limbo

It’s been a month since we last spoke.  Hello, blank screen.  I never thought it would be  difficult for me to fill your black expanse with words, but this month has felt like a long, drawn-out stalemate with life.  Not sure exactly why, but here are the possible suspects:

1) Top of the list:  We discovered one of our employees has been stealing inventory from us for a year.  Possibly 10s of thousands of dollars worth.  Each day he was slipping one or two valuable items in his bag, taking them home, and selling them on his own Amazon account.  We sell books on consignment and one of our clients discovered the secret account by searching for some of his missing items on Amazon.  Then we did some sleuthing to narrow down the suspects, and ultimately had a friend order an item from the person.  The package came with the culprit’s return address (on one of OUR envelopes with our return address marked out!).  The jig was up.  Our main concern was how to get the $6500 of inventory back that he still hadn’t sold (listed on his account).

We planned on confronting him immediately, but he’s also a depression-prone slacker who comes in at odd hours and sometimes disappears for days or weeks at a time (yeah, I know, I know).  Oh, and I forgot to mention that he’s the younger brother of one of Heidi’s best friends, the ex-boyfriend of another best friend, and a casual buddy of mine.  I didn’t just work with him; I’ve played video games with him.  We’ve killed each other with virtual swords and explosive rockets; outside of the real military, that’s about as bonded as my generation of men gets these days.  He’ll be in our lives forever, one step removed.  Anyway, long story short…the confrontation failed to come together for several weeks, driving Heidi’s intestines into fits of rage and rectal revenge.  Myself, I had trouble napping.  It was a big deal.  Morale was down among all our hard workers.

But today my brother-in-law and I were finally able to corner him at his place, like a rat.  It went as well as could be expected:  after I pulled out the evidence, he confessed, apologized, and gave back the remaining inventory.  Turns out he’s been a kleptomaniac since youth.  I felt sorry for him, since I myself battled the klepto demon as a child.  Christ gave me the will to slit its throat; this guy, on the other hand, has a raging addiction to slipping his hand in and out of the demon’s mouth.  The difference between him and me is that he left his Christian upbringing behind and hasn’t fought his way back to a faith he can hang onto.  He’s lost in the waves of the world.

He seemed a little shell-shocked when I left him to face his sister (who he lives with).  He lost his job, his illicit income, and several relationships all in a few minutes (his unsuspecting girlfriend was also waiting outside unbeknownst to me).  I really hope he gets it together.  Adam, if you read this, I hope you realize you’re forgiven.  But it’s time to grow up and quit being a criminal.

2) Suspect numero dos.  This whole month we’ve been wrestling with the IRS agent assigned to our non-profit application.  He doesn’t speak good English and has had us repeatedly re-write our application, because he hasn’t understood it.  We’ve done our business financials twice as well, and had to change our whole plan considerably to make it fit into this guy’s understanding of IRS requirements.  Never mind that his understanding differs completely from every book we read on acceptable non-profit activities and applictions.  Tonight I finally faxed him what I hope is the last rewrite needed.  Pray for swift approval to follow.  Government red tape is a great evil.  In some small way, I feel like I understand my grandfather’s struggle with Maui county now.  He’s gotta have the endurance of a giant!

3) Trying yet again to have our own actual bookstore.  It’s appropriate that this is the third possible reason for my writing malaise, because it’s the third time in three years I’ve stepped out to try for a possible storefront lease.  It’s a great location just downstairs, with lots of foot traffic.  A little smaller than I’ve always envisioned, but the lease is short and the price is right, so there’s room to grow out of it or leave it behind if it’s a disaster.  We expressed our interest a couple weeks back, and keep asking…but no response yet.  Not sure why they prefer no money to rent money, but there are other applicants so I’m sure they’re just juggling possibilities.  Meanwhile, we wait…

4)…and the waiting is difficult because we also want to move out of our loft(s).  Both of our leases are up over the next few months, and we want to separate our home from our business (a first for me!).  We also want to find a cheaper, bigger office/warehouse if the storefront downstairs doesn’t work out.  So all of that is up in the air while we wait on the storefront.

I could come up with a few more, but all in all this month has just been like getting up and down from four different sets of starting blocks in four different races, all at the same time.  A sort of strange nerve-wracking lethargy.  These waiting games are boring.  All my creative juices have leaked out as I run in place, in limbo space.

Bedtime.

lost in Kahului

It’s indicative of the busy-ness of Los Angeles that I’m just now finding a moment to write about our Maui trip, two nights after our return, even though it was the first thing I wanted to do.  Actually, to be fair to LA, it’s more indicative of having a business in your home with constant work in your face and employees coming and going.

Our time on Maui was really good, the best I’ve had in years.  It was just long enough to give me room to relax and reflect on life.  Some of that was due to a conscious effort not to fill the two weeks with constant friends and family, but to have a few days mostly to myself, to remind me what it felt like to live on the island.

Thoughts and resolutions from the trip:

Seeing my sister Emily again, a year after we almost lost her, in the parking lot of Stella Blues.  She was crying joyfully, with her characteristic hands-over-the-face.  That’s a memory I’ll always have.  It was so good to see her alive and well, happier and healed, and to hear her voice and laughter again.  Beautiful.

