Tidbits for Thursday

Tid. I took a walk today at lunch for the express purpose of taking some pictures and posting them on my blog along with whatever I ended up writing. This is because, at the going-away party on Friday, people like Juliet and Jen said they wanted more pictures and fewer words. Sometimes, there are a lot of words here.

It was not quite hot, and a little cloudy. I took a turkey sandwich from the company provided lunch. I walked through the parking lot and over to some land that the company across the access road owns. I took some pictures of a culvert, and some orange and blue building materials. There was a white flower the side of a hill overlooking a wetlands and a parking lot. I took some pictures of it, but they came out washed because the flower was white. I took a picture of an even smaller flower, maybe half and inch in diameter, and I got the bonus bug in the frame you can see there. I tried cropping it, but it didn't look right, so I ended up posting it just the way it showed up on my camera.


Bit. I'm rereading Colossians Remixed for the first time since the first time. I find myself taking more of it as a matter of course, rather than bold and personally challenging statements. Same as the second time I read Velvet Elvis, only it's a more radical book than that. In chapter 2, they have a section where they do a targum (a translation/interpretation/recontextualization) of the introduction to the book of Colossians. It is all wongerfully written and piercing. One of the bits that stuck out to me the most this time through is this:

"But here's the rub. Everything in this monolithic culture of McWorld globalization is allied against you and will try to keep your imagination captive, stripping you of the courage to dream of alternative ways to live. When a culture is threatened, it becomes especially repressive of those who dare to live differently, subject to another vision of life, especially repressive of those who dare to live differently, subject to another vision of life, another Lord. So may you be strengthened with all strength and empowered with the weighty power of God in this disempowered culture of unbearable lightness. May your vision, your stubborn refusal to allw your imaginations ot be taken captive, have the tenacity to hand in there for the long haul and a patience that doesn't need to aggressively realize the kingdom of God now, because your faith will work and wait for a miracle, for the coming of God's shalom to our terribly broken world."

Since I've read this book, I've felt allied against and have not been stubbornlly-enough refusing to keep my imagination from being taken captive. I feel that tide changing back. At least, I hope that's what I'm feeling.


Tid II.
I saw a monster at lunch.



















Bit II.
I have a very easy job . . .


















so sometimes it's hard to be motivated, knowing what's coming.


Tidbit.
Some days, when I go to the supermarket, I find all the lazyleft shopping carts and put them in the corral. Some days when I meet someone, I remember their name forever. Some days I never want to own another thing. Today, on my walk, I saw some trash, but it didn't cross my mind to pick it up.

I normally don't do this, but . . .

I know a lot of people who read this blog love people in Belarus. Here's a link to a photo essay on Belarus from Boston.com: http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2008/07/daily_life_in_belarus.html

Last day of the weak.

Summer is just ripened, I realized Friday, riding home after work with Adam. The evenings are so full of dusty light and the trees are plump with summer's own green. You'll linger over a ripe pear, no longer crisp like an apple, or a peach you were willing to wait for, letting it turn, and no matter how hard you try you can't suck the pit clean. But the brownyellow summers, the green strawberries, the summers that come in floods or ticks, the summers of florescent lights and tinted windows, they wane in memory, a tart reminder only useful for contrast. Summer will get soft soon, the night will sneak earlier, and the heat will swell until summer starts ripping along the seams, and autumn will slip in, summer ripe, too-ripe, gone.

Friday night was my high school's 10th reunion's pre-party at Johnny's Tavern in Olathe, as Austin reminded me as we rolled 10 miles an hour down the long gravel driveway, the center line grown over but trimmed, to the Perdaris estate, out across from Heritage Park. As much as I wanted to go to the pre-party, knowing how many people likely didn't want to shell out the $55 to go to the big to-do the next night, so I could only see them Fridat, I felt like the going-away party for our friends Vika and Jonathon was more important. Same reason I was late for church Sunday night: sometimes friends are more important than events. Well, always.

We were coming, via Adam's bus stop (some stairs to nowhere on Pennsylvania), from a party at Jill's work, their 20th anniversary. The place was crowded with men wearing shirts open to the second lack-of-button and women in cocktail dresses and heels. They had catered with stuffed mushrooms, and lemon shrimp and scallops on skewers, and spirals of chicken on unsharpened toothpicks, and zucchini and onion pancakes, and spicy popcorn, and two kinds of fruit/nut/olive medleys, and veggies with onion dip and pecan butter dip, and seafood salad on blini. Yeah, blini. Someone ordered Minsky's for the kids, and I heard someone else got the job of cutting it up into hors dourves size pieces because at fancy parties, full slices of pizza aren't chic, or something. But Minsky's is good no matter the size of the slice.

