Post Coming Soon...

No updates or changes yet.  I'm still kinda processing how to be a vital part of a broken family (in more than just one sense) in this type of situation.  I'm not really feeling up to writing a full 'blog tonight, plus I'm going to hang out with my friend Bryan because that seems like a better idea than hanging around my place all by myself tonight.

I figured I'd prep the Jurassic Park v. Christianity idea that I mentioned in my previous post.  Maybe some early feedback will determine whether I really ought to try and flesh it out or not.

On second thought, Bryan's here.  So... yeah.  Bye.

Calm Like a Bomb

I had intended to write a very different 'blog tonight.  I was going to call it "Why Jurassic Park Is Like Christianity" and talk about some of the more subtle themes of the novel in relation to some ideas I've been having in regards to my faith lately.  It was off to a fairly decent start, and I may still publish it in the future, but not today.

I just got a phone call from my sister.  My grandfather may die tonight.

It seems kind of pointless to try and continue my earlier post because I can't really stay focused on where I was going with it.  I mean, I know what I was trying to say with it overall, I just can't really remember how I was going to get there.  Or why I thought to write about that today.  Or who among you would really care.

But then I remembered that this is my 'blog and I can do whatever I want with it.  This is a weird situation for me to be in and I don't really know what to do.  I'm sad about it, sure, but he's been sick for a long time and I've been sad about it throughout.  I'm sure there's a slow-burning emotional fuse somewhere that's bound to reach the end at some point, but we're not there yet, so, for right now, I just want to tell you about my grandfather.

My grandfather (this is my dad's dad, by the way) has always been kind of a mystery to me.  In a lot of ways, he's something of a static character in my personal history, but in a lot of others, he's a really important figure for me.  It's difficult to characterize my relationship with him because he was never exactly a relational kind of person.  I'm almost reluctant to write about it because of how easily it might come across that my grandfather was some cold and distant man who never really had much interest in the lives of his children.  I don't necessarily see him as such, but by the same accord, he wasn't really outgoing or personable, either.  The best illustrations I can think of for my grandfather are something like a really big tree or a boulder: they don't move around much or make a lot of noise, and they'd probably just be boring if it weren't for their size and how long they'd have to have been there and how much would have had to happen for them to get so big.

I really wish my dad were here.  He's a lot better at this kinda stuff than I am.  Well, in the "remembering things about people" sense, like when they were born and where they lived and so on.  He's also better with minor characters and details, though it comes across kinda dry.  I'm the better communicator between the two of us, but I think it's only because I'll say anything just to hear the sound of my own voice.  I'm not sure what that says about either of us, nor am I certain that it's anything particularly good.  Essentially, my dad is better at remembering facts and I'm better at conveying them.  Between the two of us, you'd probably get a better sense for who my grandfather is than you will here.  But here's what I do know about him:

My grandfather was born on a farm and couldn't go to college because his family couldn't afford to send him.  He was good with numbers and drafting and would have done well to become a mechanical engineer (something my uncle went on to do instead), but he got married and joined the military in the height of World War II.  He was an army mechanic and worked on fighter planes, and was stationed in Colorado.  He never went overseas.  He owned and operated a full-service gas station in Maypearl, Texas from at least the time my father was a child, probably even before then.  He also owned farmland that he leased out to ranchers where he dug three man-made ponds for the cattle to drink out of and stocked with fish for his family to catch.  He would travel in the summers with my grandmother and her brother and his wife, always by car, and never for more than a few days at a time.

To go through all my family photos, you'd hardly know I had a grandfather at all, but you'd wonder who that man was that kept showing up in the background of all those pictures.  I don't mean this to sound as insulting and/or derogitory as it probably does; I say it with no malice or derision whatsoever.  In fact, were one to evaluate my own photographic history, one might discover the same to be true of me.  In a world where most of my "friends" have close to (and for many, north of) 1,000 pictures of themselves tagged on Facebook, I hover somewhere in the low 150's and many of them don't even have me in-frame.

And yet, my grandfather was also a man of many surprises.  In hindsight, his generosity was particularly astounding.  When I was six or seven, I would sometimes "work" at his gas station for the astronomically over-inflated price of $20 a day (plus whatever sodas and candy I consumed from his vending machines).  I don't know how many times he would fix an inner tube for free before he actually charged someone for the patch, but there were plenty of kids in the neighborhood who rode through the streets on bikes with his kindness in the tires.  There always seemed to be a pack of stray dogs that frequented his shop for the scraps left over from his lunch, and equally as many stray farmers who would drift through to say hello.  Some were regulars with their own chairs that had to be vacated when they showed up.  Some made special guest appearances that would be talked about in conversations between visits.  But it still amazes me how much life and warmth was always available in an otherwise dirty and dreary concrete cell.

Those of you who have seen it know I drive a very nice car.  I wish I could say I keep it as clean as such a nice car deserves to be, but I don't.  It's easy to get comfortable and feel like you deserve nice things whenever nice things are given to you.  And my car is definitely a nice thing.  And it was definitely a gift.  My grandfather gave me that car when my own was barely drivable.  I had an old Mazda MX-6 that, while it was a neat, fun car for a 17 year-old to get as a hand-me-down from his father, had become something of a road-hazard-on-wheels by the time I was 23.  I can still remember the pure, unadulterated misery of driving around in 100+ degree temperature with my heater running full-blast just to keep the engine from shutting down because that's what happened if you drove it for more than ten minutes at a time.  To refer to my grandfather as stoic would be like calling the Grand Canyon "a fairly large hole in the ground."  Conversation with him was usually anemic and could be summed up in three questions: "How's work/school," "How's <family member's name> doing," and "How's your car running?"  

One day, after driving my sister's car to Dallas for a family visit and answering his three questions, my grandfather told me he would be giving me his car.  It was a brand new Ford Five Hundred and had maybe 5,000 miles on it.  It had leather seats, a CD player (2005, and I was still driving around in a car with a tape-deck), a working air conditioner, and, most importantly, an engine that wasn't on the verge of spontaneous combustion.  I didn't really know what to say.  It would be like taking a Haitian whose mud hut had been destroyed in an earthquake and giving him a condo in the Domain.  "Thank you" was all I could come up with that seemed appropriate, because it's difficult to gush to a person who shuts down gratitude with a low-rumbling "Aww..." and a wave of his hand.  

