A Long-winded Discourse

on switched

2008-10-20T19:59:00.000-07:00

made the move: http://joeley.wordpress.com/

on contemplating a few things

2008-09-10T16:40:00.000-07:00

let's go for a list of contemplations, because it's quicker, easier, prettier than I could ever be in paragraphs:

1. switching over to WordPress, because everybody else who is using it seems to make things look a lot nicer than Blogger.

2. entering the blogospheric static concerning this year's hotly contested election by wagging a lyrical finger at the opposition and accusing barack obama of soullessness or sarah palin of lipstickery or john mccain of jowlyness or finding a reason not to care instead of hinging emotional well-being on something to which I only contribute one vote.

3. riding my red, red bicycle to work.

4. talking to the gorgeous barista at my favorite coffeeshop, but still thinking of people in faraway places

5. wondering for how many people number four has applied to in the last twenty minutes. probably me and the man staring longingly out the window, hand to his chin for the last thirty minutes. no one can sit so still, without contemplating the beauty of a barista!

6. moving out this weekend and how many trips I'll have to take in my car to get my crap from my folks' place to a new place.

7. seven, it has always been seven.

on awaiting arrivals and departures

2008-08-13T17:24:00.000-07:00

a plane (though not this one), flying so low and loudly that impact felt imminent, passed over our office this morning.

it reminded me then, and rarely this happens in the moment, of being much younger underneath colossal noises such as that. the mystical qualities of flight, then, when we were young enough to know nothing of mechanics like lift, dominated our imaginations; airplanes were so much bigger than we could ever be and did things we could never do, like stretch out wings and war against gravity successfully—the things we dreamed of doing as we leapt from top bunks with umbrellas and blankets hoping to win for a moment such as the ongoing war of airplane versus ground.

occasionally, it grips me like fingers on an armrest, the rush and shudder of liftoff when thinking of youth. being so young that flight felt like the natural outgrowth of being older, staying up as late as possible until after hours flight would reveal itself. it wasn't simple, though, as we are often prone to say. no, it was magical, the whole world sewn together by inconceivable threads that if seen could illuminate life and all its mysteries. and, growing up was the key that gave us vision to see.

then, we found out, slowly by that very act of growing up, that the vision to see was science, physics that explained aerodynamics and propulsion, and were unimpressed over time by the logical sequences that governed it all, thus did modernity wipe us clean of all imagination. now, airplanes and flights provide us sometimes-long threads of inactivity, spaces to read books instead of time to marvel at the air between us and the ground and our successful war against gravity.

then, while reading or watching a dvd on a laptop, the imagination returns, the ground is so far away! and all the ability of physics to explain wonder away disappears in the distance between you and the earth. and we are reabsorbed into the atmosphere, among clouds and other low-flying planes.

(photo, Jim Weidman, 2008)

on a tremendous rain

2008-08-06T16:46:00.000-07:00

and, the streets will run like rivers. when they do, we'll trade our cars for makeshift rafts made out of responsibilities and couch cushions; we'll name first mates and captains and pirates where we used to name First and Main. Instead, we'll put oars in until they hit asphalt and traverse passes once reserved for horsepower and hisses, shouting at stoplights instead of easing to a stop. There will be some who don't make it, who can't swim, and they will be lost. We have already lost so many who couldn't fashion rafts out of imagination and what surrounded them in a room, washed away.
But, you and me, we're dreamers; we've seen the flood as our open door and walked boldly out into an inhospitable world to men and women on foot. And, in putting in, we're already saying that there is a river, we are captains, and we'll get to wear hats.

on no tongue

2008-07-19T07:35:00.000-07:00

sometimes, it takes awhile for me to find something to say, but when it comes, it comes and i hope you read it (o reader).

i've had hymns running over and over in my head recently. i've been humming them as i walk into Dunkin' Donuts with blatant disregard for what humming does to distract other patrons. they're big things, hymns. they're not meant to be hummed alone; they're choral things. they want to be sung by groups of people, all of whom sing different lines, some alto, some bass and so on. when it's just a melody, it seems bare. humming a single melody with a sweating cup of iced coffee in your hand is nothing like a thunderous sanctuary filled with song, melody and harmonies layered on top of each other.

it helps us reassert that we are not individuals. we are layered lines, one on top of another, one below, supporting, accenting, completing, fulfilling. otherwise, we're fragments.

