josh barkey:

Everything I know About Acting I learned at the Olive Garden

2012-02-24T02:18:00.001-08:00

1. I am not a very good actor.

Make no mistake: that simply wonderful server you had during your carb-fest at the Olive Garden last week was indeed acting. He* did not really think you were the most wonderful people. He did not want to go home with you to play pinochle.

There is an art to making money as a server, and that art is thesbiatic in nature. There are lines (menus, greetings, jokes) to memorize, improvisation to be done, and always the audience to consider. The best server/actors know that if they want to get paid** for the work they are doing, they need to put on a good show.

I was not particularly good at putting on a show. If I was in the mood and firing on all cylinders, I was stupendous. There were even a couple of times when restaurant patrons asked so see the manager, just so they could tell him that I was the best server they had ever had in any restaurant, ever. I can be a bit moody, though (go figure - an artist with mood swings), so there were also times when patrons asked to see the manager so they could tell him I was the worst server they had ever had, ever.

Which is to say that I wasn't at all consistent. Acting is a craft; and to be a good actor, you have to be consistent.

2. Make 'em laugh.

Nonetheless, I did apply myself fairly rigorously to the learning of the craft. I did internet research, asked the other servers questions, and above all, paid attention to the patrons. If serving is theater, then a good portion of the server's role is to learn to read the audience, and to adapt his performance to their response. At the Olive Garden, I had an audience of three, sometimes four tables. Each table was different.

It was my job to figure out whether they'd like me more if I offered them lots of alcohol, or milkshakes. I had to figure out when to squat down (to give them the sense of power over me), when to touch them (to foster a sense of connection), and what to do to get them to laugh.

The key point was always, always to get them to laugh. It didn't matter if they were there to celebrate a promotion, or just to get out of the house where a loved one had recently died... there wasn't a patron in that restaurant who wouldn't buy your performance (so to speak) if I made them laugh. Laughter was paramount - laughter was transcendent.

3. If they never notice you doing your job... you're doing your job.

As an actor, my job was to help my audience forget that I was there. The focus was always on their experience, and while actor/servers are often extremely egotistical about their abilities and their performance, while the performance was going on, my ego always needed to be subsumed to the requirements of the role.

Yes, a good server/performer will pull aspects of his own life into the performance. For example, when we were allowed to modify our own name-tags I painted mine with a picture of a cute little baby, in order to prompt discussions about my newborn son. But the use of my outside life always had to be in service of the higher cause - a performance unforgettable primarily because I had been forgotten, and the role had shone through.

4. It's all about the love, baby.

This all may seem a bit manipulative... and it is, in a sense. A good performer does everything in his power to create an emotional response in his audience. This is how an artist survives. Ultimately, though, this performance must come from a place of love. An actor/server has to love what he does, thrilling to the joy of creating an experience for his audience.

A server can fake a passable performance and probably make a buck... but a server who does not love the performance will ultimately burn out and one day find himself mopping up vomit in the restrooms at Waffle House, wondering what happened.

Like I said at the start, I am not a very good actor... so, it's probably a good thing I quit when I did, before the bitterness crept in.

Nonetheless, I am beginning to realize that there is a way in which my teaching is also a performance art, and that all the rules of serving still apply. If I perform my role of teacher well, the students have a great experience, get good results, and my employment opportunities are subsequently expanded. Perhaps the old bard was right. Perhaps the world is a stage, and the question is not whether we will play a part, but how well.

If that is the case, and you are just now thinking of the ways in which you, too, are an actor at your work, then my advice to you is this little nugget from a book I once read about acting: There are no small parts - only small actors. It may be that you should be looking for a new role - one that more directly capitalizes on your inherent acting talents. But it is just as likely, I think, that with enough love the role you are in right now could really become something beautiful - a work of art.

- - -

*Use of the gender-specific masculine pronoun throughout is intentional, because I am (last time I checked), a male.

**In South Carolina, where I worked as a server, they paid half minimum wage - which, after taxes, came to a big fat ZERO, leaving me to wonder why they ever even bothered to print my checks.

love is not enough

2012-02-20T10:14:00.001-08:00

Say you're me, and for kicks and giggles you go to this wine-and-cheese "young adult" thing at the local Episcopalian Church (you wouldn't ever in real life, I know, because you're cooler than I am, but just say you do), and say that whilst you are there, some girl you don't immediately find attractive walks up to you and says "hi."

The implicit goal of such an event is for singles to mingle, pair up, ring up, procreate, and tithe their money back to the church carpet fund, sure, but it can't hurt to be friendly. So what do you do? You say "hello," of course.

Sure, Cupid's a capricious god who might or might not one day honor this connection with an arrow, but this is not why you say "hello" in return. You say "hello" because it's the polite thing to do, and only a jerk would ignore someone who has gone out of her way to be friendly.

If you determine by her manner that her intentions are a bit more than friendly, you might politely extricate yourself from the conversation - or attempt to avoid unwanted advances in the first place by hovering over the hors d'oeuvres table all night, stuffing your face - but you'd still at least respond, right? That's a no-brainer.

It gets weirdly complicated, though, when you remove the intra-corporeal dynamic by digitizing it all onto a dating website. In the online format of this crazy game, nobody can claim to just be there for the free food, so any advance of any kind is precisely, explicitly one person saying to another, "Hey, I find your carefully-crafted digital self intriguing and would be interested in exploring the possibility of perhaps one day meeting and dating you in real life. Will you look at my carefully-crafted digital self and let me know if you think we could move together beyond the confines of this ridiculous website?"

Responding, then, to a note or a "nudge" (or whatever your site-of-choice happens to use) clearly conveys that you are interested in this other person in a way that would not be as easily discernable from your response to the woman at the wine-and-cheese thing. The wine-and-cheese woman may have hoped for a romantic connection of some sort, but unless she's in a deluded-psycho-creeper phase (we all have them - admit it), she couldn't assume from the fact that you said "hello" that a possibly-romantic connection had been made.

Online, you are suddenly faced with a bit of an ethical dilemma. Do you do the otherwise normal thing and respond to a woman in a way that more clearly signals openness to dating, or do you do what would normally be extremely rude, ignore her, and save everybody the hassle of sorting out your mixed message? At first blush, the kindest thing might seem to be to respond, and then to politely express your lack of interest - but how would that serve anyone well?

Why say in ten, twenty, or thirty words what can much more clearly be said in none?

This, at least, is the rationalization you might use. Still, you'd likely have a nagging feeling that a no-answer answer is somehow wrong... that it represents a somewhat overly-calculating response to what is, in fact, an actual human being - a wonderfully complex and lovely person who, like you, has feelings and desires, hopes and fears.

For a man, this question is probably fairly easy to resolve - or at least ignore - since the prevalent gender roles played out in our culture mean that most women will wait around for you to speak first. But many women on dating websites get inundated daily with a flood of attention, as the dissociative properties of the internet remove a good deal of the fear a man might otherwise feel in approaching a woman whom he finds attractive.*

Thinking about all of this takes me back to the Ethics 211 class I signed up for my third year of University; where for the first time, I was forcefully exposed to the concept of situational ethics, the idea that certain "right" actions can be cast aside if love demands it. Our teacher carried this even further, and argued that one cannot always even know what the "right" choice is.

The idea that there might not always be one, discernible answer to an ethical dilemma terrified me. How, if this was true, was a guy supposed to live? If the goal is to live a life of love toward your fellow man (or date-starved woman, as the case may be), what do you do when there are two opposing courses of action that seem - both rationally and emotionally - to serve the purposes of love? You have to do something, after all.

Without certainty, it seemed to me, life would quickly become a series of Kafkaesque nightmares, in which you wandered from one directionless human encounter to another, never knowing if you were making the world a better or worse place with your passage; and at the time, I couldn't handle that much uncertainty. I shut down the part of me that was teetering on the edge of mystery, picked a side in each dilemma, and basically tuned out the rest of the class.

Now, though, having had a great deal of my pride and fear battered out of me by the vagaries of this here hard-knock life, I have come to appreciate the mystery. It is hard, always, to rest in it, but I am beginning to enjoy the fact that I cannot ever really Know, for absolute certain, whether I am doing the most loving thing, or just deluding myself into thinking that I am in order to be able to follow the course my baser nature most desires. There is a joy in this, but it is a joy that can only be found in something more, even, than the oft-amorphous concept of "Love." This joyous something is called Grace.

Grace is not, of course, in opposition to Love. But it is, perhaps, its most glorious, nonsensical expression. I cannot capital "K" Know whether it is more loving to respond to a woman's internetual entreaties for connection, or to ignore them. What I can do is relax, rest, and sink into the mystery and joy of it, knowing that whatever I do in fact choose to do, Love is big enough to wrap my bad decisions up in the bounteous folds of its own all-Knowing, all-forgiving wonder. And that, my disassociated internetual brethren, is what Grace is all about.

- - -

*It removes a lot of his shame and/or decency as well, I'm told... but that's another story, entirely.

get thee to the couchery!

2012-02-17T19:00:00.000-08:00

I like having Austin the Actor as a friend. He can be a bit opinionated, but you need a friend like that when you're about to go off the deep end where women are concerned.

Like, say, yesterday, when I was on this dating-website-that-shall-remain-nameless, writing a note to yet another stunning woman-person in order to distract myself from writing what I should have been writing. I was typing away something like, "you're pretty and we should, like, get married forever," when what should appear in the sidebar but a slice of moving face from the below-imbedded Ashley Furniture commercial; or - to be more precise - Austin's face, randomly mouthing something vaguely judgmental about couches.

Suddenly, I was all flustered and unsure of what to write. So I wrote the wrong thing, the woman-person got freaked out, and everybody's life stayed a little less complicated.* Thanks, Ashley Furniture. Thanks, Austin.

- - -

*Note: this story (or at least, the part about me not writing the absolute perfect thing all the time, always) might or might not have been a complete fabrication, just so I'd have an excuse to link to this commercial.

my marvelous mind

2012-02-16T18:56:00.000-08:00

I have decided that I am incredibly, incredibly intelligent.

F. Scott Fitzgerald (the guy from that recent Woody Allen movie) famously said that "the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function," and I've got scads of these opposed ideas playing tug-o-war for control of my head-noodles at any given time.

Here are a few:

1.) I desperately want a woman in my life, versus: I would rather scoop my own eyeballs out with a rusty spoon and feed them to a rabid porcupine with my bare hands than have a woman in my life.

2.) I am a golden god of the pen and everyone on the entire planet should read every word I ever write, whilst nations send delegations to beg me to keep tapping on these keys, versus: I am a no-talent hack who can't write worth beans and ought to make a pilgrimage to Canada on my bleeding knees to apologize to every tree stump that ever gave its life so I'd have notebooks to scribble on.

3.) I'm totally comfortable cruising along inside the general parameters of the religion in which I've been raised, versus: I am sick and tired of everybody pretending to know things they can't possibly know, and want to kiss Hitler's would-be assassin - Dietrich Bonhoeffer - for even suggesting the possibility of a religion-less Christianity.

4.) Strawberry ice cream is my favorite, versus: all ice cream is my favorite.

Now all I have to do is prove my ability to fulfill the second part of that Fitzgerald quote. Which is totally gonna be a breeze because I'm completely okay, and functioning at my absolute peak at all times and I thinglrb, glrb, glrb...

(breaks into uncontrollable sobs - goes off to eat ice cream).

Happy Valentines Day!

2012-02-14T04:44:00.001-08:00

josh barkey: plastic extremist

2012-02-13T15:02:00.000-08:00

I know it's called North Carolina, but I have to admit I always kinda hope the Carolina part will win out, and I won't have to deal with any of that wintery-type stuff.

I was raised in the Amazon, after all, so it's always annoying on mornings (such as today's) when I have to use my key-card from work to scrape ice off my car's windshield. The ice flakes up over my fingers, and since my heater went mostly out a couple days ago, I end up driving pretty much all the way to work before I get feeling back in all my fingers.

So why, you might ask, would I use my key-card to scrape my windshield? Why not buy some cheap, piece-of-crap scraper with a handle?

The answer is simple: I'm an extremist.

I take a basic, straightforward statement like, "I care about the earth and don't believe in defiling my own nest," and get all crazy about it - taking it to lengths no sane person ever would. I don't buy an ice-scraper because ice scrapers are made of plastic, and will therefore one day end up in a landfill, or the Pacific Ocean. Not only that, but I also strive to avoid buying any and all other plastic objects if there is ever a way to do without, even though I know that if everybody did what I do and stopped buying unnecessary plastic garbage, the global economy would collapse and millions of people (including me, probably) would probably die of starvation. See what I mean...? Nuts.

What makes it even more nuts is that I know I can't win. I know I'm not really making a significant dent, and I know that to live in this culture without going completely off-the-grid granola and dying of an infection from a tooth abscess at the age of thirty-six, I am going to have to make countless compromises. I still do my little acts of stubbornness, though, because this nagging voice inside my head keeps telling me that the only thing worse than taking pointless, stubborn little steps toward a goal I'll never reach is to simply sit down, roll over, and give up. And to quote Winston Churchill, I will "never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever ever give up."

Frozen fingers it is, then. Stubborn, stupid, ineffectual frozen fingers. Old Winnie would be proud.

old thoughts, re-packaged with gore

2012-02-12T16:42:00.000-08:00

I just finished watching The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo* for the second time; and despite the fact that the actors looked different, somehow, and the talking seemed less Swedishy this time around, they still had that one key scene where the evilbad torturer-guy has the sincere protagonist in his wicked clutches and says to him those immortal words, "you know... we're not all that different, you and I," so I wondered to myself, why is it that this line shows up in film after film after film?

My first instinct was to assume the worst - that writers are lazy and in a pinch will always revert to something that's worked before. This movie isn't a lazy movie, though - it's a taut, well-crafted thriller. Besides, there is usually a reason why something has worked in the past, and while a good writer will always look for a fresh way to express timeless truths about the human condition, one truth always remains glaringly obvious: that there is, in fact, nothing new under the sun.

All decent movies are morality plays - they say something about the discrepancy between the way people are and the way people ought to be. So... what moral truth does this particular phrase turn on? To discover this, I think we have to listen to our knee-jerk emotional response when the Bad Guy says those words, a response that tells us that we have heard his twisted logic and rejected it - that we know, deep down, that there is good and that it must not be confused with evil.

Yet another reminder, to me, that stories offer a powerful way to investigate what's really going on behind the rhetorical scum-skin of the universe. Nothing particularly earth-shattering there, I suppose. But then, what do you expect?

- - -

*Note to childrens on the internets: this is a seriously troubling movie with some crazy, graphic schtuff in it. Please don't watch it with your faces, as you will get nightmares and wet the bed.

How to Fall in Love with a Woman

2012-02-08T19:35:00.000-08:00

This past September I explained How to Fall in Love with a Chair and then, two months later, I told you How to Fall in Love with Yourself. Now, after three more months of ponderation, I want to tell you how to fall in love with a woman.

Allow myself to quote (er) myself on a few key points, to give the gist of where I am coming from.

First, on loving a chair:

"If, by drawing it, you can take the time to slow down enough to really see a flower, an eye, or a chair, then what you are doing is expressing love for them. You are saying, in a sense, that they are worth the time you must expend in your effort to see them.

In doing this, you fall in love. You set yourself aside and - in dying to yourself - begin to come alive to the wonder that is the world around you."

And then, on loving yourself:

"The reason we do not love chairs, other people, orbutterflies is that we are afraid there is not enough love in the worldfor everyone—leastwise, not us. We areafraid that by giving away our time, ourselves and our love, we are somehow diminishing. In a sense, this is true. But what isdiminishing is not the real us, but a puffed-up illusion, created in the momentof fear. The real us—the us that yearnsto BE—can only come alive when we die to our false self, shuffle off our fear,and live in the awareness of the loveliness of everybody and everything else. In thosemoments, the suckiness falls away and the beauty shines so brightly all around usthat it becomes a mirror that reveals our own loveliness."

But that is not ALL, said the writer, oh no that is not ALL.

Now, I wanna show off my ability to blah-blah-blah-blather, by talking about one of the things of which I am perhaps most especially ignorant: falling in love with (in my case) a woman.

I'm not sure I ever understood what this "falling in love" thing was supposed to mean. Walt Disney told me I'd know it when it happened; but either it didn't ever happen, or I was somehow too dense to notice when it did. Sure, I've had times when I wanted to spend my every waking moment getting to know someone, but there seemed always to be a part of my mind that sat back off to one side, rolling its mind-eyes at the absurdity of it all. The utter abandonment I'd heard about never seemed to manifest.

Last year, a woman told me that what I was describing was merely infatuation, and that there was something more transcendent. She told me I'd "just know it" when it happened.

And I thought... bollocks.

It seemed, rather, to my paradoxically hyper-rational/creative mind, that what she was describing was the sort of story people tell themselves afterwards, to justify the mind-bogglingly stupid things they often do when their pheromones start to go haywire. At least, that is what I told myself to avoid facing the possibility that I just happened to be wired wrong - destined to miss out on Hollywood's worst-kept secret... forever (insert thunderclap of doom).

Over this past week, though, I've been chatting online with this lovely, brilliant, pixie-ish little woman in Hawaii, whom I'll call Luau-Lady. For some reason, she reminded me of a girl I knew my final year in college - the first woman for whom, I think, I really went batschizzle bananas. Luau-Lady, like Banana-Girl, is the sort of person who loves openly the people around her. She's sort of an elemental, transient thing; like the call of a bird echoing through the jungle; or a fine mist of sea-spray, catching the sunbeams of a moment and then drifting away.

As I wrote to her, I started to feel some of what I'd felt in college, when I'd first spotted Banana-Girl swinging like a monkey from a rope at a public pool, chattering like she'd meant it. Banana-Girl was beautiful, sure, but she was also just... her. I wrote to Luau-Lady, thought of Banana-Girl, and began to wonder, again, what it actually means to fall in love.

I still don't think I ever really "fell in love" with Banana-Girl.

Nonetheless, the first time we ever sat down to talk, it lasted for six frickin' hours. It was electric, and I was drained to my chitlins. Nonetheless, there was something that held me back - that kept me from quite giving in to the feelings of the moment. I somehow could not bring myself to just enjoy it... to release myself into the experience without needing to define or control what, exactly, it was becoming.

A friend of mine from acting class met Banana-Girl, and started to "like" her, so I ran away without ever letting him (or her) know what I had been feeling. That following summer, Banana-Girl went away tree-planting with Actor-Man, while I lay in my tent in my own tree-planting camp, staring at the picture she'd given me of herself and writing self-flagellating poetry such as the following:

Banana Girl

I saw heras the day died.
She was sunlight, and alive.
She told me of her past, in the north, in the woods
and how she loved to feel the sun upon her face.
In that place, I imagined traces of her golden hair,
floating on feathered fingers of the breeze.

I told her that I, too, would eat the outside if I could.
Away from the rattle and hum
of a paved-over world
the only sounds would be the waves and whisperings
of other wild things,

the soundsof singing in a dream.

I saw her as the day died.
She was sunlight, and alive...

...and so on.

When the summer was over, Banana-Girl and Actor-Man decided to get married. Just like that. And somehow I knew - knew - that it was all right. He, too, was the sort of person who grasped life loosely... who did not need to box and name everything around him. Whereas I, I discovered (wriggling deeper into my little cocoon of self-loathing), was a worm.

It is now twelve years since that time.

Banana-Girl and Actor-Man are still married, and have lived a beautiful, whimsical life together. And I, having been beaten about the corporeals by years of relational pain and then the agonizing death of my own marriage, have finally begun to learn a little bit, I think, of what it means to fall in love with a woman.

I have concluded that it is similar, in some ways, to falling in love with a chair... or yourself. I have concluded that to fall in love with a woman you have to abandon fear, and hush the voice that screams for you to control the moment and make it into what you envision it to be, instead of what it already IS. I have begun to learn that to really, really love a woman, you've just got to let her fly free. You've got to let her BE, realizing that there is already enough love, right there in front of you.

There is no magic sort of person, destined for fairy tales.

There are, however, people who will stare that fear in the face, blink, and then just get lost in the wonder of it all. I have talked with Actor-Man and Banana-Girl about those moments so long ago, and have learned that they, like me, were scared of the possibilities. They, too, were young and stupid and unsure. But they were willing to release the handlebars and coast the Motorcycle of Love off a cliff - to take the risk, I guess, of a "near-life experience."

So... I'm going to relax. No more freakin' out on Luau-Lady because I'm afraid of not being able to put her into a box. I'm going to continue to write to her, others, and you - sure - but I am going to remember to breathe. I am going to reclaim my faith that there is enough love in the world, without my having to grasp after it.

I am not meant to live in the hypotheticals, wandering around in my mind looking for a little more love. I am meant for wonderment, and life. Real life, today.

I am meant for falling in love.

One day at a time.

Every day.

Forever.

Legislating Morality: Part Five

2012-02-07T08:13:00.000-08:00

If you've got some free time, I recommend you pop on over to Harvard and sign up for Michael Sandel's "Justice" course. But if, like me, you haven't got an extra pile of money sitting around and the time to jet to Cambridge once a week, I'd suggest you take the course for free, online, at THIS OVERSTATED LINK RIGHT HERE. You won't regret it.

Sandel uses a mash-up Socratic style (questions, questions, questions) to edge his students toward a better understanding of the ethical and moral principles underpinning the American legal system. There's a lot of good stuff there, but the principle most salient to my point on gay rights is that Law exists to protect the weak from being taken advantage of by the strong. I'm seriously cribbing/simplifying/mis-remembering, here, but I think that's the gist of what he said about the Law. It is not here to tell us what is bad or good, it is here to keep us from hurting each other.

I'd heard this before, of course. I can remember my high school U.S. History teacher, Pigeon-Man Willie, telling us that Law was about preserving the truism that "your right to swing your fist ends where my face begins." Somewhere along the way, though, as I allowed myself to be molded into a good little North American citizen, I began to conflate legality with morality. I ignored all the many wrong things I do (being selfish with my pie, for instance) that I do not believe ought to be legislated, and began to float along with the hazy idea that if it was illegal, it was therefore bad.

This, obviously, is not necessarily the case. For example, there is apparently a law still on the books where I live in North Carolina that says that Elephants may not be used to plow cotton fields; but I say, heck, if some poor sharecropper kid finds a neglected circus elephant and wants to nurse it back to health so it can help him save the family farm, let him try!

The law may run parallel to morality, but it does not contain it. And while I believe, as previously stated, that it's important to obey the law unless you have a compelling reason for non-compliance, this is not a good argument for confusing the two. While our morality may/must/will inform our judicial system, the purpose of law is not to define or protect our moral systems, it is to protect us from each other.

Here's another truism from high school U.S. History: "power corrupts."

The best metaphor I know for this is the one J.R.R. Tolkien came up with, with all those Rings of his. The rings were about power. They were about control. They were about seeing without being seen, approaching without being approachable. It was only those humblest, most earthy, elemental and community-centric creatures - the Hobbits - who could carry the ring of power for a while, in order to get it away from the forces of evil and then destroy it. But even the Hobbits - Tolkein's stand-in for his English countrymen of World War II - were irreversibly marked... nay, wounded... by the tarnish of power's awesome allure.

I guess what I'm saying with this hobbit-trail is that when we talk about gay rights (or not-gay-rights, or whatever), what we're really talking about is the very human desire to control other people into behaving in accordance with our own conception of what is good.

I'm not saying that people who argue against gay rights are ignorant about what the law is for, because one of the first things they set out to do is to prove demonstrable harm - to show how, by their reckoning, gay marriage (or gays in the military, or gays teaching in schools, or gays being allowed to use public water fountains) would really harm others in a big enough way that it ought to be prohibited by Law.

But this doesn't really seem to be what they're actually trying to do.

What seems more likely is that people who try to make this argument are attempting, when you get right down to it, to legislate morality. But if we're going to shift focus and make Law about legislating morality, I think we have to ask ourselves - given the obvious impossibility of moral perfection - where it will end.

How far are is the Religious Right willing to go to preserve their mythological ideal of marriage as a union of one flawless, virginal man and one flawless, virginal woman? And are they then going to translate that legislation into all aspects of life? Should men and women applying for marriage licenses be required to submit to a porn-search of their computer hard drives?

If they are going to use their (culturally-biased, temporally-influenced) version of Biblical morality as an ultimate standard for the establishment of law, it would seem they ought to maybe take more seriously the fact that gluttony, not homosexuality, is on "The List" of the things God really, really hates. Why not pass a law that denies marriage to any obese person who cannot prove that his or her weight is the result of a medical condition?

And why isn't gossip illegal? Gossip is also on the "God-Hates-This" list, and I've seen firsthand the way gossip has "destroyed the very fabric of society," to use the language of those with whom I am disagreeing. Should "unrepentant" gossips, also, be prohibited from marrying?

The application is inconsistent, and to me, this seems to indicate that it is not a question of proving demonstrable harm at all. It's about picking one particular behavior (one they perhaps do not, themselves, indulge in) and privileging it above all others, ramping up the fear and the pride that drives them to pretend to be better than someone else, perhaps so they don't have to think about all the ways in which they fall short of the impossible ideal towards which they must unendingly pretend in order to be in with their particular in crowd.

I also think this is a political game - that people under the thrall of power are using this issue to appeal to the worst in voters, in order to garner ever more power for themselves. And setting aside, for the moment, any arguments about demonstrable harm, it seems to me that making this the fight Christians are known for is just one more way of expressing unmerited attachment to our own way of thinking, and our own, tiny morality - a moral system seemingly obsessed with sexuality, to the exclusion of all else.

Law is a complicated, confusing thing, about which I am extremely unqualified to speak. Nonetheless, it seems to me that on this issue, we are not talking about law at all. We are talking about ourselves. And the question we need to start asking ourselves is this: are we as Christians willing to become the sort of people who define ourselves by conflating law and morality... aligning ourselves so closely to one, transient system of government that history will judge us by the harsh criteria it will inevitably apply to that government, as it has to unjust governmental systems in our past?

I said at the very beginning of this internet ramble of mine that I was going to be a little less-than-nice to the people with whom I disagreed, and if that's what I've done, then I am okay with it. I don't want to be nice. I want to be loving. Besides, the reason I can pretend to understand so well their pride-choked ways is that I, too, used to be sorta/kinda just like them.

In fine, rather than embroil myself in quibbling arguments over whether or not clear, dramatic, demonstrable harm would be done by allowing gay marriage to happen, I think I would rather ask those-with-whom-I-disagree to take a long, hard look at their own hearts and ask if, perhaps, they might hold their position not because of a careful exploration of justice and the purposes of Law, but rather because being all bombastic on this one makes them feel like they're the good guys. I would ask them if, perchance, what is at stake here is not the slippery concept of "the sanctity of marriage," but rather the very clear and present question of whether they are willing to abandon their pride in favor of being kind, loving, humble and unafraid.

There are places, I think, where the principle of harm is being violated, and a serious legal fight might be worth it - like, say, with regard to abortion (which I wrote about in the hopefully kind, loving, and nuanced post, "A Time to Kill?"). But this, it seems to me, is not one of those places. In this case, we are siding against love... and it needs to stop.

- - -

Post Script: I know that both sides of the issue would probably prefer that I define what, exactly, I think homosexual attraction and behavior is. Gay activists would prefer me to admit that it is a biological part of their inherent nature, and anti-gay activists would prefer that I admit that it is a heinous sin.

I have intentionally avoided this question because: A. I do not think it is relevant to the question at hand - a question of law and love; and B. I know very little about anything, and am mostly just an ignorant cuss who's trying to be less of a jerk than he was yesterday.

I invite your comments and discussion.

boom-dee-yadda drawing progress

2012-02-06T10:17:00.000-08:00

showtime(s)

2012-02-05T16:30:00.000-08:00

Showtimes at the Charlotte Film Festival are in on a couple of short films I played a part in creating. Unemployment will be playing at 7:00 pm on Monday, March 19th, and Fork will be playing at 8:45 that same night.

*Note: Some thematic material in these films is not suitable for children.

Biznatch!

2012-02-05T09:17:00.000-08:00

Every once in a while, someone will ask me if I have any prints of any of my paintings for sale. Usually I just shrug and say, "Um," and then something about how I should get right on that. I'm not exactly a biznatch kind of a guy.

A couple years ago, though, I made an account on deviantart.com, and set it up so people could buy prints. Then I forgot about it. Until two days ago, when a check arrived from deviant out of the big, wide blue. So, er... it's there. I linked it in the sidebar. You can buy a print.