It was a gesture I'd seen a million times before, given mostly to the kids who tried to give him money for their newly-patched bike tires.  It was an odd gesture, and it had a tendency to make things awkward.  He wouldn't look you in the eye and he'd usually just go back to what he was doing, as though it had barely warranted a break in his daily routine.  At the same time, though, it served to purify the kindness of the thing he had done because you understood that there would be no further discussion of payment and certainly no actual exchange.  It was a kindness born of need and paid for out of wealth, not wealth built by petty greed or sophisticated financial manipulation but through the integrity of an honest day's work.

Somewhere in my mother's house is the first sign he ever put up over his shop.  It says "WIGGINS SERVICE STATION" in big, bold, blue letters, weathered by age and many years of use.  Sometime during high school and later during college, it hung over my bed, one part family heirloom and one part hilarious double entendre.  But the more I think about that sign in the context of who my grandfather was, the less I see it as a joke and the more I understand it as a valuable description of the man himself.  I saw his brand of "service" as a child.  I saw it as an adult.  I saw it in between during the years when my grandmother was ill.  I saw it in hindsight after she died; in all the ways he fought to keep her at home and by his side until he just couldn't take care of her anymore.  I never talked with my grandfather very much, but his life spoke volumes to me.  Any idiot can inherit a fortune and piss it all away but, regardless of what happens tonight, I hope I live up to his legacy.

I love my grandfather and I wanted to share him with you while I still can.

I'm Thankful for a Mini-Vacation

I'm not going to Dallas for Thanksgiving this year and, in some ways, it's kind of a relief.  Nothing adds to holiday stress quite like having to drive two and a half hours to get to it and it's nice to not have to deal with that this week.  I am kinda disappointed that I won't get to see my family before Christmas, but everything comes with a trade-off, I guess.  I'm gonna make a turkey pot pie and take it over to a friend's house with a big bottle of Sweet Leaf for lunch tomorrow, so it should be a pretty nice little afternoon. Thanksgiving is, essentially, a harvest festival; a time to relax and enjoy the fruit of all your labors.  In keeping with the spirit of the holiday, I'm gonna go ahead and take tomorrow plus long weekend off, since most everybody's gonna be too busy eating and dealing with their family craziness to read, anyway.  Besides, I've gotta work on Black Friday and I'm kinda already stressing about that.  But whatever.  I'm gonna relax a little before then and eat 'til I hate myself, which is one of my favorite things to do around the holidays.

Before I bail, though, I just want to express my gratitude at being able to do this at all.  I get pretty consistent feedback from most of you that read it and you're always really nice about saying how you've enjoyed it and it challenged you or made you think or whatever.  I don't know if any of it is true, but I really appreciate your encouragement and support anyway.  I've never pandered to anybody, and I'm certainly not going to start, but it's nice to know that at least a few people are keeping up with it and getting something out of it.  That was all I ever really hoped to get out it, anyway.

You're all a blessing to me and I thank you from the bottom of my heart.  I hope you enjoy your holiday as much as I intend to enjoy mine and, for those of you who are or will be traveling, have a safe trip.  I'll see you all again soon.

Arrested Development or Volunteered Slavery?

I was 13 years old the first time I ever realized what sort of potential the internet held as a vast array of naked ladies.  Some of you may not remember 1995 very well but it feels like talking about living in a time without air conditioning or indoor plumbing.  Dial-up modems boasted a blazing 56 kilobit per second speed, but in rural suburbs like the one I lived in, you were doing good if you hit 20.  Currently, as I type, my thoughts are being translated to internet fodder at the rate of 30 megabits per second, a difference on an exponential scale.

To give you an analogy, the national maximum speed limit in 1995 was 65 miles per hour.  If the speed limit from then to now was raised proportionally with the speed of internet access, that would make the speed limit more than 97,000 miles per hour.  At that speed, you could fly to the moon at its farthest orbital position from Earth in a little over two and a half hours.  To put that in perspective, the fastest recorded launch of any man-made object was just over 37,000 miles an hour and took more than eight hours to pass the moon.  I don't want to seem like an agist or an anti-technologist, but when you look at it this way, it's kind of scary.  "Reckless endangerment" doesn't even begin to describe the idea of someone driving 97,000 miles an hour.  "Impossibly unfathomable" seems a bit closer, but then again, it's not that impossible when it comes to other aspects of our daily lives.

Think about this: 50 years ago, cell phones didn't exist.  The closest we came was a phone-system that could be installed in a car.  It weighed 88 pounds and cost God-only-knows how much.  The rest of the world had to either put a quarter in a pay phone or wait until they got home to make a call.  Today, people are shelling out $100 or less for phones that they give to their 12 year-old that have just as much processing power and access to the internet as a home computer ten years ago.  Again, not to sound like an agist, but you think that doesn't change people?  You think there are no repercussions to this?

It's a lot like puberty, if you think about it.  Your body starts initiating the process of adulthood, but your brain is just confused.  What's happening to me?  Where did that come from?  Why am I so different all of a sudden?  You're not really sure what's happening, but you're being flooded with all of these new sensations and urges and things don't make sense the way they used to.  You need somebody to come along and explain everything to you.  It's okay.  You're not sick.  You're not dying.  Your body is changing.  This is your new reality.

But it's also not like puberty.  It's not organic.  It doesn't happen gradually.  There's a buy-in required where contracts get signed and money gets spent.  Technology has become such a part of our culture that you're almost unable to participate in society unless you have the latest gadget or you join the newest network.  But only almost.  There are ways around it, a la my experiment last month, and when you get down to brass tacks, your cable/internet bill can't really be considered a necessity.  It's something akin to a bed: you can't really imagine not having one to sleep on, but people still slept just fine until mattresses were invented.

I guess, what I'm trying to get at without waxing philosophical (and I'm not sure I'm succeeding), is the idea that our desires to increase productivity and efficiency are just one small step removed from greed.  While I definitely believe that the Internet is one of the greatest blessings that comes from living in a developed country, the desire to speed things up has brought us to a place of either not considering or ignoring the consequences.

When I was 13 years-old, I got the idea to look at porn from watching television.  I don't really know why, but I was watching Entertainment Tonight or some other ridiculous late-night entertainment news show, and they ran a story about Anna Nicole Smith.  Her gross, old, rich Uncle Pennybags husband had just died and they were discussing the fortune she was on track to receive as a part of it, but they kept showing all of these "tastefully" censored pictures from her (then recent) days as a Playboy model.  They kept flashing a website on the screen that said "for the full story, visit..." and rather than changing the channel or going to bed, I let the thought fester until it led to another thought, and then another, and then... well, you get the idea.  

