Now that I've chimed in on these two things, maybe the news can FINALLY talk about something else.

• The question I would have asked at last night's "town hall meeting": "Mr. Obama has said that he 'still believe[s] America is the last, best hope of Earth.' Ms. Palin has recently been quoted in saying in no uncertain terms that Mr. McCain believes, and all Americans should believe, that 'America is the greatest force for good in the world,' and has also said in the VP debate that that America is to be a 'shining city on a hill' for the world. A two-part question, then: First, do you agree or disagree with these statements now? If you disagree, how do you now see America's role in the world; and why the change? If you agree, each of you have made public claims of being Christians, why do you see America, respectively, as either a better hope for the world, or a greater force for good in the world than Jesus?"
• I like capitalism, that people can ask other people for money to invest in the capital for their business, and if the business does well, that person gets some of the profit, and if it doesn't, they don't. That lets people start businesses when they otherwise couldn't. Which is good for the community at large. I like free markets for buying and selling things, letting the demand and the supply for a good set the price, and I like there being as little regulation from an outside entity on this process as possible. So, for example, if in your part of the country, there isn't much gas, I think people should be able to set a high price for it, since there's little supply. People will deal, and they'll be fine. Of course, gas is an obvious example that doesn't work that way, because the local supply and the demand are artificially controlled by several non-local outside entities. If everyone in my neighborhood decides to stop buying gas from the Quicktrip on 43rd, and goes to the 7-11 on Linwood, it's very unlikely the price will drop significantly at that Quicktrip. Not more than 10 cents, even. That's because someone up the chain is creating a different kind of demand than I and my neighbors can: a person who is buying and selling futures and options on oil to be delivered, shorting and going long. Same thing with coffee, gold, frozen orange juice conentrate (haha, but it's true), and debt even. In fact, a HUGE part of this whole "crisis" we're in right now is that people bought and sold debt. Which is weird to me. I don't know if I would ban it, but I certainly don't like it. If you make a bad investment, you should have to pay for it, says I. And let's not even get into the ability to buy and sell money itself. But this article does, much better than I could. So you should read that sometime.

All your sanity and wits, they will all vanish. I promise!

First they took Fortunate Son, and cut out all the "it ain't me"s. Which is asinine, I agree. The exact opposite of what the song originally said. When I first saw that commercial, I laughed out loud.

Now, today, as I was watching Tuesday's Daily Show full episode online, I found another example of the same edited song absurdity. The interspersed commercial was a new ad campaign that uses this song:



to promote a web search engine. So, an angry/silly song about a guy's girlfriend starting to act senile 60 years early, loses all references to losing one's mind, and now is just a silly viral jingle for a search engine I stopped using the minute another search engine stopped providing it more detailed results.

And now a song I liked to sing at random, partially for the absurdity, and partially because I happen to like gypsy punk, has now been co-opted into commercialism and consumerism. I'm not sure if I'm angrier at the company for slaughtering the song, or the band for letting it be slaughtered. At least John Fogerty didn't have any say in his song being used.

I'd say more here, but I don't want my prose to slip into purple.

A proposal. Decide for yourself how modest.

My friend Julie mentioned to me last night an idea that she came up with for solving the current global financial crisis.

Jubilee.

That's right, follow in the ritual footsteps of ancient Israel and forgive everybody's debt. Maybe just mortgage debt. Maybe all the debt. Either way.

It's probably a really foolish thing to do. But then again, so is basing the strength of your currency entirely on debt.

Trying to be ordinary, trying to be radical.

As you can see from this picture that I cribbed from the website, Jill and I took some of the middle school guys from church to see the third showing (total!) of the documentary The Ordinary Radicals on Tuesday night. Ben and Jake are also there, just off camera to the left.

The film uses this last summer's Jesus for President book tour as a structure for telling the larger story of the changing face of evangelicalism, frequently manifested politically. How by trying to follow Jesus, and by reading the Bible, what used to be a primarily politically right group of people is moving out of general American conservatism, but not necessarily into general American liberalism, per se, moving into a kind of third political sphere. There's more than the political stuff, but that's the easiest place to see the change. Apparently, I'm part of that shift.

For me, the film was just more encouragement to live more radically, to live more simply, to love people more, to listen to people more, to really live a whole life that tells the story of God. I hope it had the same impact on the youths I brought with me. Since we're also reading The Irresistible Revolution together, I think it might. It also had some really beautiful stories about particular people who God is using to love people. I was inspired; the people in this movie are the kinds of people I want to be.

One of the difficulties in communicating what's going on to people who are still entrenched in general American conservatism is that this new political face finds a lot of common ground of praxis with anarchists and progressives (and hippies), which can very easily look like a shift to the left. Maybe it is, some, but I think that maybe it's just shooting off in a new direction, and in our country anything that's not right looks left, and vice versa.

Zack Exley is interviewed in the film, and Jamie Moffet, the director, had him stand up to help lead the Q&A afterward. Zack said something at the end that I've been trying to think through for quite a while, actually, and finally had something to say about it. He talked about how this film helps him start bridging the gap between secular progressives and the new breed of evangelicals, that both groups have a lot of similar goals. How Creation Care, for example, has a lot of the same goals as typical secular environmental groups.

I think these kinds of partnerships can be good for everyone involved, and I would also hope that this film would also help people bridge the gap between the traditional evangelicals and the new evangelicals. I'm sad, though, because I think that this latter bridge may be a very long conversation with some people, late into the night at the kitchen table, where the traditional evangelicals are like a father hearing his daughter wants to elope with her boyfriend, and he's so angered by the mere mention of the topic, that very little actual communication will take place.

But what I wanted to say at the talkback in response to Zack, but didn't, because it was awfully late for a school night, and we had to leave, is that I don't think the goals of the new evangelicals and the secular progressives are the same. It's the praxis that's similar. Not that that's neccessarily a proble, but that distinction can be confusing for everyone involved. Maybe with the secular progressives, taking care of the poor, and resisting the consumerist empire, and non-violence, taking care of nature, & etc., are the goals. Which is why you see the progressives willing to go to pretty significant lengths to accomplish these things, put aside the US constitution, or flat-out take money from people that have more to give to those with less. For them, since these other things are the goal, nothing should get in the way.

And it's not that Christians should ignore the poor, or believe the narrative of redemptive consumerism and progress, or kill people, or destroy nature in pursuit of progress, but that these aren't the goals. God is the goal. As Zack said on Tuesday, for example, the progressives don't have anything fueling their desire for equality, no underlying reason for it, other than that it seems right. The new evangelicals think everyone is made in the image of God.

And so, as one woman named Rachel was saying at the talkback, there comes a particular tension when trying to live socially just and consumerisictly ethical as a new evangelical. She talked about how much morality was overtaking her thoughts lately, and how we can do all these good works, and without morality, we're still going to be judged by God. I wasn't sure what she meant by morality. What I wanted to say, but again, didn't have time for, was that morality is way more than sex, which is what it sounded like she might have been talking about (and something we've become completely obsessed with on all fronts as Americans/American Christians). But taking care of the poor is a moral issue. Not perpetuating slavery by buying things made by slaves is a moral decision. Loving people who hate you is a moral struggle. All through the prophets, God uses sexual morality imagery to call attention to immoral uses of power and abdication of the responsibility to care for the poor (also, idolatry).

