistic social sciences, and the inhumanely barbaric actions of "civilising" colonization.

there's definitely a place for dada today. people are waking to a terror about their existence--that our lives are embedded and ingrown with the ugly and the evil and the meaningless, our very society is dying under the weight of an illusory happiness. popping up from Fight Club to I [Heart] Huckabees is the idea that a true examination of our existence will be a horrifying nihilistic trip into cynically twisted ideals and empty significance.

i think that there is nothing more Christlike than the unveiling of emptiness, sickness and insanity of the society we live in and, to a large part, uphold and create with our actions. it's truth-telling to examine and reproduce the things we take for granted to be good in such a way that their vanity and depravity and insanity are plainly and inescapably obvious. to my limited understanding, that's what dada did in its time, and we are ripe for that self-examination, unpleasant and shocking as it may be, in times where it takes more and more effort to ignore or explain or drug away the absolute insanity of our lives.

go dada!

ps--podcasts aren't just for iPodders--you can download then to any computer and, with the appropriate media player, listen to them through your computer's speakers. NPR is an amazing treasure trove of fun things to listen to.

pps--for those of you in western new york--Nils the Norwegian paramedic introduced me to 970AM, where their overnight content is broadcasts by the good ol' British Broadcasting Corporation. if you're up late and want good international news and commentary--tune in!

heroin

i think we create panic and feed on it. we want to fear, and there is a little masochist inside each of us that wants to feel pain. bored old ladies make up a different ailment every day so they can go to the hospital and break the routine. young mothers fake seizures on the way to the hospital for the same reason their young daughters fake being raped--significance. pity. attention. tragic posturing. importance.

basically the same reason, on a night like tonight, i'm tempted to binge in a little "i'm lonely in the big city" blogging, or perhaps some "my tragic history" indulgence, or mainline some "let me tell you about my childhood" misery. i didn't realize until putting on my uniform that Powers was planning on covering for me tonight so that I can take his Friday night shift and he can enjoy a night out with a beautiful lady. so sit here long enough and the ennui sets in and off runs the heart to the public pity medium to try to convert excess boredom into cheap significance via emotional gluttony. you aren't bored while in the sick throes of angst and over-worn-out personal tragedy.

huh. i'm a funny-lookin' person in the mirror.

so, Plan A down the drain, it's time to work on Plan B. I have decided that I am altogether too serious and dour. the Kingdom of Heaven is no place for the mopey/self-obsessed. it is an all-out party replete with wine, women, and song (and, hopefully, hibachis and steak...) and party poopers are frowned upon. I have discovered, to my dismay, a certain weakness in the celebration-side of life. Put me in a room with angst-ridden-sense-of-importance junkies and I will passionately be bitter about all the evil and bad isms that keep people frowning and shuffling along. But call up the dance and light the candles and pour out the alcohol of choice and I am stiff and looking for my bitter coffee. Declare a feast and I sit awkwardly and try to make polite conversation or introduce some subject that I can frown and feel important and sophisticated while discussing.

And there's Jesus over there whoopin' and hollerin' and making more wine when it's obvious everyone's had enough and pulling grouchy old Aunt Edna out on the dance floor for a cha-cha and I am at a loss for what to do because being important is not important while celebrating. rejoicing and laughing and playing games and other childlike traits--they are important.

So I need to get a lot better at celebration, which generally involves a deflated ego and a good bit of unsober gleefulness and laughter and--hah! Nickleback just started playing on my pretty little iPod. Case in point. Nickleback is a popular band that makes its living making sad-tough-guy music about how my girlfriend broke up with me and my family wasn't perfect and I'll never be allright and I'm angry and I'm sad and--dim shadows, empty whiskey bottles, browns and grays and dust always fading to black. Couldn't make a dancing tune to save their lives. God save us from seductive preprocessed canned some-one-else's-misery to titillate our carefully safe, carefully cultivated, carefully bored, carefully cool lives, and somehow empty selves. God save us from people who's favorite words (followed, of course with weighty and important sighs) are "God save us..."

Well. I'm going to try to find some way to redeem this evening that involves

a. laughter

b. absolutely nothing "serious", "important", "weighty", or "tragic."

c. unless the "tragic" could also be categorized under "schadenfreude".

d. because as the merriest of monks and ascetics knows, weightiness, dourness, seriousness and other forms of self-importance are bad.

e. and rejoicing is good.

p.s.--check out the hilarious Mormon guy's faux pas on Jeopardy

a little after the fact

yup. one more valentines day spent alone. or, in this case, working, with a decidedly unattractive male medic, so that Powers could go watch Cirque de Soleil from a corporate suite and hit on wealthy lawyers. oh well. Happy St. V's and to all good luck and good night!

goodbye vocabulary

so yesterday morning i couldn't sleep even though i knew i would pay for it later. so instead of sleeping the morning away in preparation for work, i curled up in my sleeping bag in my not-so-comfy comfy chair next to the big windows in my room and pulled back the curtains a little (the room is cold enough as it is) and drank cider and listened to Christmas music and watched the rain fall. i love rain, especially watching it fall as all the typically inconsiderate aspects of life tiptoe around selfconsciously because "ssssshhh--the rain is talking!" and I love Christmas music because it is, and i didn't get to listen to any at all except for a few snatches on the radio about how grandma's drunken stupor led her into the path of an inconsiderate grass-guzzling all-brawn no-finesse H3 of a reindeer.

except that it was actually yesterday afternoon, cause there i was trying to sleep days again and i screwed up my sleep schedule again so that now i want nothing more than to wake up around ten a.m. and go to sleep around three p.m.--the former being four hours into my off-time and the latter being just about when it's time to get up and get ready for work. but spending yesterday afternoon watching the-rain-fall-with-a-cup-of-hot-cider just doesn't quite cut the mustard. you're missing half of the great experience that i had, and i wouldn't want to rob you of that.