There. Duty done. Back to work.

Legislating Morality: Part Four

2012-02-04T11:34:00.000-08:00

Memory is weird. I (obviously) can't begin to tell you all the wondrous, amazing, unforgettable things I've completely forgotten in my lifetime; but sometimes it's the simplest, dumbest things that have stuck with me, year after year.

Like the time my tall Dutch friend, Aren, convinced me that weed should be legal. Aren and I were sitting in my beloved diesel Jetta (may she rest in peace) in the parking lot at Mt. Seymour Ski Resort back in 2001, our bare feet up on the dash as we wiggled our toes over the vent. I had broken a binding, and Aren was keeping me company as we waited for our friends, so after covering the usual topics (girls, sex), we turned our conversation to helmet laws and then, of course, to marijuana.

With his annoying Dutch logic and relentless Dutch stubbornness, Aren wore me down and eventually convinced me of his main premise - that you cannot legislate morality.

This is sort of a no-brainer that jives perfectly with the Christ-faith Aren and I both grew up in (which, in keeping with Jesus' teachings, refuses to judge or condemn another person's heart), but is completely at odds with a lot of mainstream Christian Religion, which seems bent on using force to suppress any and all behavior it thinks may be indicative of a bad heart... an attitude I now find hard to describe as anything other than Evil.

I call it capital-E-Evil (as in, the Froo-itts of the Deh-veel) because it is, ultimately, dehumanizing. It treats people as things; taking an amazingly complex, wondrous creature like a human being and pretending to be able to deduce, by means of a few scattered observations, the content of that person's heart. This is ridiculous. People are not things, and no one knows the content of anyone else's heart. Heck, I've been self-obsessing for around thirty years, and I'm barely starting to begin to get a grasp of a few of the more obvious aspects of my own.

That is why, before jumping into the issue of gay rights, I've taken you on this rabbit trail through some of the more salient points along the timeline of my own awakening sexual consciousness. Because I believe that when I've gone and said my piece, it is more than likely that you'll end up making a judgment on my heart, taking my position and grafting it onto your life experience and your heart-assumptions about what people who say the sorts of things that I do are really like.

If you're going to place a moral judgment on my heart, I figure I ought to at least make you sit through a good chunk of my story, in the hope that maybe then, you'll see where I'm coming from and that idea-graft will have a better chance of "taking," growing, and blossoming into some new and exciting hybrid fruit.

While we're on the topic of vegetation, though, I should add that I do not smoke weed (except for that one time, when I got that second-hand high from my friend and his stupid vaporizer - thanks, Jesse), and in fact, I don't think anyone else should smoke weed, either - at least, not anywhere it's still illegal.

On this, I take a bit of a Gandhi-esque approach and say that you shouldn't break any laws unless it can be clearly demonstrated that love will be diminished and real harm done by compliance. That way, you'll have the moral credibility to break an unjust law when it becomes necessary to do so. I do not currently believe the demonstrable harm argument can honestly be made by (actual) non-medical marijuana users, so I still think smoking weed where it's illegal is wrong. Not like, "kill-your-parents" wrong, but still...

That's another issue entirely, but it brings in the key point - demonstrable harm - of my whole argument on gay rights. It's complicated, though, and as I'm coming down with some bug and am worn out from wrastling a four-year-old all morning, I do believe I'll save that final huzzah for later.

Let me finish, instead, with a confession: That story about Aren and I in the car at Mt. Seymour? ...I might have just made that up. While Aren and I did go snowboarding a few times and did once sit in the car waiting for friends (undoubtedly talking about girls and sex), I cannot be entirely sure if it was then that he convinced me that people should be allowed to do dumb things like frazzle their brains with weed if they darn well pleased. I'm dealing, after all, with a human mind: flawed, fickle, and given to re-writing reality to fit whatever story my life is trying to tell.

Next, I hope to tell a story in which gay rights don't look as scary to people who, like me, were erroneously taught that the way to defeat a perceived evil is with a rigorous, unflinching application of force and fear. That is, if I can remember what I'd planned to say.

the craft of virtue

2012-02-02T17:56:00.000-08:00

From Groundhog Day and the 10,000 Hour Montage, over at Slacktivist:

"Virtue, Aristotle believed, was a craft — it was something we had to learn. To be a good person, he taught, takes work. We have to learn how to be good, to study it, and then, above all, to practice practice practice.

Aristotle would have liked Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000-hour rule. In his book Outliers, Gladwell suggested that expertise isn’t innate, but is something that only comes from practice — “10,000 hours of it — 20 hours a week for 10 years.” This is true for any craft, including the craft of virtue, of being a good person. It takes time and effort to acquire the skill and to turn it into a habit, a reflex, a trait.

When I first encountered this idea of virtue as craft, I found it exciting and even liberating because it was so different from the idea of virtue I had learned growing up in American fundamentalist Christianity. I had been taught to think of virtue as mainly a matter of avoiding sin — of abstaining from a long list of bad things. Virtue wasn’t something to do, but something you had because of all the things you didn’t do. It wasn’t a craft to be learned, developed and practiced, but a stockpile to be safeguarded and hoarded. It was as though we had each been given an initial supply when we were born again as innocents, and that finite supply had to be preserved, clasped tightly, and kept pure from a dangerous and poisonous world.

The best that one could hope for, in such a view, was that 10,000 hours later one might have vigilantly defended and retained most of one’s original purity so that one wasn’t any worse after all that time. But this view didn’t allow much hope for the possibility of becoming a better person.
So the idea of virtue as a craft gave me hope. And not just a vague, impractical kind of hope. This is the kind of hope that comes with an agenda, a curriculum, a course of study and a course of action and a regimen to practice."

nominations!

2012-02-02T08:52:00.000-08:00

I think I already mentioned that the short film Fork, which I wrote and helped produce, is out doing the festival rounds and has been accepted into the Charlotte Film Festival that's coming up next month. I'm pleased to add, however, that Brett Gentile - who plays the role of "The Brute" - has been nominated for Best Actor. This pits him against actors in the feature-lengths so I don't know how it'll turn out, but he did a phenomenal job and I wish him luck.

- - -

Also nominated for best actor is Robert C. Treveiler, for his role in Unemployment, which I also helped to produce. Unemployment is up for Best Short Film, so we're all holding our breaths and hoping for some award-love to give us a little added attention and chutzpah as we head into pre-production of the next short film I wrote, called Vaudeville, that we'll be shooting in the Spring.

Legislating Morality: Part Three

2012-01-31T18:47:00.000-08:00

At University, I learned about the existence of human hermaphrodites.

For the un-initiated, wikipedia defines a human hermaphrodite as "any person incompatible with the biological gender binary," and adds that the term "has recently been replaced by 'intersex' in medicine." This means that these people are not exactly male or female, in a physiological sense. Although there is some debate over the number of people born with the condition, it is real, and it is common enough that it's quite possible you and I have met an intersex person in our lifetime.

If you weren't raised as I was, your response to this revelation might be "so what?" But I was taught that there are only two models of humans, A and B, and that these models come with an extensive list of pre-determined gender characteristics - characteristics that ranged from the presence or absence of dangly or bumpy bits, to an affinity for either frilly dresses or guns. "You can keep a little boy away from guns all you want," they'd say, "but he'll just bite his toast into a revolver shape and start shooting people."

The upshot of this was that I believed that gender was in your genes, and that people who deviated from the gender expectations of their culture were doing so by willful choice. Like, say, the way my dad used to choose to wear purple-and-white polka-dotted shorts. Dad was an aberration, and even though in our missionary community he got some extra slack for being a Canadian, the general assumption was that his weird sartorial choices were just that - choices. It stood to reason, therefore, that when I thought about human sexuality and human sexual expression, I believed that whenever anyone deviated from what was generally considered the norm, it was because they chose to do so.

But what about these intersex people, formerly known as "hermaphrodites?" They did not choose their condition, and they don't fit into category A or B - was I supposed to think of them as somehow cursed by God - a flaw? Was I supposed to believe that whatever sexual desire they happened to feel was automatically more corrupt than my own, just because they didn't really fit? That just didn't sit right with me.

I learned that some intersex persons, if they wanted to have a more "normal" gendered existence, would have to make the choice (or have it made for them at birth by their parents) to endure painful surgeries and "treatments." How just was that? How was I to fit their experience into my tidy, pre-packaged little universe? These questions began to gnaw away at me and, ultimately, to affect the way I thought about "the gay issue." I got confused. I had a lot of opinions, but very little information or experience.

At that point in my life I knew exactly zero openly gay persons. None. Zilch. Nada.

I had never had a single conversation about sexuality with any gay person, open or publicly closeted. There was a guy in one of my classes who was rumored to be gay, and once in a while I'd get hit on by a gay guy (apparently, as a consolation prize for being beanpole-thin, I have a bit of a pretty face), but I'd not yet actually conversed with someone I knew to be gay. What's more, I didn't know of anyone who was a lesbian. For all I knew, lesbians didn't even exist.

But sexual and gender identity are important parts of identity as a whole, so it's not as though my ignorance would get me out of making any kind of judgement at all. Sure, it would have been wise to reserve judgment; but with who I was, and the culture I was in, this wasn't possible. My opinion was demanded, and so I gave it. I tried to be kind - to hedge my words with the humility of ignorance - but I spoke nonetheless, opening my mouth and, as the proverb says, "removing all doubt" about my own foolishness.

I am tired of acting like I know more than I do. It's exhausting, and always leaves me afraid that my fraudery will be exposed. I am tired of accepting second and third-hand reports about a group of people I've barely just begun to get to know - to care about - to love. In the words of old-school reggae/pop band UB4O, "Every hour of every day I'm learning more. The more I learn, the less I know about before. The less I know, the more I want to look around... digging deep for clues on higher ground."

What is gender? What is sexuality? And how do I, a dust mote on the sun-beam of eternity, begin to comprehend any other dust motes; or the sunbeam; or even the sun itself? I do not know.

I'm not saying there are no answers, just that I've become far less confident in my ability to apprehend them.

It seems to me, furthermore, that what this world and this time need from me is not so much clear-cut answers to life's pressing questions, as much as the slow, boring, healing balm of love. It is therefore much less interesting to me, now, how someone came to have certain a-typical (statistically speaking) sexual drives, than it is to figure out how to love them, better, where they actually are today.

To put the question in a framework for which I do have some context, I look to my own relational history. I do not entirely understand how I came to have an ex-wife. I did not willingly choose it - she chose it for me. But now that I do, in fact, have an ex-wife, how I came to have one is kind of a moot point. While I may study the question in my head, from time to time, in hopes of avoiding repeating the experience, in my day-to-day interactions I choose instead to do my best to set it aside and be in the moment, now, with love.

Sometimes, however, love demands that we not set the questions aside. Sometimes, love asks us to stop hedging and start expressing the truth as we see it. I hope that I've revealed my history, perspective and self enough that anyone who reads my conclusions will know - wherever they might happen to fall in their opinion on gay rights - that I am doing my utmost to explore the question with love and humility. And I hope (fool that I am) that I will be able to spark off some genuine conversation, and promote the growth of love and ever more love.

- - -

To Be Continued...

In Memory of Fiction Fridays

2012-01-31T08:25:00.000-08:00

Regular readers may wonder why the weekly short stories abruptly stopped. There are three reasons: first, I was starting to HATE it. I think the last one I wrote was one of my best, but it was a painful experience and I needed to stop; second, I'm producing a short film I wrote that we'll be shooting in the Spring, so my time's in short supply; and third: after this weekend, my year commitment is over. I skipped some weeks, but managed to write 46 FRIGGIN' stories! It's enough. So for now, fini.

Legislating Morality: Part Two

2012-01-29T08:54:00.000-08:00

High school sexuality (shudder) is a minefield; a cesspool; a venomous, black pit. If I felt like a sexual dirtbag because of the childhood experience previously described in hazy, self-protective detail, in high school my sense of dirt-bagginess was compounded by the fact that I was a late, late bloomer, weighing in at only a hundred-twenty-something pounds and four-or-five armpit hairs by graduation.

This meant I experienced the typical ravages of puberty in slow motion; which contributed, perhaps, to the ability I developed to identify with outsiders - with people who, like me, did not fit the mainstream conception of what they "ought" to be. My biological exclusion made me depressive and hyper-sensitive, and while it is humiliating to be a high school male who cries easily, I now see it as a gift. There are very few men in this world who really learn to "mourn with those who mourn," but me - I mourned with everybody. I was a natural-born empathy-machine.

I was, however, still a kid, and knew very little of anything about anything. I certainly didn't know about homosexuality, beyond its vague inclusion in a long line of sexual behaviors I was supposed, at all costs, to avoid. I'm a little hazy on the history, here; but either homosexuality was still a peripheral aspect of American politics at that point, or down in Peru we were so far removed from that whole boiler-room environment that it never really made it onto our radar.

Whatever the case, the underlying assumption was that homosexuality was a sin you came to after having descended through progressively evil levels of sexual deviance (and was a short stop on the way to baby-raping), so it was not given a lot of attention. There was the more pressing issue of masturbation to worry about, after all, and "normal" fornication.

My senior year I did once overhear one of my friends confess to someone from outside our missionary community that he'd had some feelings of attraction for other guys; but that was the night I came home late from Bible Study and - rather than wake my parents to unlock the door - ended up sleeping on a lawn chair in the yard... so I tucked the knowledge of my friend's confession down deep, figuring it was none of my business. I was, after all, a degenerate who'd broken curfew by staying late at Bible Study - so who was I to judge?

Then I went off to University - to a private, Christian liberal arts school where "the gay issue" was discussed openly, and often. On one side, there were the macho, brash dorm-mates who slung insulting, unrepeatable euphemisms for homosexuals left and right and used "gay" as an epithet for anything negative. These were the sorts of people who would call me a "faggot" for trying to get them to calm down and just have fun during a game of pick-up soccer.

On the other side, there was the quieter minority, who were patiently trying to talk their way to a better understanding.

Me, I floundered somewhere in the middle. I was illustrator for the school paper, played a little soccer, and did my best to disappear into a crowd and culture I could not, as an outsider, ever fully understand. When the school paper printed a "Sex Issue" and ran an anonymous survey in which a significant* percentage of the respondents self-identified as homosexual, I mostly kept my head down and said whatever felt safest - a fairly typical, human response, but not one of which I am particularly proud.

I did write one pompous, poorly-considered article on "the gay issue" for the online version of the school paper, and although I mostly only did it to respond to a (I thought) badly-written, badly-reasoned position piece by one of the paper's staff writers, I am happy to report that I was able to convince them to expunge the regrettable thing (I think... I hope) from the internet. So I can now smile and nod and rewrite history, maintaining that I was above all that - that I kept quiet and stayed out of it. The truth, as always, is probably a lot more complicated. I was a part of the very human world in which I lived, and change comes slow and hard to humans.

Still, it is fair enough to say that while there were those who got riled up about gay rights at my school, I was not one of them. Politics overwhelmed me to the point of boredom. I was an artist, after all - and what has art to do with politics? That, at least, was my thinking at the time. But art has a way of forcing you to take long, hard looks, and I was headed for a crash-course in humility.

(To Be Continued... )

- - -

*Significant, considering that students at our school had to sign a "community standards" agreement that required them to refrain from homosexual activity - a matter of some contention that brought the school, my senior year, all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada.

peace to the galaxy

2012-01-28T14:18:00.000-08:00

Contrary to what we are taught at the School of Hallmark, children are vicious little urchins. Ask anyone with kids - or, at least, anyone with little boys. My son's barely four, and hardly a day goes by when he doesn't express a desire to shoot and kill someone... usually those he deems "bad guys."

This, as you can imagine, tends to bother my pinko-commie-pacifist self; and unfortunately, as a (qualified) pacifist, I can't exactly use force to get him to stop the violence.

Instead, I've carried out a long and patient campaign of meeting any murderous comments with a counter-offer: typically, that instead of shooting the bad guys, we try talking to them to see what they're so angry about. Then, I suggest that perhaps we might think of something kind that we could do for them to defuse the situation.

I know, I know - this is the sort of eye-rolling stuff of which tortured late-life memoirs or made. But get this... it may be working! This morning, my son and I were hiding in the fort I built for him, apparently from some bad guys, when all of a sudden he suggested - without any prompting from me - that we climb down and make a surprise pretend dinner for these bad guys. So we did, and he even got me to whip up a pretend birthday cake.

What does this prove? Well, it proves that kids will do anything for the approval of their parents, obviously. What kid in his right mind wants to make a birthday cake for the bad guys? Nonetheless, it's a step. And one day, when my son's responsible for bringing peace to the galaxy, you'll all know whom to thank.

Legislating Morality: Part One

2012-01-26T19:50:00.000-08:00

If you haven't read my latest short story, Conventional, you should. Not just because I feel it would be best for everyone in the entire world to read every word I ever write (twice)*; but also because I think Story is always a better way to make a point, since it brings you along on an emotional journey, drawing you into the protagonist's arc and (at its best) forcing you to collaborate or contend with him** in his decisions.

The one thing a story doesn't do, though, is allow you to bash somebody over the head with a message. When that happens, it stops being a story and starts being propaganda - which usually results in people getting hurt. I don't like hurting people, but I do want to get specific about a shift I've been undergoing regarding my understanding of gay rights, so I'm gonna do the next best thing and tell you my story, the one I've been living ever since Ma and Pa Barkey had a particularly enjoyable evening, roughly thirty-three years ago.

A complete discussion of gay rights would have to involve a perfect understanding of my own internal sexual politics. This is, of course, impossible, so instead I'll focus on a few lowlights, to give you an idea of the soil in which my own sexuality grew. Without going into too much lurid detail, let's just say that at the age of six, I went over to a friend's house in the Amazon basin of Peru, South America for a sleepover. Over the course of the evening, we ended up hiding under his bed and playing one of those "oh, you-have-one-of-those-too" games that are a fairly standard part of growing up and figuring out what it means to be a human male. It all felt very exciting and, although we couldn't have said precisely why, incredibly naughty.

I doubt very much that I would have had at the time a very specific understanding of "the gay thing" - or of any kind of sexuality at all - so this experience did not make me wonder about myself along those lines. What it (and subsequent, similar experiences) did accomplish was to fill me with a vague, treacle-thick guilt so pervasive that I was to bear it forward into every single sexuality-related conversation or experience I was to have for the next twenty-three or so years.

This may sound strange to someone not raised in the meticulously-preserved pseudo-innocence of an overseas, protestant missionary compound, but this shame was such a real and pressing part of my sexual identity for so long that it kind of baffles me how I can write of it so easily now, in such a public forum as the internet.

When I was in jr. high and high school, I allowed myself no such grace or freedom to be honest; and as the adults in my life began to take it upon themselves to more directly and explicitly instruct me on the forms they figured my sexuality ought to be taking, I brought to each hearing, discussion, fantasy and sexuality-related experience a deep sense of shame and guilt. I believed the story I was told - that human sexuality is ugly and vile outside of marriage - and from this story extrapolated the following moral: that I, the unmarried, teenage Josh Barkey, was an ugly, vile person, because of every single sexuality-related experience I had ever had.

Breathe, Barkey.

It was my intention, as I began to write this, to bang out all my thoughts in one monster post. But it's becoming clear to me that I ought to take it one slow piece at a time, giving my various ruminant juices the opportunity to do their work.

So let me finish by saying that whatever mind-mangle might have been done to me by the adults, friends, and films that comprised the faculty of my early School-of-Sexuality, I bear no ill will for any of it. Human sexuality is a difficult sea for anyone to navigate, and as the father of a young boy, I know all too well how easy it is to pass on your fears and failings to a child.

The purpose of this series, as explained in the "preface," is not to staple identifying name-tags onto the foreheads of villains. Rather, it is to argue that deep down, we all fight a hard battle - that we are all a mysterious admixture of the same rotten (and wonderful!) motivations. My hope is that if we can admit this, we can move together toward the sort of love and grace necessary for a little real, honest-to-God sexual healing. And maybe, in time, we can stop arguing about Rights and start living about Love.

- - -

*Insert sarcasm here, to disguise the dirty little secret that part of me really, really means it.

**I try to be as gender-neutral in my pronoun usage as possible, but in this case it didn't make sense. Plus, everyone in the story in question is male.

Notice of Copyright Infringement: Technically, I sold the rights to use my twisted cupid drawing to the EMI record label, for use as cover art on the Stabilo album, Cupid?. But given the current, flailing state of the recording industry, I figure they've got bigger problems than a little copyright infringement on my part.

in lieu of justice

2012-01-24T08:31:00.000-08:00

I don't hate lumberjacks. What I hate is the cavalier way we treat the act of cutting down a tree: as though it were nothing - an inert object, like a lego, that exists for nothing but our own amusement. I want it to matter when we cut down a tree. I want it to be significant when we end its life in order to build a house, a bridge, or the stretcher-frame for a canvas.

I guess that's why, even though I don't hate lumberjacks, it kind of makes me smile the way a tree will wrap itself over time around a metal object, sucking it in so deeply that it remains long after any external indicators have rusted out and fallen away. Tucked into the folds of the tree it becomes, in a sense, a sort of booby-trap for lumberjacks, or anybody else who might want to rev up their chainsaw and have a go.

Justice can be ugly, and indiscriminate. Even poetic justice can miscarry, meting out unmerited punishment on the undeserving - say, on the poor sap who just wants to make a birdhouse for his little boy, or a fire for his shivering wife. It's still a sort of justice, though, and although I hate even the thought of chain striking wire, flying off and badly hurting someone; I imagine that when it happens, the world-wide consciousness of trees breathes a sort of inchoate sigh.

This is why, perhaps, I find it possible to empathize with people who cheer when justice is miscarried - when a misunderstanding of the function of law leads them to applaud when punishment is meted out on the undeserving. They are wrong to be happy for this. They are wrong to argue for it. But they are right to sense that something is very wrong with the world. They are right to hope for justice.

I plan to write, next, about gay rights, and I do not plan to be entirely "nice" to people who misunderstand the proper function of law and clap their hands together in favor of ugliness. I am therefore talking about the vengeance of trees as a way of prefacing these not-nice thoughts with an appeal to empathy. Because I believe that way down - deep down under the bark and living tissue and dead rings of protection with which we've walled off our souls - we all hope for a time when the partial, imperfect, misguided justice of our world will be made right. And I believe we hate that imperfect justice so much, that we might even be willing to give up on the dream of perfect justice in exchange for empathy, and grace.

responsible control

2012-01-23T04:44:00.000-08:00

My son fancies himself a bit of a painter, but I gotta say that sometimes his attempts are a bit weak. There are flashes of brilliance, sure; but I had been hoping that now that he's made it over that four-year hump, he'd start pulling it off a bit more consistently. Not the case.

Take this piece from our session this weekend. Not terrible, mind - and definitely reminiscent of some of the better work by Anselm Keifer - but still a bit muddy and directionless.

So, while he's working on his piece and I'm sitting there doing this slap-dash little portrait and passive-aggressively insinuating that he might want to slow it down with the paint-mixing, I suddenly have this epiphany:

Josh, dude... you just gotta let this go.

Sure, he's over-mixing like mad; demanding that you squeeze more and more colors onto his palette as he works himself into a frenzy of discoloration; but in the end, if what I've done is squelched his joy at the act of creation, then who gives a rat's left earlobe?

Besides... what if I'm wrong? Perhaps he is aware that mixing colors has a neutralizing effect. Maybe he knows it and is ignoring it, creating a new style that fuses action painting with color field painting in order to echo the despair that infused the post-WWII art world, whilst at the same time saying something new and exciting about the struggle to wrest meaning from the endless distractions of a po-mo world. Or maybe he's just going through a nihilist phase... who knows?

The important thing is that I've got to let it go. He's his own little man and sometimes, to be a good father, I've gotta let him spread his little wings and fly.

But then I think... wait a minute, what about that Icarus guy? His father let him spread his wings, and look what happened.

This question - this mix-muddling of paint - becomes of vital importance. I am torn between the need to let him make his own mistakes (if, indeed, that's what they are), and the desire to show him that by not mixing the colors quite so much, he allows each one to retain a bit more of its original beauty.

I ask myself: how do I distinguish between a destructive desire to overwhelm his will with the force of my supposed "rightness," and a healthy acknowledgement and acceptance of the responsibility of fatherhood? It is not an easy question. There is no simple, one-size-fits-every-situation kind of answer. Eventually, it starts to come down to why I'm wanting to redirect him in the first place. One moment I'm lovingly tapping him toward the light with the wooden spoon of justice, and the next, I'm just hittin' for the fun of it.

Suddenly it matters - maybe more than anything else, ever - whether or not I keep squeezing out the paint and letting him "ruin" his masterpiece. How the Sam Hill am I gonna know what's the right thing to do here, when I barely even know my own motivation for doing it?

Then I get it. The answer. Because the answer's right there in the question: I don't know, I can't know, and the best way to have the best chance of doing what's right is to acknowledge that. The kid may be veering madly off on a trajectory that's going to end up with him living in some SoHo dive doing installation work with popcorn that only him and the rats he has for bedfellows are ever gonna see, but that's not really my concern. My concern is maintaining the humility to admit that I am ignorant of outcomes, so that pride can take a backseat to love.

He demands a bit more blue. I give it to him. And when he is finished, I take both our paintings and magnetize them, side-by-side, to the refrigerator.

the flipside of fear

2012-01-20T11:19:00.000-08:00

Love is boring.

It has its highs, its dopamine spikes, its exuberant joys, sure; but taken as a whole, it seems to me that Love is a low, dull, throb that pulses through the marrow of the universe. Love is a kind, healing, patient, and ultimately creative force; doing its slow, eternal work on the mitochondrial level, or deeper. "It takes a looooong time," the Ents might say, "to say anything in Love."

A week ago I left a comment on a blog I follow, suggesting that the author of said blog had veered a bit too violently into Name-Calling-Land... a place I find counter-productive to the slow, boring work of Love. Because his blog is immensely popular, and because I happened to have scored "first comment," I was immediately attacked by a great number of people, who accused me of everything from "concern trolling" to "exorbitant use of punctuation."

I was not trying to be a troll. One of the reasons I like this dude's blog in the first place is that he points out a lot of seriously problematic behaviors that I think ought to be criticized. I just get uncomfortable when it goes from a critique of behavior to the characterization of another person or group of people as the thing that they are doing. When I tried to come back in the comments and explain this, the barbs started flying again and I was reminded in no uncertain terms that I, like all those Other Christians, am an insufferable, sanctimonious jerk.

The internet is not, I think, interested in the slow work of love. It wants drama. It wants passion. It wants sound bytes. And as alluring as all that is, I am finding it very, very tiring.

So I left the comment war, rolled my eyes when the blog author dedicated his next post to explaining why it is a good Christian's duty to call some people "a**holes," and spent the next several days feeling emotionally beleaguered by the injustice of it all. I'd been accused of the opposite of my intention - which was to promote love - and it hurt.

Then yesterday, I sat down for a chat with my boss, the principal of the school where I teach. He told me that something I'd written a year ago made him feel that I was attacking him and the organization of which he is a part, the church to which our school is attached. He said he felt, for lack of a better word, "offended."

Now, I know all about the fine tradition of Artists-as-Prophets, and I know that Jesus himself was famous for "offending them one and all." But I also know this man, my boss. For three and a half years, I have watched him love people. I have watched him extend grace to kids whom I'd probably have long-since given the boot. I have experienced this man giving me grace, allowing me to stay on when parents have howled for my resignation, and supporting me through the devastation of the end of my marriage. I know this man; so I listened, and what I heard in his voice was a bit of the same feeling I'd experienced in that blog discussion - a feeling of deep frustration at being misunderstood and mis-characterized.

My boss is not a perfect man. He admits this, readily. He also sees the world very, very differently than I do. But despite his imperfections and our differences, he is not a particularly hard man to love - probably (I think) because he has worked so hard to make love a defining characteristic of his life. I have seen this love, and I know that it is real.

So I listened, and I thought about all that I have written on here - the hundreds of thousands of words I have arranged in my pursuit of Love, Truth, God, Jesus and all that jazz; and I realized that there have been times when, bored with the slow pace of love, I have attempted to tweak my words in such away as to provoke - not out of a genuine love and desire for the creative healing of a world in pain - but rather out of a desire to get more attention for this blog... for myself.

In short, I've taken shortcuts. I've forgotten, in the words of Tielhard de Chardin, to "above all, trust in the slow work of God." Instead, I have attempted to speed things up a little bit by pointing to other people and pretending to a sort of knowledge that, in reality, I cannot have. I cannot know other people's hearts. But I've pretended that I do, and in so doing have turned them into Things.