My favorite thing about Maui is that you can make something of yourself and your relationships, in a substantial way that you can feel. Perhaps most small towns are like this, but whatever work you decide to do…you can be the best at if you want.  You can start something no one else has done or is doing very well.  You can love people and feel it simply because of the slower pace of life.  It’s not a fight to share life with others like it is in LA.  You can make a creative and relational difference in the lives of others.  You can make a difference in a big city too, but the experience and feeling of it (the “reward,” if you will) is much more elusive.

I look like a snail out of its shell with my shirt off now. Soft and pale.  If I lived on Maui it would be so much easier to get fit again.  Heidi felt the same way (about herself; she claimed to like me as a snail — liar!).

I wish I could play gin rummy with my grandparents at least once a week.

Heidi was introduced to the idea “talk story,” followed by hanging out with the master of it, Bradley.  She liked it.

Our Los Angeles business needs a dramatic overhaul. The year started well, but it’s currently not making me/us any money above our expenses.  That gets us nowhere but tired.  Over the next year, I intend to either A) figure out how to make the business profitable without me working it, or B) sell it off and do something else, possibly somewhere else.

As they have many times over the past few years, thoughts of moving back to Maui have taken a positive direction again. It always goes back and forth for me, as life itself rises and dips.

That’s all, for now.

(Oh, and the title of this entry is from when I made a few wrong turns one day in town and found myself lost in a local neighborhood in Kahului that I had never driven through.  It was really depressing, like a ghetto, and it struck me how oppressively poor and downtrodden many local people on Maui are, houses falling apart and yards full of junk and weeds, like native Americans on a reservation.  I thought at that moment of the title for this blog, even though it doesn’t have anything to do with the rest of what I wrote.)

frakkin’ battlestar

(I apologize for the muddled thoughts and writing towards the end of this entry, but I don’t have time to edit it before rushing to the airport for Maui, and I need to post it before I left.)

Two nights ago Heidi and I finished watching the entire recently ended TV series Battlestar Galactica.  Season 4.5 was the last season we would ever see of those characters, and I felt incredibly sad all night.

It’s the mark of a good work of art that it draws you in as emotionally as your own real world relationships do.  I’ve watched plenty of TV series in their entirety, and was fine with them ending, even relieved that I could finally check them off my list.  But the arc of this show was so dramatic, so epic and yet so intimate, so character-driven, so full of all the stuff of life from birth to death, so throbbing with spiritual mysteries…that I literally felt the desolation of a passing as it ended.  It was a perfectly imperfect creation, just like life and those we love in life.

<SPOILER ALERT — if you ever plan on watching the show and don’t want to know the ending, DON’T read ahead!>

I don’t fully understand my feelings about the ending, which is why I’m writing this blog — to try and work them out.  In the end, all the conflict and all the driving hopes of the main characters careen together in a messy chaotic climax, followed by a strangely sad, calm resolution.  The last episode was the first time I felt some things didn’t make sense, weren’t consistent with the rest of the show, seemed forced.  That only increased the pangs of sorrow in watching the end, like a real-life death by disease or accident.  Not the way it was supposed to happen.

In the end, they don’t find the Earth they were looking for (they already found that one, and it was destroyed).  No, they find a new Earth.  And what do they do?  They decide to get rid of all their starships, their homes as far as we the viewers have known them.  They send them into the sun.  Then they all decide to split up and go their separate ways on this new planet Earth.  Most of the main characters go off to find a continent or a mountain or an island by themselves.   To live off the land, erase all traces of civilization, maybe join up with the tribal neanderthals already roaming this new Earth.  Everyone is high on a sort of idealistic, incredibly naive humanism that this is the way for humanity to live in peace:  separate from each other (especially those you love), and don’t invent anything that’s not already part of the land (cabins are okay).

But the show’s creators don’t leave it there.  In a last little clip, they jump ahead 150,000 years to yet another fully developed civilization on Earth that looks just like ours — a bee hive of production, consumption, and war.  History repeats itself.  But even while acknowledging the broken reality of human existence (oh, once again those pesky humans are gonna create robots that are alive, transfer their genetic tendencies to war, and get themselves all killed again, tee-hee!), the creators shove in yet another nod to humanism with a conversation about how things will eventually work themselves out to a happy ending if they only repeat the cycle often enough.  That’s their only hope.

To be fair, the creators sign off with a last little cartoon caricature of themselves as hippies after the final credits.  Don’t get me wrong — I’m a hippie myself, after a fashion.  A selective hippie.  My idealism is tempered by my Christianity, by my understanding of humankind’s innate fallen-ness. There is absolutely zero evidence to believe that we’ll get it right if we just have enough chances.  That’s Hinduism (Buddhism too, but Hinduism started it).  The errors of those religions I’ll leave unsaid; suffice it to say I don’t find truth in reincarnation’s rationale and I’m bummed to find it fueling Battlestar Galactica.

I guess my feelings about the ending all boil down to this:  it was a show full of truth…which ended in falsehood.  For me personally. (I can’t help but give a nod to “other” interpretations, like a good postmodern.)  To me, the whole series was basically about highly flawed characters searching and fighting their way to paradise.  To answers and peace and love.  To Heaven.    Their search for Earth was symbolic of a search for Heaven.

