Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Liveblogging the Anthem Glow accoustic set.

8:14. In Emporia at the Inner Bean Coffee House. It's an actual house. As you can see. Jeremy and Samn of Anthem Glow pictured here. This picture was taken just before they launched into their classic soundcheck, an up-tempo and cheery version of Johnny Cash's Folsom Prison Blues.

They then opened with The Killer's All These Things that I've Done, typically
cheesy, yet passionate, with a strong encouragement for the audience to join in on the I've got soul" bridge business. I am not a soldier, so, of course, joined in.

We're Going to Be Friends by The White Stripes started slow and then morphed into another Samn Wright that guy party song. Biggest applause of the three songs so far.

More and more people start filtering in. Going from just five or six to a bursting twenty in a few minutes.

Unfortunately, they are greeted with a sappy tale of love-to-be-lost, which is fortunately accompanied by a solid cover of Delicate by Damien Rice.

The story of the love lost continues with one of the few average songs in the Anthem Glow repertoire, What is Beautiful is God. Of course, an average Anthem Glow song is still . . . glowing. BAD-DUM-BUM.

Also, Amanda says something funny. And we all chuckle. That, or she just told me to say that. A little braggy.

8:33. The Euseys just walked in. I shook Evan's hand. Austin is reading this over my shoulder as I write, and patting my shoulder when I type something she agrees with.

8:37. Anthem Glow follows up the emo stylings of What is Beautiful is God with Wild Roses and Drowning in Faith, continuing the story of Samn's relationship with that girl, and also God at the same time, and how that worked out.

"Amanda returned with yet another witty comment," said Amanda. She also asked if this song was another song about that love triangle between Samn and that girl and God. It is.

8:41. During the Falling Slowly sing-along, I go up for that high note. And fail spectacularly. And intentionally.

Austin and Erin are conspiring next to me to dance together during Spider Web Waltz. I plan to thwart this plan. Bwa ha.

8:46. And now my absolute favorite Christmas song, Samn's Evergreen. Easily the highlight of the show so far. And so we cut trees down and dress them up in tinsel and strings. We ask you for a savior, you give us a baby. We asked you for a kingdom, and you gave us a mustard seed.

8:52. Aaand, break.


















9:03. We're back with Wake Up by the Arcade Fire. But it's not actually them. It's Anthem Glow covering it. Which is cool. But not, like, David Bowie cool.



At 9:07, an Invisible Girl walks through the Bean. No one sees her.

And then there was the time that Amanda took over the live blogging and allowed anyone and everyone to comment.

Question 1 of live blogging take over: Commentor Jacob, is that Jake Petty?

Ben is enjoying a lovely strawberry italian cream soda.

Also, Michelle is drinking mt. dew with whip cream. no lie. she just loves it so much.

Samn and Jeremy are still singing. Samn is sweaty and about to play Orpheus.

Poll: How sweaty is Samn?
"He's really sweaty."
"I would say 7.5, 10 being the most sweaty I've seen him."
"Just right."
"On a scale of 1 to 10, he's really sweaty."
"Question, why is Jeremy not sweaty?"

Also, I am Orpheus.

The Inner Bean is very nicely decorated, mostly with snow men. I find most of the snowmen unfrightening, but there is one that rather startles me. I feel that he prematurely gave up his icy world to settle into a life on top of an old radio without thinking about what that would mean for those who would have to sit facing him while listening to Anthem Glow. He freaks everyone out who passes by. And it's not doing much for his self esteem.


















Quote of the night: "Why are we both in Canada?"

Also, still singing.

2nd Poll on How Sweaty is Samn?:
"Is Samn crying?" "You can't tell because he is sweating."

Waltz Time:










































On second thought, he's not so bad.



Also, We Are Like the Stars.


Good night!

9:52. After a long conversation with the Euseys, and a bit part in Like the Stars, Timothy returns to find his liveblogging taken over and improved upon. Also good night.

Thursday, November 12, 2009

Just another together-when.

This last weekend there was a Saturday. I know you may think this is a normal thing for a weekend. But you would be wrong. This was a Capital-S Saturday. You don't get those every week, let me tell you.