well. and now i'm sitting here wondering if i can type another five hours until bedtime, because i have to stay awake until about six or seven so that i can sleep and get up at six (that's a.m., as in the actual morning) for my eight to midnight overtime. yeah overtime. that should be me into bona fide overtime for this pay period, and then everything else extra that i tack on is time and a half!

and i used to get excited for christmas break. i warn you all: be ready for the ensuing gosh-darn-i-feel-old-what-do-they-teach-children-in-schools-these-days posts, because i'm sure i shall age all of my characteristic grace, and i seriously think my arthritis in my right hand is flaring up. booh-yah--anyone want to talk about the price of perscription drugs?



in other news, the "email me" is fixed. so you can email me now if you don't know my address. and i got to drive to Pennsylvania and back last night, lights and sirens the whole way! made a two-hour trip in an hour-fourty, in the pouring rain! yeah backroads! picked up a little newborn Am-let (that's little Amish lad) and drove him back, just as fast, and now he breathes a lot easier. hoo-ray for me!

things that must be said

upon a quick review, I have decided this is important for re-mention:

the process is cloudy, but Dr. Bradley Beach of Houghton College, originally on the tenure track, has been told he will not recieve tenure if he so applies. The college stands to lose a professor both popular among the student body and his fellow academics.

for reading:

see'>http://www.xanga.com/Houghton_Dialogue">see especially Dr. Benedict's statemtents--three cheers for Dr. B
the'>http://www.xanga.com/PopeCharming/391517743/item.html">the pope
save the Beach

lobby. please. lobby. emails and letters from alumni much appreciated. more later.

having not written in a while...

it behooves me to say that trips to Houghton can be rather strenuous. you'd be amazed to discover what wonderful things simply leaving can do for your popularity. but popularity aside, i must work, and work, and work, and work (and then pick up a little overtime) so i must off rather quickly. for your enjoyment, my little neice, who is well known in the marketplace for her vociferous "Shikomo"-ing of the elders. My neice is a little shiki-bird!















grand kudos and thanks to another dan for his kindness in making a Houghton visit possible by ferrying me back and forth from the land of my exile.

and, who are these wierd people? yeah, they would be my friends, wouldn't they?






more to follow, at another time. peace be with you all!

bouncing off Mr. Stowell...

[reflecting on Ethan's most recent post]

i think that love is an inevitable response to recognizing humanity in another person. when the static of our imperfect communication and communion is mercifully broken, for a rare moment, one person gains a momentary glimpse of the quite literally glorious, glory-filled truecreated eternal self of another.

what response can there be to such beauty but worship to god upon viewing the creator's art, and what response but horror and sorrow at every mar and wound laid upon than creation and every noisome wrack and noxious fume that obscures it from perception?

i follow the creed that love is first and most important, and all faith and morality follow. remembering the concealed glory bourne by every human individual, it's difficult to want to be one of the ones burning the library of Alexandria, chiselling the fingers off of Michaelangelo's "David" and spraypainting the Sistene Chapel. remembering each other's all-too-obscured and confused humanity becomes the hard work of love, and self-sacrifice an act of nurturing and restoring that which is truly important: the work of a master artist, the rebirth and life of dead souls.

maybe this is why Paul spoke of heaven as a place where none marry or are given in marriage: when the kingdom of heaven comes, and we no longer see through a glass darkly, maybe we will have no preference. the veils will be pulled back and the Sons and Daughters of God revealed in full glory, for which all creation holds its breath. each and every one of us will finally be able to see and hear each other's true self beyond the misunderstanding, pain and hatred that alienates us in this world.

we will love all of us with the depth of knowledge that blows away even the intimacy grown with eighty years married progress peeling away the loneliness and miscommunication of our present condition and drawing near to each other.

we will no longer need to continually remind ourselves of the hidden glory in our neighbors because we will be too busy drooling and reeling at the revealed beauty that was present and unfinished all along in tax collectors and good friends and annoying co-workers and great-aunt martha. and we will spend all eternity not being able to get enough of each other.

new toy

see, this is my new buddy--
and it goes pretty much everywhere with me.

but i need a little help.

first of all--it needs a name.

secondly--it needs music.

thirdly--it needs more pictures.

fourthly--it's got a crapload of options that i have no idea about. know something cool i can do with my ipod? tell me...

fifthly--it has absolutely no recorded messages/goofy greetings/amusing anecdotes from my friends to spice up the "shuffle" option.

donations enthusiastically accepted. especially pictures of you. because then i can carry them around with me, and if they're silly pictures, so much the better.

[where i have been lately - a pictoral journey]

grandpa's house for christmas


playing Pirates of the Barbary Coast, with my awesome little brother (who just scored a full-ride to MSU with free lodging tossed in to boot...)


florida


with these guys


a wedding with these guys (hey, that's And James!)


and working eighty hours last week

my excellent afternoon of fine reading, tucked away in my sleeping bag

i think perhaps that this book could be the most important book of the next twenty years. the only comparison i can make is with Jean-Jacques Rousseau's succint, conversational, and devastatingly intelligent Social Contract--but entirely different. Quinn is telling us what is painfully sinful, unhealthy, wrong, silly, deadly, or unsustainable--chose your adjective--about our way of life. and he is calling for change.

Despite all the indicators of misery we live with--the ever-growing incidence of social disintegration, drug addiction, crime, suicde, mental illness, child and spousal abuse and abandonement, racism, violence against women, and so on--most people in our culture are thoroughly convinced that our way of life smply cannot be bettered by any means whatsoever. Adopting anything different would therefore have to be a comedown, an act of sacrifce.

"Very typcally, when people question me about the future, they ask if I really believe people wll be willing to "give up" the wonderful things we have for the mere privlege of avoiding extinction. When I speak, as I did in Ishmael, of "another story to be in," they seem to imagine I'm touting a sort of miserable half-life of voluntary poverty, donning sackcloth and ashes to do penance for our environmental sins. They're sure that living in a sustainable way must be about "giving up" things. It doesn't occur to them that living in an UNsustainable way is also about giving up things, very precious things like security, hope, lightheartedness, and freedom from anxiety, fear and guilt."