I don't really know why I'm telling you all this or what difference I hope it makes for me to talk about it.  It's hard for me to look back on that moment as anything other than a starting point for something I wish never existed, or the day that something inside of me that should've grown and flourished into full maturity got poisoned.  I brought up all that other stuff to illustrate how the world keeps marching on around me, even though I'm sometimes not prepared for it to, and how much it serves to make those dark little corners of my life feel like the only safe places I have; places where, sure, everything's a mess and, if I'm honest, I hate it, but everything else just feels so scary and unpredictable.

But I'm as much a perpetrator as I am a victim and I can't really decide what I hate more: the things I've let happen or the things I've done.  I don't really know what the solution should be, but as I look back on the history of it, it makes perfect sense that I ended up where I ended up.  When you think about the progression of technology as a parallel to my addiction, my parents letting me keep a computer in my bedroom was basically like letting me sleep with a loaded gun in my mouth.  Not that I think they really knew or suspected that it was even possible for me to be as neck-deep in it as I was and, at the time, password protection and filtering software was virtually unheard of.

I guess this is why I gravitate so readily to the biblical idea of forgiveness.  God never seems to diminish the "badness" of our sin in any way, but he also doesn't really seem to want to dwell that much on the hows and whys of it, either.  It's like he asks us to agree with him that it's disgusting and it makes a mess, but he's more interested in actually cleaning things up than figuring out how they got that messy to begin with.

So I guess that's the challenge in front of me right now: where and how do I start cleaning things up?  What does it mean to forgive in this situation?  How do I guard my steps going forward?  How do I get back on track to mature and grow without signing up for the beating all over again?

Sense and Sensuality

The aftermath of Friday's 'blog has been interesting, to say the least.  I've managed to upset and offend some people that I wasn't necessarily trying to upset or offend, and impress some others I wasn't necessarily trying to impress.  Also, I don't think anybody has watched even a little bit of the movie.  Which is weird, because out of everything, I kinda expected that to be the component of it that people complained about and hated the most. 

This isn't to say that I don't appreciate the feedback/reaction I've gotten; in fact, quite the opposite.  The sentiments expressed to me thus far have been forthright and honest, two qualities I appreciate most out of everythimg in life.  But the overall tone of it seems to have had a depressing effect on the interactions I have with people, like someone close to me they never knew has died and they're worried they might say something wrong to set me off crying.  It's an odd thing to try and describe.

Odder still is the effect that it had on me, personally.  It was something of a purging effect, like I was able to articulate the guilt and shame and weight of it all to such an extent that I was able to remove it from myself objectively, without having to psych myself out of it or compensate for it in some way.  Usually, there's a sort of "time heals all wounds" effect that takes place in which nothing really takes place to make anything better, per se, but enough time passes to where I just don't dwell on it as much.  This other thing is a relatively new phenomenon for me, as guilt and shame are something of a staple in my life.  I don't exactly know why, but I've always had a sense of disapproval following me around like a Charlie Brown rain cloud, showering me with disappointment and nay-saying.  I often feel like I'm doing something wrong; like everyone I know would be hurt or angry if they knew who I really was and what I was really like; like I'm only going to fail and make a mess out of everything; like I should stop trying to change and accept that I'm always going to be screwed up this way.  It impacts almost everything I do in life and I rarely experience any moments without this presence blaring its message over the loudspeakers of my mind.  Friday afternoon was a welcome departure from that, and I think something about the 'blog was responsible.  As I continued to think about it over the weekend, I came to a couple of conclusions.

Conclusion 1: Part of the reason that pornography has held such a presence in my life for as long as it has is because I haven't ever really had any sort of established structure in my life where I could talk about it openly and have meaningful discussions about what it is and why it has such a strong sway over my thinking and my behavior.  There's a sort of moratorium on conversations about porn in our culture, unless it's a drunken frat guy talking about how awesome it is or some old white-haired preacher yelling about how despicable and perverted it is and how people should be ashamed of themselves for it.  The idea that porn might be damaging is scoffed at from the one side and the thought of holding an open discussion about what those damages are and how to mend them gets all but completely shut out by the other.  If the rule is true that 10% of the people are responsible for 90% of the communication, there are 80% of us floating somewhere between the preacher and the frat guy, many of us caught up in the teeth of the thing and hopeless that we're capable of anything but drowning.  Embracing our sexuality and acting on every impulse we had is what got most of us here and flooding ourselves with guilt is what keeps most of us going back to it.  There's got to be something else out there.

Conclusion 2: If you adhere to the Christian faith, pornography is a sin.  Being disrespectful toward your parents is a sin.  Alcoholism is a sin.  Stealing is a sin.  A sin is a sin.  There's nothing special about pornography.  It's just one more thing on a list of stuff that Jesus died to forgive.  Just like any other sin, there's a reason it's tempting, there's a reason it's wrong, and there's a decision moment where you have to choose whether to trust that what God says about it is true or whether you're going to rely on your own ability to determine what's right for yourself.  I don't mean to marginalize or mitigate the damage that pornography causes or act like it's not a serious problem, but to act like it has some sort of magical quality that makes it more damaging or more serious than any other sin a person could commit is a lie, and lying is a sin, too.

Today marks exactly a 365 days since I last had a drink.  Most of you aren't going to understand the miracle that is because you never knew me to be an alcoholic.  A lot of people will express their admiration for it like you'd admire someone for not eating sugar or watching TV for a year, and I'm okay with that.  I was exceptionally good at justifying it or playing it off as nothing and I was even better at hiding it.  But the truth is that there was a point in my life when I had no ability to hope for anything outside of drinking.  For better or worse, there was no pain that couldn't be endured or joy that couldn't be celebrated with a good, stiff drink.  Or two.  Or twenty.  Everything I did, said, or thought revolved around when I had last drank and when my next drink would be.  If I was in a situation where I couldn't drink, I was angry and irritable.  If I felt like somebody was challenging me on how much I drank or whether I had a problem, I usually belittled them and made them out to be the one with the problem and I stopped associating myself with them in the future.  I was a miserable person and I made the people around me miserable, too.