I got off work at three, windows down all the way home, after six hours under florescent lights, and the weather was late-May, school's out, nothing to do, call your friends, right down the list in your phone, who wants to do something, anything, outside? Some radical insurgent Spring cell got in and took down the oppressive Empire of November. If even for one day. And when oppressive empires are going' down, we are SO there.

So, I got home, and Samn and Jeremy were practicing in the basement for the acoustic set they're playing next week in Emporia. The house was getting darker, and Samn had texted me an idea that he had, a capital idea for Capital-S Saturdays in November, and so I waited with Juliet and Amanda for the rehearsal to end, hoping it wouldn't get too dark to pull this thing off.

Once they were done, Amanda left behind to sleep off a busy week, we packed up, piled in, and drove to Loose Park. Only then did we discover that we were not the only people with brilliant Saturday ideas. Some other people we didn't even know were already there, at work. And so, we doubled what they'd done, and almost fifteen of us made like it was effing Saturday, man.

This is us, after dusk, right before we left:

























I'm pretty sure Samn is standing up there on the right.

At its best, the pile was taller than me. My first jump, I dove flat out, parallel to the ground and flew.

One kid, about 4 feet tall, just ran straight at the pile and disappeared, POOF, and he had to climb out of the middle.

Juliet went it with Jeremy one time. On his shoulders.

One tall guy did half a flip and went in head down, knees up, sunk right in.

Nobody told me this was what jumping in leaves was like. I would have started a long time ago.

You can't get leaves for that in the spring, and November weather is never this kind. It was like the evening was made just so for raking, like, half an acre of leaves into one pile and leaping into it.

Monday, November 2, 2009

American Beatitudes. A targum.

(I, of course, owe much to Brian Walsh and Sylvia Keesmaat in the inspiration of this.)
Edited 11/2/2009 8:00 pm


Wake up.
Become aware.
Come alive.
Because
The Republic of God,
The United States of Heaven,
The Commonwealth of Jesus
is right here in front of you,
is right here inside you.
There is another way.

Privileged are those without hope or ability to succeed in the economic and political and (especially) religious systems of the world,
those without a college degree,
those without enough capital to start a business,
those deep in debt,
those who don't have time to get all spiritual,
those who don't go to church because they have been judged by people in churches,
those who don't understand what all this fuss is about God.
And privileged are all the people who aren't American,
who come to this county legally or illegally,
those who could never even dream of coming here.
Because they are the senators and policymakers and secretaries in this other nation.

Privileged are those who are worn out from the weight of being a cog in the machine of industry,
working 9 to 5, or 6 to 8, or midnight to 6, or a rotating shift, never see the sun,
whose benefits don't cover their medical bills
whose bosses’ bosses’ bosses, people they’ve never met, made decisions to lay them off, and now they can’t feed their family.
And privileged are the people turned into a commodity by a depersonalizing and dehumanizing image-driven society,
the teenage girls who think they have to cut calories just so to stay thin,
men who buy magazines promising to teach them to lose a gut they will never lose,
reality show contestants wanting to be famous, because being famous means being loved,
prostitutes and johns,
everyone lonely or scared of being poor or addicted or lost.
Because in this nation,
they will be comforted and given a new life
they will get to start over fresh,
and start over again,
and start over again.

Privileged are the timid and the unstrong,
the bullied and the scared,
the impotent in a world of rampant false virility,
the ones who don’t test well,
the ones who never spoke up in class.
And privileged are those unwilling or unable to work,
the ones turned lazy by entertainment funneled down their throats
the ones who never learned to be motivated themselves.
Because they are the CEOs, and they will receive the bonuses at Christmas, and the options. Their parachutes are always golden.

Privileged are those who have only ever experienced pain and oppression,
those who see injustice around every corner,
on the way out of their bosses’ offices,
in their landlord’s notices,
from the fists of their fathers or pimps or lovers,
in the systems of the federal or state government
in the systems of charity that only helps those who can help themselves,
in the lack of any system at all to help them,
those who wish they could just stop hurting for one minute a day.
Because they will see the pain and the oppression and the injustice and especially the hurt
finally stop.
And as empty as the hurt ever was, they will be filled up and over.