"When in doubt, think about the circus. [the circus has been touted as an example of an non-hierarchical organization where people belong rather than work, and where all the members of the organization identify with and take personal responsiblity for the business.] People never run off to join the circus to give up something. They run off to the circus to get something."

--Daniel Quinn, The End of Civilization


which, oddly enough, is about spot on how i think about (i) monasticism, and (ii) redemption. what we give up, we do not really want. what we get--is worth giving up one's life for.

fullness

i feel there is too much going on for me to take in. literally. there are so many letters i feel a pressing need to write that i write none of them at all. there are so many phone calls to make and bloggy blogs to write and movies to watch and ideas to mull over and amazing books to read and bills to pay and tickets to settle and applications to write and decisions to make and...

and too much working my tookis off and fending off the restlessness long enough to put in the kind of hours that make money. i'll be sitting on top of an 80 hour work week saturday morning. three days off and i'll hit the grind again and probably start picking up overtime again...so the promised pictures and news are going to wait. my resolution to write a journal entry every day, inspired by the author of Snow Leopard, is going to wait. riding to the post office to get a stamp for that speeding ticket is going to wait. and everything else too. i need sleep. but at least i need sleep in a good way. good night...err...morning. something...

well...

i'm here-ish. in my new room. but fear not--it's the same address. i moved across the hall to my sweet new room: same rent, twice as big, two windows AND a door out to...a balcony! i'm (almost) moved in completely, so naturally it's a mess. but instead of vertical, cramped mess, i have horizontally slouching American suburban sprawl mess. and a walk-in, bang-your-head-on-the-pole closet. a place to put my boots!

and i'm off to work again--i've got to pay for those holiday adventures which have kept me hoppin'. pictures to follow.

i have little to say...

but if you're interested in someone who's positively just a pleasure to read, you should check out the Pope's latest. words worth reading just for the quality with which they were placed.


and for something completely different, a must for lovers of CS Lewis and 80's rap everywhere. thank you thankyou thankyouthankyou o thankyou sooooo much for making my morning Dan

belatedly as usual

Merry, Merry, Merry Christmas to all and everyone from the bean and the bear.

and, while quoting...

(and depriving myself of much-needed sleep)

from the Economist, 10/15, during what the British authors might call "that bloody Harriet Miers cock-up": (emphasis added)

There are few things quite as hypocritical as American politicians hurling accusations of cronyism. The Democrats are lambasting George Bush about his weakness for promoting people such as Michael Brown, the horseman turned emergency agency chief. But does anybod seriously believe that a Democratic president wouldn't appoint cronies of his or her own?...

"All countries have their cronies. That much-cited model of moral rectitude, Tony Blair, is so surrounded by them that they are called "Tony's Cronies" (he made his old roommate, Charlie Falconer, Lord Chancellor). Edith Cresson, a European commissioner, appointed her dentist to an advisory position. But you expect that sort of thing in Brussels. America's problem is the contrast between high-minded idealism and low practice.

"America regards itself as the world's purest mertiocracy--a country based on talent, not patronage and toadyism. A quick glace at history shows this is rubbish. Most presidents surround themselves with a regional mafia: look at Carter's Georgians or Reagan's Californians or Clinton's Arkansans. These mafias produce some rum appointments: Jimmy Carter made his one-time campaign driver, Jody Powell, his press secretary; Bill Clinton made his chum from Miss Marie's kindergarten in Hope, Thomas McLarty, his chief of staff. Scandals are endemic. harry Truman's missouri cronies had a weakness for gifts of mink coats and freezers (an issue in the 1952 election). As for the antics of Mr Clinton's Arkansas buddies, the less said the better.

"That does not mean every close ally is a "crony": that term inplies incompetence as well as promiximity. Condoleezza Rice is no Michael Brown, for example, just as Robert Reich was no Webb Hubbell...In deed, the trick of ruing a successful administration--as both FDR and JFK demonstrated--is to balance the competing claims of personal loyalty and individual merit. Mr Bush, as the candidate of the Republican establishment rather than a regional insurrection, brought in plenty of bruisers. Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld are guilty of many things, but being mere creatures of the president is not one of them.

"Still, if the presidential branch doesn't run on cronyism alone, it cannot run without it. A presidential campaign is a large gamble. Presidents acquire obligations to people who spend years toiling for them in the wilderness. Not all these people will be from the first division. Presidents also form a peculiar bond of trust with people who served in the campaign trenches with them. When they are in the White House, the only people they meet are supplicants. So naturally they turn to their old buddies for comfort and advice. Presidents need cronies just as cronies need patrons.

"From this perspective the real question about Mr Bush's appointment of Ms Miers is not whether it is cronyism, but whether he has stepped over the line that separates business-as-usual from offensive favoritism."

in more Timely cheer...

"This is, I say, the time for all good men not to go to the aid of their party, but to come to the aid of their country."

i'd never heard of Eugene McCarthy before last month. i'm starting to like him more and more. i think it's time to add him to my people-to-look-into-list, with a nod of appreciation to the Charmer with his penchant for intriguing conversations that first sparked my interest.

and, props to the Lao for recommending Time in the first place. yeah.

mad mad mega super (I [heart]) uber-props to Time

so here's to Time magazine's POTY: People of the Year. for those of you who need to dig your heads out of whatever it is that is so engrossing as to render you ignorant in the midst of a mass American trend toward awareness of and concern for global issues (aside--for instance, the people who put the Kashmir Quake on page 8B of the Buffalo News--end aside), Time's People of the Year award went to U2's Bono and Bill and Melinda Gates for their three-pronged assault on world health and poverty issues.

so, right next to yet another "I'm-Bono-can-you-hear-the-theme-music?-Strike-a-serious-thoughtful-pose!" slew of the ever-camera-aware (and ever-wearing-a-different-set-of-flamboyant-shades) U2 frontman's pictures are Bill and Melinda Gates. And (thank God for a break from Bono's studied meaningful glances, good for pushing AIDS initiatives AND selling iPods) Bill and Melinda have this wonderful expression on their faces, one I recognize from long experience with my homestay partner Mike.