So, when I recycle, it's because I think God's story about him loving creation is true. When I hang out with people who live on the streets, it's becaue I think that God's story about his image being in them is true. When I say I'm against war, it's because I believe God's stories about beating swords into plowshards, and not pulling up the weeds with the wheat, and turning the other cheek. But for me, God's the point, not the thing that I'm doing.

Some pictures of Minsk.

Some places feel like home, even if you've only been there a short time. Even though I was only there for a couple years, Minsk will always be one of those places for me. I'll try not to over-romanticize it. Not tell you know green it is in the spring. How there is a park where every turn is just flowers and trees so you can get lost there. How the tramvi stops in Yanka Kupala square and you used to be able to walk to the Komarovski Market and there was Pengvin ice cream in kiwi and strawberry and mango.

Anyway, here are some pictures of home I found on English Russia today: http://englishrussia.com/?p=2052

I realize the irony.

Dear GreedyMortgage-Obsessed AmericanGovernment-FinancialSystem complex,

A failure to plan on your part does not constitute a crisis on mine.

I don't usually do this, but,

I don't care who you are, that's funny.

Two sides of two different coins: just simply sharing a quote from a friend. (The long way.)

Last night I went to Dragonfly with Sam and Jeremy M. Sam bought us a pot of green tea that came out perfect on the first try; the best green tea tastes and smells a little peppery and a little sweet, and this was just so.

We talked about the issue of AdBusters I mentioned yesterday, and about politics, and the failure of hipsterism, and played a game of Midgard and a game of Taj Mahal, and the wonderful Dragonfly people gave us each a massive cinnamon roll to take home. So you should go there because they are nice and their baked goods are delicious.

Jeremy said something provocative that was simultaneously the most cynical and the most insightful thing I'd heard all day. And in a given day, I read a lot of insightful and especially a lot of cynical things on the internet, so that's actually saying something.

But the problem is, I'm sure that posting Jeremy's comment here is going to provoke some people, because it relates to a pretty sensitive subject. But then again, it seems like most subjects have gotten pretty touchy lately.

Part of the problem, I think, is that when it comes to significant issues, our country has separated into a false polarity. "Oh!" a person says, "You disagree with me on something relating to issue X? You must disagree with me on issues O-T, as well. You're one of those P believers, eh? Well, I'm not associating with you. You can't be reasoned with."

Exacerbating the problem is that these two sides of the false polarity aren't even talking about the issues on the same plane of discourse.

Take something like environmentalism. One side argues that taking care of the world we live in is really important, and businesses and people shouldn't be able to pollute it since we all live in it. So, if you're disagreeing, you must obviously be for destroying nature for the sake of personal progress. The other side is arguing that the government shouldn't be regulating environmental issues because it's only a power play to get more control over people by feeding their fears. So if you disagree, you must be trying to increase the power and control of an already massive government.

It's all so obvious. How can anyone see anything any way different than I do?

But I think it's obvious that we shouldn't destroyed nature. It's also obvious we shouldn't pander to people for our own political ascendancy. So all those other bastards are obviously evil.

And sometimes they are, I'm sure. Just like me.

(Ok, fine, grammar Nazis: Just like I.)

So, when the issue of (and I hesitate to even mention it) abortion comes up, people get rightfully hacked off. One side's rhetoric is: "Um, that's killing someone, if you're on the other side, you're for killing innocent people for your own benefit or convenience." The other side's rhetoric is: "Um, that's someone's life already. Bringing a new person into their world would be tragic for them, and hell for that new person, too. Also, what if they were forced? If you disagree with me, you must hate people."

And so the arguments shoot off in completely different skew tangents, and those other people over there are demonized, and there's no conversation.

Of course, just like with the environment, where I'm sure there are people who think that destroying nature for progress is just fine, thank you, and I'm sure there are people who think that playing on the fears of people in regards to nature is a great way to increase the power of the government, there are very likely people who don't mind killing off innocent people to decrease the population so life is "better" for them, and there are people who don't care if kids get born to poor people who can't afford to give the kids much of a "good life," because, who cares?

Why can't you think that protecting nature can be done without government control, and that babies should be born and then taken care of by someone else if the parents can't?

Because you're not allowed to do that in our country. Our system forces you to choose. Republican or Democrat. Faith or science. Life or choice. But for all these issues, and so many more, we're mostly talking about two entirely different spheres of conversation here, not two bright and distinct points at the ends of the same line.

So, in order to get to the quote, which is the point of this post, I've got to say that I've got some strong opinions on things like abortion. I think the killing innocent humans argument is more important than the post-birth isn't so hot argument. A lot more important.

But see, right there, you're either nodding your head violently, or shaking it just as violently. What can I do?

I think that we should be taking care of all the people, born or not born. People close to us, and people far away.

And yeah, I'm still not sure how. Whether national organization or personal action is more required. If one of those should be put aside for the other one on important issues. Whether we should set up a system in which right decisions can get made, or just solve the problem with the system, no matter what the necessary process.

So, anyway, here's the provocative quote I wanted to share with you, as close as I can remember it:

"As long as people keep getting elected simply for opposing abortion, it's never going to be illegal."

Ramblings from a lunch time

When I started working at this job, Jill had her car, and I drove the van. And I liked to drive over the highway, go to Taco Bell for lunch, or wherever, and sit in the parking lot, listen to the radio. I like sports radio more than I like sports. Open the windows and let the air in. Or keep the windows closed, obviously, if it was winter, just let the cold creep in until it was too much, and I had to start the van and drive back, thawing on the way. If I wanted to, I could stop at Half-Price books or Borders, or whatever. One time I even spent the whole hour driving to the game store to buy a gift for a friend. Even at an easy job where you can do what you want most of the day, the ability to hop in the car and just go feels like real freedom. It's sort of how I've been conditioned. No car? No freedom. Not in a town like this, where the good buses come twice an hour.

But now that I'm riding with Adam to work, it's rare that I get a chance to just go. Most days I either stay at my computer or take the ten+ minute walk to Hy-Vee. We're down to one income with Jill being a stay-at-home-Jill these days, and when I eat out for lunch, I've given myself a budget of the price of a $2 can of soup, since that's likely what I'd get if we went grocery shopping. At Hy-vee, I can buy a really nice roll and a fifth of a pound of rare roast beef for about a buck fifty, and with some mustard that's a right fine lunch. And seeing how I'd like to lose weight, I'm fine with not having expensive options like the only slightly further Sonic.

Sometimes I spend my two bucks on drugs. A 64 oz fountain drink is a dollar nineteen. Of course, making my own sandwiches would be even cheaper. But that means keeping ingredients fresh and available, which we're not so good at. Seems like we're always either scrounging for last scraps, or throwing out food because it's gone bad from sitting around for too long.

But Adam got back from Portland yesterday, so I drove myself to work. Which meant I had options. You can eat good at Taco Bell or McDonalds for two bucks, nice and fattening, but I wasn't even in the mood to spend that, so I ate a $1.29 carrot cake Clif Bar, and given my freedom, headed to Borders with $12.87 in two-year-old gift cards.