Privileged are those who have the easy opportunity to take advantage of someone else,
to make money,
or take power
at the expense of those without it.
And instead choose to give of themselves
to cast aside their comfort,
to not fuel someone’s slavery for the own convenience
of cheaper shoes,
a bigger television,
a better vacation.
And privileged are those who were oppressed by others and forgave,
who should have risen up and fought,
who should have sued,
who were justified to kill the men who raped their daughters,
and hugged them instead.
Because they, in return,
will be let off the hook,
be found innocent in the court of law,
will go free.
They are free.

Privileged are those without eyes to see the complexities of world,
without the understanding to read the fine-print of a mortgage document,
without the vision to depersonalize someone else's body for their own pleasure,
those unfamiliar with sex in a culture that fetishizes it,
the ones who don’t get jokes,
the gullible who get socked in the arm for looking at nothing.
Because instead of all of that,
they see and understand God.

Privileged are those who reconcile
murderers and victims' families,
landmine planters and soldiers without legs,
rapists and rape-victims,
Democrats and Republicans,
Hutus and Tutsis,
the kid who lost his fingers with the person who bought the t-shirt the kid was enslaved to make.
And privileged are those who refuse to take up arms to defend themselves,
those who stand in the way of someone else's pain, making it their own,
those who have never hostilely taken over anything,
or ordered someone to do something just because they could.
Because they will be titled:
President-on-Duty, Commanders-in-Chief.

And so, you are privileged.
When people insult you,
spit on you,
exclude you,
blog about you unfavorably,
or say all kinds of evil against you,
change their Facebook status to slight you,
invade your homeland,
laugh you out of the forum,
mock you on the Daily Show,
Fox News, or 4chan,
because you recognize this other, better nation,
because you are not a patriot anymore,
your interests abroad are deeper than American ones,
when you sympathize with killers and terrorists,
when the decisions you make for this other nation
hurt the economy of America,
when you change your life for justice,
and this inconveniences others' safety and comfort,
and especially when you forgive these very people who insult you,
rejoice and be glad!
Buck up.
Throw a party.
Someone will always persecute prophets and
people who find a third way,
and you're there among them.
So, great is your reward in
The Republic of God,
the United States of Heaven,
the Commonweath of Jesus.
You are the senators and CEOs now,
landlords and bosses.
You are the free ones.
You get to start over,
start fresh.
And you will do all these things differently.
From below,
without power or the desire to control.

And, sometimes, you will give up even this privilege.
Because,
you see God.
You have seen God.
He is here.
He is in you.

Wednesday, October 28, 2009

Send a heartbeat to . . .the void that cries through you? Or is it something else crying? Someone?

Reality doesn't match up to what I'm told it's supposed to; I don't know any evil men. I think I'm supposed to. By evil, I mean of course the sort of evil men movies premiering the week before Halloween imply are hiding in your car right now. The man with the knife. The man with in the suit in the office with floor to ceiling windows, fingers pressed to fingers. The woman who locks her foster children in the basement, you are not a person, you are a thing, you have to earn your scrap of bread, you dog. The ones who are cruel because they like it.

I read about them in the news; these kinds of evil men must exist. But how could I know them so well when I see them on the screen? "Ah, yes, that is just the sort of evil that exists, and just the sort of justice that must be mediated to stop it." So many of the resonant stories, the ones I think about for days afterward, the ones I sink down into again and again are filled with this evil, from the time I was born, from Red Riding Hood to Lord of the Rings to Boy's Life to The Eyes of the Dragon to Slumdog Millionaire to Let the Right One In, it's there, and the evil men are real, and I know them, without having met them. Cruelty and hate hide under all the rocks and in all the dark empty rooms.

But I look around me now, and I can't see any. Yes, yes, I can peek into the internet and find any number of websites dedicated to chronicling the psychopaths and the serial killers and distant politicians. The kinds of people my friend Adam says don't exist since he can't see them in person. But in my day-to-day life? Even in my excessive lazy-job-induced amount of time on the internet? I see a whole lot of hurting people. I see a whole lot of lonely people. I don't see any evil men.