And for me, and for all Christians, Heaven is where we’ll be reunited with those we loved who also loved God, where we’ll finally all meet our Creator together and all have the same understanding, eliminating pain and loss and war.  It’s a hippie religion, but with one difference:  God makes it happen.  We don’t.

So, the show’s ending was a sort of betrayal to me and my built-in Christian hope for Heaven in that it sends almost everyone into virtual solitude rather than community.  It takes away faith, then hope (because what’s left to hope for when all is accomplished? -a good question for another time), and finally, love.  There is some love, as a few couples and groups stay together, but the main heroes go it alone and the overall emotion conveyed is the end of love.  What is more desolate than a solitary life devoid of faith, hope, and love?  Jeez.

The show tries to have it both ways, giving a Divine Planner the last word while implying that It’s just patiently waiting on and tinkering with us through endless reincarnations to finally get it right.  Again, it’s Hinduism.  Hippie Hinduism.  It’s ironic for me to say so, as I’ve been a champion of truth in the midst of falsehood for many years, but right now I’m feeling that there’s nothing more irritating than a mix of truth and falsehood.  Damn you, Battlestar Galactica, for being such a perfect imperfection.

does this mean i’m only going to live to 68?

From the book What Got You Here, Won’t Get You There by Marshall Goldsmith:

Regarding why people don’t do what they committed to do (or profess to want to do):

“The answer can be found in a dream.  It’s a dream I have often — and you may, too.  It goes something like this:

You know, we are incredibly busy right now.  In fact, I feel about as busy today as I have ever felt.  Some days I feel overcommitted.  In fact, every now and then my life feels out of control.

But we are working on some unique and special challenges right now.  I feel like the worst of this is going to be over in a couple or three months.  After that, I am going to take a couple of weeks, take a little time off, get organized, spend some time with the family, and start working out.  Everything is going to change.  This time will be here soon.  After that, it won’t be crazy anymore!

Have you ever had a dream that sounds vaguely like this?  How long have you been having this dream?  How’s that working for you?

Perhaps it’s time to stop dreaming of a time when you won’t be busy.  Because the time will never come.  It’s your dream — but it’s also a mirage.”

I read that the other night and it was like small bomb dropped in my brain.  (Seems like I have that happen often, right?)  I mean, I’ve been sub-aware for awhile that I never seem to catch up with life.  That every time I finish one set of tasks or challenges, I take a breath…and another set immediately takes their place.   In addition to what life itself creates, I myself have laid up enough sets of things to do to last me several lifetimes.  I fuel the constant succession of tasks with a fantasy:  that one day, if I work hard enough, I will be able to afford to build my fantastic dreamt-of house where community and creativity can lay on a couch with solitude and leisure.  In other words, I hope someday to have nothing to do but read and write, watch movies and listen to music, and hang out with friends and family.   In a setting of my choosing.

Last year, this seemed imminently attainable.  Now, I have my doubts.  Yes, I have created a “successful” business that sustains over 20 people, including myself.  And yes, we have new opportunities to grow just bursting like ripe fruit everywhere we look.  And yes, I enjoy the work…most of the time.  And yes, it allows me the luxury to at least read and write an hour a day…most days.  But we still never seem to get ahead; we live as austere a life as I can imagine and still barely pay our bills each month (never mind ever having a surplus enough to pay for a home or kids or travel).  And there’s the nagging feeling in the back of my mind (and perhaps now in the front of it) that I’m going the wrong way.

It’s the feeling that in my quest to work hard enough to free myself to do what I really want to do, all I’ve done is create a more secure cell for myself in a nicer prison.  One of those white collar prisons where you can keep working and have relatively nice meals without fear of getting shanked in the shower.

I think reality is finally starting to dawn on me:  that my idea of heaven is not going to be found in this life.  I won’t be able to work hard enough to ever get there.  I say “starting” to dawn on me, because the fantasy is still entrenched through all the pathways of my mind and soul.  Now, however, it has been joined by the more grim companions of fear and responsibility.  One on either side, to keep me in step down the path — and to keep me from bolting.  “You’ve got employees depending on you.  You just started a new venture; you have to see it through for your partners, not to mention all the homeless children.”  “If you stopped and changed course now, you’d be starting over from scratch — all that work you’ve put in would be for nothing.”  “No one would ever trust you again if you didn’t see your plans through before starting something new.”

I don’t know what is true.  I see everything from too many angles.  Society and Christianity, in this day and age, both tell me life is short, live your dream, seize the day, obey your calling.  But knowing my history and my personality gives me pause.  I remember a time in my 20s when I didn’t have a care in the world and could read and write and hang out with friends and family to my heart’s content…and I did it, sort of.  But it was boring.  I also remember being in this place before, where I had built up an idea and then walked away from it before it flowered…and have regretted it ever since.

I may just be a grass-is-greener fool.