when my host father drove me to work in Uganda, he had a wonderful knack to sing the lines to a hymn and not always the melody. trodding down the road that bisects Kalerwe Market, he would sing, "When peace like a river, attendeth my way" in a trembling voice, nothing like a boom. his thick accent llaced into every line, he would change the tempo, occasionally lose the key, change sections from melody to tenor, from bass to melody. eventually, though, i learned to chime in, to begin singing the parts he wasn't singing. until, without much deliberate collaboration, we sang all the way through a traffic jam, and wished each other well for the workday as i exited the car.

they weren't elegant songs, and it wasn't an elegant sanctuary. we flubbed lyrics; the inside of a Nissan pales in comparison to the vaulted ceilings of a church. it was sloppy and beautiful.

i'm humming out sloppy and beautiful moments, with every iced coffee and car ride. they are all around me, and they are full of memories.

on good morning, monday

2008-06-30T06:43:00.000-07:00

this week, i decided to start listening to the songs wrapped in memories of different times and places so as to fashion a congruent line between my lives. it'll make me believe in everything again, that the day is opening up for its own possibilities, that the beach is only a bike ride away will be as magical as it was when i first heard this song!!

if this were xanga, i could say what i was currently listening to as effortlessly as pressing a button; instead, you have to imagine the soundtrack to my memories. trust me; it's delightful.

on the whole

2008-06-17T09:27:00.000-07:00

everything, if it could breathe, would exhale a gigantic sigh as though the whole earth being porous could squeeze and release all the air pent up inside itself. and, what a tremendous sigh–like a wind that could blow off your hat. all the kids on swingsets and the pushers of kids on swingsets across the world could do underdoggies beneath each other without the peril of hands pressed on plastic seats and ferocious sprinting from behind to below to in front.

it was simpler then, i'll say. life should always be as simple as this. the most terrifying thing in the world should be a gust of wind and the sensation of a friend passing underneath you on the swingset. or, the most complex thing in the world should be the monkeybars, i could say that, too. the biggest thing we ever do should be climb to the crest of a slide and slip down, courageously, into the mulch below.

instead, i can feel the world breathing beneath my feet. there was nothing more sure than that the ground would be there at the end of a slide, underneath the monkeybars, at the bottom of a long jump (on the count of 3-2-1) from a swing. but, the ground sags and heaves, rumbles and groans under the weight of ambitious feet–boys who have outgrown the playground but refuse to leap from swing to floor and land as adults on uneven earth.

but, there will be touchdown. one day, we may look like the men in ties and cleanly pressed shirts in coffeeshops on lunchbreaks, talking on blackberry cellphones and saying things like, i look forward to it!! sounds like a winner!! until our neatly-styled hair recedes and we make phone calls like these, to confirm meetings, to talk business over lunch, we'll look at it flabbergasted, how could we become this?!? what will we be looking on at boys in coffeeshops, thinking of ourselves when we were this young, disheveled and lost??

but, we're lost. both of us, me in my tattered jeans, him in his pleated khakis. and you're lost, fingers on a keyboard, eyes to the screen.

the man who just left the bathroom, he looks like Lorne Michaels, except chubbier; he's also taking a handful of free cinnamon bagel samples and stuffing them into his pockets. he knows what he wants. i'll be him and wear my hawaiian shirt in suburban ohio, take free samples without any regard for how much taking would qualify as theft.

on stacking everything I own

2008-05-31T18:06:00.000-07:00

most of it fits in boxes–books, clothes, kitchen knives, dvds. and, it will all be on the road soon, headed across states and states. i'll be the one on the road, listening to podcasts with the seats folded away, boxes meticulously tucked away. setting the cruise-control, i'm going to sweep across this country, starting here in the midwest and ending up in the northeast.

because when there's nowhere you're supposed to be, there's everywhere you're gonna go. i'm going to chase God through city blocks in Chicago, to the North Woods of Wisconsin, to Indianapolis, through Ohio, until God hits the sunrise on the Atlantic in Rye, New Hampshire. when that sun breaks across the horizon and the air heats up, the sea sprays against the rocky coast and we're all there. we were all wrapped up in it; now, we're being unfolded with each wave. then, we'll eddy behind neglected sandcastles until another wave takes us out to sea.