And maybe I should. If there are any police officers reading right now, I imagine they would tell me that the evil men are closer than I think. That I am glad the police patrol and protect and intimidate. Otherwise, POW, right in the kisser. And if there are any people who live without very much money reading, I imagine they would tell me that the evil men are everywhere and they own everything, and keep it for themselves, and there is no way to get ahead. Even the other people without very much money will do anything to get just a little.

But even those people aren't Hannibal, aren't Goebbels, aren't Maleficent, aren't Iago. Those are selfish people, or desperate people, or angry people. But evil?

Maybe it's the opposite, then. Maybe I know only evil men. And this is why all these stories resonate. Everyone around me holds all this potential for cruelty, and have somehow, miraculously, they keep that pushed down under, letting good shine out. So when Stephen King's cruel children characters torment his normal kid characters, and then are killed for it by supernatural clown/temporal-spiders or whatever, it's not that I identify with the normal kids, it's that I see the cruel kid within myself and want it to be killed there, too.

But that's too simplistic, too. Because I do identify with the normal kid. Maybe I haven' t been bullied to that extent. Maybe I haven't been tortured. Maybe I haven't had everything taken from me. But I feel those things. I want justice for me. I want justice for other people. I've seen cruelty, and I've seen oppression, and, heck, I even have this huge weight of knowing that by typing this on a computer I am in some way affecting other people's lives ecologically and economically, people I could not even attempt to visit and get to know without continuing to contribute to the same cycles and systems. So, I'm right there, too.

So, yeah. I do not know any evil men. I do not know anyone but evil men.

But all this seems to me like it might be a pedestrian conversation. Stuff, maybe, we all know. So, there are deeper questions this idea of no evil/all evil brings up for me. Two sets of questions, actually.

First, how do atheists deal with evil in the world? I don't mean intellectually. I mean emotionally. How do the people who really, honestly, don't believe that there is anything beyond the emperical come to grip emotionally with the fact that there are really cruel people around? Also, even as a hyper-social species as we are, why should I, intellectually-justifyably, care about people who are hurting rather than just kill them off? Just because I get an endorphin release? Because my genetics dictate that 'nice' survives? Those answers seem really shallow. To treat someone as a human, and humanity enough for respect seems like a mystical concept, not an empirical one. But one that I think most people are drawn to emotionally. Maybe I just don't get ethics. But, even on the plane of ethics, most atheists I know believe there are some disposable people. Some people for whom it's ok for the gene pool to remove via natural selection. That I shouldn't care about them because we're evolving past them. In other words, not mine, "Does it make you happy you're so strange?" Does reality match up with what you're told, and what you tell?

Secondly, how should we theists (small-t) deal with all of this? I don't mean emotionally. We've got lots of good reasons to care about people and treat them well. Everyone's made in the image of God, so treat 'em good. Love your neighbor like you want to be loved. Gotcha. I mean intellectually. It seems like an awful big cop-out to say that the reason life really really sucks for a lot of people is that God lets it be so in order to allow for free will. Because life doesn't have to suck this much, does it? And why should a person who doesn't believe in God take seriously the reason that evil is in the world is that God is too big and too wonderful, and his ways are above our ways? Isn't it just simpler to say that life sucks because it was chance for it to be here, and we evolved in such an odd way as to notice it? And also, are people generally, who actually believe what I say they ought to belive actually changed for the better? Actually less cruel? Does entering the upside down kingdom turn me upside down? Or, in other words, not mine, "Is it bright where you are? Have the people changed?" Does reality match up with what I'm told, and what I tell?

