Wikkid Thoughts

What is Natural? (A Parable)

2012-01-22T13:04:00.003-05:00

There once was a girl named Jane. When she was in her early teens she would announce almost every day to everyone around her how much she delighted in being a woman and a Christian. She sang songs about Christian femininity, and she had a green canvas knapsack with "Ovaries Are A Gift From God: Use Them Responsibly!" on it. She campaigned ceaselessly against abortion, though she herself had never been pregnant and was not, of course, sexually active. But she could be found many weekends, standing with a small group of middle-aged ladies in front of restaurants with signs depicting scarlet bloody abortions. She did not think this at all strange or unnatural for a teenaged girl. It was what teenaged Christian girls should all do. It was what Jesus would have done.

"Remember every day to be as grateful as you should be that you were born with the ability to Bear Children for Christ, or you just might LOSE that ability!" she would tell her friends, if they played organized sports, got short haircuts, or went outside without their makeup. She was always troubled when girls around her did not act as she felt they should.

Every morning she got up early and had her vitamins and daily chapter of scripture from her little tan bible. Every night she either went to an evening church activity or watched an episode of Touched By An Angel, Dr. Quinn: Medicine Woman or Road to Avonlea and retired early. Still, no teenaged boys showed any abiding interest in her or her obedience to scripture and interest in bearing Christian babies.

As she approached twenty, she started to become increasingly restless. "I'm a woman. I should be pregnant" she mused. "It's what Jesus wants. What is wrong with men? Only interested in One Thing." She daily sang her songs about the privilege of being born female and Christian, and wrote poems about loving to sing about Jesus, fallopian tubes and uteri, and derived some small satisfaction from them, but still she fretted.

"What kind of a woman am I?" she eventually despaired. "I should be pregnant for Jesus, and I'm not. What good is it being female if I'm not going to have a baby? I'm of prime child-bearing age. I'm wasting it!"

To try to improve her attitude toward her Special Burden (and to meet godly Christian young men), she took courses in Christian Women's Studies at venerable old, red brick Blessed Triumphant Savior College (not accredited). For eight years she worked part-time at a little Christian book store to be able to afford these courses. She went to bed early each night and woke up bright and early each morning, filled with an undying resolve to do what she'd been Designed For one day. To do what Jesus wanted her to do.

Eventually Geoff, one of the professors at Blessed Triumphant Savior College, consented to marry her. He was young and keen, having himself only gotten his PhD from bible college (unaccredited by man's Academic system) the year previous. She'd come to his office wanting clarification on some of the finer points of Proverbs 31, but he'd wanted to lecture on the Song of Songs.

"The bible is a book filled throughout with lyrics of various kinds by sundry authors," he'd intoned, looking off somewhere above and an only occasionally stealing glances at her, sitting there in her jean skirt and pink "Abortion Is Murder" cardigan. "But only that one ancient Semitic poem cycle commonly attributed to Solomon is sometimes called 'The Song of Songs.' Very telling. And that entire work is a quite frank, lyrical depiction of erotic love and acts associated with those ancient, very natural feelings. So, according to the editors, translators and book titlers of the very Word of God itself, the best song, the arch-song, as it were, the over-song, a Song Above All Songs, is a song about...sex. From this earth-shattering scriptoerotic epiphany we have to humbly agree that all of the very best songs, from time immemorial right up to the present day with its Katy Perry and its Justin Bieber, are without exception, always and only about that very scripture-sanctioned, divinely-approved topic. Eros." And then he looked directly at her for just a moment, as if he'd said something daring.

The wedding was all Jane had hoped for. For that one day, she was the princess she'd always imagined she was when she was little and had imagined Jesus as her Fairy Godmother. Everything was white. The dresses, the tuxes, the cake, the chairs, the bunting. All were the same radiant white. Everyone there (besides the catering staff of course) was as well. It looked so pure and holy. It cost a fortune, but it was so worth it. It was just what Jesus wanted of a young Christian woman who just really wanted to please him.

Jane breathed a giant sigh of relief in her life. Now things were going to work out. Now she could do what she'd been Made to Do. Now she could REALLY serve Jesus, as a meek, submissive, grateful wife. She could begin filling the world with the Christian-raised fruit of her very womb, just like the apostle instructed all Christians to do. And she could home-school her children to preserve them from the secular taint that less loving Christian mothers weekly exposed their wretched little get to, sending them daily on that big yellow bus to that reeking pit of rank humanism.

Geoff continued to teach at the Christian college, where he was spending more and more time lately. Every morning Jane took her vitamins and read her chapter of scripture (often reading Proverbs 31), and every Saturday night, she made love to her husband. Just as Jesus wanted. Naturally, she refused to engage in any kind of sexual activity which was unlikely to result in her conceiving a child.

But the months rolled on apace, and with every month came, as regular as clockwork, her inescapable menses. Like wretched Hannah of old, every month she sat on their gleaming white toilet and wept bitter tears. "How I have failed my Lord! It is fitting that my eyes cry these salty tears even as my womb cries bloody ones, mourning the death of yet another potential Child of God!" she cried. "What am I doing wrong?" she wondered. It had to be something.

Had it been that time when she'd cut her hair shorter than usual and Geoff hadn't liked it? Had it been her tendency to sometimes argue to an unseemly degree with her husband (strangely, often on Saturday nights)? Well, it was so difficult to submit to such an ungodly man! Had it in fact been the result those few occasions she'd let her (clearly hypocritical, unloving and depraved) husband lead her astray into Unproductive Acts? There'd even been that one time when she'd almost felt she'd liked... but then she cast that unworthy thought from her like a live viper, and continued weeping, soul-searching and praying. Because that's what Jesus wanted.

Whatever it was, she knew it was her fault she wasn't conceiving. Oh yes, it was very tempting to blame Geoff and his depravity, but she'd been raised well enough to know not to act like Eve blaming Adam for her own disobedience. Her duty to successfully bring healthy, pinkly Christian babies to term was hers and hers alone. It was what a Christian woman did for God. Something was disrupting that delicate relationship between Jane and her Saviour... Was it the presence of too many garishly secular woman's magazines in their house, like insidious tares among the good wheat of the more modestly hued Christian ones? And sometimes the wrong kind of secular ones? (The kind which told women how to orgasm, rather than how to make casseroles and sweaters?) Sometimes she just couldn't wait in line at the supermarket without being led astray by one of those... As her mother used to ominously quote from her old King James Bible "What hast thou in thy house?"

Two years went by and she purged the house of all secular magazines in a manner which Geoff insisted was, but she denied was anything like, superstitious. Either way, it was obvious that spiritually, she was keeping her fingers crossed. She made it clear to her husband that if it wasn't Saturday evening, and if it wasn't a Saturday evening when his seed was likely to Take Root in her, and if the act wasn't even designed to implant a blooming heaven-sent baby in her God-given abdominal birth arena, then the pearly, glistening Gates of Heaven were closed to him, and that even Saint Peter himself would not have been able to prevail against them.

She retooled both her diet and her husband's, forbidding him eating or doing anything which was not clearly conducive to conception. Everything they ate was to be 100% organic. She'd catch him drinking a beer, coffee or a caffeinated cola and wave under his protesting nose articles dutifully snipped from Fecund Christian Wife Weekly magazine. Articles about studies somebody or other had allegedly done which strongly indicated possible connections between indulging in these kinds of things, and in somewhat reduced male fertility. She threw away all of his usual underwear in favour of some mail order ones she'd bought him;, ones designed to increase male fertility. Sometimes he refused to wear them and went to the college to lecture on Christian Women's Studies "commando." Disgusting. Childish. So unhygienic. If the young Christian women taking his courses had any idea what was going on, unbridledly unrestrained, in his pants... She barely suppressed a shudder.

One time she actually caught him masturbating, just as her Christian wives magazines had warned in hundreds of articles with titles like "Self-Abuse: One Family's Private Tragedy!" and "How My Tragic Addiction To Interfering With My Own Body Robbed Me Of My Christian Marriage!" (And it wasn't even Saturday!) To make matters worse, Geoff had been performing the act while inspired by the diagrams in an article from one of her magazines entitled "How To Examine Your God-Given Child-Nurturing Breasts For Cancer Without Inciting Animal Lust In Your Heart!"
Jane had had enough. "Those are MY sperm!" she'd shrieked in delicate, submissive righteous indignation, holding aloft a squelchy Kleenex and waving it graciously at him. "You have stolen them from my very birth canal! You had NO RIGHT! Clearly you don't even love Jesus anymore!"
Geoff then had the unmitigated gall to look her straight in the eye while she was meekly laying out where he'd gone wrong as to scriptural precepts, and had actually mimed pleasuring himself, with a sneering disdainful look on his face the whole time, until she'd stormed long-sufferingly out of the room! Jane didn't know how much longer she could go on. She told everyone in her woman's bible study group all about the incident and they told her she'd need the support of every one of them to endure the man and his obvious war against what was clearly laid out in God's Word.

Then, as eventually happened with the manna from Heaven sent to the Israelites of old, in May her period did not come. It was almost too good to be true. Had her dutiful submission to What Jesus Wanted finally made one of her Saturday Evening Scriptural Unions with Geoff fruitful? She'd just known if she made the house as pure as she kept her body, that God would honour her obedience to what was so clearly laid out in His Word for her to follow. Because it was all up to her. Only her.

Four pregnancy test kits and a doctor's visit confirmed her wildest hope: she was pregnant! Just as Jesus wanted! God was honouring her obedience and rewarding it with blessing, as He had promised in His word always to do! She stopped the Saturday night activities entirely at this point, of course. After all, what was the use?

Geoff left her a month later for a nineteen year old Christian Women's Studies major who shared his love of the Song of Songs. He claimed it was over the magazines. He actually had the nerve to say they were weird.

"Imagine if someone had a collection of magazines about nothing but Christianity and cocks and balls and getting women pregnant. Someone not gay, I mean," Geoff clarified with a snarl, as he got into his car. "Don't you see how weird that was for me? Maybe you shouldn't have thrown out my magazines about women's private bits!" And with this completely unfair sally he drove away putting, Jane felt, an unneccessarily forceful pressure on the gas pedal.
What was wrong with men? Were they completely blind to the Wonders of God's Creation? Were they such slaves to their own Equipment that they had no interest in what God had designed women's bodies to do for Him? When would they learn to take an interest inside Women's bodies? Men truly looked on the "outward appearance" only. They were all just penises with shoes, the lot of them. If she hadn't been a submissive Christian woman, she told herself, she'd have called him a misogynist. He obviously hated women.

The months wore on. Jane was, of course, on some level, heart-broken, but at least, she told herself, the question of who was really following Jesus (and just really being obedient to God Word each day) was now settled once and for all. For all Geoff's claims that she made an idol of children and pregnancy and the family in general, now there could be no argument. It was she who was truly, meekly, submissively following scripture. The ladies in her woman's bible study group all agreed. Geoff was actually filing for divorce, unheeding of how clearly against scripture this was. This made her feel even better.
As the tiny life grew inside her, Jane was aglow with the possibilities. She bought many, many Christian Pregnancy books. She took special "Expecting Christian Moms" vitamins and Quiverfull Supplements. She took Christian Pre-natal classes, explaining to everyone there on a weekly basis that sadly, her husband had forsaken the things of the Lord and followed the mute, primal calling of his own depraved flesh with a wanton Jezebel from the college. Jane positively lived for ultrasounds and doctor's appointments. She managed to get her doctor to agree that she was a Special Case which bore scheduling thrice the usual number of appointments, particularly for ultrasounds (or her "Family Pictures," as Jane called them).

Above all, Jane read books with charts which told her about the normal development of a God-fearing Christian fetus. She regularly entreated Helen the ultrasound technicians as to whether Helen felt the development of her little one was going according to schedule. If things were going perhaps even slightly ahead of schedule, Jane filled with the satisfaction of knowing that her dutiful attention to the tenets of scripture were truly paying off. If Helen felt that perhaps the child was a pound less than the statistical average (as happened at 17 weeks, 27 weeks and 29 weeks), Jane panicked and just knew that if she'd lived the previous week more according to what Jesus wanted, she would have made her child develop more normally. It was all up to her and her alone.
But in week 29, Jane knew that if she continued in her current path of occasionally wavering faith and inconsistent devotion to scripture, her child could well be born with webbed toes like that Hall girl. Jane's path was clear. More reading. Stricter diet. No reading the covers of supermarket magazines at the checkout. If she'd been occasionally making her womb such an inhospitable environment for a Christian fetus, what was she expecting? It was time to really get serious. Jesus wants us to get serious.

And so she kept at it. She ate mountains of broccoli (God's Cure-All, Pregnancy Wonderdrug!), avoided seasonings of all sorts (including the leeks and garlicks of Egypt), and ate only Ezekiel bread (baked perfectly according to the original recipe laid out in scripture by God Himself, minus, of course, the human excrement).

Eventually Jane's due date loomed tantalizingly closer. On average, a woman as far along as Jane was would tend to give birth, the doctor felt, this coming Wednesday somewhere around three in the morning. Jane was ecstatic. This Wednesday she'd finally meet her little boy outside her body, after having given birth to him completely naturally, having felt each and every blessed birth pang without benefit of drugs, and then would continue her good work of raising him to just really value the special gift that God had given to women! For months she'd been putting her CD player against her swollen belly and playing inspirational music and "Focus on the Family" sermons so he could be born already steeped in knowing What Jesus Wanted.

On Tuesday Jane faithfully and quietly packed her things in a small bag and took a taxi to the gleaming metal and glass hospital late in the evening after watching Dr. Quinn.

"What are you doing here, Jane?" the medical receptionist in the little powder blue E.R. waiting room asked. "Have your contractions started?" Jane's contractions had not started.

"I'm just going to sit here and wait until it is The Lord's Time for me to give birth in the wee hours of this morning," Jane said. "It should start at any point now. I just have a really good feeling about it, y'know? It's just so clear in scripture."

"Why don't you just go home and wait until the contractions indicate that it is time," the receptionist suggested.

"Because I'm a Christian," Jane explained. "I'm just really living for my Lord and acting in faith, truly trusting Him to bring His little one to term when it is His Own Good Time in a few hours. Everything is going to work out as it should. I just know it, with the eyes of faith. Do you know Jesus?"

The receptionist left Jane there reading Wombs For Jesus!, and walked away to get some coffee, shaking her head slightly. What a phenomenal testimony Jane knew she was being!

The next morning, an exhausted Jane woke up to find the sun had risen and was shining in through the off-white venetian blinds in the waiting room at the hospital where she sat slumped in a not-particularly-comfortable waiting chair. She looked down at herself. Disappointingly, the baby had not come in the night. First Jane was confused. Then suddenly she was angry, as only a woman who truly believes in God can be:

"How could you do this to me?! What is wrong with you? Haven't you seen what I've done for you and how obedient and dutiful I've always tried to be? What I've sacrificed for you and given up and endured? I've always done my very best, and now this... I cannot believe this...It makes me doubt positively everything!" Jane shouted at her round belly.

Then the self-doubt and recrimination that had been trained into Jane from birth slowly took hold. "Here I am doubting. How awful. And what have I done? Like Peter, James and John I have fallen asleep just when I was supposed to be watching! Shame on me! Shame!"

Jane took a taxi home, with her head held low, tightly clutching her small overnight bag, baby firmly in utero.

Jane sat on her brown couch watching the clock on the microwave. She slept some more. She watched Road to Avonlea. Still, not a thing. She felt ashamed of herself for sleeping, but though the spirit was willing, the flesh was so weak. She threatened to call her son "Lazarus" if he didn't blessed well come forth immediately. Thursday evening came and went. And Friday dawned clear and bright.

Jane's doctor phoned to ask "Anything yet?" and Jane had to admit that though the Christian fetus within her had stirred from time to time, it had clearly not heeded John Piper's recorded advice to "rise early and be diligent!" which Jane had been broadcasting to him through her belly fluid. Infant sluggard. "Okay. We'll give him until tomorrow, and then we'll have to talk about inducing," the doctor said before hanging up.

Inducing? Jane was at first delighted and reassured at the very idea that she need not to be held captive by nature, by the Little Tyrant within her. Then her self-doubt and recrimination training predictably caught up with her racing thoughts:
Would this be natural, though? Wouldn't it be cheating God? Wouldn't it be trying to snatch the reward from His Reluctant Fingers before His Own Good Time had Come? Jane wept bitterly, feeling horribly ashamed at the very things she'd actually been considering doing. Why, she was no better than an abortionist! Apart from actually killing a Christian baby, she was agreeing to let the doctor do almost precisely what abortionists did every day of their heinous lives! Laying a finger on what was not Man's place to meddle in.

Jane now knew what she had to do. She didn't know why she hadn't thought of this before. There were no hospitals mentioned in scripture. Not even one! No obstetricians or gynecologists. She was pretty sure there was a midwife in there somewhere, though. She didn't remember where, but she did remember an inspiring interview with an elderly Christian midwife in January's My Ovaries Are His! This pillar of faith had delivered four hundred and fifty three babies in her lengthy career, and had never once in all that time missed cooking her pastor husband his supper.

One phone call, and an hour later a Christian midwife was at Jane's door. Susan was a sturdy young woman who'd never had a child herself (not being married, despite going to bed early every night, and taking vitamins every morning with her daily chapter of scripture.) She was a duly certified Christian midwife, having received her training at an institution whose credentials are, amazingly, still unrecognized by the American Medical Association to this day.

That evening was the best evening Jane had spent in recent memory. She was finally doing things just as Jesus wanted. All of the doubt was blessedly gone. She had a Christian midwife rather than a somewhat snarky, coldly clinical, science-obsessed unbelieving female doctor. The house had been purged of magazines which were about...that...instead of about nearly virginal Christian childbirth. The walls rang with songs about singing about Jesus and cervix dilation. Susan even had a hymn which she was happy to teach Jane, written by a godly midwife precisely to be sung for the glory of God while the Gates of Motherhood parted like the Red Sea, gracing the world with yet another Christian to sing His praise!

When the baby finally came, Jane felt completely fulfilled. She endured the suffering of the pain of childbirth brought about by Eve's disobedience without resorting to any drugs or other aids besides a bit of Tylenol and some ice packs. Her problems were over. Her life was on track for good. No more backsliding.
Her little boy would grow up understanding about the bible and women, and would serve the Lord as no man had ever served the Lord before. He would be a Mighty Warrior for God. This little boy wouldn't be nasty like so many of the other Christian men Jane and Susan had known. He wouldn't steal glances at women's God given chests while he was talking to them. He would value God's Special Gift to women, and would one day seek out a godly, virtuous, submissive help-meet like her, just like the one described in Proverbs 31 (only with less unbecoming focus on entrepreneurship and export/import ventures) and go on to plant an army of stalwart Christian Soldiers in her obedient, on-fire-for-Jesus belly.
If all went well, as Jane now trusted her Lord it would, due to her adherence to His Word, she could raise her little one to be just as giving, gracious, forgiving and mild as she was, and not like his lustful, hypocrite of a father who, sadly, only wanted One Thing. She had only the one child, so he would be fortunate enough to be receiving her full, undivided attention right through childhood.

Jane called his name Ephraim, and as she suckled him in the darkness after Susan left, the silence broken only by a CD of John Piper laying a beat-down on Christians who weren't Serious For God, she knew she was doing exactly what Jesus wanted.

Did Jesus Sparkle? (Okay, twinkle)

2012-01-14T14:45:00.000-05:00

A guy who writes a pretty good blog was writing about Jesus lately, and he said (I believe) that he pictured Jesus calling stuff bullshit, but with a twinkle, like a fond old grandfather. This clashed with my own understanding of why people wanted to nail Jesus to things. So I wanted to comment on that. Because I'm like that.

After a perhaps somewhat sacrilegious phone exchange in which a friend and I imagined that some Christians (not blogger Dave, of course, he's smart and probably hates Twilight) might picture Jesus nowadays as being Edward from Twilight, having died, but now still living, going around without blood (having lost his own) and having supernatural powers and perhaps sparkling (or twinkling), we settled down a bit and some stuff came out.

The original blog posting David did was in response to this viral video that's out there. It really seems to be drawing together religious and irreligious alike. I haven't watched it, of course. Because I'm like that. I have always really liked Chris Tse's "I'm A Christian (I'm Sorry)" when it comes to poetry about Christianity which reaches everybody in the way that Johnny Cash and C.S. Lewis seemed to be able, magically, to do.

Whenever anything draws us together that, whenever something makes us feel like maybe we're all the same, and that we're united, some people inevitably tend to feel their identities threatened and want to say "No! THEY'RE just [the one dubious thing], but I'm [the right thing]!" I think maybe David was doing that a bit, not that my judging yes or no matters in the matter. It is equally possible he wasn't.

He was saying that this video was creating a false dichotomy (and goodness knows that gets done all the time) between claiming some kind of connection to Jesus, and being religious. He felt, understandably enough, that loving Jesus and being religious (according to the dictionary definition of the term) weren't mutually exclusive. That's a popular opinion, but one that seems to not work for a lot of people, to judge by the success of this video. This stuff I was now thinking about connected (in my head anyway) to some other good stuff that other Facebook acquaintances have linked to, (looking at you, Brandon) mostly talking about the difference between simply believing something is a fact, and believing it in the sense of it changing your life in any way. I don't think believing in Jesus is supposed to be like believing there is Australia.

But anyway, I did one of my things where I wanted to respond to his blog to disagree slightly, share different opinions, put our heads together and the like, in hopes of us learning stuff from each other and I commented, and the comment got so long I decided "this comment is long enough that it should be a blog entry, and I haven't blogged since last year, so..."

So (edited and added to it a bit. There's stuff in there that I've said before):

I think at all times when people are differing vocally from one another, there are two things going on:

-a very up front 'us vs. them' thing, which in modern times has become less of a "I would die for our side" and more a matter of cheering for one hockey team or another. Flag-waving. T-shirt support. Bumpersticker fealty. "Like this link if you'd give your life for Jesus!", "Share this video if you support supporting stuff" stuff. It always confuses me when your average everyday American republican or democrat voters fling nasty, spiteful-sounding 'we're it and you're shit' stuff at the other side, and then if you try to have any kind of serious talk about it with them, suddenly they kind of reveal that, to them, although they kind of claim to care about it, mostly it's just kind of a game to them. Kind of cheering for our side and booing theirs. It's maybe nothing more than childish name-calling without any desire, interest or even ability to discuss any of it, or back any of it up any more solidly than to look right. Ideological competitiveness, satisfying itself with burning the other side or simply making them look bad, with dismissing them out of hand as not worth thinking about, let alone talking to. They want to say "end of discussion" to make sure there isn't one, because they're not into comprehension and understanding each other, but just competing. Us vs. them.

-a much harder to see, and in my opinion easily missed and very valuable thing. A situation where understanding between two quite different human beings, and their very different ways of thinking and feeling about important stuff ,is pretty much waiting to happen. Pretty much being handed to you on a plate if you get through a discussion without being sidetracked by washroom breaks, nutritionist appointments and texting. It would be very worthwhile to make sure it does happen, I think. I tend to think that connecting is The Point in a way that disagreeing, differing and "taking a stand against" stuff really just isn't. It's natural. If you're willing to stop feeding your ego identity with the labels ("*I'M* a Christian/an atheist, while you're just the OTHER thing, you loser!") you will see how much the same you are, and how much you agree upon, and how much you can connect and work together, so that when you do find things that you differ on, stuff you care about enough to discuss, you can have a working relationship together that supports a discussion and will tend to lead to growing understanding and learning from each other.

That being said, I think Jesus wasn't very twinkly all those times when he was going around saying all those things about what he thought was weak, self-righteous, fleshly, empty religious bullshit. You know? The stuff "they" wanted him dead over? The stuff people were offended at? I can't read the gospels without seeing someone who ranted and raved enough to upset people. Very political, very acerbic. Prone to biting rhetoric. Not tactful. Certainly not consistently "positive." Like Christopher Hitchens. But only toward religious stuff. Not toward ANYTHING else. When it came to drunkards, whores and extortioners, he'd either:

-not talk about their vices at all (he simply wasn't on earth to go around stopping people from doing these things nor making them feel guilty if they did them. Not a whit more than we are here to do that either, for that matter)

-or blankly mention it ("and the man you're living with right now is not your husband") if it was on topic and worth talking about for another reason. Certainly not in the same ranty, name-calling way he is reported to have frequently used when publicly standing up and loudly attacking religious practices and figures like Pharisees and Sadducees. He never called a whore a whore, let alone referring to her as a hypocrite, a white-washed tomb, from a generation of vipers or anything like that. He called whores "Mary," or whatever their names were. And he called the Pharisees "the Pharisees", generalizing boldly and without reference to any single men who were shining examples of being exceptions to the problems in that group. He'd just say "Those religious guys? Don't live like them. It's not good enough. It's self-serving hypocrisy." We don't dare generalize like that nowadays. Except when talking about Nazis. Because who's going to have the nuts to stand up and say "I'm a Nazi and I resent the bigotry and insensitive ignorance seen in your comments"?

As to the difference between a connection or identification with Jesus, and with what we normally think of as "religion," the apostle Paul actually defines what he calls "true religion." In writing. For serious. He was defining it to correct people's existing definitions. He defines it as doing things that Jesus actually isn't documented as spending much time doing. According to Paul, true religion wasn't showing up at synagogue/church and singing and praying and reading. It was helping the widows and fatherless. Jesus certainly healed the sick and handicapped, but we don't read of him turning the widow's two mites (coins) into "an hundred and twenty mites," nor making sure that the beggar's purse kept coming up with coins. He only did the "coin in a fish's mouth" trick to handle taxes for his own sake, and more importantly, to make a point. He fed people if they were right in front of him, hungry because they'd followed him to hear him talk, when he hadn't asked them to, and was known for trying to get away from them. We never read of him going around feeding the poor as a routine thing. In fact, when a woman spends money on him and a "religious" dude (Judas Iscariot) lectures her for not spending the money on helping the poor, Jesus actually tells him off, stands by what she did and pretty much pooh-poohs the concern for the poor being presented as paramount.

So, given what Paul said, I don't think going to church or singing hymns or worshiping or bible-reading is anything we are encouraged by the bible to think of or call "religious." That's personal stuff between us and God, and it's far too intimate and personal to be merely "religious practice." True religion is charity work.

And we seem to need continually to un-confuse discussions which blur Jesus and church together. Probably why that guy made the poem and the viral YouTube video. There's for a very simple reason for this needing to be done over and over: in our culture, what we call religion (in direct contradiction to any biblical definition of religion) has become for many, what the bible would call idolatry. Idolatry is a thing you do instead of directly dealing with the divine. It's a way of abstracting things, of inserting a series of buffers, or intermediaries between you and God so you dilute the intimacy of the connection. Instead of talking to God and seeing if you think He has anything He wants you to know, feel or think about, you focus more on your singing about Him with other people. Instead of feeling about Him, you sing about, read about, talk about and do PowerPoint about how you feel about Him. And then in charity work (true religion) you spend huge amounts "raising awareness" of poverty, without having to actually talk to any dirty people.

Christianity as a practiced, idolatrous "religion" is mostly talk nowadays. A propaganda machine endlessly selling itself to its own people. An infomercial which lowers your self-esteem and increases your guilt, while always promising to fix that for you, if you do (or don't do) certain things for it. It's reading the Cole's notes for a book without reading it, and then writing a blog about how much you like the book you haven't read from beginning to end. (trying not to twinkle while typing any of that)

I am what you would tend to call a Christian. But I am really not very religious in any conventional sense of the term. The amount of time I spend in a designated church building on a yearly basis is nil, barring weddings and funerals. I am much more about wrestling with doubt than I am about singing happy songs. If you made a list of Christian things to do:

-plastic fish on car (in case you don't know what that is, think a rainbow sticker for a lesbian couple)

-Christian music in my iPod

-retreat/camp/missions t-shirts

-spending a lot of my money on third world problems instead of paying off my debts

-taking one of my bibles around with me wherever I go

-preaching unsolicitedly
-telling everyone how much I claim to love Jesus (find me any New Testament author who tells his readers that he claims to love Jesus, in those terms. I dare you.)

-dressing business casual

-citing chapter and verse to look righter when referring to concepts and situation depicted in the bible

-giving any of my time to church committees, meetings, services or initiatives

and so on,

you would find that I just don't really do any of that. Not really. At all. Am I really a Christian, then? What Christian stuff do I do?

A better way to word that, I think, is "What stuff do I do most weeks for reasons that have to do with trying to live a life which is influenced by Jesus Christ, perhaps even working as an agent for the now-departed person of the Godhead?"

Here's the funny thing: because of my belief as to what Jesus wants/would want (depending on your views as to the afterlife), I'm generally going to avoid talking to anyone about that stuff. Because it's personal. Because I'm working it out. Because I don't know you like that. Because I'm afraid of ever using it to look or feel Christian in order to boost my self-esteem or self-righteous piety a little bit. Because I think it's cheating. Because I think Jesus gave some very specific advice to his disciples to the effect that they had to do the work of being his followers, and try to make that work, but they didn't get cred or props for it. He didn't send them out, two-by-two, with matching t-shirts about their "outreach mission." He didn't entice them with the suggestion that they could put their work with poor people in Guatemala on their resumes. He didn't say they could go to bible school and then write letters like MDiv or titles like Rev. before and after their names. He didn't encourage them to ask "What religion are you? I'm Christian! Wanna come to my church and watch me be Christian?!" Because it's not a club. And it's not the Klan. And it's not the Montreal Canadiens. It's not about identity. It's not about you.

I just really don't think it was ever meant to be like it is now. And that's why it makes no sense to me. (Start of discussion. Only if you really mean anything you say you do.)

The Christmas Question

2011-12-25T22:16:00.003-05:00

I was brought up, as I have often said, by religious fanatics. This is another way of saying they were superstitious about a great many things. Rock music. Fantasy and horror novels. Television. Movies. Dancing. Vulgar/Emphatic language. Alcohol. They didn't so much think indulgence in these things would bring "bad luck" so much as that they'd mess up your life karmicly. If you went to the movie theatre, your life would take a downturn. Stuff would stop working out. You wouldn't be blessed with success. Okay, I guess that means they did think indulgence in these things would bring bad luck.

They didn't like us having anything to do with Halloween. They didn't like the religious connections of Halloween to Samhein and other stuff like that which they knew little about, but disliked and were deeply, unexaminedly superstitious about. They only discussed it with their ears wide shut. They were concerned and wanted to distance themselves and take a firm stand against the pagan/druidic roots of Halloween. They didn't like us to even SAY Halloween. They were upset by anything that happened at school that would make us have to take part in Halloween. One time in art class our teacher had us make construction paper masks on Halloween. Of course I got black and made a Darth Vader mask. I then wore it at recess. My parents had sent me to school sans Halloween costume "to be a good example to nonChristians", and they got wind later that I, at age 11, had done this and they were all wigged out by it. Mad at me. Feeling tricked and betrayed. Scared that I'd done something unlucky/worldly/not Christian. More upset than some people get when they break a mirror, spill some salt, have a black cat cross their path and walk under a ladder, all in the same hour, on Friday the 13th.