Then one day, I got dangerously close to the edge of a cliff I didn't think I could recover from falling over and I decided to stop lying to myself.  I stopped looking for a comparative standard by which to judge myself and feel okay with what I was doing and, instead, asked myself what honest to God freedom would look like and, if it were actually possible for me to achieve, how I could go about it.  I began looking for ways in which I could take small, manageable steps toward something healthy and positive.  I surrounded myself with people who would hold me accountable and help me when I struggled and I stopped worrying about whether or not I was a good or bad person and worked on just trying to be a sober one.  And after a while, a few days turned into a few weeks since my last drink.  Then it became a few months.  Now it's been a year.

I say this because I need to connect some ideas to it.  First, I don't know how long it's gonna be this way, but I think I'm going to start using my 'blog as a guide for walking through the process of sobriety and tying it into my struggle with porn.  I may lose the last five people I actually have as an audience, but I don't care.  There's nothing I would trade for what has been accomplished with the last year of my life and nothing I wouldn't give to see that happen in the next year.  If it means losing the opportunity to gain a massive following of adoring fans, so be it.  I'm not much good to you in my present condition anyway.  Second, like I said before, there's a pretty serious resistance to talking about porn in our culture, and I don't think it's just because nobody wants to get too carried away on the frat guy/preacher spectrum.  There are some fairly hefty stigmas attached to sexual brokenness/addiction/sin, not least of which are labels like "pervert" or "freak" or "degenerate filth," and sometimes you just need to see somebody stand up and say "Yeah, I guess I am," before you can say "Yeah, me too."  I guess if those are labels you want to ascribe to me, go ahead.  Or maybe you want to dismiss me as crazy and awkward and unnecessarily guilt-ridden.  Whatever.  The point is, there comes a time when you have to get past the labels and deal with the problem and I feel like that's where I am.  So make what you will of it.  This is what it is.

Mostly, though, I just want to see my life be revolutionized again.  I don't know if I can adequately explain what a different wavelength of existence I've been tripping on for the last twelve months (though I'm certainly going to try).  It's like I was born in a mental hospital and I've just spent the last year learning what it's like to live outside of the straitjacket.  And, to be honest, I'm not even sure I can imagine what that would look like if it suddenly began to apply to this area of my life.  What I do know is that the same God who guided me through sobriety promises to be faithful throughout all areas of my life and there's an entire generation of your sons and brothers who need to know not only that it's possible to be free from this, but how it's possible.

This has truly been a year worth remembering and I thank you all for being part of it.

Grace and peace to you,

Pairsh

Three Things

Thing 1: This post is gonna be quick (at least in the writing, and probably not very good) because I have neither the time nor the energy to bullshit around about it.  I haven't showered in three days, I've eaten nothing but pudding and cereal today and, to be blatantly honest with you, I wasted most of my morning sleeping in, playing World of Warcraft, and downloading porn for what I hope will be the last time in my life.  It's stupid and pointless and empty and I hate it and if I had a time machine, I would go back to 1995 and kick my 13 year-old ass before he ever got it in his head to regard the internet as one big jukebox of filth.  Of course, I've been saying that for the better part of fifteen years, so who knows how much weight that statement can really hold.

I didn't really want to 'blog today for all the same reasons I never want to 'blog... because I feel like all I do is complain about the things that frustrate me and how difficult it is for me to write anything of substance.  I started 'blogging in the hopes that it would get me somewhere, that I would improve and connect better with people, and that, somehow, it would be something I'd look back on later as the best decision I ever made.  To be fair, it's done some good and I don't regret starting it.  It just seems like I've written myself into a hole that I don't know how to get out of.  I feel like my whole life is just one stupid hurdle after another and for every good and encouraging thing that happens, there are three other things to get and/or be frustrated with or discouraged about.  I really do want to have an awesome 'blog that attracts a lot of people who love it and say that it's impacted them so profoundly that it changed the way they live their life. 

Okay, maybe that's overstating it a bit.  But I do want to produce good writing and make a dent in the way people think.  I want you think about something funny I said and laugh about it later.  I want it to brighten your day or encourage you to be more active or positive or determined not to get sucked in by all the crap that everybody has to deal with everyday.  And if I'm really, really point-blank honest, I want that for you because it want it for myself.

One of my recurring aspirations in life (in a sort of, "Hey, wouldn't that be awesome?" kind of way) is to be successful Christian author somewhere between Donald Miller and C.S. Lewis.  There are a number of problems with this, not least of which is the extreme lack of talent needed to stand in the gap between those two, but chief among them is that I don't have my life or my theology in any semblance of order enough to write the way that they do.  In fact, I don't even have my life/theology in order enough to write about the things that they do.  I'm not as creative or academic as C.S. Lewis and I don't have whatever it is about Donald Miller that makes people gravitate toward him as the kind of person they'd all like to be friends with.  I'm too stuck on all the juvenile things that I imagine most people put behind them in their late teens and early twenties.  

It took me nine years to get through college because going to class and studying and doing my homework on a consistent basis were too hard.  I've been done since May and I'm still selling my dignity to big-box retail for $9.67 an hour.  At the end of the day, I don't even have the wherewithal to make a plan of what I'm going to do with my day and then get down to business.  I hate that these things are true and that they consume my thoughts, but they are and they do and I don't have it in me to put up a front and act like everything's fine and I'm really getting out there and making it happen.  It's funny, I always thought the people I'd be most afraid of running into were those who didn't share my faith and expected me to explain why I believe what I believe.  As it turns out, I'm an even bigger coward to the people who do because I always feel like they have a better handle on it than me and I don't have any excuse for struggling so hard and failing so miserably.

Thing 2: If you haven't seen or heard about it, there's a Zach Galifianakis movie called "Visioneers" that was produced sometime before The Hangover and it never got any funding, so it just sort of disappeared from the Hollywood map.  It envisions a sort of dystopian future/alternate reality where everything gets hedged in by corporate America and has a canned laugh track to tell you when to laugh and how to feel.  It's super-weird and probably not your cup of tea, but it's also a really great movie that captures the essence of what I'm talking about.  I don't really have any sort of landing point for it, but I figured it would be enough to share it with you.  You can find it on Hulu here.  Or not.  In the grand scheme of things, it probably doesn't matter and I don't really care anyway.

