a return to blogging

Weekly, dear reader, I get on myself about updating this blog so infrequently. Please, humor me as I survey thoughts rolling around my head when I think a bit about what I should be writing.

I get excited about things. I have ideas for blogs. I know I have a few blogs posts in me. In fact, I need to have a few blog posts in me—it’s integral to my self-concept that I’m a person with interesting things to say and write, that after reading books and articles and engaging other minds I’m able to synthesize others’ thoughts with my own and better approach life and discover its truths (particularly the ones impinging on my life). “Be an interesting person,” I tell myself.

Integral to being an interesting person is being a creative one, evolving the mind into greater levels of understanding, of knowing. And this is where writing is so important—a synthesis happens there, in a Word document or Notepad file, where connections are made and sentences are given life that could never be midwifed on the fly in conversation. Written words prefer the complex, the nuanced, the balanced: ideas are named and supported with a detail and attention that are rarely found extemporaneously. There are certainly many who possess the gift of verbal profundity—have you ever read a transcribed response to an interviewer’s question and been gob-smacked by the eloquence? --Not something I can emulate. I prefer the Susan Sontag approach: I read once that Sontag, a popular intellectual, said that she was of rather average intelligence but that in her writing she could rewrite and rewrite, slowly edging up her intelligence. I find hope and motivation in the “edging up.”

So, some blogs that I should give some hours to:

Perhaps, one about death? Ryan’s death, my aging grandmother, my insecurity about my eternal salvation, overstaying brow furrows, and reading How We Die—all fodder for my reflections on the end of life. I bought As I Lay Dying—perhaps death will get its due after I read that.

Perhaps, reflections on college, one year removed from graduation? —A favorite topic of discussion among my peers, for certain. I feel most compelled to write this one, to lend those recurring thoughts about college some form and style. At 23, I don’t feel quite the adult, surely not the adult I imagined post-college as an adolescent. “Where’s the career?” teenage Matt would ask me. In addition, I’m passionate about my theology education, about my socialization into a group of Christians who thought critically, academically, and faithfully—and I need to commit these passions (the loving and the critical) to text, especially if I’m planning on mission work or graduate study in theology (plus, my amorphous commitments are best suited to the 10 second answer people get when they ask me about my future—they need to be concretized before I make the decisions that set my life on years-long tracks).

Perhaps, one that’s a little more sweetness and light? I don’t want to believe that only my problems deserve ink, that I’m most prolific at bitching and moaning. Obviously, I exploit and manipulate conflict and the pangs of despair for creative gain. While not overtly drawing attention to myself by bragging about my successes or fortunate circumstances, I seem to have little compunction about doing the same for my failures and character disorders. It’s not a trait I appreciate in others: the belief that pain, ill fortune, and self-serving confessions make one interesting and deserving of attention or, worse, fawning sympathy. Though I’ve reined it in some I need to exorcise more of the sinful mechanisms of ingratiating and/or selfish and immature self-disclosure. Still, after that indictment I will, to be fair, say that nothing like loneliness, boredom, or guilt spurs me to put pen to paper (or fingers to keys as it is) in the interest of the rather human thing of seeking solutions and connections to others, of expressing the very real and persistent conflicts that animate my inferior approaches to myself, others, and God. I want to better person and I need to gear my writing toward that evolution into better person-hood.

Well, that’s it for now. Thank you for stopping by and return soon. I promise I’ll be updating this more frequently from now on.

"just say something true"

I suck at life.

handhold out of reach

i want to write a letter
but only jagged thoughts,
half formed
rise to the top
they need more dressing,
they need legs
but i can't will the concentration

i'm invigorated by the ideas
but they are naked
not ready for show,
not ready for you
only ideas with soft bellies
exposed hides
ripe for spearing
you'd kill them
dismiss me

taciturn outside
tumult inside
i thrash for an anchor but fall resigned
the prose won't come
this is an autodidact's lament
none of this comes naturally to me
mine is an intellect of intention
born of personality, not nature
so much distress for so long
because I mistook potentialities for realities

so now I sow pitiful grappling hooks
and write shitty poetry

I will win

you peevish, small man

to belittle me?
you fool!