Over time my parents got more and more relig...superstitious. About Christmas too. We'd never had any Christmas decorations, nor a tree or anything like that, but over time they kept cutting back on what we were allowed to do in December too. There was even a year or two there where they made us refuse any Christmas candy or presents from others. Mostly they made up for this by taking us out and buying us presents on Boxing Day or for New Years. But we were NOT to call them "Christmas presents." If someone asked "What did you get for Christmas?" we were to say "We don't celebrate Christmas" to superstitiously distance ourselves and be a good example, and then we could say "But on Boxing Day they got me..."

Because, just like with Halloween, they were superstitious and concerned and wanting to distance themselves and take a firm stand against the pagan roots of Christmas. The tree, the gift-giving, the winter solstice. All the stuff that would have confused anyone in the bible (apart from the guy who wrote that observant Jews were NOT to go into the forest and cut down a tree, decorate it with silver and gold and sparkly things, set it up and worship it. Because God hated that.) I knew many other Plymouth Brethren families with a similar Christian prohibition against Christmas. Some Plymouth Brethren kids laughingly said they'd got things for "Snow Day." Because they weren't supposed to say "Christmas." It was beyond stupid.

Today I went to my folks' house, where the TV was on, playing movies, and their Christmas tree was lit. Thing is, it wasn't hypocrisy; it wasn't them "giving in." It was them growing up. Developing spiritually. Demonstrating an understanding of what actually matters. Showing a better relationship with joy and yearly opportunities to share and celebrate. 'Cause when others are enjoying themselves in something that isn't actually hurting them in any significant way that's your business, and you want to superstitiously distance yourself, state your concern and warn people about it, you really need to STFU and GTFO.

So you can imagine how I feel when various people get all concerned and superstitious about the Christian roots of Christmas, don't want their kids to be subjected to Christmas songs that are about angels (though dancing snowmen and flying reindeer are JUST fine) and who don't want anyone to even SAY the word Christmas. I really wish they'd STFU and GTFO. In no meaningful way is there any real "war against Christmas." Not in my area, anyway. It's a mythic thing spoken of, an urban legend, as far as we in the country know. It's not real to us. Not any more real than the idea that Christmas started out 100% Christian, with no input drawn from pagans and other religious stuff revolving around winter solstice. But I know there're idiots, on both sides, being all weird about something that can mean whatever you want it to mean. It can mean something or it can mean nothing.

If Christmas is only a Christian thing, then no one else should have it, probably. Christian kids should get Christmas Day off and other kids should go to school. If Christmas is only a Christian thing.
That would be dumb, obviously. If it is for everyone (which we're trying like hell to make sure it is), then everyone should be able to enjoy it without anyone getting embarrassed or superstitious about where it came from (pagan, then Christian, and then commercialized roots).

This is one of those things I find so stupidly reactionary and vacuously unthought-out that I could barely bring myself to even weigh in on it. It's December 25th. Do whatever. Or do nothing. And leave me alone. If I don't want to go to a church, don't bother to tell me what you think of that. And if I sing a song with Lil' Christ in it, don't bother to tell me what you think of that either. Because I don't want to hear it. I'm busy living my own life. Don't start (or make up) a war on or against something and want me to jump in.

At what we unabashedly called our high school's "Christmas Assembly," I sang "Oh Holy Night" (anti-slavery verse and all) and John "Imagine There's No Heaven" Lennon's great song "This Is Christmas/War Is Over". There was a reason for those choices. I loved singing both of them. I got lighters waved and huge applause for both, equally. There was no contradiction. People got into both. No one even commented on me singing a Christian Christmas song. No one commented on me singing John Lennon.
Like most things, Christmas isn't only one of two possible things that you have to decide between. It is many things. And it's what you make it. You can make it what you want it to be. If you want to make it a special thing you don't want anyone outside your religion from having a right to partake in, go ahead. If you want to make it an evil, creepy, source of creep, go ahead. And have a big hot cup of (unChristmas) STFU while you're at it.

What Kinds of Kids Fail High School Courses More Regularly Than Others?

2011-12-15T22:26:00.001-05:00

I wrote this at school, after fretting over the fact that, every time a kid fails, we act like that's never happened before, it's very confusing and must be explained. Actually it's a reality of the job, and I think we should know more, generally, about it. I don't think the habit of looking at every kid as a unique little snowflake is always helpful. Sometimes profiling means you have more tools to bring to understanding stuff. Here's what I wrote (it starts out more dry and academic than I usually am on here):

Any number of factors far beyond a school’s sphere of influence (and sometimes even its knowledge) have undeniably huge effects on student success. A sobering question is “What, if anything, could we do about any of this?”

Since the divorce rate skyrocketed in the 50s and 60s, extensive research has been carried out exploring links between parental splits and juvenile crime. It is very seldom that one sees a student who is in trouble with the law, but experiencing no problems in the classroom. When it comes to explaining why certain kids end up getting into trouble with the law, the parents and the home are most often pointed to.

A study by Kolvin et. al in 1988 concluded that parental splits were just as significant a factor in juvenile crime as family income, lack of parental supervision, IQ, overly large families, or hyperactivity and related disorders. The fact that all of these factors have been routinely used to explain why teenagers end up committing crime suggests that it would be only sensible to expect to see them having an effect on success in school as well.

When there is a divorce or separation going on (and in each class, there always are), many kids find their entire lives turned upside down and dumped onto the floor, and this is usually seen in their classroom performance as well. Serious illness in the family may have a similar effect, though often to a lesser degree. It is telling that several studies (among them Amato and Keith 1991; Wadsworth 1970) indicate that the death of a parent has a significantly less disruptive and lasting negative effect on a family and its members than a parental separation does.

Kids dealing with illnesses or injuries of their own, from emotional and psychological problems such as depression or eating disorders, right up through epilepsy, surgeries and cancers, predictably find that school becomes (of necessity) less and less a main focus.

Studies such as one by Hirschi (1969) indicate three factors which protect children from falling through the cracks and becoming juvenile delinquents:

· identification with parents (as fellow human beings),

· intimacy of communication with parents (two-way),

· supervision by parents. (structure, routine, boundaries and protocols)

It is interesting to see that the risk of social and legal rule-breaking is provably increased by kids not having a personal connection to, open lines of communication with, and supervision by the authority figures in their homes. I would suggest that in a classroom, teachers are as much parent figures as they are anything else, especially in the psyches of the kids.

Problems can be predicted with kids who aren’t identifying with their teachers and administrators (not seeing them as people, not accepting them as having competence or authority over kids, not sympathizing with their struggles and not feeling that they are being, nor are even capable of being, helpful or supportive in any significant way).

Equally if kids do not communicate freely with their teachers, avoiding any kind of meaningful dialogue, this cuts off any number of avenues for help and makes educating them almost impossible. Kids can use anything, including purposely topic-changing small-talk, wild stories, profanity, surly silence, belligerence, humour (and simply leaving the room or the school) to avoid any meaningful two-way communication about their success ever happening.

Also at risk are kids who are either not supervised in their classrooms, or who remove themselves from being supervised by being truant or leaving the classroom at every opportunity. Just as some students use extracurricular activities (or in-school duties related to sports or other events) to learn new skills under the friendly, looser and more personal supervision of teachers, others use them to avoid time spent in the classroom being supervised as they learn.

What is seen in the classroom when kids are “at risk” of failing?

Uninvestedness: Kids Who Don’t Hope or Care

After the first ten formative years of education, most kids have learned that adults seem to care about (to them foreign) things like savings accounts, income tax, parking, mortgages, elections, pension funds and education. Kids often have trouble identifying with anyone who is going to be talking for any length of time about these topics, let alone taking any interest themselves, though it could be argued that these things will (one day, at least) be of great importance to most of them.

Many of our students have learned that when it comes to these things, if they know nothing about them and never try to make changes to them or not, as far as they’re concerned “nothing happens either way,” so it “doesn’t matter.” If they think people should vote liberal in Lanark County, a conservative will still win anyway, every time. They’ve seen it happen their whole lives. And they’re too young to vote. So caring about things in which they don’t feel they have any say seems pointless. Getting emotionally invested in any of it seems risky, wasteful and foolish.

The depth of their understanding as to how they’re doing financially, socially and educationally goes no deeper, often, than a passionately felt “She loves me!” or “She hates me!” Their reality can be colourful and brutal, painted with the broadest of strokes. It isn’t, to their minds, that they spent all their money and then tried to make a cell phone payment and so a lady is phoning from the bank, or that they gossiped about a friend and so are now getting the cold shoulder, or that they didn’t do any school work and so are now failing a course. That cause and effect relationship simply doesn’t seem real to many of them. To many, it’s simply “She hates me.”

As childish as this sounds, kids who fail courses quite often honestly believe that they have “been failed” because the teacher “hated” them. They are quick to point out students whom they feel to be lazier and less intelligent than themselves who did better in a course, as evidence that “she loves him, so of course he did better than me!” (And things like that have actually been known to happen.) Kids have a strong belief that the world isn’t fair and can see dramas and conspiracies everywhere. They also sense the importance of healthy communication and personal connections. They know that identifying with people determines whether we can work with them.

Some parents have (sometimes in a practice handed down through several generations) just as little investment as their kids in the idea that school is necessary and good, and worth doing right and for real. Some parental figures, if quizzed, would not be able to tell you which courses their child is taking this semester. In some extreme cases parents wouldn’t actually know what grade their child is in (or what previous grade their child is still making up courses from.) I had one parent come in to demand why I was assigning exactly the same novels to her son again this year in English as I’d assigned him the previous one. She hadn’t remembered that he was taking the same course again because he’d failed it the year before. At the end of the term he hadn't attended school for two months, nor was he living in the same town as his mom.

For parents who see school as a formality, and as something to give lip service to, but which doesn’t actually matter in any real way, phone calls from teachers are just about teachers shaming parents for their child’s lack of success. For some of them, their kids are doing poorly because clearly, we “hate” them. There is some truth to this as, if no personal connection has ever formed between teacher and student, and there is no communication, and the student will not work within the structures of the classroom, success is doubtful.

Actually wanting to pass and simply being made to feel ashamed of having failed are not the same things at all. The effect of not investing emotionally in getting school credits is pretty predictable, of course. If your passing of courses and graduating high school is merely someone else’s hope (rather than your own), you are free to say “I don’t care” whenever you are urged to do work you don’t want to do. In fact, “I don’t care” becomes a magic, good-for-all-eventualities shield against troublesome authority figures. Because it works. Stumps them every time. If you really don’t care, no one can really help you at all until you do.

Disengaged Kids

A number of studies indicate that despite everything we put into teaching them, kids mostly teach each other. We are not part of their inner circle, and so we are often just talking heads to them. It is commonplace to see students daily paying no attention whatsoever to teachers and administrators who are earnestly talking away (including what PA announcements and written instructions are saying). We've all seen that. Still, we assume that if any kid is working, they must be doing what the teacher asked, or what is written on the sheet. Not so. What happens is that after having not listened, if they later feel they need to know anything, the first student who thinks s/he’s got it figured out often guides the work of anyone who gets in any way curious about it all. Fortunately for students, so many handouts, sheets, essays and assignments are so uneducatingly identical one to the other throughout the school experience that, with a quick glance at a sheet, they can develop some kind of wild guess as to what they maybe should do, and do that, after perhaps conferring with whoever is sitting nearby, working confidently away. Any teacher who routinely assigns work which isn't routine, and which has little "assignment easter eggs/powerups/hidden levels" built into it, will quickly see how on auto-pilot kids are, and how much they are relying on each other's guesses rather than teacherly instruction. Students generally prefer asking each other what we meant, rather than simply asking us, standing beside their desk at time of asking. They certainly do not trust that every single thing we tell them is very important and which they should listen to, actually is important and that they should listen to it. And they are right in not so assuming. We really do repeat ourselves, filled as we are, generally, of the correct conviction that we're not being heeded.

A kid who is ostracized or reluctant to engage with others is cut off from this network of peer support. Students who feel no connections to any students or teachers may simply not ask anyone anything, even if they need to know something in order to succeed. Even if they didn’t listen or weren’t there when instructions were given. These students may give up on assignments at this point, or may hand in what are (diplomatically speaking) brave, wild guesses at what they are supposed to be demonstrating mastery of.

To complicate things, some kids have irregular phone service at their house, or no land line. Some kids have no computers at home, or no printing and/or internet. Some don’t know how to use any of these things properly. This means even if they do schoolwork at home and have a home computer, they often can’t/don’t know how to print it or transfer the data to school for further work on it, teacher or student help, or handing it in for marks. All of this further cuts them off from being able to connect to the school, the other kids, and teachers.

A Problem Identifying with Formality

To many kids, people who are dressed “business casual” (or even more formally than that) or who use even slightly formal language, tones of voice or jargon, and who avoid conflict with odd platitudes and placating "I" phrases are simply not people they know. To these kids, people dressed this way and acting like this are about as real-world as Mickey Mouse. Many kids literally cannot identify with people painted with a veneer of formality, paper-thin courtesy and a shellacking of professionalism. They cannot view them as real human beings in quite the way they themselves are real human beings. They can't see through the candy shell, but are fairly certain it's not a person under there.

Undeniably, when it comes to people who work with addicts, gang members, teen moms and victims of any stripe, the first thing that needs to be thrown out is formality. At adult high schools, all teachers are called by their first names. Therapists do not have their patients call them “Dr.” At Alcoholics Anonymous, nobody gets called “Ms.”or "Sir."

So a strong negative response to middle-class formality and professionalism is understandable: these business casual folks who don’t swear are not anything like anyone in the families many of our "at-risk" kids come from, nor even like any friends of their family. These authority figures are, to them, dressed like landlords, lawyers, police, Jehovah’s Witnesses and politicians. Like the evil, digital Agent Smith from The Matrix. Formal language is a foreign language to many of the kids having the most trouble with school. They understandably cannot identify with administrators who spend the day coming onto the P.A. as disembodies voices, saying things such as:

Your attention please: This is an important reminder for all senior students that the third floor is out of bounds during period 1A at this time until further notice for all students not having Trent University bursary application surveys proctored on flip days this week. And a reminder as well to all students to not go up the “down” staircase at any time, particularly during lunch B or during Flex periods. As well, could the members of this year's ZOOM Student Advocacy Team report to the cafetorium now for briefing and reorienting. Thank you. TGIF.

They equally cannot identify with teachers who say things like:

Listen up, guys! This is essential to your future! You need to buy into your own success and have an Action Plan for achieving it!
Alright folks: get out your Personal Passports for Guaranteed Success (that’s your PPGSs) and turn to the "SHOOT! Action Registry" section. (It’s the section colour-coded periwinkle. Right after the sunflower "Ideas! Idea! Ideas! CURVE is your friend!" section on maximizing your own potential and formulating strategies for success…)

Paul, don’t tell me you lost your Passport to Success again?! How will you succeed now?

Okay, just go get another one from the pile. In the lavender “Totally Essential Resources You Need to Help You Succeed!” bin, yes. TERYNTHYS. That’s right. Lavender. Beside the taupe one. The big pile of papers, yes.

Many of our students didn’t learn talk like that in their homes. It sounds foreign to them because it is. It sounds like elves from Mirkwood, or Star Trek Klingons speaking their own, wholly made up tongues. Because this is made up language. It is, generally, a failed attempt at communication. It isn’t remotely from the culture these kids are from. They're too busy thinking "WTF?!" to hear and decipher a word. In their heads, people who speak it aren’t real people being real. They feel that people who talk like this (and who never swear, though they often look angry) are fake and are probably lying or selling something. (and they're not far wrong) They cannot identify with the people spouting this arcane argot, so they are mostly going to simply pretend these people aren’t there at all and hope they go away. Failing that, they can mock them for seeming so foreign to what is the culture 'round here. They feel there is something simple, honest and virtuous in what some would consider slang or vulgarity. A warm, appreciative laugh of recognition and identification rings out whenever a bit of it creeps into any conversation they hadn’t until that point been accepting as genuine. Suddenly they identify.

Unaccustomed to Structure or Boundaries

What is the effect of kids not having much parental supervision? These kids may sleep on as many as three different beds/couches in three different towns, all in the same week, every week. The word "home" doesn't mean much to them. They may have personal belongings, including school work, in all of these various places, and also in a number of motor vehicles and in their locker. (of course some fix this by never taking school work with them when they leave the building.) This lack of a home base can result in a simple “Where is your novel, Sarah?” being answered quite honestly with:

Novel? Oh that one? I dunno…I’m still mad because the principal said I did stuff I totally didn’t. I hate him, but he hates me anyway, so that’s okay. He better watch out. Anyway, my dad’s stupid girlfriend picked me up from bingo last night and I might have left it in her car, but she dropped me off at Judy (that’s my foster mom)’s house and it could be there, but then I had a fight with her doucebag son Jacob so I had to crash at my boyfriend’s step-mom’s place (her name’s Destiny) instead, so it could be there too. Bitch stole my lighter. Or Jess might have it. I’m not talking to her anymore. Such a skank. Took my weed and thirty dollars. I’ll see if I can get Jane (that’s my real mom) to drive me around and look for it, but she’s not in town again until next weekend, if she gets her license back, I mean. I’m having a super tough week, so don’t bother me or I’ll just totally lose it, okay? I SO have PMS right now... Just go ahead and teach your class or whatever and I’ll text Mark (he’s my worker) to maybe go get it or something. That book is so boring and pointless anyway. I can't read it. Oh, and plus I’m going to be away tomorrow for court. Can I go the bathroom? I need a drink. Also Stacy needs her smokes.

There are no boundaries. Persons, places and things blur together and slip and slide over into and back out of each other all week long, with no specific time and place for anything. These kids may have been raised with no regular meal times, no regular bed times, or in fact, bath or laundry days. Things like tattoos, smoking, piercings, drug and alcohol use, promiscuity (and kneejerk reflex, physically combative responses to any perceived affront to their dignity or mood) may unfold throughout their formative years, completely unsupervised (or even observed) by any parent figure, starting at a shockingly low age.

It is also possible that they are imitating their parent figures when showing immature or immoderate approaches to these. However the adults around them act is their “normal.” If the adults around them demonstrate no capacity for delaying gratification, no understanding of boundaries, and little personal restraint in most areas of their lives, kids grow up with that being normal. If failure and apathy are a child’s culture, it’s no wonder that colourful, peppy, acronym-infested brochures about maximizing one’s potential for excellence tend to fall on deaf floors.

These “absent parent” kids are often badly nourished, and their sleep habits and indulgences in junk foods, cigarettes, alcohol, pot and energy drinks/“coffee milkshake” beverages aren’t helping their brains develop nor function. For many, a strong admixture of stimulants and depressants (often along with a great deal of aspirin and other pharmacy stuff) has been the formula for getting through their day for longer than they can remember.

To expect these kids to show up to school and then to five different classes at specific, not-on-the-hour times (many kids cannot read the hands of the school’s clocks) without being late, and having brought different expected materials to each, having worked on various assignments “at home” is simply beyond some of them. Schools with "flip" timetables, in which students are not in the same class at the same time from day to day, are perhaps not really considering this.

Others have literally never had to remain within any environment in which someone else had the right to decide where they sat, whether or not they were allowed to talk or swear or eat, or what they were allowed to do with their cell phones. Some of them have been allowed to smoke at the dinner table for some time. For some, pajama bottoms, yoga pants or sweats can be worn 24/7 without being washed or removed for a week. To them, teachers who let them sit in the back of the room zoning out and playing games on their phones are acting normal, while teachers who encroach upon their accustomed liberty in these areas “hate them” and are clearly bad people with emotional problems and control issues. The fact that there are so many teachers with emotional problems and control issues does not help this impression. The experience seems no doubt like they have been sold into indentured servitude.

It’s Not Just About Class

Although a glance into the “resource room” of any school will reveal how direct the correlation between “kids in jeopardy” and kids from lower income, broken homes really is, that’s not the whole story. Sometimes kids from fairly affluent homes have many of the same problems getting through high school as their less moneyed counterparts.

First, it should be obvious that some kids with a surprising amount of disposable income can still display trouble in the three aforementioned areas. Kids from rich homes can equally be accustomed to being left unsupervised, with no regular times for eating, sleeping, homework, laundry, changing clothes and all the rest.

They can also get very emotionally cut off from their parents and end up living with closed lines of communication. Some kids communicate mostly digitally. They can, often, equally fail to identify with their parents as with students and teachers at school. Sometimes having affluent, influential, highly educated and successful parents is daunting and can cause children to despair of ever being that kind of person. Parental success is a lot to live up to, and can be its own burden.
Conversely, children of "successful" people may learn only the use of the money, the influence and the power, without having been around to see how it was earned or how it is maintained. They may come into a school feeling undeniably entitled to success simply because they are themselves. Also, children of affluent families may be unwilling or unable to connect to students and teachers who are clearly from a lower financial bracket. Hard to take a teacher seriously when your car is nicer.

No matter the reason, it is a serious problem when any child is not even slightly invested in success (as defined by a teacher or school population with which they may not identify or communicate with in any genuine way) and is also completely disengaged from most of what goes on in their classes each day. More sobering, there is no guarantee that any strategy is simply going to “fix” this situation for all affected students. At the root of the thing, if you can get the student to accept you as part of his or her life, part of his or her culture and story, that you are a genuine human being and you mean what you say and are competent and capable of communicating and genuinely helping (and willing to boot), then you may well make a difference. Or not. And you have to be prepared for both eventualities.

It would be nice to feel that we have all the control, and enough ideas to save the day pretty much every time or know the reason why, to be able to insightfully and eloquently outline the reasons for "lack of success" on forms, to be able to ensure it doesn't recur. The grim reality is that this is and always has been a two-way thing. Until a student chooses to identify with you, to communicate with you and "work with" your boundaries and structure and supervision, you can’t succeed with them on any level. And you won't have much of a clue what went on, let alone what went wrong. You'll just know that the lines of communication, the personal connection, the identifying with each other and working together instead of being at loggerheads, simply never happened.

These People Like Glee, For Goodness Sake...

2011-12-13T21:35:00.001-05:00

I've mentioned before on here my experience at the first staff meeting of the year, held before the school year started: administration was announcing a stripped-down, "kids just walk in and go to their classes" kind of first day, with a "welcome back" assembly to be held later in the week once we were all settled in.

This was met with relief by many of us, but an outcry went up from a few. "What about when we get the school mascot in, and do the school cheer, and really, really just welcome everyone back to our school, and just really make everyone feel how we're US, and we're the best school in our region and everything?" They spoke wistfully of colour-coded schools with uniforms and school songs and marching bands and cheerleaders and other things.

These are, too, the same people who squawked when our school's Latin motto was being looked at, in terms of "is 'Enter To Learn, Go Forth To Serve' kind of old-fashioned? Do we still think that word "serve" has the same context and meaning for us that it might have once had? Is this something a few of us might be into, but it's not saying anything that is reaching any of the kids it is supposed to be talking about?"

I didn't judge them, but I looked at them with new eyes and realized they felt as different from me as if they had come from a different planet. You see, the majority of teachers seem to be individualists. Every year, zippy, snappily-dressed, smiles-set-to-stunned people from who knows where show up to a hastily-called special meeting we don't want to attend, and these freaks announce "exciting new initiatives that we're very excited to be a part of this year, moving forward." We see them once and never again. We don't even know how long they hold their oddly-worded job titles. They promise the sky, and hand out fistfuls of colourful, glossily printed things that will most likely never be mentioned again. Because we go into our rooms, we do what seems best to us in there, and we resent being bothered by people who don't know what we do in there, not even getting our names, but showing up and telling us what "we're" all going to be doing.

We don't WANT to "team teach" or "standardize the whole department" for the most part, if it means interrupting or ceasing doing stuff we're trying that seems to be working. Many of us don't like time away from our classes to attend meetings, leaving our classes in the hands of fill-in strangers who can't do what we've been doing, so at best babysit their way through a placeholder day, and at worst, re-instill the idea that adults don't know kids, don't know what they're doing, and just get angry and demand things kids aren't going to give them, and then threaten things which likely aren't going to happen, and it they do, who gives a fuck? Rapport is the coin of the realm in a classroom and its sometimes hard won, and it always takes time and can always be cheapened.

Many of us are as I describe. But a few of our teachers are different. They love being on as many committees as possible. They don't think school committees (laughably called "teams" lately, like we're all going to actually wear shorts and not be sitting in chairs the whole friggin time) are most often attention-getting, ego-stroking, claiming-things-and-having-zero-effect, getting out of classrooms filled with teens to sit in rooms with adults kinda things. Many of us do feel toward them as I have just described. But some people love teams, committees, groups, collectives, initiatives and coalitions. As many as possible. Until they're goggle-eyed with stress and need heavily colour-coded schedules as badges of how sought-after their time truly is. When you need a union rep, they're on that. Any "you get a job title and a whole lot of duties and time-committment, but no extra money and probably no real benefit will be seen, nor will what you're doing still be around in three years time" kind of position, and they're first in line.

They like church. They like Girl Guides, Scouts, Rotary Clubs, Legion, Civitan, Monarchist Clubs and town council. It makes their eyes light up. I really don't get them at all. They're not bad people. Sometimes they're almost a quarter as effective and important and influential as they are letting on. And that's certainly not nothing. But I don't get them. They don't seem like part of my species. They think if one person singing or dancing is cool, twenty or fifty people singing or dancing is magic! Not to me. I think the more people involved, the less impressive. If one singer can bring a tear to my eye, I'm deeply impressed. A massive choir? Never going to bring anything to me eye. These people like Glee, for goodness sake. So, where I'd like one voice singing "Don't Stop Believing," they'd actually prefer a choir doing it. Why? I do not get that... The Beatles singing "The Long and Winding Road" or "Here Comes The Sun" has a quiet, understated soul that is amazing. A school choir of people who can certainly sing, being conducted lockstep into an acapella, robotic, watery, plastic version? Not my idea of fun. Musicals, to me, have no soul. To me they are cheesy. Like Cheez Whiz is cheesy. Fakey. Insincere. Painful.

I think these mysteriously collectivist beings define their own identities very much in terms of what role they play in what groups of humans. I guess I don't do that very much. If I listened to what groups tell me, I'd have to accept, for no very good reason (besides "for the good of the group") that I am gay, a Satanist, a religious fanatic, clinically depressed, evil, cruel, lazy, perverse and any number of other things I must conclude I simply really am not. I've been told I am any number of things my whole life, by any number of people, in groups and individually. I have had to learn to accept that they don't know who I am, and then I have to just go about doing what I'm doing as a free agent. I have noticed that the better, deeper, more passionate and more astute my choices are, the more stupid and bad things they can be misattributed to.

I am a chronic lone wolf. Many teachers are like this. One lesson that is dying slowly and hard is that I can just go do what I want, and I don't need to argue with people before doing it, and I often don't need to get permission, and I don't need to announce why I'm not doing what has been done before, or by others, or might generally be expected. I can just go ahead and do my thing. Better that way. Avoids conflict. Spends the time in possibly succeeding rather than in talking to others about trying to succeed in ways they don't like/understand/approve of.

Every time I say "Now, I know you're used to..." or "Now, instead of..." or "Now, usually...", I'm kinda drawing attention to a potential fight we could have, or inviting comments as to "Well, what's wrong with the old way?" or "Why take the extra trouble for no reason?" or "Do you think you're better than..?" I might sound terribly arrogant also. I have actually worked with people who assumed that if I didn't do pretty much exactly what they were doing, the way they were doing it, that I clearly disrespected them and didn't think what they were doing, and how they were doing it, was any good. Nothing could be further from the truth. Fact is, I'm not paying much attention to what they're doing or how they're doing it, unless I for some reason want to steal and retool some bits of it.

But I have offended people by adapting the current way of doing stuff to something a bit more me. They have felt that I was arrogant or disrespectful. That really upset me. I have had to explain to many people over the years that I'm a lot like that kid who feels a whole lot better once she's drawn the logo of her favorite band on the front of her binder. Now it feels like mine. So, when I work, I like to make things up and try them out and learn and innovate. In fact, that's the only thing that makes my job something I'm into. Inventing. Experimenting. Adds suspense. Means I am often wondering "Now why did this thing work so well? I don't get it..." while others are wondering "Why does this thing never work? Kids sure are stupid and horrible."

This has been called "re-inventing the wheel" in the past, usually in the context of "I don't see why we(you) need to be..." Thing is, it's about growth to me. It's about having a class that is changing each year, and maybe adjusting and being flexible enough to show the mark of whatever kids are being run through my little system, for good or bad. Some classes are more red-necky than others. Different things fly with different groups. Increasingly, I teach very differently depending on who my audience is. It's like if you play music in various different venues. It's like being The Blues Brothers and singing "Stand By Your Man" and "Rawhide" because you're in a bar with both kinds of music (country and western!).

So I'm an individualist. Every time something says "Alright everyone..." they've lost me. When they say "You know what would be so fun? Let's all..." they've once again lost me. My whole family's a bit like that. I remember growing up and every time there was a one-size-fits-all, or "go on, try it. I guarantee you'll like it because how can anyone not like it?" thing, whoever was offering this turned out to have no clue about me at all. How could I not like football? How could I not like coffee? How could I not like Armageddon? Pearl Harbor? Transformers? The Tragically Hip? I could alright. I could not like the shit out of anything anyone tossed at me. Because someone was tossing it at me and assuming I was enough like everyone else that I'd like it? Maybe a bit. But it certainly couldn't be explained wholly by that.

Was I weird? Yeah. Liked things many others didn't. Didn't like things many others did. But I'm not that weird. Every single thing I like (and I like so many, many things, many of them nerdy or dark) is liked by an awful lot of others, and not just weird people on the Internet. How can I like Babylon 5? How can I like Neil Gaiman and Alan Moore? How can I like Pink Floyd? Are those even questions?

I don't like packages, I guess. I want to pick and choose. I have paid extra so as to avoid getting fries with that. I don't understand why I should compromise when I'm signing up for something I could just as easily have nothing to do with. When it comes to cable TV, I want the package that gives me only the few premium channels and none of the others. No such package exists. To me, it looks like a scam to make you have to pay maximum rate to get any two good channels. Not into that. I don't like the radio. I'm not willing to listen to the talking, and the songs I don't like. I don't like network TV. I'm not willing to have to watch things at a certain time, and have to spend an hour doing it instead of forty minutes, just because someone wants to try to sell me life insurance, toilet paper and lady razors.