Thing 3: I don't remember what Thing 3 was supposed to be.  I'd apologize, but I'm not really sorry.  I'm gonna go take a shower now.  I'll talk at you later.  I'm gonna go take a shower now.

Dry Spells

...so I'm not doing a very good job of keeping up with the whole "new routine" business.  I had hoped that getting my computer back would lead to a more rapid succession of productive endeavors, but it turns out I'm not that different a person as I was three or four weeks ago.

Part of the trouble I've had is a lack of significant 'blog fodder.  I have a few desperate ramblings saved in my "drafts" folder, but none of them felt like they were going anywhere and I couldn't really get on enough of a roll to fill them out into something worth posting.  I'm going to save them and see if I can use them for ideas later, but I'm not gonna put them up for public consideration.  At least, not now.  Not in the condition they're in.

I saw an interview with Jon Stewart recently, and it reminded me of all the reasons I really like him.  He's right about everything he says in terms of his position in politics and the responsibilities that come out of it, but even still... he's probably the most clear-headed person in the punditry business and I tend to agree with his attitude toward politics and government.

He says something in it about the nature of satire and how, essentially, satirists are parasitic organisms: they don't create anything of their own, they just comment on the things around them.  He doesn't make the statement in any sort of derogatory way, it's just a very matter-of-fact, "This is how it is" statement.  And I never really thought about it that way before, largely because satirists are some of my favorite sources of humor and I've always sort of wanted to be one.  I like the tongue-in-cheek, over the top way of getting a point across, but I never really stopped to consider the nature of the game itself.  In the interview, Stewart used an illustration of 24 hour news networks being "on the field" and considers himself to be sitting in the stands shouting things.  And this is not necessarily a new idea or a new stance for him.  He's always maintained a sort of genuine outsider attitude toward the political/punditry process and, as I said, I think he's right.  But I had never really thought of him as dependent on that process to be successful or funny.  At least, I never did until now.

If Jon Stewart never made it into comedy, he'd still be one of the smartest and funniest people in America.  He'd probably have a ton of friends at work who liked being around him and liked having lunch with him because he'd always make them laugh and have something intelligent to say.  And, if it weren't for the last 12 years of political happenings and the news media's evolution and response to it, he might have gone down that road.  But, because of the nature of comedy and the way satire works, he's made himself and his program into a hugely successful operation with a massive following.  I'd be lying if I said I didn't admire and, in some ways, envy him for that, but at the same time, I really don't want to be that. 

Creativity is less about doing something with style or flair and more about just doing something.  It doesn't really even matter if it's been done before; it's about bringing something into existence and trying your best to make it work and, if it doesn't, trying again.  It's a mind-boggling and, in a lot of ways, maddening process, but in the end it's what I really want to do.  I want to show up on an empty lot with a blank canvas and put something on both that didn't exist before I got there.  It may not be good and I may not make any money at it, but I'm going to try my best and work as hard as I can at it.

I think I'm going to spend the rest of my week/weekend coming up with some goals for myself to accomplish by the end of the year.  One will be to write a short story, something I've never done.  Who knows what the rest will or ought to be.  I guess we'll find out soon enough, though.

See you tomorrow...

Atrophy of a Trophy

It's odd that I should loathe sports as much as I do, given how much I appreciate sports metaphors. Perhaps the inverse is more befitting; maybe I should hate sports metaphors because of my disdain for organized sports.  Who knows?  All I can really say is that I do love a good analogy and there are so many of them to be had in the physiology/conditioning typically associated with professional sports.

Getting back into the swing of things with 'blogging has been more difficult than I thought it would be.  You'd think that it would be easy find the willpower necessary to do something you enjoy and get so much satisfaction and fulfillment from, but it seems to be just the opposite.  There's something of a sweet-spot in writing, where you enter a sort of transcendental state of communicating with the universe or, at least, with the universe inside your head.  It's this kind of literary witching-hour where all the stars align and thoughts flow seamlessly onto the page, clear and crisp as an autumn morning, with little rays of sunlight illuminating all the right places to make you notice and appreciate things you've never even considered as a part of your reality before.  You know the sort of thing I'm talking about, you can see it in all your favorite writers.  When one merely considers the final product, it's not hard to walk away thinking that good writers exist within some sort of elite stratosphere of the universe, where everything they write is immediately put on the top shelf by the front door of every Barnes and Noble, while the rest of us straggle somewhere along the bottom of the barrel with our sad little 'blogs that nobody will ever read. 

As many people as I could point to as evidence for this theory, I'm coming to see it for the lie that it is.  Read any article or interview with a writer that deals with the actual process of writing and every one of them will tell you what sort of unadulterated misery it can be at times.  My personal favorites on this subject are Anne Lamott and Donald Miller.  They seem to occupy a similar space as me, one where writing functions somewhere between a communicative vehicle for their ideas and a compulsive disorder substituted for collecting all their dead skin and belly-button lint in an old masonry jar.  It's not quite a need, per se, but there's a certain sense you get from them, like writing is an urge they have to satisfy, that they would still be writing down their thoughts and ideas, even if they weren't being paid or published.

I thought about this idea a week or two ago when I read an article from Animal Planet dealing with black market exotic pet industry (you can check it out for yourself here).  It talked about the many downfalls of the exotic pet trade, how it encourages poaching and spreads diseases and affects the balance of the ecosystems from which many of these animals are taken.  As tree-huggy as it was, the article did a good job of making a practical case against the exotic animal trade (a market essentially rooted in novelty) because it's cool to have a pet tiger and all, but the sort of impulse buyers that would actually pay for one rarely stop to think of the consequences.

Although the article didn't dwell too much on it, the thing that got me going was the idea that, regardless of its upbringing, a wild animal will always be, instinctively, a wild animal.  They grow more rapidly and, usually, to a larger size than domesticated animals will.  They have needs (which are fairly specific and quite substantial) for a certain amount of space and social interactions, certain types of food, shelter, and reproduction rituals.  For instance, pandas eat upwards of 20 pounds of food a day.  An adult male tiger may stake out a territory of anywhere between 20 and 40 square miles.  When those needs aren't met, they exhibit signs of stress and may adopt unusual behavioral patterns that typically involve some type of self- or others-oriented abuse.  I remembered, after seeing this, that I'd read somewhere that zoos and circuses will sometimes drug the bigger animals to keep them from freaking out all the time because their living conditions are so artificial and confined.

