so-called chaos

art is the language of the heart.

and I'm not trying to be fucking cute. when you feel, express yourself in and thru art. feel thru the art.

get off the prose, son.

numb

losing it

I haven't lost my sense of humor, maybe just my sense of perspective.

During lunch with a friend, the room started to spin and I had to focus on a single point as if it were a mooring. During another conversation, I teared up like a wide-eyed orphan. Speaking of kids, I was sitting at a red light one recent Sunday morning when the sight a young boy on a bike shattered my composure and I started to sob when it hit me that I may never have a son.

I once wrote that getting broken up with is like being pushed into another world, one with a new future. Well, that's where I am at now: contemplating a new future. And, like with many a relationship, the break came when it was time to make a greater commitment (I got a mission placement, but declined). It was like Life Dominoes: when Mission Corps fell, seminary followed--and so went the life I had planned for the next 4-5 years. I suppose now I can just say, solemnly, that I'm not cut out for the life I planned.

I'm still smiling (in that aesthetics-of-pain sorta way).  Everything is both sudden and a long-time coming. My commitments to truth and my ideas about authenticity and identity are in flux. Life, without seminary, will be different. It will be more self-directed, less circumscribed by dogma or ecclesial community.

Though, it's not as if I lost myself, woke up as a new person, and changed my creed to "to thyself, be true." As Ibsen points out in Peer Gynt, that's merely another way of saying, "to thyself, be enough." But I'm not enough. I want my church. My friends. My family. My ideals. I want God, too and I know that, for the Christian, freedom and liberation apart from God are delusions, dead-ends. Alas, I can't help but see all of this as (among other things, of course) a lack of faith. I don't want only God, or, rather, I can't live for only him. I like culture; it nourishes and envelops me. And the very studies I launched myself into because my will had failed me have handicapped any faculty for childlike, obedient faith. So I lurch toward syncretism (in life and career).

Other, emotional currents are in the fore (though I am trying to think as hard as I'm feeling) and this dogmatist (albeit of the California liberal variety)--is flirting with be-yourself-ism. I'm getting swept away--floodwaters from without and erupting within.

See the rock that you hold onto
Is it gonna save you
When the earth begins to crumble?
Why d'you feel you have to hold on?

Imagine if you let go

Let's hope there's a life ring.

With the broken pieces of abandoned aspirations at my feet, I'm trying to imagine a new future and sincerely hoping that when I look back one day, this isn't what apostasy looked like.

pick up line I've come up with

cross-sexed flirting:

person one, with puppy dog eyes starving for love: "I'm gay so I'm just curious. No pressure. *re-assuring head shake/hand swat gesture* But would you date me?"

person two, caught off guard but wants to be polite and affirming: "Oh, yea. I mean you're, uh, cute and you seem like a nice guy/girl."

person one, pleased with the affirmative response: "I'm kidding. I'm not gay. What are you doing Friday?"

oh c'mon

mlm sales-pitches should be reserved for enemies, not friends and acquaintances. don't do it.

ten years on

“We are not afraid of death,” the suicide bombers say to show their superiority to ordinary people. But they are afraid of life, constantly trampling on it, slandering it, destroying it, and training children still in their cradles for martyrdom. Observers have noted that the photos of terrorists taken a few hours before they made their attacks show people who are serene and at peace. They have eliminated doubt: they know. It is the paradox of open societies that they seem to be disordered, unjust, threatened by crime, loneliness, and drugs because they display their indignity before the whole world, never ceasing to admit their defects, whereas other, more oppressive societies seem harmonious because the press and the opposition are muzzled. “Where there are no visible conflicts, there is no freedom,” Montesquieu said. Democracies are by nature uneasy, they never realize their ideal; they necessarily disappoint us, creating a gap between the hope they elicit and the realities they construct. They repeat the slanders proffered by their enemies, according them the right to hate them in all sincerity. From the imperfection of our governments, their fundamental perversity is deduced. But we should maintain the reverse: to publicly exhibit our faults is to be conscious of our vices, whereas the real fault is being ignorant of what ails us.

-Pascal Bruckner

give 'em the ol' (blog-y) razzle dazzle

let me help you write a "profound" or "courageous" blog:

1. choose a point of liberal or humanitarian or christian dogma that you want to restate by metaphor. (if you can think of no moral to communicate, just fall back on "appreciate the little things in life.")

2. pick something mundane or someone insignificant or something from nature like a tree branch that you want rhapsodize, perhaps lift to the heavens. a cup of coffee, the woman who empties your trash at work, some acorns, for example. but don't lose focus; it's not about the object. the narrator is the most important thing in this story. remember, this a neo-transcendentalist exercise and your aim is to demonstrate how sensitive and perceptive you are.

3. you should probably swear. this makes you gritty, makes you real. if you are a christian, your swear-y shibboleth will let others know that, while a christian, you are not one of those christians. the same can be accomplished with gratuitous talk of sex or drinking. 

4. if at all possible, you should narrow your audience to the young--for it is usually the young who are likely to appreciate description for description's sake and who, when it comes to radical or transgressive morality, are still impressed that the wider world is broader and more dynamic than the world of their childhoods and who still desire flattery for their newfound broadmindedness.

5. stay away from ideas; this is about feelings. pay lip service to insight, but remember to focus your efforts on narcissistic self-exposure. may your audience reflect back to you your exaggerated self-image. let the comments field be a cast net and may the encouragements of your friends feed you for a few more days.

(written to myself, as much as anyone else)