I have said it before, and you will likely hear me say it again, but bookstores are dangerous places. It's a bit like a porn addict flipping through the underwear ads in the Sunday paper. You're still skirting the edge of realm of safety, but you've got an outside chance of going off the deep end. I'm just finishing reading Colossians Remixed again, having read Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt and Watchmen in between, while I'm still in the middle of A Failure of Nerve, and further back, Exclusion and Embrace, so it's not like there's a real strong temptation to empty the bank on books I don't need, but it still felt a little dangerous walking through the double doors with the name of the store engraved in the wooden handles. In the end, it's not owning books, that's dangerous. Not really. It's the potential of books. It's the hidden story, the one you discover, and no one else knows. It's getting lost in them.

Right at the front of the store there's a display of political books, and one of them is a thin biography of Sarah Palin with quotes on the front about her VP nomination. That's really fast. I wonder if it was fast-tracked or re-released. It had a 2008 copyright. I know there are people out there who write insta-non-fiction. Propose a book on current hot topic, write it in a week, sell it, propose another. But this one seemed thoroughly researched. So that's a mystery.

I headed over to the discount fiction. If I needed a copy of all three Lord of the Rings books, I could have had that for $8.97, but I'm already there, more than once, and there wasn't anything else I was interested in. And I didn't feel like a coffee table book, or a book on how to do tai chi, or a miniature zen garden, or any of the cookbooks, so I moved on to the graphic novels, looking for 1602, even though I know it was a cool $19.95.

But it wasn't even in stock for me to be able to check the sticker. I stood there and read Incredible Hulk: The End: the Last Titan. Thematically, it compares the Marvel superheros to the titans of Greek mythology. Hulk is created by the atomic age, and he is the first of the new 'titans.' This story is set in the distant future, the world destroyed, Hulk/Banner and huge cockroaches are the only living things left, and Hulk is the new Prometheus, now the last titan, left to be eaten again and again by the cockroaches, never able to die, even though Banner is trying to end their lonely lives. It's these kinds of modern takes on classically tragic stories are the reasons I like the comics and graphic novels I like (Watchmen and Sandman for example), and this Hulk story makes the link between old stories and new stories even more clear.

As I left the comics section, I got that rich, heavy feeling I get sometimes in book stores and almost always in libraries, walking through stacked rows of books, back cover to front cover packed in shelves, the feeling of so many words and ideas brimming in such a small space, the weight of possibility, the stretch of all that time: reading a book is days, unless it's tiny, and then it's at least hours. And just within my reach are a hundred books, thousands in view. And how long was a single book to write, even? A season of work, solstice to solstice? A year, maybe? And all that time is packed down and overflowing there in the bookstore. Moreso in the library, books upon books, some untouches for decades. That's gravitas, man. That vibe stuck with me for a good hour after I left.

I looked at some other stuff. There are a couple of Get Fuzzy books newer than we have in the Get Fuzzy bathroom. I almost got one, but I wanted both. so I didn't get any. I realize that thinking is bad economics, but that's how it was. In the end, I decided to get the latest issue of AdBusters, an advertisementless magazine that I cannot usually afford since it has to rely on sales for revenue, but gift cards are gift cards, and I pulled $8.95 off the card with the picture of the wrapped Christmas gift on it, even though I meant to use the one with The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe on it first, since it's only got 28 cents left. Almost without thinking, deliberate like in a Wes Anderson movie, I took the magazine off the counter, receipt tucked inside, in my hand so as I was carrying it face up, right side up. Words and time demand my respect, apparently.

This theme issue of Adbusters is the decline of the West and the rise of the East, which is manifesting in the US and China, primarily, it says. And the issue is a double issue, if you start and read it normally for us, left to right, you get the part about the west, and if you read from the end, right column to left column, it's about the east, and the stories meet in the middle, ask you to see the other perspective by jumping to the end and starting over. I'm not done reading it yet, and I'm not convinced the rise and fall business is definitely going to happen; I'm no oracle. But there was a particularly interesting quote at the end of an article on the east side by a guy named Martin Jacques: "America is utterly unprepared for a world in which it is no longer the dominant power: it has barely given any though to the question, not even in its nightmares."

And I'd have to agree, even if I'm not utterly convinced if the west is really in decline or if that's just speculation. It's like we think we're always going to epic-ly rule, and are planning accordingly. But what if the Fed can't keep messing with interest rates? What if the bottom did fall out of the dollar? What if China called in all that debt? I'm not worried about it, and I wonder if on a macro scale preparing for economic disaster brings it (or vice versa), but I also think that occasionally contemplating our west declining isn't a bad thing either. Maybe we'd be more humble.

So I drove back and sat at my desk, nestled in my cube, and helped the people who pushed it to bubble, try to help the housing market turn back again. And read my magazine. And wrote most of this.

I realize not doing it with a Polaroid camera strips it of some of the poignancy.

But a laptop webcam with a single take is as close as I can get. So I'm joining in:


















Before I die, I want to do something
really, really well.

From a thread.

Last week I stayed up late, watched gymnasts and beach volleyballists and badmintoners getting their job done, son. Beat the metal of your life into a pleasing shape, and if it's your day, you get a medal. Not your day? Then you aren't even shown on the camera, and so you're as alive to the world as I am here in my office chair. Dive in the water, decisecond here, you're a millionaire, decasecond there, you're a nobody from a nobody country, and the world waves its red or white and blue and you wave no banner at all. Well, unless you're American. Two teams drop two batons in two relays and I see more about them than the teams who advanced.

I watched that swimmer guy win some medals last week. That was impressive.

I almost didn't start watching, though. I hadn't really planned on it. I figured China'd be China, and I didn't want to participate in that, even from afar. And after watching, it was like I figured, China's China after all, and all the blind faith of the IOC in itself to make the world a better place by its mere presence hasn't done a darn thing to help. As of this afternoon, there are still six American protesters flat out missing. Another 12 hours or so, and the embassy can start looking. Until then their hands are tied. That doesn't count the 12 bloggers arrested for protesting. China didn't clean their air (can you even do that?), and they didn't open the internet, and it's all a big show so a red party can prove to a big ol' sixth of the world it's still worthy of ruling them. All like we expected. So knowing that kind of thing was coming from China was almost enough in and of itself to keep me uninterested.

I was also considering not watching due to not knowing how I would feel about the dominance of the American empire's Olympic juggernaut. The richest, most powerful country in the world wins athletic events, so it's no big story, right? Empire being empire. But the U.S. Olympic Committee is a not-for-profit, not a government entity, and all those athletes give so much of their own (and parents') lives and time and money (before sponsorship (sometimes it doesn't even come)) to becoming the best at what they do. So, yeah, we're all emperor here, we're all the shadow government. You buy phone service and the phone company donates some of your money to the people who go to the Olympics so they can do well so you'll watch and they can advertise phone service at you. So even though I'm also not interested in participating in the propaganda my own empire, even from afar, I still find myself drawn on by the culture around me. Kind of like how when you're a kid you think that smart and cultured people are supposed to like the evening news, supposed to be informed, but then you learn the evening news is not really for informing. Aren't I supposed to want to watch the Olympics.? Make it an us up there winning, not a them? Do my part to support the economy, er, I mean, the team?