For me, the most surprising aspect of all is how common-sense this stuff is.  Part of what makes these animals so unique is how perfectly adapted they are for their natural habitats, so yeah, it's understandable that being removed from them would create problems.  It's kinda like being kidnapped, I suppose, and I can't even imagine what kind of emotional/psychological trauma that must cause.

But then I started thinking about my own predicaments in life, and all the stresses and strains I've been wrestling with.  I started thinking about the rapid growth that's taken place in my own life over the last few years; about how my instincts have changed and now my needs are different from what they used to be.  At one point, retail was a great gig to have because I could sleep 'til noon, show up hungover and squeeze my school-schedule in wherever I needed to, as long as I was free to work weekends.  At one point, having a messy apartment was safe and comfortable and kept people from invading my space too much.  At one point, I was an alcoholic pothead whose sole purpose in life was to feel as good as possible for as cheaply as possible, doing as little work as possible.  Now, I'm coming up on a year's worth of being sober and I have a college degree.  I want a real job with a fixed schedule where I can work hard, knowing that my ability to be productive is not only making a difference to me financially, but it's making a difference in the people around me; that, by doing my own job with pride and excellence, I'm having an impact on somebody else's ability to do theirs.  

I've been going through register training at work hoping that, by adding the ability to do one more thing in the store, I won't be so bored and frustrated all the time.  But the truth of the matter is that it won't make a difference.  In the end, I'm still a wheel in a cog in a machine that, truth be told, doesn't really need me.  I've put in a fair amount of time there, to be sure, and they've certainly invested a fair amount in me, but let's face it: saying that Home Depot needs me as an employee is like saying that the bathrooms need hand-spun silk instead of toilet paper.  I'm never going to be happy there because I'm not cut out for retail.  I'm too smart to stand around and tell people what aisle air filters are on or where the paint department is.  I'm too gifted for "actively seeking out customers" to be the most engaging thing I do.  It's no wonder my back has been all broken out and I'm not sleeping well lately... I'm the fiercest killer in the animal kingdom living in a concrete dog run.

Back In the Saddle

...metaphorically speaking, of course...  I'm extremely allergic to horses and have never actually been in a saddle to be thrown out of it.  Whatever.  That's not what I'm here to 'blog about.

So today marks the end of a sabbatical that didn't last as long as I had planned.  Originally, I was going to leave my computer with a friend until December 1st in the hopes that something about my life would change dramatically in the interim.  Not to say it didn't have its moments, but... let's just say I'm still a human being on planet Earth with the same struggle to live as before.

I've been talking with some folks over the last week or so about the effect that going without a computer has had on me.  If nothing else, it's definitely opened me up to community in a way that I didn't have before.  It's been interesting to see the cavalcade of humanity that filters through the business center on a regular basis.  I say that as though it's been some diverse array of people from all walks of life... mostly it's just been old ladies who are too cheap/inexperienced to actually buy a computer for themselves.  There was the black lady who would download podcasts from her church and participate in the Hallelujah choruses, the lady who bought a new phone and didn't know how to work it, and the lady who was always complaining about how poorly the internet was working when, in reality, it was the cheap computers the apartment provides as an amenity that were usually acting up.  I guess everybody's gotta have something to complain about.

The problem for me in all of this was how much it crippled me in being able to interact with people.  On the one hand, my computer had become something of an isolation machine; something I could use as a security blanket to keep from having to go outside and deal with people directly.  However, not having it at my instantaneous disposal for a few weeks helped me to see a lot of the benefits I imagine most people get from it when they use it as more than just an $800 porn/World of Warcraft jukebox.  The business center was only open during certain hours and, my work schedule being what it is, I was usually either having to cram my "to do" list into a short hour here or there before or after work.  I'm not entirely sure why, but it's been difficult to coordinate and keep track of all the necessary components of doing a budget, sending out résumés, people I need to touch base with, etc. having to run up and downstairs between my apartment and the front office.  I applied for a job last week by e-mailing a woman from my phone, telling her I would send her my résumé the next afternoon when I would be free and the business center would be open.  I won't blame the fact that I haven't heard back from her solely on that, but I can't imagine it conveyed a high degree of confidence in my having-it-all-together-ness.

I guess the bottom line is that, while having a computer can create a danger for me in providing an opportunity to just check out and stop being productive, not having a computer pretty much robs me of any possibility to be productive at all.  And not just in the sense of "Everybody uses computers these days" or "Man, it sucks to not have my iTunes anymore," even though both are true... but, I mean, just take this for example.  I've really wanted to 'blog a lot over the last week or so, but I haven't been able to squeeze that in alongside everything else that I've needed to do with the short amount of time I have access to a computer without some distraction happening around me.  Plus, I've lost a lot of momentum not making this a daily thing.  I had a pretty good thing going toward the end of September, and then I lost it.  And then, right when I should've knuckled down and gotten started again, I cut myself off at the knees and gave up my computer.

Ugh.  I feel like I'm running circles around this thing, so I'm just gonna check today off the calendar and get on with my day.  Suffice it to say, I can't do the things I want to do without a computer.  I just can't.  Whatever problems or issues that brings along with it, I'm gonna have to learn to deal with it and move on because I'll never get where I need/want to be just hiding in the dark.  I can do this.  I guess the only question at this point is whether or not I will.

It's good to be back.  I'll see you all again soon.  Take care of yourself.  :)

Forecast: Chili

Today is Electric Boots' birthday and I'm trying to hurry and get this 'blog done so that I can go about doing all the prep-work so's I can leave for Dallas first thing after work tomorrow.  I could give a crap about all these people hanging around the business center waiting for me to get done with the computer... I had to wait my turn.  So can they.

I talked to her a little bit yesterday about how things have been going and she said she had a better understanding of the melancholy I associated with my birthday this year.  We talked about how annoying it is that your birthday seems like the one time of year that you should be allowed to do whatever you want and have fun without having to feel guilty for being self-centered for a whole 1/365th of the year, yet it seems to get more difficult to actually do so with every year that passes.  Having points of solidarity with my sister is a relatively new phenomenon (within the last five years or so) and it was a good conversation to have.