I don't like church. I'm not willing to try on that one-size-fits-us-all thing. I will meet up with Christians and discuss stuff and talk about the bible and write stuff and worship or the like with a great deal of contentment. But I don't join things. I don't like being a member. Membership has its fees, responsibilities and obligations. If you're an individualist, you really start to notice just how many compromises are made to maintain groups and status and peace within them, how much of who people are and how they live their lives are molded by the groups they find themselves in.

When you meet people, they try to slot you into an identity based on what groups you're part of. Protestant or Catholic? Modern or traditional worship? The "married with small children" group? The gay group? The hockey fan group? They Star Trek nerd group? The stoners? The jocks? The preps? It's like high school all over again. Like any good little angst-ridden goth/emo/scene kid, I gotta be me, and if you think you know me by identifying some group you think I fit into, go ahead and see how well that works.
If you want to actually know me of course, you'll have to be willing to hang out with me. And I'm not willing to hang out in groups. I won't be at your church. I'm not going to the Rotary Club meeting and paying membership dues. You'd have to actually go out for coffee/a beer with me. And if you're not willing to do that? Don't worry about it. But don't judge me and don't tell others who you think I am. Because you don't know me.

Why Would Anyone Want To Kill Someone Like Jesus?

2011-11-20T12:52:00.001-05:00

Because He basically kept standing up in church and in the middle of town (they didn't have TV or YouTube or newspapers) and saying this kind of thing (paraphrased into modern cultural references so people might feel it more deeply):

Beware of the kind of Christians which love to go around wearing pointedly modest clothing, and love being recognized in public and sitting in the front rows in church and standing up and speaking at various events: which make long prayers for show and preach and post inspiring things on Facebook with pictures of the sun bursting through the clouds. These shall receive greater condemnation.

When they tell you to do something that is from the bible, do that, but don't act anything like them, because they say one thing and then don't actually do it once they've said how important it is to agree that it is important. They paint unattainable images of supposedly ideal Christian life, though they themselves are making no real effort to live that way. Everything they do is to be seen as Christian by others: they dress in carefully understated business casual outfits (khaki and golf or rugby shirts) so as to seem affluent but classy. They love to sit in the seats of power and influence at church and at Christian gatherings. They like to be called "pastor," "reverend," "Father," "Sister" or "Brother."

Do not let anyone call you by these titles, for one is pastor and reverend, and that is Christ, and you are all brothers and sisters. And don't call anyone on earth "Father Geoff" because you have a Father in heaven already, and neither be called pastors, for you already have a shepherd, and that is Christ.
Do not be like the Christians who post things they are supposedly praying on Facebook or Twitter, showing off their contrite spirits and prayerful eloquence to a global audience. They have their audience and God's not in it. Do not be like the Christians who announce in person and on YouTube, their websites and the very t-shirts they wear that they support various charities. They have gotten the recognition they seek from the group of people they have reached with their posters, bumperstickers and brochures. And God's not part of that group. If you make a donation to a charity, let not your Visa card know what your PayPal account is doing.
And don't pray long, wordy prayers, superstitiously repeating the same supposedly magic phrases over and over again, hoping God will give you what you want if you throw enough words, repeated enough times, at Him. Pray privately in your room where no one can see, and be brief and to the point.

But woe unto you, Catholics and Protestants, Evangelicals, Charismatics, Mennonites, Plymouth Brethren, Quakers and Emergents! You are all play-acting. You are locking the doors of Heaven, and are neither going in yourselves, nor allowing anyone else to go in, inviting them instead to vow to remember to commit to think about remembering to rededicate their lives to remembering to consider going in and then watching a PowerPoint slideshow and singing a song about it without having ever done it.

Woe unto you, Catholics and Protestants, play-actors! For you travel to the other side of the planet to make one Christian convert, and when he is made, you make him twice as much the child of hell as you are yourselves.
   Woe unto you, blind pastors, which say "We place no real emphasis, and waste little time talking about our church building, because churches are made of people and not bricks, but let's talk for two hours about the money we've spent, the money we've raised and the further money we want to collect and spend on multimedia extravaganzas to pull in more converts, while people are sitting at home thinking of killing themselves or wondering how they're going to raise a baby, or if they're gay or not!"
   You fools and clueless: what's more important? The church as a corporation with money which is wholly invested in marketing itself, or the church as a group of people, many of whom need you not being afraid to "get real" with them?
   Woe unto you, Catholics and Protestants, empty infomercials for church living! You raise charity money but have omitted the weightier matters of Christianity: fair judgment, mercy, forgiveness, grace and faith. You think forgiveness is nothing more than a promise not to bother someone about a given shortcoming until the next time they annoy you!
   You blind people in important positions of church oversight, which gag at the idea of swallowing a mosquito, and swallow a moose whole. Woe unto you, Baptists and Free Methodists, you piles of garishly coloured Jesus junk mail cluttering the doors of the nation! For you make clean the outside of the cup and the undersides of the plates, but inside they are full of moneygrabbing avarice, pride, trite self importance and insincere personal indulgence. You blind church-goer, cleanse first that which is inside the cup and on the plate, that the outside of them may be clean also.
   Woe unto you, Vineyard people, Harvest House and River of Life Ministries, hypocrites! for you are like whitewashed burial crypts, which indeed appear beautiful outside, but are within full of dead men's bones, stench and rot.
   You also outwardly appear to be good churchgoing people to your neighbors, but within you are full of fakeness, insanity, rage, jealousy, competitive piety, deceit, self-delusion and corruption.
   Woe unto you, Presbyterians and Pentecostals, you actors in B movies! because you quote C.S. Lewis and G.K. Chesterton and say "If we had been around when they were alive, we would not have gone on YouTube and made shrill, shrieking videos decrying ALL IN CAPS how they DENY THE TRUTH OF THE TRINITY!!! or ARE NOT CLEAR ON ETERNAL SONSHIP!!! DONT LISSEN TO HIM OR YULL END UP IN A LOST ETERNITY!!! We would certainly not have stood up on our pulpits and at the dinner table and warned people not to read the past equivalents of The Shack or Blue Like Jazz because we were claiming, without reading them, that they were full of lies about God."
Consider: You are the children of them which defamed and censored, called "commies" and sanctioned anyone who wasn't blindly supportive of the churches and their leaders and traditions, and of conserving your own error and of Republican politicians in general. Go ahead and fill the blood-stained jackboots of your fathers. Conserve their legacy and the tradition of doing things their way in the name of being right, no matter the cost to others.

You serpents, you generation of vipers, how can you escape the damnation of hell? In light of this, look: I send unto you malcontents, objectors, authors, poets, songwriters, social workers and therapists. I send unto you earnest teenage girls who were molested by their pastors who then told them not to read Harry Potter. They are people and they have stories to tell. I send unto you bitter choirboys who were molested by their priests, who then told them not to play Call of Duty. They are people and they have stories to tell. I send unto you angry gay Christians who are ostracized and alienated by married church members who have committed adultery and paid prostitutes for blowjobs in the back of their SUVs and then "spoke out" against gay marriage because they felt it demeaned the institution of marriage. God has sent homosexuality upon your culture, as said the scriptures, and gay Christians are people and they have stories to tell, if they are not shoved into a dusty shoebox in the back of a closet in a church basement.
You have brothers and sisters with you. And some of them you will kill the careers of; and some of them you will publicly humiliate and defame in your churches and homes, and hound and badger and vilify on the Internet: that upon you may come all the righteous blood shed upon the earth, from Mahondas Ghandi to Martin Luther King.

(That's why people wanted him killed. Because he sounded like that to them, a whole lot of the time.)

Abstraction

2011-11-11T22:36:00.001-05:00

When I worked at Nortel, I had just come from working for government agencies with the developmentally handicapped. I had already got a snootfull of euphemisms and indirect talk. Now, my own heritage is that I come from unPC, blunt, socially awkward stock, people who don't know how to say things gently. That being said, I resented what was being done to language (and, by proxy, thinking) in those kinds of jobs.

All of my managers were women. And the sorts of women who got positions of power were women who cared more how things looked or seemed than how they were. It was important to them that they seemed successful and in control at all times. This meant that noticing any problem or inconsistency was a way to get unpopular fast. Even if you were drawing attention to it only by starting to fix it. Well I have a bit of a knack for seeing just those things. It's built into my basic design. It certainly can be useful, especially to people in groups, where things can get missed so easily, but that stuff's seldom welcomed.

In these jobs, I'd say something like "This has been going on. It is a problem. I think we should fix it." Right away, the women (they were not only always women, they were always of a very specific type) would get pained expressions on their faces liked I'd sworn or farted or something, and they'd say things like "Well, I'm sure you feel that there's an issue, but..." and then they'd make it go away, with language. It wouldn't be a fact anymore. It would become merely something I felt, because I was whacky, and that they in turn felt they weren't going to discuss, and in fact felt resentful about having any attention drawn to. And I realized "My language is being corrected. These ladies with very little education, or a bit of training in accounting or management or business administration are correcting my language. And I just got a degree in English Literature. The word "problem" isn't allowed. They want me to say 'issue' and they don't want me leaping on 'issues' to point them out and fix them. They want them to disappear without being fixed, because each one makes them feel less successful. There aren't any problems. There aren't even any issues. If I speak of any, or try to fix any, they will have concerns, and nobody wants concerns."

Also, you didn't say things like "embarrassing, bad, wrong, mistake, screwup, ineffective, broken, damaged, layoffs, disappointing, unworkable," or "silly." No, all of those words, those intellectual and emotional labels, those judgments or reactions, had to simply be replaced with the term "negative." (If you were talking about plural nouns, they could be called "negatives.") In fact, if you were really on your game, you'd say something more like "not the most positive." So, you wouldn't say "Bob got laid off. That sucks." You'd say "Bob was surplussed. That's not the most positive, I guess." It was about abstraction. I was simply not made for that. I was all about using language to accurately convey problematic stuff so we could look at improving it. I wasn't ready for a place where, if one person said something that wasn't true, and another person said something true, but unwelcome (because it didn't help the Success Story we were all required to be telling) nothing would be said at all, ever about the untrue statement, so long as it was "positive." Immediately, however, the unwelcome, off-point commenter would be reprimanded with a "That's actually pretty negative." I realized I was part of a big game of Let's Pretend. That stuff actually scares me. When you're dealing with people's lives and time and money, there is no room for anything but dealing in reality and truth.
If I as an individual screwed up, I'd get a talking to alright, with a bunch of "feelings" talk tossed in, all of which always made me feel worse rather than better. It often didn't matter what had happened, we were to take extremely seriously people's impression of what happened, with whatever had actually happened being completely irrelevant, and there was no focus on fixing anything, only on deciding whose feelings were to be focused on and dwelling in those feelings. Invariably, the person with the upset feelings. The more abstracted, vague, uprooted from facts, and euphemistic the talk got, the more I felt uncomfortable with it. And frequently, I got in trouble for seeing problems, mentioning them, and then having them happen. It was like they thought if I'd simply not thought about them, they wouldn't have happened. Nortel was run on blind optimism. (well, all optimism is blind, just like all pessimism is. I tried to explain that to a girl recently but she killed herself before we could pick that conversation back up again.)

I work in schools now. The corporate crap-talk is catching up to me here too. Increasingly, the people with any power in education are not educators or even behaviourists, but rather management, marketing, accounting, planning and public relations people. Principals become less educators and more those other things. The principals become less and less concerned with (and competent to discuss) what sorts of things are teaching kids stuff, and what sorts of things actually prove kids have learned stuff, and become more and more concerned only with whether parents and the community are all clearly getting the message that our school is providing world class educational opportunities in a variety of flexible learning environments for the broad cross-section of society represented in all of our diverse learners, each with their own attributes, aptitudes and attitudes, which we, as a school, value, foster, model, facilitate, scaffold and nurture daily with design-down, forward-focussed, centre-motivated, upwardly-aspiring, rollout methodology, pedagogy and ideation. Policy and decision-making are driven by what can be claimed (and neat acronyms made), not what needs to actually be workable, actually achieved.
Teachers have to sit through interminable meetings in which Mission Statements and new Vision Initiatives are unrolled, ramped up, rolled out, tabled, implemented, launched and spoken to. (I'm surprised, given the passion which which they are often presented, that they are not simply ejaculated.) Normally we are pulled in to admire these rhetorical, semantic trainwrecks when we've got report cards waiting for us to complete. I've seen this stuff before, too. All of this shit comes from the contrived corporate crapfactories that are seeking government bailouts because they are such houses of cards. Why are economies and corporations alike foundering so much lately? Because of what is at the heart and the foundation of them. You can't build a kingdom on optimism and greed. (if it's a church you're thinking of, rather than a corporation or other empire, instead of greed for sales, think greed for converts. Instead of greed for as many facilities and buildings, think the same thing, but in terms of church buildings. Instead of greed for as many new employees as possible, to meet the need of how much work they're getting, think greed for new members, and committees, initiatives, projects and missions. The blind need to simply be doing big things, not to achieve great good, but to be the big people who are doing the big things.)

My principals have performed well to varying degrees whenever I've fallen afoul of the usual "one or two parents in every year's worth of kids" who is going to come in and raise as much shit in the school as they can if their completely helpless, surly, coddled juvenile delinquent isn't being given solid passing grades and being made to feel special despite how many classes they've skipped, assignments they've not attempted, and teachers they've called fags and then told to fuck off. Many administrators just start with "You've got a parent pissed off? Why'd you do that? I don't really care what they did, or what the kid did or didn't do, nor even what you did or didn't do, nor indeed what happened here, but the fact is, they're pissed off. I certainly do not have the time to get into the details with you. They accused you of all sorts of things. How are you going to do your job here and not get accused of these things? We can't have this sort of thing as a school. We have to make sure that parents are all getting the right message. And by "we" I mean you. Fix this for me and make sure it doesn't happen again." Often it's more of the "The facts don't matter. What you said doesn't matter. What happened? Irrelevant. This is about what impression Mrs. Surly says she took away from the conversation I made you have with her, once she'd had a couple of days to think about it and rewrite most of it."
Some are a bit better. But each one has increasingly felt the pull to be more of a marketing agency for the school, with "the customer is always right" approach to parents who are very angry that in high school, suddenly real failure starts to become possible in certain classrooms, of which mine is a proud example. I do not believe success means anything if it was impossible to fail. I don't believe you can teach kids to take risks if you make sure there aren't any. I don't believe that the less the kids do, the more the teacher should do.

The language gets farther and farther from talking about anything that's actually happening or not happening. The people who write policy for our school board, who show up with glossy pamphlets and booklets and even glossier patter and smiles get farther and farther removed from being recognizable as knowing anything about how to handle a classroom.
The other day I thought to myself "I am going to imagine that, for some reason, some day, a specific administrator who I'm imagining, for some reason had to come in and teach my classes. The ones she normally interrupts continually, using phone, intercom and knocking on my door when I'm teaching. I sat in a staff meeting and just imagined that she had to make them treat her with respect. That she had to make them leave each other alone. That she had to make them believe she knew what she was talking about, knew what was going on, knew what she was doing. That once she'd taken attendance to her own satisfaction, she'd have to actually get them to understand and do things and that she'd have to deal with one half to a third of them trying like hell not to do them and claiming ignorance of and surly disinterest in those things."
Well I simply couldn't imagine her being able to even start doing my job. The very thought was amusing. I can't imagine she was ever able to do my job. Because she clearly can't deal with more than one kid at a time on the best of days. That's why she has the job she does. She can't make twenty kids shut and listen to her with any seriousness. She just wouldn't be able to do the job she constantly interrupts my doing. Couldn't. Not even without her interrupting by classroom phone and in person, as often as three times in one hour, to pester herself with questions or information about kids who aren't there, haven't been there and aren't going to be there, who haven't done work, aren't doing work and aren't going to do work, but for some reason need me to stop doing my job in that room right now, all to provide information to all and sundry regarding what they haven't done and what they will, in future, also be choosing not to do, and which I will then have recorded in great detail their not doing and not having been there to do, but must then justify how I failed to engage and promote their success through student-centred pedagogy while working in an administration-centered school board.
Because you don't get kids to do things they don't feel like doing because you're a good manager of people, a good administrator, a good scheduler. You get them to do those things because you build a relationship with them based upon being convincingly genuine as a human being they can relate to.

This week two people I cared about died. Also, there was a Remembrance Day Assembly today. (Outside of Canada, Remembrance Day is called things like Veteran's Day or ANZAC Day.) So one person died of old age, and the other committed suicide, though no one's really told me about it. (The "remembered" soldiers from the wars, of course, were killed and died.) But do you want to see a partial list of words which were never used in any of the talking and electronic communications regarding all of this death? Here it is: death, dead, killed, died, grave, suicide, funeral, loss, sad, alone, miss, never. How do you even have a conversation about those things without mentioning those words? Well, you say things like:

-gone to be with her Lord, now she's finally in the Loving Arms of her Dear Savior, on the Other Side

-these men paid the highest price, making the ultimate sacrifice

-she succumbed after a long, brave struggle with depression

-passed away, passed on, is no longer with us

-the celebration of life/visitation will be on Sunday

I asked a class "Why did we read those men's names?" The answer was "Because they passed away." I have to tell you: death is tough to deal with emotionally. For me. This week. And for me, when we're not allowed to say what happened, it is that much harder. At high school Remembrance Day Assemblies, kids have to be forcibly made to go sit in the chairs, because the favourite place of many of them is to stand at the back of the room, leaning on something, wearing their hats, watching the more compliant kids sitting in chairs watching a young soldier put up happily posed pictures of various whacky shenanigans by other soldiers when he was stationed in Afghanistan, without really mentioning the fact that Remembrance Day is anything to do with death in any form. Death was not mentioned. Call of Duty was. And some of the kids texted what was happening to other people who weren't in the room. Telecommunications is a technology used to put as many buffers between us and real-life experience as we can. Kids watching kids watch a soldier putting up pictures of other soldiers playing military shooting games on XBOX360 in which they play idealized soldier characters who get shot and "go hide in bushes and their life comes back" to quote the inarguably highly-trained, intelligent, charming young man who spoke to us. He at least said "It doesn't work like that." But he was so charming and funny and "Aw shuck!" that no one got a sense of loss or risk or death or anything unpleasant for a moment.
A girl in my class scoffed afterward that "this other girl" didn't even know what a poppy means. I asked her what it meant. She said it was a peace symbol. It was an anti-war thing. When I told her it meant blood, death and a way of easing the pain of the wounded and dying, it flew so counter to her expectations, to the message she'd been getting, that she couldn't really believe me. Couldn't believe the simple facts. Poppies mean peace. They represent there being no war.

It is my birthday this weekend. I don't know if I'll see any friends or relatives. I have two funerals to go to, neither of which is really being called a funeral, and I don't want to go to both. In fact, I don't feel able to handle both. At all. I might cry or something. I think I'll skip the "old lady who stopped writing to me once I really wasn't coming back to church again" one. It will be a big party with people being Christian at each other, and people who are shunning me for life asking me how I'm doing. I don't think I could keep from punching Christians there.
The other is the girl I was hoping to hang out with last weekend but who is dead. No doubt there will be many Christians acting punchworthy at her "celebration of life." Fact is, she's dead. No one celebrated her life until she ended it.
I found out from a Facebook status saying "Katie I will always love you." I knew that this wouldn't be the status if things were ok. If things were ok, the status would be more mundane, or only kinda roughly affectionate. I sort of knew right then.
When I checked her Facebook page and people had posted "too many" pictures of her at different ages, I had to "just know" but not really know. I've been stuck like that all week. I have chatted with the bereaved, dealing boyfriend about it, on Facebook, though he's a couple of blocks away. None of it was really directly about her. It was about "arrangements." It was about "dealing." It was about feeling numb, which is to say being in shock. There were pretty much no facts of any kind in the mix. No real mention of her. I have no idea what happened. And no voices. No faces. He LOLed occasionally. This is all a little too surreal for me.

Again

2011-11-08T20:35:00.003-05:00

When I first met Katie a couple of years ago, she was a cute, perky little thing working at the pet store. She had a big smile and she spoke warmly to everyone, eyes quickly moving from person's eyes to person's eyes. She was immediately recognizable as one of those people who light up a room. I saw a jar on the store counter which said she was raising money to go to Guatemala to help build stuff. The word "missions" was on it, so I knew it was church-based.

"What a typical cheery church girl!" I thought. "I can never relate to those people. Too sunshiney and out of touch with stuff they think is too dark. One day she will likely get disillusioned with all of it when she gets a taste of the real world. The one over here, where you have to live in the grey mundane bureaucratically-bounded tedium, rather than the one where you get to be a magic white person who helps brown people. Then we'll talk."

As I went to the pet store for cat food every few months over the next year or so, I saw the jar gone, and her gone too. "Katie in Guatemala?" I asked, and was told that she was.

She came back eventually. We both knew Dave, who'd been her manager at the coffee shop which had been her second job. I couldn't quite tell how old she was. Too young for me to date, though, I was sure. Maybe 20?

But then one time I went to the pet store and she looked different. She was wearing a lot of black. No makeup. A wool hat over her hair. She was a bit more sober-faced. "Church Girl is finally going through that process of getting disillusioned with church stuff and being a bit wild," I suspected. I tried to talk to her about her trip and she said she was "giving all that a rest for a while." It was clear that she was doing some heavy thinking. It looked like it could have been a deep, meaningful conversation, but she kept saying "I...can't think right now." She was clearly overcome with her introspection. Was trying to make sense of many things.

Months after that, and maybe two years after first seeing her working there, I went in to buy cat food and she was standing outside smoking. She had a new facial piercing (a "Monroe") and a wrist tattoo which said "This too shall pass."

"Church girl gone all the way rebel" I thought. We chatted. It was lively and sparkling and mostly about music and she wanted to talk more. I mentioned I'd written my second book and she wanted a copy. I said I'd leave her one. I went back a few days later and did that.

We talked a bit on Facebook, though she didn't "do Facebook" much, and she was full of questions about my book. She mentioned that she had trouble with depression. She asked if it would be weird to hang out. I said it would be fine. She'd told me that she had a boyfriend, so that made things simple, though as my friend Mark says, nothing a man and a woman do together is ever completely innocent.

I met her at the coffee shop which was her second job, and bought an organic soda, as I don't drink coffee. Her boss was a Christian who was connected by church and marriage to every Christian person I knew locally. She shared her experience of local churches, and seemed to see everything I saw. She said church was something she tried, but it didn't work for her. "They decided I was unsaveable" she joked. Turned out she was actually 24, having just had her birthday. Still too young to date, but not so embarrassing for a high school teacher in his forties to be seen having coffee with.

She'd asked if I wanted to sit inside or out front in the sun. I knew she liked the sun, so I said outside was better. She sat down on the grass instead of at the little tables, so I creakily sat on the grass with her and she showed me some things she was learning on guitar, and smoked and played me songs on her phone that she wanted to learn, and she had me play and sing on her guitar. Her boyfriend showed up from work (he had too many jobs) and seemed cool with us hanging out, eager to meet another person trying to come to terms with having Christian beliefs and upbringing, but problems with church Christianity.
We adjourned to the pub around the corner, where Katie knew everyone, and we sat on the back patio and she smoked cigarettes and we drank beers and talked and talked as the sun set. We laughed a lot.

The next weekend she offered to meet me "for coffee" at the coffee shop just down from where I live. We sat outside as everyone in town walked by. Between the two of us, we knew everyone. She had a coffee and I had an organic soda.

Then we walked down to a park. In the autumn sun we sat on a picnic table and talked about our plans to get in better shape. She claimed to be able to do ten pushups. Not bad for a girl. I wasn't sure how many I had left in me, but we got down in the leaves and she did ten and I did twenty without much trouble, and we got up, her with a big orange maple leaf stuck to one boob. (She had great boobs.)

We walked around the area, and through the park and down the big hill behind the arena, and then we came upon the pile of snow behind the arena from the Zamboni grooming the ice. She decided we had to hit a big tree with snowballs. We threw snowballs at it for a while until we were hitting it well, and then came back to where her bike was. We climbed out onto a concrete abutment by the waterfalls and talked about our apartments and rent and neighbors and stuff. It got cold and the sun had set, so we agreed we'd hang out the next weekend too.
"My place or yours?" she wanted to know. Mine is messy, so I said hers would be better. "Mine's messy too!" she protested, but agreed to clean it. "You bring a pizza and we'll watch Suckerpunch." She really wanted me to see it, though I was unenthusiastic. She said she liked movies about people in emotional distress, dealing with their problems.

The next weekend, after the usual Facebook messages saying "Do you still want to hang out? You know shit and are wicked smart and know about depression and everything. Are you sick of me yet?" I went to her place. She'd bought Suckerpunch so we could watch it.

The doorbell was broken so I went up and knocked. No answer. I decided she might be late getting home from work, and didn't see her red bicycle, so I decided to walk around the block and see if she'd get home during that time. I was halfway around when she leaned out of her window and said "How does someone miss the whole building?!" It turned out she'd had her washing machine on and hadn't heard the door.

I came in, met her pet bird and we watched Suckerpunch. I was perhaps a little MST3K, and a little jokey about it, but she didn't seem to mind. Then she put on Equilibrium with the sound low and we talked. She hadn't read George Orwell's 1984, nor seen V For Vendetta, so I told her about those and Gattaca and other movies of that type. She seemed interested. Then we got a bit deep. She sketched out her situation, which was that all summer long she'd play guitar and hang with her boyfriend and work two jobs, and bicycle, but she'd be haunted by the feeling that she was wasting her life, that she needed to get an education, get an important job, probably in the third world, making a difference. What was the point of anything? There had to be one, and she thought there wasn't. God was supposed to provide one and He wasn't real. In wintertime, when the sun left us, all this would really catch up with her. "I almost died last year," she told me.

I told her she was being a bad mum to herself, shoving herself in a direction she wasn't too clear about, telling her that what she was doing wasn't good enough. I tried to talk to her (as I'd been for weeks) about black and white thinking, about all or nothing approaches not being the best ones. I talked about how accepting "what is" can be kind of essential before changing it and moving on to making other things be. I talked about finding small "points" rather than one large one, about how she clearly felt that to be happy, one had to pretend, because all the real stuff was really awful. I talked about how pessimism is just as blind as optimism. I likened both of them to kids given a box filled with red and green Easter eggs, with one kid scrambling for a handful of green ones to prove Easter eggs are really green, and discarding the red ones because they didn't help make that point, while the other kid was doing the opposite. I explained that our tendency to think only bad things were real wasn't accurate. She seemed to like that. She always listened with rapt attention, knees drawn up to her chest, big eyes, following my face and gestures. She always claimed that what I said made sense and sounded good, but that she wasn't sure she could quite look at things that way. I was presenting the idea that she needed to give herself some middle ground, some room to breathe, some peace.

Her boyfriend came home, and quite unjealously plopped himself between us where we'd been sitting on the couch while the sun set. We chatted and talked more as Equilibrium finished. He talked about church stuff and his favourite bands, and how he and Katie had been working together in Guatemala and the Christian folk had wanted them to not be alone together. He talked about music and his church experiences. He talked about trying to get along with Christian parents while being sexually active. We talked about how Christians over-emphasize the biblical image of us being sheep, focussing upon herd movement, following the flock, and pastors (shepherds). Not as much mention of the soldiering, race-running, wrestling, "tree-planted-immovable-unshakeable-by-the-water" imagery as of the sheep stuff.

She said "But it says 'the Lord is my shepherd', right? So you're supposed to be sheep, according to that."

I said, "No, it's just a description. Because people are sheep. Often foolishly so. It's not something we have to try for. It is reality, mostly. And David wrote that, presumably, when he actually was a shepherd. Picture him sitting at 4:20 on a hillside looking at all his sheep, smoking a joint. He says to himself 'So, I'm like....(inhale) a shepherd, right? And the Lord...(exhale) is like MY shepherd... (cough) Yeah. That's so trippy.' So not an instruction. An observation." We had a great time and I went home, with that feeling like I wasn't the only one, for once, who wanted the talking to continue. I walked home in the chilly autumn darkness.

The next week I wondered what she'd made of our "getting deep." I wondered what she was thinking about it. I sent her a Facebook message and "gave her time" when she didn't answer immediately. The next Sunday (two days ago) I went to the pet store to see how things were. She wasn't working. So I left her a phone message.

Then today, I checked Facebook and saw her wall was now a tribute to her. Because she's dead.
No one's saying what happened, but I think I know. I remember hearing a lot of sirens Sunday evening now. Just after the sun set. Not long after I'd phoned.

My blood feels hot and fizzy. I feel like I can't breathe. I feel like I got stabbed. I feel like I felt those other times, like when I heard Doug had put a revolver in his mouth and pulled the trigger while talking on the phone to Michael, like when I heard Danny had hung himself from a rafter in his dad's barn, like when I heard Brian had overdosed, like when I heard that Paul the bartender had fallen in the bathroom and broken his neck, like when I heard that Rose had died in a car accident, like when I heard Bruce had put a shotgun to his chest and pulled the trigger, like when I heard Brett had stabbed his sister Dawn so many times in the belly in their parents' kitchen and now she was dead and he was in prison.

"When I talk to girls," I'd told her, sitting on the grass in the sun, holding her guitar, "Things go spectacularly wrong. First that one I just told you about, and look... now I decide to 'talk to the Christian girl who works in the pet store,' and look what happened there!" She laughed.

Look what happened. It's dark outside, and terribly, horribly silent.

Slap-Together Video For "Pomises (God's Country)"

2011-11-08T15:41:00.000-05:00

Literally "playing God."

What Is The Message?

2011-11-06T12:15:00.005-05:00

As a Christian child, I was brought up with the idea that the main function of a Christian human being on this earth was to "spread the gospel." (The use of the word "spread" made me think of Cheez Whiz, or possibly of a woman's legs. Or of AIDS.)

Of course the actual bible doesn't use that word. It uses words like "tell," "announce" or "preach." (think about how the behaviour of Christians has made the word "preachy" have a very specific connotation, mostly involving selfishly soapboxing, not listening or comprehending, not having a conversation, not building any personal connection, just yet another person selfishly selling an idea for their own reasons with no thought of what their hapless listener might be going through. Very different from what Jesus did.) The actual bible seems focussed on people hearing more than on all the ways that superpreachers would try to make that happen (the opposite of the multimedia megachurch mentality, seems to me).

Interestingly, no one seems to be able to agree anymore about what exactly "the gospel" or "the Word," or "God's Final Message To His Creation" really is anymore these days.

The gospel message I was raised with is lampooned with painful accuracy by the late standup comedian George Carlin:

...there's an invisible man living in the sky who watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish, where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry forever and ever 'til the end of time!

But He loves you. He loves you, and He needs money!