Color me chagrined.

For a long, long time, I have used this blog to trace the ways in which I have allowed fear to control my actions. I have rooted out this fear as I have written about my faith, sexual identity, relationships - all of it. This is a good thing, to be sure. But the problem, as I see it, is that in so doing I have sometimes ignored the flipside of fear, which is pride.

It's time for a shift in focus.

So consider this post an apology... and a promise.

I don't want to position myself, any more, in a place of pride. I want to root out the false humility that has lead me to do the very thing I hate the most: to "thingify" other people. I want to be a part of something better, something that seeks to build not by destroying what is bad, but by affirming what is good - believing in faith that Creative Love is the side that's gonna win in this mad-house dialectical broo-ha-hah we call life.

I'll be as snarky as ever, probably - but now, hopefully, with a focus on redemption and the slow, boring work of Love.

workaday

2012-01-19T04:43:00.000-08:00

Hawk hunched 'gainst cold
feathers bunched
on wire
inner fire.

I drive down low
zig-zag, fast slow
back hunched
work, ho.

Day break, frost melt
sun glow, sun felt.
Hawk fly free.

Not me.

scaredy dad

2012-01-18T03:09:00.000-08:00

I used to think my mom was scared of everything; partly because she's my mom, and partly because I don't think she ever really tried to hide her fear. I can remember coming across a journal of hers with an entry she'd written when I was entering Kindergarten, talking about how afraid she was to let me go. It seemed pretty par for the course.

Then I had my own kid.

Suddenly, it made sense to be scared to send your son off to Kindergarten, or even to the other side of the yard. Suddenly, I realized how you can love someone so much - how you can want so bad it hurts for them to have all the joys that a long, full life can offer. Realizing that, and knowing at the same time how hard life is, and how fragile, it came to seem a miracle how unafraid my parents really were. It baffled me to think of how my parents allowed me, at the age of five, to have my own machete and to run around in the jungle, unsupervised. How reckless and unimaginably secure my parents must have been, to have allowed me the freedoms that they did.

It becomes, in the context of my fear-soaked, American life, an absurdity. Me, I want to toss my son into a padded room and slide trays of organic, hypoallergenic food under the door for all eternity. I want to hold his hand when he crosses this street, and the next one, and the next - so that I will always be there to throw myself under the bus for his salvation.

But then I think... what then? Who will hold his hand after I'm just another bloody smear on the grille of a semi? Who will keep him safe when I cannot? The fear is cyclical, and it spirals ever downward.

I cannot keep him safe. Not really.

And what good is a life spent fearing the grille of a semi, anyways? I stop. I breathe. I squeeze his tiny, perfect little hand in mine and then, little by little, I let go.

become an editor, absolutely FREE!

2012-01-16T10:55:00.000-08:00

Here's the deal, amigorinos: I need to pick short stories for a book I'll be putting out in a couple months as part of a kickstarter campaign. I was going to wait on this until I had all fifty-two stories in the can, but as I need to get to editing right away, I am asking you to help me in the selection process by commenting on which stories you feel absolutely have to make the cut. If you've been following along, I'd love your input.

So far, I've written forty-six stories (one of those was a two-parter, but we'll let that slide), totaling around 106,000 words.

In random order, these are the stories I'm considering for inclusion...

Sept. 16: The Hookup (A farm family is changed forever when the internet man comes to town) – 435 words
Mar. 26: Spoiled (An author, depressed over perceived failure in writing and relationship, hallucinates and attempts suicide) – 1,705
Mar. 11: The Day the Bear Ate Pappy (A tall tale in which brothers go treeplanting to prove their manliness to their father, and end up watching him get ‘et) – 3,245
Mar. 4: Blackbird Train (A Vonnegut-esque story in which two people make a connection whilst stuck on a train careening toward derailment) – 3,785
Feb. 25: Red Gold (A young tribal boy dies in a conflict brought about when an oil man impregnates his sister) – 2,384
Feb. 11: Zaphod (In a Douglas-Adams-esque sci-fi parody, an undercover duck participates in the chicken-takeover of the Universe) – 1,878
Feb. 4: Love, In a Taxi (Two lovers are re-united in a taxi, only to plunge – with the driver – to their deaths) – 1,410
Aug. 9: A Thinly-Veiled Grey (A third-culture kid goes to a class reunion hoping to show how much things have changed, and ends in a fistfight after being sucked back into his highschool self’s headspace) – 2,056
Jul. 29: When Twice Again they Died (The death of a child, told through the eyes of his teddy bear) – 2,157
Jul. 22: Hydra (A guy who is death-to-automobiles recovers his stolen car, only to watch it ruined – and the thief killed – in a lightning strike) – 2,008
Jul. 15: The Hunt (After shooting a squirrel, a kid finds that the glories of hunting aren’t all he’d dreamed) – 2,266
Jul. 8: Plink (An uprooted boy just starting to find joy at his new boarding school is brutally disappointed when the girl he is with has a terrible accident) – 2,223
Jun. 24: Muted (A man who’s saved his whole life to buy a farm finds his dreams dashed in one, fateful night) – 1,274
Jun. 17: A Grizzly Bear on Columbia Street (A societal satire in which a marauding grizzly bear is ignored until he diverts his attention from a city’s homeless to one of its wealthier denizens) – 2,356
May 17: Immortality (A treeplanting superstar saves his brother’s life by sacrificing himself during an encounter with a grizzly) – 4,563
Oct. 7: The Apple and the Oak (An apple and an oak tree become friends, and then deal in their own ways with the separation entailed by their mortality) – 1,163
Sept. 30: The Strange Case of Benson T. Hueson and the Morning Paper (Everything gets turned around for Mr. Hueson, until his future-telling paper ceases to prognosticate) – 3,084
Sept. 9: Bottlecap Billy (An autistic guy, confused about where money comes from, attempts to rob a bank and is tragically killed) – 2,980
Sept. 3: Vocation (A painter, frustrated at the perceived failure of a show, destroys his own work) – 1,612
Aug. 26: Perspective (A weird, existentialist experiment in which a guy who’d fantasized about the cowboy life dies from being shot in the gut) – 1,528
Oct. 21: The Horsefly (A treeplanter eats a horsefly to amuse a young boy, and finds meaning in suffering) –
Apr. 15: Loyalty (Some hutterite boys learn a lesson about loyalty, grace and forgiveness while shoveling pig manure as punishment) – 3,146
Apr. 29: Exist (In an existentialist, story-within-a-story experiment, a young man gradually realizes that he is a figment of this author’s imagination) – 2,903
Oct. 28: Butterball (A streetwise, train-hopping kid returns to his grandparents' house looking for a leg up and instead finds a dog skeleton and a cold reception) – 2,351
Apr. 8: Extranjero (A kid gets hit with a stone while freeing fish from a net in Peru) – 1,382
Nov. 25: Parabolic (The Good Samaritan on the beach dies saving a Mexican) – 2,320
Nov. 10: Sanctuary (A lapsed church attendee walks out of a megachurch for good, after surviving a choking incident) – 1,784
Nov. 4: Crossing the Border (A guy discovers his own racism when he goes to Mexico and gets a root canal on the wrong tooth.) – 1,858
Dec. 2: Two-Winter’s Fall (A story of elves, in which a boy and a girl shoot the same bird in a time of hunger) – 3,456
Dec. 9: Into that Good Night (A high school teacher sacrifices himself to save a student from a shooting) – 2589
Dec. 16: It Has No Future but Itself (A treeplanter finds hope, while weathering a storm of affliction, through an unexpected vision on a stormy day) – 2,616
Dec. 30: Sliced in Two (A young boy deals with the agony of discovering that the girl he loved is no longer the person she once was) – 1049
Jan. 6: The Epiphany (A boy, bored out of his mind in church, gets a welcome reprieve in the form of a whistler, a bat, and an angry bible-swing) – 2,350
Jan. 14: Conventional (A politician, two dogs, and a stage manager from the sky collide in this story of angry rhetoric and the downfall of western society) – 3,300
Mar. 18: Supernova (An actor is accidentally put in a coma by an extra, who goes to jail for a crime he didn’t really commit) – 3,070

...and these are the stories I'm already planning on cutting.

1. Apr. 1: Fear Itself (A game designer discovers enlightenment after living through a weird alien apocalypse) – 2,822
2. Feb. 18: Obey (A hyper kid is drugged into submission) – 605
3. Jul. 1: Curious George Gets Angry (A satirization of the inaccuracies in children’s literature, based on the characters in the Curious George books) – 729
4. Jun. 3: Pongo (A teenage boy proves himself to his father on a rafting trip in the Amazon) – 6,965
5. May 20: Supernova, chapter 2 (Told from the film star’s perspective as she is waking from her coma) – 1,142
6. May 14: Hoppit: or Just There, Mostly (A mashup of children’s stories, about a rabbit whose wisdom saves his life, but not his brothers’) – 2,892
7. May 6: Cheesecake (Short film script) – 1,519
8. Oct. 14: Shiggles McGee the Biting Tree (A man buys a biting tree to rid himself of squirrels and gets more than he bargained for) – 2,336
9. Aug. 19: Big Fish (A journalist, investigating a shark found in the woods in Maine, uncovers a disturbing story) – 2,524
10. Nov. 18: Open Seating (A server in a restaurant quits because of racist patrons) – 2128

For now, what I'm looking for is fresh eyes in the selection process. Is there a story I'm cutting that you really liked? One I'm thinking of including that you really didn't? If so, please tell me why in the comments. It's hard for me to be objective at this point, so if you can help me out, I surely would appreciate it.

Sincerest thanks,

The Management.

not that innocent

2012-01-14T17:35:00.000-08:00

In the 2011 film "Margin Call," Paul Bettany plays the character of Will Emerson: a conflicted, ruthless, nearly-suicidal stock trader who participates in the first big sell-off that sparked the current global economic meltdown. In a conversation with a younger trader, who's just expressed concern over what they're about to do, Bettany delivers a monologue that I figure has to be just about the most concise, damning assessment of the mindset of the wealthy (that is to say, us) that I've heard in a long while. It's so good, that despite the sometimes blue language, I'm gonna reprint it right here.

WILL EMERSON "Look, Ifyou want to do this with your life, and do it well,you need to believe that you are necessary. And you are. If people want to livelike this--with their big cars and these houses that they haven’t even paidfor--then you are necessary. The only reason they can continue to live likekings is because we’ve got our fingers on the scale in THEIR favor. And if Iwere to take my finger off... Then the whole world gets really f-----g fair,really f-----g quickly. And no one wants that, they say they do...but theydon’t. They want what we’re giving them, but they also want to play innocentand pretend they have no idea how we get it. And that’s more hypocrisy than Ican swallow. So f--- them."

The best storytelling does not loudly proclaim that something's evil. It gets inside the evil and lets you feel the compelling allure of its twisted logic so that you'll know - KNOW - that there but for the grace of God go you. It's a solid movie. Watch it.

Conventional

2012-01-14T15:17:00.000-08:00

The little stray's black, wet nose poked out from under a loose pile of debris, and he sniffed tentatively at the crispening air of early evening. Even beneath the loose, discarded wrappers and bits of tattered cardboard, his keen little triangle ears had picked up a new, very human sound. And although he was torn between his hunger, and the desire to sleep for the night in the relative safety of this pile, the gnawing hunger was stronger and so he emerged, trembling, and took another unobstructed, cautious pull of the darkening air. No food there, yet, but that was no sure sign. The presence of people meant stones and fear and danger, but it also nearly always meant food. He decided to take a chance, and began to trot toward the sound; pausing regularly to sniff, and listen.

Far ahead - across a ravaged landscaped pocked with craters and littered with the ruins of a bygone world where every remaining vertical surface was plastered with layer upon layer of fading and torn posters advertising a succession of gesticulating messiah's - lay a massive big top, lit up on all sides by an array of multicolored lights that played quickly back and forth across the broad canvas stripes, so as not to reveal too clearly the frayed edges and gaping holes of its surface.

Several of the side-flaps were rolled up and tied, at the rim of the roof, to reveal a vast, open area. And inside, hundreds of men were milling about, decked out in an array of colors and sequins and bangles so variegated as to resemble the plumage of the world's mostly extinct, forgotten birds of paradise; an effect diminished by a nearly universal tarnish and tatter, bearing witness to the general decay of the entire assembly.

No such decay was evident in the finery of the man ten feet above them, whose two-toned suit was shimmering in the brilliant lights and exaggerated opulence of the elevated stage that towered several feet over the heads of the energized throngs. He stood at a plexiglass podium, so they could see the way the maroon and crimson stripes running from boot-cuffs to collar reflected the thousand pinpoints of light from on high as he stepped from one side to another, addressing each direction in turn with great animation. The brass band had just climbed off, and it was his role, as a barker of sorts, to whip the crowd even further into an anticipatory frenzy before the arrival of his employer, the evening's main event. On the barker's head was perched a top hat of the brightest crimson - several shades lighter, even, than the suit.

It was so tall that David - the man in the scaffolded metal rafters high above - mused to himself that he looked like a sort of a rooster, crowing to an expectant brood of hens.

"You've seen his writing in the sky," the red-hat man was saying, "You've heard his words through the town wireless at listening-hour! And now, the moment you've all been waiting for... the man who needs NO introduction.... Mister! RONNICK! MITTANORUMMMM!"

David rolled his eyes and grabbed the handle to train the main spotlight on the trapdoor, out of which the Candidate would rise with long-since perfected choreography to fanfare and confetti.

David was a slim man in simple, all-black clothing. He yearned for the days of yesteryear - for a time when, he believed, there were still some who valued beauty over spectacle... truth over spin. David had painstakingly gathered a collection of ancient vinyl records, and each night, after the horrible necessity of this job, he would unwind by hooking an old car battery to the record player he kept in a room he'd built in the shell of a long-abandoned department store, near what once had been the makeup counter. Despite his best efforts at insulation some sound did leak out; but the wide corridors formed by the maze of skeletal shelves helped him feel protected - the vast, unhospitable emptiness of the place providing a psychological barrier to the things that lurked endlessly in the night.

It wasn't much of an existence, he thought, with his participation in this farce being punctuated only by his Beethoven and what rare companionship he could imagine in the fleeting glancing connective eye-contact made with men who, like him, moved swiftly and furtively in the shadows of this broken landscape. It wasn't much, but it was life.

Every morning, before the revelatory light of day, David would slip through a slit in the canvas at the back of the cavernous big top, and shimmy up the makeshift, knotted rope he'd tucked in behind a pole, to scale the aging aluminum bracketing to his nest at the top, where with light from a small hole in the canvas over his head, he would read again one of the few good books he'd managed to preserve during the Great Burning and wait to see if there would be another convention today - another profitician come to make the world a better place through bright words, whitewash, and spit-shine.

He sighed, quietly - grateful again for the old man who'd taught him to operate and repair the failing system, and to rig it with booby traps that so far had mostly foiled the regular attempts at thievery. The men in the know - the somber men behind the shiny suits and bright lights - tolerated him, as men have always tolerated the bugaboos for which they have a use. And so he nestled like a bird, or an insect, and from his tenuous spot punched the button that activated the motor that whirred and clanked to reveal Mr. Ronnick Mittanorum, this latest of Messiahs.

This time, though, he fell silent and attentive with the masses of men below, because on the groaning wood panel next to Mittanorum, showered in confetti, was a dog. And not just a dog, but a large, perfectly-white male Alsatian - perhaps an albino. It was sleek and toothy and plump, and panted amicably, completely unaware of the disquieting effect of its very existence in a world so protein-starved as this. Mittanorum, however, knew perfectly well the effect of his pet, and milked it to the utmost by completely ignoring the dog - a masterstroke.

Just outside the huge tent, the mangy little stray had begun to flinch from trash heap to rubble pile, unsure of how to proceed. He had not yet caught the scent of the Alsatian, which was even then drifting down off the stage and hugging the ground between the legs of the carnivalesque gentlemen to waft like a spear-shaft of memory, to drag the emaciated mongrel back to a time, long before, when he was not yet quite so very, very alone. For now, though, he smelled only the whelming musk of thousands of perspiring men and the hint - despite the bass-undercurrent of rumbling coming from their collective digestive tracts - of food.

Ronnick Mittanorum stepped confidently forward in the glare of the spotlight and with a wide, beaming smile brushed a little of the confetti off his shoulders. He ran a hand, spread-fingered, through his thick, dark hair.

"Thank you, HOSEAVILLE!" he said at last, the timbre of his voice echoing out across the crowded space. "How y'all doin' tonight?" The calculated southernism was belied by his bland, mid-western accent, but it did not matter. His voice was clear and the Alsatian's presence had ratcheted up the tension, and given a focal point to their general enthusiasm. They were here for the show, after all, and it is likely he could have said anything and still receive the murmured approval spreading out like a wave toward the back of the big top.

He basked in it - just long enough to seem appreciative, but not so long that they might begin to resent him for it. Then, leaning forward into the podium, Mittanorum began to speak earnestly, in the companionable tones of a man who knew that a good start was just that - a start - and that emotional rapport must be built one undulation at a time - coaxed, over the course of an evening, to the proper, voting pitch.

David had heard of this one, of course, on the posters that presaged his arrival, but there had been something different - he now remembered - in the sort of heavy buzz that had been building around Hoseaville over the past several weeks. He wondered if it was the dog, but decided there must be more to it and so took a risk, leaving his perch to skitter down the metal framework so as to be right over the Candidate and his dog. Usually, when he did this, there would be some sort of a reward: a bald spot, perhaps, or a false back to the suit, revealing the cheaper fabric to which the impeccable front had been sewn. In this case, however, the presentation was flawless. This was a man to be watched, and so David hunkered down to listen.

"That's great. Just great to hear," the man continued. "Good citizens of Hoseaville," he said, "I know your time is of great value, so I will not waste it."

David harrumphed, perhaps a little too loudly, prompting a nearly imperceptible shift in the shoulders of the man below, who shrugged, recovered, and went on.

"The Republocrats would have you believe that things are as they have to be - that ever since The Event and the War Against Extinction that followed, the combined political will that arose to meet those grave challenges was enough... that they have done ENOUGH to heal the ravages of this our broken land."

Heads began to nod.

"Be PATIENT, they say" he continued. "Be patient, because a great work requires great patience... and great sacrifice. I don't need to tell you this, my friends. You've heard it over the wireless - the endless promises of a change that never comes. But I am here to tell you, good citizens of Hoseaville, that it IS NOT ENOUGH!"

With this, he hit the plexiglass podium with the flat of his right hand, simultaneously stamping his right foot down hard for added effect on the surface of the stage. A scattered cheer smattered its way around the assembled throng, as the excitement began to build.

Outside, the little mutt at last received his whiff of canine heaven, which drove him to deleriums in a way the smell of food could never have done. Against his better instincts, he edged through one of the open flaps and began to nervously thread his way through the maze of legs, over the uneven, stony ground toward the delectable smell of the other dog. He need not have worried, for every eye was focused - locked, really - on the stage, the speaker... the Alsatian.

"They want you to believe that in those troubled times they saw with a clarity no one else had to a threat that had not yet been perceived." Mittanorum's voice rose in pitch and tone and he began to shift his weight and gaze from side to side, so that each man in the place felt as though the Candidate was speaking directly to him. He paused, at last bending slightly to scratch the dog mildly on the head, causing a small cascade of colored confetti to snowflake toward the floor. A collective sigh filled the room as each man remembered a time when he believed that he, too, had been driven by something other than his hunger, or his fear.

"And they were right," the Candidate said, just barely loud enough that the furthest back would hear. "They were right to see that men had grown weak, that it was our WEAKNESS that allowed The Threat to rise and very nearly exterminate us. That it was our WEAKNESS that made us vulnerable to the sort of attack that in stronger times would not have cost us nearly so much. They were RIGHT to see that men had been emasculated by the machinations of the Femme-Nazis, and they were RIGHT to see that the real problem - the REAL threat that nearly wiped our race from the face of the planet was not our technology, or our greed, or our "global warming..."

At this a low chuckle rolled around the big-top. Mittanorum paused to chuckle with them and then continued, dropping his voice for a moment and leaning with casual solidarity against the podium, "...although those are all threats that, if they were real, would of course concern the good citizens of Hoseaville. They were NOT, of course!"

His voice again rose, the sing-song cadences of his speech lifting the crowd, like music, to the heights towards which the Candidate was beginning to strain.

"No, the REAL threat that emasculated the race of men and nearly cost us our wives, our children, our VERY EXISTENCE was... you KNOW what I'm talking about! Say it with me! That's right..."

and with him, in rapture, they yelled:

"THE GAY HOMOSEXUALS!"

The big top erupted. Cheers, hoots and angry catcalls nearly shook the rafters, and up above, David kicked out involuntarily and smacked his foot squarely against one of the stage lights, which clattered so loudly that if not for the roar of the crowd, he would easily have been discovered. As it was, only the Candidate himself had noticed, and with great poise had corralled his response to a mere raised eyebrow before continuing, riding the angry frenzy to his vote-ensuring climax.

"They saw the threat, my friends, YES. But NO, they did NOT DO ENOUGH!"

He was shouting, now, his face flushed and sweat beginning to fly in shining globlets off his sculpted hair like a mad conductor from times-long-gone, when orchestras were more than just a fading dream.

"Because there are still gay homosexuals among us, and these baby-rapers are still working to undermine our very masculinity, setting us on a straight path right back to the brink of destruction!"

He raised his arms, then, subduing the crowd.

"My name... is Mr. Ronnick Mittanorum," he said, when they had begun to settle, "And I am leading the New Demmicans on a new Campaign for Purity because I know that YOU, the good citizens of Hoseaville, have been lied to for long enough. You have suffered long enough, scrabbling amidst the wreckage of this once-great nation for a pittance, when it is your right - your GOD-GIVEN right - to live not in poverty, but in abundance!"

He scratched the Alsatian's head again, to rigorous head-nodding and near-worshipful adulation.

"You deserve more than this, " he continued, "you were MADE for more than this, and with the Campaign for Purity you will get it, because WE WILL DO ENOUGH!"

By this point, the scrawny mutt had made his way to the very front of the crowd, which was by then pressed directly against the stage. He was desperate, now, in his drive toward that gorgeous canine scent, and so he wove his way between the stage and wall of legs toward the very back of the big-top. As Mittanorum shouted out eruptions in the name of "Gaw-ud" and "The Good Lorrd!" the stray managed to slip around the back corner and scrape between the canvas and wood in a crack too narrow for any man to pass. At the back he reached a narrow wooden ladder, and was just able, in his desperation, to actually scramble up the rungs to the top and scratch his way onto the stage, where the Alsatian at last scented him and swung his great head around in muted, dumb curiosity.

"When I am elected your leader, the New Campaign for Purity will ensure that every last GOD-D***ED one of them is, is, is..."

Mittanorum stopped, for though he was a man of great focus and poise, he was also a man with a certain inexplicable devotion to that dog, which for the first time in he-could-not-remember-when had left his side and was circling, curiously, around the mange-ridden mutt who had intruded, like some fiendish ghoul, upon his moment of triumph.

The little dog was cautious, as always, but so overwhelmed with the pure JOY of contact that he reached out a darting little tongue and began to lick the most delectable-smelling spot he could find on his new canine friend.

"Speak of the DE-VILLE!" the Candidate yelled, pointing in shock and dismay at behavior grown unrecognizably rare, in a world where most dogs had long since been consumed. With this expostulation, he ran-slash-dove to separate the two, and although he was awkward and somewhat ungainly in his movements, the swelling, appreciative roar from the crowd behind him made him think - deep-down in his lizard-profitician's brain - that this might be the very sort of legend-making event that could propel him to the position he so coveted. If they wanted blood, he thought, then blood they would have.

Fate and God often get blamed for the way they make mince-meat of men's good intentions. But it is worth noting that they sometimes do the same to their evil desires as well. Fifteen feet above Mittanorum, David flinched at the violence hurtling toward the little dog, and grabbed tightly onto the metal bars by his head. This one small action knocked loose a bracket from the stage light he had previously kicked, and the flimsy piece of metal fell, striking the little dog on the back of the head and sending it yelping. This brought Mittanorum up short as David, who had jumped forward in an attempt to stop the metal from falling, succeeded only in knocking loose the one, final bolt that was still holding the heavy light; which, for reasons he would never have the opportunity to comprehend, was for some reason not secured by its safety cable and therefore fell - all thirty-two pounds of it - to strike the Alsatian in the back of the head, killing him instantly in a spray of crimson.

Mittanorum roared at this, but also did not have the chance to think about the machinations of destiny, because David's failed attempt had caused him to slip and fall, squarely, on top of the Candidate, which knocked Mittanorum sideways and off the stage, where the crowd parted and he landed, with a sickening crack, on his head.

Silence, hot and bloody, fell over the entire big top. The yelping of the little dog faded completely as it ran off into the night. David moved his legs, then arms, and then pushed himself painfully to his feet at the edge of the stage to stand there, tottering and disoriented, in the sudden glare of the spotlight.

The circus of colors below him swirled, kaleidoscoped, and then gradually coalesced into a seething mass of men who, until that moment, had known him only as a figure hidden in the shadows. Sure, they'd seen him slinking through the streets and sure, they suspected the kind of man he must of course have been, but they had worries of their own, and until this moment had been content to ignore the vague sensation of not-rightness creeping at the edges of their collective consciousness.

David blinked, twice, and raised a hand delicately, palm outward, to shield his now-bleary eyes from the light. It was this gesture, this moment of childlike weakness, that led a man at the front to bend, swiftly, and pick up a rock. David saw this, and knew it for what it was, but somehow still managed to say the very last thing he should have said... the very last thing of all.

"Please."

- - -

Author's note: This post is the forty-sixth short story in my year of short stories. Click the label below to read some previous ones, and feel free to threaten to come to my house and break my kneecaps if I don't finish all fifty-two.

crowd-sourcing my laziness

2012-01-13T13:53:00.000-08:00

It's amazing that no matter how much work I have that I have to get finished, I still find seconds, minutes, and chunks of minutes to waste. I'm wondering if wasting time (or rather, spending it unproductively) is a basic human need, like air - or hugs.

Take, for example, the fifty seconds I just spent on those last two sentences. I could have spent that time working on finishing the rough draft of this week's Fiction Friday offering, but I didn't and I won't, because I've concluded that I'm not going to get it done and polished in time to post tonight, anyways.

My son decided to fall asleep on the couch, though, so I've decided to use this bit of parental respite to ask if there is anyone in the Charlotte, North Carolina area who'd like to give me a hand on my next short film project.

Basically, I need all local eyes and ears open for some location scouting. I am looking for a restaurant - a place that's classy and elegant, but not completely upper crust. The sort of place where you could have jazz playing lightly in the background, but an actual jazz trio in suits would seem a little awkward. It has to have a bar in it, preferably not right out in the middle. Decor should be simple, with clean, elegant lines and a warm color range, if possible.

Here's the tough part: it has to be rentable for cheap (or free) for a good chunk of time on three consecutive days, sometime after mid-April, but not too much after. The ideal place would probably be some restaurant that was just about to open, or just about to close, so we could do it without disrupting too much business.

Why would anyone let us do that do their business without charging us a kidney, an arm, and a leg? Well, because movies (even short ones) are awesome, and need your support. Plus, this project is seriously legit. It's gonna play in major festivals, and it's gonna make whatever restaurant we use look so good, they'll be booking celebrity chefs just to fold the napkins.

So, whaddaya say? Do you (or someone who owes you a favor because you had a guy whacked for them) know of, or own, such a place?

I mean, I suppose I could go out of my way and actually search the internet myself. But c'mon. I'm over here. Wasting time.

God: More Secrets Revealed

2012-01-11T19:04:00.000-08:00

My son just turned four. Naturally, we've started to have the occasional discussion about the Almighty, so I thought I'd share with you an insight the kid shared with me in the car this evening.

I have to warn you, though: the kid's a bit of a serious chap, and can take you so far down the rabbit hole, you'll be scratching your hindquarters and begging for a carrot.

THE KID: I'm mad.
ME: What are you mad about?
THE KID: I don't remember.

A pause.

THE KID: I'm staying mad forever.
ME: How very God-like of you.
THE KID: Are you telling on God?!? That's not fair!
ME: It's not fair?
THE KID: Don't say that.
ME: Why not?
THE KID: Only kids can say that. Not humans.