She decided that she wants to have a chili cook-off with her friends and family and invite people to get involved, so she asked if I wanted to cook or be a judge.  I'm not gonna lie, the prospect of having to do nothing but eat is an appealing one, but the more I thought about it in the context of being her birthday and her party, the more I wanted to contribute something to the cause so that she wouldn't have to.  I've been looking up chili recipes online and trying to get ideas from everywhere I can and Robbie's coming over in a bit to hang out while I throw it all together.  It may not be very good, but I decided to give it a shot.

It might seem silly, but I'm excited about it.  For one thing, I've never made chili, so I feel like we're all standing on the verge of finding out that I'm some kind of culinary genius when it comes to ground venison and spices.  It's similar to the feeling I have when I'm standing in front of a blank canvas: I have no idea what's about to happen, but I am unreservedly confident in its impending awesomeness.

For another, I know this isn't going to go as planned.  I deep-cleaned my kitchen earlier this week to give myself enough space/dishes to get through whatever abomination of food is about to happen to it, and I can only imagine the devastation my first venture into the land of chili will bring.  If art school taught me anything, it's that nothing EVER goes according to plan and you have to be ready to make a gigantic freaking mess to get it done correctly and on time.  And, for some weird reason, this only adds to the excitement for me.  I love running into problems and having to figure out how to solve them and getting to the end of things and having not only a great result to show for all my effort, but a gigantic mess to prove how hard I worked.  Something about leaving a trail makes me feel better about my effort.  It's weird.  But I like it.

Most of all, though, and she probably won't see it as much this way, but I feel like I'm doing this for her.  Honestly, I'm tired and broke and I had to get up at 6 this morning so that I could have the evening free to make the chili and wrap her present and I have to be there at 6 tomorrow so that I can leave on time and I really don't feel like making chili or driving to Dallas or interacting with my family or dealing with whatever dramatic-hell is certain to break loose upon my arrival.  But I love my sister more than anybody else I can think of and I can't wait to see her and, hopefully, impress her with a decent entry into her contest.  And, sometimes, I think that showing love to other people is about doing a whole bunch of stuff you really don't wanna do just because you know that they'll be standing at the end of the line.  It's like dealing with a really complicated and finicky padlock that requires a very particular and difficult to remember combination.  I'm sure that, when all's said and done, I'll probably only get a solid hour or hour and a half of good, quality time with my sister in the course of things, but I value that enough for it to be worth it.

I guess maybe you have to know what kind of a-hole I've been in the past to understand why that's a big deal to me, but I don't really have time to get into all that right now.  Right now, I've got a pot of chili to get started on so I can make it to Dallas on time tomorrow, and that's more important to me than anything else.

Happy birthday, Karen.  I love you.

Reminiscence...

I went to dinner last night with a friend I haven't hung out with in the better part of two years.  I see her fairly often, but never in any sort of social, "Hang out and talk about real stuff" kind of settings.  It was weird for me to realize how long it had really been since we last went out for drinks, partly because my brain registers physically seeing a person on the same social frequency as hanging out with them and partly because the last year has been kind of a blur.  We had a lot to catch up on (not least of which was that I don't drink anymore), but it was good.

She's an old-school Austinite, one that's been here since before the dot-com boom, before it started its slow, cancerous transmogrification into another (desperately-needed) Dallas suburb, when it was just a wheat field with a school in it.  She does some really awesome video work and has a pretty amazing portfolio of opportunities seized and lost.  Her partner is a dance choreographer and they went to see a mutual friend who had an opening at the Long Center downtown.  The woman's name is Sally Jacques, and I think I may have seen and or heard of her while at school, though I can't really remember.  She told me about the opening, and how this well-trained troupe of dancers used the space of the building itself to perform some really beautiful and dangerous moves.

She told me about how Ms. Jacques doesn't perform on her own much; how she usually instructs and arranges others in some of the most intricate and elaborately choreographed post-modern dances out there.  I've never been much into dance (largely because I can't do it) and I don't really understand it.  It reminded me though, of something I saw a few years ago that I haven't thought about in ages.

I went to see Citizen Cope at La Zona Rosa with my mom, my sister and some friends.  My family and I have impeccable taste in music and performances, but we're relatively impatient people, particularly when it comes to getting in the car and going home.  We're not very big Stand-around-and-talk-ers; we're people of action and, besides, we're tired and our feet hurt and we're hungry.  We had parked probably three miles away from the venue (because we also patently refuse to pay for parking) and were shuffling in a particular hurry when I saw a woman fall off the top of a building.

It was odd for a number of reasons, not least of which was the fact that the building was incomplete and under construction and she was wearing what seemed to be some type of choral robe, as though she had just come from an Easter service or Christmas pageant.  Stranger still was the fact that there was a spot-light being shone on her that followed her as she fell.  But the strangest thing of all was the way she fell.  She didn't flail through the air or scream.  She seemed to glide, as though she hadn't a care in the world, as if the multi-story drop were an elegant display rather than a grisly end to a miserable life.  In fact, it was less her own body that communicated this than the robe or gown (whatever) that she was wearing.  It flowed behind her, almost as if it were a gigantic silken playground slide and she were skimming effortlessly over the top of it.

As she reached the bottom of her descent, that's when I noticed the harness and realized that she wasn't falling; she was dancing.  She was lifted back through the air, the direction of her flowing robes now reversed, and proceeded this way for what seemed like an eternity.  It was one of the most beautiful moments I have ever experienced in my life.  And then my someone among my party who had drank about as much as I had turned around to ask what the hell I was staring at and tell me to come on, they were cold.  I seemed to be the only one who noticed or was affected by it.  And then we went home.

As I described this, my friend explained that she was there that night, standing near the spotlight, years before we would meet, seeing it all from a different perspective and the woman on the harness was none other than Sally Jacques.

I'm not sure what this means.  I'm not entirely sure it means anything, except to say that it's good, sometimes, to stop and think about things you haven't remembered in a long while: friends you haven't seen or things you haven't done in a long time; an experience you had where you took a big risk and it paid off; someone you used to love or someone who hurt you; maybe it's an instance in your life that made a profound, if unintelligible, impact on some otherwise-insignificant moment in time.  Some of the best memories I have in life are of things with no foreseeable purpose.  They just are what they are and have somehow contributed to making me who I am.  I miss having a family.  I miss the things we used to do together.  I miss seeing something incredible only to see something incredibler on the way back to the car.  I miss dancing in a harness on the side of a building simply because nobody else would think to do it.  It doesn't necessarily need to mean something.  I guess it just is what it is.