Considering that the word 'gospel' means 'good news,' this story always seemed ironically like bad news. People were so focussed on convincing potential converts that they were (despite their best self-images, efforts and intentions) horrible, hopelessly depraved, lust-mongering sinners, and of how horrible and excitingly Heavy Metal Album Cover Hell no doubt was, that they actually did a downright shoddy job of painting any kind of appealing view of Heaven. Heaven didn't sound like anywhere I wanted to be, anyway. I was supposed to loathe the wicked, evil, corrupt world which we were to forswear (filled as it was with corrupting, soul-destroying things like The A-Team, Pac-man, Pink Floyd and Star Wars) and I was supposed to eagerly await the rapture, to take me away to Heaven. Heaven, where one couldn't sneak comics or TV, because there just wouldn't be any.

Everything would be a blank white sheet of paper you weren't allowed to colour on (and there weren't any colours, let alone crayons) forever and ever and ever. And you had to sing. Church songs. For ever. So, a lot like church, but you'd never be allowed to leave. And just like with gyms, I have never in my life sat in church without wanting to leave shortly after I arrive. This "heaven is like never-ending church" imagery sounded very like Christian Kid Hell. For a Christian kid, paradise would involve not having to go to church or do church stuff anymore. (Not that any of that blank white, colourless, passionless, singing eternally imagery came from the actual bible, of course.)

And in the actual bible Jesus never made any attempt to draw away from and not associate with the world and the people and activities in it the way I was taught I must. He walked around in it and ate with people of all sorts. Talked to the slutty girls and the drunk guys. He didn't preach 24/7. Was that ok? "Well, He was God," everyone would tell me. "You aren't supposed to try to be like Him. You're supposed to live like a Christian." Apparently that was a kind of opposite thing. So, they'd taken away Jesus Christ as the head of the Christian faith, as the example or inspiration or forerunner for us, and replaced him tidily with joy-crushing, suburban, business-casual-wearing bureaucratic church folk with no balls nor guts. Where Jesus had been abrasive, challenging and revolutionary, they were insipid and nice. (To your face. Kinda. Sometimes) Where Jesus was confident and assertive, they were timid and were always bringing forward lists of concerns and possible offense taken in the past, present or future; in actuality or in theory only.

And then I encountered modern church Christians of a much less dour bent. And their gospel was "Jesus came! He's so awesome! He loves you! Come to our church and watch us sing about him! Maybe you'll catch it too!" It was all very Invasion of the Body Snatchers, very Pod People. It was like those Saturn commercials in the 90s which lampooned how cult-like they hoped their buyership could be induced to become. Because advertising to nonchurch folk how cuckoo for Jesuspuffs you are was somehow expected to attract them in droves. Terrifying thought, that a normal, rational person could go into that building, and then simply have their humanity and personality rent from them, leaving an empty husk, with a smiling church-mask, singing horrible, horrible songs and being bracingly cheerful and painfully earnest. And, I found, this was something that many people who'd never set foot in a church themselves feared would happen, should they ever do that. So many new converts to Jesus-following have expressed what huge delight they have taken in knowing that they didn't now need to become church sheep. And the church sheep bleat frantically "Well, but you have to go to church! You just have to! Or else you're disobeying God and the bible!" Bullshit, I say, with confidence, having read that book, and having seen that their one "forsaking not the assembling of yourselves together" verse is one which they need to disallow all non-church forms of Christian connecting in order to smack us all with.

Writers like N.T. Wright reject outright this idea that the message from God is all about how the world is horrible and hopeless and that we will therefore, thankfully, get airlifted out of it, as God has scrapped it, and that we'd best hide in a church community in the meantime. They feel that there is much in the bible about Christianity sanctifying (or redeeming or Jesusforming) our planet. They would point to the end of slavery in America, to the victory over Hitler during the second world war, to the growth of tolerance in our culture, and say that this is the work of Jesus coming to fruition, with Christians seen in every chapter of that story, helping bring it about.

Very new thoughts to me. Not sure it's the whole story. They seem uncomfortable with the actual faces of evil in our world, particularly those among them, and even the actual ugliness of Christ's death, when worshiping.

We are, largely, what we were raised to be. I realized today that I was raised to be sober, serious, blankfaced, solemn and respectfully reverent. I was to have a pained face handy, ready for things I wouldn't or couldn't get involved in ("dirty" jokes, partying, celebration), so I could opt out of those, tut tutting quietly, and then use the serious, solemn one the rest of the time.
I may have grown a bit over the years, but when I decide I "need to get serious" about anything (some talking to God, my job, my diet, exercise, whatever), there is a proud, satisfied feeling that I'm doing something immensely worthwhile and proper. All because I was brought up with so much approval earned for somber, serious reverence on Sunday morning, which was meant to be the very center of our lives. This feeling of proud, satisfied pride and virtue that I'm doing something good just because I'm "getting serious" is seldom warranted, if the end results are any indication at least. I end up doing far more interesting and important stuff when I follow a mischievous whim, rather than when I "get serious."

Conversely, whenever I'm being glib, sarcastic, flip, mocking, witty, clever, light-hearted, devil-may-care and the like, there is an intoxicating feeling like I'm snorting the Devil's Own Cocaine, and having far more fun than I "should." Because I'm not being sober, serious or reverent. And it's SO fun. My upbringing is still making that fun to this very day (and frantically telling me not to have that sort of fun.)

Equally, my upbringing taught that truly good things were Heaven-like in nature: empty, quiet, sober, pure, insipid, dry, dull, passionless. Modern music was all thought to be very bad of course, but I soon recognized what kinds of it immediately made my parents deeply uncomfortable, made them afraid it would rub off on me and transform my attitude. It was anything primal, energetic, edgy or anything with attitude. Anything with snarl. Anything with a deep glee to it. Anything with a depth or height of emotional expression not normally achieved by white people. That was all seen as marked with Satan's thumbprint, and the response to it can only be described as superstitious. So that stuff is still my favourite stuff, and the hardest thing for me to achieve in my own videos and music.

What's the easiest for me to successfully achieve in my own music? Quiet, serious, haunting, reverent, solemn sorrow and regret. Dirgey, hymnic stuff. I practiced that mood every Sunday of my adolescent life. I've got it down. It's a comfortable mood for me. Seems virtuous just feeling it. Every time I set foot inside a church and the music is joyful and peppy, my solemn mood fights it without me even trying. "That's not how it goes!" snarls my deepest, primal heart. "It's about death and darkness, fire and punishment, dark and light, pain and relief! It's an opera painted in bold strokes! It's not supposed to be a reassuring peppy thing by the Jonas Brothers or Justin Bieber! It's not supposed to be safe and reassuring!" And as much as church folk encourage me to "get over myself for one hour and just enjoy Jesus with us," I really can't do that. (And it's not just me I'm getting over. It's everything, including them.) And they and their music really don't seem worth it to me. Couldn't be bothered to pirate that music. If someone lent me a CD of it, I wouldn't be able to bring myself to endure it. Hardly seems worth trying to rewire my whole psyche so it responds favourably to what now seems like pablum.
Because nothing they are doing rings true to me. It still seems like it would almost belong in the "heaven" of my upbringing. It is still passionless, bland, empty, dry, dull, naively sincere and boring. It makes Justin Bieber seem like an angry young man with important feelings to express and deep roots in the very crotch of music. It makes Selena Gomez and Katy Perry seem insightful, edgy and heart-felt. It makes everything Disney wants to sell us seem palatable.

Because it's still about the children, apparently. They can watch Disney channel and Disney movies (so long as they don't get too edgy or passionate or dark.) We set no upper limits on schmaltz, on triteness, or plastic cheesy crap when it comes to our kids. Because that stuff's nothing to worry about, right? God likes it? Full House is, as far as we're concerned, as edgy as we need ever get with kids, providing the deep, heart-felt lessons and hysterically funny life moments we can only wish to experience in our real lives.

Last night three atheist friends took me to see Slim Cessna's Auto Club perform at the Dominion Tavern. I saw cowboy/hipster-looking dudes play manically to a room full of Ottawa's oldest hipsters, goths, punks, hippies, and whatevers. I saw the atheist son of a Baptist minister sing songs filled with half-ironic bible content, continually using stage moves taken from revival meetings. It was all hands held high in the air, wobbling fingers jazz-hands style. He wasn't quite slaying people in the spirit, but pretty much. And I saw the roomful of mostly atheist people unironically doing exactly what people would do in a Pentecostal or lively southern Baptist church, feeling the same way, filled with joy, hands in the air. And it was, to say the least, a tiny bit odd for me.

Maybe Someday: Memories of Nortel and Loss

2011-11-01T06:22:00.000-04:00

Once I had gathered and edited together all of the video from the weekend, I decided I needed some footage of my playing and singing the song too. Walking a fine line between wearing a wig and old glasses to hark back to that era, and ruining the video by looking too silly. I drove to a remote Park 'N Ride, put on the car headlights and shot the "playing the guitar and singing" sillouette, keeping it barely visible.

Ottawa Adventures

2011-10-29T23:53:00.007-04:00

When I woke up, I then slept some more, and then started to ponder my plans for the day. I had some purchases to make for my video-making, and needed to go into Ottawa to make them. Trouble was, I soon fell deeply into one of my Ecclesiastical states, thinking "What's the point of anything? Why bother? Isn't it a waste of time, self-indulgent, not worth the trouble and not going to be good?"

Then KT phoned. She has a boyfriend, and is in her twenties, but she has troubles with depression, and seems to want to use me as a depression sponsor the way alcoholics use each other as addiction sponsors. She was firming up a plan to hang out tomorrow, and also invited me to go out with her boyfriend and her (that is grammatically sound, uninformed scoffers...) to a haunted Halloween house farm thing. I declined. And adjourned to the couch to try to work up the energy to get off the couch. Wasn't working.
Then Peter emailed to ask if I'd like to go hiking. I declined that as well. (I should point out that I just read the latest of Jeff Lindsay's Dexter books, upon which the TV series is based, and the dry formality in which his serial killer protagonist conveys his unorthodox thoughts and feelings seems to be catching)

By supper-time I still wasn't heading anywhere much, having merely watched some Bored To Death, exchanged opinionated Facebook messages and re-encoded and watched a BBC documentary about the Spitfire aircraft at a size my hacked XBOX can play, so I went up the street to the butcher's, got some meat, and also got a Monster energy drink. Energy drinks and I do not mix. I get all buzzy, terribly impatient and think and talk at about triple speed. And not for an hour. Like for six. (so, buzzing still at time of writing this)

I realized I could also do something I'd been planning on for a while. I'm doing video for my various songs, and although the songs go very much in a specific order, I've been doing whatever video seems fun and seasonal and so on. My song "Maybe Someday" was written at the end of October, walking home down Moodie Avenue in Nepean (Ottawa) late at night, coming home from an evening shift at Nortel. It contains the words "October's ending cold, October's ending cold this year." I realized if I videoed this evening, I could literally film during October, right before November got here. So I waited until the sun was setting, and headed into the city, all buzzed and vibrating on Monster.

I had a list of things to buy at the Bayshore Shopping Mall. It's a big, three-floor mall, so I thought I'd have no trouble getting my stuff. My list was:

a pair of black, high-top Converse All-Stars for when I'm shooting a video pretending to be the Ramones. Shoes are important in my videos, as I don't usually show faces. I'm a size ten and a half or eleven, which is a pretty average shoe size for a man, so a shoe store should have that stocked.
one of those straps you can connect to glasses or sunglasses so they don't come off your head while playing sports or going in the water.
a bowtie.

First I went to Sports Experts for the Converses. Converses are sports shoes in name only, nowadays, so they sent me to Footlocker (yes, the "Sandals?! In August?! Are you mad?!" store). There was a big bench to sit on while trying on shoes, and at each end of it, in the men's shoe section, a very large woman was blocking the way into the entire section. One also had a stroller. I stood, Monster coursing like hot venom through my arteries, using body language to let them know they were very much in the way of me getting to look at some shoes too. They were large, slow-moving and uncivil, so I thought "If I actually hopped the bench, I could stand and look at the shoes. But that would be pretty eccentric and rude. Quite beneath a dignified gentleman of middle years." I waited longer, to see if they'd let me by. They showed no sign, so in a fluid movement, I jumped the entire bench, landing catlike just past it and looked at the shoes. No reaction. From anyone. They had a few Converse, but nothing retro, just the new failed attempts. Silly looking things. Only two classic high-top ones, and not in my size and in a choice of two wrong colours. It all looked pretty grim. And no staff showing any interesting in helping me in any way, despite how eagerly I had jumped their fitting bench. So I hopped the bench in the other direction and left.

On my way up the esplanade, a shrill voice called out "Neighbor!" and I turned reluctantly to see that it was one of the lustful 50-somethings who stand smoking and watch me daily ascend my fire-escape to my third floor apartment. She was raising money for a charity, and was abusing her living near me to try to guilt me into listening to what was clearly going to be an involved sales pitch. My face remained as impassive as it tends to, and gradually as she spoke and my face didn't open up, her face fell and she wound down and then said "Do you want to hear this?" and I smiled winsomely and said "Not right now..."

"You in a hurry?" she asked.

"Yes" I said very emphatically, as the Monster was making anything else impossible. I headed off to look for the Converses.

West 49th stocks no Converses of any kind. The kid there named three stores in the mall which he thought should have some. Stance had nothing bigger than size 9. Sof Moc only had them for women. Town Shoe also only had high top Converses for women. Boathouse had a lot of pairs for women and nothing larger than 8 for men. All stores agreed that the lack of these shoes for men was because lots of men had liked them and had bought them. They also agreed that restocking these popular shoes would therefore make good business sense.

As at every single store, the pre-teen manager at Boathouse agreed wholeheartedly with this sentiment and said the shoe order system was "weird. Like really weird." He had a girl phone all five of their Ottawa area stores, and said "Not a single store in Ottawa has anything like that for men bigger than 9, except Orleans, which has one size twelve."
"You're all only interested in selling shoes to mini-men, looks like," I said, aware this was a bizarre comment. "Average to tall guys? Forget about it."

"Oh well. Internet!" I said. He agreed that this was wise and I left.

"I give up on the Converses," I decided. "I will get the strap for the glasses." When I'm wearing the black morphsuit with the wig and glasses, the glasses don't properly have ears and nose to hold them on, as they're squashed flat by the morphsuit. I tried Sports Experts again, this time for the strap. You know? To keep glasses from flying off while sports experts play sports? They sent me to Footlocker again.
They didn't have any of those either. The guy there said, as he's dressing as Bubbles from Trailerpark Boys for Halloween, that he needs one of those too. I tried various stores, including looking at Zellers. No luck. Then I realized "This mall has a Lenscrafters! They sell glasses! They'll have those spectacle accessories for sure!"
Nope. They told me to try Zellers or Watch It!, the watch and sunglasses store. Also nope.

"Can it be I will not be able to get any of the things I want from this mall?" I wondered, tweaking on the remnants of the Monster and not showing any signs of coming down. "It really seems more and more like a poorly stocked, shitty mall that is always out of stock on whatever I want," I decided. "Maybe I should just never shop here."
I then saw Tip Top Tailors, a formal wear store. The sales lady was in her fifties, and was flirty in a pleasant, warm way without being pressuring like the ones who live near me always are. I got two good shirts for teaching in, a tie clip and...a bow tie. "Huzzah!" I thought. Finally I had obtained my first item from my list of three things. It had only taken about an hour and a half.

Walking by Foot Locker before leaving, I saw exactly the Converse I wanted on the opposite side of the store. "Could they have their classic Converses in a different section? No doubt the bovine ladies are gone. I will go in yet again," I decided. Yup, the Converses I wanted. Sitting right there, on the wrong side of the store? I stood impatiently by them, and then gradually realized that the reason they were on the opposite side of the store was because it was the ladies side. No staff was in the least bit interested in helping me anyway, so I figured that out myself. I then went over to the men's side and decided to try to flag down a staff member and ask if they'd phone their other stores to see if any other store was stocked for men's Converse, size typical.
Two referee-striped sales guys walked past me over and over, stocking the shelves, pointedly avoiding eye-contact and clearly not interested in selling any shoes. Eventually a third guy (there were no other customers in the store) said he'd call about the shoes, said that it was really weird that no stores had any, and then suddenly said "You know, I just stocked the shelves with the last order we got earlier this week. But maybe I forgot some boxes or something. Let me look." He went into the back room for a really long time, and then came out quite casually holding a box of the shoes I was looking for, in the size I was looking for. Hallelujah.

Walking out of the store, I saw a kiosk store called Sunglass Hut. I thought "What are the odds they'll have those head strap things no one else, even the eyeglasses store, seems to have?" They had them. On the counter, in various kinds, free for the taking. There was no one manning the kiosk. I stood, holding the strap in my hand, no one around, thinking "I have never been so tempted to steal something in my life."

Turning eventually to a guy who was manning some kind of cosmetics wonderstuff for women kiosk across the concourse, I said "Have you seen anyone working here? I'm thinking of shoplifting this..."

He laughed, said they'd probably gone to the washroom or something and pointed to my shirt and said "Pink Floyd's The Wall... did you see the tour?" I said I'd seen in when they came to town. He was confused, as he'd seen it in Israel, where he's from. When had they come here? And had David Gilmour and Roger Waters played together? They certainly didn't mind coming to Israel and tut-tutting over Israel and Palestine not getting along, he said, but they couldn't even get along in the same band!
We had a long conversation about Pink Floyd and Israel and stuff, and eventually I said "I can't actually shoplift this, so I'm just going to put it down on the counter and walk away as if I were a moral person." He smiled and I did just that.

Walking across the concourse, I saw a well-dressed girl walking very quickly. "What are the odds she's hurrying back to the Sunglass Hut kiosk?" I wondered. I watched her and sure enough, she took up running the kiosk. So I went and bought the strap and left, feeling like I'd been terribly clever. Monster tends to make me feel clever.

Then I drove to the old complex where I used to work at Nortel. It isn't a Nortel complex anymore. I parked my car in a dark area and got out and shot video of the lighted windows of the building. Seeing a security guy patrolling inside as I looked in from the bushes, I remembered that they tend to accost people lurking outside industrial complexes. I lurked anyway, and got some not terribly good footage. Then I decided to move my car to a better lit area and put on my "costume" (a Halloween short-hair wig and my late 90s glasses, with my coat from that era) in my car and video myself walking in front of the entrance as if I was leaving work. I was just about ready to get out of the car when a security car popped on its headlights and turned the car so as to shine them on mine. They do that to encourage you to leave, before accosting you. So I drove just off property, stopped and shot some stuff from there.

I shot numerous shots of me walking up Moodie Ave in my ridiculous wig and glasses, and did time-lapse of the tail-lights streaking past. Then I drove up to where I used to live and shot footage there as well. Made me feel like such a stalker. Wondered why no one called the cops. There was, of course, a mysterious figure walking around with a camera, and wearing a bizarre wig and glasses. (It is kinda Halloween, though...)

Then I came home. The moral of the story is, when feeling that one's life is pointless and not worth living, it is a sound strategy to fill up on caffeine and go indulge one's fool's quest silliness, so as not to be lying around being miserable.

The Parable of the Earnest Fireman

2011-10-27T11:52:00.011-04:00

There once was a man who had never met a fireman before. Upon a certain day he met a man who proudly pronounced that he himself was a fireman. Having heard that a neighborhood house was aflame with a child trapped inside, and seeing the fireman standing on the sidewalk, he asked in concern "Has that child been rescued from that burning house? Is the fire out?"

"I'm so glad you raised this topic!" the fireman replied. "My fire marshal said this would happen! I don't mind telling you that I absolutely love being a fireman. It's the single, best, most wonderful defining point of my life. My entire self is built around being one. We have weekly meetings about fire safety and being firemen and how bad fire is. I would really love it if you came to one!"

"Yes, but have you handled that fire yet?" the man asked with concern.

"Well, I did the right thing, if that's what you mean. I played my little part to raise awareness of the dangers of fires and fire-related things. I always try to do what's right for a fireman. Fire Marshal Bob says I'm a good fireman. I just finished polishing the firetruck! Do you want to see?" the fireman asked.

"But is the fire out?" the man asked again.

"I followed all the rules. I didn't do anything wrong. I try very hard to follow the rules. My boots are very shiny. Every Friday I polish them. If you came to our biweekly grooming standards meeting on Tuesday, I could show you how," the fireman continued.

Perturbed, the man asked "Do you even know if that house is still on fire right now or not?"

Equally perturbed, the fireman asked in return "What house? Why are you talking about a house? Did I not tell you what a good fireman I am and all of the good, important, special fireman things I do each week? I always try to do the right thing. We have one particular song about folding the hoses that we love to sing. Would you like to hear it?"

"Not really," the man replied. "What can you actually tell me about fire? In general, I mean. You are, you say, a fireman, correct?"

"Of course I am. You should be one too! If you're interested, I can get you a form right now and sign you up! It's really easy. Anyone can be a fireman," the fireman said. "We have three firemen who are in wheelchairs, a blind one and we have the youngest fireman in the entire country. He's very keen. Only six years old."

"But what can you tell me about fire? Like, in general," the man repeated.

The fireman furrowed his brow as if recalling something he'd been told long ago and then said "Fire is really, really bad. It's pretty, admittedly, just so we'll be tempted to like it, and it makes us warm when we're cold, but we shouldn't be fooled. It is so totally dangerous that no one should even own matches or barbeque lighters. It is is really, really super bad, actually. I need to always remind myself to remember that every day!"

"Look, I don't feel very reassured by the quality of fire protection seemingly offered by, well, you. Is there anyone else I could talk to?" the man asked.

"Well, you could talk to my fire marshal. His name's Marshal Bob. He's REALLY well-taught about fires and stuff! He can answer any question!" the fireman told him. And so the appointment was made.

* * *

Two weeks later, it was time for the man's appointment with Marshal Bob. The fire marshal was in a well-appointed, immaculate office, and was wearing a blue pinstriped suit, loafers and a gold tie.

"First, let me start by handing you our latest brochure about the importance of not buying matches," started the marshal. And he did so.

"I wanted to know about that house that was on fire two weeks ago, and the child who was reportedly trapped inside," the man began. "Is everything alright now? I didn't see anything about it in the paper..."

"Oh, I don't really think it appropriate to get into all of that at this time, moving forward," the marshal replied. "I have confidentiality to consider. Very important to remember. Something I'm always telling folks."

"Confidentiality to protect whom?" asked the man.

"Well, that's a great question. I think you'll agree that confidentiality in general is a terribly important thing we would all do well to consider. The Policies and Procedures Manual has a lot to say about it. I really cannot, therefore, discuss actual fires of any kind with you except in the most hypothetical of scenario-building. But for now, why not just focus on the pamphlet? It will raise your awareness of fires and fire-starting items."

"Ok, but don't you think that responsible people could safely use matches without concern?" the man asked.

"Oh, that's a very commonly held misconception! All of that is explained in this pamphlet I am reasonably sure," the marshal said, somewhat condescendingly, the man thought.

"For one thing..." the man began.

"I'm sorry. I'll have to stop you right there," the marshal interjected. "I am a fire marshal, so getting into the technical details, the nitty gritty, if you will, the value-added, paradigm-shifting granularity of the extremely beneficial, growth-opportunity-ready info contained in that pamphlet? Not really part of my job. There are folks, I imagine, who I'm fairly sure would be more than willing to get into all of that for you. Now what can I do for you?"

"I see," said the man. "Because your job is to go out and put out fires."

The marshal smiled again, even more condescendingly. "Again, a commonly held misapprehension. The pamphlet goes into that in some detail, I'm told."

"So what do you do?" the man asked.

The fire marshal knitted his brow, puffed out his cheeks a few times and then said "I have the privilege to be on the oversight committee, which I chair monthly, to speak to issues surrounding the ongoing initiative to change hearts and minds and raise awareness of fire-related concepts. The team's mandate is broad, shallow and far-reaching."

"Do you have a fire truck?" the man asked, a suspicion growing behind his eyes.

"Well, the department certainly has several top-of-the-line, very progressive fire awareness raising vehicles which are, I imagine, housed in our vehicle housing facility. I was actually on the steering committee which facilitated acquiring and standardizing these acquisitions," he added proudly.

"Can you drive one?" the man asked.

"Well, I suppose I COULD if I had wanted," the marshal said, looking startled. "Of course we've standardized them all fully, so that question is moot at this point."

"Standardized?" the man asked.

"Yes. We have made the vehicles one hundred and twenty percent compliant with our fire awareness and combustibility index protocol procedure," he said, once again with obvious pride. "You really should come out to one of our meetings. I'm sure you'd be very impressed. It gives even the most casual attender a warm sense of purposefulness, effectivity and involvedness just to have their awareness raised like that. Value added, of course. Rolls over into so many beneficial areas. We speak to and table all kinds of things!"

"What exactly was involved in standardizing the vehicles?" the man asked more pointedly and with a growing suspicion.

"Well, we have adapted them to make them comply, as I said, one hundred and twenty..."

"What was necessary to do, literally, with your hands, to make them comply?" the man asked, interrupting.

"Well, as I was on the steering committee I was not personally tasked, of course, with any hands-on work. Oh no, our sub-committees have qualified hands-on folks who are personally tasked with overseeing any of that sort of procedure or protocol. I simply make it happen," the marshal continued. "I make so many things happen I sometimes have trouble remembering everything I'm doing," he added, conspiratorially.

"If I were talking to some of those people, and I asked them what they do to the vehicles, what would they tell me?" the man asked.

"Not really something I'm qualified to speak to, exactly. I'm not really involved at the on-the-ground level, naturally. But, obviously, the removal of anything flammable from the interior or design of the vehicle in question. We mandated that quite clearly. No limit to how worried about safety we should all be!" the marshal replied. "'Worrying Makes A Difference!' I always say."

"What kind of flammable things?" the man pressed.

"You do have a most...interesting way of returning over and over again to the same, if you don't mind my saying, rather odd concerns. But, I suppose, anything made of paper, or rubber, wood, plastic and any flammable liquid..." the marshal began.

With a horrible realization the man asked "So, things like tires, oil and gasoline?"

"Precisely!" the marshal replied. "Can't be too safe. And of course boots and hoses are not allowed on-board the stationary fire awareness raising vehicles! They are to be stowed prior to approaching the vehicles in special fire-retardant lockers housed in a separate room. And we comply with our Go Green ecological mandate as to not wasting water, so our vehicles have been one hundred and thirty percent free of water, water tanks or anything water related ten years running. But all of that's not really a part of my day-to-day concern. I am involved at a higher level than the folks who oversee, chair, table, facilitate, mentor, instill and generally supervise that kind of issue. I'm trying to make a difference. I mean, we can put out fires one at a time, or we can change minds! It's never too late to begin raising awareness, I always say. You really should come out to our next meeting."

"I feel safer already," the man replied, somewhat disengenuously.

Stop Motion

2011-10-02T19:38:00.001-04:00

Messed around this weekend with a curious mixture of doing marking of short stories, finishing a book that I needed to finish before reading a couple of ones that are reading choices in classes I'm teaching semester two, and doing stop action animation.
Some of my more interesting comments on students' writing was things like "...I tell you this to make you a better writer, rather than a better serial killer," "skulls don't have hilts" and "well-made lingerie doesn't leave traces lying around."( the latter was in response to "She had found traces of lingerie around the apartment." I suggested that, though the lingerie might be traces of women, that lingerie didn't itself leave traces of itself, and that it was better to omit the words "traces of" entirely. The middle one was in response to "the sword had the hilt of a skull," which I suggested would read better as "the sword had a skull for a hilt.")

The idea was to make two wire frames like I've seen in books about claymation, and then build clay on them. What's recommended is twisting together two strands of 16 gauge aluminum wire and making little eight inch models. I tried one bigger than that. When asking about what to use in terms of plasticine or whatever, it was recommended that I try some Crayola air-drying stuff, and Sculpey. I've never tried Sculpey before, but knew you're supposed to fire it, so I was safe and bought some of both.

I found that the Crayola stuff was really the consistency of cookie dough or taffy, and that it didn't air dry to anything very hard. It is very light, but it is too fragile to deal with being on a wire frame that's getting reefed around. I was curiously reluctant to start, afraid it wouldn't work, but I got down to it and decided to use the air dry stuff as kind of a skeleton on the smaller frame, with Sculpey to follow later. Doing this and then trying some rudimentary stop motion showed me how solidly rooted the thing needs to stay, and how tough it has to be.

I then tried an experiment with the Sculpey. Much heavier, and I wasn't proficient enough to know how to design the model to take it easy on myself. Trying something hard. But a brief experiment with putting some Sculpey on a bit of aluminum wire in the toaster oven showed me that it gets much harder than the Crayola stuff, so is that I need to do. Focussed on making the frame more sturdy, with more support bits attached with epoxy.

This weekend was abruptly grey, dripping and cold. Had to put the heat on a tiny bit, I eventually decided. It was depressing. Didn't talk to anyone either day.

Read the greater part of a little book I got online: Frederick Beuchner's Telling the Truth: The Gospel As Tragedy, Comedy & Fairy Tale. Part of it put into words, better than anything I've seen before, why I can't take preachers seriously, why they don't reach me when they work:

...they sit there waiting for him to work a miracle, and the miracle they are waiting for is that he will not just say that God is present, because they have heard it said before and it has made no great and lasting difference to them, will not just speak the words of joy, hope, comedy, because they have heard it spoken before too and have spoken it among themselves, but that he will somehow make it real to them....He is called not to be an actor, a magician, in the pulpit. He is called to be himself. He is called to tell the truth as he has experienced it. He is called to be human, and that is calling enough for any man. If he doesn't make real to them the human experience of what it is to cry into the storm and receive no answer, to be sick at heart and find no healing, then he becomes the only one there who seems not to have had that experience because most surely...all the others there have had it whether they talk of it or not. As much as anything else, it is their experience of the absence of God that has brought them there in search of his presence, and if the preacher does not speak of that and to that, then he becomes like the captain of a ship who is the only one aboard who either does not know that the waves are twenty feet high and the decks awash, or will not face up to it so that anything else he tires to say by way of hope and comfort and empowering becomes suspect on the basis of that one crucial ignorance or disingenuousness or cowardice of reluctance to speak in love any truths but the ones people love to hear.

Time Lapse

2011-09-29T23:01:00.001-04:00

I've been teaching my new high school English classes for a month now, so obviously can't write all the funny, troubling, awesome, sad and weird things that happen. What I've been doing apart from that is trying out time-lapse photography. A few videos of it are on my YouTube page now. I've tried to get gloomy clouds and tonight was all about the streaky tail-lights.

I also went and saw Roger Daltrey of The Who. Very glad I did. I'm more of a Pink Floyd's The Wall fan than I am a The Who's Tommy, but I like Tommy also, as a somewhat lesser, but cool, work. Daltrey was in amazing form, especially for someone who is 67, has had throat surgery in the past couple of years, has lost two of the four members of the band that made him famous, and had Pete Townsend's brother Simon with him in place of Pete. Daltrey fluttered around with a pair of tamborines as if they were prosthetic wings, he did yo-yo tricks with his microphone, joked around with the audience a lot, sang a medley of Johnny Cash songs, and played harmonica, guitar and ukelele. ("Pete would never play song because he said he'd look fuckin' stupid wearing a ukelele. Here I am, obviously not giving a SHIT!") Mostly he just rocked out with a somewhat deeper, snarlier, growlier, rougher version of one of the most iconic voices in rock history.