Now, you're probably way ahead of me and don't need any kind of explanation, but I like to think with my fingers, so here's what I'm guessing the kid was saying.

I, his father, introduced God into the conversation by making a wry comment on one of the implications of the concept of an unchanging God that is posited by the Judeo-Christian worldview. To wit, that an unchanging God who gets angry sometimes must therefore always be angry.

Now, it's a complex and confusing point, about which theologians and philosophers have written reams of dense, nearly impenetrable prose; but what I want you to see here is how quickly and cuttingly the kid reminded me that it is foolish for a man to propose to speak for God at all. "Are you telling on God?" he asked, "That's not fair!"

He didn't stop there, though. My son - that wisest confounder of the the wise - went on to subtly suggest (I think - I'm a human, so I'm a little slow) that it is only children who have the spiritual grace, humility, and uncluttered reason to have the right to say anything about God's nature - to actually talk meaningfully about God at all. My son, I'm beginning think, would probably be aligned somewhat to a Kierkegaardian mode of thought... if that weren't such a human thing to do.

I never did find out what he was mad about, though. Probably the Republican primaries.

fotoshop

2012-01-10T03:36:00.000-08:00

I love it when cool, creative people I hung out with in college ten years ago make cool, creative things and then put them on the internets, so I can link to them and make myself seem cooler and more creative, on account of the company I keep (kept). So without further ado, here's a just-for-fun video from my old cronies, Jesse and Lyn Rosten, a beautiful and altitudinously-diverse couple of cool, creative people out in Redding, Californica.

forktastic news!

2012-01-05T17:49:00.000-08:00

Well, paint me red and shove a crowbar up my nose - the short film I wrote, FORK, has been accepted into the Charlotte Film Festival! This is its first acceptance and a portent, we hope, of things to come.

Given that FORK is the first short film I ever wrote, I'm pleased as pickles to see it not only get produced, but also to be selected by the Queen (city) herself for viewing.

And the peasants rejoiced!

Why Charlie Kaufman Might Hate You

2012-01-04T08:54:00.000-08:00

Charlie Kaufman, to the uninitiated, is the brilliant pen behind a bunch of really weird films about the convoluted mind of Charlie Kaufman. The better known-and-critically-received of these are Being John Malkovitch, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and Adaptation.

I have seen and enjoyed these three movies, so last night I followed a link to a talk Kaufman gave at BAFTA, in which he rambled, creatively and sometimes less-than-coherently, to a bunch of screenwriters about all sorts of writing-related things. One that stuck out to me was his mention of the tendency among artists to grow to hate their audience. It sounds awful, I know, but it's something I've long-noticed among artists of all kinds and (confession time) it's actually a temptation towards which I, myself, sometimes feel a bit of a pull.

Why?

I can't quite figure it out, but here's the best I've got so far...

Why Artists Hate Their Audience: A Theory

A. Art is often an outgrowth of the self's desire to be loved. An artist's motivation for making things is often, at some primal level, an attempt to say to other people: please, please love me.

B. If the artist is honest, works hard, and tells the truth, art patrons will often recognize themselves in the art. They'll respond emotionally, and some of the love they feel for the artist's product will inevitably spill over to the artist.

C. This love is, however, conditional. It requires the artist to make new and interesting things, and quickly becomes bored and withdraws love when the artist does not.

D. The artist feels betrayed by what he or she perceives as mis-directed and conditional love, and begins to resent the audience for not loving unconditionally enough.

E. Although the artist might even be aware of the irrationality of this resentment, the resentment can nonetheless shrivel into bitterness, which eventually shrivels into hatred.

That seems as likely an explanation as any for the tripped-out stuff that goes on in my mind.

As creatively helpful as it can be to wallow down in the mire of my wounded psyche, however, at the end of the day I have to remind myself that I do believe in love and grace, and that to make is to have hope - to live. I'm grateful for that, and for the joys of well-made art... no matter what Charlie Kaufman might think of me for it.

Be like THESE people!

2012-01-03T16:15:00.000-08:00

I've just discovered The Nonconformist Family, read their manifesto, and like their mojo. I decided, therefore, to add them to my blogroll and see what kind of awesome they come up with over the next year. So... heads up!

scare the quit out of them

2012-01-01T18:47:00.000-08:00

Back when I was interviewing young men and women for production tree-planting (one of the most miserable, horrendous, soul-crushingly-wonderful summer jobs on God's green earth), the very first thing I tried to do was to convince them they didn't want the job - that there were a million reasons to run away and never look back. I told them of the horrors of inescapable exposure to rain and hail and sleet and snow; of the deprivations; of heat exhaustion; of over-long days; and of estrangement from friends and slurpees and mid-summer matinees.

I didn't do this because I did not like them and did not wish to work with them - I was interviewing them, after all, because I'd seen their resume and thought they looked promising. Neither did I hate tree-planting. Some of the best times and most valuable lessons of my life came from tree-planting. The job shaped me in ways that nothing else could, and I wouldn't trade my ten summers in planting for anything.

On the contrary - I tried to scare them out of tree-planting because I knew what it would cost them, and I knew there was no way for them to know what it would be like until they were right there in the thick of it. I cared for them, and I did not want them to move forward until I'd done my best to make them understand the price they'd have to pay, and to figure out if they were the sort who'd be willing to pay it... Because if they weren't, they would not grow to love the job, as I had. They would grow to hate it, and their summer could very well end in failure.

I was wondering today what it would be like if premarital counseling was actually conducted with that mindset. I do not think this happens very often. I think, rather, that counselors tend to see their role as being to help these two wondrously autonomous individuals iron out a few rough edges that - let's face it - simply cannot be truly dealt with until you are actually there, in the thick of it.

Perhaps it's a business decision. It seems unlikely in this cultural climate that a counselor known for talking people out of getting married would get too many referrals.

Here's what I do know - while a lot of people quit during their first tree planting season, in six years of leading crew after crew through some of the most horrendous working conditions available to a late-teens Canadian, I never, ever had anyone quit. My advice to would-be counselors, therefore, is this: scare the living quit out of your clients, and don't ever regret it.

an earful

2011-12-29T06:18:00.000-08:00

Now and again I've ranted about how "Christian" music sucks. Well, my old pal Josh Garrels' latest album just got voted "best album of 2011" by Christianity Today, and there's a good music critic over at Image magazine who put Josh's album on his list of Ten 2011 Albums for Christians who Hate Christian Music. I like Josh's music, so I figured I'd offer a qualification.

I think the best way to express my qualification is in the words of Under the Radar, a radio program that just voted Josh's album one of the eleven best of 2011, and bills itself as "a weekly syndicated radio program of the best music from Christians." With those two words, "from Christians" they undo a whole lot of dualist nonsense bound up in the words "Christian music."

While I'd probably still take issue with them in that I don't feel that where an artist comes from is as important as where he or she goes, I think it's cool they're picking their in-house favorites based on artistry, rather than just whether or not an artist toes the party line. "Christian" music (as as a separate music industry) still sucks tank; but there are musicians who refer to themselves as Christians and nonetheless make music that sucketh not.

In addition to being fans of Josh, the Under the Radar people also like "The Civil Wars" and "Over the Rhine." They're awesome too, so you have my permission to go check them out. And while I'm at it, you also have my permission to check out the music of my exceptionally hairy and beautiful friend Christopher John, who is more awesome than ten opossums.

not quite all there

2011-12-28T13:37:00.000-08:00

I know I'm a writer when I walk up to the gorgeous blonde TSA agent and my very first thought is, "I'm gonna to have to remember to write that you know you're in Los Angeles when even the TSA agents look like movie stars."

I don't say it out loud, of course. I'm a writer, after all, not an actor.

So what if she's flashing a million-dollar smile at me and my ridiculously cute son? So what if it's midnight and the place is deserted and there's no rush; and so what if I've got nothing to lose and who-knows-what to gain with a little flirtatious repartee? That's not the point. The point is: I'm a writer. A writer's life is not for living, it's for collecting.

Sometimes I wonder if I've ever actually been anywhere. Not in the comparative sense, like, "between the two of them, my brother and sister have traveled to about half the countries on the planet (true story); but I've never been anywhere." Rather, more like I've never actually been any place where I've actually been, because even though I've been more places and seen more things than your average yak-herder or amazonian villager, I really have spent most of those traveling-times somewhere else completely -- the inside of my head.

I'm reminded of the way Sir Ken Robinson describes University professors, whom he says "look upon their body as a form of transport for their heads." It's not just professors who live like this, though, it's writers and perhaps even all other artists, as well. Maybe that's why so many writers end up miserable and alone (and maybe alcoholic, for good measure). Maybe by the time they've written well enough that women start to chase them down, they've had so little practice at actually living in their bodies where they are that they can never quite get the hang of relating to a real, live, human woman.

We're an odd lot, us writers and creatives, and pretty much all introverts. As Jonathan Rauch said in his brilliant Atlantic Monthly piece, "Caring for Your Introvert," being an introvert isn't about being shy. "Shy people are anxious or frightened or self-excoriating in social settings; introverts generally are not," Rauch says, "Introverts are also not misanthropic, though some of us do go along with Sartre as far as to say 'Hell is other people at breakfast.' Rather, introverts are people who find other people tiring." People -- and, I would argue, life in general. So we retreat into our heads, fabricating worlds where we don't have to struggle through the wearying performance that is social engagement. It's unsurprising that Rauch goes on to say that many, many introverts are very successful actors.

Maybe that's why I find Christmas to be such a tiring, depressing time of year. Because then, of all times, it seems as though we are supposed to be happy - to live with perpetual smiles on our faces as though we are actually there (wherever that might be) instead of off somewhere inside our heads, rewriting whatever it is that just happened.

To an extrovert, I'm sure that what I've just described seems incomprehensibly horrendous... and sometimes it is. But I'd be willing to bet a large collection of Iranian dance music that no authentic extrovert ever made much art worth experiencing, because making art well requires a person to be very comfortable within his or her own head, for very, very long periods of time. It is only there, in fact -- in the making-space of my own mind -- that I ever actually feel truly and completely present.

I used to think that everybody was the same; that extroverts were just too cowardly to stop and listen to their own inner monologue. Now -- although I still don't believe there are ever anything but the most hazy of lines between types of people -- I'm willing to let them be different. I'm willing to allow them to have their own, more holistic (if, to me, less interesting) reality. I have come to believe that I'm wired the way I am for a reason: so that I'll be better at making stuff that other people can't; so that I can express the inexpressible and help provide stories that bring joy and help make sense of this madhouse we call life.

And even though it sucks that I don't get to develop a poetic and tortured long-distance relationship with the lovely lady with the badge and pen who looked at my ID and marked my ticket two days ago, I can still imagine that she used that pen after I left to write down my name, google-search it, find this blog, and start following.

Who knows, one day maybe I'll write that into a story, and make it true.

- - -

Author's note: while I did, in fact, briefly entertain the hope that said TSA agent would write down my name and stalk me on the internets (yes, I am that pathetic), this post was still meant to be funny. So please, don't forward my name and picture to all the single women you know. I've got a girlfriend. Her name is Mya Writing, and she and I are pretty serious right now.

Christmas in California with the Boy!

2011-12-27T13:22:00.000-08:00

me n' annie

2011-12-23T20:47:00.000-08:00

You can now watch a movie I'm in for free on Hulu... but please don't, cuz it's really bad.
Still, if you're curious (and are in the States - cuz as commenters have pointed out, Hulu only works in 'Merica), it's called "Passengers" and I'm recognizable at 3:35, schmoozin' away in my suit as a "background atmospheric performer": http://www.hulu.com/watch/311719/passengers

How to Fix the Church in One, Slightly-Modified Step

2011-12-22T15:40:00.000-08:00

I guess we can agree that Big isn't quite as Beautiful as some of us might once have thought. To come to this point, we don't even have to account for our own ancestors who worked in the grinding, de-humanizing conditions of the early Industrial Revolution to make all this current Bigness possible, nor forget as well the millions and perhaps billions of people to whom we've exported those still-just-as-nasty jobs in order to sit around congratulating ourselves on our shiny new Information Economy -- the new millenium is far too rife with examples of the failure of our longtime Bigness Mentality for us to do anything but groan (along with the rest of Creation) at the evils our clumsy, ever-biggifying hands have wrought.

On the other hand, we can't go back. Not, I don't think, because it is impossible to exchange insanity for health; but rather because the earth and all that live on it -- including ourselves -- have been changed by what we have done. We have gained so much beauty, wonder, knowledge, mystery and perhaps even Truth; but we have lost so much as well. We are no longer the naive children that once we were; so if honesty is to be preserved, any positive forward motion must be made in awareness of steps already taken. Ignore this, and we run the risk of creating yet another Fascist agenda of the sort that inevitably results in public beheadings, Kafkaesque bureaucracy, and the horrors of daytime television.

When problems are this big, they become abstractions too hazy for my pea-brain to comprehend, so for the purpose of today's musing on the fixification of the planet, I'm going to focus on one institution that has always become (quite publicly) corrupted and defiled by the biggification process -- the church -- and explore how one might go about dismantling the megalomaniacal monstrosity that is the North American Protestant Evangelical (NAPE) church in a way that frees it from some of the nasty, inevitable side effects of biggification.

Let today's post be considered a modification of the process of church-fixing outlined in my previous post, "How to Fix the Church in One Easy, Koolaid-Free Step," in which I whined and wailed about all the obvious stupidity to be found in NAPE-town, while at the same time attempting to offer a radical but straight-forward step toward un-stupidification: To wit -- to abandon all the buildings, giving them back to the surrounding communities and returning to the house-church model that for a very short time meant the church was not in bed with the powers-that-were.

While I still think this is a pretty classy way of de-biggifying (and something I wouldn't mind seeing the government facilitate by removing tax-exempt status from all churches in America), I have been reading Malcolm Gladwell's book "The Tipping Point" over the past few days, and it's got me thinking that this awesome solution of mine might be in need of modification.

His fifth chapter, in particular, talks about the magic number of 150, which shows up again and again as the tipping point at which any organization is no longer able to maintain its group ethos on the basis of interpersonal relationships and must therefore resort to systems of power and control to attempt to maintain the original intent of the group. Gladwell refers to psychological research that shows that order and community can be maintained on the basis of social relationships without the imposition of power-structures only when the group is smaller than 150. As evidence, he cites real-life examples from business, anthropology, and even the Hutterites (think Amish, but with tractors), who for centuries have followed a policy of splitting off into a new colony every time they reach that magic number of 150.

When I suggested the abandonment of church buildings, it was because I had no idea where or how to draw a line for when real community becomes impossible. I knew that there weren't really all that many houses out there with the capacity to hold enough people to cross that line, though, so I suggested the house church as an alternative.

Gladwell's book, with its offer of a precise number that is backed by research, has made me think again; because the fact is that there is strength in numbers. Sometimes it takes a bit of a larger group to have the ability to help the few with greater needs.

Now, I am aware that most megalomonstrous churches are aware of the disconnective defect brought about by their massive size, and attempt to counter that by creating something they call "Small Groups." But it is my impression that these attempts are not so much an admission of the failure of their format, as they are an attempt to create a better marketing campaign for whatever the church-brand is that they happen to be selling. These SGs exist under the direct control of the master-hub, which sets the tone, tenor, and direction of them in order to ensure that no one ever forgets that they are not actually "churches," but just sort of supplemental tendrils growing directly from the central tumor.

Church shouldn't be about maintaining power structures, though. It should be about community. So my modified church-fix is to give away the nasty buildings, start with house churches, and let them grow, organically, to gatherings of no more than 150 people.

I am aware that the scenario I am describing here is not really likely to happen, for a lot of reasons. Like, say, the fact that most NAPE churches are centered around two things: a charismatic leader and crappy, rip-off pop music - both of which can be hard to reproduce, instantly, in a second church. There is also the fact that power corrupts people and turns them into power-lusting-dirtbags. Make no mistake: there are no magic fixes for a culture addicted to being stupid.

Smallness doesn't immediately fix the problems of bigness, but bigness has the unfortunate distinction of exponential destructive potential. I'm not proposing to fix a broken mindset all at once. I'm just trying to envision a scenario that would rob a broken system of much of its power to do damage, believing (perhaps overly-optimistically) that in time, people would rise to the occasion and stop being quite so endlessly awful to each other.

I chose to apply this concept to the NAPE church because it is something I am familiar with, and have spent my life studying. But it could just as easily be a way to fix other social constructions where bigness inevitably precipitates a failure to connect.

I know it's what I want, as I sit week after week in the isolation of my little shed in the woods. I'm an introvert, sure, but even introverts need the connection of community. So for the time being, I'm gonna keep dreamin' small.

- - -

*NOTE: While I had planned to write a Fiction Friday story whilst on vacation out here in Californica, I am apparently more a creature of routine than I had thought - which is to say that I can't seem to find the headspace for it in all the runnings hither and yon of the Holiday Season. For me, stories take silence and calm to gestate. So, my apologies, and I'll be sure to get back to it for next week.

and in the darkness bind them

2011-12-19T16:44:00.000-08:00

I spent a couple hours last night putting the final touches on the script for my next film project with Austin the Director. It was already decent, I think - the characters were interesting and likable enough - but it wasn't really about anything, so we spent a while talking through what it was I thought the piece was trying to say... which is an Artist's Gobbledygook way of saying that Austin and I argued back and forth about the nature of the universe as our script spiraled ever-downward into cynicism and despair.

In the end, we decided that the point of the story was that romantic relationships are all just complex negotiations of power. It made sense for the story and seemed to fit with both our experiences, but at one point I had to stop Austin and say, "Look, dude, you are remembering that we're not talking here about what people are capable of... just how they generally conduct themselves, right? There are such things as grace and love, you know."

He laughed; maybe agreeing, but perhaps in gentle mockery of my naivete.

Austin thinks people are motivated primarily by pride. He thinks a woman chooses a man by carefully weighing her perception of his power-status within their mutual social group against her perception of her own relative power-status to determine if the match increase her power. He says that a woman wants a man other women find difficult to snag, in order to increase her standing among her peers - and that men do pretty much the same. Once a man and a woman have negotiated that power struggle and made that "relationship" plunge they enter a new realm of power negotiations, which they enact again and again until break-up or death or divorce do them part.

He's right, you know.

Power (or control, if you prefer) is one of our most favoritest human illusions, and we will go to absurd lengths to capture and hold onto it. People are pathetic and stupid and proud and grasping and weak and unloving and graceless; and there really isn't all that much we won't do for a quick hit of pride.

I think that the reason we do this is that we are afraid. We are afraid to be alone. We are afraid to die. We are afraid that deep, deep down, we're just plain un-lovable. And so we do the opposite of love and try to control our situation and other people, believing that with enough power, we can make others love us.

It doesn't work, but there is a better, seemingly counter-intuitive way. We can sacrifice power. We can lift others up, stripping off layer after layer of illusion until all that's left is people loving people. We peoples can do this, together; but we don't, mostly, so my characters don't. They play power games all day and get nowhere closer to what they really want and need - love.

Stupid, pathetic, imaginary people... it's nice to have someone other than myself around to mock every once in a while.

from the 2011 film, Contagion:

2011-12-18T04:36:00.000-08:00

"Blogging isn't writing -- it's graffiti with punctuation."

Ha-ha-hah... it's funny 'cause it's true.

random photo

2011-12-15T06:30:00.001-08:00

baby-stepping screenwriter

2011-12-13T13:31:00.000-08:00

Reading the work of people who are better than I am tends to have two simultaneous and opposite effects on me. On the one hand, I feel super-charged to go out and scribble me some awesome; on the other, I feel like a useless, talentless turd. I've been reading a lot on *johnaugust.com in the past couple of weeks, and right now I feel like an awesome, super-jazzed, inspired piece of poopy.

Fortunately for me, one of the recurring themes on August's website is that everybody who writes feels this way a lot of the time, and success comes to those who can focus on the awesomeness long enough to work through the fear. So when August invents a few lines of dialogue to answer a reader's question and they're better and funnier than anything I've ever written, ever, I just shrug my shoulders and remember that not only did he probably steal it from somebody else, I've also got something he'll never have... ME.

I've been places and seen things he'll never see, and I've got networks of neurons in my brain he can only dream about. That, coupled with the fact that I have written and read like a motherfool for the past few years, means that I am capable of writing films he couldn't imagine. But I've got a feeling - from the way he's written about three jillion posts giving all sorts of encouraging, insider tips - that John August would be pleased to hear it.

---

*For the uninitiated, John August is the writer behind Charlie's Angels, Big Fish, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Corpse Bride, and a bunch of other stuff.

The Tyranny of the Perfect

2011-12-12T12:57:00.000-08:00

I'm gonna go ahead and let you off the hook by telling you right up front that you're gonna fail. It doesn't matter what, exactly, you're trying to do... you are going to crash and burn.

I suppose this is the place where you expect me to give you some sort of phoenix metaphor about how "from the ashes of disaster grow the roses of success;" but I'm not, because I can't promise you'll recover from your failure - no one can. All I can guarantee is failure.

There is a flip side to it, sure - Faith, Hope, Love, And Cetera - but I want to focus on the failure for a moment because the truth of it is that anything good that ever happens in your life happens within the context of good old-fashioned suck; and anyone who paints you a hazy picture of some alternate life of cotton-candy cottages where nothing bad ever happens - and then has the audacity to call that reality - well, that person is a dirty shill. Or, to put it in the words of everybody's favorite pirate, Westley, "Life is pain, Highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something."

Sure, we're all attracted to the idea of living in a world where things go exactly right for us, every time - but for this life, the one we live in right now, we're just going to have to accept that perfection ain't doable and move on. You are going to fail - probably even badly - from time to time. But that's okay, because you're in good company - like, say, everybody.

This is, I think, especially important when it gets down to morals, or virtue, or whatever you want to call it when you try to be good all the time. I'm here to tell you that it can't be done. Pretending that it can will only pile up guilt and shame and fear, and you weren't made for those things. You were made for love, and hope, and self-control, and power. Not the illusion of self-control and power that comes from suppressing the free will of others, but the kind that frees you to really, really LIVE, with love.

By all means, please try to live a moral life. Do it. The world can be a pretty cruel place, and it's usually the immoral decisions of people just like you that make it so. But really, you need to start chilling out and giving yourself a bit of a break.

The next time someone tries in any way to sell you on moral perfection, acknowledge it as a fantasy. Understand that they are trying to manipulate you for their own nasty purposes, or perhaps just because they've bought into it themselves and are too bound up in fear to recognize it as a lie - I don't know. But I do know that one of the greatest moral choices you can make in life is to recognize that perfection is an impossibly cruel taskmaster, because you will never get there. Your failure's a foregone conclusion, so what matters most is if you're willing to acknowledge that and move on - to pick up the pieces of your good intentions and stumble forward with the faith and hope that there is something bigger than your ability to be perfect. That there is LOVE: awesome, perfect, personal love.

Jump into it. Share it around. You'll be surprised at how pleasant things can get when everybody isn't trying so hard to make things pleasant all the time.

potty minds

2011-12-06T16:16:00.001-08:00

A sage Machiguenga living in the jungles of Peru, South America once said that there are two types of people in the world - those who wear hats, and those who don't. But I, aware as I am of the advances of Western civilization, know that there are actually four types of people in the world (well, five, if you count folks who like to make pretentious lists that once and for all divide up the types of people in the world).

The four types of people in the world are:

1. Those who use bidets.

2. Those who wish they could use bidets but don't because they don't have access to them.

3. Those who don't really know about bidets, and therefore aren't particularly bothered that they don't get to use them.

4. those who know about bidets and might or might not have access to them, but through an act of willful stubbornness continue to assert that they actually prefer to put their hand down there to wipe excrement from their [ahem, ahems] with bits of dry paper.

This is, perhaps, the key moral issue of our time. And although I am hesitant to pass any kind of moral judgment on anyone else, ever, I have to say that the final group really gets my goat. These are the sort of people who are so invested in the idea that "the way they've always done it" is the right one, that they will actually turn off their brains and argue against the obvious in order to avoid having their paradigm shifted in a less feceous direction.

Feel free to extrapolate this principle out to whatever other sort of willfully ignorant behavior you've ever encountered.

up-selling your science

2011-12-05T14:19:00.001-08:00

There are times when I know a radio program will annoy me, but I listen to it anyways because I want to be as aware as possible of who the idiots are (not me, of course - never me).

Times like, say, whenever I tune to conservative talk radio; and sometimes late at night, when I'll beat driver's boredom by listening to a little hellfire & brimstone Baptist shouting.

This morning when the NPR dude announced on my drive to work that they'd be talking next about the "Science of Tantrums," my hand moved to the dial. I had a pretty good idea what was coming next, but at the last moment I pulled my hand back, deciding to give them the opportunity to annoy me. They did not disappoint.

The first thing they said was that never before in the history of the world had the "hard sciences" taken such a close look at tantrums, and then they went on to talk about the tantrum-research of a couple of psychologists. Bad opening gambit, my friends: psychology is most definitely not a hard science.

That's not just me talking, though. Even though the distinction between "hard" and "soft" sciences is sometimes fuzzy and there are gradations within the two, psychology sits squarely in the realm of the "soft" social sciences because it has long been broadly-acknowledged that there are far too many variables at play to draw the sort of hard, verifiable conclusions you would get with something like, say, particle physics. I like this distinction, and I like it on an emotional level; because while science is awesome and can endlessly teach us about so many aspects of the human experience, I do not believe that it is in the position to "explain it all away." People are too complex and awesome to be reduced to bits of data.

I may be overreacting. It could have been that the NPR announcer just made a mistake - but I don't think so. I have noticed a broad-spectrum trend in the last while to claim "hard-science" status for psychology, and I think it is the manifestation of a worldview that wishes to completely demystify the human experience - to reduce it to a series of ones and zeros.

In this particular case, the attempt to hard-sciencifize psychology came off as laughable, as the psychologist went on to describe his data-gathering in some seriously affected, up-selling language, saying something to the effect that "we devised an apparatus whereby we affixed a high-quality recording device to a onesie, and the parents were then able to activate it using an on-switch, at which point we blah-blah-blah-oo-oo-ee-ee-can I have a banana?"

I almost think I heard him laughing a little as he said it - as though he were aware of how silly he sounded. There is nothing silly or funny, however, about re-defining words in the name of politics.

And what evidence do I have that this trend is happening, even on good-ole NPR(smirk)? Well none, of course - I'm not a frickin' scientist.

I love this guy...

2011-12-04T16:35:00.001-08:00

Richard Beck on Ghosts:

"When it comes to God, more than anything else, people are wrestling with ghosts.
And by that I mean people are wrestling with their past. Their home. Their church. Their early and formative experiences with God. These ghosts are ever present. They haunt every conversation about God, faith, and the church. Nine times out of 10, if someone expresses a view about the church they are talking about a ghost. Some residual hurt that has never healed. Nine times out of 10, if someone expresses a view about God they are talking about a ghost. A parent. A church. A preacher.

Ghosts haunt it all. So much so it’s hard sometimes to tell when we are talking theologically or therapeutically. The wounds of the past spill forward into any conversation about the life of faith."

A Minor in Art

2011-12-02T04:42:00.001-08:00

Although it violates the concerns of post-representative abstractification, not everyone has enjoyed the privilege of an extensive education in the visual arts, so I have decided to provide something of an explanation for the work below:

This piece was created with an intentional eye to reproducing the illusion of the innocence of youth. In it, the artist [my son] played with the gap between expectation and desire, brilliantly exploring a multi-dimensional concept within the confines of two-dimensional space - in essence arguing for the primacy of emotional response to events perceived.

The emotional vista of the human psyche and soul are, obviously, a domain of irreducible complexity, not suffering well the transfer to the more linear, temporal paroxysms of symbolic language. Nonetheless, for the sake of brevity I will merely conjecture that this particular piece is intended to explore the parameters of the emotion roughly categorized as "fear," and to enliven the debate over the paradoxical and sometimes symbiotic relationship of this emotion to the conceptual boundaries of "pleasure."

Although the artist's own interpretation is, of course, irrelevant, I find it sometimes illuminating to record said interpretation for the purposes of understanding process and the socio-cultural context of the the art-making endeavor. Ergo, in his own words (paraphrased):

"It's a Halloween house. There's a dog who's biting the trick-or-treat candy [lower left], and those are ghosts [upper left]. That's Lulua [cousin] on the roof, fixing the chim-minny, and that's Roman and Hiccup [step-brother, and character in "How to Train your Dragon", upper right].