It's the look of completely futile curiosity as the western mind tries to build bridges during catastrophic cross-cultural shifts: it pretty much played constantly on Mike's face (and, as I'm sure he can attest, rather dramatically on mine) as we grappled with inadequate language skills, exciteable interpreters, physical exhaustion, emotional bombardment, and massive non-parities. and, of course, poverty.

In retrospect, it's a charming look, and Mike's was probably a lot more composed and patient and less prone to vacant stares than mine. But I got to watch him, and not me, so he gets the bad press. At any rate, there's the capitalist megabillionnaire who has little badges that you can wear in his house so that the house knows where you are and where you are going and adjusts the lights accordingly, taking into account the time of day to soften or brighten things up and makes sure your selection of music follows you from room to room. And I've heard he has a "trampoline room..."

So there's Gates in a mudbrick house in India with that loopy look in his eyes, trying to figure out what the interpreter is saying and asking questions about land ownership and inheritance and local economic flows and governance peculiarities, scrunching his eyes together and trying to figure out what happens where and how those effects ripple through an entirely different, and much more lively third-world system. And Melinda's sitting beside him trying to explain with that patient look in her eyes, and their travelling slacks are wrinkled and they flew in just a few hours ago. on the private jet...

Go Bill. and props to Time for an issue half-devoted to some really excellent things that people, from billionnaires to Catholic priests to New Orleans scuba divers to Indonesia guys without last names, are doing in awful situations.

woooo-hooo-ful

yes! superfantastiche! i was hoping and hoping as i was reading that i would get tagged and i DID!

Yayyyy Conformity!

Ground Rules: The first player of this "game" starts with the topic "5 weird habits of yours" and people who get tagged need to write an LJ/blog/xanga entry about their 5 quirky habits as well as state this rule clearly. In the end, you need to choose the next 5 people to be tagged and list their names.

okay.

one. i can't find my fingernail clippers--i haven't used them in a while. instead, i carefully tend to my fingernails so that they're all at various lengths, and one at a time half chew one off and floss with it. hey, i hate flossing, but i get bored, and it seems like the healthy thing to do. and if you're a backacker, you can save weight by not having to pack floss.

two. i try to learn curses in other languages at any opportunity. currently, i've got a smattering of Russian, French, Spanish, Yiddish, Mandarin Chinese (thankyou Firefly), Japanese, German, some quite vile Kiswahili, a burgeoning English collection (thankyou, coworkers), Farscape-ish, and my personal favorite, Ki-Musser (Good Lork!).

three. i sleep on a mat on the floor because i want to stay in hiking shape and not have to adjust to sleeping outdoors everytime i sleep outdoors.

four. i like hats. of the warm, fluffy, and flamboyant variety. i collect "gear," which is outdoorsman-ish for expensive toys for living as far away from permanent structures as possible.

five. when driving exceedingly fast in ambulances with the lights flashing and sirens blaring, i love turning up 103.3 The Edge and rockin' it out such tunes as "Into the Abyss Will I Run," "Let the Bodies Hit the Floor," andything by System of a Down, and other assorted angry dark metal-ish music. an added bonus is flipping the siren between modes like a DJ to the tune of whatever it is that's in my head/i'm listening to. a few nights ago, around three a.m., we serenaded the fine people of the Apple District with "Jingle Bells" on the air horn. i think we freaked out some homeless guys...

OK. Now: dave lilley, dan perrine, mark lemke, dan reilley, chris moeller.

more bibliophilic musings

like the Seven Pillars of Islam (quiz: can you name all seven? in Arabic? i can't.), there exist the Nine Literary Pillars of Dan. except now it's Ten. without further ado, i give you one of the vital pieces of me:

Frederick Buechner's Speak What We Feel, Not What We Ought To Say.

yeah. it's about Chesterton, Shakespeare, Twain, and Hopkins. it's not cute, and sometimes it's harsh, but it is enduring and ultimately beautiful. it's one of those handy, necessary texts for navigating deep and unknown waters.

i have just one thing to say....

seriously, did you believe the title? c'mon here, it's me talking. let's start with the easy things to say:

so i have finally broken through the wall at work. my new paramedic (who i'll be picking up shifts with when i'm not on my normal schedule) took me out to the ol' Pink...a.k.a. what used to be the Pink Flamingo, and now is functionally nameless except for the wonderful moniker "the old Pink Flamingo."

this medic, who moonlights as a seasonal forest ranger in the 'Dacks and is the only person at work who doesn't think i'm crazy for riding around on my bike in this weather, figured immediately that the Pink was the place for me--it's sort of the last holdout, for people who dance, drink, mingle, or chill for no other reason than a sheer desire to enjoy themselves. it's tucked away nameless in Allentown, and anyone remotely resembling trendy would immediately generate laughs and be shooed out the door. o.k., the first word in the association game running through my head was "dive"...but i'm amending it ex post facto to "family dive", if "family" are the people who drink and laugh and cheer and are completely comfortable with each other's oddities. kind of the first bar i've ever seen with gay couples making out right next to straight ones, and nobody cares even to trumpet their own diversity because the entire place isn't about being impressive...it's about fun in the no-pretense zone. me and my new alpaca wool hat with the pigtailed earflaps fit in just fine.

the medic was right...it's my kind of place. which made me ever happier to turn around to the tap on my right shoulder into the grinning face of Greg Tedesco.