we're drifters on an endless sea–try that for a cliché. put words like that on a roadtrip; see how the mixing of road and sea suits entire days spent in cars. an endless sea, that suits the whole of what it is right now.

graduated without much place else to go but drift–i should build a raft out of fallen trees, rope and other island-survivor miscellanea.

on what stands in the way

2008-05-03T16:46:00.001-07:00

Roadblocks are big, and they look like sociology papers, portfolios and professors.

on hope

2008-04-15T12:34:00.000-07:00

It all comes to a point. As Fr. Richard Rohr says, "Cynicism comes far too easy. Cynicism is the easiest thing. It doesn't take surrender, love, kindness, patience, virtue to be a cynic ... We're not called to cynicism; we're called to faith, to living in the threshold, to living with our feet in both places, to trusting and respecting both worlds–the world as it is and the world as we believe it could be or should be."

It's not sustainable, emotionally or physically, to despair. But, it is at the precise moments of despair that the end of human possibilities are clear. We are simply not capable.

One morning, months ago in Kampala, I awoke at Bishop Zac Niringiye's home and began taking a cup of tea; he was in the frontyard, doing a morning round of exercises with a jump rope. Eventually, he came inside, slightly winded, and greeted me. Apparently engrossed in a thought, he heaved a sigh and gave me these words:

Oh, Jo-el, he said. You are entitled to nothing. You deserve nothing. Nothing that you have you have earned.

He smiled with as broad a smile as I've ever known, the corners of his mouth curled upward and his eyebrows raised. Everything, he said and paused. Everything is a gift of grace. At that, he tossed his jumprope over his shoulder and continued, Jo-el, you are single.

I hummed in agreement. He indicated that Moses, too, was single–Moses, being his nephew whom lived in his home. Moses, sitting in the living room, affirmed it and came into the dining room. Zac said, Don't live life wanting just to be married. Don't live life always anticipating the next moment. The best preparation for the next step is to live fully in this given moment.

Everything is a gift of grace. He laughed heartily, not condescending in the least, on the contrary, affirming and assuring.

I still hear that laugh and remember the assurances of his presence. I long to be content with that presence; I think that cynicism is a sort of discontent improperly emphasized. Hope is discontent tempered in the belief that there will be a better day than this one and the practice of appreciation for the grace that this day holds. Surely, to hope must come after despair, under the feelings that nothing is happening, and that nothing will happen again.

But, despair is not a complete sentiment; it cannot be. To live fully in the moments of despair has to mean that we ultimately believe in hope, believe that the dynamic hope of Christ is real and bodily and here.

Seeing more fully and living more fully is an unfolding of that hope and the way in which it is woven into the grace of every given moment. I'm beginning to see again.

on what might have been lost

2008-03-30T20:55:00.000-07:00

While I really, really want this video to speak for itself, I can't resist.

No nevermind; I'll resist.

* * * * *

Maybe, I'm not really cut out for blogging if I resist the urge to explain what I have posted. Bon Iver, alias for Justin Vernon, is a remarkable new act that ought to be shared. The story surrounding the album is remarkable enough This music has made a longer than comfortable winter into something more manageable; watching snowflakes fall on the windshield is more bearable with this soundtrack than without it– even in late March.

But, I am ready for some sunshine; at which point, I will blog about Van Halen "Jump" or Poison "Nothing but a Good Time."

on the public square

2008-03-26T12:23:00.000-07:00

i've been debating, for what seems like years, whether or not to post poetry on this blog. i don't know if this is read, for one, so it might seem like a tree falling into uninhabited woods. But, if this happens to have readership; i'd like to know and might start the electronic foray into self-publication.

That might also be a principle, extroverted insecurity of my own, but i'm also unconvinced that this Internet thing is a legitimate avenue for poetry. it still seems distant and impersonal despite all the personified profiles of facebook and myspace. Maybe this is hung on the hope that we're not so distant from one another, just distinct from the other expressions in previous eras, where poetry was read in the public square, when poetry carried upon itself the duties of storytelling and prophecy, when poetry came out of community.

Perhaps, it is our concept of community that has been so expanded and digitized that i can't see the voice poetry has for that broad a place. Because, you don't see what i see–you don't walk past the anti-Semitic graffiti underneath the train station at College Avenue like i do, you're not where i am–i'm terrified that the exercise will be meaningless. It could all be another bookmark, another RSS on your Google reader, another stop along the on-demand-and-there-it-is. But, is that any different than walking up to your bookshelf, assuming you have a bookshelf, and pulling this from it, feeling the pages in between your fingers and smelling the glue in the binding with each flick and turn?