The Imaginary Gatekeepers of Love

2011-11-28T12:09:00.001-08:00

When I was a kid, I lived in the psychological shadow of an older brother who was bigger, stronger, louder, more voluble, and more athletic than myself. It has been a long, hard path to letting myself off the hook for being, well... me, so I can understand why one of the primary touch-points of Canadian national identity is in not being American. This attitude is everywhere in Canada. It's as though Canadians - fearful of being overwhelmed by the personality of their bigger brother to the south - have reflexively chosen "definition by negation" as a default psychological stance.

Because I was raised as a half-breed, with a shot of Americano spliced genetically into me in my mother's womb, when I moved to Canada for school (after having been raised in a primarily-American missionary community), I endured a certain amount of nationality-based ribbing. I quickly learned to laugh along at TV shows that make fun of the United States, and to roll my eyes and groan when the President started to give his flag-waving speech-to-the-world during the climax of the movie Independence Day.

I have spent my entire life within the ever-fluctuating boundaries of Protestant North American Evangelicalism, and it seems pretty clear to me that this bizarro Christian subculture has chosen to define itself by the same sort of "identity-by-negation" so characteristic of little brothers everywhere.

Although it is obvious (to everyone else) that Protestant Evangelicals are by no means the little brother, anymore, they still maintain that characteristic, cringing defensiveness. The list of examples goes on and on, as Protestants have shuffled off things such as Tradition and Confession in an effort to prove their not-Catholicness.

I am not a theologian, and I would rather not wallow around in the somewhat childish, "he-said, he-said" world of dogmatic religious belief, so I'm not going to try to pick apart the arguments for either Catholicism or Protestantism. That is not, after all, what blogs are for. What blogs are for is whining; so instead, I am going to whine for a while about an area where the Protestant attempt to distance itself from Catholicism has resulted in some serious hypocrisy and damage - the priesthood.

For the uninitiated, the Protestant Christian religion developed over time (starting about six hundred years ago) as a negation - a re-formulation of what it saw as the True First Principles of Christianity, principles that had been violated for far too long by all those dirty Papists. In those days, there weren't newspapers reporting about the pedophilic evils going on in secrecy behind locked Catholic doors; but there didn't have to be, because there were a lot of other violations going on right out in public: things like, for example, the selling of indulgences. These were violations, but I don't think they were the result of Catholicness, per se, but rather the inevitable outcome when people conspire to manipulate the structures of a society in order to gain forcible control over other human beings.

If we were going to be charitable here, we might say that these violations grew, at first, out of a desire to help others make the life-choices that are, in fact, better for them. But the path to the human heart is not mapped in the cold circuitry of law, and moral change can only happen slowly, over time, in an environment rich with love and the free choice that love demands.

Yes, I do understand that in the short term, the rule of law is necessary to protect the weak from the un-loving choices of the strong; but the law itself is an inert tool, no more capable of producing real, human love than a hammer.

This Protestant, protesting movement directed much of its animosity toward what was at the time a particularly malfunctioning tool of the Catholic Church - the priesthood - and began to loudly insist that it was this warped mis-application of power that had led to so many violations of Christ's message. The problem with this conclusion, again, is that it is not the priesthood that is to blame. While ecclesiastic authority is, yes, perhaps too easily adopted by men (yes, men) who would use its power to control the wills of others, there are and have been a great many priests who have not betrayed the message of Christ. It is not inevitable.

By focusing on the manifestation instead of the source issue, Protestants have opened themselves up to the same sort of corruption, with the added hypocrisy of having to now pretend that they do not, in fact, believe in Priests. "Oh, no," they say (loudly, and to anyone who'll listen), "we believe in the Holy Priesthood of all Believers, Bless Jay-sus!"

But just try (I double-dog-dare you) to disagree, loudly and for any sustained period of time, with any of the "important" precepts maintained by the not-priest-priests of whichever sect to which you happen to belong. Just try that, and see how long it is before they start to eye you suspiciously, to doubt your inclusion "among the elect," and, ultimately, to give you the old heave-ho from their little loving community of priests.

By getting rid of the villains in the robes and pointy hats, they've merely endowed everyone with the authority to become a villain, and given tacit assent to the idea that priesthood is really about using whatever power you've got to control others into an illusion of propositional and moral purity. This is, of course, completely antithetical to the message of Jesus, who taught that nobody's pure, and that moral beauty (as close as you can hope to approximate it) is not found in systems of belief, but rather in persistent, sustained behaviors of love.

It is a scary thing, though, to abandon the comforting illusions provided by a Gatekeeper to the Truth. We are very small and the universe is very big, so we feel it better to put our faith in some tangible shepherd. We feel a need for priests, pastors, and gatekeepers, because we want someone to assure us that life is simple, and that everything will be okay.

Would I leave you, then, without a starry-eyed, self-appointed Messiah to guide you along the path to moral purity? Of course not. Instead, I present you with... ME (er, um... hah-hah, he mumbles to himself in embarrassment).

I guess it's inevitable, but Jesus offers a mediator-free path by suggesting that the way to approach God is to approach one another - in love. He gave his life as a bridge to God, an exemplification of the sort of self-sacrificial, grace-full love that transforms an abstract, cotton-candy concept into something human, immediate, and real. He even went so far as to say (and I'm not making this up) that wherever you found people most in need of your love, that's where he was, and that whatever heaven is/was/meant (it's not that clear in the Bible), the way to get there was to shut your pie-hole about all the propositions you accept, and to start loving the people who are in need. Jesus is always starving, thirsty, imprisoned, marginalized, grieving and oppressed. Go there, and you'll find God.

Someone with the "official" distinction of priest (or pastor, or whatever) is marvelously positioned to offer this sort of love, because in an ideal world, he (or she) would love like this, and word would start to get out among the needy. All the rest - all that sermonizing and crap music played on Sundays and blah-blah-blah-christianese - that's all just noise. There are no gatekeepers. The Truth is Love, and it is readily available to anyone who has the eyes to see love-need in another.

My older brother lives in California, now. I see him, sometimes, and when I do, I don't think about how he's better at sports, or socializing, or getting girls to think he's cool. In fact, I sometimes think he's a bit of a dork, living in worldview-weirdoland. But you know what? It doesn't matter. He's my brother, and I love him. He's same-same, but different, and it's not my job to change him. My job is to be me (and a pretty wonderful me I am), and to hug him when he needs it... regardless of whether or not time spent in Governator Megachurchville is turning him into a right-wing nut-job.

Yep... it's amateur hour.

2011-11-23T17:18:00.000-08:00

Causality. Or: how to become a screenwriter in one, easy lifetime.

2011-11-22T16:34:00.001-08:00

One of the nicest things about being born a human is that humans usually come one at a time, so nobody has to be the runt who dies for lack of milk. Nonetheless, I was born runt-sized on August 12, 1979, in Lancaster, South Carolina - the progeny of Ron and Marty Barkey. This was perhaps the most significant step on my path to becoming a screenwriter.

My father was an English teacher, see. He had a mother who was a painter, and a great-aunt who was a painter of some repute. He also had an older brother who came to be obsessed, as the years went by, with the oddly disjunctive hobbies of eschatology and family lineage, but since my own father never gave much of a rat's hoot about where he came from, I'm afraid that's all the creative ancestry I can give you.

Oh, except, my mother is/was a hyper-emotive, creative firecracker who loves drama and was responsible for nearly every play and musical I was forced to take part in, from my squeezing-out day in '79 and onwards. Her father was an avid reader and a dabbler in philosophy and theology, so my heritage on both sides was one of introspection, intellect, and creativity.

And did I mention I was white? Well, sort of a blazing, slimy pink at first, then morphing into more of a peachy, off-white color; but the point I'm trying to make is that I am the American, Caucasian child of two University-educated creative people who had the wherewithal to get me educated and literate, and did me the immense favor of moving me, six months after my birth, to Peru, South America.

This meant that while I was born a member of the most privileged class of people in the history of the world, I nonetheless was raised outside the status quo of my generation and class, in a place where books were the readiest means of entertainment, and where what televisions I did come into contact with were usually used to play films - a great many of which were (this being a missionary community, after all) products of the so-called "Golden Age of the Silver Screen."

As a result of all this, and because of my socially-inept nature, I grew up on a steady diet of books and classic movies, missing out completely on things like He-Man and those dear heroes of the Renaissance, the Ninja Turtles. Then, when high school came and I discovered the joys of cheap, pirated movies on the streets of the "developing nation" where I lived, my cinephilic tendencies began to flourish.

Zippedy-doo-dah forward to University in British Columbia, Canada, where I was enrolled - without my knowledge and somewhat against my will - as an English major. I can recall that on no less than three separate occasions in my freshman and year, I marched into the main office and insisted that they change me back to the "undeclared major" I had in fact declared myself to be when I had filled in their application. They promised to do so and didn't, so by my third year I gave up and accepted that English it was, and English it evermore would be.

This meant that not only was I being forced for the first time to read a lot of literature and philosophy that was not immediately enjoyable or accessible (read: brain-food), but I also had to write, regularly, on things about which I was both ignorant and uninterested. I found I had a knack for it, and although I graduated with a B.A. in English (minor in Art), it could just as well have been a B.S., with the facility I developed for writing quickly and convincingly(ish) on a whole lot of things I knew nothing about. I perfected a system for writing research papers with as little research as possible, and probably half my GPA was earned entirely through creativity and chutzpah.

Perhaps the best thing to come out of this was that I started journaling, which by the time I graduated had morphed into blogging and the development (eventually) of writerly discipline. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

First, I should say that I paid for my schooling by getting a job in production tree-planting, which over the next ten summers not only hugely shaped my character as a dirty, uncivilized beast, but also introduced me to a young man named Ryan, whom I interviewed for a planting position whilst I was foremanning crews. Ryan later got me a job serving alongside him at the Olive Garden in Langley, BC. Because of this, after I had un-enrolled from a Master's of Art Education in BC and moved instead back to North Carolina, I ended up transferring to the Olive Garden in Rock Hill, South Carolina - where I met actor, director, and producer Austin Herring.

While we worked together, Austin mostly just made fun of my inexperience; but later after I'd gotten a teaching job and he had been fired for incompetence (or maybe incontinence), he called up to whine about some woman who'd kicked the excrement out of him. Since we both were into art, theology, philosophy, and whining about women who'd kicked the excrement out of us, we bonded. It was Austin who suggested I might want to turn my meandering pencil to screenplays, and since I was just coming off a Hollywood High from a few months spent moonlighting as an extra in film and television up in Vancouver (Hollywood North), I thought I'd give it a rip. I'd recently had my heart torn from my chestal cavity and was writing about a thousand words a day to try to staunch the blood-flow, so I figured one more creative outlet would be just the thing.

Around that time, my roving-gypsy sister, Hannah, dragged me out of my depressive man-cave to a Halloween bonfire at the the home of some childhood friends, the Harveys. While at this bonfire I got to talking with Aaron Harvey, the artist-son who was about my age and had moved to L.A. to break into the movie biz. Aaron had bought a couple of my paintings when I'd moved down from Canada, but other than that we really hadn't interacted since I'd given him my ratty, yellow Nash skateboard back in the sixth grade. As it turned out, we shared some interests (making fun of "Christian" films. for example), so he suggested I send him some of my writing so he could read it. I did and he did, and then he suggested I try writing some short films for him.

Although by the time I got around to it, Aaron was distracted by his next big film project, Austin was ready and willing to help me whip my very first screenplay, Fork, into shootable shape so it could be produced, packaged, and shipped off to a pile of festivals (fingers crossed).

As it turns out, Austin is probably the most versatile and broadly-knowledgeable of the local independent filmmakers, and has over the past year or two been massively helpful, teaching and mentoring me as I've attempted to learn the craft of film-making. In that time I've cranked out two more short films (now in pre-production) and one feature-length that Aaron loved and is going to help me shop around L.A. so I can get my foot into, in his words, "bigger doors than [I'd] otherwise be able to access."

The point of all this is to say that if I were a betting man (which I'm not) and a fatalist (which I'm not), I'd bet it was pretty much my fate to become a screenwriter, and that some outside Entity was pulling some mighty appreciable strings.

Since I am neither of those things, I choose instead to return to my Artist Analogy, and to suggest that in the grand tapestry of Everything, it would seem that an appreciable number of strings have been woven somehow into a confluence of events that make writing for film a very good fit for me, and a lovely way to spend my evenings.

Stories are awesome, magical, mystical things; and although I have no idea what I'm doing, I love every second I get to spend in this world of words and stories and - if The Artist wills it and the creek don't rise - film.

Dear Protestant North American Religion:

2011-11-22T09:05:00.001-08:00

I have been watching you now for some time,
for all time,
for every bit of time that I have had;

and I have concluded at last
that you are not what you pretend to be -
that you don't see quite so clearly,
and you don't know what you claim .

You aim too low
and move too slow on what matters
as you grow fat, and fatter.

And so I say to you,
Dear Protestant America:

that you do not own Jesus.
You are not the gatekeeper you presume.

And so I say to you,
(in the words of a culture you purport to transcend):

"I divorce you, I divorce you, I divorce you"

(the end).

Except, no.
Because, you see, we share a lot, still.
So I will bend my will
to see you yet on holidays and such, and say,

"Hello - how do you do?"

And, true, our small talk makes me almost wish that I could die
(and most surely, yes, to cry);

But I will, still, try...

a work in progress

2011-11-22T04:25:00.001-08:00

When I've had a minute here and there during art classes, I've taken to doodling away at this picture, which I call my "boom-dee-yadda" piece. I wouldn't usually show you something partially completed, but since I'm "finishing as I go," I figure it's okay.

boom-dee-yadda, detail

How to Build a Film Character from Scratch

2011-11-20T09:06:00.001-08:00

I think the best-kept secret in Hollywood is that pretty much every decent movie you've ever watched is a morality play. Not in the technical sense (because that's boring and medieval), but in the sense that they present you with a character or characters who are faced with a series of conflicts and choices that, through their resolution, argue for a certain moral perspective. The better the film-making, the more you will identify with the character(s) as they make these choices, and consequently the more you will track with them as they arrive at their eventual conclusions regarding the primary theme of the film.

The good screenwriter must keep a number of plates spinning, but it seems to me that the most important one (after, perhaps, the overall structure of ever-increasing conflict, climax, and resolution) is the creation of characters with whom we can identify. This is much, much harder than it seems. A script is a delicate piece of poetic machinery. As with a machine, a great many moving parts must work in perfect harmony or the whole thing will come to a crashing, hissing halt. And as with poetry, it is endlessly easy to at any moment say one word or one syllable too much, and entirely kill the spirit of the thing.

When it comes to characters, the first and best way to destroy your script is to fail to love them. You cannot treat your characters as objects or slaves. You must love them, heart and soul... yes, even the bad guys. There is very little that is less pleasurable than spending an hour and forty-five minutes listening to someone tell you how much they hate somebody else.

So, how do you fall in love with a character? The same way you fall in love with anything or anybody - you spend time with them. You get to know them. You listen to them speak, with a desire to know, and to understand. If the way you look is real - if it is honest, and true - then these characters will begin to come alive in your love. Practically speaking, the best way to fall in love with your characters is to start writing about them. This is called "creating a back story," and a lot of better, more experienced writers than I have explored this process in great detail.

What I will do here, then, is describe the three, ascending levels of reality that can be built into a character within the context of the overall morality play of the script, once he or she has already begun to take shape. This is because the truth about a character is only ever revealed as it plays out in a story (sort of like, say, real life).

The first and simplest level of on-the-day character-building is to discover what a character wants. For example, you could have a male character who wants to sleep with a girl. He wants something, so he is interesting. If you do not understand your character at the level of his wants, your story is over right there.These desires will drive the choices your character makes, which will set the stage for the next conflict. So ask yourself: given what I know about my character, what would he be most likely to want in this situation?

The second level of character-building is to figure out what a character really needs within the story. Your male character may want to sleep with the girl, but why? Is it just because of some inbuilt biological necessity to procreate, a need augmented by primal, lizard-brain memories of the dopamine spikes of past sexual release? Or is there perhaps more... could he be wanting to sleep with the girl because he feels lonely, and yearns for a more profound and meaningful human connection than he finds in his everyday life? The deeper and further you explore these questions, the more interesting your story is likely to become.

I've done a little thespiatic training, and I can tell you that since Stanslavski, most of what writers and actors try to do is to live in the realm of primal needs as they relate to character motivation. Yet I am going to take the incredibly presumptuous step of adding to this another level of character development; the level of ambiguity. This is an intangible aspect - the hardest to define, and by far the hardest to write. At this level, you recognize that within the character's desire to sleep with the girl there exist simultaneously two very antithetical things. First, there is a narcissistic desire for self-fulfillment and self-aggrandizement. And second, there is a desire to please and love the other person.

It is my belief that all human choices and all human action - all of them - are motivated simultaneously by the two most primal driving forces: Love, and Fear.

He wants to sleep with the girl because he wants love. Love is his soul's highest intent, it's greatest yearning. But he also realizes that in love are found vulnerability, self-diminishment, and loss of control. What this realization does, therefore, is it confronts him with his greatest fear: the fact that he is not in control of his life and will someday die. In short, the promise of sexual love forces him to face his own mortality.

I firmly believe that every truly great film character is written with an eye for the tension between these two things: Love, and Fear. I believe that if we can write characters in a way that expresses an understanding of this tension, we will have seen into the depths of what it means to be human. We will have expressed, in building such characters, that we have looked deeply into ourselves and into our characters and have loved well.

In a sense, it doesn't even matter all that much, at that point, if our characters choose the path of fear, or of love, because the way in which they make those choices will be true, and audiences will follow them on their moral journey. They, too, will love our characters as we have loved them, and our stories will be successful.

The choices our characters make will reveal the way in which we as writers view the world, and I would hope that we would want to give viewers a picture of the world in which love, hope and grace win the day. But think for a moment about film not as some exalted, transcendent art form, but rather as one facet of the larger Story, and of storytelling in general. Think of a grandfather telling his grandson about the time he picked up a skunk by the tail because his grandfather had told him an elevated skunk couldn't spray, and how his arm started to tire and he had to run down and throw it into the pond. Think about a story in that way - as perhaps the truest and most memorable way of communicating who we are to others - and you will realize that a well-built, well-loved character in a well-crafted story structure is all you can really hope for.

And it is enough.

Crash the Superbowl!

2011-11-19T06:24:00.001-08:00

For all the readers of this blog who are personal friends with, say, Steven Spielberg, you might want to mention to him that I've been working pretty dang hard to break into screenwriting. And for my latest filmic trick...

...I contributed, ever-so-slightly, to the writing for an entry into the Doritos "Crash the Superbowl" contest. Ergo, I invite you now to go and view THIS LINK RIGHT HERE and leave a glowing comment, so as to unduly influence the judges in our favor.

The winner either gets a kiss from the maid Marian; or 25 grand, superbowl playtime, and a shot at a million-dollar prize. Either way, it's ooh-dah-lally, and what are you waiting for!?!*

*bonus points for recognizing the obscure Disney reference just there.

a treeless day

2011-11-15T15:18:00.001-08:00

Ask most people their favorite tree and they'll likely tell you a species, but for me and most of the people I grew up with in Peru, our favorite tree had a name: Big Root.

Big Root was a Banyan tree - a wild fig - and it was so named because it was actually a parasite that had grown from a seed dropped on a tree, most likely, by a bird, and then had choked that tree with vines until all that was left was a myriad of branch-sized, loopy root-vines, making a jungle-gym fun-house for all us kids. Big Root grew on the shore of Yarinacocha, an oxbow lake just outside of Pucallpa - a dusty jungle city in the amazon basin. The water level in the Amazon rises and falls with the seasons - sometimes as much as thirty feet. This meant that Big Root was not only the world's best climbing tree, but for half the year it was also the world's best climbing tree over water.

There are a lot of really stupid (fun) things a kid will do when his or her climbing tree is over water. Like, say, run full-tilt in a game of tree-tag along the leg-thick curve of a major branch and then leap out, fully-splayed, to grab a wrist-thick branch and swing to safety over a thicket of barely-submerged thorn bushes; or jumping from twenty-five feet up into a vast floating island of vine-choked water hyacinths, that might or might not have been hiding a submerged log or two, and were definitely home to a whole lot of spiders, stinging insects, eels, and fresh-water crabs.

I first climbed Big Root in low-water at age five, and after that initiation spent a great deal of my exuberant young life in that tree; playing tree tag, skittering like a monkey across the tiniest branches, and hanging out with friends.

Then came middle school.

Middle school was hell. Hell. H-E-double-hockey-stick-HELL. I still loved being a jungle kid, and I still loved being alive. Except, sometimes, I didn't.

I don't know if it was my asocial temperament, or because I was a runtish late-bloomer, but I began to "wander lonely as a cloud," from one glancing social encounter to the next. Oftentimes I would find myself alone, high in the branches of Big Root.

I can distinctly remember one late afternoon in dry season, sitting with my head nearly poking out the top of that tree. Silent tears ran down my face as I listened to a few of my friends hollering and splashing, about a hundred feet down the shore. I could not have told you why I was crying, but I began to wonder how they might feel if I were to slip and fall, bouncing off the larger branches below before landing, crumpled and lifeless, on the muddy ground. I wondered if they would notice. I wondered if they would care.

This was one of my first encounters with depression, and we've had an on-again, off-again relationship ever since.

There are times when it seems obviously situational - as in, say, when my nether-regions failed to sprout foliage at the appointed hour, or when my marriage was especially hellish to live in, or even more hellish to live without. At such times, I often retreated into the dubious consolation of mySelf, and it is at such times that I could understand what it is that drives some people to the ultimate act of despair.

The strange thing is, when I am not in those moments, hours, or days of despair, I absolutely cannot comprehend why anyone would ever want to check out of a life so rich, bounteous and full of joy-potential. I can rationally understand that depression is a real emotional state, and that people really do live in it day after day - but I can't really understand, on a visceral level, what that means.

Today is not one of those days. Today, I find myself back in the sort of thick, gray fog I was in when I was writing gray poems and pitying myself for my broken marriage. And that's the weird thing - I know it's self-pity that puts me here. I know that I have buckets and piles of things for which to be grateful, but somehow I can't seem to get my eyes off the ugliness. It's not a constant thing, of course, but the regular pin-prickings of despair have brought me once again back into the fog-bank, where I float: disconnected and alone. I am not alone. I feel alone, and that is an entirely different thing.

I realized this evening that for the past several weeks I have been eating not because I am hungry, but rather because I know I need to eat in order to stay alive. I had convinced myself that I my hesitance to eat has been because I've been so passionate about my writing, but that's not the case. I am depressed. Sometimes, it can be so effing hard to be a Caucasian middle class male in America with most of his teeth, all of his health, a job, talent, no debt, family, friends, and a son who loves him.

So, I ate a bowl of cereal for dinner and pitied myself for a while longer.

Again.

The year after I graduated from high school and left the place and country where I had lived since I was a year old, Big Root fell into the lake. They were closing down the jungle Bible Translation center, and most of the missionary population (a population nearly two-hundred strong in my younger years) was going away. For fifty years, Big Root had been supporting the antics of generations of missionary kids just like myself. It was as though without us, it lost the will to live and fell, as we so often had, into Yarinacocha.

Writing about Big Root has made me smile, and while I was writing, my son called to wish me good night. He was chipper and happy, and when he asked me if I was going to pick him up tomorrow and I answered in the affirmative, he replied, "That's okay for me, Dadu."

My heart swelled with the joy of life. I gloried, for a moment, in being alive. A while later, my friend Austin the Director called for some advice on a commercial he just shot for the Doritos "Crash the Superbowl" competition, and I was able to help him come up with the perfect tagline. I remembered that I have abilities and that I contribute. I smiled, again.

What will happen tomorrow? How will I feel, tonight, as I fall into bed? I don't know. But right now, I feel better. I always feel better when I make something.

telephonication

2011-11-13T05:15:00.001-08:00

I saw an ad for Sprint on Hulu touting the virtues of their phone plan, and even though I do not own a cellular telecommunications device, I would like to congratulate them on their marketing.

First, because when I went on their website, the first thing I saw, under a big, yellow dollar sign, was the slogan, "Happiness Guaranteed." I mean - what other product can I buy that guarantees my happiness?

Second, I'm really proud of them for their family plan, which takes a family that perhaps once wallowed in despair with only one land-line for, like, thirty bucks a month, and now has the option of buying a family cell plan for only $189.99 a month (excluding taxes, fees, and surcharges). How nifty is that!?!

Finally, I'm stoked they've managed to charge extra for texting, when they know full well that all texts ride piggyback on signals the cell phones would be sending to the towers anyways in order to "locate" themselves. Selling nothing for something is, like, the crowning achievement of marketing awesomeness!

Right on, guys! Three cheers for progress!

OBEY

2011-11-10T09:37:00.001-08:00

For a massive repository of excellent, not-stupid thoughts on everything from faith, to psychology, to monsters, to faith about the psychology of monsters, please visit Dr. Richard Beck's blog, Experimental Psychology, today. Not only does the guy have letters before his name (emphasis: mine) but he also writes with both humility and, yes, humor.

And humor, as we know, is the ultimate test of not-stupidness.

smile while you're bleedin'

2011-11-09T08:54:00.000-08:00

When I was a kid I heard a lot about "suffering with Christ."

It's something they harp on when you grow up in Christianeseland, and even though you sometimes suspect it's all about getting you to shut up and stop whining about your undoubtedly-expensive toothache, you bury that sentiment under a load of guilt because, well, you don't want to get lightning-bolted. It's sort of the Christian version of Stoicism.

It also has a fair bit of support from the Bible - mostly the parts after Jesus died, un-died, then re-sort-of-died. Back in the parts of the Bible we call the "Old Testament," the writers had no compunction at all about expressing exactly how they felt about suffering - which was that they were completely against it. David, the once-King of Israel and (apparently) a man after God's own heart, wrote lengthy poems of protest in which he raged against God for making him suffer while other, less virtuous people strolled through rose gardens, sipping margaritas.

After Jesus, though, when Christians got invented and then dipped in hot pitch and burned to death for the Emperor's amusement (true story), they started to say things about suffering that seemed, well... weird. In Romans 5:3, for example, the author talks about how "we also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; ⁴ perseverance, character; and character, hope." The message seems to be, "suck it up, Princess, suffering is good for you."

I recently heard a guy speaking on this subject, and he was making the argument that when things got to be going too well in life, he'd pray for suffering so he could get closer to God. Which is a fatalist, depressing, and (let's face it) weird way of looking at the world.

It reminds me of a time when I was out tree planting and I was waiting in the food line at the mess tent with the owner of the company and I said to him, "you know, sometimes things just get going too nice: the land is great, the tree prices are great, my friends are great - even the weather is great. And when that happens," I said, "I start to worry about something bad sneaking up on me and I think, NO, I'm not gonna let that happen! So whenever things get too good I throw my hand up high in the air [at this point, I raised my hand high in the air], and I punch myself in the balls!"

I guess I was operating under the theory that self-preservation will keep you from hitting yourself hard enough to make it hurt (I was wrong), and although in that case I was just thinking I could get a laugh (I was right), I think the principle is still the same.

So, when this speaker started to talk about praying for bad things to happen to you, I cornered him later and explained as tactfully as I could that I thought the Bible was saying something completely different. The way I see it, all that talk of suffering being a good thing comes from the shift in perspective that Jesus brought. By getting down and dirty with us in our suffering, Jesus was showing us a picture of what true love really is. He was saying that if you really want to love, you have to be willing to suffer with those who suffer. To grieve with those who grieve, to (Republican-Party-2009-be-danged) empathize with other people.

You don't have to pray for suffering to come to you - it's already here, all around you. All you have to do is step outside your own tiny world and start being aware that everyone is fighting a very difficult battle. All that talk of the joys of suffering isn't a rallying cry for the "New Christian S&M Movement" - rather, it is an invitation to dig down deep into the mire of the world and, by loving, to lift our fellow humanity above it.

pretty little angel eyes

2011-11-07T07:48:00.000-08:00

monday morning picturation (not to be confused with micturation)

How to Fall in Love with Yourself

2011-11-06T11:13:00.000-08:00

Let me start out by saying that you are beautiful, and Ilove you. Not well, of course, and not like that (I barely know you, c'mon!), but I’m willing to take the risk that you’ll end up on my doorstepin a trench-coat and lingerie (please don’t—and if you’re a guy… prettyplease don’t), because I have a suspicion that it might be somethingyou need to hear today.