in any other bar, we would have made a scene, whooping and hollering and hugging and spinning around. in the Pink, it's like family Thanksgiving: same spirit, random people. a place of miracles. we hugged and laughed and looked at each other and hugged again. i guess a few Guinesses helped (did i mention they serve Guiness? how perfect can it be?) but it was pure, unadulterated heart-joy to see Greg almost three years after he left Houghton without contact information. we spent little time together there, but what we did is live together on opposite ends of 3rd Shen and always manage to brush our teeth at the same time most nights. sometimes we'd brush our teeth for an hour or two in that beautiful old 3rd Shen bathroom, Plato and Socrates in pajamas waving teethbrushes for effect. He had a voice and an experience that spoke of depth and exacting joy--the meticulous concern for the beautiful in life that marks the steps of a dancer and the pen of a poet. He had eyes that glowed and original, unborrowed dreams.

yeah. Greg Tedesco. in the only bar in Buffalo where three random people like us could all feel at home. i feel the movement of that unseen glorious mischief.

it only makes it better that it all followed a few good solid Guinesses and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. i could write on all night in praise--it's that good. in every way that the Lord of the Rings was something of a disappointment, a departure from the spirit of the original, Narnia the movie was spot on in the spirit of the greatest children's story ever. i really could go on for a long time, but it was beautiful, moving, joyous, British, innocent, childlike, and excellently done. and in sheer sheepish joy, i cannot get over the animals--i kept getting excited. people were teasing me, i got so pumped everytime i saw a new one. the unicorn, the satyrs, the leopards, the cheetahs, and i won't spoil the surprise on my favorites (the African animals!!!! oh the African animals!!!) and most glorious of all: the centaurs. i want to be a centaur now. wow.

and that's just the effects, the battle. the story itself is excellently well done. perhaps a little weak on really introducing and allowing you to love Aslan and understand his death--but that's for the better, i think, considering that Aslan as Christ-figure is only really understandable on screen to those who have read the books or who already have fallen in love with the Christ-story. the children are gorgeous--you want to adopt Lucy, and love her for her open-heartedness.

oh...and most important of all--they put in the mice! it's simply excellent. i'm going to go watch it again as soon as i can. i think it'll probably be better the second time around. that could be the Guiness talking, but i doubt it. by far, Narnia is an excellent, excellent movie for all who watch it. do yourself a favor--go sit in a movie theater and let your heart remember what it was like to be a child, to see the world with a child's eyes and imagination and spirit and now the thrill and fear and courage of a childlike soul.

ooh! a quick fix for ontological lightness!

take a moment to visit Houghton's mainpage and you will see, in the lower right corner of the main picture, the red hair, blue-clad back and lamentably uncelebrated buttocks (bluejean clad, fear not) of myself! [right under the "y" in community, if you still need help] you see, i know it's me because i remember when they carefully staged the picture :) funny, though, about that view from the back--they always seemed to want the pretty girls facing the camera and my back always ended up....

"the weight of this sad time we must obey/speak what we feel, not what we ought to say"

[excerpts from and thoughts after a recent Rolling Stone article on John Lennon]

[if you want to skip all the quotes and get to the thoughts, scroll to the next orange part]

"For years, starting before the end of the Beatles, Lennon and Ono had pursued a mdia-directed campaign for hte cause of peace--which at that time meant promoting an end to the war in Vietnam, though they were also advocating the larger philosophy of nonviolence that had guided India's Mahatma Gandhi and the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. In March 1969, following their marriage in Gibraltar, Lennon and Ono flew to Amsterdam, where they staged a "bed-in" for peace. For seven days they sat in bed in their pajamas at the Amsterdam Hilton and gave hundreds of interviews, discussing their views that true peace begins as a personal pursuit and talking about intersections between activism, popular culture, ideology, and Eastern and Western religion...Lennon later said that he was trying to change his own heart as much as anybody else's. 'It's the most violent people who go for love and peace,' he told Playboy. 'But I sincerely believe in love and peace. I'm a violent man who has learned not to be violent and regrets his violence.' "


-


"Lennon also studied feminist history and theory. 'It's men who have come a long way from even contemplating the idea of equality. I am the one who has come a long way. I was the real pig. And it is a relief not to be a pig. The pressures of being a pig were enormous. They were killing me. All those years of trying to be tough and the heavy rocker and heavy womanizer and heavy drinker were killing me. And it is a relief not to have to do it."


-


" 'We sold out. The music was dead before we even went on the theater tour of Britain...The Beatles music died then, as musicians.'...'Fuckin' big bastards, that what the Beatles were. You have to be a bastard to make it, man. That's a fact, and the Beatles were the biggest bastards on earth.' ' One has to humiliate oneself to be what the Beatles were, and that's what I resent...About all we can do is do it like fuckin' circus animals. I resent being an artist in that respect, I resent performing for fucking idiots who won't know--who don't know--anything. 'Cause they can't feel. I'm the one that's feeling, cause I'm the one that's expressing what they are trying to. They live vicariously through me and the other artists.'

"It was difficult to read his words without feeling that Lennon was indicting not just the band but those who had placed a stake in the Beatles. No other major artist ever razed his own image so devastatingly.

"However--not surprisingly--when Lennon applied his hurt and vitriol to his music, the result was transcendant...[for his first solo album he chose] minimalist instrumentation. Lennon sang about the most painful memories and undercurrents of his life--the death of his mother, the failures of faith and fame, the betrayals in misplaced ideals--in such a way that there was nothing to shield a listener from the resulting raw anger and anguish...he decided to 'shave off all imagery, pretensions of poetry, illusions of grandeur....Just say what it is, simple English, make it rhyme and put a backbeat on it and express yourself as simply and straightforwardly as possible.'..."

" 'The dream is over/What can I say?/The dream is over/Yesterday/I was the dream weaver/But now I'm reborn/I was the Walrus/But now I'm John/And so, dear friends/You'll just have to carry on/The dream is over."

[the album sold poorly.]