my mind went blank
how I shook for a clever retort
a withering put-down
a riposte straight to your heart

but nothing.
humiliated, I despaired

but then!
I saw their eyes
and I angled to let them witness me
pity my resigned and downcast stare

you will lose!
the innocent is exalted
the guilty condemned

this slight will pass from your mind
but not from mine

the others will hate you
I will sow the seeds of your contempt
nurture the sproutlings of your censure
I will raise a smothering jungle!

enjoy the self-satisfaction of your affront
illusory highs will stalk your fated alienation!

I am dedicated

I will win

beautiful song

been looping this song for weeks. i love the lyrics--the biblical references, faith's language co-opted for romantic love. it makes me want to fall in (desirous) love, to feel love. experience that for someone.

video's a bit camp. sure, lennox is white-girl-soul-ing it up, but I had hoped that her music-videoed vocals would be ascending toward transcendence a little more reverently and conservatively instead of riding irridescent bands emanating from a silver catsuit-ed lennox. oh well.

death

My former roommate, Ryan, whom I lived with during my sophomore year of college, was murdered the day after Christmas. Over a drink placed on a billiard table. Stabbed to death in a parking lot. 22 years old. Youthful and animated. Now recumbent, decaying.

For a few minutes after receiving the link to the news story ("Son of prominent I.E. pastor stabbed to death in Temecula bar fight Friday night") I could barely stand. There must have been anguish and blood and slipping away. And what of his embodiment so familiar to me? Lifeless? How? What?

My head was light, my utterances breathy, my face listless and mouth agape. Bending over, I clutched my legs—my insides were churning and I needed to recoup solidity. Though I didn't act on it, I felt a desire to crouch in a corner, perpendicular walls flanking my body. Then the mind finds a strain it can grasp—you think about how this is affecting you. Thoughts must be verbalized and responded to. And then you reach for your cell phone. And you start calling others.

Untimely death, like nothing else, leads to uneasy, yet deliberate reflection—but also these bouts of shocked head shaking and resignment. Unrelated thought streams are interrupted with an exhalation and a subdued declaration, "he's really dead." It confounds the mind. Repeatedly.

Mental energy is devoted to the usual time travel fantasies and the what-ifs of Byzantine cause and effect etiologies. You entertain visions of vigilante justice meted out brutally and mercilessly. And you think of his body—his hands and his face once supple and animated, now deteriorating. You vacillate between the indecorum of macabre posturing and the righteous defense of hard reality in lieu of white misty souls ascending to heaven. You think about his salvation. What happened to everything-him?

Physicalist Christian that I mostly am, there is no comfort for me in the pieties that "he is now with Jesus" or "receiving his reward." His embodied existence, i.e., his total personal existence, is over. There is no breath in his body. In my amateur estimation, "he" is awaiting resurrection and in the meantime the "he" that remains is a memory, a void in the context and relationships he shaped but from which he is now absent. Reality marches on, except, now, without the influence of his agency here or anywhere.

His ceased existence challenges my own and the ominous fact of non-breath is unsettling everything-me.

history channel shows about Christianity are awful

though perhaps a dozen or so eminent scholars are assembled and interviewed, the producers always manage to contrive a sensationalistic plot with conspiratorial or ominous mysteries. yes, they give a soundbite to Mr. PhD from Yale...but, "oh, hey, what does mrs. marginal crank have to say about this?" then the viewer endures silly intoning from some lady who wrote a book that you can't even get the cover image for on amazon.

most of the shows also begin with some radical, heretofore marginalized or new theory that is the WRH (what really happened), which contradicts popular or generally accepted knowledge.

crackpots get to get on tv and it appears that professors get their words twisted to back up the precoceived WRH (though, I'm sure at least a handful of professors get giddy over the opportunity to share w/ the world their novel thesis originally published in the Northeastern Journal of Biblical Archaelogy--issue 36 volume 4--back in 1996).

I always learn a bit--but it's not worth the cringing!