It is certainly different, and i'm waiting to make sense of the feeling of its difference.

on tom

2008-03-24T19:58:00.000-07:00

maybe, it's the gravel in his voice that so many critics have described. something about his voice is real–imperfect, broken apart. i want that raspy voice to characterize what i say; i'm still listening closely, hoping to hear that from me–something like it at least.

i've got years to harden like that, to let them all ring out in the grit of my voice. then again, it might take a lot of cigarettes to get that bark; a lot more than i'm willing to smoke.

but, i'm wearing my years as it is; i'm tired of staying up all night to get a paper done for the morning. it all seems fleeting now, but i won't go into that. Got another paper to write before morning. i should expend my intellectual energy on it instead of entering another tribute into the pipeline about another songwriter.

on this being what we've waited for

2008-02-14T17:28:00.000-08:00

i could be embittered, lonely, dissatisfied, or all of the above on this valentine's day. but, i've decided to take solace in this.

on exchanging my favor for something more like this

2008-02-11T12:05:00.001-08:00

in the end, i'll take this:

because, this beats being indoors and hoping that a whole season will just pass us over, wearing hats and scarves, burning logs. i'd rather burn logs on the beach, tuck my feet into the sand and strum out my favorite Dylan song on a worn-out guitar.

eventually, i'll have to come back from california. but, for right now, it fits.

on not wanting to grow up, in favor of being a Toys'R'Us Kid

2008-02-07T19:36:00.000-08:00

If I let the sky--because it needs my permission--open up and let loose on this place, it would look like it does today. It would slog the whole town down so much that we couldn't move, trapped inside our homes and forced to cook leftovers and light a fire and have conversation with our friends as we peer over the margins of secondhand novels. We'd listen to vinyl instead of turning on the TV, like real aesthetics, unafraid of the click and hiss of spinning records, and tell stories over the warble of a jazz standard.

i'd take that igloo of a lifestyle, as long as i had enough scarves and sweaters, firewood to last through the days, instead of the harshness of life outside–textbooks, exams, business suits, morning commutes. But, maybe it could snow so much that the trainyard is a great white sea of windswept snow dunes, engines rolling gradually, bumps underneath an outstretched linen sheet.

we could bury what we have to do after we're done here. we could let it ice over beneath the weight of lake effect snow and imagine the whole thing will stay frozen forever to the soundtrack of trumpet and fuzz and the crackle of a fireplace, okay?

on having found the democracy in myself

2008-02-05T19:54:00.000-08:00

pure, unadulterated, completely inspirational propoganda. and, if it were a milkshake, i would drink it to the final slurp.

on it having been awhile

2008-02-05T11:47:00.000-08:00

because of where i am, i don't know if i've got a lot to say.

maybe that will change, and i will someday re-enter the blogosphere,
fearlessly emboldened enough to believe in democracy.

on the difficulty of understanding

2007-10-02T03:00:00.000-07:00

when words, spoken in a language other than your own, grow in the midst of my ability to understand them, the exhaustion of understanding replaces the complacency in not and the weariness in being so nihilistic.

the unarguable fact, sorry nihilists of the world, is that it does matter, and the intricate web of human experience and symbols into which we are placed is a marketplace of activity. and we are all sellers of matooke, groundnuts, sugar cane strapped to bicycles, sweet potatoes in a wheelbarrow and roast maize by the roadside. the language we share in transactions revolves around relationship, you to me, you and me to land, and all of it to God, who is riding a bus through the market, face pressed against the glass. then, stepping down and walking among the piles of tomatoes and eggplants are means of participation in the vastness of our arranged human experience.

instead of watching the sky and hoping that it will end, why don't we gather around the dinner table, after having prepared ugali and matooke, smothering all of it in groundnut sauce? why mercilessly count down the days until a nation-state makes a pact with another nation-state and ushers in the apocalypse when there is food to be given to those without and tables to be shared beyond our understandings? after all, we are all probably wrong. wrong about the way it will end and wrong about when it will happen.