"With his next album, Imagine, Lennon tried to present his concerns more accessibly...Lennon's lyrics still chased troubling themes--but this time he wrapped them in a savvy pop sensibility. The album's title track, in particular, put forth some daring notions--and it did so in a beguiling and haunting way. The song was a prayer, the most radical prayer that ever played widely on radio. 'Imagine, both the song and the album,' Lennon said, 'is the same thing as "Working Class Hero," "Mom" and "God" on the first disc. But the first record was too real for people so nobody bought it..."Imagine" was the same message but sugarcoated...it's a big hit almost everywhere--anti-religious, anti-conventional, anti-nationalistic, anti-capitalistic, but because it is sugarcoated it is accepted. Now I understand what you have to do: Put your political message across with a little honey.' "


-


"After his death, things changed around us. America entered the years of Ronald Reagan; Britain, the years of Margaret Thatcher. Modern history was reversing its hopes. Rock 'n Roll, and later hip-hop, has still pushed against that reversal, but it has never pushed as hard as it did in the years of John Lennon. That isn't simply because Lennon was killed. Rather, it's because he lived. The Beatles set something loose in their time: a sense of generational transformation that moved quickly from the blissful to the artistic to the political, and for a few remarkable years, it seemed irrefutable.

"The story of our times since then has been the product of a determination to make sure that nothing like that could happen again. While "Imagine" can still be played on the radio because its music sounds familiar and comforting, there's little-if anything-with that sort of nerve in today's mainstream pop. The free market of ideas just isn't that free right now. A pop star as popular as Lennon proclaiming similar ideals in our current environment would run the risk of being judged a heretic.

"So we got something when we had John Lennon, and we lost something when his voice was killed. We lost somebody as fucked up as us, who worked his whole life to overcome himself, and, in doing so, his creativity would help us overcome the madness of our times - at least for a while. Through it all, he told us to keep faith, to keep courage, to defy our hurt, our fear, to find love and hope and fight for their meaning."

--now for the thoughts of the wildebeen--

if the opportunity presents itself to get December 15th's Rolling Stone in your hands, do yourself a favor and read Mikal Gilmore's article on John Lennon. it's concise, profound, and moving. it explores Lennon as a person growing and living and wrestling with redemption and pain through the length of his life.

in particular, it wrestles with the tension between stability and change, the competition between pragmatics and ideals, and the prophet's dilemma of speaking to a people who long for change and comfort at the same time: redemption without repentance, new life without death.

i've been remarkably sad lately over a situation at one of my adopted home-places, Houghton College. the passionate and often exciteable and ever-engaging Dr. Beech, a philosophy professor with a penchant for drawing even the most uninterested student deep into charged discussions and redeeming the potentially boring philosophy requirement into riskily deep introspection and examination, was asked by the administration not to apply for tenure. In short, he's being canned and asked not to make noise about it.

several semesters ago, Dr. Beech gave one of the few chapel speeches i have heard in my four years worthy of presentation at an institution claiming to be academic. he vigorously called for an examination of issues of justice and righteousness, for honest introspection and inquiry into the justice of acquiescing to an overwhelming flood of blind nationalism and patriotic furor.

in the aforementioned philosophy prerequisite, Dr. Beech maintained with vigor and passion the necessity of self-examination. quoting either Socrates, Plato, or Aristotle (i cannot remember which, i did not do so well in the exams) he maintained that the unexamined life is not worth living, and went further to say that Christ himself compels us to examine our lives and our selves and not merely float along on popular ideas or live comfortably as we are pleased to.

the only comparison i can find for Dr. Beech is a hippie--a youthful man driven by ideals and a sense that all is not as it should be, and in the light of such wrongs revolutions of thought and action are necessary. admittedly, he was far too well-dressed and groomed to be an actual hippie, but the spirit was there--the spirit of John Lennon's decade where the idea that humanity was being crushed by machines of metal and social and political construction was felt widely enough to become a popular movement. people threw themselves, en masse, at change.

the movement died. the eighties of greed and power and the reduction of people to systemic grist and numbers in macroeconomic models and marketing plans happened. Lennon died, and now we have the knowledge of our human dilemmas without any real hope for change. there is no The Man and there is no revolution. Just an entire world of pragmatic individuals.

no one rocks the boat anymore. no one speaks the words worth hearing--or they are not spoken loud enough. the church contents itself with a sort of Feng Shui of theological furniture. the only freedom pop culture desires is the freedom to consume. and all around us peace is being slaughtered, any meaningful communities that are not being actively destroyed are dying of neglect, people are lonely, and increasingly visible to all is how disfigured we all are as humans. but no one has the will to speak up, to challenge the status quo or the powers of the air that hold us captive.

Lennon grappled with those powers. That's why his music--even the sellout music, the sugarcoated together with the deeply honest, is treasured for its beauty and ability to speak about life to our cold dark hearts.

Dr. Beech paces behind a podium in a required class in a school specializing in speaking to the happy comfortable people and declaims with a spirit fervor dead and cold and unheard in our society since the seventies. his words kindle little fires, risky scary and necessary, in the ears of his hearers.

why are we stoning our prophets?

reasons i am happy to be alive:

i. am planning a winter hiking trip with a paramedic/ass't forest ranger from work. for tomorrow. in the snow. sleeping outside. we are packing mango-chai granola and indian rice dishes. we are persevering in spite of of the best efforts of frigid and bitter bureaucracies at work and the threat of hunters in the field.

ii. dan sahli. jared rosenau. seth nichols. chris marshall.

iii. eileen frawley, who can turn failing to finish a bike oddysey into something fun.

iv. the afterglow from an amazing houghton trip. and hi uan's amazing back massage. with paul christensen's company.

v. i saved a life this week. (finally!) within fourteen minutes of calling 911, our young gunshot wound victim was recieving definitive care at the Erie County Medical Center. it didn't look great for him, the .40 cal hole in his ribs with a matching exit wound in the back and the rather white cast his skin was taking on, and the increasing incoherence--he had started circling the drain as we arrived--but word from surgery is that he's going to pull through. i drove, and directed backboarding/extrication while Nils the Norwegian Paramedic prepped the rig.

yeah diggity. so let the tally now stand; as far as immediate life threats go: the Reaper: 4, Me: 1. i am very happy to finally be on the board.