Also, and I may be alone on this, but who cares if someone's the best in the world at something? What does that prove? What's the good? In the "kingdom of God" there's neither Olympian nor official nor spectator, neither Chinese nor American, neither sweat shop worker nor consumer; we're all one in Christ, right?

So I'd decided I might not participate at all. I would have a private little boycott. Maybe I'd even end up avoiding self-righteousness. Ha, fat chance.

Ended up, we were at Jill's cousins' house watching the opening day events, and the kids were getting all kinds of over-excited about winning. Chastising the players for not playing as well as they needed to. "Blood makes the grass grow, kill kill kill" trickles down. "Home of the Chiefs" trickles, so does "we love you Chelsea." But who am I to deny the hospitality, deny a shared experience, so I did participate then, and I got hooked and I still am participating. As I'm editing this, the women's platform diving is pre-empting the men's beach volleyball final that we'll see an over-edited version of as soon as the network says it's okay, boys and girls. [Later edit. Never mind. It's live, after all. My schedule was wrong. Whoops] But the reason I kept watching the Olympics is the same reason that I watch that one golfer some Sundays lying half-awake on the couch: I like seeing people do really well at things. Sometimes I feel like I and the world are such good buddies in failure, it's so reassuring to see someone excel at anything, even if it's just hitting a thing into a thing from a ways off so people will pay you to say their motorcars are for fancy people. Or swimming faster than everybody else in the world six times in a row and that gets your mom her own clothing line, and you a million dollar bonus. Or sometimes it's just one person proving they're better than someone else at something, even if, in the grand scheme, that doesn't mean anything. Right then, that person was good. Right then, the world wasn't so broken that a person couldn't do well at a thing.

Or maybe I just like being entertained.

Or wanted an excuse to stay up late, push myself to limits of exhaustion.

So I chased those late Olympic nights last week with morning caffeine, stretched myself out on a rack between the two, like Bilbo and butter and bread, getting more and more tired, watched one event while another played on the laptop, no commentary, just the soothing seashore of a crowd, and gulls of the stadium announcers. Got snippy at work. Cheered for the eastern European outside lanes in swimming. Cheered for people to do well, no matter what country. Skipped naps for sports I didn't care about. Cheered for people at all, when it came down to it. Good job, under-age Chinese girl, you did it even though they made you lie. You still did the best, did your best. Good job Japanese guy flying off the rings. You'll be fine even without a medal on your neck. Good job guy whose elbow went backwards weightlifting. Good job specific height-range, specific eye-width to face-height ratio medal ceremony attendants. Good job over-thirty crowd. Good job opening ceremony propagandists. Good job Morgan Freeman voice-over hiring director. Good job Georgian athletes, way to overcome what's being done to your country. Way to go Russian athletes, way to overcome what's being done by your country.

But it wore me out, and the only thing I did creatively all week was take a couple pictures (some shown in this post) on break on Tuesday. So, that's where I've been, if you've been wondering. (Also, I've got a potential new job thing on the horizon, pushed back again to the horizon, and I was thinking about that an awful lot.)

So I was glad to take the day off on Friday in preparation for going on pilgrimage over the weekend. Slept in. Took it slow. Did watch some Olympics, if ya believe it.

Every year our church takes a weekend to travel to a camp an hour away from home and eat, play, and pray together for a couple days. Prayer three times a day, food three times a day, swimming, camping, talking. Do nothing or do everything.

Saturday night, most of us spent a couple hours grouped in 20s on a symbolic pilgrimage out through the woods, stopping to reminisce about the Hebrew exodus a couple times, then through a 1/3 scale model of the tabernacle, talking about how Yahweh's right here among us, a god who pitched his tent among the people, and what that might mean for us. We talked about that for a while in our group, and how a bunch of us are more in love with comfort than most things, even a god we're trying to follow. And I watched the other groups come down the path and through the tent like a nation on the move, and then we sang some songs like we Christians like to do sometimes, and then headed back to build a fire so Sam's last year rained-out s'mores plan could come to fruition.

I ran inside real quick to go to the bathroom before we went to make the fire, and on the big screen in the dining room there was a crowd gathered watching a swimming relay race. I watched it. It was impressive, like all the others. Some of the people cheered when the U.S. won. Some of the people clapped. I saw a man earn an eighth gold medal, get turned into something more than a man in mythological imaginations, still be just a man. I ask why he is the god or the dolphin, the one going home to Sea World? Why not the Japanese breast stroke guy, or the back stroke guy, or the guy who whose name I don't know who swam under a world record time but slower than three other guys who did the same? They're still above and beyond my ability, your ability, all but one other guy's ability. Gotta be the best, or you aren't a god. Or you aren't anything, apparently.

I read an article the other day by this lady who used to be a gymnast, and she is now an office drone, and she's tired of people saying that they could have been an Olympian, could have been that swimmer, that wrestler, that fencer, if only they'd stuck with it back when they were younger, could have flipped above the beam, flipped just so -- so there's no splash, jumped a horse over parallel metal bars. And while I agree that no matter how hard you try, there are some things you won't do, some medals you won't win, not everyone could win, I also think that anyone could have won. Anyone could have been that guy. Who picked field hockey? Not good enough for soccer? Of course, some people could never be there, no matter how they trained. But it could have been anyone. Didn't the Chinese replace most of the men's gymnastics just before the games? Maybe they were good enough for gold, too. My friend Galia swam for the junior national Belarusian team. Maybe she'd be famous, I wouldn't have a friend Galia if she hadn't quit. Maybe that pole vaulter is a friend of Jill's, save a choice she made when she was ten. Maybe Jill's on that uneven bar eight years ago if her parents pushed her to be the best, rather than the Jill. Maybe none of that, maybe all of it.

Things could have been different. Some guy's dad sticks with his mom, and he never gets into after-school swimming in Baltimore, and someone else gets to be America's Apollo this year. Like in those speculative commercials where the famous pitcher is instead a famous bowler. Maybe the swimmer would be the ninth best fencer, or the fifth best biathelete (it was the shooting that will keep him home from Vancouver in two years), and we'd never know him. Or maybe he'd be some frat guy at a college, gonna be the next big thing at the law firms in New York. He'd be just as unalive to the world at large as we are. Just as unsponsered, unaccoladed, unmedaled, just as much an everyday emperor as the next guy, buying phone service. Just a cog, just a bolt in a row of bolts on top of an air conditioner behind some power boxes in an industrial park. Or maybe, he's supposed to swim, that's who he is, he's made to swim, that's how he makes the world more beautiful. Maybe he would have been there no matter what.

I'm not trying to discount the work, the mornings, the sacrifice. Those are beautiful things. Maybe more beautiful performances than the ones on the big stage. But, for what? What's the big story those small ones tell? Is it so I can say my empire's just as strong as the red one? So I can have comradery with my fellow US-ians. Because it's good for the economy? To foster peace around the world. Aren't these the reasons use to we go to war? Is this the bloodless war?