so, let's go beyond our wrongness and dwell with God in the marketplace of human experience, trading, speaking and savoring the goodness of food grown on hillsides of the villages away from town. and instead of misconstruing metaphors into elaborate systems to explain the way in which the world will end, let's understand that in its ending, it matters what we do until then and it can be a life of pineapples whose sweetness runs from the corners of your mouth and down the chin.

the temporality of earth is a means to its beauty, but it does not justify its dismissal

On containing the Unknown

2007-09-16T08:24:00.000-07:00

What I want to do is sit on the roadside, watching overcrowded matatus taking people from one place to another, making sense of those in the market they pass. I want to sit in another rainy afternoon, as Kampala washes away, collects in the valleys between her hills and her watery life gathers as a river. And, I want to ride that river from one end to another, making a raft with my friends from tin rooves and mattresses, jerrycans and soda bottles. And, all of us, taking the river from the valleys to the lake.

There, we could go on to Jinja, take the lake into the river and make our way down the Nile. We will navigate all that way, traversing the rapids, diving the falls. We'll make one a look out atop a crow's nest! And, there in all our fashioning we'll have one who calls out for falls while we portage around, cutting bushpaths through malarial forests.

A crew of equals making our way down the Nile, eventually to Egypt, were we will deposit ourselves along with silt from Murchison Falls into the Mediterranean Sea. Taking a warm bath on the Egyptian shore. Then, splashing in the sea! This is what we have from a day's worth of rain: a river to a lake to the River to the Sea.

And, in being lost, we make sense of what we don't know. In being lost, we know the Unknown and the sky that belongs as it empties itself into the valleys.

on what i have to say after two months of not saying much

2007-08-03T08:03:00.000-07:00

Now that I have been away for nine weeks, which is a not that long time; I mean, six months of displacement is not that long. I had this conversation with my co-worker that I have so little time. I think that I still have that very American impulse to contain within myself all the knowledge of a moment--that I will understand everything, language and culture and all differences all at the same time because I have to know! know! know!

But, the unknown–I think that is where the Word becomes flesh. I think that the Incarnation becomes a part of the act of not-knowing. In all its intercessary distance, the Incarnation passes through the unknown. And, that leap of faith at the bottom of everything, at the end of all knowledge, that jump from known–empirically known and tangibly experienced–to unknown has already been performed.

On Thursday, I attended a teaching session by Bishop Zac Niringye, the passage over which he taught was Romans 5. And, what struck me aside from his hypnotic teaching method and the way I was drawn into it, was that he called the act of salvation an act outside the self. That to be saved is to be in the midst of being saved, that the act of salvation is ongoing, but it has already been done! Christ died once for all–something we, Americans, have buried under a mountain of cliché comprised of song and t-shirt and institutionalized religion–and the act of salvation is about what has been done for you not what you have done.

In that, I recall the prayer of salvation I prayed as a child in the aftermath of a particularly frightening Sunday School lesson about the afterlife; I remember timidly repeating the words of the ABC prayer: Admitting that I was a sinner, Believing that Jesus was who He said He was and that He died for me, and Committing my life to Him in return. And, I think about the oddity of a seven year old committing his life to Christ. When, for a seven-year-old, the passage of a month comprises a considerable amount of his life, I wonder what a lifetime looks like to my former self. I wonder if I imagined myself as an old man, gray-haired and all, making morning prayers when I made a commitment at seven-years-old.

Of course not; it is a foregone conclusion. But, that doesn't discredit that it was the beginning. It was the beginning of the practice of standing in grace, and I with all my wobbling seven-year-old knees began crawling until I could come to a day when as a twenty-two year old, I begin standing. Yes, I live a life of beginnings. And, I require all the intercessary distance of Word become flesh to make a stand into a leap–one that has been taken.

And, these are all the conclusions of one displaced and there, wrapped in the cloth of uncertainty. They mingle with the unknown, and it is the task of all my poetry, prose and daily routine to stand and to leap over great distance.

on things to do in the zurich airport for an hour

2007-05-29T23:53:00.000-07:00

This will not be an extensive catalogue; actually, this won't be a catalogue at all. If it were a catalogue it would be littered with variations on "Buy yummy swiss chocolates," but this is not a catalogue.

This is a transition. I am on my way. I've been travelling for twenty-four hours already, and I have fifteen more ahead of me. This is my way of saying, "Bring it on."