People stood around half-eating, drinking the free booze and making their small talk, which I failed at. I was tired, and when I'm tired, I can't get up for meaninglessness. Except it's not meaninglessness, really. People are trying to connect, trying to have a good time, trying to escape something to know someone to be somebody. But in my fog, I couldn't remember to try to make it happen. I kept meeting people, kept forgetting names, kept eating the food. What do you do at a party like that? I've never known. Now if only I could break my way into all meaningful conversations I want to have, but can't find a way.

Even though it was stifling outside, they had a jazz band playing, and the smokers stood around in the shade over by a side door, begging for scraps of air conditioning. We stood out with them for a while, Jill's work friends among them, and the talk was just as small as it was inside. But Jill had already said something to me, reminded me to be present, so I tried to perk it up, get with the program. I'd say I mildly succeeded, made a couple jokes, offered unheard help to a friend of Jill's who said she was allergic to the unlabeled pecan butter, and needed to go to the hospital, her EpiPen was in her blocks-away car, but then she stood around like nothing was wrong, and I didn't bring it up again because she didn't. Like a nodding-off driver, all it took me to engage was a reminder I wasn't engaging. Even so, I was tired, and on the way to get Adam, I filled up on the 44 0z diet Mountain Dew from Quik Trip, because that is a wagon I am very much back on, much to my, and surprisingly few others', chagrin.

Later on, at the going-away party, we sat around talking in lawn chairs, the bugs whirling around the lamp post, bocce and badminton lost to the waning light, all of us drenched Jen's home-mixed all-natural bug spray and sweat, talking. Iron Chef, and family business causing family heartache, and babies.

We'd stayed at the Perdaris house for a few months on our way back from the Belarus all-summer in 2004. Summers there are like a six-moth spring, cool rain and always budding. The Perdarises were good friends, and they let us store stuff in their barn while we were gone, and it was almost natural for them to let us come stay. Jill and I spent half the year living out of suitcases in different one rooms. The transition from the missions trip lasted longer than the trip itself. I came back all fired up, ready to live like a missionary back in my home culture, and I failed at that, too. Looking for a job always makes me feel inadequate and I let myself get lost in a selfish fog, like being tired, but months long, and you can't take a hit of caffeine for temporary relief. There I was, eating other people's lunches out of the refrigerator, buying Jill super-crappy birthday presents, ignoring promised household chores, playing video games and lounging like a teenager on summer break. Jen sat me down one night, slapped me out of it like real family, kind and direct, instead of booting me out the door like she could have. And I'd like to hope I shaped up lickity, but I can't remember much more of our stay after her kick in the pants of true friendship, and that I tried a whole heck of a lot harder once I knew to try. But I should of known. I still use that event as a touchstone; am I being that guy right now? So, thanks, Jen, for that, and everything else. Thanks thanks thanks thanks thanks.

When we moved out of their house, we moved away, and Jill and I were working through things, and then Jill got busy with school, and I taught high school, and we've rarely hung out with them, and I hate that. Seems like I hardly have time for old friends. It's like each time I take a step, I'm leaving droves of friends behind, Moscow, Minsk, Olathe North, Emporia, Olathe Bible. But sitting around, drinking bottled water as Vika shot people with the water gun, and Juliet got her back with ice water from the cooler, and the night was warm and waning, it felt a little bit like old times, friends in early summer, before it's gone full.

Road Show. An Epic Review.

Kept trying this in prose. Started last Tuesday. Kept failing. Hope this is better. But tha's why it took so long. Sorry.

postlude
Tuesday night she said
how long the weekend felt,
how luxurious
even with the busyness.
I agreed.

I. back
We left Wichita nine Monday evening,
following Stafford's deep rung bell
through rolling flint hills, a picture of Ireland,
green and elusive.
Sunset faded. We talked of art and Jill's future,
intersection without pretension?
What is an art? What is a future?
And before we expected,
we dropped down towards lights of Emporia,
oasis of vaporized sodium and halogen
nestled in the pre-horizon dark.
Vocal trance filled the best kind of silence:
the comfort of a warm lap laptop,
home without bustle, love without words.
And the whole drive steamed on lickity:
pee stop in Beto, shoes back on, smooth without socks,
up over Ottawa causeway,
where Jill's been home, but it's not home anymore.
As the sky grew bright with metropolis,
we corner-to-cornered through Johnson County,
a good 30 miles, I'd guess, but slowed by construction,
dark fields to dull concrete.
We cut the corner of Wyandotte,
nestled ourselves back home
just inside the Missouri border
just before midnight.

II. there.
We were in Wichita because Sam lost a kidney,
Tuesday morning, early, like losing his soul,
(how else can you find it?)
to his aunt, who needed one.
So we drove down noon Monday,
sat in his aunt's living room,
a whole wall with no pictures,
the blanket and pillow and bottle clutter of illness,
talking small-ly of dinner,
(Pizza or salad? Out or in?)
the pallid hunger of her dying kidneys
muffling the conversation.
What's on TV?