So I’m caught in a Catch-22.  My dreams may be my downfall.  If I pursue a current dream to its end, I may waste so much time that I don’t have time to pursue another one.  If I change course and pursue a different dream, I may in turn find it unfinished and replaced by yet another in a few years’ time.  Those are my biggest fears:  that I’ll look back at the end of my life and A) wish I had done or started something else way earlier, or B) wish I had kept going with one dream to its end.  How do you choose between fears?  Or better yet, how do you get rid of those fears and live an entirely different life?

In all of this, I’m trying to be obedient and give glory to God in everything I do.  My feeling, though, is that he doesn’t give a rat’s ass about my dreams one way or the other.  That he just wants me to forget about myself and my mundane middle-class fantasies and just pour out my life as a sacrifice for others.  I don’t know how to do that, though, and that seems just as frustrating a path as any other.

Life.  You can’t live it, and you can’t live without it.

it’s a love story, not a love story

When we were up in Portland last weekend, we saw an indie film called 500 Days of Summer.  It was something of a mind-trip for me.  Let me try to explain.

First, it was shot entirely in downtown LA.  Nothing unusual about that, since downtown is a popular film location these days.  But a key dramatic spot for the characters is on a hill looking at our building (they sit on the grassy knoll we see from our window)!  Our loft is in the middle of the shot in both scenes of them looking at our block of buildings, and the man talks about the building next to ours as his favorite historical building.  He’s a wannabe architect who never followed through on that dream, and the building is symbolic of that failure to follow.

Second, the movie is about his delusionary quest to be in love with the One.  He’s found the girl of his romantic dreams, and although she’s upfront with him about not wanting a serious relationship, about not being committal, he’s sure it will work out and he can bring her around.  Story of my frickin’ life!  Pre-Heidi, of course.

I won’t say any more because I don’t want to spoil it for any of you who catch the film in the future, but the story’s resemblance emotionally to my past life (and a couple relationships in particular) is uncanny.  When you pair it with my building and my loft being a key story element, it’s jarring to the point of being a sign.  Especially considering my sleeping dream of the past week as well, interpreted to be about my past life.

Is it my subconsciousness, is it God, is it synchronicity…what does it all mean?  I usually frown upon people’s attempts to discover some secret plan for their life, as if God’s will was in a special Easter egg you have to hunt for amid bushes and trees.  But when two consecutive events — one perhaps of my own mental making but one certainly not — address the same thematic undercurrent in the plot of my life, it makes me as a writer sit up and pay attention.  How is this supposed to change my character and where does it take my story?

The only thing I can identify so far is that both seem to be resolutions of the past and point to a hopeful, creative future.  I could probably go deeper, but I’m going to leave it at that for now before I get too crazy analytical.

I’ll finish with a quote from an interview from sci-fi author Philip K. Dick, explaining his belief that God hides himself in trash, in suffering, in dreams, in lowly people, in that which is easy for people to dismiss and requires faith to discern:

“He picked real stupid dopey people.  I mean it’s part of his strategy.  That way you have, the recipient has the option to discard the whole thing.  It forces the recipient to do what nobody will do and that is read the messages themselves and draw their own conclusion.  What they do is pick up the book, look at the cover, turn it over, hold it open like this and throw it down and they don’t know what, if I ask them “What did it say?”  They won’t know.  They see but they do not see.  They look but they do not look.  They hear but they do not hear.  But someday they will remember it was handed to them.”

Here’s a clip of the actors from 500 Days of Summer talking about how beautiful LA is (which I disagree with; I think it has beautiful locations but is dishearteningly ugly as a whole).  I include it because it has 3 quick shots from the movie of them looking at our building, at :44, 1:28, and 1:41 in the clip.

film clip

dream lover

I had a dream last night.

It was remarkably cinematic, with a beginning and an end (just as my alarm went off!), three main characters, a theme, symbolism, a plot…everything good storytelling has.

Unfortunately my memory of dreams is always shoddy and full of blank spaces and holes, but here’s what I remember:

A young man was travelling.  He was me, but not me.  I saw through his eyes but it was not me.  I don’t know why he was travelling, but he came upon something of an island paradise.  On this island was a fragile, beautiful young woman played by Audrey Tatou (Amelie).  She lived with an older man of dark complexion and fierce eyes.  It wasn’t clear what their relatonship was, whether he was father, lover, or captor.  The young woman seemed to fear the older man but also cared for him, respected him in a way the young man could not fathom.

The young man fell in love with the young woman.  She too fell in love with him, in a way.  Like a bird with a broken wing allows a boy to show it tenderness for a time.  Whenever the older man was away taking care of something on the island, or sometimes only cooking in the kitchen, they would sneak in their times of kissing, touching, whispering, embracing.  They both feared being caught by the older man, but it was never said why.  There was an ever-present sense of jealousy from him, but he did not seem to take any chance to catch them in the act.  And there was a constant  threat of violence in his gruff demeanor, although he had never done anything to either of them.

The beautiful locale and the secret sweet love of the two young people was thwarted by an overwhelming tension in the dream between all three characters.  Everything was film-quality sensation — waves, sand, skin, lips, glances, sounds, the smell and taste of spicy food — but their communication was largely unspoken and an air of mystery pervaded the entire story.  Things went unexplained.