Friday Night

2011-08-27T13:07:00.002-04:00

This video was about trying to decide what to do with Friday night, when one's teenage options were church events organized by chirpy teenaged girls, or going out drinking and trying to get into bars. The voice of "Redneck Ken" was done by Mike Dubue of The Hilotrons many years ago. (The songs at the end contain vulgar language.) These HD YouTube videos seem to be getting cut in half by Blogger, so best to full-screen it by double-clicking on it, or go see it at YouTube.

What The Old Testament Doesn't Say About Sex

2011-08-27T00:12:00.006-04:00

I found a kinda out-there, zany-toned 40 page ebook called "Biblical Sex," which, disappointingly, wasn't a how to guide or manual, but was a wild and oddly successful attempt to change one's outlook on what the Old Testament actually doesn't say about sex.

First, the easy ones: it doesn't say for men not to have several wives. It doesn't say for wives not to "get" their husbands sex-slaves, sexual surrogates or concubines ("Handmaids" as Margaret Atwood noticed they're called in the King James Version). It doesn't say to get married before having sex. It doesn't outlaw any sexual acts between two consenting adults of opposite genders. It doesn't in any way mention masturbation or sexual fantasy, pornography or anything of that kind in Ancient Israel. And we know what kind of dirty pictures some of their neighbours liked, so one is curious to get some kind of "yea" or "nay" on that! It doesn't say for women not to have sex with other women, though it does say for men not to have sex with other men. The determining characteristic as to sex with relatives is what male figure one might be trespassing on the turf of, or disrespecting. So, Moses and Aaron's mom was their dad's aunt. This made their mom both their mother and their great aunt, and made them both brothers and cousins. And this wasn't warned against. Men weren't to get sexual (including enjoying gazing upon the nakedness of) with their father's wife (whether their mother or step-mother, or one of dad's many wives or concubines), sister or daughter. If a man had sex with a virgin girl whose dad had been expecting some money from her husband-to-be whenever she married, the man was supposed to pay that, as if he'd scratched her dad's car. If a man wanted to take a sex slave in a war, there was a whole method for how to do that, because it was ok. A man wasn't to have sex with another man's wife, as this was adultery. There is no mention of a married man having sex with an unmarried woman being adultery. In fact, God-sanctioned kings of Israel routinely did that and simply added them to the stack of wives and concubines. When David took over from Saul, the prophet Nathan says God "gave" David Saul's wives and concubines. Good to be king.

In the New Testament, when a bunch of religious assholes are badgering Jesus, trying to make him join them in getting Old Testament on an adulterous woman's ass, it is said that she was caught "in the very act." Note that the dude she was caught committing adultery with isn't mentioned. No one was dragging him along trying to kill him with rocks. Men, huh?

As you may have noticed, the Old Testament law (the Mosaic/Moses law), including the ten commandments and many other things don't really address ethics or morality or spirituality. (a surprising portion of the bible isn't about spirituality or morality). It's more code of conduct, operating principles and law. Law like we have. Our laws don't address what is immoral, unspiritual or even wrong. They address what is forbidden and how doing it gets punished in a given system. So, being promiscuous may be something foolish, something callow, something one's mother warns against in the scripture, but it's not against the law. Not in our culture, and not in the Old Testament. There was a distinction between things that would get you killed or otherwise punished, and things that were probably just stupid. It wasn't against Jewish law to be an alcoholic, to be promiscuous or to be a glutton. It was just bad, but not illegal.

The New Testament seems to suggest that the very function of the law wasn't to make people good human beings, but to overtly demonstrate that, all questions of being a good person aside, human beings couldn't even keep from transgressing these quite extreme boundaries laid out to outline that much lower standard (not what makes a good person, but what makes a person who isn't, in modern parlance, a criminal/lawbreaker.)

But yeah, the bible has a lot to say about what's good and about what is a righteous or holy or excellent person. The "law" part of it really just isn't about that, any more than the biblical book of erotic poetry is about the law. (It's about what's romantic) The Proverbs aren't about what is lawful, but raise the standard to discuss what is workable and wise and sensible, in the same way the New Testament further raises the standard to include things like what is charitable, kind or generous.

The focus in the Old Testament law was 1) you men treated God with respect and didn't step over the boundaries of trust and honour that were supposed to be in place, for instance by leaving Him for Someone Else. 2) you treated other men with respect and didn't step over the boundaries of trust and honour that were supposed to be in place, like eyeing up his wife, his field or his ass. Old Testament law writing is all about boundaries and jurisdictions and staying on your own side of the line. And it isn't very fair, by our standards. It is only remotely "fair" if you're a Jewish, adult male. It's mostly like an operating manual for "How to Effectively Maintain A Growing, Successful Jewish Household With Lands, Livestock, Servants, Wives, Concubines and Sundry Other Assets." If you're an Ethiopian or Philistine or Samaritan (or woman) you simply aren't being addressed by the law scriptures, and aren't really part of the patriarchy, so the law doesn't protect your rights. In fact, they're allowed to make you a slave, and they're not supposed to take TOO many of your women as wives, lest your phony religion might rub off on them, as things tend to eventually do, when people are sexual for any length of time. That's how they lived.

The New Testament is different. Suddenly Jesus is living and preaching a religion in which he spends a lot of time talking to, listening to and taking quite seriously, people like women, children, Romans, Greeks, Samaritans and the like. Oh sure, he is a bit harsh with nonJews on occasion, explaining that he is doing them a favour to be including them, but when they understand how he's putting himself out, he goes right ahead and puts himself out and talks them up to any Jews within earshot. Suddenly, when the Jews want to know who is their neighbour (who they have to treat with respect and avoid coveting the stuff of) Jesus starts telling a story about a Samaritan who considers a Jew his neighbour and who then helps him when he's in need. (Jesus is, clearly, a Jew, telling this story to Samaritan-disparaging Jews who are wondering how helpful they have to be to their fellow Jews. So a story, not about them helping out even Samaritans, but "flipped" as it were).

Jesus talks about love more than you'd expect from the OT. That's new. You don't just serve God and praise Him and obey Him and never cheat on Him. You know that He loves you and you reciprocate that. And your neighbour? You don't just keep your fences up and respect boundaries, you are to love him. You don't follow your law-outlined rights of vengeance and retribution, you are to forgive humans, because humans screw up. The Golden Rule comes in. You're not just supposed to look after those of your own family and household, but are supposed to treat others (even outside it) the way you want to be treated (bad advice for masochists, C.S. Lewis said). You're supposed to help people. You're not just supposed to amass all the wealth you can to look after your family, including all of your wives, children and concubines anymore. You're actually supposed to look after the poor. And, in fact, being rich is a bad thing, according to Jesus. Because rich people, Jesus says, centuries before Karl Marx, get and stay rich on the backs of the poor. Jesus commands his followers to neither trust the rich, nor to respect them a whit more than they would respect a poor person (think "a homeless guy"). I'm not sure modern Christians are really willing to do this.

But as to sexual sin? There is not a single marriage ceremony referred to in the bible. Oh, guys took women to their tents "as wife," "knew them" and they conceived and all. And there are certainly a few marriage suppers or feasts, but no actual marriage rituals. No enjoinders to "wait" until marriage. No, sex IS a marriage in the bible. There is no dating. There is no "playing the field" for a while, getting free samples from willing ladies. You get a wife (or wives), usually from arranged marriage, the spoils of war, or wherever else. In the Old Testament almost every single man spoken of unreservedly with respect by every New Testament person including Jesus, had a bunch of them. And no one says "Which wasn't ok." King Solomon was record-breaking in terms of numbers of wives and concubines. Was his apparently insatiable appetite for strange criticized? Only in that they weren't nice Jewish girls. They turned him away to their gods. THE cardinal Jewish sin. Having a perfectly good, committed deity around, and making your own fake ones instead, or having gods made to order, to your liking, in keeping with your own psychological explorations, by other cultures.

In the NT, Jesus mentions how Moses allowed Jewish men to divorce their wives if they didn't like them (notice Jewish women couldn't divorce their husbands, as they were the property of their husbands and not the other way around), and that this wasn't ok, but in no way addresses that Moses allowed them to have (and himself had) numerous wives, and doesn't say that THIS isn't ok with him now. There is discussion in Paul's writings of women being adulteresses if they "be to another" while their husband is still living. Christians always assume that this is meant to go equally for a man who leaves his wife and gets a new one, but it really doesn't read like that. All things being equal, it isn't very equal. (We can always pretend, though, if we don't like what's actually written there.)

"Forced Loneliness"

2011-08-26T22:14:00.003-04:00

During an online discussion (most of mine are that, lately) about being single, Jeremy (laughingly, it later turned out) referenced something I hadn't heard about: The True Forced Loneliness Movement. You just search that on YouTube and there are many, many videos decrying it and others disseminating its Conspiracy Theory doctrine. Dude pictured above is one of the main proponents.

Like so many of these things, it starts pretty inarguably: There's a problem with eating disorders like anorexia and bulimia. We blame the media. There's a widespread problem with obesity. We blame the media and the fast food and "crap in food" industries, and all the industries making fascinating, time-gobbling activities that require one to plant ass-to-chair. So thanks to them, now people hate how they look, lack confidence, have an unattainable standard for how perfect they have to look, and how perfect their partner has to look in order to feel ok about being seen with them. Not too much to argue about there, right?

Next: People are lonely and single. Lots of people. Maybe even troublingly growing numbers of people. Marriages don't last. People keep trying to "upgrade" to better-looking or more socially adept or wealthier people at the first sign of The Thrill is Gone getting there. They're dumping people who thought they'd both grow old together, because of having their expectations in these areas aggressively elevated by the media. We've never lived in a time in which relationships were supposed to be more perfect, more flawlessly equal, more nurturing, feminist, vegetarian, fitness and health-focussed, gluten-free, recycling, gay-tolerant, globally-conscious and anti-allergenic. So these impossible, "have to be perfect" relationships fail. And we live in a consumer culture, in which the most expensive and precious of things are bought with planned obsolescence built right in so that we're always in the middle of arranging buying new houses, cars, computers, phones, spectacles, shoes and iPods. Like we're cash cows. Or sultans of shit from Shanghai. And people are treating their sexual and romantic partners the same way as their shoes, and needing more current, more modelly models. That kinda sounds right too.

Then: Someone is doing that to us on purpose, and there's a Plan, and Everything's Connected. It's So Clear If You Watch The News. It's not just people blindly scrabbling after money and importance. It's a cynically calculated plan by human beings who, as we know, excel at keeping secrets secret, and at working together effectively (and secretly) to Fool Us All, except those of us pontificating on YouTube.

That's where they lose me. People suck at keeping secrets. People suck at working together. It's like in nature: If there are enough beavers, or ants or bats or whatever, they wreck everything just by fighting to survive. Humans are doing that. Due to sheer numbers, and the competition that comes with it.

And Then More: So, every time some crazy guy (it's normally a guy, unless it's a woman who's sawed off a guy's penis and Sharon Osbourne and other harpies are on TV laughing uproariously in a way they might well not if it were a story about a woman getting her genitals mutilated by her husband with a butcher knife) hurts some women (those random American shooting sprees) we must conclude that This Is What We Get. We make people lonely and they get desperate, unhappy and confused and lash out, so we (well, They, the secret-keeping cabal of People Who Work Well With Others) suffer from what was done to these poor loners, of whom there are ever more and more. And we've built a culture with World of Warcraft and Black Ops and so on, and the Internet, and the Food Channel, so that people are supposed to stay out of each other's houses and sit alone on their own futons, with someone awesome they've somehow met, impressed and inveigled into living there, just the two of them. But there's no one, so they're alone and growing fatter by the day. They're supposed to stay in their own houses where the pretty people getting slaughtered on the cover of the tabloids won't have to look at their fat asses.

But sometimes, someone invites single you into their Sanctum Sanctorum, an honour normally reserved, ironically, for other not-alone people. You get invited over and find, if the conversation is singing and dancing, that you don't want to leave. Some nice couple has you over, shares food and drink, and you feel like "Please don't cast me out alone into the dark night to wander aimless and babbling! Let me stay just a little longer here with you! You two aren't alone all the time!"

So yeah. We want to blame society, blame the media, blame Dr. Phil, blame Oprah, Donald Trump, Sarah Palin, Paris Hilton and whoever else is famous right now. And then there are always people with videos on YouTube earnestly explaining how they Just Don't Get How Everyone Can't See that the hidden They have purposely created a culture of loneliness, one which sidelines less-than-perfect-looking-and-socializing people, and which makes even them chronically hate themselves, and how that then men shoot women or women hate men and slice off their John Thomas' because of this and it's Our Fault.

I get that the conspiracy view makes them feel like they know secret, occult things. If you know something secret about the core of the Earth or UFOs or the Gross National Product or The Rapture, you can dance around on YouTube barely able to keep from acting like you did in grade three when you sang "I know something YOU don't know! I know something YOU don't know!" all recess long and down the hall into class, then eventually telling what it is and having everyone say "That's just stupid. It doesn't make any sense at all!" to your bafflement and consternation.

My view is simpler. People are fucking up. In large numbers. In patterns. And it's not getting better. The world was meant to be better. Western society isn't a good place for people to live, emotionally and spiritually. And it's not getting good. And we're not going to change it, and we're not going to leave it, nor change significantly ourselves. We will consume what we can, and die. Alone.

My Latest Video

2011-08-25T12:06:00.007-04:00

Always did like David Lynch and Twin Peaks when it came to making things that were quirky and odd and maybe a bit disturbing. This is a good example of me not having enough people to help me with stuff, so doing it all myself. I'm the only person playing any instruments or appearing in the video. Note: you can watch it here, even though it's kinda "cut off" on the right hand third. To see it well, go to where it is on YouTube and hit full screen. If the strobe light hadn't flaked out and started flashing like once or twice a minute, this video would have been much less weird-looking.

Antici...pation.

2011-08-21T12:03:00.010-04:00

I have a problem with being asked to participate in anticipating future things. I will explain later how this kicks in when they chirpily ask "Are you excited for the movie?" (rather than "excited about the movie?") and I can't really explain that I don't get excited about things until they are actually happening, or more often, until afterward. I sometimes get very intent upon obtaining things alright, but I don't do that thing, the thing where you pretend in your head that you're already in possession of the experience, and you go right ahead and enjoy the shit out of it.

A very nerdy and mundane everyday example: right now, on Facebook, they're asking me to "like" the Doctor Who group if I'm, right now, really looking forward to them, next week, reminiscing over that time a few years back when the Matt Smith Doctor took over the lead role from David Tennant.

Enjoying planned reminiscing in advance of doing it? I just can't look forward to that joyful looking back. Not really. Every time someone asks "Are you looking forward to Christmas/Summer/second semester/Hockey season?" I have this annoyed, picked-on feeling like someone had asked an autistic person if they were looking forward to making heaps of meaningful human connections that day. Because I don't. I do not look forward to things and get worked up fantasizing about them. I can't. I am burdened by the knowledge that anything imagined really, really won't turn out very much like the way it is in one's head, if it happens at all. I know that just imagining something and planning for it is FAR from guarantee it will ever come to pass. But also, I just can't enjoy things that haven't happened (yet). I wait.

When I clean my apartment? I can't do that under the fuel of imagining how nice and clean it is going to look. I can't imagine it being even a bit cleaner. I just have to get a head of steam, get down to it and notice if/when any improvement starts to happen.

So am I looking forward to them reminiscing over the Matt Smith Doctor Who? Am I imagining those cheery, informative posts and enjoying them, right now, when they haven't happened and are not at this point real in any way? No. I can imagine all sorts of other things, though. I can imagine Matt Smith getting put in jail for something horrible like killing three old ladies while driving under the influence of crack, or pedophilia or something, and them not wanting to reminisce over him. I can imagine me dying suddenly in any one of a thousand ways and not ever seeing the Facebook stuff. I can imagine Facebook re-configuring and crashing and the whole Doctor Who group getting wiped. I can imagine the guy who updates the group being rushed to hospital and the group updates not happening. I can imagine that there are an infinite number more ways than I can imagine that my enjoying of this happy little Facebook group might never come to pass. So I wait. I don't take out enjoyment loans on stuff that hasn't happened yet.

Of course, I could look into my past and note that I was seldom promised nice things as a child, and that when I was, quite often they'd not materialize or actually be taken away, and if I was upset I'd be told to smarten up and realize that life was like that. Life wasn't a bowl of cherries, I was frequently reminded. It was not to be enjoyed. That's why it was like it was. The implication was that life was a bucket of shit.

And things went away, right when you were into them. Things like Christmas could be taken away. People could give Christmas gifts to us, for little me to imagine opening, and my father could return the Christmas gifts to them unopened after the colourfully-wrapped boxes sitting in our house for two weeks, due to family squabbles/church politics. To this day I STILL have no idea what the anticipated gifts were, the two gift givers being long since dead. In my home, TV (with Bugs Bunny, Captain Kangaroo, Mr. Dressup, Tony Orlando and Dawn, Sonny and Cher, The Harlem Globetrotters, The Irish Rovers, Frosty the Snowman, It's Christmas Charlie Brown, Scooby Doo, Speed Buggy, Shazam!, Tarzan and M*A*S*H*) just, quite literally went away without warning one day. Halloween went away in similar fashion, as did Easter. Attending or having birthday parties outside of immediate family went away too. There may have been reports of these things happening somewhere else to other kids, but for us, they just got erased from existence, once we'd decided we REALLY liked them. For some kids that I knew growing up, even school (with other kids, anyway) could go away, if the parents were shocked enough by what went on there (i.e. typical Western living. The equivalents of Harry Potter being allowed to sit in the school library back then, or whatever). And not matter what kids may say, doing homework with mom for ten years is not more fun than going to school.

But really, anticipating stuff is something that nobody I'm related to (besides my sister) seems to be able to do at all. We can reminisce alright. We can wax sentimental. We can hoard stuff that made us happy, but we really can't anticipate specific good things happening in the future, and go ahead and enjoy them in advance. We don't like to throw away anything old or worn out, until we've got a new one, and not even then is it easy. (Parts, you know. Some imagined monetary or sentimental value retained.) On a good day, a feeble general expectation that things will work out alright, or that there will be social or fun things to do, probably, is the best we can muster. Not only is there wiring missing that allows for enjoying specific things that have not happened and may never happen, there is a very strong, superstitious fear that were we able to do this, it would certainly jinx the whole thing. Looking around at others, this looks like a very plausible superstition to keep.

I move forward with a timid, blind belief that moving forward is a good thing and it may well work out OK. I move forward to see how far I get. Maybe I will get far. Maybe it will work out really well. That happens sometimes and it would be great. It's worth whistling in the dark. I'm not going to count on it, though. Because you can't. I have an inability to imagine how nice I think all that will be, and then "enjoy on credit" and invest this positive feeling in motivating myself to move toward it. I can't use my imagination and make up somewhere I want to be, and then simply try to go there.

I am endlessly motivated to work toward trying to stop bad things from recurring, of course. I think "I'd better do something, or I'll be dealing with this more and more, again and again!" but I never think "It sure will be nice to live in a world in which I have vanquished this problem, oh, I can just picture it. With new resolve, this spurs me onward with quickening gait!" That is SO foreign to me.

I always had a strong aversion to pep rallies in high school. We were supposed to get excited over a football game (they'd lost me right there). But the big problem was that we were also supposed to be shouting and screaming with anticipation over being part of something I did not feel part of, caring about something I did not care about, and imagining how great it would be when we inevitably won the game, even though I knew right well that "we" really never won football games. Can denial be taught in large groups? Do we believe in the power of wishing? Do we believe that simply imagining things changes the universe?

So I do not enjoy things in advance because I can't. It's not part of how I'm wired. I suspect there are more people like this out there than anyone imagines. And they just keep telling us to be more positive, to visualize our future success. "Imagine how much better you'll look if you jog for four months" (I'm not going to still be jogging after one month, let alone four), "Picture yourself in an expansive home, with a large circle of friends, a boat and international fame" (why?)
"Picture yourself in a boat on a river with tangerine trees and marmalade skies" I am tempted to respond.

But every time someone says "Are you looking forward to...?" (or, increasingly "Are you excited for...?") they're making small talk. And I don't know if anyone has ever noticed, but I don't really make much small talk. I don't get it. (I do "How was your vacation?" "Good" and that's about it. I resent every moment past one sentence spent discussing the possible future weather)

Maybe from now on I will just say "I don't look forward to things." Because I don't. Because I can't. Not specific things one has to imagine details for, because of their unreality. And aren't Christians supposed to? Or is that something we're NOT supposed to do?

Stuff and Stories

2011-08-20T22:53:00.005-04:00

I watched a National Geographic documentary about hoarders today (it was an episode of Extreme Lives. I watched it and made piles of "to throw out" and "to keep." My living quarters are not as depicted in this googled image above. Yet.) The show was upsetting. People who keep hundreds and hundreds of animals until some of the animals start getting sick and dying. People who can't throw away empty packages and papers and receipts and bags and trash, so their living quarters become unlivable. People who buy things all the time, though they're not going to open the packages, or use them, just to fill up sometimes as many as three houses with items, and have nowhere to live. People who live in warehouses jammed with their stuff, and have no room for anything else but the very basics.

I'm a bit like that, alright. Nothing of the order of what I've seen onscreen there, but yeah. Trouble clearing a path? Yeah. Rotting garbage and piles of heavy things that tower to the ceiling and occasionally fall on people? Not quite. I know people with quite the opposite problem. People who are secretly haunted by the existence of other people's stuff in a box in the basement, and sneaking down and throwing it all away with a sick mixture of guilt and triumph. Like they stole something, but didn't keep it. I knew a woman who let her husband keep a trunk of old things in the basement. It bugged her. She fretted over it all the time.
"If it were in France, would that help?" I asked.
"No," she said. "I'd still know it was there."

There is a difference between being an avid collector, and being an out-of-control hoarder. But I thought this evening about what I hoard. I hoard books more than anything, really. Why have I always done that? Because in books, there is a hero and there is resolution. Or in non-fiction, there are ideas and answers. There is an end, a solution. Usually, there's a cool guy, and there's an adventure that works out satisfactorily. The school library would be getting rid of these adventures I'd just recently had, and I'd keep boxes of them.

Life's not enough like a book for me. In life, I don't feel like you really get to be the wizard, the king, the hero, the cowboy, the romantic lead, The Man. Life's disappointing like that. I think I am actually ever more bitterly disillusioned about this, the older I get. To not get to grow up and be a hero. After reading too much Spider-man and Batman. But if you actually try to live your life, walking around talking about yourself as if you were the hero in a world full of other people, perhaps even using third person, and creating a whole "Of course, you know me..." mythology? You're an asshole. (A deluded, attention-seeking asshole.)

And I hoard TV shows and movies and toys; really anything that ever made me happy. It's like I was raised without any ability to expect anything nice to happen in future. A chronic inability to even imagine myself with something I want unless I'm just about to get it (and even then, it's tough). I had trouble buying a car due to this. Couldn't quite believe I could really do it. So, it's like I'm determined to hold onto everything that ever made me happy at all. I certainly don't expect anything else to come along. My bad years, my bouts of abortive romance, all commemorated and kept. Mostly they were really horrible. But I will keep it all and make songs and poems and drawings and stories and videos about it. Because I really don't expect anything nice to happen next. So I keep it all. And turn much of it into anecdotes which make structured stories. Or songs and poems with endings and concluding thoughts or images.

So like a hoarder typically does, when I live in an environment that's decorated with wall-to-wall reminders of little things that made me happy in the past, little Star Wars and Fight Club things and Atari and Nintendo games and consoles, various musical instruments, endless photographs and books, t-shirts with holes in them but with Alice Cooper on the front because I got them at a concert of his that I really enjoyed; it's like it all reminds me of past enjoyment and I want to keep it stored somewhere near me. Like sadness is always waiting, and that stuff is associated with happiness and could perhaps dilute the misery a bit.

But this hoarding has gone as far as it can. I have a Kindle, with even more books in it than are on my shelves. I have a computer with as many pictures in it as are in my albums. My past is commemorated in the form of songs and blog entries and books on the very Internet. And it isn't enough. It isn't working. With Internet piracy, I can hoard, almost for free, a truly staggering amount of stuff I will never have the time to enjoy. And I'm tired of it. I need something else. And can't imagine myself having anything else.

Because happiness doesn't work well unless it's shared. And the older I get, the fewer people are around that one can share anything with, and make new memories with. The ones who are around, increasingly weren't there back in the day when the stories were made and don't get it. And new memories are increasingly hard to come by. It's all been done before, and more vigorously. So now it's just stuff and stories. This is what getting old feels like.

Sandals and a Strobe Light

2011-08-19T20:34:00.007-04:00

My mission today was to buy a strobe light (for making David Lynch/Twin Peaks like creepy video) and some sandals. You see, every summer, I put on last year's sandals, and by late July or early August, from wearing them every day, they start to crack across the bottom, and eventually will break right in two if you keep walking on them. A rhythm has started up by which the sandals always need to be replaced in late July or in August.

So, this year I put it off a bit, and went a' sandal buying after recording Mindy in the city. Everyone had assured me that, if I wanted to buy things like black lights or strobe lights, I needed a "head shop," (which is really a bong shop.) Radio Shack/The Source no longer has things like that.

Mindy took me to a head shop right by her place. Smoke Dreams. The woman behind the counter, when asked if they had strobe lights or that kind of thing said very distinctly "no," like that was insultingly stereotypical. She just had a store-full of bongs, banana-flavoured rolling papers, vaporizers, incense, various things made of hemp, and a whole lot of lighters, belt buckles and knives.

Mindy assured me that Rock Junction on Rideau Street would have one. I took my leave of her and walked up there. They had one entire room full of colourful bongs (and bongs everywhere else, too) and Doc Martins and t-shirts, knives and belt-buckles, but no trippy lighting equipment. 'Try Happy Daze in the Rideau Shopping Center' was their advice.

So I did. "I can buy sandals!" I told myself, as I navigated what appeared to be some Mennonites, furtively poking at people with gospel tracts without looking any of said people in the face at all, trying to actually give them the tracts without their faces having been seen. As usual, the guys were dressed like upwardly-mobile Harvard types, and the women more like Little Cult On The Prairie.

I went into Payless Shoes, where I'd gotten some Airwalk sandals the previous year. "Oh, we've taken them all off the shelves. It's August, you know..." the girl said with mild reproach.

"That seems rather premature, considering the temperatures out there. It's actually pretty friggin' hot" I said, with slightly less reproach than she had used.

"True. Well, I don't know why, but it's how retail works. We're always kinda a couple of months ahead. I'm not sure why, exactly" she said, with furrowed brow.

"It's called greed" I said mildly. "Reaching ahead for the next big dollar and tripping over the month they're actually in. Nortel did the same thing on a bigger scale, and they're pretty much out of business now. You gotta take care of this month before you get to move on to more money later."

"Really" she said, somewhat amused at my silliness. "I guess that's true."

I took my leave of her and stopped at Happy Daze, found a strobe light, asked them about it, so they got it out of the box to demonstrate it and it didn't work. The girl asked a male staff to get her another, and he wasn't moving very quickly, so I grabbed one from the shelf behind me and gave it to her. It worked. I bought it.

At Footlocker, I interrupted the conversation the two ref-dressed young guys were having to ask about sandals. I got the dude's version of the exact same, reproachful "It's AUGust, dude!" lecture and pointed out that it was still frickin' hot out today.

"True dat. Tell you what," said the one guy. "Go to Latellier and ask for Jess. She's the blonde one. She's really good-looking."

I said I would and set off. When I arrived, I was dismayed. Everything in the store was brown, with occasional bursts of flamboyantly gaudy beige. Birkenstocks were in a place of honour. They actually had some sandals, but they were on a Clearance Rack and were getting pretty sparse. A beautiful black-haired girl wearing no brown or tan at all came out and asked if I wanted anything.

"I would like a pair of sandals which are not brown" I said.

"Umm, so that would make them black?" she asked.

"Not exclusively" I said.

"Well, we only have what you see here," she replied, and then gave me a little reproachful lecture about the naked folly of trying to buy summer clothing in August. She said "That's how we do things in retail. We fill the back with things ready for the next couple of months, and so things aren't really summer in here anymore right now."

"I think that's called reach exceeding grasp" I said almost testily.

She understood that, and giggled, so I decided she was smart as well as stunning, and that I liked her.

I said I was too old and too messianic-looking to carry off brown sandals.

She expressed confusion.

I said I was middle-aged, and a high school teacher, but I saw no reason to wear powder blue golf shirts and tan pants all the time, with brown sandals and socks. She giggled.

We found a pair that were Rockports, which were a bit more 'dress sandals' than I wanted, but my dress shoes are Rockports, so I caved. "Those are almost brown, but I'll take them" I said.

"Those are absolutely brown" she agreed and went to get what she called "the mate" to the one we'd agreed upon.

At this point, a brittle-looking bleach-blonde, short-haired, toothy, skinny girl asked if I needed help. (She wasn't wearing any tan or brown either. Unless she had Birkenstocks lingerie)

"I'm looked after" I said. "I got referred here by a guy at Footlocker who said to ask for you. Said you were The Good-Looking one. I think he likes you."

"That would be Josh" she said, and turned away in pleased embarrassment. I thought maybe she was going to go to her locker and scream "ohmygodOhMyGod!" to her friends.

'My' salesgirl came back, and told me that Josh was Jesse's boyfriend, and while ringing my stuff up asked me about being a high school teacher, and how much patience I must have (I said that, whenever kids try to be annoying, I have the utmost confidence, given years of experience and the authority vested in me, to effortlessly be far more annoying than they can ever hope to be. I was outlining just this strategy for classroom management when over my shoulder, dressed from head to toe in a rainbow of beiges with occasional bursts of flamboyantly gaudy brown, was my Vice Principal. "Oh, and this is my Vice Principal" I said gesturing at her and heading toward the door with my brown sandals and strobe light.

The Vice, not accustomed to seeing me outside of my proper classroom, school and city, looked up in characteristic disoriented confusion from some brown shoes she was eying in a way many a mouse would recognize.

"Hi!" I said. "I was just agreeing that being a high school teacher requires patience."

"Oh, it does!" she agreed, pleased to understand something. "It certainly does..."

"See ya!" I said and left.

Thoughts You Don't Agree With

2011-08-18T17:12:00.001-04:00

People react a whole lot of different ways when put in this daily, human situation: a thought is voiced that they don't agree with.