III. elsewhere
But before we could sup, we went to Brianna,
director of evangelism at a church
long as a city block,
winding non-Euclidean hallways,
four-story abstract stained glass in the shell-shaped sanctuary,
an institution among churches.
A building more than people.
The hospital decor welcome center
makes the membership, aging (long dead?),
feel right so at home.

As far I can tell, "Director of Evangelism" means
"Beat Ye Up On This Person,
All of Waning Faith"
or maybe "She's Just a Girl,
What Can She Do?"
It's been the the jobs of six people, at least:
Sunday School teacher,
middle-aged singles ministry director,
young adult ministry co-chair,
heck, girl, set up chairs for the men,
cook their meals
like a good girl ought,
a list long like a scroll,
bitter but not sweet.
I ask myself, does that hinder her real job,
as a lover of people?
And my answer feels obvious.

She preaches on Saturday, but.
Fancy Sunday, she's on camera singing,
"seen, but not heard
unless it's her place,
our place for her."
One wall of her private office,
name and title on the door,
is rows of someone's counseling pamphlets,
the shelves are stacked with
general church storage,
sheaves of dead trees stacked in tree boxes.

Sunday night, at the Church Basement Roadshow, a rolling revival,
a man said 70% of the people in the American church are traditionalists,
that they would cuddle continuously with the status quo,
if only if it were propriatous to cuddle these days
what would people think?
But there with Brianna,
the number's more ninety,
so, I guess I'm complaining here,
on her behalf.
Justice,
revival,
repentance,
all words for the same thing.
Why can't it come?

IV. before.
The Church Basement Roadshow rolled through our city,
and just off our driveway, 1909 in a 2008 coach.
Old-timey beards and hats and video screens.
We sat on the steps, ate bread and cheese and tomatoes,
cracked coconuts with a hammer,
scraped them with knives for the meat.
Inside, they were shilling for books that I'd like to read,
propaganda for the propagandists,
entertainment for faith.
Would you buy their snake oil,
if they told up up front
that it won't work,
and it's good on a salad?

Who do we follow?
Why, the man, Jesus of Nazereth.
Is his news good?
Aye, it is good.
Love your enemy, yea, I say verily.
But, should buy from your friend?

I want to enjoy this. I think it is funny.
I think I enjoy this. The message is clear.
But why do it for books, why do it for sales,
(I read one of the books. I thought it was good.
I've quoted it twice. But I felt dirty
for getting it as a bonus,
like a shirt with campus plastic,
you got from a a sheet on a clipboard,
(aren't Sallie Mae loans enough?)
for promising to help a boy in Africa,
whose name I've just learned,
whose face is a stranger,
eat.)
if it's good enough on its own?

V. again, almost.
At the institution, Sam parked in the heat,
waves off the pavement, across from a coach,
that we'd all just seen, just off our driveway, yesterday night.

We followed the Road Show in at a distance,
down to the basement, where they met Brianna,
she'd been cooking their meal.
She already knew Tony, as he mentioned in his blog.
and after she'd hugged them, we hugged her.
Brianna made dinner, the chicken and fruit kinds of salad,
for the Road Show Revivalists, and we carted it up
along with lemonade and water, the drinks of revival,
to the prison ministry room, the old library,
after our tour of the building.
Then Tony and Mark and Doug came up,
and stared at clean-faced pictures of pastors past,
none in 1909, alas.

We said that we'd been there last night. We'd seen the show.
And Tony asked me what I thought.
I didn't yet know, and so I said,
"It must be a hard line to walk."
He said, "What do you mean?"
I said, "Between being campy and being serious."
And he said, "See the thing is, people think
we're going to make fun of old time revivals,
but really we like them." Then we had to go.
Sam's Aunt was waiting.
I would have liked to say more, sit
and discuss what and why and how,
with these Emergent leaders,
and I think I came off rude,
having not helped set up
the chairs for the show,
because we'd been with Brianna,
loving her deeply and briefly,
and then that thing about walking a line.
But there were dinners more pressing.

VI. even earlier.
Jill asks me what I like to do when I'm swimming.
It's Sunday, and we're between church when we serve
and church when we're served. Sabbath is fleeting.
We sprayed sunscreen from our spray can
from our anniversary theme park splurge
I got Jill off te phone by threatening to throw her in.
Then I did anyway.
Eight years, still flirting.
If that's what you call it.
"I just like being in the water," I said,
"I find it relaxing."
When I was a kid, at Mill Creek Pool,
I'd hold my breath and ball up under water,
eyes tight, floating until my lungs felt like spilling the air out,
letting the sharp water spill back in, push to the edge
and then I'd push up,
grab the oxygen with my lips,
eyes smarting with chlorine and sunlight after darkness.
And it's like CDs, I guess, what is the intended venue?
When are you supposed to be listening?
What are you supposed to do in the pool?
Or, even, what are you supposed to do at a revival?
What if you don't change? What if your soul is untouched?
Is that something you can schedule?
Eight o'clock Sunday, your soul comes alive.
Don't be late.