My dad is bigger than your fatherland.

I met a foul-mouthed guy named Jeremiah at lunch today who caught a ride to Olathe last night to "visit his homegirl." She's going to buy her grandmother's car, but hasn't yet, so he was trying to hop a bus downtown to get home to 42nd and Rainbow. He said that a cop stopped him as he was walking to HyVee from 125th and Ridgeview because he had an axeman tattoo that indicated he was into the Insane Clown Posse, and Olathe's having a Juggalo problem. You read that right. The cop said Olathe's having a Juggalo problem. A. Juggalo. Problem. Jeremiah said he got his tattoo in fifth grade, back when he was doing whatever he wanted, before he knew better. The cop asked his birthdate. Sometime in early 89, he said. So he's not truant or anything. Cop searched him for drugs and alcohol based on the probable cause of a "gang-related" tattoo. I helped Jeremiah find where the Olathe Connector stops, so he could get to the "great" mall, and then get on the C bus four hours later to get home. I shook his hand and wished him luck, prayed for him a little on the inside.

I wonder if Jeremiah could have been an Olympian, if he wasn't the next Adonis, but he grew up in KCK, never learned a sport he loves. Probably not, I guess. That's a specially gifted human who gets there, after all. But I do know that I care more about this guy whose life story I haven't seen in stock footage and popular music and twirling black background camera shots, and who I'll never see again (let alone for shore in four years) than I do about people who worked really hard their whole lives to win a shiny disc on the end of a wide ribbon, a shiny disc that's for their country, as much (or more than) it's for themselves. I hope he made it home.

Disclaimer: I listened to my second through umpteenth Bright Eyes songs while writing this today.

Cracked time parentheticals

But somehow (

The wall clock we bought with our wedding money at Target, the old-timey one that had the cracked face from when we moved, that is now missing a fat shard from laying on its face the last time I took it down for the batteries and (by not saying what for, I have) (and not one of the three white-plastic-thick-around-the-face clocks we got at the wedding (which we thought might have been part of an elaborate joke, given who the three people were who gave them to us (including Jordan, to whom (and Ellie) we gave white towels and a sappy card as a subtle joke at their wedding( but maybe too subtle (since they didn't get the joke))) but we later came to believe we must have registered for them, and then returned two of them, and one lives behind the blinds in the window over the sink by the canned air ("Danger: Do not open." it says.) Paris)) there's a ring (why, I don't know (or how)) on the wall where it's since we moved here. So I find myself in the absurd position of glancing at a faint circle and a nail when I want the time.

Therefore, I have no idea what time it is when I'm first writing this with one of the Bic ballpoint pens Jill bought when we ran out of pens (instead of the gel ink pens I thought she'd would buy (that's married people communication for ya)(I like the gel ones better)) on a sheet of printer paper which on the package is labeled "copy machine paper" (but when you get it for free (or, let's be honest, even when you pay for it) can you tell the difference?) using the back of a large black dictionary (not the magic dictionary, which is brown, and my friend Dan used to use for divination ("What should I do with my life" Opens it, points to an entry: "go away" in the phrase section) back in the days when our Ten Percent Society (the society we founded because we still believed in chivalry and muses) had names and faces) as a writing surface here on the arm of the couch.

I can't tell if I'm writing in it (I suspect not), but I can hear Stephen King's voice in my head. And although to most people this means something entirely different, to me it is a lucid voice, unafraid to say things that, although quite terribly true, need to be said. I have just finished reading the last 2/5 or so of Lisey's Story, up from a cool skin, soft sheets bed where I laid for an itself indeterminable amount of time, eyes happyclosed, but not sleeping (even though yesterday was spread thin like finals week and I nearly dozed several times at work, and oh yes, my excellent good friends, I went to bed early).

I suspect it is the caffeine, although my last hit was in that sweet spot, 2-3 in the afternoon, when your circadian rythyms are least affected. As I said, I'm using again, 90 mg at a time, 2-3 times a day. I once read that 100 mg in a setting is what it takes to get you high, and according to a study I read that's also the level at which chemical dependence starts. And 30 mg is enough for mood changes. But I've talked plenty about caffeine before. Moving on.

(I've reached the point in my job where I don't care enough some days to get enough sleep the night before. So I'm tired enough that I, as Dan puts it, give people "the sass." Which means that I, as I put it, am needlessly short with people and spontaneously annoyed with minor setbacks in people listening to me and following directions. Also, people being at all non-self-sufficient. In other words, combine not caring enough to go to bed early with not caring about the job, and I get rude. Dan says it's surreal to hear me being that way with people. And I agree. So, many days, it's the caffeine that keeps me civil.

Jill asks how my day went and I can only talk about what I am doing besides my job. Partially because there are only so many days you can complain about willfully ignorant rich people ("OK, double-click on that." "Double left click?"), and partially because I'm not at all proud of being unable to be kind to them ("That's the way it's usually done." "Well I'm not very computer savvy, so you'll have to be patient with me." (Is there any time in navigating a web page one must double-right-click? In Windows even? I'm only being so specific because you've needed such excessive hand holding thus far.)).

So I don't know if I should stick it out and learn to be the proverbial best ditch digger I can be, or jump ship so old ladies dipping their toes in the eastern seaboard real estate market can get technical support from someone else, someone under or over the fabled 18 month lifespan hump of a technical support I'm running up against, and not getting over.)

I read the that last 2/5 of Lisey's Story (which, as you might expect) tells its story in nested flashbacks), partially becuase the story was calling me from bed (along with Fantastic Contraption (which I played all day (you know how videos games are at the end of a day of playing them))), and also partially because although I could not sleep (tired though I was) my eyes did not feel like the light of a computer monitor (my oftentimes activity when this late night unsleeping happens (always in seasons when I'm on caffeine, ('strue)). I was afraid to bother Jill, but I turned on the lights, anyway, expecting her to complain if they did, corner floor, pillar table, curled up on the couch and got on with my better addiction. Not until I'd finished it, and the paragraph before the paragraph before this one, did my eyes feel like getting back to bed. So I did (after taking some pictures for the blog (not my favorite set I've taken)).

) I'm quite awake and doing well today at work, though, thanks. (I've even been nice.)

I got the thiiing.

Every week, as part of my workplace's continuing effort to improve our morale so as to encourage us forget the fact that our poor business model (no plans for the market ever turning down even a little, apparently) resulted in none of our workers getting our annual and expected merit-based raises this year, (that's right, folks, it's Spirit Month!) they sent around a movie trivia quiz, via email, the winner winning some delightful and sparkly and distracting from lower pay trinket. (Technically, a gift card to Target, which I do not need, nor do I really, deep down, want, given that it would only further drive my unwanted desire for STUFF and THINGS.) But I love quizzes, so I busted out IMDB and answered all the questions correctly. I was the first person to get my results in. I even went so far as to double-check my answers, if you can believe it. I know, I know.