Some people don't pay any attention to what other people think, so they don't notice. Some people just aren't very good at seeing which thoughts would be contradictory, and which ones are complimentary or compatible, so they don't note the contradiction between what they think, and what was just said. Some people simply don't understand any opinions that aren't what they think themselves, so they just repeat "I don't get what you're saying" because they're listening for it to make sense to them, and it never seems to do that. Some just leave the room. Some want others to do the same. Some express annoyance or disapproval before leaving. "You should be ashamed of yourself." Some try to dismiss the person instead of the opinion. Many resort to name-calling. "You would think that...You're a liberal/white person/Christian/African/anarchist!"

But some of us are weird. Some of us believe that, when someone says something that isn't right, as far as we can tell, that we should tear both of our viewpoints down to see what makes them tick, pit them against each other and try to come to some sort of agreement, even if only that we're not done figuring them out yet.

Now, many people are very uncomfortable with social, verbal or intellectual conflict. They have that fight or flight thing go off, because they feel like there is danger. And there might be. One's reputation might suffer, and with it one's career, should one look ill-equipped to keep up in a discussion. So they want to get out of "harm's way."

My father didn't use the word "discussion." He used the word "fight." As in "Now, let's not have a..." To his mind, if people agreed, there was nothing to talk about, and if they didn't, they couldn't talk without fighting, so they "just couldn't talk."

I've always had a blind, unfounded belief in the worth of thrashing stuff out. A bit post-modern of me, probably. You think something? Why? Have you always thought this? Where did you first encounter this idea? Have you looked at the alternatives? Where is your idea taking you? How's that working out? What do you think of this common other view on the subject.

And I'm one of those (also) weird people who, when I meet with adversity, controversy, resistance or trouble, it gets my blood up and makes me very wide awake, all fired up and alive and bright-eyed and ready to dig into the matter. When a piece of technology isn't doing what I think it should be, I don't want to throw it away. I want to figure out everything about it and a host of other things it can do, until I feel like I have mastered it thoroughly from a number of angles, rather than being left baffled.

So I guess it isn't odd that this happens on the Internet: Lately it's been about people saying something is all about one thing (and no other thing. End of story. If you think differently, you're a something-ist.) Like, in one case, a guy mentioned feminism, so of course a woman brought up rape, as the go-to theoretical example for use in understanding How Men Get Things Wrong, and why women, though very much equal, need special protection from men and so on. Now, because rape involves (to varying degrees) nudity and sex organs, people usually assume it's because some selfish guy got horny and lacked the empathy to understand and feel what he was doing to another man or woman. They assume it's that every time, and that it's about that, and about nothing else. Very few things are all about one thing and nothing else.

So in this discussion, the feminist needed to get people to broaden their minds from the "rape is about sex" to consider her view, which is "rape is about power and control." Not "also about power and control" mind, but "only about power and control, and not about sex at all." I simply said "Very few things are about only one thing."

Bam. Giant argument. Was rape only about sex? Or was it only about power? And me trying to suggest that, like many things, it could be about many things, and different things depending upon the people involved. And then I cheated, got "realer" and less theoretical than anyone else was being, and said "I know that on the few occasions that women have tried to push unwanted physical attentions upon me, that I could not and cannot begin to tell you what it was "all about" for them. I don't have a clue."

And then today there was a "breastfeeding in public" thing that broke out on Facebook. A young man was sitting in a shopping mall next to a large woman who was breastfeeding and making no attempt to be somewhat modest or discreet, so he had to, without warning, get a very up-close, lasting, awkward eye-full of some breasts he found unattractive, from a complete stranger he had no interest in seeing the nipples of, in a context he found forced upon him.

Now only a fool could not have seen that his then suggesting babies should have to "eat" in bathrooms would annoy the mums. But no one wanted to give him his due, and empathize with his side of things. He has a girlfriend, he was in a shopping mall, and he felt that what he described as "pepperoni-sized nipples" (guaranteed to win over all the women in the debate, having thus demonstrated his respect and delicacy concerning the female form) were rather indiscreetly kinda right in face, as he sat on a bench, waiting for someone.

And soon young mothers, for whom breastfeeding was a cause quite close to their, well, teats, began to announce how men should feel and think about breasts. Because, apparently, breasts are not sexual, and men should not feel, think or deal with breasts as if they were sexual. Because they aren't. Breasts are for feeding babies. I pointed out that I am not fond of people who tell me what they think my correct feelings and thoughts need to be. That seems to me to infringe upon stuff that should be my own business, never mind my own rights. And I made what I felt was a simple point: breasts do more than one thing. Breasts are more than one thing. This caused annoyance and umbrage. Didn't I get it? Breasts are not sexual! I realize that, as a man, I am not going to get any respect from women, if trying to talk about the female body. They just don't extend us any credit when it comes to that. We aren't even supposed to MENTION periods or breasts or the like, for the most part. But I made my point anyway. Breasts are sexual (for the woman they're attached to, for her partner and various people who may see her in the course of her youthful adult life) and they are practical, if and when they are ever used to feed a baby at any point in the woman's life.

This was not well-received. I failed to acknowledge my inferior place (as a man) and therefore my not having a right to have an opinion, and was called an asshole for having an opinion and reminded that breasts were REALLY made to feed babies. First. My suggestion that they may have played a sexual role first, and then fed a baby nine months later did not go down well. My "take an adult female's life and contrast the number of months that their breasts functioned as sexual enticements/accessories/organs, vs. the months spent feeding babies" argument was not brought out, as that may well have been pearls before swine.

Because I've got this problem: arguments, discussions, debates; they don't scare me. I like them. Over the years I've gotten fairly good at them, though I'm not a professional. And in many circles, I get the whole "Well, you could argue ANYthing, so your compelling argument serves, not to make you sound like you may have a point, but just like a tricky bastard." How fair is that?

Because what upsets me and makes me uncomfortable in precisely the same way some people get when the Dickens hits the fan is when there is a (dangerous) gorilla in the room that one is not allowed to stare at or mention. I hate unspoken, assumed, tacit stuff that was not and will not be discussed, even if communication breaks down due to this "strategy" of dealing. I feel unsafe when there is a house of cards built of tacit understandings, unspoken agreements or objections, and when it is viewed as the greatest of faux pas to address anything very real or problematic. It makes me scared to leave problems and see how big they grow if we just pretend they're not there.

At work, everyone is mostly terribly worried about a heated discussion breaking out. So we avoid having them. And then discussions often haven't really been properly had and gossip happens and backstabbing and the like. I find that "putting the cards out on the table" when people are steadfastly not having a discussion does not make one any friends. I have this unpopular thing I do when someone is treating me in a way that is, I think, horrible, and there is this understanding that I am not going to refer to it, that I will simply put into words what is being done, while it's being done, and leave the ball in the other person's court. Usually they need to leave the room to avoid discussing it. And sometimes (if it's a woman) another woman will ask me to apologize for having mentioned the Thing Done To Me when We Just Don't Do That. Why can't I just backstab and gossip like a regular middle-aged woman? I am neither regular nor a woman, but I refuse to accept that this is normal or Okay for women or men, despite a lifetime of working with regular middle-aged women.

I prefer having a straight up verbal sparring match to hiring someone to stab people in the back for me. I don't think honour and courage are stressed enough in the upbringing of modern children. I think girls in particular are condescendingly raised with far less expectation that they will show honour or courage at any point. My experience of good women is that one can expect every bit as much honour and courage and knowing their own minds, or admitting they aren't decided upon a matter, every bit as much being straightforward and candid and forthright, as one could expect from a good man. These are things I think. I don't think "It's all and only about that." But I do think this is "a thing."

But maybe you don't agree with that.

Secret Christian Stuff

2011-08-14T03:06:00.003-04:00

I'm not supposed to tell anyone this stuff:

Q. Why are Christians all split up in an almost infinite number of separate groups, most of which make no effort to become aware of each other's existance, let alone connect on a personal human (or Christian) level, or work together?

A. They prefer it that way.

Q. In many human systems, including dysfunctional homes, churches and businesses, the most important rules are never written down or spoken. You find this everywhere. How do people even learn the nature of the unwritten, unspoken, stuff, if talking about it is against an unspoken rule?

A. By noting that people around them seem to get punished when they act a certain way. This teaches a lesson, even if the unspoken rule is never mentioned (even during the punishing of the offending party. Quite often exactly what the person did is misrepresented, or becomes something "we don't talk about.")

Q. In the stricter corners of Judaism, Islam and Christianity alike, there are men (with a few women also benefiting from not practicing what they preach at ALL) whose favourite topic of conversation and concern is how to further limit the influence and participation of women in their religious endeavors. Why?

A. Women will change things. (Even the women who are traveling the country seeing to their entrepreneurial enterprises of promoting books they've written about how women should fight the changes of the twentieth century by staying home and looking after their families and not going out in the world and worrying overmuch about money.)

Q. People are hurt by churches every day. Pedophiles, bigots, sexists, homophobes and haters of all kinds inevitably get shelter from churches of various stripes. Wherever you find someone spouting hatred, whether it's burning crosses on someone's lawn, shooting doctors who perform abortions, picketing a soldier's funeral or what have you, there is always bible quoting and some church or other supporting, aiding, funding and facilitating it. Question is: people are being hurt, and harm is being done, but who actually is benefiting from it?

A. The bible refers to them as "principalities and powers." Never mind the red-skinned, prancing satyr of a devil figure; Christian belief involves the idea that, wherever there is the potential to do good, there is some kind of system set up to ensure potential is wasted (usually on meetings of various kinds, crafting pretty words about who we claim to be and do, and doling out official-sounding titles, with no lack of backroom backstabbing going on over the whole thing). Human systems are extremely effective at wasting all the resources available, not the least of which being time. Eventually, people are inevitably punished for matters of conscience, and people are rewarded for being bad people. All human systems routinely reward misbehaviour. We tend to like to think this is all by accident, that people screwing up while doing the best they can just kinda looks like that. Christian belief is that it's inevitable rather than accidental, and that it's all by design. The good is being wasted, mislabeled and punished, and the theory is that any human system which more than maybe two or three people in it gets there eventually, and is serving, not the people (clearly), but some kind of faceless, bureaucratic evil. Now, some would argue that the system is serving the people on top, who clearly benefit from it. It must be noted, though, that there is usually a fair bit of changing which bastard's on the top of the heap, as being top of the heap doesn't seem healthy. And, in the words of The Who "Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss."

Think of a bad thing that was done to someone by someone else who knew better. Then ask if a human system or organization that was supposed to prevent this from happening (and deal if it happened anyway) "got it right" in preventing the problem, or in helping the victim and not in any way helping the person at fault. And if a random good Samaritan wanted to help, would the system officially "in charge" of helping have helped the Samaritan, or questioned his/her credentials and intentions? Then ask yourself "Who benefited from this harmful action?"

You can explain away anything overly dark or mysterious by simply chalking the whole thing up to people being weak and misguidedly and selfishly serving their short-term interests. Thing is, it isn't just the one person, it isn't just random, an overall effect is achieved; the whole thing DOES serve a long term interest in ensuring good is wasted, corrupted, mislabeled or blocked.

Every time you say "they," as in "they don't deal well with this" or "they charge tax on this" or "they are trying to stop this," you aren't talking about a person, you're talking about a system. And who is in charge, let alone in control? Who is "they" and what are they achieving? Well, it's been decided who is responsible for what, but the actual power, wielded daily, doesn't ever quite follow what's on paper. There are always things happening and people doing things, which the organizational charts do not adequately represent. Aptitudes have something to say about things, and we all know that there are incompetent bosses, and we know what happens when the boss is incompetent. And what gets rewarded? The competence shown in filling in for the boss? Not usually. We serve The System. Them. Stuff is achieved. Stuff is blocked. Stuff becomes inevitable or impossible and no one's really in charge of it.

Many people sense that there is a pattern to the power, and they construct elaborate conspiracy theories. I have never been able to take them very seriously, because I lack the necessary faith in this mythic human ability to work together effectively in groups, or keep secrets. But as a Christian, I believe in good and I believe in evil. And I believe evil's achieving specific, predictable outcomes we are not ignorant of. Look for decay, corruption, harm and exploitation (drug cartels, human trafficking, various types of fraud), and try to think of it as random. Then look at all the unconnected individuals acting similarly, and their actions adding up to an Effect of which they are ignorant. Then imagine a personality which intended that.

Some people don't like to think of God as having a personality, agenda or plan. Many don't like to think of evil as having those either. The Christian belief is that evil has a plan, and it doesn't involve "winning souls." It involves a parasitic, toxic infestation; a gutting of life, excellence, potential, love and grace, a negating of good or value which should be inherent and inevitable.

A lot of atheists still believe in good, but try to deny there is such a thing as evil. I think that's just adorable.

How Long?

2011-08-13T21:29:00.002-04:00

Have you ever wanted to hear a heavily Neil-Young-influenced song recorded in an afternoon, (with me playing everything, including a bodhran instead of a kick drum) which is about resisting the temptation to give up, with an angelic FM choir of voices in the chorus singing "Give Up!" the whole while? Well, now you can. A Twin Peaks nod is seen in the chorus lyrics and also in finger snaps during same.

I've been messing around with wanting to make video to go with this. Some "too dark" stuff is currently here.

August Rolls On Apace

2011-08-06T23:59:00.000-04:00

August rolls on apace. I am keeping busy by watching Arrested Development (which is having an unfortunate influence on my vocal cadences when telling any anecdotes. I start talking like Ron Howard), Buffy, The X-Files and Babylon 5.

I have been shooting bits of video with my digital SLR camera, and then editing them together to make video to go with my songs. That's fun. Very small-time movie making, but still... Some bits of it are on my YouTube channel.

Almonte has a huge puppetry festival each summer, and I often play live music at it. Dude in charge of it forgot to ask me this year, so I was pouty, then he woke me up this morning with a phone call, asking me to sing.

I hung out talking to the sound guys and kids recently graduated from our school who were photographing and sound-mixing the event, and also went to ARG Mayhem, the Star Wars, GI Joe and wrestling toy store, comic store and video rental place. There were people dressed as various Star Wars characters, so I hung out with them and talked about props and stuff. Cool to be talking with people who knew more about Star Wars than I do.

Put on my top hat and vintage 80s Adidas basketball shoes (white with black stripes) and busted out some music like I just didn't care. It was good. It wasn't mistake-free, but it was passionate. A recently-graduated student from our school wanted to play drums for me, so we did that. Just before I left the apartment, a girl on Facebook had quoted the True Blood theme song, saying "I wanna do bad things with you," so I commented "Do you dare me to sing that song in the middle of my town, wearing a top hat?" (I was going to do that anyway). She agreed, and I did it and was soon furnished with photographic evidence of the deed.

The Face of Evil

2011-07-22T13:56:00.004-04:00

I'm reading a book about a guy who becomes a devil. It's Horns, by Joe Hill (who's really Stephen King's son).
In reading it, I starting mentally cataloguing all the things that people think of when they think of the devil, which things do not in any way come from the bible (which means they're coming from somewhere else and then getting blamed on the bible). Assuming that the bible would be one's "go-to book" to even know about the devil (being a character first referred to in there), if we are going to think about him (as a real or fictional character) in terms of his depiction in the bible, we would need to think about him without thinking of any of the following:

-a goatee, and goat feet
-a tail
-red skin
-a pitchfork
-horns
-being in Hell right now, let alone ruling it in any way
-wanting people's souls
-punishing sinners

Because not one of those things is in there in any shape or form. And what does that leave, exactly? As with most things biblical, I realized that everything the bible ever said on the subject has been completely replaced by other stuff from stupid little cartoons and silly crap from John Milton and Dante Alighieri and then that being bastardized on Star Trek, and then people looking at that pile of patently silly stuff and saying "That's silly! How could anyone see any validity in thinking along those lines? Further evidence that there is nothing of validity in the whole book!" Clearly the writers of the bible would agree, as they didn't talk about evil in those terms either.

In fact, what that impish creature seems to resemble most is a satyr or faun from Greek mythology (and the gods Pan and Baccus, as well.) So, just the typical thing of making the personification of evil nothing more than a thinly-veiled, revisionist smearing of the Puritan-annoying embodiments of celebration of wine, women and song, of celebration itself. Again. The bible has a bunch of stuff about the virtues and value of wine, celebration, sex and song. The whole "androgynousedly sexless, effete angels squaring off effeminately against the sneering, funny, witty, horny devils" thing is such a Puritans vs. Partyers thing, and nothing to do with the bible at all. It's about people who wanted to stamp out all partying, with a special focus upon alcohol. In the bible, the devil doesn't have any tunes at all, let alone the best ones. The bible has song lyrics in it. And poetry. An entire book of erotic poetry, in fact.

So, celebration is bad, right? And alcohol in particular? Yet in the bible, alcohol doesn't represent evil. It represents celebration, which is an (in fact "the only") appropriate response to joyful occasions such as weddings and things. It isn't evil to celebrate something. Evil in the bible isn't about partying or celebration. It is about the opposite of celebration, in fact. It's about addiction, betrayal, exploitation, faithlessness and despair. Evil doesn't collect souls to punish for their sinning. It eats entire lives. Makes sure every good thing is wasted, squandered, traded or mixed in with shit. I can think along those lines. In my experience, that's what evil's like, alright. In my experience, evil doesn't have horns. In my life, it wears a tie and is always having meetings, selling something you can't touch with your finger, spin-doctoring truth and spouting unintelligible business jargon. In fact, in my life, evil has always looked a bit more like this:

My Trip

2011-07-13T18:03:00.002-04:00

This is more bloggy than usual. Thought I should report on my use of my summer vacation thus far:

I live alone, so I struggle with how to fill my time when, as a teacher, I get whole weeks and months off at a time as I do each year, so that I might regain my ability to not eat children alive. I have often visited my friends Michael and Bethany as a way to get away. They tend to live far away, so this always involves driving for 7 or 8 hours, and frequently I have had to deal with hassles at the Canada/America border due to sharing the identical first and last name and birth date (including year) as a local felon. U.S. customs officials use handcuffs made by the fine Smith and Wesson company of America.

I wrapped up the school year, and got the kids failed who most needed to (in order for the hard work of the other kids to not be totally without cause, and for passing my course to mean anything at all.) It is very hard work to get kids failed. It is viewed as a failure of the system, and of me in particular. But it was always and only down to kids missing more than half of the classes and doing less than a third of the work.

So I got that done, was convinced that what I really needed to buy was a camera, and scored online deals by getting a new camera and lens from Hong Kong. I saved perhaps a hundred dollars on each of those, including shipping (which was free). I have the camera body, and will enjoy it a lot more once the lens arrives and I can actually take pictures with it. It arrived just when I got back from My Trip. I always used to take pictures everywhere I went, Back in the Day. I used film cameras, mostly, and mainly an SLR (with removable, interchangeable lenses, if you don't understand what Single Lens Reflex cameras are). I always wanted to "replace" the film one with a digital SLR, but they're pricey. Took the plunge this summer. Now I actually need to go places and do things that are worth photographing. But anyway...My Trip:

I took my (purchased this year) 2010 Dodge Charger (black, with leather seats and spoiler) on what I thought of as its maiden voyage with me, and drove, air conditioned and iPod soundtracked, by the guidance of a GPS, my car represented onscreen as the General Lee, to my aunt and uncle's house in New Jersey.

I have gone there a couple of times, leaving my mostly worn-out, about-to-break-down vehicles at their house in an affluent neighbourhood, and taking the short train ride to Penn Station in New York City. This is to save me the impossible job of trying to park my car in Brooklyn. Every single time I've attempted that before, I've somehow gotten both a dent and a parking ticket. Hard to find cars in NYC without any dents. This time, though, I took my time getting to Jersey, hung out there, slept overnight in the bedroom I used to sleep in when we'd visit when I was a kid, and then took the train the next day.

It was sweltering hot the whole trip, with air conditioned car, train and subway, and "deal with it" everywhere else. There is a certain greasy/gritty atmosphere in New York. It's like nothing is ever clean.

Hung with Michael and Bethany, installed an NES and a SNES (Nintendo and SuperNintendo) emulator on their son's computer, leaving a USB hand controller as well, so he can grow up knowing the wonders of the Nintendo stuff from the 80s and 90s. Link, Mario, Megaman, Metroid and all the rest. I probably waxed overzealous in sharing child-management tips and the like. I had to decompress from the year I just worked. Some of that involves resolving to remember what worked and resolving to make sure stuff that didn't doesn't happen the same way next year.

When it's that hot, I find I don't want to eat much. Ice cream is good, though. And beer. As is usually the way, we didn't exactly sight-see, so much as go walking all over the city. Walking across the Manhattan Bridge with Michael around midnight provided a nice city-scape view. We talked about the structure of TV shows. I explained about Fringe, which he is unlikely to ever watch, and he talked to me about Game of Thrones which people have been trying to get me to watch for a while. At one point, he broke off the discussion to chase a rat across a few yards of the bridge. It had been trying to keep just ahead of us, hugging the shadows, and in a fit of typical playfulness, Michael decided to run after it.

As usual, we tended to stay up most of the night doing stuff like that, then sleeping until noon. Bethany had got her younger son cello lessons, and had rented him a little cello and a normal sized one for herself. Despite not having taken more than one lesson herself, her coaching him in playing some basic songs and her learning what note each string was, and getting her bowing technique together meant she could jam with Michael and I playing Michael's guitar. At first we had Michael play songs we knew, and he was singing the melody, and she was playing the melody by ear on the cello. When I had her just play the root note of the guitar chords played for the singing, it provided some awfully nice accompaniment without being so difficult. They'd asked me to bring recording stuff, so I brought my laptop, breakout box, headphones and a microphone. I plonked the microphone onto the coffee table between Bethany and I, and we did a passable version of Neil Young's Music Arcade. I think cello adds so much to acoustic music.

I also got to Forbidden Planet NYC, the huge comic store, which enabled me to pick up the latest hardcover binding of Alan Moore's career-making run on Swamp Thing. Normally I get them from amazon. Also got to the New York Costume Shop for a V for Vendetta mask to replace the ones the kids stole this year (along with my grade 9 yearbook, my Walking Dead season one DVD set and various other things). Apparently the stolen mask has been sighted on Facebook, used in a drunken pub crawl. I also picked up a V wig to go along with it, to put on a styrofoam head in my classroom. And, on impulse, a black top hat from Gothic Renaissance, which is beside the costume shop. I've always wanted one of those.

I went to The Strand (a giant used book store up the street from Gothic Renaissance and New York Costume Shop "Sixteen Miles of Books!") and bought a fistful of used graphic novels, including one with comic parodies of classical stories. Like Mac Worth (Mary Worth and Macbeth) and Blonde Eve (Blondie, with Dagwood as Adam, Blondie as Eve, and Dagwood's boss as God).

On the evening that Bethany arranged babysitting so she could come out with us, it rained a lot. We got quite wet, and picked up sushi and things from a place called Gourmet Garage, and went to a club called The Fat Cat, where we sat in the corner and ate it all. It looks like they took all the basements of the stores on that block and made it into one huge space, with pool tables, foosball and ping pong everywhere, and a small bar. At one end, there was a band. This evening, it was a gospel group. Four old black guys with grey moustaches and blue golf shirts, singing their guts out, like Sam Cooke and James Brown rolled into one, four part harmony accompanied by drums, bass, guitar and piano, but with the voices doing all the musical work. The place was infested with hipsters, each timidly bearing some feeble badge of desperate, carefully uncool individualism, yet looking completely uniform and homogeneous as a group.
What I really struggle with, in terms of my own mental and emotional well-being, is being able to talk about ideas with people for whom talking about ideas (instead of gossiping about people real, or the ones on Jersey Shore) is neither novel, confusing or upsetting. I got to talk for days with Michael and Bethany, who are very smart, and equally got both ends of the spectrum, talking at length to my "going to my Plymouth Brethren church really works for me and I'd recommend it to everyone because everyone needs to go to church" uncle, and his divorced, lost-his-job-this-week, fairly recently atheist son. They're very smart too. And they don't just observe the ideas and label what ism they sound like. They get into it for real. It was all good.

Made it back without incident, got all of my stuff bestowed upon my sweaty, humid little apartment, did final tweaks to a mix of a song on J's band's album which they want ready for Saturday's show, graphic designed better inserts for the DVD case inserts the store downstairs uses for their rentals (they'd used scissors and a photocopier for their current ones), did some work on a silly song of mine which needs more collaboration with other musicians, got my camera body at the post office, and picked up a memory card for it, and tried unsuccessfully to schedule a visit with my niece and nephew who moved out of my parents' place last week, and into an apartment in the city.
I've been filling the time between computer fiddling and waiting for my camera's lens to come in with watching the entire Lord of the Rings Extended Version DVDs back to back with the director/writers commentary on, and watching episodes of Justified. Justified is such a good redeeming of that tired old "macho, always gets his man through thinking and shooting, modern cowboy cop" idea. It could so be Walker: Texas Ranger and it so isn't.
It's raining now. That's doing beautiful things to the temperature. Here is the new "rented DVD and games" insert I designed for ARG Mayhem, the video rental/toys and collectables store downstairs. Google image stealing to make a little collage, rather like the collage of snippets of photocopies from comic book covers and toy packaging that makes up their current packaging. (They are self-admitted technotards.)

My Job Is Like This...

2011-07-03T11:18:00.000-04:00

Heroism

2011-07-02T12:38:00.003-04:00

A woman asked me once exactly why it seems I have always attracted/been attracted to damsels in distress. My answer was glib: "We don't grow up on Batman comics without it having an effect." I thought maybe this needed going into in more detail.

I have always loved stories of heroes. When I was a little kid, there was Bugs Bunny, who may seem an unlikely hero, but think about it: faced with bigger, meaner or better armed antagonists, he kept his cool, fought back with his wits, and made fools of anyone who messed with him. He didn't mind being a stinker at times, and was quite unrepentant. He was a smart-alec. I did not grow up in a home nor in circles in which wit was encouraged or even viewed as a virtue.

I don't even remember when I started being into Batman. I'm sure it was probably seeing a snippet of the Adam West Batman from the 60s on a TV in Zellers, Radio Shack or some other store that sold TVs. When I was five, my dad, mortified at how risqué the jokes on M*A*S*H* were getting, and how it depicted promiscuity, adultery and alcoholism, got rid of our TV, and there was no more Bugs Bunny in our house. But somehow, I still began to idolize Batman.

Batman is not usually a smart-alec, but he isn't above the occasional wry comment. He was grim, unstoppable and determined, in most depictions of him. The world was messed up and corrupt, and he made a difference. He couldn't fix it, but he could chip away at it, and that made him feel his life was worthwhile. He had all manner of gimmicks designed for no purpose other than making that difference. He had an awesome big black car. He wasn't a goody two-shoes. He was actually scary for criminals. Pretty badass, not pretty boyscout or pretty Peter Pan, which I always found Superman to be a little bit too. (And Robin. They wrote Robin into Batman comics in an attempt to lighten them up, and to give kids someone to identify with. Waste of time. I liked dark stuff, and was already identifying with Batman just fine).

When I discovered Zorro (in friends' comic books, and in a cartoon version glimpsed briefly on TV), I immediately liked him for all of the reasons I liked Batman. I wasn't surprised years later to find that Batman was heavily based upon Zorro. Like Batman, only with a black horse instead of a black car, and with constant jokes and smart-aleckry. Same with Robin Hood, who I also loved. Why smart-alecs? Because I grew up in a world of male people saying "I can impose my will upon you and embarrass you publicly because my fist is stronger and faster than yours is" and me responding "No, I can hold my own against you because my wit is stronger and faster than yours is."

When I was six or seven, the Ottawa Journal newspaper that we got each day started carrying daily comic strips of Spider-man. He was strong, he rescued people, and he climbed buildings and swung around the city even better than Batman. Unlike Batman, who was a rich adult businessman by day (how unheroic!), Spider-man was a nerdy teenager during the day (equally unheroic, but something I could relate to), having to worry about school and peers and his boss at work. The idea that someone could have a life quite a bit like the one I knew I would have in my teens, but secretly "get his own back" from the bullies, the bosses and the criminals during the night was enticing. There was also the 60s cartoon of Spider-man still being repeated on Saturdays, and I stole a couple glimpses of that too, growing up.

Somewhere around that time, at Kevin Durkee's house, I saw a couple of episodes of Filmation's Tarzan: Lord of the Jungle. (it was one in which Tarzan gets abducted by some jungle-visiting aliens, and the one where he has to fight a robot Tarzan) This was around the same time as the Ottawa Citizen started carrying daily comics of Conan the Barbarian. Conan was pretty much Tarzan with a sword and some other accessories. These men were strong, dangerous, adept at killing people, but there was a nobility to them. They often rescued people. They were berserkers when they were angry, and they were quite different (especially Tarzan) in daily conversation. They had adventures, because they were explorers. Where Batman and Spider-man had fairly generic cities with alleys and waterfronts to police, Conan and Tarzan would find hidden cities of gold with leopard people and giant spiders or the like. Exploring ancient, murky underground places filled with danger and mystery was pretty intoxicating. When the Indiana Jones movies came out, I read the novelizations of them eagerly.

A kid left the book Star Trek: Log Seven (novelising Star Trek: The Animated Series) in the change room at the school at which my dad was basketball coach and gym teacher. I was hooked immediately. Exploring. Strange new worlds. Gimmicks. Smart people solving problems and beating stronger, meaner, better armed folk. Smart-aleckry. Very American. Typically, they hired Canadians to play the American captain and the Scottish engineer.

Star Wars (read in novelization form) provided the idea of another berserker hero with a fast ride (Han Solo), and to a lesser degree, Luke Skywalker was also cool, in terms of learning that he could grow up to possess secret wisdom and skills, mostly to deal with his scary, overbearing, emotionally-detached father. Very American again. Overtly following Joseph Cambell's hero cycle theory, which was either an observation that most hero tales follow the same structure, or an attempt to formalize millennia of stories of heroism.

Doctor Who was something I read in novelization form also. The BBC may have had pretty much zero budgets for their plywood and styrofoam sets and props, but in the books of course, everything was real. Tom Baker's idiosyncratic performances were so off-the-wall that they came through 100% in the books, even without seeing or hearing him. Doctor Who was very British. What a counterpoint to the American stuff! Where in Star Trek two spaceships would (both carefully right-side-up) encounter each other and reenact a submarine movie, or people would go down to a planet and bring guns and (like a more laid-back Star Wars) posture and make threats and shoot at each other and blow things up and punch and wrestle, the Doctor pretty much won by condescending to everyone. He didn't have weapons. He was an incurable smart-alec and he won because he was smart and knew everything. Very like Bugs Bunny, if you think about it. And The Doctor was Jesus. He often found ways to heal planets and people, he came "from beyond with infinite insider's knowledge" about the Universe and how it was put together, and he wasn't merely human, though you couldn't tell by looking. What he'd do, when pushed to it, was sacrifice his life and his body to save everyone, and then, getting all glowy and radiant, he'd actually resurrect and live on to save a whole lot more people.