The young man begged the young woman to flee the island with him, which he viewed as a prison for her.  She wistfully let him go on and on about it, to the brink of believing that she would go with him, but in the end she would not leave and he was forced to sail from the island heartbroken.

The dream skipped ahead a few years, and strangely there’s a scene where the older man and the young woman leave the island to visit the younger man and a group of others who were apparently on the island with them all at the same time — although I have no memory of them in the earlier part of the dream.

The reunion is revealing.  This time the younger woman is not as young, and she has become even more frail.  It’s clear that she has a debilitating and painful disease, for which she must be carried most of the time by the older man.  Her limbs are disfigured.  It’s obvious they both knew all along what her future had been, and that the young man — despite his love for the young woman — had been a distraction, a brief respite for her in a larger predetermined life of tragedy.  The older man had known everything, and everyone now knew his kindness at allowing the fling and were in awe of his sacrificial care of the young woman.  He was still fearsome, but softened now that his responsibility was understood and revealed in full.

The last scene in the dream is the planting of a baby tree.  The young man and his friends put a ring of something (wood, clay?) a foot or so around the tree, and the young man carves the numbers, 1, 2, and 3 in the top edge of the ring, followed by “no number,” “no number,” “no number.”  It clearly has some significance to him in relation to the woman, but it was lost to me when I awoke.  Through time-lapse photography the tree ages and grows larger until it swallows up the ring with the carved numbers and no-numbers.  It splits into three trunks, and I and my friends comment on that being the type of tree it was:  a “three-branch tree.”  Then the tree becomes so old that it falls over.  In the dream I say with hope and sadness that it still has life in it, that its roots are merely too weak to hold it in the ground — but the tree could still live on if it had soil solid enough to support it.

We stand around it and the screen fades, for it is very much like a movie at the end and I think of it as such as I wake up.

Whether or not it has any significance only God knows, but it was remarkable to me in that it had a definite story arc and resolution just before my alarm went off, while all my other dreams are always abruptly cut off in the midst of unresolved action.

what the heck, jesus

Well, this lack of writing is kind of embarrassing.  I felt like I had all these grand plans for this blog, and it’s just sort of petered out.  Not a thought in my head for weeks.  Or rather, not an urge to write any of my thoughts in weeks.

I did have a further observation about the idea of systemic sin which I wrote about awhile back.  I was conflicted over ways in which my lifestyle or actions were participating in global manifestations of sin.  I used the example of driving a car being linked systemically to the murder of thousands of people through oil-related wars.  I could have used other examples, since pretty much anything we do in America is exploitative of people in the third world.  In order for us to live the lifestyle we do, others must suffer.  It’s just a law of economic imbalance.

However, related to this is the issue of taxes.  Christians have long held that we are supposed to pay them even when we don’t agree with what our government is doing with the taxes.  Jesus himself supported this idea when he said “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and God what is God’s.”  Or something to that effect.  I don’t know what to think about that statement.  Then there are the verses in the NT about government being God’s instrument and how everyone should submit to it.  If people had obeyed that, America would never have existed — because it was only formed by overthrowing the existing British rule.  And that was just over taxes, not wanting to pay them.  This “Christian” nation was formed by disobeying two of Jesus’ direct commands.  Hmmm.

But I’m getting off topic.  I brought up the issue of taxes and governance because it seems to indicate that Jesus gave us freedom from worrying about systemic sin.  After all, those taxes he instructed his followers to pay to the Roman empire were most definitely going to be used in wars, exploitation, debauchery of rulers, and persecution of Christians.  They were paying the salaries of their own persecutors and executioners!  We’re in an age when social justice and civil rights are considered moral responsibilities of believers and non-believers alike.  But it seems that Christ was not concerned with justice on this earth and directed us to overlook it as well.  There can be no justice on this earth.  He seemed to always indicate that we should let God take care of justice; we need to be focused on being citizens of heaven instead of citizens of earth.  Yet that contradicts everything we hold to be moral and ethical in this day and age.  How does one submit to systemic sin on the one hand and love your neighbor on the other?  They seem to be mutually exclusive to me, yet Jesus commanded us to do both.

I usually revel in the many paradoxes of Christianity, but this one is troubling.  I can see I have some serious reading and thinking to do.

Feast

Wow, it’s been almost 3 weeks since I posted anything.  What can I say, haven’t had many thoughts lately.  I think all those ones I mentioned awhile back have sort of drifted away.  Perhaps I can collect them again sometime.  But it’s been a dry spell.  I’ve just been working on getting my new office manager up to speed, working with our designer (R. Kim) to get our non-profit graphics done (see link to the right for BFP), and buying books.  As my friend Kean put it, “mundanity.”  I suppose.

I did start book club.  We’re reading God: A Biography by Jack Miles.  Some well-written, possibly heretical, possibly enlightening literary criticism of the Old Testament.  Got about 9-10 people, should be good times.  We’ve had the first session so far, and aside from the usual awkwardness of an initial group meeting, it went well.  Everyone seems to be on the same page with the same questions.

I got a long email from my sister Emily, which was amazing.  Since her injury, I don’t get to hear from her often (and she could say the same of me), so it’s always a big treat when I do.  I want to write more about her, but will ask her first.