Well, most of my answers and mostly correctly. When it came down to clicking send, or checking every single one, I decided not to check the first question, since I thought it was right: What was the other X-rated picture to be nominated for best picture besides Midnight Cowboy? The answer is, of course, A Clockwork Orange. I, however, answered Last Tango in Paris, which was nominated for best director, which is close, but not close enough, also not that great a film, in my opinion. Depressing, artistic, and bland. Not a best picture. I should have known.

So I didn't win the trinket. Which is how I figured it would turn out when I clicked send. See, when I take a test, I fully and completely expect to getat least one of the answers wrong becaue I thought I knew, and didn't check. No matter how well I know the subject matter. I'm surprised when I get them all right even when I'm the one who made the test. It's kind of an anticlimax if I do get them all right, too; all that work, and then, well, boring success.

The same happens when I create a puzzle; I expect to have to go back and fix it at some point. In third grade, we were assigned to make assignments for the rest of the class for our spelling words. I made a word search that was really complicated: some were backwards and up to the left, even. But, I misspelled about half of them, and people kept getting confused. So, things that I said were in it, weren't. And then, some of you got to see what happened when I made that puzzle for the blog. Had to redo it, like, three times. So, I figure, when I do a thing that requires precision, I'm gonna mess something up along the way. I'm much more of a creative person than an ontarget person. No excuses, fie on it, even, but it is so.

So, when this week's history quiz came along in my email yesterday, I decided to go all out, answer all the questions really thoroughly, researched on Wikipedia, the whole bit. Elaborated on Napoleon and Hitler's downfall in attacking Russia during the spring. Named 10 of the modern countries that exist within the boundaries of the Holy Roman Empire, instead of just 5. Double-checked the ones I thought I knew. Mentioned the last unsuccessful invasion of Britain in a question about the last successful one. So, then, I made it creative and precise. Best of both worlds. But when the results came back, I wasn't even in the top 2. Thought I'd done so well, too.

Today, the guy who made the quiz came by and told me I did a good job, and I asked him what I missed. I thought it might have been that I put "The Orient" instead of "The East Indies" in a question about ol' Chris Columbus, but he said that was fine. Turns out I'd only lost half a point: I left off the "when" part of the question about which two presidents died on the same day, and when. Same old, same old. Missing minor details and hitting the big picture. 'Swhy I'd make a lousy engineer. On my ACTs, I hit the 97th or higher percentile on every category except pre-algebra. Aced the college level reading, bombed jr. high math. It's my life.

But then the guy who made the quiz said he had come by, not to let me know what I'd gotten wrong, but what I'd gotten right, to let me know that I was correct: Tanzania had never declared independence, that it is a merger of two other countries that had declared independence previously, and so there is no true date of independence for Tanzania. Then, he gave me a very nice consolation prize, a leather keychain with a carrying bag(!(?)), which I won't need for the keychain which I will now use, that I may end up using for holding dice or for my sunglasses, which I am tired of losing.

So, to celebrate creatvity trimphing over lack of precision, I turned on my under-shelf florescent lamp, tore July off my desk calendar for a backdrop, and I took a picture. That I posted on my blog. And then wrote a blog post about. Which you are reading. Er, have been reading. Good day.






Oh, and for those who care, here's a link to the rest of the good pictures I took yesterday at lunch: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=62312&l=2a2e3&id=529650350

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.

It's the aftershocks that surpise you.

Note: I know I said I'd talk more about weddings and marriage today, and single people. I'll get to it. This morning, this started coming out instead. It's kind of about marriage, too.

Quite a while ago, I had a long and multi-faceted dream in which I was teaching in a very large high school. At first, thinking back this morning, I thought I'd had the dream the night before I started teaching at Turner, but it's more likely it was just a dream I had sometime well after I stopped teaching. Especially considering how I think one of the people in the dream was one of my favorite students, J. who was bubbly and deep at the same time, the sort of person perfectly suited to lead you through a dream. The dream covered a few weeks of classes, and a field trip, and as dreams do, the beginning and end of the school year, and lots of teaching and interacting with kids, and a lot to do with the end of the school day, bright and sunny and school busses.

The dream school building was made up of all different parts of other schools I'd been in, hodge-podged of different eras and insitutional architectural styles like Olathe North is. It had very long halls akin to my memory of visiting Lawrence High as part of a Stu-Co exchange back in high school (or maybe it was Free State; they're both huge). It had a central commons hub with hall spokes like Olathe South. A lot of the classroom halls were the two-story stacked hospital sterility of Olathe Northwest.

But the atmosphere of the whole building reminded me of my grade school's little theatre, which had a long snake-curved concrete wall that formed the back wall of the stage in the middle of a large room. The wall had a balcony you could get up to from behind, which is quite the amazement for grade schoolers, let me tell you. A balcony! Such fun! They cut some fat, curved steps into the concrete floor for seats. The whole thing, stage and seats and balcony, was thin carpeted. It was a wondrous place, a room open to the hall, right by the office, usually dark, except for special events. A room where anything could happen. I remember performing a melodrama there with the girl I always had a crush on, I wore a my dad's fedora and a trenchcoat and sunglasses, the first time I remember loving theatre. Brian Busby came once to speak about the weather. One of my most vivid memoeries is a speed arithmetic competition that I did not win, but always wanted to have won because I thought I was SO smart, and I still look back on for perspective on my own thinking processes.

So there was a magic and nostalgic sadness to the dream school. But also, there was the feel of the back stage, behind that snake wall, with the stairs up to the balcony, and the storage for the projection machine for making large primary colored posters with bold lines. I was in Mr. Lang's fifth grade class, and his room was down the hall behind the little theater, in between the two kindergarten classes. And on the way back from lunch or gym or music, or especially visiting the other two 5th grade classes, on the far end of the building, we walked in line by that backstage area, which was indirectly lit and littered with bulky school supplies like rolls of colored paper and that projector I mentioned, and there was a door to outside that we almost never used, but let light in like heaven when it was open, and it all felt like the back side of the world, God's scaffolding exposed.

They later filled the sunken seats in with more concrete and carpeted it over and remodeled the whole thing into an expansion for the neighboring library, and all the magic left. Which is the exact opposite you'd expect for filling a space with books, but that is what happened. That's the truth.

In this school in the dream, there was a sparsely-used wing, far off the commons, and the top floor had 50's style classrooms like Shawnee Mission North, with doors to the outside and untinted windows in the hall. But if you went down a dimly lit hall underneath, and then down a long ramp like the ramp at Olathe North, but done in the brick architectural style of Johnson County Community college and underground. Then you got to a small commons area, with a pod of classrooms on the other side like California/Chisolm Trail. But before that pod, on the left side, at the bottom of the ramp, across from the janitor's closet, was an old band room, dug into the side of the hill, which was my classroom. It had tiered seating going down, and I brought incandescent floor lamps, so it felt like home or a hobbit hole, and my desk was at the top in the right corner, surrounded by posters and shelves and knick-knacks, and I taught lots of interesting things, and it was good.