When I was first reading books, I read the Hardy Boys and Tom Swift. These were kids who had adventures and explored mysterious places and had gimmicks and cool boats, cars, planes, motorcycles and stuff. They had fun adventures, but they were far too boyscout. This meant they didn't last. Also, the books were written according to a formula calculated to sell, and farmed out to ghost writers. In the case of the first several Hardy Boys books, they hired a Canadian (from Carleton Place, Ontario, actually, where Roy Brown, who likely shot down the Red Baron also hailed from) named Leslie McFarlane to write them. The formula worked at first, but after reading about twenty of the books, it got repetitive. This would later happen with Star Trek and Star Wars. Far too many hours of adventures that were far too clearly formulaic. Not Doctor Who, though.

When I was a kid, I did have a fondness for the Incredible Hulk also. He wasn't smart (though David Banner was, and he was a very interesting character) but he was a berserker and he was misunderstood and ostracised, which we can all relate to. Also, like Spider-man, he was a nerd part of the time, and an stoppable, take-no-crap hero the rest of the time.

In my teens, I latched onto any TV heroes who were smart-alecs, who had cool cars and who rescued women and solved mysteries. So, Shaggy from Scooby Doo (Freddie was too boyscout and gay), Rick Simon from Simon and Simon, McCall from The Equalizer, Michael Knight from Knight Rider, Murdoch from The A-Team, Luke Duke from The Dukes of Hazzard, Magnum from Magnum P.I. and many others, including Canadian, budget-cut, injured, desk-bound superspy V.H. Adderly from the show Adderly. I'd been reading Robert B. Parker's Spenser books, about the beer-loving, smart-alec Bostonian private investigator, and so the few episodes of Spenser: For Hire that I saw on TV at a friend's house delighted me.

Still reading many, many books of heroism, I loved the Sherlock Holmes books, and Lord of the Rings. I think something I have always valued in heroes is intelligence and composure. Keeping their cool, as it were. Characters like The Doctor from Doctor Who, Bugs Bunny, Spock from Star Trek and many others were brave in the sense of not showing fear. Magnum and Han Solo/Indiana Jones were humourous exceptions to that rule, being known for kind of funny running away, or wincing after they'd hit someone, or the like, but in the end, it kind of came off as Bugs Bunny, and it worked. Tarzan, the Hulk, Conan and others only lost their temper for the best possible reasons and with the best possible results.
In my late teens (not having previously been allowed to own comic books) I got into the X-Men, mostly because of Canadian macho berserker Wolverine. I got especially into the character when he got his own book, and it became about keeping his temper. He would lose his temper when he should (to fight or whatever) but there was the new idea that losing his temper socially would keep him from getting the girl, from getting the support of his team or whatever.

Looking back, I find a couple of things interesting:

I liked nobility and heroism, but only down-to-earth nobility by characters who had normal lives also, if that makes any sense. I liked the everyday heroic quality to Spider-man and the rest. Characters like Thor or the Silver Surfer didn't do it for me, because they didn't really have normal life components to their day. They talked a bit like the bible I was expected to read daily, but the writers weren't actually all that good at that. Even in the "Amok Time" episode of Star Trek, they'd gone all "thee" without knowing how to go "thou" or "thy" properly in an attempt to make Spock's planet Vulcan seem more spiritual and ancient. I liked the idea that these characters were heroes, and that they were real people with normal lives who could also be heroes. Spock's job was to be a scientist and researcher, not to sacrifice his life for people. Spider-man was just supposed to be taking pictures, not actually rescuing people from burning buildings or cackling madmen. Tarzan was trying to live in peace in the jungle away from people, but then he'd help out people anyway, though they gave him little reason to. Han Solo's better judgement told him to take the money and run, and Shaggy just wanted to get high and eat giant sandwiches. Characters like Frodo and Aragorn didn't want to be heroes and were actually sacrificing their comfortable, everyday lives to be heroic for the greater good. Characters like Wolverine really made you believe that, unless they chose to do heroic acts of sacrifice on an hour-by-hour basis, they'd have lives to live that would keep them busy enough. Not so much Thor or the Silver Surfer. I like those characters (as in the recent Thor movie) when their "normal lives" are explored, so that there is a backstory and a context for their heroism on Earth.

I liked smart-alecs, but not if they were mean. I always reacted badly to David Spade characters, and even to characters from Seinfeld eventually (after too many shows and too much obvious formula repetition) if they were just nasty, and displayed no capacity for empathy or generosity.

In the modern world, I have loved stories which deal in light/dark and good/evil concerns, especially ones which present a world-view I recognize: not one in which unless we're careful and do not say Beetlejuice three times, play with Ouiji boards or feed the mogwai after midnight, evil will suddenly take over with teeth and stuff. No, ones in which evil, as a more corrupting, all-pervasive, bureaucratic rot has already taken over and is running everything. Even in Star Trek, with the all-powerful Federation ruling everything, the impracticality and inflexibility of bureaucracy and disputes over rules are important. In Star Wars, the government has been taken over by bureaucracy-exploiting thugs. On Twin Peaks, goodhearted people prove ill-equipped to deal with the slow, insidious rot that evil has already brought about. In The X-Files, your government routinely keeps secrets from and lies to you, and will sell you out for money or more power, and two people with a lot of questions will go around shining flashlights into ancient, murky underground places filled with danger and mystery despite being told not to question the status quo. In Babylon 5, there are mysterious, dark (and light) forces at work behind the scenes, to which we are pawns, and our government is siding with the dark. In Battlestar Galactica, things are complicated, and there are wheels within wheels again, and we're always two steps behind knowing what's really going on, yet we have to make important life-changing choices now.
In Vertigo comics, the dreams of everyone in existence are shaped by the Sandman's inability to forgive, to find love, to hope, to change, to find freedom, to find the joy in life. Hellblazer's John Constantine finds that, once people have stuck their hand in evil's maw, and tasted evil and used it, they're kinda doomed and all he can do is damage control. Preacher's Jesse Custer feels like the God he was raised to believe in has abandoned the world and buggered off. So he's going to find Him and demand answers, navigating a dangerous world of powerful men with deep perversions. Transmetropolitan's Spider Jerusalem isn't a virtuous man, but one thing he can't let go of is a mania for telling the truth, for letting people know, for not believing the lies.
House is Sherlock Holmes. The Matrix presented evil as wearing suits and ties and demanding conformity. (No one wearing a tie has ever said anything to me that I ever wanted to hear.) Dexter reminds me of Wolverine and the Hulk, and presents the idea that the bosses know more than they're telling, but also don't have a clue what's really going on, so are bureaucratically in the way all the time. Sometimes he needs to go into the night and take care of business his own way. Because once people have drank the koolaid and become part of the system, they've often lost important bits of both their empathy and their realism along the way (like Odin giving up an eye for wisdom), become somehow neither naive enough nor cynical enough to be fully human in any way that's going to help, yet kind of too naive and too cynical in ways that won't. The Walking Dead presents a world already lost, yet in which all of the little human concerns remain as important as ever. Fringe is new X-Files episodes, with the Star Wars element that, even if the fate of galaxies lie in the balance, it all really revolves around whether a father and son can get along.

And back to "why are you attracted to normally strong women who suddenly seem to need to be rescued?" I could add to that "Why do you routinely not believe that anyone in any position of authority over you is ever very good and competent and informed?" and "Why are you such a smart-alec when just shutting your mouth would probably cause less friction?" and "Why do you lose your temper how and when you do?" And "Why did you buy a big, cool, black Dodge Charger, which is the same make and model of car as the General Lee on the Dukes of Hazzard, but now looks more like the Batmobile?" And "Why did you just buy a big, black, Peter Parker SLR camera?" Also "Why do you buy so many gadgets?"

Some sad lessons:

-you can't actually rescue anyone. The best you can do is be a comfort or a help in a time of need, and then not be needed after that, unless you're dealing with a parasite. So:
-you don't really get to be a hero. Even if you're a smart-alec with cool gadgets and a fast car. And your life will just have to be good enough to suit you anyway. Cartoons make girls want to be princesses. They make us need to rescue people.

-it is almost never safe to lose your temper. Anger can work as fuel only if kept to a low simmer, and it's only good for being destructive. If you have a tree to chop down, a bulletin board to tear all the stuff from, or a person who is crossing all kinds of boundaries and really needs to be sat down hard, then it's useful. Usually? Not.
-smart, witty people can be bullies every bit as much as strong, nasty thugs can. So can pretty, popular or rich people.
-we do not fight to keep evil from happening. It's here, it has occurred, and worst of all, it's us.
-as the damage done by western culture and the religion it created having their huge prolonged falling-out continues, widespread failure to appreciate and understand the colour, flavour and nature of "religious" virtues such as empathy, self-sacrifice, heroism, nobility, grace, forgiveness, redemption, patience, charity and the like will continue to result in simple-minded story telling with heroism that rings false in our hearts. The more "virtuous" means prissy, tight-assed, selfish, judgemental, closed-hearted, martyr, self-pitying, superstitious, ritualistic, self-mythologizing crap, the more we decide that, in order for an angel to make a kickass hero, he really needs to half demon to get rid of the stench of church. The more batarangs Van Helsing needs. The more giant robots and explosions, the more noise and fury to try to cover up the signifying of nothing.

-We need to explore. Places, people, things. Or we'll simply die of stagnation.

-If you make only sensible choices, you aren't likely to have any adventures.
-without the possibility of failure, success doesn't mean anything and is, therefore, meaningless and impossible.

The Meaning of the Word "Romantic"

2011-07-01T14:30:00.003-04:00

This was an email I sent to someone. Thought I'd just stick it up here for comment.

The dictionary definitions of the word "romantic" are like this:
romantic: having no basis in fact : imaginary
romantic : impractical in conception or plan : visionary
romantic : marked by the imaginative or emotional appeal of what is heroic, adventurous, remote, mysterious, or idealized
romantic : of, relating to, or having the characteristics of romanticism
romantic : of or relating to music of the 19th century characterized by an emphasis on subjective emotional qualities and freedom of form; also : of or relating to a composer of this music
romantic : having an inclination for romance : responsive to the appeal of what is idealized, heroic, or adventurous
romantic : marked by expressions of love or affection
romantic : conducive to or suitable for lovemaking
romantic : of, relating to, or constituting the part of the hero especially in a light comedy

I think that when a young or new lover is just starting out with someone else, it is more of a "looking ahead" and an "imagining and hoping and buying into something envisioned" kind of thing. They've both got the dreams and hopes and pleasant imaginings, and it's partly about saying "Let's try to make some of that at least, come/feel true."

But once people are committed to one another, when they mention "romance" they're mostly either looking back in terms of idealizing the past, or in terms of trying to recapture it or enjoy something that reminds them of it. Which has to do with nostalgia. Which raises the question of significance.

In my vast, storied and much vaunted experiences with ladies, I have found that, while it's going on, you don't quite know what any of it feels like yet while you're in the moment. Afterward, of course, you decide what it meant, what it didn't mean, what it felt like, how you remember it, and all of that. You construct and ascribe significance. You make the memory what it's going to be. The hurt feelings in promiscuous sex usually come, I believe, from either (or any) of the parties being too human to keep from ascribing significance to the thing. I don't know if animals ascribe significance to things. I know that anniversaries, birthdays and memorials, eulogies, tributes, blessings and all of that are about marking an occasion or the number of years passed since an occasion, and deciding the thing was significant and wanting to mark that somehow.

People contrast the glowy, "my spouse/kid/parent is all magic and the Best One On The Planet" feelings and experiences (which I think we all like to have, but sometimes fail to see the capacity for drunkenness in and clear risk of being a fool before others) with the "I deeply appreciate it when my spouse/kid/parent does really useful, needed, everyday, undramatic 'little' things that one would shrink from romanticizing (like cleaning a toilet after I threw up in it from my chemo or whatever). The feelings are kind of the same, they're kind of deep, and yet they're different.

Because we have this idea that God meant/expects all things to be perfect (atheists: pretend I said "That we have to make everything perfect.") That He has been forced to deal with imperfection and that this is our job to fix. That every time we have a gathering, a relationship, a child or whatever, that it "has to be perfect" and it never is, not even for a moment, to our shame, despite what we're working with, but we live for those moments we can pretend that, right now, it's perfect. But it never ever is. Yet we want to pretend.

So "romantic" can often mean "when we pretend it's perfect and nothing besides euphoric" and then there's this other stuff that deals with compassion, competence and faithfulness in dealing excellently with the imperfections seen in the whole thing. So, a rose can be "so romantic" but cleaning up messes is something else that is quite, yet, not entirely different. Part of a thing that deals in "making things ok that otherwise wouldn't be" instead of "helping pretending things are perfect, So We Can Rest."

No, even Solomon didn't feel foolish pretending, idealizing, imagining and all of that. So maybe there's a place for it. But when the virtuous woman is described, one tends to feel "Yeah, that's what a wife should do, but it's not very Romantic." And it isn't. And maybe we're not wrong that it isn't. Maybe romance is one thing, and not everything, and maybe not everything is romance.

I know that it's not just me that wishes day-to-day life was more adventurous, mysterious, heroic and all of that romantic stuff. But we plan our lives to make damn sure they aren't.

Claws and Teeth

2011-06-26T16:19:00.006-04:00

When I was a little feller, we had a cat named Freddy. I was taught that there was a God who'd designed the world, and people and cats and dogs and things like that. (if you weren't raised that way, just imagine I said "evolution" instead of God in that sentence, if it makes you feel better) I was fascinated with Freddy. He was a large black cat with short soft fur, and he liked hunting. And sleeping curled up in the bathroom sink basin on hot nights.

So, I was basing my view of "What kind of worker is God anyway? What stuff does He like to make?" upon His work in having made a three-year old's pet cat. I was amazed at how quick and agile Freddy was, how he could hide in any room he felt like and you really, really couldn't find him, how he could end up on top of bookshelves and the like, sitting primly far above where I could reach. And the way he could just ask to leave the house in the middle of the night and they'd let him go uptown on his own, and despite traffic and children and who knows what, he'd come back, often having killed and eaten something. One time he killed a rabbit about as big as he was, and ate as much of it as he could and lay around blissfully for days with a bloated stomach. I was terribly impressed. I certainly would not have been able to catch a rabbit, let alone kill it.

My parents always had time for me, and always had to look after my needs when I was a toddler, but the cat was different. If he got sick of us, he'd just hide where we couldn't find him, or simply leave and go uptown. And one time he did something I was not prepared for; I was petting him more than he wanted, he tried to leave and I tried to pick him up, and he scratched my arm so that it bled. Point made.

I had to think about that one. God made this warm, purring, fuzzy, acrobatic creature. And He gave him teeth and claws enough to really hurt me. And the more I got to know him, the more he seemed like a being designed purely to track motion and kill things. All of his playing with yarn and balls of paper and sneaking around and pouncing on things seemed more like killing practice. It was also clear that he found a deep and abiding satisfaction in using his teeth and claws on things. That game he played where he'd grab hold of my teddy bear with his front claws hooked deeply into it to secure it while he raked it with his hind claws? That was just practice for grabbing hold of struggling prey while he tore its guts open with his hind claws. (we had a German Shepherd too. I didn't learn a thing about violence from her, though, as she was nothing but motherly to me)

The thing about this was, all of this made him much more, rather than less, cool. It meant when he jumped up on the bed purring, and wanting to rub his cheek scent all over me, he was in THAT mood, and when he wanted to go kill something, he was in THAT mood. It meant when he was being nice, he was choosing that, and he had two sides to him. Not like a Care Bear. Not like the Jesus they told us about in Sunday School. (He was described as being gentle, meek and mild and loving children. Bit of a prat, really. Samson was cooler.)

Of course I learned that real people had two sides too. My dad could hug me, but could also shout and hit and break stuff. Made his kindness mean something. And even socially, people were like that too. Compliments and generosity sometimes, slights and sarcasm at other times. Dumb kids just thought that angry adults were mean. I entertained the notion that losing one's temper was part of being a real person.

Weird thing I saw: some people wanted to get hairless cats their kids couldn't be allergic to, get their claws and reproductive organs surgically removed, and then not let them out of the house, so they'd be "safe." (Same thing with their cats. For a few decades, vets have been routinely prescribing Prozac for cats who seem dissatisfied with their lot in life. Any thoughts on reasons why?) This just didn't seem right to me. We wouldn't remove a baby's vocal chords to quiet it, would we?

When I went to university and studied William Blake's poetry, he had a pair of poems that talked about "what kind of God would make a tiger, anyway?!" They were in a book called Songs of Innocence and Experience. The first one is about how nice and harmless and cuddly and innocent a thing a lamb really is:

Little Lamb, who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee?
Gave thee life, and bid thee feed,
By the stream and o'er the mead;
Gave thee clothing of delight,
Softest clothing, woolly, bright;
Gave thee such a tender voice,
Making all the vales rejoice?
Little Lamb, who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee?

Little Lamb, I'll tell thee,
Little Lamb, I'll tell thee.
He is called by thy name,
For He calls Himself a Lamb.
He is meek, and He is mild;
He became a little child.
I a child, and thou a lamb,
We are called by His name.
Little Lamb, God bless thee!
Little Lamb, God bless thee!

Now THIS was Sunday School stuff. "Thank You God For Making Peanut Butter!" and so on. God is nice. He's our Pal. The lamb is nice. God is nice. I didn't like that poem one bit. The Tiger poem, on the other hand, is quite a bit different:

Tiger, tiger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize the fire?

And what shoulder and what art
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand and what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? What dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears,
And water'd heaven with their tears,
Did He smile His work to see?
Did He who made the lamb make thee?

Tiger, tiger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

Now that kind of thing wasn't really talked about in Sunday School. Sounded a bit like Lord of the Rings stuff, actually, in places. We were told not to listen to heavy metal music (the lyrics of which sounded quite like that) also. And the thing is, we thought all that stuff was cool. Fire? Spears? Hammers? Chains? Monsters in the night? AWEsome! And there were huge parts of the bible devoted to slaughter, whores, blood, fire and mythic creatures with teeth and claws. We coloured pictures of peanut butter and letters which said "Thank You God For Making Peanut Butter!" instead, thereby learning the necessity of putting an exclamation point after every religious pronouncement!

They didn't teach us kids that cool heavy metal, Lord of the Rings bible stuff. And, unsurprisingly, when some of the kids lost siblings in snowmobile or car accidents, or to cancer, and when kids lost parents, the "lambs are nice/thank you god for making peanut butter!" faith they'd been given was manifestly not adequate to deal with the shake up their world views were going through.

And I've been to churches that have a Sunday morning service that's almost all about "God's our Pal! We sure looooooooove Him!" I've been to churches that tell the story of Jesus without one harsh, revolutionary, judgemental word spoken by the man, and no blood, no death, and no pain. Or they skim uncomfortably over those bits so they can get back to singing "We sure looooooooove Him!" songs without being brought down too much, like a bunch of khaki pant and golf shirt wearing Care Bears, swaying with their kids in time to the cheerful stuff.

The world God made (or "evolution" if that makes you feel more comfortable) and the people and things in it, it turns out, have claws and teeth. (Of course there are lambs too. And peanut butter. And if you can avoid getting kicked by their sharp, hard little hooves, you can hold lambs and stroke them. If you don't mind getting mud and lamb shit on your khaki pants)

The Whys Have It

2011-05-29T13:41:00.002-04:00

(Note: after writing this blog entry, I wrote and quickly, sloppily recorded this song)

There's been a lifelong progression as to why the sacrifices in my life were being made. When I was a kid, I kinda had these things sacrificed for me (I had no say in the matter and was punished every time I expressed any interest in not making these sacrifices meekly and without question):

-the 80s pretty much as a decade
-being part of Canadian culture and my age group

-trying to be fashionable or cool

-expressing myself by my hairstyle and clothing choices

-all forms of entertainment and pop culture (including the music, television and movies of the time)

-dating girls who didn't go to our church

-alcohol

-smoking

-gambling

-voting

-slangy, fashionable, vulgar or overly colourful language

-emotional expression in most of its forms

-discontent, questioning, defiance, dissent

-any Christian replacements for pop music or videos or the like

Now, that may not seem like much (and I've never learned what the appeal of smoking, gambling or voting is at all), but what making these sacrifices does is it leaves you cut off from the culture and world going on around you. The question always was "Why is all of this being sacrificed? You seem deeply unhappy and your life is extremely lonely, boring, empty, pointless and depressing. So, why?"

To begin with, the answers were as follows:

-because God requires this

-because you will be rewarded for these sacrifices when you get to heaven

-because our church is the only right one, and you need to live like this to be a part of the Only Right Church

-because God will only bless you (add success into your life) if you make these sacrifices

-because God does not bless people who don't make these sacrifices

-because good people make these sacrifices

-because you're better than "all of that stuff"

-because you can hold a position of responsibility and respect one day in your church if you do

Well, it turns out that as far as I can tell, God didn't want all of that. I think this neo-pharisee, nouveau puritan lifestyle was actually sinful, self-indulgent and excessive, and something I have to get over on earth, rather than being rewarded/reimbursed for in heaven. All abstinences are by definition immoderate. Our church was wrong about many things, including about them being The Only Right One. Also, despite making these sacrifices, I was never really a part of that church, and many people who did not really make these sacrifices at all were and are part of it to this day. Things have changed. Also, they now hold positions of responsibility and respect sufficient to involve excommunicating my whole family for not supporting their authority to excommunicate others, then they can enjoy going home and having a beer in front of the TV. I have met many good people who do not make sacrifices of these kinds. They are generally more joyful and healthy. I was not better than "that stuff." I was a religious prick. As the years have gone by, I've seen God bless screwups and sinners, addicts and assholes of every stripe but a religious one. Jesus treated religious people completely differently from how he treated everyone else. And God has not blessed any of that sacrifice-making. He has asked me to repent of the piety of it. It wasn't just all for nothing. It was actually misguided, life-damaging and bad. And it wasn't just the What. The Whys were all wrong too, it turns out. Often, that's more important.

Harold Camping: The Boy Who Cried Rapture

2011-05-22T14:39:00.007-04:00

I'm of too many minds about all of this. I know what it's like to grow up and believe there would be a rapture coming soon. I know what it's like to have the advent of 1984, 1986, 1992, 1994, 1998, 2000, 2011 and 2012 greeted by all the crazy prophecy talk:

JIM: Did you see the paper? Ships of shittim in the Gulf. Like Mr. Lunden said there'd be. The abomination of desolation in the temple.

MORT: Yes. The Lord is so good. The Roman Beast. The third horn and Lybia. We know it's Ghadaffi, now that Hussein's out of the picture..

JIM: Yes, and Cyprus. Hitler, too. A grievous head wound of which he is healed. The woman riding the scarlet beast. Like in "No King But Caesar"

MORT: The Roman beast and the church in Rome. CNN and Fox News. The two witnesses. Three days and creatures like scorpions with the hair of women.

JIM: Well, Babylon, anyway. With the sixth seal and the fourth woe and the angel being told to write down the measurements. Cubits upon cubits. Seven plus eleven is 19 in Greek. Jerusalem, Jerusalem.

MORT: And Obama playing right into Daniel 4. With the four and the seven and the three. Which add up to twenty in Hebrew numerology, which spells "LORD" in Greek numero-linguistic glyphs.

JIM: Yes. How wonderful it is to know the Lord. Not like that Jack Van Impe with his ignorant misuse of scripture!

MORT: Oh, certainly. How sad it would be to be like the Baptists and be deaf to the clear teaching of the word of God regarding the false prophets and teachers!

JIM: Yes! It's SO clear! I just don't understand why everyone can't see it. They must have their hearts hardened against it so they might not believe.

I grew up surrounded by that talk. By people who forbid us watching Star Wars or Ghostbusters because they delved into the occult. My house was full of it. So much so that on May 21st, it really made me antsy. Superstitious. Very divided in my thinking and feeling. In 1984, 1986, 1992 and all the rest, it was just weird-to-others-but-normal-to-us stuff that people did in our houses, but almost no one much even knew about it, let alone cared. The majority of the people in our churches had no idea about and placed no emphasis on this stuff if it didn't interest them. They just thought that people who were "into that" were pretty smart. For most, it was not an important part of their faith. My dad was into it for a good while. It attracts people who need there to be a clear right answer to everything, and to be someone who knows it.
People in general are very interested in how the world might/could/probably will end lately. The Mayan calendar. Zombie apocalypses. (Ships of shittim in the Gulf. Like Mr. Lunden said there'd be. Two twos, which add up to five in newspeak.) It's fun to imagine the end of the world.
For the past two years, I've been added on Facebook by many followers of Harold Camping. He's another one of these old dudes vivisecting the bible and trying to use it like it's a word problem in grade 10 algebra, but he's also an old dude with a 122 million dollar radio station and many thousands of followers who sell their stuff because the end is nigh, and give him all their money. Their thinking never made sense to me. But it sounded terribly familiar. Human pattern-making gone mad. Projecting personal issues onto text.
Some Christians believe you get in God's good books by believing. Some believe you do it by devoted following of a Christian lifestyle. Some believe you need confession and priests and stuff. Some believe you do it by having correct teaching and not believing anything false. Some believe you do it by careful, dutiful association with and submission to a community of Christians who form what they call a "church." Many just think "I'm not such a bad guy. God's going to tell St. Peter to let me in."
But Christians who seem to me to be connected in some way with the bible feel it says this:

God was making dinner, and humans were supposed to get to help, but were convinced to believe that putting dogshit from the lawn into the casserole wouldn't ruin it and make it harmful to eat, and then God became a human to show how being human is meant to be done (people are wrong, but don't judge them; people change, and let them; people learn and help them; people mess with you, but don't start a war). It's almost like being in a group in school, and Jesus is in your group, and because of his exemplary work, you get to share his mark/grade. So long as you say "I'm with him. This is the work our group did." If you say "I don't want to be in Jesus' group anymore. I think his work sucks. I'm handing in my own crayon diagram of a newly-redesigned nuclear power plant instead of his (I know his Dad invented the nuclear power plant, but who cares, right?)" then that's suddenly more of a problem as to what mark you get.

So, the idea that:
God wanted things to go well, people tend to screw it all up, and that God works well with screwups and likes them, and helps us, and if we accept the help rather than saying "No, I'm OK. Leave me alone. I haven't been shot, that's...a pimple. I don't need an ambulance", then He's got us covered, things will be fine?

Used to that idea. Christians are sharply divided into two groups on one particular matter, though: will some people not benefit from God's bailout plan?

-Some think that anyone who chooses to go with it (and they frequently make an idol out of their own capacity for, and past wonderful, mystic Choice For God) will be fine.

-Others think that God chose who would be able to hear this message from the beginning, and so when people learn about it, if they have been helped to be able to hear, they will hear (and God knew who'd be able to hear, and worked in them to help them hear) and if they can't hear stuff like that, it's like planting a seed on the sidewalk.

So, the Campingites were being interesting on Facebook this year. They were really stressing the idea that, if God has worked in you, you can't do a damned thing to avoid being damned, because you were already looked after and will be fine. But then (and this is what confused me) they sort of claimed they were the only ones in the world Christian enough to know the day and the hour that Christ would return to earth to take with him the only people who God had worked in, who would be saved from the (zombie) apocalypse.

And then, they kept going on about how everyone should beg God's mercy. "Why beg His mercy?" I would ask. "If He's already worked with you, and you're set, why the grovelling and fear and stuff?"

Their answers never made sense to me. They said that begging God's mercy if He hadn't been working with you wouldn't do a damned thing for already-damned people. They said that begging God's mercy if He had been working with you wouldn't do a damned thing to already-saved people. And then it seemed that the begging (and the warning others to beg) seemed to be their favourite thing to do all the time, and the only relationship with God they ever spoke of.

I would ask them exactly where the peace (or joy or serenity or contentment or the other stuff God claims to have sent Christ to give Christians) was in their view. They'd dismiss me in ways that made no sense and tell me to beg for mercy. Because begging was the "only appropriate response to the situation" they'd say.

They did signs and billboards and vans and radio and TV. They were on CNN and Fox. They seemed to feel that God would choose not to help the majority of the world's population, but then have the minority saved group "warn" the others that there was no hope for them, and to beg (fruitlessly) for God's mercy, though He'd chosen from before the foundation of the earth not to show them any. Made no sense to me.

And here was the weirdest thing: I grew up with the secret embarrassment of knowing approximately how weird parts of our religious belief would sound to "regular" people. I grew up taking comfort in the fact that, apart from a few curious question-askers and people who studied theology professionally, no one was paying any attention. And just like with Fred "God Hates Fags" Phelps, suddenly the entire Internet, radio and TV network lit up worldwide this week, looking on and laughing at people who spoke uncomfortably like how people did in my house. I was in Subway (restaurant) with a musician I was doing final mixes for, and a veterinarian who also does music production work with her, getting a late supper, and the DJ on the radio was flipping out with boyish delight at how stoopid the rapture people were. It was quite like being pantsed before the world.

And it really further complicated the whole messy science vs. religion nonsense (You know, the bigotry which feels that there're no scientists who are informedly religious, and no religious people who are good scientists. No good, live injuns.):

"What's your religion?"

"Oh, I don't have any religion. It's all bullshit."

"So, you have no beliefs as to how we came to be, where we came from, where we're going, how the world will end, what human existence is in aid of, how humans should act, any of that?"

"Oh, yeah! I have all that. But I don't just have beliefs... I have FACTS! You know? Not like religious freaks. They're all dogmatic and closed-minded to what's REALLY going on!"

"So, you believe in the modern grab bag of misheard high school chemistry, Dr. Phil relational dynamics, Oprah ethics and National Inquirer/New Age/herbs/gluten-free superstition?"

"No. I don't believe. I KNOW! Not like religious people who just believe what the bible says."

"How do you know what to believe?"

"I don't believe, I know. I already told you that. I know because the bible... I mean, because a recent survey I read about on the Internet by some guy, I forget who, said. He said his research might indicate that (or maybe something else, he's not sure, and can't explain various things that happened and didn't happen.)"
"So you're a scientist?"
"No. I dropped out of high school and now I work at Wal-mart. But I know enough to see through religion!"

"So the smartest of scientists, if they are religious men and women, get no respect from you?"

"None. Stephen Hawking and Richard Dawkins get my respect."
"Have you read any of their books?"
"Well, no, but they're the shit, dude!"

"Do you claim to understand Stephen Hawking's theories well enough to know if there are any holes in them? Do you feel he is qualified to dismiss there being any merit whatsoever in work that was being done for centuries by the most educated men and women of the time?"

"There aren't any holes in them! What are you, insane?"

"You can say this because you understand them, as well as the thinking done by theologians for centuries?"

"Well, no, but he's right. I know that. Because he's writing more recently than they are. And he's really smart. Just look at him!"

"So you believe him. You trust him to know, and then you believe him."

"No, I KNOW. Haven't you been listening?"