That’s one thing I wanted to write about before:  the apparent lack of writing and thoughts about others in my life.  Oftentimes this blog feels incredibly self-absorbed and navel-gazing to me, and I assume to others as well.  The funny thing is, in daily life I spend as much if not more time thinking about and praying for my friends and family and co-workers.  But when it comes to writing about them, I feel like it would be inappropriate or unappreciated — an invasion of their privacy.  I dunno if people like it when others write about them or if they don’t, so I try to stay away from it other than brief mentions that affect who I am.  In particular, that explains my long silence about my sister Emily and the struggles she and our family have gone through since she was injured and on death’s door last year.

Switching gears yet again…here’s yet another brilliant business idea I’ve had for awhile.  If I ever have the money and time, I might explore it on some level.  Here it is:  live album-listening in a theater.  You know how powerful and moving film music sounds when you’re in a big dark theater with wall to wall speakers larger than anything that would fit in your house?  Actually, I don’t know how big they are, but I assume they’re that big.  You just feel the music more in a theater, and that’s why movie soundtracks are such big business.  Music you wouldn’t like otherwise sounds amazing in that context.  So, why not use that spacious size of sound in a theater and just let music-lovers sit and soak in an entire album?  You could have album release parties for bigger artists like Radiohead or whoever.  Obviously, the idea would only appeal to audiophiles or people who have the patience to listen to an album from beginning to end.  It might have to be a small theater.  But it would be different from a live concert, because you could actually hear everything going on in the music instead of just loud noise.

Or…and here’s another idea that I thought of, which I’m combining with this one:  you put it together with a restaurant.  So instead of dinner theater you have dinner musical.  But not musical in the traditional sense.  Obviously I’m thinking of the kind of music I like — rock, metal, underground, alt.country, etc.  You could do any type of music that lends itself to sit-down listening, though.  And then, to add yet another element, a visual one:  how about a big fire-pit in the center of the restaurant every night?  Because nothing gets people contemplative more than a big crackling fire.

So, a restaurant where you eat by bonfire-light, smiling at your friends as the recorded sounds of your favorite band fill the room and wash over you with perfect high-fidelity.  No conversation, because you wouldn’t be able to hear anybody talk (as in an ideal movie theater).  Just a purely sense-laden time that you share with others but experience alone.  Taste, sight, sound.  A feast for the senses, but one that paradoxically gets you out of your body.  In fact, that’s what I would call the place/event:  Feast.

I’ll probably never have the money to do anything like that, or I’m sure someone with money will read this and do it before I do.  But maybe someday I’ll try it on a small scale.  Like in my house over dinner, when I get a good sound system.  I love the idea of creating communal experiences like that, beyond the ordinary.

i like green grass

Even as I’m caught up in the tentacled arms of business, I often think of other lives I might have led.  Without further ado, here are some of them:

1) Mechanic. I’ve always admired grease-monkeys, with their secret knowledge of the machines modern society relies on.  It seems to me that an honest mechanic would be a rare and honorable profession.  The sense of satisfaction gained through the constant fixing of people’s problems would be intoxicating.  I also think a good TV reality show would be a mechanic crew that travelled around the country scouring for interesting wrecks covered by weeds or buried in old garages, and remaking them.  It would be like an auto resurrection squad.

2) Professor. This one could still happen someday.  It has been long enough since I was in school for only fond memories to remain.  I could see myself returning to get a degree with the aim of teaching, or writing some books that might win me a guest lecturer position without the extra education.  Maybe in history, comparative religion, writing, some sort of cultural studies.  It would exciting to try and communicate my passion for certain knowledge to young minds not yet swallowed up by society’s mundanity.  (I just made that noun form of mundane up; i think it’s great)

3) Architect. With my dad’s career in building and my youthful experiences in it, I’ve always enjoyed thinking about structures.  Perhaps the actual practice of architecture would be too mathematical for my mind, and the steps from idea to completion too long and laden with red tape, but I like to imagine myself as an iconoclastic visionary architect pushing the field in directions it doesn’t currently go.  I like the idea of designing beautiful, unique shelters to affix to God’s earth.  Maybe designing my own house someday will have to do.

4) Graphic Designer. I’ve said several times that if I could redo college, I would have studied this instead of Communications.  Or at least added a few classes in it to get the technical knowledge down.  I have a good eye and appreciation for design as the communication of ideas, but my attempts at it have always been frustrated by an ignorance of the technology and arts of matching colors and fonts and all the elements of modern design.  I would have liked to study the principles, because I think good design in every field makes the world a more beautiful place.

5) Redneck chick magnet. Kinda like Matthew Mcconaughey’s character in Dazed and Confused.  Living in the South, driving a Camaro jamming “Rock You Like a Hurricane,” just cruisin’ and picking up chicks with my sweet mullet.  Given a few different circumstances growing up, that could have been me.

6) Beach bum/ski bum. My junior year in college, that was sort of my number one plan when I graduated.  Just to travel around the world and surf and snowboard, working odd jobs to pay my way.  Just being a total hedonist.  Following the endless wave.  Which is probably why I think I got paralyzed, because God didn’t want me to waste my life on pleasure.  Thanks a lot, God.