Last night, I went back to the dream school, and I thought it was Turner. Not until much later in the night did I remember what my actual classroom was like. I walked the classroom halls, and the corridors, and the dark overhang of the entryways off the commons, light streaming in through high windows, there in the waning days of the school year, after classes had stopped, but before the teachers had left. Summer school weeks away. This is when school buildings always feel the oldest. All the youth is gone home to play, and the motes hang in the shafts. It's closing time, you've cleared all your things and you've put them in boxes. But there are stragglers turning in last late projects, yearbook staff settling in for the last deadline work of the summer, football players hitting the weight room, teachers sliding laminated posters into drawers, finishing grades, really hearing the air conditioning fans deep in the ceiling for the first time since August..

I went down a hall, past a dark place that felt like the back side of the world, and down the ramp which was very much in the same place as Mr. Lang's classroom somehow, and into my old classroom. It looked much the same, the new teacher had posters, and her own floor lamps, and her own shelves. It'd been raining lately, and the ceiling had been leaking from the waterlogged earth above, and it was stained brown and peeling.

I had this long conversation with the wonderful woman who now taught in my old room. Some of her students came in and hung out, did some work, felt at home. She was young, and punky, short brown hair. We talked about how she was keeping up a lot of the things I'd done, without even knowing I'd done them before; the kids kept telling her. The incandescent lights, and the laid-back style, and hanging out with the kids like they were people, and teaching them with really good books how to read better. She'd had them reading Maus to expand their reading skills to graphic novels, something I hadn't considered. The year was good. She was hoping for another. Some of my old students came in and they said how much they missed me, but that the new teacher was good, so I didn't have to worry, that the new lady had taken over, and it was fine.

I've always felt a little guilty about leaving teaching. Sometiems I like to lie to myself that there's nothig I coud have done, but that's not true. There are many things I could have done, if I'd only started much sooner. If I'd known I'd teach before I taught. And yeah, I liked having a job that felt meaningful, but the profession? Meh, really. You can have that. Oh, but the kids? Ah, alas.

It's like I was SO important, and I needed to be there, those kids needed me to listen to their stories, and to teach them more stories. But this obviously isn't true. Other teachers can come along and be there, and other teachers do come along, and other people, too, adults and peers. I am just a man. Just a small part. But you love them enough, you think maybe you can change something. Surely you can change something.

I think the best teachers must feel like this. This is why they're always there, late at light, weekends, summers, preparing and thinking. Letting the building soak into you, and you become part of it. You've got something to offer those kids, like nothing else anyone can offer, so you've got to be there. Your life for theirs. Your life is theirs. That's why so many good teachers seem like they don't have other lives. Their lives have become the school. Giving your life up for someone gives your life meaning. Is teaching enough?

In my dream, I thanked the new teacher for for being there, and I meant it, she was good, and I said goodbye to the kids, and visted the teachers in the pod across the small commons, they had been my lifeline my "first year", and then I went outside on the hill next to the school and I buried my face in the cool grass and cried for a good long time, really letting myself mourn, for the first time, leaving teaching.

Weddings are, like, the biggest deal ever. Also, not a big deal at all. Part 1

Last week, 'a Monday, a good friend of mine asked me if I, or anyone I knew, was ordained and could perform a wedding. I told her about my dad, who is ordained seeing as how he is/was a missionary and Rev. is a useful door-opening title for missionaries, and about our mutual long-time acquaintance Ben, who is a youth pastor in town, and I forgot to mention my friend Maux who got ordained one time just to perform a wedding on a beach for some friends of hers, which is as good a reason for ordination as I know.

At the same time, I also asked my friend why she was asking, and she said that she was getting married that next weekend, if she could pull it off, seeing as how her affianced was going to be shipped out to Iraq at the end of June for 15 months, and she knew, I mean, knew, and the families were happy with the idea, and even suggested the this-weekend nuptials.

But it came out that she wasn't really asking me so much about anyone I knew, per se, rather me, specifically, re: ordained persons, and how even though Kansas doesn't require somebody official to say you are married, you can do it yourself, that the two of them would like me to do it, if I could. I was honored, quite so, as you might expect, and so I looked up my options on the internets, and decided to do it.

I decided to go with the more universalist option I found over a slightly more theologically distinct option, since the theologically distinct option costs, like, fifty bucks, and the universalists are free. All I had to do to be a Rev. in that church was believe in 1) religious freedom for all faiths, and 2) doing the right thing, and even though I'm a lot more specific than that when it comes to my own theology and praxis, I was willing to just roll with it for the sake of a friend, and signed up for a grade A, legal, internet ordination.

The bride and groom aren't really religious types anyway, and are pretty laid back, so they asked me to do a laid-back service, which they thought I could pull off. I think I did. Come Saturday morning, I officiated, gave a short homily as it were, oversaw vows, gave charges, and they even let me pray for them, and we signed papers, and had a substantial breakfast/lunch afterwards, and fielded the kinds of general, skeptical/reverent questions from the family that I can assume ministers always field at these sorts of events (and, I suppose, at all kinds of events in folk cultural religianity here in the US.). We did the whole ceremony in a park, with an arch and balloons provided by Austin, and we played on the playground afterwards. It was beautiful and simple and so right, and so was the weather.

The homily I gave was tailored to the couple, obviously, but the main point I tried to make was to ask why we were there at a wedding at all, considering we didn't have to be. And the two main reasons I gave were that marriage is, like, a really big deal, and not a big deal at all.

Heck, those are the two reasons I even officiated the wedding in the first place: I thought it was a really big deal, and I wanted to be there, and be supportive, and I also thought it wasn't a big deal at all, it's so right, so let's just do the thing.

Now, I've got more thoughts on the issue than would fit in the fifteen minute time limit for the whole ceremony (self-imposed) or were appropriate for that venue, so I compressed it, and tailored it, as you'd expect. But I'd like to expand on them a little more, more than I did there at least, and this seems like a better venue for general thoughts.

A lot of what I said then had to do with the fact that the bride and groom are going to be apart for most of the next 18 months, barring a single furlow. So, if you'll forgive me, and I do apologize, what I'm going to say here will be more universal than what I said on Saturday, and like all universals, it'll be less meaningful than a particular would be. Certainly less meaningful than being up there with a good friend and seeing her very real sparkling eyes and smile as she married the man she wants to meld the rest of her life with. But we'll have to deal. So, here's my take on weddings, then. Culled and edited and expanded on, I remind you, from something I wrote for two particular and wonderful people, and while, aiming for the universal, still completely from within my context, as everything I write is:

Marriage . . . Big Deal? Not a Big Deal? Yes, Both.

When you go celebrate a wedding for someone, right off you've got to ask yourself why. I mean, those two people standing up there, walking down the aisle, or appearing from the pastor's special secret door that far too many churches have for some reason, or coming in from the side, and/or lighting candles, and/or sliding down a zipcord, and/or jumping out of cakes, or just standing up and walking over from the tree, or whatever, those people didn't have to have a wedding.

They could have easily gotten together on their own, in secret, and gotten married. Kansas law permits it, for example; you don't even need an ordained me up there overseeing the whole thing like I did this last Saturday. It's all very catholic now. Or heck, they could just decide their love is enough, and who needs a marriage, it's just a piece of paper, and they could make promises to each other in secret and get on with their lives. But instead, they decide to bring you and all these other people in on it, to let you in on the secret, and more importantly to get you all to help keep and maintain the secret of their love for each other. And so you show up to affirm that. To be like, "Right on. You're taking a huge step, and we want to affirm that." So that's part of why you're there: you get to be a secret keeper.