Thursday, March 26, 2009

It's the ancillary work you don't think about at the outset

This evening, during that crazy Mizzou game (Dear Memphis, had you ever seen a defence before?), I worked this up for the novel I'm working on (yay having a part time job to allow times for to be writing!). It's heavily based on Young's Literal Translation. I changed a couple of words here and there to stronger syonyms, modified most of the punctuation, and omited needless words (Thanks, Messrs Strunk, White!), but I did keep as much of the sweet grammar of the translation as I could. Sections of this piece will serve as chapter notation in the first half of the novel. Thought I'd share it with you, since it'll be months before I can share any of the actual work with anyone, and sharing is really motivating for me, re: artistic endevours. (By-the-by, the whole pre-Noah section of this first book is pretty much my favorite passage in the whole collection. I love the untouchable mystery of stories told through the eyes of ancient peoples about times even more ancient, times that would otherwise outside the realm of history.)



In the Beginning
(Of the Elohim's preparing the heavens, the earth)

The earth had existed waste and void,
darkness on the face of the deep,
the Spirit of the Elohim fluttering on the face of the waters.

And the Elohim says,
'Let light be.'
Light is.
The Elohim sees the light good,
separates between the light, the darkness,
calls to the light, 'Day.'
To the darkness he has called, 'Night.'
There is an evening; there is a morning --
day one.

And the Elohim says,
'Let an expanse be in the midst of the waters,
let it be separating between waters and waters.
The Elohim makes the expanse;
it separates between the waters-under-the-expanse,
the waters the expanse.
It is so:
The Elohim calls to the expanse, 'Heavens.'
There is an evening; there is a morning --
day second.

And the Elohim says,
'Let the waters-under-the-heavens
be collected unto one place.
Let the dry land be seen.'
It is so:
The Elohim calls to the dry land, `Earth.'
To the collection of the waters He has called, `Seas.'
The Elohim sees good.
The Elohim says, `Let the earth yield tender grass,
herb sowing seed,
fruit-tree (seed in itself) making fruit
on the earth.'
It is so:
the earth brings forth tender grass,
herb sowing seed
tree making fruit (seed in itself).
The Elohim sees good.
There is an evening; there is a morning --
day third.

And the Elohim says,
'Let luminaries be in the expanse of the heavens
to make a separation between the day, the night,
for signs, for seasons, for days, for years,
luminaries in the expanse of the heavens
to give light upon the earth.'
It is so:
the Elohim makes the two great luminaries,
the great luminary for the reign of the day,
the small luminary and the stars for the reign of the night.
The Elohim gives them in the expanse of the heavens
to give light upon the earth,
to reign over day, over night,
to make a separation between the light,
the darkness.
The Elohim sees good.
There is an evening; there is a morning --
day fourth.

And the Elohim says,
'Let the waters teem with the teeming-living-creature.
Fowl, let fly on the earth,
on the face of the expanse of the heavens.'
The Elohim prepares the great monsters,
every living-creature-that-is-creeping which the waters have teemed with,
every fowl-with-wing.
The Elohim sees good,
blesses them, saying,
'Be fruitful, multiply,
fill the waters in the seas.
The fowl, let multiply in the earth.'
There is an evening; there is a morning --
day fifth.

And the Elohim says,
'Let the earth bring forth the living creature,
cattle, creeping thing, beast-of-the-earth.'
It is so:
the Elohim makes the beast-of-the-earth,
the cattle, every creeping thing of the ground.
The Elohim sees good.
The Elohim says,
'Let us make human in our image, according to our likeness.
Let them rule over fish of the sea,
over fowl of the heavens, over cattle,
over all the earth,
over every creeping thing creeping on the earth.'
The Elohim prepares the human in his image;
in the image of the Elohim he prepared him,
a male and a female he prepared them.
The Elohim blesses them,
says to them, 'Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth. Subdue it.
Rule over fish of the sea,
over fowl of the heavens,
over every living thing creeping upon the earth.'
The Elohim says, `Look around, I have given to you
every herb sowing seed upon the face of all the earth,
every tree, the fruit of a tree sowing seed.
To you it is for food.
And to every beast of the earth,
to every fowl of the heavens,
to every creeping thing on the earth in which breath of life,
every green herb for food:'
It is so.
The Elohim sees all that he has done very good.
There is an evening; there is a morning --
day the sixth.

The heavens, the earth are completed, all their host.
The Elohim completes by the seventh day.
His work which he has made ceases by the seventh day,
all his work which he has made.
The Elohim blesses the seventh day,
sanctifies it, for in it, he has ceased from all his work
which the Elohim had prepared for making.