Wednesday Wish-List

1. I wish I had a better job.

2. I wish I were debt free.

3. I wish I had a room I could convert into a studio.

4. I wish I had land with which to grow a garden.

5. I wish I had more time to 'blog.

6. I wish that wish-lists made a difference.

For Clarity's Sake

Gonna try 'blogging from the cell on my lunch-break and see how this works. It's lagging pretty bad and I don't have access to a lot of the normal formatting options usually available from home, so that's already a couple strikes against it. But, oh well. It'll do in a pinch, I suppose.

I didn't sleep very much or very well last night. I was having some really bad stomach cramps/constipation issues, so I wasn't ever really comfortable enough to sleep. I watched three movies and dozed off a couple times, but never really could relax. I had to cancel breakfast w/ BRT this morning and I was kinda bummed about that. I haven't seen him much since he got back from Greece and I was really looking forward to hanging out with him. Sorry, B.

Needless to say, sleepless nights don't make for very productive days, hence the lunch'blog from the cellular device. I got a few things done with my budget before work, buy nothing I'd really consider an accomplishment. Given the amount of sleep I got and the way I felt when I finally woke up today, I figured I was doing good to make it to work on time in a clean shirt. Sometimes you just gotta take the small victories wherever you can.

I completely forgot about voting today. Not that I was registered or wanted to or anything, I just forgot that it was going on until someone at work asked me if I had and I had to think for a minute and figure out why they were asking.

I hate being asked if I voted, and not just because I never do. I hate it because it feels like I'm being asked what I got someone for their birthday; like you're only asking so you can find out whether or not it's okay to judge me. "Did you hear what happened to Pairsh? He got his legs cut off by the giant mechanical cogs of a clocktower." "Serves him right. I heard he didn't even vote this year!"

One thing I hate worse is the idea that "You don't get to complain if you don't vote," as if you don't get to have an opinion without a registration card. That's one of the many beauties of democracy: you're allowed to think whatever crazy thoughts you like and nobody gets to tell you that you're wrong, all they can do is out-vote you. It's a beautiful thing, these checks and balances.

But I think the thing I hate the most is the idea that not voting is tantamount to laziness and there's no category to distinguish those of us who have simply lost faith in the system. I don't vote because I don't WANT to vote, and it's stupid to say "it doesn't matter who you vote for, just as long as you vote." Politics is just another way of saying "us vs. them" and I don't want to have to fight against crowds and lines (two of my all time biggest nemeses) just to decide whether I want my next four-year-long turd sandwich on white or wheat.

All said, I don't mean to soapbox one way or the other, so please don't look to me to help you figure out what you should do. Truth be told, I don't really even understand how the American political system works in any real way. I just don't see how candidate A will have any more or less measurable impact on the things in life that are really important to me than candidate B will. I realize this isn't a very popular stance among veterans and poli-sci majors, so it's no coincidence that I typically avoid talking politics like the plague.

One of my major theories in life is that nobody listens to people who they believe aren't listening to them. I hate this theory, but I think it's true, and I've always seen politics as just another vehicle used to reinforce it. Maybe if someone came along who could talk about it with the kind of conviction that doesn't care whether anybody else follows them or not, I'd be a lot more apt to listen. In the meantime, I'd just appreciate it if my silent political statements would stop being confused with apathy. But then again, what do I really know about it?

Back to Work, You!

I can't remember if I talked about this before or not (and I'm too pressed for time/lazy to go back and look), but I took my computer to Johnny Shortstuff's office for safe-keeping while I go on something of a sabbatical from owning a computer.  There were a lot of reasons for it, but the bottom line is that given a choice between being productive and absolutely anything else on earth, I'll take whatever's behind door number two.  It was a difficult decision, to say the least, and one I procrastinated about for close to a month, but I did it and now it's over and I'm going to give myself until December 1st before I head back up to the church to reclaim it.  Not that I won't be going to church until December, but... you get what I'm saying.

It hasn't had the wonderously magical effect that I was hoping it would.  In honesty, a part of myself was really wanting God to reward me for being so self-sacrificing by tossing a job into my lap once I finally stopped hem-hawing around and went through with it.  But it didn't work out that way.  I kinda just cashed in one big problem for a hundred little ones.  It's like when I quit drinking: you finally get your biggest distraction out of the way, and now you see all the messes they were distracting you from.  In a certain sense, it's annoying because it's kinda like being rewarded for your faithfulness by getting a failing report card.  "Congratulations, you still suck."

But in another sense, it's a small movement toward progress and I'm pleased with it.  In a television-oriented culture where Jack Bauer can save the world from terrorist annihilation over the course of a single hour, it's hard to believe that taking a month to build up the courage to surrender something I haven't gone without for 15 years makes any difference in the grand scheme of things, but it does.  It's a tiny adjustment in the over-arching trajectory of a life that's veered off course and, if I can do it again in other small ways, over the course of time, it'll make a difference.  C.S. Lewis talked about a similar idea in one of his books (though I forget the title).  He was writing about how the impact of small moral decisions differs between different people; how, having eternal spirits, we're all always either getting better or worse; how what might be some insignificant act of kindness done by one man may be a saving grace for another.  It probably doesn't make much sense to anybody else but me, but that's okay.  I don't need it to make sense to you, I just need it to keep being true.

I've decided (under advisement) that I should get back to regular 'blogging.  I had a good couple months of it, and I've had a good break, and now it's time to get back to work.  The pity-party that was October has run its course and I need to get back into the routine of doing good things for myself.  I'm not quite back up to biking all the time and eating better, but hey... baby steps, man.  Baby steps.

My friend Cliff has an analogy for sobriety that I really appreciate.  He describes it like trying to redirect water flowing downhill.  If you place one thing in its path, it's just going to run around whatever single object you put down and keep going the way it was going.  But if you stack enough stuff together, eventually, you can change its course.  And I like this idea.  I like dispelling the belief that there's one magic solution that fixes everything.  I like seeing my computer sabbatical as being added to a pile of stones in the middle of a river.  I like knowing that if I make enough of those little decisions, one day I'll have a nice little dam going.  Maybe I won't do it all the time.  Maybe I'll get frustrated and quit at some point.  But for right now, the perspective is enough to keep me going and, though I may waste the entirety of my future, I won't lose this moment, right now, today.  I love you guys.  It's good to be back.

See you tomorrow...