Even (or perhaps especially) if you typically act likean arrogant jerk, I very much doubt you think of yourself as marvelouslybeautiful and lovely. And in my experience of humans both general and specific,well... you are horribly wrong.You are amazing. It’s true. But before I start channeling Stuart Smalley, I guess I had better back up and tell you why it occurred to meto tell you what you are and how I feel about you.

See, I have been having thisongoing conversation with myself and the internets about how uber-poopy it isto simplify people down into word-boxes they won’t fit into—word-boxes like “fool,”or “illegal immigrant,” or “bully”—and it dawned on me that this links upnicely to the post I wrote about drawing called “How to Fall in Love with a Chair,” which argued against symbolic thinking and advocated a more open approach to the Universe.

I went back and read it, and in after gagging in my embarrassment at how badly I used to write way back a month ago, I realizedthat I had neglected to explain why it is that people fail to fallin love with chairs: fear and pride.

Austin the Director and I have this ongoing, to-the-deathdebate on the root cause of suckiness (or sin, or whatever-you-wanna-call-it)in the world. He says it’s pride and I say it’s fear, and in order to avoidkilling each other and adding a little more suckiness to the world, we haveagreed to pretend that we believe they both sort of work together.

Nonetheless, I will nowattempt to demonstrate why I am right and he is not-right (that’s code for “wrong”).

To draw a chair well you have to love it. Failure to draw aswell as possible, given your current level of experience at chair-loving, represents a failure to love, which is a suckything (although not in any way out of the ordinary). So by Austin’s argument, if you do not take the time to love and draw achair well, you are being proud; in a sense saying to that chair that it is not importantenough to love and that your agenda and your non-chair-loving desires are whatreally matter. Not a big deal when you say this to chairs, of course, but ifyou say it often enough to humans, well, they stop calling to invite you totheir wine-and-cheese parties.

You can call a human on his behavior and he might stilllisten to you. But the moment you deny him his humanity and simplify him downinto some word-object, he’ll smell your pride and stop listening.

What causes that pride, though? Why would someone puff up with prideover being “better” than a chair? If somebody is objectifying people, you cansay it’s because he's done the math on the other person’s value and found itto be wanting. But with chairs, it doesn’t make sense. Unless, of course, thereis something else propelling the ship. Something like, say (ding-ding!) fear.

See, I don't think of pride as an additive attribute, but rather subtractive—adiminution of the humility that is humanity’s natural state. Pride occurs whenwe lose, for the moment, the ability to see the truth about our humancondition: that we are finite, ignorant, vulnerable and mortal. What causes usto lose this ability? And I say it again: fear.

The reason we do not love chairs, other people, orbutterflies is that we are afraid there is not enough love in the worldfor everyone—leastwise, not us. We areafraid that by giving away our time, ourselves and our love, we are somehow diminishing. In a sense, this is true. But what isdiminishing is not the real us, but a puffed-up illusion, created in the momentof fear. The real us—the us that yearnsto BE—can only come alive when we die to our false self, shuffle off our fear,and live in the awareness of the loveliness of everybody and everything else. In thosemoments, the suckiness falls away and the beauty shines so brightly all around usthat it becomes a mirror that reveals our own loveliness.

That is how we fall in love with ourselves. By abandoning thefalse pride that fear engenders and loving, we become open to the truththat we are beautiful and lovely.

Sadly, this does not happen often. Most of the time, we arefar too caught up in fear at our own smallness and mortality to ever reallylove anyone else. We run around frantically shoving everything into boxes,proudly proclaiming in a thousand small ways our own transcendence. This would perhaps becomical from far enough away. Up close, it’s just sucky and sad.

As the moments of my life slip by, I am losing confidence inmy own ability to stop being afraid—to love. Love seems more and more the thingthat actuallytranscends. It sneaks up, hunkers down, and pounces. I don't understand it, but God-Almighty, I'm grateful.

why bullies don't exist

2011-11-02T13:35:00.000-07:00

When I google-search "mark driscoll is..." the first autocomplete option I get is "a bully." When I push "enter," google directs me first to the blog post: "Mark Driscoll is a bully, Stand up to him," written by Rachel Held Evans, which elaborates in great detail the ways in which Mr. Driscoll's behavior proves that he is not a godly man. Readers are then encouraged to contact Driscoll's church to express their distaste for his rotten, bullying ways, and - if they know him - to "approach him as a friend and request that he get the counseling he needs."

The first time I saw this post, I shared it on Facebook. First, because I agree with Mrs. Evans that Mark Driscoll needs to stop his obnoxious gum-flapping, and second because I have the sort of build that the more generous among us might refer to as "slight," "slim," or "wiry." This means, naturally, that I have a pretty visceral reaction when people use their strength/power/size to dominate and/or intimidate those who, by genetics or inclination, tend to lean toward choosing gentleness, sensitivity and kindness, over brute force.

Nonetheless, as I got to thinking about her post, I began to see a big, gaping problem in it. That is, her characterization of Mark Driscoll as a "bully." The reason I think this is a problem is that I don't think bullies exist.

For most people, that will sound like insanity. "Of course bullies exist!" they'll say, "They're everywhere! Didn't I hear an hour-long special on bullies on NPR just the other day; and didn't Barack Obama just speak out against them from the White House?"

It's true, too: Bullies are everywhere. Anti-bullying is a major, major trend right now, and most people who talk about bullying do not bother to make the distinction between the action and the person.

I would even go so far as to guess that this (in addition to the fact that Mark Driscoll behaves like a dink) largely accounts for Rachel Held Evan's choice to use that word four times in her blog post, and why her blog post returns so high on searches about Mark Driscoll. It is probably this very zeitgeist that has made this post her third-most popular (prompting 513 comments at this writing), and has helped her build a career out of her writing.

More power to her, I say - ride that zeitgeist. Except...

Except, I don't think bullies really exist, because I think for them to exist, you've gotta first take a whole big, complicated person and cram them down into one, tiny little word, a word that fails to empathize, or to account for all the greatness that goes hand in hand with the stupidity that, yes, Mark Driscoll evidences in spades.

Words matter. It matters when we take people and violate them in this way. It matters when we see them not as whole, wonderful humans, but as ugly catchphrases that simplify them down so small that they become things.

That, I think, is sin. It doesn't matter who does it, or how justified they might be. It still sucks.

Now, you might think that by attacking her post, I'm trying to grab a little of that internet thunder, myself. I'd be lying if I said I wouldn't welcome it. I have serious doubts, however, that any post trying to nuance the discussion toward empathy and compassion for those with whose behavior you disagree is ever going to generate the same kind of interest as one that crams another person into a word-sized box.

I've written about this sort of thing before (most recently in my post: Jesus the Magician), and I understand why people are drawn to that. It's easier. It's quicker. And it allows me to "other" myself from the dirtiness - to create something of a scapegoat for the iniquities I'd much rather ignore in myself.

I know it's hard, but I really do think that people are worth the time it takes to understand that they are not one thing that they do, or even all the things that they do. They are image-bearers of the Divine, and they are worth not just our time, but our love.

I will close by once again quoting from Granny Weatherwax, that amazing old witch from Terry Pratchett's wonderful discworld series, on the nature of sin:

"...And that's what your holy men discuss, is it?" [asked Granny Weatherwax.]

"Not usually. There is a very interesting debate raging at the moment on the nature of sin. for example." [answered Mightily Oats.]

"And what do they think? Against it, are they?"

"It's not as simple as that. It's not a black and white issue. There are so many shades of gray."

"Nope."

"Pardon?"

"There's no grays, only white that's got grubby. I'm surprised you don't know that. And sin, young man, is when you treat people like things. Including yourself. That's what sin is."

"It's a lot more complicated than that--"

"No. It ain't. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they're getting worried that they won't like the truth. People as things, that's where it starts."

"Oh, I'm sure there are worse crimes--"

"But they starts with thinking about people as things..."

monday morning picturation (not to be confused with "micturation")

2011-10-31T06:53:00.000-07:00

This weekend I did a little two-hour gig as "event photographer" for a nature museum event. Most of the pics I took were of other people's kids (and therefore un-internetable), but here's a nice one I took in the butterfly room.

dental hygiene

2011-10-27T03:04:00.000-07:00

Becoming a real writer is like growing up and going to the dentist.

When I was a kid, going to the dentist was about enforced suffering. Being gifted, as I was, with bad(ish) teeth, and a propensity to bring those teeth into regular contact with as much sugar as I could find, I spent a fair bit of time lying back and being mangled by those sadistic dental monsters with their cold, gleaming instruments of torture.

Although it was torture, it was also in some ways easier back then, because I had parents making me go. There was an inevitability to it.

Nowadays, though, no one is making me do it. I have to willingly pick up the phone and set a date with dental destiny, and then I have to drive myself there and willingly plop myself down so the smiling dentists with their perfect, gleaming white teeth can have their way with me. No one will scold me if I don't, and the only consequence for procrastination is the possibility of greater problems further on.

It's sort of the same with writing.

When I was younger, other people made me write and then, when I'd given them my writing, they told me if it was acceptable by assigning me a grade that determined, for all to see, my writing's relative suckiness. I had the choice to ignore what they'd taught me and to ignore their assignments all together - but there were immediate consequences.

Now, however, no one makes me write, and there is no one to grade my papers. What is more, my writing still kind of sucks. As any writer worth his or her beans will tell you, there aren't really many good writers out there - just good re-writers.

That's where the dentist comes in. There are few things quite so unpleasant as the attempt to attack your own writing with the detached honesty of a high school English teacher. This is because good re-writing forces you to attack your very self, to repeatedly come to what you thought was your best representation of yourself and rip it to shreds - to root out all your failures and weaknesses and self-deceptions, exposing them to the cold light of your best editorial instincts.

The capacity to ignore problems is endless, because it hurts to admit to weakness. It is way easier to stuff a suspicion of failure and gloss over the problems in a bit of writing than it is to take out the red pen and slash away at your creation with first a chainsaw, then a hacksaw, and then a scalpel. And no one is making you do it.

Here's the really bad part, though: it doesn't get any easier.

Well, let me qualify that: it does get easier, but only if you continue to follow all the same paths you have before - to find a formula that worked once and continuously re-apply it to every situation. These sorts of posts, for example, get easier for me, because I have written them many times before. But formula is the death of Art. It is stagnation. So instead of sticking with this formula, I write my Fiction Fridays, attempting as I do to tell stories in new and interesting ways - to risk, with every paragraph, the distinct possibility of utter failure.

In my other writing time I am attempting, as well, to break into screenwriting. Partially, I think, because filmic fiction can be radically new and different every time, and partially because it's just something I really suck at. I write a screenplay and once again am confronted point-blank with my own laziness and fear - my tendency to mistake wordplay for wisdom and cleverness for truth.

Yesterday, I made myself go to the dentist and act pleasant while the man in the pale green mask ground off a significant amount of my dentalbone and attached a temporary crown. Believe it or not, it hurt a little (although definitely not as much, I am told, as the root canal I'll most likely be getting in another week or so). When he was finished, though, I felt great. I had made a hard choice for a better future. I was king of the world (at least, until the Novocaine wore off).

Honesty is difficult. It is difficult to tell the truth about yourself, to yourself. It is also, I think, the beginning of wisdom. So pick up a pencil, today, and write. And then, more importantly, re-write.

---

Note: Sometimes I don't want to do the hard work of honest self-examination, so I send incomplete, first-draft garbage off to be read by other people. This is selfish, irresponsible, dishonest and lazy. If I have done this to you in the past, you have my apologies.

blessins

2011-10-25T16:18:00.000-07:00

After venting my frustration at my rough day yesterday, I thought it would be apropos to balance that out by unburdening a little more of my inner world upon you - but this time in the opposite direction. So here, in no apparent order, are a number of the things for which I am grateful:

I am grateful for...

1. My son, who brings me joy every single day.
2. My family, who love and stabilize me through it all, even when I'm interrupting their movie to make them listen to an extended whine about rich people, the economy, America, and killing a bunny rabbit with my car (thanks, dad).
3. My little brother, especially, who drove forty minutes each way yesterday, just to bring me the spare keys to the car (seriously, ladies... date this man, now!).
4. My pet dog, for not existing. Because why would I need a pet dog when the trees are full of all the squirrels I could ever hope to eat (don't worry, guys. I think two was enough)?
5. My job, because it's an amazing place to go and a wonderful community of which to be a part.
6. My students, who are smart enough to pretend I've still got something to teach them.
7. Medical Science, for the torture it might be putting me through with the root canal I might be getting tomorrow.
8. My ex-wife, for making it a priority to allow me to engage with my son, even on days when I don't technically "have" him.
9. The trees, because trees are amazing.
10. All the other beautiful, drop-dead gorgeous natural wonderments I've had the privilege to see, and feel, and breathe in.
11. The Divine First Artist, who designed this glorious mess and made it all possible.

i ain't no k'naan

2011-10-24T18:35:00.000-07:00

The first time I heard K'naan's music was in the truck on the way to a day of treeplanting. I had this policy where we had to give everybody's music a fair shake, so even though as foreman I had control over the stereo and even though my little missionary kid ears were tingling from his truly astounding potty language, I let it play.

Eventually - not then, but eventually - I learned to appreciate K'naan's music, and to accept that perhaps a Somali Canadian who'd lived through the ugliness of a war-torn childhood had a bit of a right to make my ears tingle as he struggled to draw attention to issues of social justice; and to express his frustration at how effed-up the world sometimes is.

I think the bit that bugged me most, in my pre-enlightened state (snerk), was the song "Stabbed by Satan."
I don't think I ever stopped to actually listen to the words, but at the time it "sounded wrong," and that was reason enough for me to tune it out on the truck ride to another day of planting hell. Except, it wasn't hell.

Planting was never hell. Not the sort of hell a lot of people live in, daily, worldwide. Like, say, a whole lot of Somalians, who are currently watching their children die at astonishing rates due to a truly horrendous drought. Here is the chorus to that song:

I was stabbed by Satan, on the day that I was born
I was promised lovin', but instead I was torn
La la la, la la la, My heart bled tears
La la la, la la la, My eyes shed tears

If anybody has a right to express such a sentiment (and with as many potty words as he wants), it's a child of Somali war. I ain't no K'naan.

Still, I sometimes just get so tired of everything. I get tired of rich people pretending to be Jesus while they step on poor people's faces. I get tired of poor people being so desperate they just start stepping on each other's faces. I get tired of shopping malls, and tired of times when people prefer to assert their "right to be angry" about other people's failings, instead of empathizing and loving self-sacrificially. I get tired of the asphalt rivers of black death we call roads that lay in grisly webs all over the good earth.

I get tired of feeling like I suck at every creative endeavor I ever try, and of feeling like I'm never going to amount to anything or catch a break, creatively (which I probably don't deserve, anyway). I get tired of feeling like my dream of working for myself so I can stop driving a car forty minutes each way to work and instead spend a lot more of my time creating things and spending time with my son is just another pipe dream by yet another mediocre guy with illusions of greatness.

And even though I ain't no K'naan, I still sometimes have days like today where after a long, hard journey into night I end up topping it all off by accidentally weaponizing my car into and over a defenseless rabbit on that asphalt river I mentioned earlier.

So I turn around and go back, and I stand there over yet another dead creature for which I am unable to cry (that comes later, when I get home) and I lay him out on the grass and say a prayer and tell him I love him and take a picture - so that at least his death is remembered. I feel again the crushing, horrendous weight of it all and you know what? Sometimes blog posts don't have happy endings. Because you know what... ?

I was stabbed by Satan, on the day that I was born
I was promised lovin', but instead I was torn
La la la, la la la, My heart bled tears
La la la, la la la, My eyes shed tears

Jesus the Magician

2011-10-18T09:00:00.000-07:00

I was raised in a community of people who had left theirhomes in Germany, Sweden, Canada and the United States to bring a magical bookcalled the Bible to small groups of indigenous people in the far reaches of theAmazon. This may account for the fact that, despite my enlightened,late-Twentieth Century Education, as I a little boy I continued to believe inmagic.

I am convinced that there is something in the human psychethat needs magic, and will inevitably create it when none is readily available.The form this took in my childhood culture was an investment of magic into anarrangement of words called the Bible, and although the support team and BibleTranslators under whose wings I was raised were all college-educated,intelligent and often wise people, there was sometimes a bit of voodoo in theirapproach to the Bible’s Holy Writ.

I osmosified this attitude to the point that despite mythoroughly modern education, I was often unable to hear or read the words ofthe Bible without a sort of eerie, spine-tingling sensation – the kind thatrobs a man of his higher faculties and renders him incapable of processinginformation with anything other than, for lack of a better term, his “lizardbrain.”

For example, in Matthew 5:22, Jesus is quoted as saying that“whoever says ‘you fool!’ [to his brother] will be liable to the hell of fire.[ESV]” This was perfect fuel for my magic-loving, unformed brain. There,spelled out in black-and-white English, was a magic phrase that had the powerto indamnificate a man to burning torture for all eternity.

This was the sort of black incantation that might be sought industy, leather-bound tomes by the children of satan-worshipping atheists (thelikes of whom, I was assured, were positively everywhere); and although I wasfar too good and pure a person to ever use such a power, there was still a certaingrim satisfaction in having that knowledge tucked down into my Biblical backpocket.

As I have grown older and (possibly) a little more mature, Ihave grown first away from that magical thinking and then, more recently, backto it. I have come to believe that Ineed not necessarily look beyond the observable, natural realities of asituation in order to find the magic – that there is a wonder and magic thatcourses through the everyday and imbues it with an incomprehensible, expansivepower – a power to seemingly magically change reality from what it is to what,with enough love, it might just become.

Let me draw your attention again, by way of example, to themagic my younger self incanted from that Jesus quote, a quote which (as is usualin these sorts of circumstances), can be vastly improved by a little morecontext.

When Jesus said that the words “you fool” could send a manto the “hell of fire,” the statement was actually one of three similarstatements intending to contrast a previous way of thinking and living. It goeslike this:

“You have heard that it was said to those of old, ‘You shall notmurder; and whoever murders will be liable to judgment.’ But I say to you thateveryone who is angry with his brother will be subject to judgment; whoeverinsults his brother will be liable to the council; and whoever says ‘you fool!’will be liable to the hell of fire.”

Now, this seems weird, but that first bit – the part aboutthe murder – was actually a well-developed moral stance to be taking in a worldmuch more brutal and more violent thanour own (at least, for those who, like me, happen to live in a cushy,rule-of-law microcosm). At the time, the general idea was that if you had enoughpower to get away with it, you were free to kill pretty much anybody you wanted. Which is, of course, nothing at all likethe world we live in today.

Prohibiting murder was a good thing, yes, but it was aimed mostlyat the management and control of a destructive action. Jesus took it severalsteps further, out of the realms of action management and control and down intothe murky depths of the human heart. It is in this heart-realm – where no lawcould ever hope to intrude – that Jesus makes his most astounding moral mark,a mark especially evidenced by his famous “Sermon on the Mount,” of which thisparticular inversion of established wisdom is but a small part.

But what is he saying here?

Is he merely introducing another, more stringent form ofexternal behavioral control, grasping for the minds and hearts of people by sellingthis novel idea of an eternal, torturous afterlife to a people group that, tothat point, had only the vaguest ideas about an afterlife?

I think perhaps not.

You see, the word translated as “hell of fire” here wasoriginally written down as Gahenna, the Greek word for the Valley of the Son of Hinnom, arift in the ground outside the city of Jerusalem where they dumped and burned alltheir trash. Jesus’ listeners would not have had the dubious advantage havingwatched “Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey,” so what they would have heard was not “aplace with red guys with horns and pokers,” but rather, “that garbage dumpoutside the city where they burn stuff.”

Read in that light, there is nothing in Jesus’ words tosuggest he was trying to lay out some new legal code – showing a progression ofpunishments for a progression of more and more egregious infractions. The three actions and consequences listed there are of a kind, not a scale. In point of fact, “Raca”may even have been a more damning insult than “you fool.” It seems more likelyto me, then, that what Jesus is doing here is listing three different manifestations of a particularly ugly disease of the heart, using metaphor to explain how destructive this disease truly is. In each case, a person is - through anger, or words - declaring their essential moral superiority over the person they presume to judge.

So… no magic words: just words that, as poetry and metaphor,take on a magic and a power all their own.

While the Jewish people had come to rely on a pre-determinedlist of moral guidelines to provide them with a sense of qualitative moralsuperiority over the people around them, Jesus seems to be suggesting – here andeverywhere else – that it is just that sense of superiority that ultimatelycauses all the putrescence and garbage-burning rottenness that humansperpetually dump all over each other. I am not arguing against the rule of law - just suggesting (with, I think, Jesus himself) that law is insufficient, and does nothing to correct the fundamental fear and arrogance of the human heart.

“Stop judging and start loving,” Jesus says, over and over,but nobody really seems to listen.

Why?

I think that perhaps no one listens because it is a scarything to let go of the illusion of control and to live in a world where you cannever attain the dream of Ultimate Justice – to live in a world where no one issuperior to anyone else. Instead, we twist the words of Jesus, re-shaping them into another, even more insidious system of control.

Sometimes I wonder why Jesus – knowing as he did thatwhatever he said would be warped to the interests of the powermongerers – would evenbother. But when I get close to despair,I begin to once again see the beauty of his teachings. I see the way he usedmetaphors and told stories; and how he demonstrated what he meant by healing people,meeting their physical needs, and hanging out – sans judgment – with losers andscrew-ups like me. There is so much beauty there, such grace and love and, yes,magic, that my hope is rekindled.

Despite all the ugly rationalizations and empty,fine-sounding arguments piled up by those who try to hijack the message ofChrist to bolster their own overdeveloped sense of moral superiority, the truthof who Jesus was still shines through.

And that is all the magic I need.

Nuke Obama ?

2011-10-11T08:09:00.000-07:00

Yesterday at work, I overheard the following terrifying conversation:

Ed Mugglesworth: "People who say you should vote for anybody other than Obama are stupid. I mean, I think he's an idiot and all, but that's like saying you should vote for Hitler before Obama."

Fred Bugglesworth: "Yeah, well... maybe that wouldn't be such a bad idea - I betcha Hitler could fix the economy."

- - -

There are some fairly obvious problems with this little interchange, but given that we like sheep have gone astray to the cliff-edge of loudly-bleated, obvious idiocies, I figure I oughtta make a few obvious observations:

One: Never, ever, ever should a person with even a smidge of compassion ever suggest it would be worth it to have another Hitler if it would fix the economy - not even as a joke. Jokes should be funny, see, and there is nothing at all funny about suggesting that genocide would be acceptable if it provided the majority with greater wealth.

Two: When the more moderate voice in your discussion refers to the leader of your country as an "idiot," you have a problem. It is perfectly acceptable in a democracy to argue that one or all the policies of a leader are idiotic, or misguided, or stupid - but to turn from there to an attack on him (or her) as a person is a dangerous, dangerous place to be. Instead of implying a reasoned difference of opinion, it asserts a qualitative difference between yourself and the other person.

This is a mistake. In the words of the Beatles long ago, "I am you and you are me and we are we." Anything else is arrogant and dangerous and - let's face it - a little bit Hitlerish. And, yes, I did feel the same way when people made these same derogatory qualitative claims about then-President George W. Bush.

Three: When you scapegoat (or idolize) the President, you not only miss the bigger picture, but you also allow the larger, more powerful forces that really run the world to have their way with you (Yes, I'm talking to you, you pusillanimous Pentaverate).

Four: Foolishness inevitably escalates. Ugly, unwise, un-measured thoughts grow to a place where you not only have some dumb radio caller saying she'd "vote for Charles Manson before this guy [Obama]," but you also have a major Republican Presidential candidate thanking her for that opinion. I suppose the argument could be made that Bachmann was thanking her for the part where she pledged support (and not the whole Manson thing), but the fact that she didn't bat an eye when one of her supporters referred to her competitor as being worse than a serial killer... well, that says something more than a little bit scary about the current political climate.

Five: What it says, I think, is that a lot of people in this country are being driven by the love of money - which is, I would argue, the root of all kinds of evil. To echo something I said during my (brief, ill-fated, facetious) youtube Presidential campaign, "People vote with their wallets." This love of money and the fear it implies has been responsible for a whole lot of the ugliness we've been dishing out all over ourselves, others, and the Good Earth.

This money-love has been vociferously encouraged and adopted by the nominally Christian "Church" with which I still, despite myself, tend to associate. It's garbage, and it has to stop.

Jesus Fatigue

2011-10-04T06:58:00.000-07:00

I saw a man remove Jesus from his pocket

like some well-worn, snot-encrusted handkerchief

stuck all over with laundry lint;

saw him wave it in another man's face;

saw him place it there to make his point and win his way

and say that he and Jesus

were pocket-close.

I saw a woman do the same

and another man, another woman

a preacher,

a plumber,

a climber of cracks and a cracker of backs.

I saw them

- all of them -

mounting unprovoked attacks

as they bore their snot-rag flags,

their handkerchief Jesus

in red and white and spangled blue

into the faces of those they never knew.

And, true,

they did say "Jesus" awful loud,

and awful proud and well

as they damned those who didn't

off to hell.

But I,

I began to suspect their snot-rag Jesus

- their linted handkerchief Savior -

was not at all the Jesus they believed,

was little more than

a little flag of fabric,

the mucus-marked reminder

of their cold,

their uncalculated

fear.

Film Review: 50/50

2011-10-02T17:20:00.000-07:00

If you know Seth Rogen, as I do (if not in the “Biblical” sense, then at least in the “I’ve seen a few movies he’s been in” kind of way), then you know the guy’s a bit of a potty mouth. He grabs an already vulgar thing and then adds his own nasty Canadian flavor to make it worse (being 50% Canadian, I can say that), taking the utterly unprecedented (insert sarcasm here) comedic tack of shattering any and all rules of propriety in the process.

Rogen is one gross dude, that’s for sure... but he does it with such a jolly grin and kindly demeanor that you still can’t help but like the guy. You end up believing he is not doing it because he is a gross guy, but rather because he wants you to have the pleasure of believing there’s someone out there who is as perverse as you are on the inside – someone willing to actually come out and say the things that you, at your worst, sometimes think. He makes himself the fool, so you can laugh and feel yourself a sage.

In 50/50, Rogen plays Kyle, the foolish foil to Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s straight man. JGL is perfect as Adam, a guy dealing with a particularly nasty cancer prognosis, and together they are a match made in comedic heaven. It works. Not only is it a very funny movie (don’t take your mom, though, or you’ll be ashamed you laughed), but it also hits a range of other notes as well, bringing the viewer all along the scale, from laughter through to tears.

Through it all, Rogen is, well, “roguish,” indulging in the sort of dirty, low-brow humor we have come to expect of our northern friend. It is a self-aware vulgarity, however, that digs past the surface and into the heart of the matter, affirming such virtues as honesty, transparency, and above all, loyalty and love in the face of adversity.

In the end, Rogen’s character comes off as not so much a fool, but rather a moral center for the whole ordeal. And although his own moral choices may perhaps be suspect, we are left with the understanding that when it comes down to it, abiding love is far more important than appropriate behavior.

--

Article first published as Movie Review: 50/50 on Blogcritics.

you and me together, fighting for our love

2011-09-27T08:31:00.000-07:00

One of the first things my son said to me when he got back from his weekend trip to the mountains was that he did not like me.

He wasn't upset when he said it - there was no flailing of limbs, no vale of tears. He just sat there in his car seat and calmly, reasonably informed me of the fact. Granted, I had just removed him, without his consent, from the small mountain of toys and new step-bro he has at his mother's house... but still.

Changing lanes here, I have to confess that I have been watching a vulgar, rather filthy TV show on Hulu. It's called Louie. It is "intended only for mature audiences," so before watching, I have to type in a password and confirm that I know I'm a dirty pig. I do it anyway.

I do it because (in addition to the fact that it's flippin' hilarious) in the very first episode I watched, Louie CK (creator, producer, writer and titular character) is talking with his six-year-old daughter, and she informs him that she loves mommy more than him, because the food is better at her house. Now, I am a passable cook, so I don't worry too much about losing my son's affections to a more appealing meal plan. But the principal of the thing is the same, and Louie's oddly-paced, critically-acclaimed comedy struck an authentic note - as did his response to his daughter, which was to wait until she turned away and then tell her he loved her while flipping the birdie at her retreating back.