Sunday, March 22, 2009

Never easy.

I've taken down two wall hangings this week. One of them is a huge orangey-red Celtic knot, faded from washing after it got all dirty and wet when the ceiling caved in. It happened a couple of years ago, and was a direct result of water pouring through the ceiling of our old place, as upstairs pipes burst during a 50 degree warm snap. At this apartment, it hung above the antique mirror from my Omi that we set above our bed like a headboard. Now the wall is white and there is a gray crack running up from the floor that someone patched once upon a time.

The other hanging I took down is the vintage British flag that hung above the computer. Next time you see one, look to see how the stripes are uneven. The red against white is shifted to the counter-clockwise side. Having one in the house, you notice things like that .Jones's parents brought it back from England in the 70s, and she gave it to us when she moved in with Eric, what with being married and all. As I took it down, I wondered why we hang it. I was careful to have Jill sew on some loops to the upper corners so we didn't have to punch holes in it. Something about respect. I wonder if we should do something to make it an art piece, rather than just a massive hanging reminder of the existence of another country; I mean, we are no great anglophiles. Maybe we should paint "Jesus is bigger" on it, and get an American flag, and do the same. Hang them on opposite walls. I doubt that will happen, true as it may be. BUt it's fun to think about it.

The wall is empty where the flag used to be, too, and you can see the boarded up door that leads to the stairs to the neighbor's place above us. There are holes in the wall, where we miscalculated the height of nails. Apparently, we've covered a lot of imperfections with decorations.

The bookshelves that cover the window in the computer room so Jill wasn't as cold when she was studying French this winter are also empty, except for a couple of straggling knick-knacks and our copy of the board game Dominion.

See, we are moving.

On Sunday afternoons, before church, our friends stop in to drop off food for after, or sit on our couch and talk. They park in our driveway, and if you've been to Jacob's Well, directions are easy. You can see the building from our kitchen window. One of the biggest reasons we moved here was to be close to that building -- brick, with Scopes-era crenelations. Sometimes, late at night, Shayne is sneaking in for late night pastor stuff, and I am taking out the trash, and when I call out to him, maybe he thinks it's God saying hello. When I'm hanging out with the youth upstairs Sunday mornings, and there is a book I want to loan one of them, or we are done early, and I want to grab a game to play, it's a quick walk back, hardly knew I was gone. We jokingly named our wi-fi network The Rectory. After church, I invite someone over. "It's right there," I say. "Come have tacos. Play a game or have a good talk." And they do.

All of this is a matter of convenience, I realize. But it has been a beneficial convenience. I've seen life spring up here and there like the surprise lilies are just now pushing up in the back yard. Lots of friendships deepened over "Come on over." I am going to miss the convenience of living "right there."

But it's more than just an amazing location. This is where we had Jill's balloon party, when the balloons came down the next day, and wandered around the house like they had minds of their own. The doorway to our bedroom is where I last saw some friends of mine happy in their relationship before it went sour, talking about the election with another couple, two players on a debate team. This is the home of "The Noodle Game." This is the house I thought we'd only get pushed out of by our first kid. This is the bathroom I get allergic to in the spring, and the closet you get your clothes out of pre-shower in the winter, believe me. This is the basement we cleaned two trash bags of dust out of. This is the front porch we played late-summer-night Settlers on. I hid under one set of stairs and on another set in a game of sardines over Christmas. This is the house I came home to when I got laid off, and the house I couldn't get to sleep in when I didn't get that youth job I wanted so much. This is the house I've felt more at home in than any other.

Yeah, I am excited about the new place, new opportunities, new location, new layout, new roommates, 9/14ths rent, where the hangings will go up, etc, etc, amen. Really, really, I am. But I'll you all about that some other time.

For now, I'm going to miss this place. Really, really, I am.

Tuesday, February 24, 2009

Bigger than a The Beatles reunion, tour, I kid you not.