vi. the postal service

vii. The US Postal Service

viii. the very persistent and full of surprises Rosaline Kelada-Sedra, who demanded a story from me last December and finally got it two weeks ago, and with it more soul-searching monologue than she bargained for (and indeed more than i had delivered since...well, certain portentous events). and who likes the Original Pancake House. and embraces her own Africa-time.

ix. a partner who is easy to work with and compassionate with patients. even if a bit disgruntled. and a bigger, shinier, all-around-nicer ambulance. here's to #557: 432864 miles and may she keep on tickin'!

x. Legends of the Fall ...but it makes me sad, too...in a good way?

xi. lunch with Pauls Shaffner, Christensen, and Shea, with guest appearances by Woolseys, Fortes', and Kriggs.


yeah eye candy! (or is it...iCandy? muah-ha hah hah. watch your shoulders!)

xii. driving CHOB 501, the Neonatal Intensive Care Transport, twice in one night, down to my old hospital haunts in Olean and Wellsville, in a blinding snowstorm, to pick up ailing preemies with a Neonatal Nurse Practitioner and a Neonatal Respiratory Therapist. and doing the whole drive basically--nearly to Pennsylvania and back--with lights and sirens on. and having the team compliment me at the end of the trip on being an excellent driver. yesssss...taking care of cute little newborns. and visiting the southern tier. priceless.



xiii. my grandpa told me the other day that he wants to visit my brother in africa and he wants me to come with him. i couldn't imagine a more awesome journey, an epoch for the books of lore.

xiv. christmas is coming--and i am lucky enough to get a few days around the holiday off! then there's new years, a new years i can legally drink at! and shelly bloser's wedding!

xv. the amazingly productive social effects of drinking beer together. it's like the new commensality.

xvi. i'm going to sleep now--in a bed i made, in a room i rent, with money i make, clothes i bought, furniture i fashioned, and food i cook. a comfortable place of my own.

a toast: to living on my own terms. (hah! as much as a disgruntled cog in a bitterly steep and harshly uncaring power structure can...) "to the founder of the feast..."

by popular demand...

wow. comments. i love it--after a rather long work week, it was cheer-i-fying to hear from so many of you. love ya...

for Michelle, and all those who wondered, Plough Publishing's (a now extinct entity) Advent (Watch for the Light) and Lenten (Bread and Wine) devotionals are worth whatever you have to pay to get your hands on them. They are, apparently, out of print. and, for the record, Mr. Ben Howard first introduced me to the fine devotionals, for which i am eternally greatful--in a very serious use of both words.

and now
for something Completely
. Different

a few aspirations to liven the mundane workdays of the holidays and the mundane nonholiday holidays of January:

one.
rescue time from the hecticity to put some time and thought into seriously thoughtful and not merely consumerist gifts for my family. because i don't get christmas vacation anymore--i get four days off, and i'm lucky for it.

two.
engage in a literary/visual tour-de-force by watching three exciting movies and reading three literary inspirations. i'm definitely watching The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, to which I'm excited to add Geisha and a little trepidatiously, Pride and Predjudice,. Then, I'll read Pride and Predjudice, Memoirs of a Geisha, and the novella that inspired my all time favorite movie, Legends of the Fall. I've already watched Legends, in fact re-watched it today, and of course from time immemorial read the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. in point of fact, my father read it to me as a child, and I have been thinking of late how greatful I am to him for that. and the (seriously) hundreds of books, biographies, and theological treatises that he read to us, faithfully, night after night throughout my childhood. I owe most of my literary knowledge and vocabulary to those books.

hitch. and shameless begging.
does anyone have/want to loan me Geisha? i think Eileen's going to loan me Pride...right Eileen? right?

three.
somehwere in there find time to watch Peter Jackson's King Kong, for which I am rather excited, Aeon Flux (Matrix with a girl? hmmmm), and The Family Stone (can you say Rachel MacAdams...?), Walk the Line (what can I say? I love Johnny Cash...). and, of course, Mike F and Becca B, you must join me because I have to see Rent and it wouldn't be the same without you...

four.
that's just for fun. for serious, Capote and Good Night and Good Luck demand attention, though they may wait for DVD release. Syriana is billed not just as a excellent movie, but a window into oil politics--and i'm greatly intrigued. let's not even mention the well-reviewed Squid and the Whale and Ushpizin.

five.
and finally. here's the challenge. Brokeback Mountain stars Heath Ledger, who has been billed on various lists as the sexiest man in America, and Jake Gyllenhaal, an up-and-coming actor who is often touted as the otherwise-good-point in recent not-so-amazing movies. Ledger has been playing heartthrob successfully for years (cute Aussie exchange student, witty New Yawk ad executive, and grinning Southern warrior-archeologist) and Jake the man's man and stoic warrior. the twist is, Brokeback Mountain is the somewhat painful love story of these two sheep ranch hands and their homosexual relationship, based on Anne Proulx's novella of the same name. it's been getting tremendous reviews, including an excellent Rolling Stone article that occumpanied my breakfast. why is a chick-flick-for-gay-guys on my must-see list this season?

this is important. a few of my friends, both old and new, are homosexuals. others have dabbled in or struggled with the label and stereotype of "he-who-sleeps-with-guys". in many circles, it's pretty much anathema--entire lives and stories, situations and individuals are redwashed by one category of their lives, one aspect of their human experience and expression. many communities calling themselves Christian live in a kind of terrified ignorance of the increasingly expanding and diversifying cultural phenomena. there's a terrified, eyes-squeezed-shut, someone-please-explain-this-to-me-so-I-don't-have-to-wrestle-with-it-myself mentality effectively isolating entire communities (such as the one from which I just graduated) from a large number of people who, in the eyes of God, cannot be simply thought of as write-offs or deeply flawed individuals.