I did not flip my son off. Instead, I stifled the rush of emotions and told him the truth - that I loved him very much, even when he didn't love me back. And then I tightened my grip on the wheel and kept driving, proud as all get-out of my extreme display of righteousness in the face of adversity. It wasn't, though (righteousness, that is), because his comment was just one statement out of many.

I know that he was just doing as kids do. I know there have been times when he's been with his mother and has told her he'd prefer to be with me (usually, of course, when he's not getting exactly what he wants). And although there is always a little fresh pain when those sorts of comments are addressed to me, it is not so great that it can't be balmed by his subsequent, un-solicited assurances that he loves me.

It made me wonder, though, if I could be so calm and kind if I didn't know that kids are kids, or if I hadn't the regular assurances of his love to bolster me up. If I've said it twice, I've said it two times: I'm not a particularly fabulous guy. It seems that every time I become convinced of how awesome and loving I am, something else comes along to remind me that it is fear and insecurity - not grace and love - that tend to drive my actions.

It's tempting, in those moments, to spiral downward into despair and self-loathing. Sometimes, I do. Other times, though, I remember that grace and love come in tiny, moment-sized packages. I remember that a loving life is lived right now, not in some imaginary, impossible ideal uber-package.

So even if I'm scared, and even if it's tempting, at times, to see myself as being in some sort of love-competition, I do know that love doesn't work that way, and that making tiny choices against fear and insecurity erodes them, inexorably, to the nothing that they really are.

when sun drips like liquid gold

2011-09-26T09:30:00.000-07:00

View out my back door: mid-rainshower at sundown last night... and I did not digitally manipulate the colors.

fini

2011-09-23T17:32:00.000-07:00

Historians of Hollywood, take note. After having worked long and hard in spare minutes spread over a year, and after having written all this live-long day: at approximately 8:30 in the p.m. on September 23, 2011, Josh Barkey finished the first draft of his first ever screenplay, "Supernova."

And the peasants rejoiced.

please, sir... I want some more.

2011-09-21T04:43:00.000-07:00

It's always so easy to look at other people and recognize that they are workaholics.

Never mind that in addition to a full-time job as a high school teacher, I am also currently working on a freelance film writing project for Focul Point productions (with more to come, including possibly some work as an interviewer). Never mind that for some reason I committed myself to writing a short story a week for an entire year. Never mind that I am on page 77 (out of 110) of the the rough draft for my first feature-length screenplay, or that I am trying to learn how to use Final Cut Pro, play the ukulele, and become a more proficient photographer.

What matters is that I would also like to learn to play the piano and develop a regular weight training and exercise program for myself, while maintaining loose contact with dozens of remote friends and close contact with a few local ones. What matters is that given all the time I have to spend on frivolities like cooking, cleaning, eating and sleeping; and the fact that I have a three-year-old who requires near-constant attention when I have him (which is awesome, by the way)... well, there just isn't enough time.

I'm not a workaholic, I've just been handed a clock with too few minutes on it.

I get anxious about this sometimes. I think, "live is big and beautiful and wonderful. There is so much to do and experience and contribute and love - what if I miss something?" This anxiety drives me to put down my writing and my son and my ukulele and my final cut pro, and to just sort of meander. It grows into fear, and before I know it the weight of my own mortality is pressing down upon me. I become aware, suddenly, of the miles and miles of atmosphere stacked high above my head.

Sometimes, though, when I am afraid, I remember that I don't have to be. I grasp onto that faith I hold, the hope that this, now - while amazing - is not the end. That death is not the final word. That I can rest, occasionally, without being afraid of lost moments - lost days - lost life.

Oh, death... where is your sting? It is everywhere, and I am stung.

Stung, but free.

Oh, Snap!

2011-09-19T08:02:00.000-07:00

Last Friday, I took my students on a walking photography expotition to downtown Matthews, NC. I try to practice what I preach, so here are a few of the shots I took...

I love objects with history.

Flower stop

and of course, you have to stop for horseplay

Not a particularly great photo, but it made me smile to see this old dog and its pet.

The conspiracy is a conspiracy!

2011-09-15T08:51:00.000-07:00

A friend of mine recently told me with some conviction that it was the American government that had taken out the twin towers on 9/11. The media was in on it, she said, and eyewitnesses had been silenced. My first instinct was to laugh. Well, point and laugh, actually - because what's funnier than someone who believes something different?

I didn't argue with her or ask her reasons. First, because of the steel in her eye, and second, because I don't much care. Sure, I know it matters a lot whether or not the U.S. government faked a terrorist attack and a moon landing, and whether "a secret society of the five wealthiest people known as the Pentavirate run everything in the world, including the newspapers, and meet tri-annually at a secret mansion in Colorado known as... 'The Meadows' ... (The Queen, the Vatican, the Gettys, the Rothschilds, and Coronel Sanders)."

But I chose long ago not to get riled up about things I'm not going to work to change. I'm an artist, a storyteller, and a teacher - not a disbander of secret societies.

While I am open to the possibility that the nuttier theories of the world are based on fact, even if the justification for the Middle-Eastern invasion that jacked up the American economy and bloated an already gargantuan military-industrial complex was a crock of bull (which, I hear tell, it was - Imaginary WMDs, anyone?), I still don't feel the need to get upset and chase conspiracy theories around the internet, because the fact is, they're not necessary.

It doesn't take a powerful, string-pulling elite to get humans to agree to ugly, stupid things. All it takes is human nature. Humans are generally selfish, greedy oinkers, who use whatever power and money they have to protect it and get more. We are fear-driven lemmings who - when the chips are down and threats loom large - will believe anything that allows us to look elsewhere for the villain who, most likely, resides squarely within.

Even a pacifist, liberal(ish), pinko-commie, hippie-wannabe such as myself is complicit in some ways in the mindset that allows this country to bomb poor people and maintain the status quo. I drive the roads and reap the benefits of the most glutted, obesely wealthy nation in the history of the world (thrift stores, anyone? woot! woot!).

There's a conspiracy, sure, but it ain't no secret. The conspiracy is us.

Drawing 101: How to Fall in Love with a Chair

2011-09-07T17:33:00.000-07:00

One of the best things about the teaching profession is that it regularly confronts you with your own stupidity and ignorance. Which, as any proactive self-help aficionado will tell you, is just another opportunity for growth.

I sidestep a lot of that growth by being the art teacher in a world where art is seen as a second-tier discipline, and no one expects the art teacher to know or say much of anything. Nonetheless, confronted every day by a captive audience used to bad puns and staunch authoritarianism, I find myself inspired more often than is wise to open my mouth and let all my weird, outsider presuppositions leak out.

As a result, I inevitably end up saying stupid things, things that today's whip-smart youth are not always willing to overlook. I get called on my stupidity and then - sometimes - I grow.

Yesterday's revelation was more general in nature, however. I was standing there blathering on about the basic principles of drawing, when it suddenly occurred to me that I've been going about the whole thing the wrong way. Oh sure, over the past three years of teaching I have taught a lot of lovely, artsy-fartsy things, but I am afraid I have to admit to one great big, glaring stupidity: my art class has been missing its soul.

Let me 'splain.
No, there is too much - let me sum up:
It all comes back to drawing.

Observational drawing is the foundation of all visual art forms. It is the skeleton around which are wrapped painting and photography, sculpture, design and film-making. But drawing is not, as some would imagine, a superpower. It is not only for special people, nor is it the sole province of those with well-coordinated fingers. In fact, drawing has very little to do with fingers at all, and everything to do with the mind. It is about seeing.

Georgia O'Keefe once said that "in a way, nobody ever sees a flower really, it is so small, we haven't time - and to see takes time." The job of the visual artist, then, is to take the time to see things. And believe it or not, this is not as easy - nor as inevitable - as you might think.

The world we live in is astonishingly, endlessly complex, and for most of us, sight is the primary sense by which we perceive that complexity. It is so complex, in fact, that our minds must find shortcuts, shortcuts that have been described with the word "symbol" (which is itself a symbol for the concept, "symbol"). But while symbols are useful tools that can help us cope with the infinite complexity of our universe, they can only ever be generalizations. They are tools and touch-points - never the "thing itself."

Allow me to illustrate... with an illustration. If you were my student and I were to sit you down and demand that you draw an eye, you might draw something like this:

This is not because you don't know what an eye looks like. Rather, it is because you have never really looked very closely at an eye with the intent to understand it. Your mind therefore takes the easy way out, and provides you with a vastly simplified symbol to stand in for the information it can't be bothered to provide.

The fact is, your mind is capable of making incredibly sophisticated distinctions between the most minute eye-variations, and of using that information intuitively, subconsciously compiling it with all the other information available from a face so that you are in no danger whatsoever of making what seems (to me) to be the fairly easy mistake of confusing my face with that of, say, Brad Pitt (who, compared to any crustacean or herbaceous plant, is pretty much my doppelganger).

You do all this subconsciously, and in our very pragmatic, industrially-minded culture, the subconscious is where most real seeing stays.

The problems start to arise when we begin to actually believe in our symbols, to believe that they are not symbols at all, but "the things in themselves." In doing this, we turn the entire world into an elaborate set of objects: controllable, man-made things that can be used and manipulated however we please.

Take you, for example. To me, you are a "reader," and although on some level I know that you are as irreducibly complex as I am, for the purposes of our interaction today, it is much easier for me to think of you as a simplified concept, and to lump you with all my other readers.

This is okay, I suppose, because if I were to expend my energy trying to get to know each and every one of you, it would take every moment of the rest of my life and not only would I never have time to write anything, I would also still ultimately fail, because (and here is the awesome part) you are not static. You change. As do I.

What drawing does is it attempts, by really looking and seeing, to fight back against the ugly things - like dehumanization, racism and selfishness - that are the inevitable by-products of the objectification process.

But just as we objectify people and things in order to avoid having to deal with them in all their complexity, so does the opposite action have the opposite effect. If, by drawing it, you can take the time to slow down enough to really see a flower, an eye, or a chair, then what you are doing is expressing love for them. You are saying, in a sense, that they are worth the time you must expend to in your effort to see them.

In doing this, you fall in love. You set yourself aside and - in dying to yourself - begin to come alive to the wonder that is the world around you.

Sure, you can approach drawing as but another mechanical skill to be taught and learned and sure, it will help you if you do. The human brain does best when it does not view the entire world as objects, and as your mind becomes more holistically engaged, your capacity to creatively meet the demands of a fast-changing world will no doubt increase. You were not designed, after all, to live life with an artificially bifurcated mind.

But in the (misquoted) words of a dude I like very much,

"If you draw with the mastery of gods;
if you become a profound copying machine, capable of seeing and recording the tiniest details on your way to an advanced degree in the applied science of picture-making;
if you use your skills to get money, a hot spouse, and smokin' cars;
if you do all manner of artistic awesomeness, but have not learned how to love... well, then, what's the point? Everything you will have done will have been useless, and you'll be little more than a forgettable bit of pop-culture drivel."

My epiphany yesterday was not a sudden realization of the importance of love. Nor was it the discovery of my own love of drawing, and visual arts as a whole. Rather, it was the realization that I am not here just to teach a few kids how to see better so that they can draw better, impress their friends, win contests, and make me look good as a teacher.

Rather, I am here to teach them to see better so that they can learn how to love better. If, because they have been in my class, they learn how to take the time to see and love a flower, then perhaps they can also learn to love a tree or a forest. And perhaps the next time they are tempted to profile, simplify and objectify some other person, they will instead pause, see, and fall in love.

read this (pretty please)...

2011-09-03T17:05:00.000-07:00

If you kinda-sorta like this blog but are A. a person who thinks I'm a bleeding heretic and wonder how I dare claim any kind of affinity with Christianity, or B. a person who thinks I seem in my writing to be far too intelligent to be a Christian; then I think it would be a good idea for you to go to This Blog and go read This Post and listen to the podcast, in which Ben Myers - the author of the blog - explains why he believes in God. It will take about twenty minutes of your time, but it ought to clear up any confusion.

Although the blog, Faith and Theology, is perhaps one of my favorites more for its humor, irreverence, and creativity than for its theological insight, in this case the author presents what to my mind is about the only argument for Faith in God and, specifically, Jesus, that I think is really worth making. If you are person A or person B, I'm going to go so far as to beseech you to listen. It'll be worth it, I pinky-swear.

can you recommend any good films?

2011-09-03T14:57:00.000-07:00

Late this past summer vacation, I decided to start writing down the movies I was watching. I'm getting into film-making, so I figured it might be good to keep a record for my, er, records.

Then I decided to write down what I could remember of the movies I'd already seen, and that's when it got a bit crazy. I quickly realized that if I randomly wrote down the names of movies as they occurred to me, it wouldn't be to long before I would have to re-read the entire list to make sure I wasn't repeating myself.

So I decided to get systematic. I went on Wikipedia and searched "Major Film Studios," then clicked on each in turn and scrolled through the list presented of movies they had put out. It took a very. long. time, but eventually I did it. I missed a few, I'm sure. There were films whose names I'd forgotten, there were indie and foreign films that weren't on that list, and there was the simple fact that copying names from a list of thousands numbs the brain to the point where it won't work anymore. Nonetheless, I did it.

I figured that for my list to be useful, I really ought to alphabetize it so I could later slot in forgotten films without having to read the entire thing to make sure I wasn't repeating myself; but the thought of all that typing made my brain hurt. Then my sister came to town. I thought - "she types fast... and what better way for her to spend her vacation than doing a mind-numbing task for her darling older brother?" It was a match made in film-history heaven.

What follows is that list, copied from an excel spreadsheet. What I'd like from you is this: Read the whole dang thing, and tell me what essential films I've missed. Why? Because you're my friend, right? My sister typed the dang thing. It's the least you can do.

300 2007 (500) Days of Summer 2009 10 Things I Hate About You 1999 101 Dalmatians 1961 12 Angry Men 1997 12 Monkeys 1995 127 hours 2010 16 Blocks 2006 200 Cigarettes 1999 21 grams 2003 3:10 to Yuma 2007 8 Seconds 1994 A Beautiful Mind 2001 A Bug's Life 1998 A Few Good Men 1992 A Goofy Movie 1995 A History of Violence 2005 A Knight's Tale 2001 A Midsummers Night's Dream 1999 A Mighty Wind 2003 A Perfect Murder 1998 A River Runs Through It 1992 A Time to Kill 1996 A walk in the clouds 1995 A.I. Artificial Intelligence 2001 About a Boy 2002 Ace Ventura: pet Detective 1994 Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls 1995 Adaptation 2002 Aeon Flux 2005 Against the Ropes 2004 Air Force One 1997 Airheads 1994 Airplane! 1980 Aladdin 1992 Alex and Emma 2003 Alfie 2004 Ali 2001 Alice in Wonderland 1951 Alien vs. Predator 2004 All the Right Moves 1983 Almost Famous 2000 Almost Heroes 1998 Alvin and the Chipmunks 2007 Always 1989 Amelie 2004 American Gangster 2007 American History X 1999 American Outlaws 2001 An American Tail 1986 an American Tail; Fivel Goes West 1991 Anaconda 1997 analyze That 2002 Analyze This 1999 Anastasia 1997 Angela's Ashes 1999 Angels and Demons 2009 Angels in the Outfield 1994 Anger Management 2003 Angus 1995 Animal Kingdom 2010 Annie 1982 Anti Trust 2001 Antoine Fisher 2002 Apollo 13 1995 Armageddon 1998 Arsenic & Old Lace 1944 As Good as it Gets 1997 As it is in Heaven 2004 Assault on Precinct 12 2005 At War with the Army 1950 Avatar 2009 Awakenings 1990 babe 1995 baby Geniuses 1998 Babylon AD 2008 Back to the Future 1985 Back to the Future II 1989 Back to the Future III 1990 Backdraft 1991 Bait 2000 Bambi 1942 Band of Brothers 2001 Bandits 2001 Batman 1989 Batman and Robin 1997 batman Begins 2005 Batman Forever 1995 Batman Returns 1992 Batteries not included 1987 Be Cool 2005 Be Kind, Rewind 2008 Beauty & the Beast 1991 Beethoven 1992 Beethoven's 2nd 1993 Behind Enemy lines 2001 Being John Malkovitch 1999 Ben Hur 1959 Benji 1974 Benji the Hunted 1987 Benny and Joon 1993 Beowulf 2007 Beverly Hills Ninja 1997 Beyond the Sea 2004 Big 1988 Big Daddy 1999 Big Fish 2003 Big Red 1962 Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey 1991 Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure 1989 Billy Madison 1995 bioDome 1996 Bird on a Wire 1990 Black Beauty 1971 Black Hawk Down 2001 Black Knight 2001 Black Sheep 1996 Blade Runner 1982 Blades of Glory 2007 Blast from the Past 1999 Bloodsport 1988 Bloodsport II 1996 Blow 2001 Blue Hawaii 1961 Body of Lies 2008 Boiler Room 2000 Bottle Rocket 1996 Boy's Town 1938 Brat Patrol 1986 Braveheart 1995 Breakfast at Tiffany's 1961 Breaking Away 1979 Breaking Away 1979 Brokeback Mountain 2005 Broken Arrow 1996 Brokendown Palace 1999 Bruce Almighty 2002 Bullworth 1998 Burn After Reading 2008 Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid 1969 Caddyshack 1980 Can't Buy Me Love 1987 Can't Hardly Wait 1998 Capote 2005 Captain's Courageous 1937 Captains Corelli's Mandolin 2001 Carlito's Way 1993 Casino Royale 2006 Castaway 2000 Catch a Fire 2006 Catch and Release 2007 Catch Me if you Can 2002 Cats and Dogs 2001 Catwoman 2004 Cedar Rapids 2010 Chain Reaction 1996 Changing Lanes 2002 Chariots of Fire 1981 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory 2005 Charlie Bartlett 2007 Charlie's Angels 2000 Charlotte's Web 1973 Chicken Run 2000 Children of Men 2006 Chitty Chitty Bang Bang 1968 Chronicles of Narnia, L, W, W 2005 Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian 2008 Cinderella 1950 Cinderella Man 2005 City of Angels 1998 City of Ember 2008 City of Joy 1992 Clear and Present Danger 1995 Click 2006 Cliffhanger 1993 Closer 2004 Cloudy with a chance of Meatballs 2009 Clueless 1995 Collateral 2004 Con Air 1997 Congo 1995 Conspiracy Theory 1997 Contact 1997 Cool Hand Luke 1967 Cool Runnings 1993 Cool Runnings Corpse Bride 2005 Corrina, Corrina 1994 Courage Under Fire 1996 Coyote Ugly 2000 Crash 2004 Crazy Heart 2009 Crazy People 1990 Crocodile Dundee 1986 Crocodile Dundee II 1988 Crocodile Dundee in L.A. 2001 Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon 2000 D.A.R.Y.L. 1985 D2 1994 Daisy Miller 1974 Dan in Real Life 2007 Dave 1993 Davy Crocket 1955 Days of Thunder 1990 Dead Poets Society 1989 Deep Impact 1998 Definitely, Maybe 2008 Deja Vu 2006 DeLovely 2004 Demolition Man 1993 Dennis the Menace 1993 Desperado 1995 Despicable Me 2010 Die another Day 2002 Die Hard 1988 Die Hard II 1990 Die Hard with a Vengeance 1995 Dirty Work 1998 District 9 2010 Doc Hollywood 1991 Dogma 1999 Domri Brasco 1997 Double Impact 1991 Double Jeopardy 1999 Dr. Dolittle 1998 Dr. Dr. Seuss's Horton Hears a Who! 2008 Dr. Seuss How the Grinch Stole Christmas 2000 Dragon Heart 1996 Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story 1993 Dragonfly 2002 Dream Girls 2006 Driving Miss Daisy 1989 Drumline 2002 Dude, Where's my Car? 2000 Dudley Do Right 1999 Duma 2005 Dumb and Dumber 1994 Dumb and Dumberer 2003 Dumbo 1941 Dune 1984 Dunston Checks in 1996 Eagle Eye 2008 Ed TV 1999 Ed Wood 1994 Edward Scisserhands El Aura 2005 El Mariachi 1993 Elf 2003 Empire of the Sun 1987 Empire Records 1995 Enchanted 2007 Encino Man 1992 Enemy at the Gates 2001 Enemy of the State 1998 Entrapment 1999 Envy 2004 Eraser 1996 Erin Brockovitch 2000 Ernest Goes to Camp 1987 Ernest Goest to Jail 1990 Ernest Saves Christmas 1998 Ernest scared Stupid 1991 Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind 2004 Evan Almighty 2007 Evan Almighty 2007 Ever After 1998 Evolution 2001 Face/off 1997 Fahrenheit 451 1966 Failure to Launch 2006 Fantasia 1940 Fantastic Four 2005 Fantastic Mr. Fox 2009 Far and Away 1992 Fast Five 2011 Fast Times at Ridgemont High 1982 Father of the Bride 1991 Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas 1998 Fern Gully 1992 Ferris Bueller's Day off 1986 Fight Club 1999 Finding Forrester 2000 Finding Nemo 2003 Firefox 1982 First Knight 1995 Flags of our Fathers 2006 Flight of the Navigator 1986 Flubber 1998 Flushed Away 2006 Fly Away Home 1996 Forever Young 1992 Forgetting Sarah Marshall 2008 Forrest Gump 1994 Four Brothers 2005 Fracture 2007 Freaky Friday 1976 Free Willy 1993 French Kiss 1995 Frequency 2000 Friday 1995 Frost/Nixon 2008 Fun with Dick and Jane 2005 Funny Girl 1968 Funny People 2009 Garden State 2004 Garfield: The Movie 2004 Gattaca 1997 George of the Jungle 1997 Get Shorty 1995 Get Smart 2008 Ghostbusters 1984 Ghostbusters, Part II 1989 Gidget 1959 Gladiator 2000 Glory 1989 Glory Road 2006 Godzilla 1998 Gone in 60 Seconds 2000 Good Morning, Vietnam 1987 Gran Torino 2009 Grease 1978 Great Expectations 1998 Green Card 1990 Green Zone 2010 Grosse Pointe Blank 1997 Groundhog Day 1993 Guarding Tess 1994 Hackers 1995 Hamlet 1991 Hamlet 2000 Hancock 2008 Hanna 2011 Hannibal 2001 Hans Christian Anderson 1952 Happy Feet 2006 Happy Gilmore 1996 Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets 2002 Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows P.I. 2010 Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire 2005 Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince 2009 Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone 2001 Harry Potter Order of the Phoenix 2007 Harry Potter Prisoner of Azkaban 2004 Hart's War 2002 Harvey 1950 He's Just Not that Into You 2009 Heat 1995 Heist 2001 Hellboy 2004 Hellboy II: The Golden Army 2008 Herbie Goes Bananas 1980 Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo 1977 Herbie Rides Again 1974 Hidalgo 2004 High Fidelity 2000 Highlander 1986 Hitch 2005 Hitman 2007 Hollow Man 2000 Home Alone 1990 Home Alone 2 1992 Homeward Bound 1993 hook 1991 Hope Floats 1998 Hot Shots! 1991 House of Flying Daggers 2004 House of Sand and Fog 2003 Houseguest 1995 How to lose a guy in 10 days 2002 How to Train Your Dragon 2010 I am Legend 2007 I Am Sam 2001 I Heart Hucklabees 2004 I Love Trouble 1994 I Spy 2003 I, Robot 2004 I.Q. 1994 Ice Age 2002 Ice Age: The Meltdown 2006 Idiocracy 2006 In America 2003 IN Bruges 2008 In God's Hands 1998 IN the Line of Fire 1993 Inception 2010 independence Day 1996 Indiana Jones and Crystal Skull 2008 Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade 1989 Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom 1984 Inglorious Bastards 2009 Innerspace 1987 Inside Man 2006 Invictus 2009 Invincible 2006 Ip Man 2008 Ip Man 2 2010 Iron Eagle 1986 Iron Eagle II 1988 Iron Man 2008 Iron Man II 2010 Iron Will 1994 Ironclad 2001 It Might Get Loud 2008 It's a Wonderful Life 1946 It's Kindof a Funny Story 2010 Jack 1996 James and the Giant Peach 1996 Jarhead 2005 Jerry Maguire 1996 JFK 1991 Joe Dirt 2001 Joe vs. the Volcano 1990 John Q 2001 Johnny English 2002 Johnny Mueumonic 1995 Judge Dredd 1995 Jumanji 1995 Jumper 2008 Jumpin' Jack Flash 1986 Juno 2007 Jurassic Park 1993 Jurassic Park III 2001 Just Like hEaven 2005 K-19: The Widow Maker 2002 K-Pax 2001 Karate Kid 1984 Keeping the Faith 2000 Keith 2008 Kick-Ass 2010 King Authur 2004 King King 2005 King Ralph 1991 Kingdom of Heaven 2005 Kiss Kiss Bang Bang 2005 Kiss the Girls 1997 Knight and Day 2010 Knocked UP 2007 Kokowaah Kung Pow 2002 Kung-Fu Panda 2008 L'Illusionniste 2010 Labyrinth 1986 Lady & the Tramp 1955 Lady & the Tramp 1955 Ladyhawke 1984 Lara Croft: Tomb Raider 2001 Lars and the Real Girl 2007 Lassie Come Home 1943 Last Action Hero 1993 Layer Cake 2005 Legends of the Fall 1994 Lemony Snicket... 2004 Les Miserables 1995 Lethal Weapon 1987 Lethal weapon 2 1989 Lethal Weapon 3 1992 Lethal Weapon 4 1998 Liar, Liar 1997 Lilo & Stitch 2002 Limitless 2011 Little Miss Sunshine 2006 Live Free or Die Hard 2007 Lord of the rings, Fellowship of the Ring 2001 Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King 2003 Lord of War 2005 Lords of Dogtown 2005 Lost in Translation 2003 Love Actually 2002 Love Happens 2009 Love in the Time of Cholera 2007 Lucky Number Sleven 2006 Luther 2003 Machete Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa 2008 Magnolia 1999 Maid in Manhattan 2002 Maid of Honor 2008 Major Payne 1995 Man on Fire 2004 Mary Poppins 1964 Master & Commander 2002 Master and Commander 2003 Matchstick Men 2003 Maverick 1994 Max Payne 2008 McHale's Navy 1964 Me, Myself, and Irene 2000 Meet Joe Black 1998 Meet the Fockers 2004 Meet the Parents 2000 Meet the Robinsons 2007 Megamind 2010 Memphis Belle 1990 Men IN Black 1997 Men In Black II 2002 Men of Honor 2000 Michael Clayton 2007 Michael Collins 1996 Mickey Blue Eyes 1999 Mighty Joe Young 1998 Milk 2008 Minority Report 2002 Miracle on 34th Street 1994 Miss Congeniality 2000 Miss Potter 2007 Mission Impossible III 2006 Mission: Impossible 1996 Mission: Impossible II 2000 Monsters, Inc 2001 Moon 2009 Mortal Combat 1995 Moulin Rouge! 2001 Mr Brooks 2007 Mr. and Mrs. Smith 2005 Mr. Belvedere Goes to College 1949 Mr. Belvedere Rings the Bell 1951 Mr. Deeds 2002 Mr. Holland's Opus 1995 Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium 2007 Mrs. Doubtfire 1993 Much Ado About Nothing 1993 Mulan 1998 Munich 2005 Muppet Treasure Island 1996 Muppets from Space 1999 Murder at 1600 1997 My Best Friend's Wedding 1997 My Cousin Vinny 1992 My Fair Lady 1964 My Side of the Mountain 1969 Mystery Men 1999 Mystic River 2003 Nacho Libre 2006 Nanny Mcphee 2006 Nanny Mcphee Returns 2010 Napoleon Dynamite 2004 National Treasure: Book of Secrets 2007 Nell 1994 Never been Kissed 1999 Never Cry Wolf 1983 Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist 2008 Nick of Time 1995 Night at the Museum 2006 Night at the Museum 2006 North By Northwest 1959 Not Without My Daughter 1991 Notting Hill 1999 Nueve Reinas 2002 O Brother, Where Art Thou? 2000 Ocean's Eleven 2001 Ocean's Thirteen 2007 Ocean's Twelve 2004 Of Mice and Men 1992 Off the Map 2003 Office Space 1999 Old School 2003 Old Yeller 1957 Oliver & Company 1988 Once 2007 Once Upon a Time in Mexico 2003 Open Season 2006 Operation Dumbo Drop 1955 Opportunity Knocks 1990 Orange County 2002 Oscar 1991 Outbreak 1995 Over the Hedge 2006 Passenger 57 1992 Patch Adams 1998 Patriot Games 1992 Paul 2011 Pay it Forward 2000 Payback 1999 Paycheck 2003 Pearl Harbor 2001 Penelope 2006 Pete's Dragon 1977 Peter Pan 1953 Peter Pan 2002 Phenomenon 1996 Philadelphia 1993 Phone Booth 2003 Pineapple Express 2008 Pinnocchio 1950 Pirates of the Caribbean 2003 Pirates of the Caribbean II 2006 Pitch Black 2000 Planes, Trains, and Automobiles 1987 Planet 51 2010 Planet of the Apes 1968 Planet of the Apes 2001 Pleasantville 1998 Point Break 1991 Pollyanna 1960 Powder 1995 Predator 1987 Predator II 1990 Predators 2010 Presumed Innocent 1990 Priceless 2006 Prime 2005 Proof of Life 2000 Pure Luck 1991 Quantum of Solace 2008 Quigley Down Under 1990 Quiz Show 1994 Race to Witch Mountain 2009 Rachel Getting Married 2008 Radio 2003 Raiders of the lost Ark 1981 Raising Arizona 1987 Rango 2011 Ransom 1996 Rat Race 2001 ratatouille 2007 Ray 2004 Reality Bites 1994 Rear Window 1954 Regarding Henry 1991 Reign of Fire 2002 Reign over me 2007 Remember the Titans 2000 Renaissance Man 1994 Repo Men 2010 Rescue Dawn 2007 Revolutionary Road 2008 Rio 2011 Road to Perdition 2002 Robin Hood: Men in Tights 1993 Robinhood: Prince of Thieves 1991 Robots 2005 Romancing the Stone 1984 Romeo and Juliet 1996 Ronin 1998 Roxanne 1987 Rudo y Cursi 2009 Rudy 1993 Run, Lola, Run 1999 Runaway Bride 1999 Runaway Jury 2003 Rush Hour 1998 Rush Hour 2 2001 Rush Hour 3 2007 Rushmore 1999 S.W.A.T. 2003 Sabrina 1995 Sahara 2005 Salt 2010 Sarah, Plain & Tall 1991 Save the Last Dance 2001 Saving private Ryan 1998 School For Scoundrels School Ties 1992 Scott Pilgrim vs. the World 2010 Scrooged 1988 Seabusicuit 2002 Searching for Bobby Fischer 1993 Second hand Lions 2003 Seven Brides for Seven Brothers 1954 Seven Pounds 2008 Seven Years in Tibet 1997 Shanghai Nights 2003 Shanghai Noon 2000 Shark Tale 2004 Shawshank Redemption 1994 She's the Man 2006 Sherlock Holmes 2009 Shooter 2007 Short Circuit 1986 Short Circuit 2 1988 Shrek 2001 Signs 2002 Simon Birch 1999 Sister Act 1992 Sister Act 2 1993 Six Days, Seven Nights 1998 Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow 2004 Sleeping Beauty 1959 Sleepless in Seattle 1993 Slumdog Millionaire 2008 Small Soldiers 1998 Small Time Crooks 2000 Sneakers 1992 Snow White & 7 Dwarves 1938 So I married an Axe Murderer 1993 Something's Gotta Give 2003 Something's Gotta Give 2003 Somewhere 2008 Son in Law 1993 Space Jam 1996 Spaceballs 1987 Spanglish 2004 Spartacus 1960 Speed 1994 Speed 2: Cruise Control 1997 Sphere 1998 Spider Man 2002 Spiderman 2 2004 Spiderman 3 2007 Spies Like Us 1985 Spy Game 2001 Spy Hard 1996 Star Trek 2009 Star Trek Generations 1994 Star Trek: First Contact 1996 Star Trek: Nemesis 2002 Star Wars 1977 Star Wars II: Attack of the Clones 2002 Stardust 2007 Stargate 1994 Starsky and Hutch 2004 Start Trek IV 1986 Starwars III Revenge of the Sixth 2005 Starwars: Phantom Menace 1999 State and Main 2000 State of Play 2009 Stepmom 1998 Stepmom 1998 Stick It 2006 Strange Brew 1983 Super 8 2011 Superman 1978 Superman II 1981 Superman IV: the Quest for Peace 1987 Superman Returns 2006 Surf's Up 2007 Surrogates 2009 Sweet Home Alabama 2002 Swing Kids 1993 Swiss Family Robinson 1960 Swordfish 2001 Syriana 2005 Taken 2009 Taladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby 2006 Talk to Me 2007 Tangled 2010 Tango and Cash 1989 Tarzan 1999 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 1990 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II 1991 Terminator 1984 Terminator 2: Judgement Day 1991 Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines 2003 Terminator Salvation 2009 Thank you for Smoking 2006 That thing you do 1996 the 13th Warrior 1999 The 40 year old Virgin 2005 The Absent Minded Professor 1961 The Addams Family 1991 The Adjustment Bureau 2011 The Adventures of Robin-Hood 1938 The Adventures of RobinHood 1938 The Air up There 1994 The American 2010 The Apple Dumpling Gang 1975 The Apple Dumpling Gang Rides Again 1979 The Aristocrats 1970 The Associate 1996 The Aunt Bully 2006 The Avengers 1998 The Aviator 2004 The Beach 2000 The Beaver 2011 The Beverly Hillbillies 1993 The Big Hit 1998 the Big Kahuna 1999 The Big Lebowski 1988 The Black Balloon 2008 The Black Stallion 1979 The Blood Diamond 2006 The Blues Brothers 1980 The Bodyguard 1992 The Book of Eli 2010 The Bourne Identity 2002 The Bourne Supremacy 2004 The Bourne Ultimatum 2007 The Brady Bunch Movie 1995 The Breakfast Club 1985 The Bridge on the River Kuwai 1957 The Brother's Grimm 2005 The Bucket List 2007 The Burbs 1989 The Cat in the Hat 2002 The Chronicles of Riddick 2004 The Client 1994 The Constant Gardener 2005 The Count of Monte Cristo 2002 The Court Jester 1955 The curious Case of benjamin Button 2008 The Cutting Edge 1992 The Darjeeling Limited 2007 The Dark Knight 2008 The Davinci Code 2006 The day after Tomorrow 2004 The Day of the Jackal 1973 The Day the Earth Stood Still 2008 The Departed 2006 The Devil Wears Prada 2006 The Devil's Own 1997 The Edge 1997 The Emperor's Club 2002 The Emperor's New Groove 2000 The Empire Strikes Back 1980 The Fabulous Baker Boys 1989 The Family Man 2000 The Fast & the Furious 2001 The Fifth Element 1997 The Fighter 2010 The Firm 1993 The Fisher King 1991 The Flight of the Phoenix 1965 The Flight of the Phoenix 2004 The Fly 1986 The Forbidden Kingdom 2008 The Foreigner 2002 The Fountain 2006 The Fox and the Hound 1981 The Fugitive 1993 the Full Monty 1997 The Ghost and the Darkness 1996 The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo 2009 The Godfather 1972 The Godfather, Part II 1974 The Gods Must be Crazy 1984 The Gods Must be Crazy II 1990 The Good Shepherd 2006 The Goonies 1985 The Grapes of Wrath 1940 The Green Mile 1999 The Guns of Navarone 1961 The Hangover 2009 The Hitchhiker's Guide to eh Galaxy 2005 The Horse Whisperer 1998 The Hunt for the Red October 1990 The Hurricane 1999 The Incredible Hulk 2008 The Incredibles 2004 The Indian in the Cupboard 1995 The Indian in the Cupboard 1995 The Informant! 2009 The Insider 1999 The Inspector General 1959 The international 2009 The Interpreter 2005 The Island 2005 The Italian Job 2003 The Jackal 1997 The Jacket 2005 the Jerk 1979 The Jungle Book 1967 The Karate Kid, Part II 1986 The Kid 2000 The King and I 1956 The Kingdom 2007 The Kite Runner 2007 The Land Before Time 1988 The Land Before Time II 1994 The last King of Scotland 2006 The Last Mimzy 2007 The Last of the Mohicans 1992 The Last Samurai 2003 The Last Star-fighter 1984 The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen 2003 The Leftovers 1986 The Legend of Bagger Vance 2000 The Legend of Zorro 2005 The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou 2004 The Lincoln Lawyer 2011 The Lion King 1994 The Little Mermaid 1989 The Little Rascals 1994 The Lives of Others 2007 The Longest Yard 2005 The Lookout 2007 The Lord of the Rings: Two Towers 2003 The Lost World: Jurassic Park 1997 The Love Bug 1968 The Majestic 2001 The Man 2005 The Man From Snowy River 1982 The Man in the Iron Mask 1998 The Man Who Knew Too Little 1997 The man without a Face 1993 The Manchurian candidate 2004 The Manhattan Project 1986 The Mask 1994 The Mask of Zorro 1998 The Matrix 1999 The Matrix Reloaded 2003 The Matrix Revolutions 2003 The Men Who Stare at Goats 2009 The Merchant of Venice 2004 The meteor Man 1993 The Mighty Ducks 1992 The Missing 2003 The Motorcycle Diaries 2004 The Mummy 1999 The Muppet Christmas Carol 1992 The Muppet Movie 1979 The Muppets Take Manhattan 1984 The Musketeer 2001 The Name of the Rose 1986 The Negotiator 1998 The Net 1995 The Never ending Story 1984 The Nutty Professor 1963 The Nutty Professor 1996 The Old Man & the Sea 1958 The One 2001 The other Guys 2010 The Outsiders 1983 The Parent Trap 1961 The Patriot 2000 The Pelican Brief 1993 The Perfect Storm 2000 The Phantom 1996 The Phantom of the Opera 2005 The Pianist 2002 The Power of One 1992 The Prestige 2006 The Prince and Me 2004 The Princess and the Frog 2009 The Princess bride 1987 The Princess Diaries 2001 The Proposal 2009 The Pursuit of Happyness 2006 The Quick and the Dead 1995 The Rainmaker 1997 The Recruit 2003 The Red Badge of Courage 1951 The Reluctant Astronaut 1967 The Rescuers Down Under 1990 The Return of the Jedi 1983 The Right Stuff 1983 The River Wild 1994 The Rock 1996 The Royal Tenenbaums 2001 The Rundown 2003 The Russians are Coming X2 1966 The Saint 1997 The Sandlot 1992 The Santa Claus 1994 The Scarlet Pimpernel 1934 The School of Rock 2003 The Scorpion King 2002 The Secret Life of Bees 2008 The Sentinel 2006 The Shaggy DA 1971 The Shakiest Gun in the West 1968 The Siege 1998 The Sign of Zorro 1958 The Simpsons Movie 2007 The Sixth Sense 1999 The Social Network 2010 The Soloist 2009 The Sound of Music 1965 The Stepford Wives 2004 The Story of Robin Hood & his Merrie Men 1952 The Story of Us 1999 The String 1973 The Sum of All Fears 2002 The Sword in the Stone 1963 The taking of Pelham 123 2009 The Terminal 2004 The Thin Red Line 1998 The Thomas Crown Affair 1999 The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada 2005 The Three Musketeers 1973 The Three Musketeers 1993 The Town 2010 The Transporter 2002 The Truman Show 1998 The Tuxedo 2002 The United States of Leland 2003 The Untouchables 1987 The Village 2004 The War 1994 The Wedding Singer 1998 The Whole Ten Yards 2004 The Wizard of Oz 1939 The World is Not Enough 1999 The X-FIles 1998 The X-files: I want to Believe 2008 Thor 2011 Three Kings 1999 Tigerland 2000 Time Line 2003 Time-Cop 1994 Tin Cup 1996 Titan AE 2000 Titanic 1997 To Catch a Thief 1955 To Kill a Mockingbird 1962 To Sir, With Love 1967 Tombstone 1993 Tommy Boy 1995 Tomorrow Never Dies 1997 Top Gun 1986 Tora! Tora! Tora! 1970 Total Recall 1990 Toy Story 1995 Toy Story 2 1999 Toy Story 3 2010 Toys 1992 trading Places 1983 Training Day 2001 Transformers 2007 Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen 2009 Tristan and Isolde 2006 Tron Legacy 2010 Tropic Thunder 2008 Troy 2004 True Grit 2010 True Lies 1994 Tuck Everlasting 2002 Turner and Hooch 1989 Twisted 2004 Twister 1996 Two Week's Notice 2002 U-571 2000 U.S. Marshals 1998 Unbreakable 2000 Uncle Buck 1989 Under Siege 1992 Under Siege 2: Dark Territory 1995 Undercover Blues 1993 Unleashed 2005 Up 2009 Up in the Air 2009 V for Vendetta 2006 Valkyvre 2009 Van Helsing 2004 Vantage Point 2008 Wag the Dog 1997 Waking Life 2001 Waking Ned Divine 1998 Walk the Line 2005 Wall-E 2008 Wanted 2008 War of the Worlds 2005 Watchmen 2009 Waterboy 1998 Waterworld 1995 Wayne's World 1992 We Are Marshall 2006 We Were Soldiers 2002 What about bob 1991 What Women Want 2001 What's Eating Gilbert Grape 1993 Where the Wild things Are 2009 While you were Sleeping 1995 White Christmas 1954 White Fang 1991 White Noise 2005 White Squall 1996 Wild America 1997 Wild Hogs 2007 Willow 1988 Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory 1971 Windtalkers 2002 Wit 2001 X-Men 2000 X-Men Origins: Wolverine 2009 X-Men: First Class X-Men: The Last Stand 2006 X2 2003 XXX 2002 Y0ung Guns 1988 Yes Man 2008 You, Me & Depree 2006 You've Got Mail 1998 Young Einstein 1989 Young Guns II 1990 Yours, Mine and Ours 2005 Zoolander 2001 1986