I watched the first, say, 30 episodes of Rosie O'Donnell's daytime TV show. Weird, I know. But it was funny and fresh back in the day, and she shot koosh balls at the audience, and koosh balls rule. I thought to myself at the time, "If I'm ever famous, when I'm doing the talk show circuit, I will go on Rosie's show, and be like, I saw all the first episodes of your show. I am not a poser, or whatever. Also, can I have a Koosh?"

Around the same time, watching a lot of talk shows, I noticed that people with a thing to plug had a very clear path ahead of them. Laid out by publicists and their ilk. You had to go on all these shows, and some had good interviewers (Letterman (we didher show like Jonathon Ross; it'll be HUGE)) and some had terrible interviewers (Has any guest ever gotten a full interesting sentence out in the presense of Regis Philbin?). You'd see someone on a popular morning show on Monday, and by Friday they'd pop up after midnight. I remember thinking to myself, "If I'm ever famous, I will go on the best shows first, rather than save them for last. So, for example, Leno and Letterman and especially the Today Show could wait, Imo goin' on Conan day one."

All that to say, omygosh you guys, Andy Richter's gonna be on the Tonight Show with Conan. Squee!

Rhetorical question, short hand for same rheotrical question, rhetorical answer, tell a friend.

First posts back from long blog hiatuses are supposed to be about the events of the interim, supposed to apologize for it being so long since the last post, tell you stories about how the author thought a lot about writing, but life got in the way at first, and then the habit fell away, and you, dear readers, should be grateful that the blog has continued at all.

Whatever.

Besides one justifiable dalliance on my birthday, this blog has, I admit, lain dormant since the day I got waylaid on the way out of the cubicle row with lunch on my mind and sent to a meeting where we were told by a man with a creepily thick neck whose position in the power-structure of my brain is still "company stooge whose unintentional Simon Pegg movie quotations asked me to shill our now terminal Previa out for the company" that everyone in the room was getting laid off. Among these fine people were the company party planning committee (one woman), the only man I've ever seen actually enjoying long conversations with real estate agents mid-tech-support-call, and the guy who took more calls on average than any other tech, and who once spent 20 minutes chewing out an AOL technician who refused to allow a user the basic email functionality to receive emails that they themselves were sending from another email account because it "might be spam" (SIR, this woman is sending the email, please do your job as an email provider and allow her to get emails that she herself is sending! She is telling you that she wants to get a particular email, there is no more basic function of your job than to let her do this!), among plenty of other fine people. So, the creepy neck guy who had just waltzed in to say his little speech about the importance doing his dead wife proud by winning Village of the Year again, or whatever it was, I wasn't really paying attention, waltzed right back out to go lean over a desk in a glass-doored office next door and look important with the new execs. That morning they'd also just laid off the entire executive team, which was a nice gesture to the rest of us, I'll admit, but I'm not sure what good it actually did. Then again, I don't really care how the company does anymore. Surpisring, I know.

And that day set in motion an over-3-month ordeal of trying to collect unemployment benefits while emptying what paltry savings we had, and relying quite heavily on the kindness of strangers and friends (Thanks, friends and anonymous donors . . . theinds and thanonymous donors.) to be able to do basic things like eat food and not get kicked out of our apartment for failure to pay the rent.

This morning, we drove to the credit union and used our fancy new state-mandated-financial-institution-I-don't-really-trust-issued debit card to deposit the daily maximum in our checking account, the rest to follow via electronic transfer in "up to three business days".

So, although it was not intentional, ala my eight-month, post-teaching job search sabbatical from Halo 2, the day of bloody finally depositing the first money from the unemployment office I've been paying into for, say, 13 years, seems like a good day to get back to this blogging business. I can't promise it'll be as frequent, as I used to blog almost exclusively during the work day (while still resolving more calls on average than any other technician, I might add) but it's back.

Oh, and now I TOTALLY wish I had taken that license plate cover for the Previa. The back bumper is falling off, the front right blinker cover is shattered, and the rear end screams like a dying animal with a really high pitched, whining, moaning scream whenever you drive more than 30 MPH. Its going to just die on us someday soon unless we shell out a couple grand. Nothing signifies my confidence and belief in the fidelity of that real estate software company I used to work for than that mini-van.