7) Musician. Most of my friends have all been guitarists.  I wish I had started in high school myself.  All of those hundreds of critical album reviews I wrote in my 20s…that was my frustration over not being disciplined enough to learn an instrument and create my own damn music.  I tried learning bass and acoustic guitar, but the problem was always that my friends started before me and were too good for me to catch up by the time I thought of it.  That was my excuse but I think I was just lazy.  I could have made some really unique albums.

8) Prison Bodybuilder. Not many people know this, but I was quite the kleptomaniac as a child.  I regularly pilfered pocketfuls of toys from stores and school, and even as late as high school I had my own scheme going to support my comic book collecting habit.  When the clerk wasn’t looking, I would take their own collectible back issues out of the box, bring them up to the counter, and trade them in as my own for new comics.  Then as recent as 10 years ago I kept myself off the street by making and selling bootleg CDs on the internet.  These were isolated periods of incidents — and always tied to getting something else that I really wanted — but I’m not proud of those actions.  I’m a sinner, just like you reading this.  It took repeated inner convictions by the Holy Spirit to curb that behavior.  Otherwise I could have eventually been thrown in the slammer, in which case I would have worked out all the time and become the biggest badass in jail.  Now that I enjoy working and have money, I feel no temptation towards crime of any sort — which is why I tend to blame poverty and corporate/media creation of desire as the systemic cause of thievery.   Our society is geared towards creating material desires while withholding them from those without resources, which causes crime.  I was a living example!  (Disclaimer: if anyone in law enforcement is reading this, I could be exaggerating my past for dramatic purposes — please don’t come after me!)

9) Artist. All I did as a kid and young adult was draw and create my own worlds.  I think I could have been a really great recluse, just painting or drawing my own far-out universe for years and years.  I was never really exposed to the actual mediums of painting and drawing, though, and as I wrote in an earlier blog entry, my circumstances growing up steered me away from that path.

10) Forest Ranger. All of the best memories and experiences of my life pre-injury relate to being one with nature.  My greatest sadness is that I’m completely cut off from that now due to my paralysis.  Playing in the woods constantly as a kid, watching Tarzan, climbing trees, searching for wild animals, and loving to hike into the unknown as a young adult…I can’t imagine any greater life than constantly traversing vast stretches of mountainous wilderness.  Sometimes I even fantasize about living completely in the wild.  Not stupidly like that kid Into the Wild was based on; more like a modern day Davey Crockett or Daniel Boone.

11) Family Business Partner. I love how talented and hard-working and independent everyone in my family is.  I wouldn’t even care what kind of business it was — a store, a restaurant, a farm — in an alternate reality I’d love to be a part of a dream team made up of everyone in my family, each working according to their gifts and creating a business that would give loads and loads of life to its surrounding community over decades.  I guess I should have joined up with my grandpa’s company a long time ago, but I know the reality of family working together is usually much more contentious than the dream.  Still, I’m managing a second form of it with my wife and brother-in-law.  Maybe we should hurry up and get some kids for the free labor…just kidding.

That’s all I can think of for now.  I’m glad to be doing what I’m doing, but hopefully I’ll have the courage and fortitude to switch it up at some point.

love pain

Oh man, it has been too long since I’ve been able to write a new entry.  Ideas for a dozen new entries have been squirming and jostling their way through the daily crowd of other thoughts vying for personhood in my mind, but until now they’ve been out-shouted by the mental workers in charge of the mundane details of life.

I’ve got a lot of catching up to do.  Gotta figure out what I think about a number of things.  I’ll get those entries done hopefully in the next few days.

I’ve been hesitant to include quotes from others in this blog, even though I keep notebooks of them from the books I read.  I would rather strain to come up with my own brilliant arrangements of words.  Kind of like a musician feels about playing cover songs versus their own music.

However, maybe that’s just arrogance.

So, in light of our recently passed first anniversary, here are some of my favorite quotes from one of the most incisive books I’ve ever read, The Mystery of Marriage by Mike Mason:

“Marriage is, before it is anything else, an act of contemplation.  It is a divine pondering, an exercise in amazement…for marriage, as simply as it can be defined, is the contemplation of the love of God in and through the form of another human being.”

“Even to people who have dreamed for years about getting married and who think of themselves as hating to be alone, marriage still cannot help but come as an invasion of privacy. No one has ever married without being surprised, and usually alarmed, at the sheer intensity of this invasion.”
(Josh: I am an exception to this, because I never felt that, but I like the idea and think it applies to most people.)

“It is an enormous source of human frustration that our need for intimacy far outstrips its capacity to be met in other people.”

“The fact is that our natural tendency is to treat people as if they were not ‘others’ at all, but merely aspects of ourselves.  We do not experience them as the overwhelming, comprehensive realities which we feel ourselves to be.  Compared with us, they are not quite real.  We see them as if through a haze, the haze of our own all-engulfing selfhood…

…for truly to open our hearts to another person is to invite them into our own throne room and to set them down on our very own throne, on the seat normally warmed by no one but ourselves.  And to do that is to have the throne, the seat of the ego, rocked right off its foundations.  Love is an earthquake that relocates the center of the universe.”