But there's more to the big deal-ness of weddings than just the presence of the audience, a large part of it is because those two people up there, and this is really big, I think, have transcended their natural human tendency to be selfish and self-centered, and any time that happens, it is a cause for celebration. So, especially with two people you know and love. It's not everyday humdrum to give yourself up. It certainly wasn't with the wedding I did this weekend. Those two people were giving up, at the very least, 18 months of potential freedom to vow to love each other. They bound themselves to each other even in absence. That's amazing.

But for any wedding, the two people choose to give themselves up for each other, to give up their independent lives and their independent hopes and dreams to form this new project, this micro-community within a larger community that we've termed marriage, to morph their independence into interdependence, into shared lives and shared hopes and shared dreams. That's exciting. And if you look around you, it's not the norm for something like this to happen. Not in our culture. Not anymore, at the very least. Maybe not ever. People tend towards selfishness, especially in relationships.

And, to be honest, even though most marriages start out with all these ideals at the wedding, many times, they lose all the luster, and people get selfish again. The marriage couldn't overcome it. But it's that hope for a better world that drives us as humans back to the marriage project again and again. Maybe this one will work. Maybe they'll make it. Maybe people can be selfless. Weddings are the hope that people can be more than animals, people can be human. So if we can agree, I'm talking here about the potential of a marriage, not every marriage that comes along. And what else is a wedding than a celebration of the potential of a marriage?

Besides that, though, there are all kinds of reasons that we always give for a wedding being a big deal. It's such a huge commitment. It's a choice for forever. It's excluding other sexual partners. You're merging finances. You're leaving a family to create a family. Etc, etc, amen.

But we all know marriage is a big to-do, that's why most people spend so much on the ceremony, and people freak out about it, and there's this massive industry with magazines filled mostly pictures of depressed women in dresses (I always read those for the articles, if ya believe it), and parents tell their kids things like, "Well, when you grow up and get married and have kids you can . . ." when they want to justify their parenting decisions, and people are always trying to find a person to marry so they aren't lonely anymore, and little girls play wedding, where the older one gets to be the groom because she can do the threshold-carrying.

But I also want to talk about why it's not a big deal; it's the completely natural thing for people to do. Because I don't hear enough of that, how this is the right and normal thing for emotionally mature people to do when they fall in love -- to get married, to become this new person with another person, and to move on through life together.

First off, there's totally precedent. Looking back through history, we see this desire for two people to commit to each other playing out. Yeah, sometimes it was political, sometimes it was stupidly over-dramatically fakey-romantic, sometimes it was just convenient. But it's pervasive -- people coming together, giving up what they had on their own to go form this new marriage project. I mean, almost every culture has a specific wedding ceremony it practices. Cultures get people together. Look at how much we teach our young kids about it. And hey, it's even expected in a lot of our subcultures.

Marriage is even one of the primary metaphors God's relationship with his people in Christianity, our culture's folk religion. So when God his-very-self is trying to explain how much he loves everybody and wants us to know him and him to know us, he explains it using our terminology; he explains it being like a marriage. There was even a really strong parallel this weekend, with the whole Iraq deployment business, where that groom is like Jesus in , going off, and leaving the bride waiting for him to come back, and everyone's looking forward to that day, but no one knows how it's going to play out.

So, yeah, it's not a big deal because there's something very historically and culturally normative going on here.

But there's more than that. Another reason marriage is so normal is that people get lonely. And it's good for people to form deep, committed relationships they can rely on when they're lonely. Not even necessarily romantic relationships, singles take note. But when people are so in tune with each other, and so in love with each other, a wedding is just the natural outflow of that relationship.

But it is hard to stay committed to someone. People get selfish. So, like so many events in a healthy culture, we set it apart with a ceremony or a ritual, and in this case we bring along some friends and family to say, "Hey! You guys! Stay together! You can make it." Maybe even just to give the other people hope in a better world, right?

Another reason people so naturally get married is because it's a good, healthy place to raise kids. And kids are the future of humanity; if we want to keep it going, we need to have, at least, a few of them here and there. And it's hard to raise healthy kids on your own, without another person. And it's hard to be an emotionally healthy kid without a mom and a dad both, to learn how to relate to different genders. Not saying that you can't make it with a single parent, but it's harder. And it's a lot easier if your parents get along. On Saturday, I reminded everyone that we had the parents of the bride and groom there, and so I cut the kids talk off there, to try to avoid you know (wink), controversial subjects. But if you're going to have kids, a committed, loving relationship is a very good place to do it. I'm just sayin'.

One last reason I gave, and the last I'll give here, that it's so natural to have weddings is that people get horny. And there is no better place, in my opinion, to live out that natural and human desire for sex than in a committed relationship. I'd even go so far as to say it's best with a committed relationship where you've had some sort of ritual and people around to affirm your sexuality. In that kind of relationship context, sex can mostly easily become about maintaining this other person, not just consuming them like entertainment or just to get your own kicks. In other words, sex is better as a team event than masturbating with someone else's body.

Also, in my experience, there's something almost mystical about sex when you know you can completely be yourself, and this other person can completely be themselves, not worrying about what's next in the relationship, just being together, and you can trust each other, and you can let sex become, not this super-duper magical thing up on a pedestal, like a once-a-year trip to Disney World or whatever, but a wonderful, natural, normal everyday pleasure. With high points and low points, like eating, or sleeping, even, that is communal, though -- it symbolically and literally melds you into one person. Of course, with the two people I married, they're going to get some of that that once-a-year Disney World experience inside a committed relationship for this first bit here, so, congrats for that to them-- best of both worlds . . .

I don't know if what I'm saying here disparages 'sex without a preceding wedding'. I honestly don't even know if I want to disparage it or avoid disparagement, which. On the one hand, I don't want to play down things where people find connections, and can stave off the natural loneliness of life. On the other hand, I want people to have the substantial comfort of the ceremony and the community's encouragement as a context for sex; I've seen sex from that place and I think it's so much healthier and beneficial than it would be elsewhere. And I see a lot of people getting really hurt with sex in an amarital context. I dunno. Maybe I just think it works better in that context. It has the opportunity to be more everyday, and so can become more transcendant. I'll just direct anyone interested in a good spiritual take on this to Lauren Winner's delightful and insightful book Real Sex, which says what I'm trying to say here about a million times better.

From this point in the conversation on Saturday, we went on to the ring exchange and the vows and the charges and the making out and the clapping. It was all very beautiful, and I hope hope that it succeeds. That it becomes everything that we hoped for.

I didn't talk very much about people who are not getting married at that time. I did briefly mention that I didn't want all of that ceremony business to make it seem like single people have to get married to be happy or whatever. That marriage, because it is normal and natural, is also necessary. I left it at that, saying that I don't think we hear enough of that sentiment, but that was a wedding, and we were there for that. I've got a lot more to say about how weddings aren't a big deal, and how that relates to people not getting married, I'll come back to that tomorrow.