so. do yourself a favor and do something risky. go watch Brokeback Mountain (or, if you're daring, Transamerica) this holiday. then find a gay friend and strike up a conversation and see what they think. maybe it'll end up being a bomb of a movie, or maybe it will mean to them what Legends of the Fall means to me. if you feel bold, check college campuses and hip coffeehouses for pamphlets advertising films that have sprung up from the gay community. now, i'm not advocating everyone going out and buying a gay porn tape. far from it. don't be silly. you're wasting your time. but: there's been quite a bit of pain involved in being gay all over the world, and the stories and voices from that movement have often made themselves heard through cinema. maybe it's time to start listening to those voices and hearing what they have to say, and how they have become the stories of gay men and women (or is it gay men and lesbian women? my vocabulary is inadequate...) all over the world.

because the most difficult thing in the world, generally, is really stopping and listening to your neighbor before you try to love him.

a gift

i awoke this morning awash in lethargy and disillusionment; i wondered if i would ever escape this bent-inward-self. i thought about how empty and vain and full of sound and fury my life is--i was consumed especially by my ability to pontificate without end on righteousness and justice and truth and the spiritual journey without actually taking part in the holy struggle--the jihad--to make those things realities. i wondered where i would find the strength to shake off a lifestyle of feeling good about rearranging mental furniture and renovating dusty theologies without setting foot outside my very comfortable little life.

i seem to have come to a sluggish impasse; despite all my railings and incisive indictments of modern consumerism identities and drowsy unincarnate churches theology without praxis, i have built a comfortably smug specialist consumer identity, become a drowsily unincarnate fashionable talking head, and filled myself with the importance of my ideas without feeding or clothing or comforting a single hungry, naked or brokenhearted person this week.

so i lay there, troubled and a little perplexed; where is my salvation? who can resurrect the dead, who can bring my sick soul to health?

i stood up and dealt with the sour milk in the fridge and distinct lack of breakfast cereals (my daily staple) in my larder. i called a few friends and invited one to dinner, to break out of my habitual isolation. and later, as i went walking down the sidewalk--i did one of those leaping-and-kicking-your-feet-together sort of leprechaun things that cool people in musicals do and cool people in real life never do. especially not in the middle of my neighborhood. but i felt like doing it, because being outside always cheers me up, even on (sometimes, especially on) blustery days in late fall. and i figure, if i do it enough, i'll be able to manage tapping my heels together twice midjump, instead of my current quick-clap-and-stumble awkward version.

and as i hung there midair, thinking at the speed of light so as to have great and amazing thought frozen in micromoments of action, i remembered that not three months ago i was walking on crutches. For two months i couldn't go anywhere without an ankle brace on. i would come home from work limping like an old man and grab ice packs out of the freezer. Four weeks ago a grin split my face and i leaped for joy (immediately grimacing in pain) for the boy who once ran three miles in twenty-one minutes could finally managed more than a gimpy one-block jog. and sometime last week i was standing on my damaged right ankle stretching really far when i realized how miraculous it was that i was feeling no pain.

so there i am, hanging midair with panache to make that dude from Seven Brides for Seven Brothers green with envy, thinking, wow. i am also talking about girls (i guess they're women now that i'm officially a long way removed from high school) again with Dan Sahli and laughing carefreely more often and speaking and writing with boldness and confidence that were completely shattered last year. i'm no longer so easily blown and tossed by discouragement and stress, and i make bold plans more often and am dreaming and stowing away cash for the future. i'm a long way from that long December.

the body heals when you give it time--it's processes are slow, almost imperceptible until you look at baby pictures. i went from one foot to 5'11" one quarter-inch at a time, and i went from 135 (my pre-college weight) to 160 one all-you-can-eat cafeteria buffet and one step-carrying-sixty-pounds-and-a-canoe at a time. i shave my head and it grows--not when i'm watching, but behind my back, while i'm asleep. i wake one morning after another, one bowl of cereal at a time, over and over and over and over again, dressing for work and shaving and riding off and riding back and sleeping and waking and doing it all over again. and my body is nourished and wore out and rested and life goes on. the sun comes up. the sun goes down. the seasons pass, and turn around, and come again.

and my ankle heals. and so does my heart. and when i peruse the pictures from Tanzania, and the journal and blog entries from last year, i remember a weekend when i couldn't walk for the pain in my ankle and a week where i didn't talk to anyone for the pain that was in my heart. and last week i rode my bicycle fifty miles and at the end knew such richness of fellowship and joy as blows away the word friend. the ways of salvation are slow wrought, painful, meandering, and mundane. they are accomplished over days and months and years, and even generations. they are always quietly lapping like waves on the shore, and as deep and mysterious and mercurial as the oceans.

so, there i was, midleap, and part of my heart was stilled and awe-filled and at peace. but i landed (with a slight wince--i'm still not full well yet) and even reassured, i hunger still to be more than an idea-monger, words without substance and thought without deed, unformed or misshapen steel. i know my need more than ever to be saved and remade and brought to life. and i know more than ever the forces of death and despair that stalk through the streets of the city of my sojourn, how they strike the rich and the poor and the working-to-get-by alike, forces that i feel bound to see but powerless to resist.

that's when i checked my mail (ok, i took a couple more leaps and made my destination and returned home--but for the sake of narrative, seriously, stop interrupting!) and found a package from home. with great rejoicing i discovered an Advent devotional from my mother, an early Christmas gift, the companion to a Lenten devotional which sustained my soul through difficult times in my Tanzanian spring and ever since.

immediately, i opened and read: in classic Christian form, Bonhoeffer (who knew rather intimately the confines of a prison cell), told of Advent as "a prison cell in which one waits and hopes and does various unessential things...but is completely dependent on the fact that the door of freedom has to be opened from the outside," while J.B. Phillips warned against indifference, urging vigilance and the donning of work clothes, that we may be about our master's business when he comes to finish setting the world aright.

so now i'm not hungering alone, and my longing is not aimless. my soul is set on pilgrimage this winter season, and it is salvation that my heart is working towards. come and join us; watch and pray--time is short and our need is great.