"What do you think about black and white, right/wrong thinking?"

"Oh, it's fucking stupid. Religious people do that. Must be nice being wrong about everything and still getting up in the morning!"

And on and on. The Camping people were extremely arrogant and irritating (and in a couple of cases, said they hoped I had a family so I could watch my family suffer and die, hopefully for the entire period leading up to October 21st of this year, at which time the entire earth would finally be consumed, lucky/magic/divine seven months after the chosen few were airlifted out.)

But it is May 22nd today, and I wonder where they are and if they're ok. The entire world is looking on so they can have a good laugh at People Who Thought They Were Right but Were Wrong. Because that makes us right, and we LOVE being right. And we LOVE laughing at people who were wrong. Because we tend to screw things up.
I have heard report of suicide attempts and people having sold homes, vehicles, property and businesses only to donate the money to Harold Camping to pay for more "warning the irrevocably damned to fruitlessly beg God's withheld mercy" stuff. Only three of Camping's many followers who added me on Facebook have contacted me today. One deactivated his account and did not answer my email. Another privately claimed that have lost faith in the May 21st date a month prior to it, but had not said anything; another says that May 21st is still, somehow, correct, perhaps in a way not yet clear to us. (Because God's right, and the bible's right, so if we disagree with it, we're wrong and fools, right? And the bible doesn't have to make any sense?) One flatly and bravely stated his error, and apologized. That makes him the best Campingite I know.

Christian Books I Actually Like

2011-04-27T16:42:00.007-04:00

Normally I hate Christian books. Thought I'd put up a few that I do like, just so people know about them:

I like this book because it isn't a self-help book, and it isn't either an anguished tale of growing up without a Christian upbringing, nor is it an earnest story about growing up with a (Baptist) Christian upbringing, and finding something more, something deeper. It is a funny, unpretentious, both-feet-on-the-ground, artistic musing work about growing up with a Christian upbringing and looking for more, and learning to deal with the whole world and all of life, rather than just living a ghettoized Christian existence. Funny, and with an aptitude for Kurt Vonnegut-grade "wording things in such simple terms they seem ludicrous" technique.

I like this book because it also isn't a self-help book, and it's about a (Plymouth Brethren) Christian upbringing really not working out. I don't think I've ever seen this story told before. It's about gradually losing faith in Christians and churches, but not in God, and trying to live a life, and about reaching forty, childless and without a wife. It is very honest and occasionally rude and very funny. It actually is a story, a real-life story, but told to tell a story rather than to make a point, and not because there was cancer, or work done in Africa, or a child born with a tragic defect, or a family member crippled by a debilitating accident, but still praising God. There is none of that. He's not a pastor, either. Just a dude, trying to live his life in North America, believing in God but having lost all faith in "Christians operating in groups."

I like this book because it again isn't a self-help book, and it's not by a pastor explaining about how he learned what he learned, and what he thinks is important, and how he helps people until tears run down their cheeks. It's a woman's story, and it's about the (Lutheran) Christian upbringing not really working out, and, at therapy having a shrink who was bright enough to know he needed a really clear picture of what kind of God she actually believed in (a snappy, sarcastic, cold one, it turned out) so they could talk about that. She alternates personifying God for her therapist with real-life anecdotes about growing up in California as an aspiring actress, playing the photograph of John Candy's wife in Planes, Trains and Automobiles, and a friend of Mallory's on Family Ties, and reaching forty, knowing it wasn't getting any better than that, and childless and husbandless to boot, and losing faith that God wasn't altogether too much like her father.

I like this book because it is about growing up in a Plymouth Brethren group that was so much stricter and meaner than our group was that it actually makes me grateful. This book is about a woman being ritualistically shunned by her birth culture for using birth control, and having her husband somewhat grudgingly refuse the church's pressure to divorce her because of her misbehaviour, and then trying to deprogram and live a life in the world outside that soul-crushing pressure cooker. This is the second edition, as she had to remove some stuff that was in the first edition, under threat of lawsuit by the litigious Exclusive Brethren of New Zealand and Australia, who are, without exaggeration, a cult, by any definition.

Leathery Wings

2011-04-26T23:18:00.003-04:00

This one was about what happens when you try to repress the angrier, darker side of yourself and follow only your best intentions (that builds up like pus inside until eventually you are sick with it and you really need to be lanced like a putrid boil and/or given some kind of cataclysmic enema of the soul). I wanted kinda punk, and got Jay to do a White Stripes kinda guitar to it to make it sound less like Green Day, as it used to sound uncomfortably like "When I Come Around." Jay also sang the highest notes in the chorus. I'm handling vocals, bass guitar, and "thickening" drop D snarly guitars on the choruses, along with an end "solo" and some percussion. Again, would like Tyler K to do a bass line that's more varied, if he feels up to it.
This is designed to follow a virtuous, "good intentions" kinda song on the album, which is all sappy and pretty, and then gets rudely "interrupted" by this song knocking to get in. The "trick" in this one is that the rhyme scheme, oddly, involves rhyming the first word of every line with the last word of the previous one.

Leathery Wings

I envy the sought-for, the hunted, the wanted

Flaunted the attractions that make life a game

Lame house of memory seems to be haunted

Cries from the roots of the mountains again

Leathery wings batter my ribcage

Leathery wings tear through my veins

Leathery wings disrupt my nightmares

Leathery wings sear my brain

Small parts go missing, the gears grind together

Whether the power is flowing or no

Go to the place where you stand in the weather

Rip it all open, let everything show

Voices hysterical shriek, laugh, they're frantic

Clinic for fear that has made you its own

Groan of black terror is swirling, gigantic

Stand on the stone and throw everything down

Open the iron door, let out the blackness

Cackles and hooting that rend the night air

Fair is the light that will transfix the darkness

Burnt to a cinder the dragon despair

Eugene's Poem

2011-04-24T02:28:00.001-04:00

My Facebook status today said:
has drank a Monster energy drink to shake the chilly, wet, grey lethargy, and has installed new, non-grinding-noise-making power supplies in two of his computers, vacuumed the dust out of said machines, virtuously bought reasonably-priced DVDs of things previously pirated, deleted said files and shuffled data among hard drives rather than merely buying a brand new 3 Tb external drive, as he was very tempted to do.

Recorded another of my songs that George did drums on. This was an odd one. I set myself an odd task. Back when a song tune came to me almost every day, I decided "I'll just choose any odd poem a friend has written, and surprise him by making it into a song." And I did. There are supposed to be Irish elements in it, some of which can still be added to the intro and two quiet verses. Like everything I do lately though, this one seemed to get louder and louder, which felt great at the time. One good thing: I'm not worrying about being too careful. Obviously. Makes me wonder exactly how much frustration and energy there is that I'm clearly using music to vent... Mark is apt to write poetry that is a bit silly, so I picked one that I liked:

Eugene's Poem

I've often seen wonder, more often seen pride

And I've let down the trappings but never complied

I've seen little creatures in puddles of light

Sharing their colours with all of the night.

I look when I'm lonely, I sing when I'm free

And seaweed is only the weed of the sea

Come sing with me comrade, come fly with me friend

These heart-aches I've kindled are not going to end.

When I have a heart-ache I drink me some cream

And ride floating planets, go drifting downstream

But I work when I'm humble, I dream when I'm sane

And I never rely on Rememory's Lane

But hunger is peaceful and lifetime is long

Loneliness lovely and sadness a song

Quack quack quack-quack quack quack quack quack quack quack

The small fuzzy creatures with mint on their fangs

Will warble of pickles and lost hunger pangs

We'll wake up in hunger, we'll feed us on doubt

And dream on the light 'till it radiates out.

As Country as They Wanna Be

2011-04-23T00:02:00.002-04:00

I grew up with parents who thought rock and roll and jazz and pop were evil, and that one should properly listen to old hymns only, but a delight in old country music was understandable. I prefer louder music, though I like a bit of wood in my rock. I also have a baritone voice which would be better for singing country. Normally I fight this, but this one song of mine is supposed to be country. It's based on a bad pun. I had written the song "Who Are You Anyway?" which admitted the realization that I really didn't know God like I thought I did. Didn't get Him at all, actually. I wanted a song which allowed Him to respond. I dared to write one.

It's called "Promises (God's Country)" and is mainly about things I always believed God had promised, but which, actually, He seemed to want me to know He hadn't. The hard one was that, I was always taught that when the apostle Paul wrote to one specific group of people and said "As you supplied all of my needs, so my God will supply your needs," that this meant that if I never needed anything at all, God would get me that. The idea was that if I didn't have it, I didn't need it.
But then one has to ask: What about all the Christians who starve each day? Didn't they need food? The answer I've always been given to that one (that what they needed was to die and go to be with God in Heaven) never seemed to me to be satisfactory. So I had a look and thought "Just because Paul said that one thing to that one group of guys, given how they'd treated him personally, what makes me feel that God has Himself promised to get me anything I need at any given point in time?" This version needs Tyler to do me some real bass, and other Tyler to do me some piano. A country fiddle would be great, too.

Promises (God’s Country)

I didn’t promise that you would never hunger

I didn’t promise that you would feel no pain

I didn’t promise that the sun would never beat down harshly on you

On the just and on the rest I send the rain

I gave you life to live and I won’t say how long you have

I refuse to make your life decisions for you

Because they’re part of what I put you in this big world to explore

But I promise you that I don’t plan to bore you

I didn’t promise I would give you daily bread

You will see I won’t supply your every need

I didn’t promise things would work out in your lifetime

But I often add some growth if you plant a seed.

I didn’t promise that there’d be someone to hold you

I didn’t promise there’d be folks to understand

I didn’t promise to reward your good behaviour

But if you look for it, now and then you’ll see my hand

I didn’t promise you would live to see old age

I didn’t promise that you’d have somewhere to sleep

I didn’t promise that I’d keep you free from cancer

But not a tear falls down uncounted when you weep

I made a lot of things that I really hope you go check out

For everything there is a time and season

Enjoy the things you can and if you can, survive the rest

I don’t promise you will always know My reasons

Even More Heavy

2011-04-17T19:44:00.001-04:00

I now have a handful of songs I need to record to the shiny new drums George played for me. This weekend I was supposed to work on music more. So far, I went out to Moxie's with Leiffster, pottered around on the Internets, formatted and reWindowsed my piracy computer, took an abortive trip home to my folks' (my brakes in the van aren't, well, braking so much as breaking right now. Garage time.) and came home. So, looking through some stuff Derek gave me about compression, I remixed "Proud Someday," posted last week, to make it EVEN HEAVIER. My music isn't generally heavy, but this is 21st Century heavy, almost, yet still with the Neil Young in it. Turn it on, turn it up, sandblast your frontal lobes and comment to let me know you did that. Otherwise I won't know anyone anywhere ever heard it's triumphant, messy cacophony.

Two Kinds of Stuff or Something

2011-04-17T12:21:00.005-04:00

People usually screw things up by going to one extreme or another. When it comes to Christianity, this has historically always been part of it. Some people emphasized that Jesus was the son of God to the point of believing that he "wasn't really" human. Like maybe he was a ghost or apparition or angelic being of some kind, masquerading as a man. All of his miracles were about "Look, I'm glowy magic!" Others, of course, emphasized his humanity to the point of believing that he was merely the best of humans, with no particular connection to God. Just a good man, a prophet, a teacher, who was misquoted or mistranslated every time he suggested otherwise. All of the accounts of miracles were embarrassing lies, and every bit of his teaching or prophecy or humanity which revolved around them was mistranslated, quoted out of context, or was more embarrassing lies.

When it comes to the modern Christian, the two basic extremes I'm dealing with are:

-people who think Christianity is all about the Kingdom of Heaven/God/Jesus having come to earth and us continuing to spread goodness, healing and magic to it as Agents of the Kingdom, on the one hand,

-and people who think Christianity is all about the Cross, and about the irredeemable horror that is the world in which we live, and how Jesus had to die to spirit us away to Heaven so we wouldn't have to deal with it anymore.

One question as to these two views is "Which one is right?" That's kind of a dumb question, actually, which reveals an insistence upon polarized thinking, about it needing to be one or the other, and not both and/or neither, kinda. The belief that one of these two opposites is actually in the middle, and that only the other is "off to one side." This is the kind of thinking which causes the characteristic church divisions and compartments in the first place. The Mona Lisa: Right or Wrong? Obama: The New Messiah, or The Beast, AntiChrist and False Prophet of the End Times Rolled into one? Stupid.

Another question is "Which parts of the bible are they glossing over to overemphasize their preferred half of the story, and what do those parts say?" Yet another question is "What kind of person does it make you/which kind of person chooses to overemphasize the one or the other side of the message?

I listened to this today. Tom Wright. Up to his usual shenanigans. More perspective than one can comfortably hold in one's head at one time (if, like me, you are lacking sufficient intelligence to take it all in like this) and no practical application. Ridiculous words like "salvific" and "narratival." Terribly valuable, though. A thing to remember as one goes on living one's life, rather than a thing to "get" immediately.

I was raised with "All Cross, no Kingdom" Christianity, and am now finding the company of "All Kingdom, no Cross" people equally ungratifying.

In my upbringing, the gospels "led up to" the cross. In other words, the whole point of history, and therefore of course the whole bible (including millennia of Jewish history) and the gospels and epistles "pointed to" (were really actually about) the cross. The whole story of humanity was about how God created the molecular universe on purpose with a plan, and intended human beings to have a stewardly, participatory role in it, and we betrayed him, fell in with a bad crowd, and let them take over what God had put us in charge of, so it could be ruined and subverted, kinda ruining but maybe not ruining, God's plan. The world was therefore, irrevocably ruined, so Jesus came to rescue us from it by dying on the cross. The Christian job was to not get too enamoured of anything or anyone which might SEEM nice, as we were in enemy territory, awaiting airlift out. When bad things happened in the world, it made us feel better, righter, smugger and more comfortable that our world view was the one everyone should have. Right now some very shrill and certain people are preaching that Jesus will come May 21st, 2011, and that this world will at long last, by October at the latest, finally, and blessedly burn. Hallelujah!

The other view is quite different. the gospels "led up to" the kingdom of God being reasserted on earth. God is setting the world to rights and wants us to take part in this. In other words, the whole point of history, and therefore of course the whole bible (including millennia of Jewish history) and the gospels and epistles "pointed to" (were really actually about) Jesus coming and "thy Kingdom com[ing] on earth as it is in heaven." The whole story of humanity was about how God created the molecular universe on purpose, and intended human beings to have a stewardly, participatory role in it, and we betrayed him, fell in with a bad crowd, and let them take over what God had put us in charge of, so it could be ruined and subverted. The world was therefore, needing to be put, once again, under the rule of heaven, so Jesus came to set that right. He is the King, and he has come. The Christian job is to work as the agents of the King, spreading news or and demonstrating for others how the Kingdom of God works and is run. When bad things happen in the world, it just means we have a LOT more work to do.

People raised as I was have a lot of death and gloom to them. A lot of resigned acceptance that things are "just terrible" but that, so long as we focus on the there and later rather than the here and now, we can, sort of, be happy, in our imaginations at least. Too much reading verses about the Kingdom (or the Holy Spirit) made us wiggy and made us worry that the bible might prove the Kingdom folk to be right, after all. We glossed over them quickly, didn't quote them much, and spent more time explaining them away than explaining them. But then we citizens of Heaven behind enemy lines would quite often find that we really liked some good stuff that really seemed to exist in the world. The Olympics, House, Macbeth, Pink Floyd. And people we liked too. People who, as near as we could tell, were wrong about stuff. And either we felt guilty, or we tried to Christianize it, or somehow argue that this thing from the world is actually from God, so it was ok to enjoy it, and not a form of consorting with the enemy.

People focussed instead upon the Kingdom smile and hug people a lot. They are always eager to set the world right. They want to reach out and connect with human beings we treated like enemies. They believe, as Wilton Knight on Knight Rider did, that One Man can Make a Difference. They tend to have to go to Africa to do it, too, or the poorest neighbourhood they can find. Mostly they don't, feel guilty about that, and salve their smarting consciences by being something-pastors, on something-teams, or giving money or time to people "serving abroad." Because it's usually abroad. They can't make their fellow countrymen and women see that things need to change. They can't deal with the complacency in their own culture, so they go to people whose lives are undeniably fucked so they can help. I've seen and talked to many of these people. I've seen that they sometimes burn out on well-doing. They get weary of it. They get disillusioned about how much good they can maintain any belief that they can actually do, and about various eventually disappointing people they'd trusted to get good done with, about how much of a difference a group of people, let alone one man, can really make in any measurable way.

Once again: the dumb question: Which is the right way to think and live?

N.T. Wright is pretty smart. He says you should read the gospels and Paul (most people don't actually do this, but settle for Sparksnotes.com "Significant Quotations" bits, like that's the same experience), and that you should simply let them actually say what they want to say, and actually be about what they are actually about, rather than slanting them to the one side or the other, to "History until now has been a prolonged introduction leading up to the cross" on the one hand or "the kingdom has begun and we need to not focus unduly upon the fact that Jesus died, because that's actually perhaps somewhat confusing/depressing and those gloom and doom folk have been sucked into that vortex of old-fashioned crappy Christianity" on the other.

Easier said than done. Most people just don't read the bible at all. I mean today, I read Ezekiel 14, and it said in verse 16 (speaking to Jerusalem, Ezekiel says there) "she increased her whoring, remembering the days of her youth, when she played the whore in the land of Egypt and lusted after her paramours there, whose members were like those of donkeys, and whose issue was like that of horses. Thus you longed for the lewdness of your youth, when the Egyptians handled your bosom and pressed your young breasts." Now, should I view that in terms of pointing forward to the cross? Or in terms of being the sad state of affairs that existed while Jerusalem was awaiting the coming of Jesus to proclaim the arrival of the Kingdom of Heaven? Maybe it's about both of those and neither, and about other things besides. Maybe "Which side is right?" is a dumb question.

Spent

2011-04-10T01:24:00.001-04:00

Embarassingly, I overscheduled myself this week. Dentist appointment. Last minute marking before report card mark calculation. Making some form of parental contact for kids who aren't doing work and want to pass anyway. Taking the Reach for the Top (Canadian high school trivia show like Jeopardy) team two hours away all day to play on TV.

Friday was the worst (as I'm sure Rebecca Black would agree). A day of teaching school which was the deadline day for work counting toward the report card, a three hour session recording George's drum parts on my songs (which he had to learn, and I had some weird ones for him.) Then off to the school to stay all night chaperoning a fundraiser (30 Hour Famine. The kids take pledges to not eat for 30 hours, and Friday night is like a huge campout/sleepover in the school, ending with a breakfast Saturday morning. XBOXs and iPods as far as the eye can see).

So today I slept until midafternoon (after getting in at around 8am after having stayed up for the whole night), ate really nothing besides some muffins left over from the breakfast, and eventually got the energy together to tackle the song George had recorded a drum part for me, about which I was most excited. I found myself hitting a beer bottle with a drumstick, singing girlie vocals, played dropped-D crunch chords on what was formerly an acoustic song and otherwise doing the whole thing myself, mostly with first-take stuff, just to find out what it would sound like. I am now shockingly exhausted, and, foolhardily have put up my rough mix on the Internets though I'm not fit to type words, let alone decide if the mistakes are fixed enough. (in the song AND the blog entry)

The song is called Proud Someday. It was about how once one starts to grow, to change, to take one's life in a new direction; family, friends and others around suddenly get looks of disapproval and discomfort, and start a lot of sentences they don't finish. ("Don't you think..." "You used to be so..." "You know we worry when you..." "Why can't you just..."). This was a surprisingly snarly little acoustic song and now that I got George to do some quite aggressive drums to it, a barking, roaring managerie of crap joined the acoustic to make this cacophony. I struggled with how to try to make the incomplete sentences clearly be that. Putting sentence fragments into a song structure means they sound oddly OK.

Proud Someday

You know what? You can't, can't just…

It's not that… 'cause you need to, have to…

Because you should just stop the… and then go back to…

You know there's nothing quite so…as never doing anything that…

Anyone could ever…or feel that it's too…

We thought, we thought, we thought, we thought

We thought you'd make us…

We thought, we thought, we thought, we thought

You'd make us…

We thought, we thought, we thought, we thought

We thought you'd make us…

You know we worry when you..you used to be so…

We're concerned about your…you're doing things that…

There's a look in your…and we just don't know any…

Why can't you stop the..come back in and try to…

Please just, please just…and we could all be…

We thought, we thought, we thought, we thought

You'd make us…

We thought, we thought, we thought, we thought

You'd make us…

We thought, we thought, we thought, we thought

You'd make us proud someday, but now you're…

What Does Wise/Spiritual Look Like?

2011-04-06T23:50:00.005-04:00

Christianity is an Eastern religion. It comes from Asia and is the work of Oriental thinkers and writers, by strict definition. We have westernized it, of course, and in so doing, we have robbed it of much of what makes it unique. We've all heard this. We've also done the opposite: we've taken this one specific Eastern philosophy/religion/path to wisdom/approach to life, and we've failed to see what is different about it when compared to the others.

For example, our view of what a wise, holy, spiritual person looks like. Our view can be seen in a hundred movie characters. Mr. Miyagi, Yoda, Splinter. Galadriel, Elrond, Flynn. Neo, Paul Atreides, Spock. The movie versions of Jesus are the same. These guys don't sweat. They don't have any big facial expressions. They are detached, uninvested, distant. They observe and see much, but from a place higher or a bit removed from the action. They teach serenity, a lack of attachment, emotional investment or passion. In fact, they teach that giving into emotions is the path to failure or even evil. They counsel against frustration, anger, sorrow and eagerness. They have blank, sometimes slightly bemused faces. (except Jesus, who is too stoned to be bemused.) So, wisdom and spirituality are connected with detachment, and a lack of emotional reaction or investment. Jedi aren't to love women. Minds are to be cleared until they are empty so the body may act. The turmoil of the heart is to be stilled and made quiet.

Thing is, the Jesus of the bible sweats. He groans in frustration or sorrow. He expresses rage, eagerness, and disappointment. He loses his temper, he calls people names and kicks over tables, he cries, he shouts, he groans, he berates, regrets, dreads and anticipates. He pleads with God.

That makes him different. I can relate to that person a whole lot better than stoned Jesus in the movies, or perennially wise, rubber Yoda. I take comfort in a role model who isn't afraid to both feel and publicly express (on record for millennia) the full gamut of human experience without suggesting this is weak, foolish or a path to evil or failure. Because feeling and participating fully in the full gamut of the human experience, and painting your life with the full palette of human emotional expression? It's part of being human.

Confidence!

2011-04-02T21:33:00.001-04:00

Apparently my energies work mainly only in opposition. Too much comfort, complacency and a lack of anyone knowing what I'm up to or nor caring? Lethargy. Opposition? We're good to go. Opposition to other people's doubts and quibbles, opposition to looming deadlines, budget problems, people flaking out and letting one down, and technical problems. Jack White would be in strong agreement.

I vented, got it together and did another song. Did a bunch of "Neil Young with Crazy Horse loud" guitars which seemed to blow a winter's worth of soul-crap straight out through the wall of my apartment and all over the cars in the parking lot. Also did shakers, acoustics, bass guitar, fiddly leads and backing vocals, because once again there was no one here but me to do that.

This song when I've recorded it in the past has been a bit church-music, cheerful, cheesy acousticky, or a bit lazy, Rolling Stonesey. I took it straight down sludge street this evening. Actually broke a sweat, too. The B.C. Rich Warlock was roaring through the Vox tube amp. The neighbour, fortunately, wasn't home, so I could turn everything up to 2 and flail away. Her cat (sounds Siamese) was screaming through the door at me as is his wont when I went into the hall on my way to get a sub from Subway across the street. I decided to stick a mic in front of her door and record the cat screaming and put it in the background throughout the song. I could picture that being awesome. Typically, as soon as the mic was brought, he shut right up and wouldn't make a peep.

When I wrote it, the words were in deadly earnest, and I can't say I don't feel like this anymore either. Obviously, it's to God:

Who Are You Anyway?

I know you're not like Santa Claus, although you know who's naughty or nice

I don't say "I've been good all year, so give me this." You don't have a sleigh, do you have advice?

'Cause I can't help but wonder because I just don't understand

I don't know who you are anymore I don't even know who I am

But I've been bad all year.

I know you're not like Jupiter. You're more than Zeus in one of his bad moods

Sometimes you help, sometimes you smite, most times I don't get a reason why

Although I don't wish to be rude, sir

The calves are bloody. Guess I tripped and fell.

I know you're not like my father, although your standards are almost as high

If I'm your son, I'm more prodigal than prodigy, I'm scared to come home and I don't know why

This all sounds like teenaged angst but I need some answers now

I didn't get too many then, but I'm asking you anyhow

Who are you anyway? And who am I?

Confidence

2011-04-02T15:22:00.004-04:00

Do you know that I lack? Do you know what the "deal" was in my church? It was about confidence. You had to check with them all the time, and the idea was that, if they had confidence in you, you got to feel confident too, and do your stuff. I'm not wired (or trained or raised) to be able to just go ahead and do things I've thought of unless a collective of people has said it's good and I should. I can get a little burst of outrage or the like, and go ahead and do something once in a single uncharacteristic afterburner blast, but I pretty consistently lack motive power to go ahead and do any good thing I can think of. I'm old enough to know better, and I do, but I AM not better and do not function any better than that.

You can't move forward without confidence. It's connected to faith, to the belief that what you are doing is, in fact, worth doing, and that you can DO it at all. When I moved in those circles, I was never allowed to speak or do anything at all in groups of Christian people, though they were always complaining that young men were not doing that stuff, and there were begging young men to do something, anything. In that kind of circle, people went to great lengths to step around me and ask other people to speak. I stood in Ottawa while a guy tried his damnedest to try to convince my cousin (standing just past me, me standing between the two men) to do a bible talk for everyone. My cousin doesn't do that. I was standing there, and I did not get asked to talk. It wasn't a question of knowledge or brains or talent. It was a question of trust. So, the guy who absolutely can't talk in front of a room full of people, and who has given few signs of having opinions of any kind is futilely begged to speak. Professional public speaker is always, every single time without exception, sidelined. Most of my life I have been paid to explain things to people. Yet in "Christian circles" great steps are always taken to shut me up.

So, will my songs get recorded? Will I write things? Will I finish my first book? It's always a matter of confidence. If the idea, the inspiration takes hold of me hard enough, I slap something together in a flurry of work before I lose my nerve (that's why my second book got done), put it online or wherever it is, and then, usually...silence. The hit counters go up, people seem to know who I am, I get ten friend requests on Facebook and two or three friend requests on YouTube every single week from people I have no idea who they are, yet not a single word is spoken or emailed personally. Just numbers on my computer.

A couple of times a year someone tells me I shouldn't do what I'm doing, and that I'm a bad person, a sick person who needs to be medicated, or someone who needs counselling for "anger issues." And every year or so someone tells me what THEY would have done, had they been me, and had my idea, and still, for some reason, wanted to do it their way, to suit them, for their reasons and their audience. How could my piece be made more accessible to pastors? (you know what, FUCK pastors. I've lost my belief in them. They can all die of AIDS.) How could my song be more like what Casting Crowns are doing? I have learned that this is probably the nicest backhanded compliment I can be offered. "I like the intention behind what you did enough to tell you you did it kinda wrong and it doesn't work."

Well, confidence is the fuel. Recently I got the confidence to not only endlessly record other people, but to get some drums recorded for my own stuff. "Why are you doing that?" people want to know. "Entering a song contest? Trying to get signed by a label? Putting together a live show?" "Why did you do it?"

No. I wrote these songs and said these things. Maybe that stuff should be out there for people to hear. Every now and then I get a little surge of confidence (there's certainly no one in my life who "blows smoke up my ass" so to speak) and I decide to record or write something. A song is up on the Internet. Then the silence, broken, perhaps by:

"embellish it like jim steinman would. y'know; break it up more, toss in female support vocals, and dramatize the "you've got to change" ...possibly with a children's chorus or something."

But I don't want to do what Jim Steinman would do. I don't want it broken up more. I might get female support vocals, but would prefer high male ones. I really don't want a children's chorus or anything. And you know what? Recording one song? It uses up that tiny puddle of confidence that collected like condensation. It has to grow back. Puts one in an Elijah frame of heart. "I only I." Other work remains to be done. Why am I sitting not doing it? The engine is out of fuel. I sit without any motive power to move forward because of an overwhelming cloud of "Should I/Can I/Will I and Why?"

You know what would make it easier to be confident? If someone said something I did was good, or said out loud that I was good at something, instead of just asking me to do things for them. You know? Not just have me record them for free (and win contests with what I recorded for them), but also say something to me about me being good at recording, or that I did a good job. Are people afraid that praising me will be like feeding Gremlins after midnight? Will I hit critical mass in terms of confidence if I am praised, and take over the world?

People are listening, sometimes. A brethren kid emailed once to ask if what I wrote could be used in a bible study. I don't know if that happened. I said yes and he didn't respond to my subsequent email. A (hardcore) Exclusive brethren man asked if he could adapt my website content to a "text only" format allowed by his brethren group (graphics are evil, I guess, including fancy fonts and logos) so he could share it with Exclusive brethren who'd be less challenged in terms of conscience if it were text only. I don't know if that happened. I said yes and he didn't respond to my subsequent email.

So yeah. The world if full of people putting stuff out there. It is not all equally good. One thing though: if you don't have support from others and/or confidence? It's not ever going to get out there. You know who's confident enough to get things done? Fred Phelps. Mark Driscoll. Ghadaffi. Saddam Hussein was confident until we had him killed.

Wikkid Thoughts

What is Natural? (A Parable)

Did Jesus Sparkle? (Okay, twinkle)

The Christmas Question

What Kinds of Kids Fail High School Courses More Regularly Than Others?

These People Like Glee, For Goodness Sake...

Why Would Anyone Want To Kill Someone Like Jesus?

Abstraction

Again

Slap-Together Video For "Pomises (God's Country)"

What Is The Message?

Maybe Someday: Memories of Nortel and Loss

Ottawa Adventures

The Parable of the Earnest Fireman

More Videoing

Stop Motion

Time Lapse

Friday Night

What The Old Testament Doesn't Say About Sex

"Forced Loneliness"

My Latest Video

Antici...pation.

Stuff and Stories

Sandals and a Strobe Light

Thoughts You Don't Agree With

Secret Christian Stuff

How Long?

August Rolls On Apace

The Face of Evil

My Trip

My Job Is Like This...

Heroism

The Meaning of the Word "Romantic"

Claws and Teeth

The Whys Have It

Harold Camping: The Boy Who Cried Rapture

Christian Books I Actually Like

Leathery Wings

Eugene's Poem

As Country as They Wanna Be

Even More Heavy

Two Kinds of Stuff or Something

Spent

What Does Wise/Spiritual Look Like?

Confidence!

Confidence