the nobaby pill

2011-08-31T18:23:00.000-07:00

If ever you need confirmation that this is in fact a bonkers-gee-whiz-yahoo-nutso world we happen to live in, look no further than the oral contraceptives in your bathroom cabinet.

When doctors prescribe these little no-baby pills, they love to tell you that the risks are minimal for women who aren't planning to take them "forever and ever." They use this amorphous wording because they're protecting their legal be-heinies. They want you to think (even as they hand you a box of pills wrapped in a list of possible side effects that is quite literally longer than your forearm) that what they are saying is that these pills are perfectly healthy unless you are ridiculous enough take them right up until the day you stop menstruating. This is not, of course, entirely forthright of them... as you will discover when you try to sue.

At that point, the doctors (who are either getting some sort of kick-back from the Drug Magnates, or think you are stupid and want to save the world from the possibility that you might procreate) will claim that what they meant was that the pills are perfectly safe if you only take them for three and a half days--after that, it's anybody's guess.

Like everyone not living within the walls of the Vatican, I've known a number of women who have taken these little bad boys, and they have all--absolutely without exception--experienced some sort of adverse side effect or another. Why does this happen, you ask? Why do these pills mess with everybody who takes them? Well, because they "work" (most of the time) by screwing with a woman's hormone levels; in a sense convincing her body that it is perpetually pregnant and therefore will not be needing to "line the nest," so to speak.

But as anyone who has ever been pregnant (or who has ever had the privilege of waiting on an expectant human incubator) knows, being pregnant is not meant to last every single day until you stop menstruating. It's supposed to end after roughly nine months, with a whole lot of yelling and cursing and tearing, and in some cases even a bit of pooping (yes, really).

These pills mess with women's hormone levels. They cause their skin to darken. They make them bloat, grow hair in weird places, have heart attacks, and so on and so on. They even poison any babies they may happen to get pregnant with, despite all their chemical efforts. Because let's face it, folks... in the words of the movie Jurassic Park, "Life will find a way."

So why do women take them? Although some have to because of other medical reasons, I'm guessing that many do it because they don't want to get pregnant and their doctor says it's okay. I could argue that it's because men are dirtbags and pressure them into it so they can blame the woman if she gets pregnant, but I think, rather, that it's mostly because it's easier than the more effective methods (which usually involve knives cutting into human flesh), and less labor-intensive than the less-effective methods, which pretty much all (except for the rhythm thing, but who has time for that?) create a physical barrier between the two partners.

I don't really blame the doctors, either. They probably just figure that before too long, any pill-popping couple having sex is either married or is going to eventually want to get married--at which point sex is going to taper off to the point where the pill no longer makes any sense, and they will start using barrier methods when necessary (birthdays and...maybe... Christmas).

Does this mean I think everybody should go out and have fifteen babies, just like the good old days? Well, no. Not really. I'm too much of a depressive cynic for that. The world's a zoo right now, and before we bring in more animals, we ought to tidy up a bit.

But when fear of pregnancy (which might just sometimes be a fear of being confronted with our own selfishness) causes us to ignore the clear and present dangers staring us in the face, well... I think we've got some re-thinking to do.

In an ideal world, I tend to think it would probably be best that people have sex only within committed relationships, and only when both sex partners are willing to accept the truth: that any time the boy baby-maker travels into the near proximity of the girl baby-maker, the making of babies is always a possibility.

Of course, it's not an ideal world, and I know that a majority of people in this country figure, "no big whoop... I can always just 'take care of it' later if I happen to get pregnant," but I don't really buy it. It smacks too much of a selfish diminishment of love to me.

I guess you could say I think that people who use harmful drugs to lower the chances of baby-making are taking ugly risks with human lives--perhaps even primarily their own--and ultimately ignoring reality to chase after what seems to feel good in the moment. What better definition of insanity is there than that?

SPELUNK! (or in other words, sorry for dropping the, er, rock)

2011-08-25T18:58:00.000-07:00

Yep.

I am, in fact, aware that part of what makes a blog a blog is that you write on it regularly. I am also aware that my insanely-long "short" stories don't really count.

Here are my excuses: school's been finishing, it's been my birthday, I've been helping with the writing of some ethics training videos, I'm closing in on finishing up the treatment for my first feature-length screenplay, and I've been embroiled in teacher meetings for the start of the school year. To quote Prince Humperdink; "I'm swamped."

Things will settle, soon, and the Barkey Snarkey will once again flow freely. Pinky Swear.

the truth about funerals

2011-08-20T21:42:00.000-07:00

I probably should not say this, but I'm going to, anyways:

I really don't like it when people use other people's grief to push an agenda. I don't care what that agenda is - it could be saving kittens from napalm, for all I care - it's just wrong. Sick and wrong. The proper response to people who are grieving is grief. Period.

Today, I attended the memorial service of a man I loved. I did not know him well, but what I knew, I loved. He was a kind man who'd helped care for my son during a rough patch. He was a man who loved broadly and well, a man who loved self-sacrificially, even when it hurt.

At the memorial service, a mutual friend had been asked to speak. He shared a few passages from the Bible. He shared a few stories, and made everybody laugh. He shared a few truths, and made everybody cry. When he had finished, a bunch of other people who'd also loved this man got up as well. Mostly it was his family, talking through a bit more laughter and tears. I was a wreck.

There seemed to be an endless stream of people wanting to get up and publicly express their love for this man, and so after a while, one of his sons rose and said that in the interest of time, he'd like the pastor of the church where the service was being held to come up and close, and everybody could share their love for his daddy afterwards.

The pastor, a man with a too-nice suit and a lot of hair gel, got up and after a dramatic pause said, "Well, I had some notes, but I think they've pretty much said it all" and I thought:

"Thank you, God."

I had been worried, see, that some churchmudgeon was going to turn this tragedy into a cudgel. Before today, I had only ever sat through one other memorial service in my life, and it was for my grandmother a couple years ago. Our family sort of ran the show, that time, and it went as my grandmother would have liked, with lots of people who'd loved her sharing a lot of laughter and tears. Nonetheless, I grew up in the Christian Church, so I knew how these sorts of things tend to go, and I had hoped for a pass for this man's family in their hour of grief. It was not to be.

Apparently, the pastor was just lying for dramatic effect. I mean, it's possible that he changed his mind in a fraction of a second there about everything necessary having been said, but I've sat through enough itty-bitty-Jesus-sermon-lies to know a dramatic deception when I smell it.

So instead of letting the family speak out of their grief and pain of their father's faith and their own, he chose to go on for another thirty-five minutes out of his lack of grief about how certain he was about everything, forgetting pretty much everything that mattered.

Like mourning with those who mourn. Or that knowledge puffs up. Or that it's not cool to tell someone in pain that their father - who had been ripped from them in such an untimely fashion only two days before - would not want them to grieve, because this was a day of rejoicing and celebration.

He forgot, as well, that he was just a dude. A dude with a suit who did not know what lay beyond the grave, because no one knows, not really, which is why they call it faith. A dude with a suit who had the audacity to quote Ecclesiastes, make a dumb "Mommas and Poppas" joke intended to show his cultural savvy, and then completely ignore the possibility that this might be what that selfsame verse in Ecclesiastes was referring to when it said there was "a time to mourn."

Mourn - not slickly recite memorized phrases about eternal destinies in an attempt to proselytize whatever "damned unbelievers" might have been drawn unwittingly into our midsts by the death of a man that they, too, had loved and were there to grieve.

As one of his sons said to me later, "If daddy showed love to someone with his life, then that was Jesus enough for them..."

I guess I should let it go. It was, after all, just a Baptist preacher, doing what Baptist preachers do. He started with a lie, though. A slick-suited lie.

* Movie Review: The Beaver

2011-08-12T18:57:00.000-07:00

Mel Gibson makes a superb whipping boy. I mean, seriously… what’s not to mock? He’s old—which in this country is a hanging offense—and he’s someone most of us at one point in our lives have either yearned to be, or get with (or both), but to no avail. Nothing like sour grapes to get the old jealousy bones creaking. Oh, yeah, and there’s that whole racist, sexist thing.

Making fun of racism, sexism, and beingajerkism are all just and noble pursuits, and Mel Gibson has bought himself a full portion of it with his repeated drink-induced, anti-Semitic and misogynistic rants, for which there is no excuse.

Nonetheless, I am going to excuse him. Not because he’s earned it, but because I’m pretty sure that someday I’m going to publicly spout off something idiotic as well, and I’d like to think Mel’s gonna remember this moment and cut me some slack.

See, you cannot take a sound byte from a whole human life and use it to write off an entire person. People are complicated. They hold bizarre, often self-contradictory views. They do things they know to be wrong, and believe things they suspect to be incorrect. What is most tragic, however, is where most of this comes from—a fear of being un-loved. Because of this, human beings run around destroying themselves in all sorts of weird, illogical and counter-productive ways, hoping to find someone who really, truly loves them, even though they’re behaving like poo-stains.

For Mel Gibson, one such a person is Jodie Foster. Much has been made of her “indefensible” defense of Mr. Gibson, the idea being that if you stand in front of a villain deflecting rocks, then you yourself must in fact be a villain. But perhaps there is more to a person than his or her actions, and more to love than mere agreement. Perhaps there are times when you defend someone not because you’re convinced of their perfection, but because you understand that no one is perfect, and that without unconditional love, no one will ever become the best person they are capable of being.

Whether or not this is true, Foster and Gibson have chosen a lovely story to help make their case. In The Beaver, Gibson’s character is a man named Walter Black, who takes an extreme path of self-hating reinvention in a desperate attempt to redirect from the same depression that led to his father’s suicide. His reinvented, badly ventriloquizing self is funny, passionate, loving and awake in all the ways Black could not manage to be.

Nearly everyone responds positively to his new alter-ego, which fuels his self-hating dementia to the point where he ends up taking a number of actions(like pushing and hurting his teenage son) that are exactly the opposite of what he ever wanted to do.

In the end, he grows to hate the popular false persona he's created, and it is only by both figuratively and literally cutting it away from himself that he is able to realize that his family loves him not for any accomplishment or for the entertainment value he provides, but for who he is—even despite the fact that he is truly very sick.

It is a message nuanced by the fact that Black’s wife, played by Jodie Foster, is not willing to merely accept Walter’s disturbed behavior indefinitely. But although she does call him on it in no uncertain terms, for her own protection and the protection of her children, there is never any doubt that it is love that prompts her action.

The Beaver is not a perfect film, but it is quite a lovely, effective (often funny) one. I would venture to guess that its poor box-office showing has less to do with its relative merits, and more to do with the fact that the average American is not particularly interested in extending to Gibson the sort of love of which Foster has been an exemplar.

Screenwriter Kyle Killen has said that a recurring theme in his work is doubt over the amount that people really can change, and that The Beaver is an attempt to flesh out his suspicion that what we are really stuck with is just learning how to love—both ourselves and others. I, for one, am glad of the reminder, and wish both Foster and Gibson the best.

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*Author's note: Last week marked the halfway point for my Fiction Friday Series. Furthermore, it is my birthday, and I started back at work this week. So, after twenty-six short stories, I decided to take one week off and re-charge my creative batteries.

This article was first published as Movie Review: The Beaver on blogcritics.org.

poopin' on our own beds

2011-07-28T09:27:00.000-07:00

An old University associate of mine just posted THIS LINK, which reprints in its entirety the address given by a man named Tim DeChristopher at his sentencing yesterday.

Mr. DeChristopher had been put on trial for the crime of going to a land auction and bidding up the price on some publicly-owned land, in order to try to draw attention to the way the United States government is selling publicly-owned land to private Big Oil companies, in whose silk-lined pockets said government currently resides. They gave him two years in prison and a ten-grand fine for the express purpose of discouraging others from joining him in his fight.

If you still side with wealth and power... if you still think that everything is hunky-dory and that things are as they should be, then I implore you to at least go read it.

If, like me, you believe in a Creative God (or even if you don't), then stop holding hands with those who are raping the Good Earth, in exchange for a new sports car and a second house in Maui. Stop being naive. Do something. I'm sick and tired of not being able to fish for my dinner in the local river. I'm sick and tired of a few people getting rich off the destruction of the world my son is going to have to live in.

I found Mr. DeChristopher's closing remarks particularly moving:

"This is not going away. At this point of unimaginable threats on the horizon, this is what hope looks like. In these times of a morally bankrupt government that has sold out its principles, this is what patriotism looks like. With countless lives on the line, this is what love looks like, and it will only grow. The choice you are making today is what side are you on."

This is what love looks like.
Side with love.

batter my heart

2011-07-24T11:41:00.000-07:00

Sometimes, I tell people I am part of the "Church of the Broken" - a broken man in a broken world. I find it helpful to classify myself like this, but it does tend to annoy people.

Being as weird as I am and having absolutely no compunction about messing with the English language - pirating, inventing, dismantling and re-creating words to meet my needs and whims - I tend to be loose with definitions and lazy about justifying them. But the word "broken" is important enough that I think it's worth clarifying.

So let me admit that when I refer to myself as "broken," I don't mean "malfunctioning." I don't think I was once going along all ticketty-boo, and then something awful happened and now I'm a useless mess. What I mean is something more like broken-down, like clay that's pliable because someone has broken it out of its hardened shape and bent and kneeded it by hand, so that the hand-warmth has infused it with potential. When this happens, the clay has become perpetually available to be molded into a new shape - the shape required by ever-evolving circumstances.

There is something about the air on this planet that wants to harden me... to force me to retain a shape once I'm in it. It seems safer to be something - to have rigid ideas about the world and very set patterns for how I am living in it. It is safer, in one sense, to turn myself into an inanimate object. But it is also, I have found, very boring. It is not life.

There was a time when I thought I knew what I was. I sat as still as possible, my teeth clenched and my brow furrowed as cracks began to form all over me and I hardened into an ugly, misshapen parody of what an earthen vessel can be.

But then, at what seems to me now to have been the last possible moment, someone came along and picked me up and smashed me, hard, against a table. They did this again and again and it was the most horrible thing I could have imagined. I thought I was going to die, as my life and my marriage unraveled. They threw me around, punched me, and beat me with dripping wet hands. I felt parts of myself flying off in every direction. But I also felt water and warmth seeping into me, and eventually, I realized something new... I was free to be anything. I was free to live. For the briefest moment, I realized with my whole being that I did not need to be so sure all the time. I could let loose, and enjoy being constantly re-shaped and re-made by something beyond my ability to comprehend.

I think I was born to be - in the best possible way - the plaything of God. I was made to be ever-incomplete, a part of a joyous creative process. In brokenness is life. I wasn't made to know, or to understand or to be one thing. Those are interesting diversions and at their best provide a quest that is an intriguing part of living, but I was not meant for knowledge, control, rigidity or arrival, I was made for the joy of it, for a Great, Becoming Act of Creation.

To be this way is to live fully in faith... to abandon all fear. I do not like this. I (sort of) enjoy my certitude and fear. They give me the illusion of power in a world where I am very small, and weak, and isolated. But I am tired of drying up and becoming brittle.

I'd rather be broken.