“…how tiring and intrusive other people can be!  They heap us with expectations, demands, responsibilities, and any sense of significance in our own lives runs the risk of being swallowed up among the sheer numbers, the impossible teeming billions of others in the world….Is it any wonder we seek some refuge from this insignificance, from the crushing pressure of relationships, from the armies of other beings who would trek like locusts through the verdant pastures of our innermost souls?  The need for such a refuge can only be met by the deliberate yet subliminal fantasy that we are all alone in the universe.  And so we walk with our head in the clouds, pass people on the street as if they were telephone poles, look them straight in the eye and hardly see them, and engage in conversations that are really only conversations with ourselves.  Too often others are but the punctuation marks in the dry and windy monologues of our own self-centered existence.

This willful but unconscious dilution of the full reality of other people is at heart a dilution of the reality of God — a watering down, that is, of reality Himself.  For people are the consciousness of God in the world, the closest thing to Him in the physical realm, and a more vivid reminder than anything else in creation of His existence, His mystery, and His creative power.  If man really is fashioned more than anything else, in the image of God, then clearly it follows that there is nothing on earth so near to God as a human being.  The conclusion is inescapable, that to be in the presence of even the meanest, lowest, most repulsive specimen of humanity…is still to be closer to God than when looking up into the starry sky or at a beautiful sunset.”

“…everyone on earth bears a secret resentment toward everyone else, simply for being alive.  We resent one another for revealing so accurately and so openly and so painfully the depth of our lovelessness.”

“When the illegitimate self, the one that is founded upon human pride and illusion, comes up against the real thing, it cannot stand.  It has found what it has itself been struggling to be, and so crumbles with shame, relief, joy, realization.

Love attacks and destroys pride, therefore, simply by eliminating the need for it…what use is there in asserting the self if the self is already loved, fully and unreservedly, and not because of but in spite of anything it might do?”

“…the tongue is a pen, which pressing deeply enough (and whether for good or for evil) will write upon the heart.”

“A marriage is not a joining of two worlds, but an abandoning of two worlds in order that one new one might be formed.”

“We would like to think of ourselves, perhaps, as having a great impact on the world, touching and influencing thousands of lives.  How great is our frustration when we realize that we do not adequately touch even the one single life of the person closest to us!”

“You cannot leave a marriage sitting in the driveway even for a day, because the only reason for marriage is togetherness.  It is an alliance of love, and love is a spiritual vehicle, a rocket ship, that travels faster and farther than anything else under the sun.  Get out of it for a moment, and it leaves you for parts unknown; let it idle, and it begins to rust; neglect it, and it seizes right up.  It can be a full-time job just being a passenger in this thing.  But like it or not, you and your spouse are in it together, and in it for life, and the work of traveling in marriage is the most vital work you can do.”

“…He has planned, through marriage, for the demands of love to be made so concrete, so immediate and particular, so focused and intense as to become inescapable.  It is His way of turning love into a ‘do-or-die’ situation…in the taking of vows, it is as if they have agreed to an actual ultimatum:  love or else.  This is a curious and frustrating and often excruciatingly painful trap to be in, but the plain fact is that if a couple do not love one another first, as they do themselves, then they cannot really love themselves or anyone else.  But when they do love, that love becomes a fire which has the power to enkindle all around them.”

“…contrary to the assumption of many, Scripture was not given to be obeyed; rather, it was given that the Lord might be obeyed.”

“In marriage it so happens that the Lord has devised a particularly gentle (but no less disciplined and effective) means for helping men and women to humble themselves, to surrender their errant wills.  Even the closest of couples will inevitably find themselves engaged in a struggle of wills, for marriage is a wild, audacious attempt at an almost impossible degree of cooperation between two powerful centers of self-assertion.  Marriage cannot help being a furnace of conflict, a crucible in which these two wills must be melted down and purified and made to conform.  Most people do not realize that this is what they are signing up for when they get married…It cannot succeed without, first of all, a profound acceptance of the conditions of struggle, the state of personal seige, in which it must be lived out, and secondly, without an ever-growing realization that one’s own self cannot and must not emerge as the winner of this struggle.”

“From one point of view, the whole of life may be seen as a taking away, as one long and painful series of subtractions.  We are forever being called upon to pull up stakes, to release our hold upon the things and places and people we have loved, and even upon each precious second as it slips through our aging fingers.  Our very bodies are like tents, says Paul, the most temporary of houses, and our whole existence under the sun bears the marks of exile and nomadism.”

“Just as the man who loves God will almost certainly incur greater suffering in this world than the man who does not, so it is that a man who loves a woman may…open himself up to deeper levels of suffering than a man who will not commit himself to any love at all.  For it is not in the nature of love to deflect pain, but rather to absorb it, and to absorb greater and greater amounts of it.”

“The person we love is inevitably a cross, as well as being a helper in the carrying of our own cross.  Why must this be so?  Simply because it is impossible to love anyone without seeing intimately into the tragedy of their lives, and everything that we see becomes a weight of grief in us.  To love is not to view someone as being the most wonderful person in the world or to think of them as a saint.  On the contrary, it may mean to see them as we must come to see ourselves, even as the ‘chief of sinners.’”

Whew.