More than I am saying "bring it on," I am saying I need sleep. It always seems the first thing to go when travelling; be it the functional minimum I procured before leaving Tulsa or the few winks from Oklahoma City to Chicago or the two hours I pieced together from Boston to Zurich. I am a weary man, but I'm almost there.

The reading list for the day so far: Henderson the Rain King by Saul Bellow and Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking. True, Didion's thoughts on mortality and bereavement are weighty–perhaps too weighty for morning flights from Oklahoma to Chicago then on to Boston. Despite their context, her words struck me in an enabling way. Her ability to weave together psychologies of grief, medicinal terminologies, personal reflections and vulnerability–eye-popping sincerity–makes me feel like I too can write.

Needless to say, I recommend it.

on leaving one state for another and being closer, closer to it

2007-05-13T21:34:00.000-07:00

Okay, okay. I'm guessing the differences in quality aren't socially constructed–that Diet Pepsi cola has more cola taste in realistic difference than Diet Coca Cola. That is a safe guess, and it mirrors what I have been told by the television.

When you get your teeth surgically removed–the doctor, being overly curt, introduces himself while administering an anesthetic as "Dr. Sleepy-time" and then you disappear into a dreamless world of Novocaine and anesthesia (but there are clouds, big ones like pillows, and you bound from pillow to pillow and turn the clouds into horses and turtles so little kids will look up at your handiwork and go, "A turtle!")–when they knock you out and pull what was yours out of your own mouth, you tend to watch a lot of television. A lot of ESPN, in my case, a lot of Law and Order, some subtitled Kurosawa films (the subtitles are a mistake, you can't read in this state, at least you can't sustain it).

I've been watching for long enough, and I doubt that Diet Pepsi is different from Diet Coke, take your national taste test and find someone more interested.

So, I am leaving. Going to the East Coast, to find the Atlantic–you see it needs me. It can't lap against the rocks jutting out from the sharp corner of Route 1-A, just north of Rye Beach, without me listening. It can't reflect the moon on a cloudless night without me, and it certainly can't separate me from Africa if I'm in Ohio.

So I will go and find the Atlantic. I'll leave a post-it note on the door and ride until the whole thing spreads out in front of me, blue in its own reflection of the sky.

on the mixture of novocaine, an anesthetic drip and oxycodone

2007-05-08T03:34:00.000-07:00

If what I'm looking for is to stop feeling, I've found a dental procedure to handle it. Getting my wisdom teeth out is like signing up for catharsis. I've been seated on the couch watching Kurosawa movies–well, kind of watching them. I've been sinking in and out of sleep during Kurosawa movies, and the whole subtitles thing doesn't translate well through oxycodone and whatever-the-hell-else is in my bloodstream.

Honestly, though, the removal of wisdom teeth is such a strange ritual anyway. It is like a rite-of-passage, nearly every college student or young adult has a story to tell when the incident of wisdom teeth is mentioned. Whether someone chimes in with a "I had dry-socket" or a "I cursed out my nurses," we all seem to have a story, and creating an amalgamation out of all those stories when anticipating your own extraction–well–that's just absurdly fun.

So, I found some stimulus to write in becoming completely numb; there's some social commentary in there, but it's not worth fleshing out.

on wanting you, friend, to particpate

2007-04-26T22:30:00.000-07:00

okay, okay. I'm going to do this: a semi-functional post. Because struggling with the Incarnation, Word become flesh, can sustain a blog for only so long, I'll actually do something of utility. How do you like me now?

As I'm sure you've gathered, I'm going on an internship with the HNGR program at Wheaton College. I will be working for six months at FOCUS in Kampala, and I would like to update you on the situation. I will occasionally post on this "thingamajigger," but they will not be functional/helpful/all-that-advantageous-to-be-read (see, I can still undermine myself in a semi-functional posting, hooray for the inadequacy of language!).

All that to actually say, if you would like to receive e-mail updates from me while in Kampala, please make comment that you would like that. Feel free to attach any other encouragements or salutations, because I have no idea what my readership is here. And, I like it when folks respond to my words, it helps them (the words) enter into the communal space–try that one on for Anabaptist size (hooray for obscure theologies!).

And it makes this whole weblog a little less artificial. But it is so, so artificial, isn't it?

So, let's war against the artificiality–let's be vulnerable (in e-mails, where I know who's reading, who they are, what they sound like, what they tend to wear, their demeanors, the impressions of their characters). That doesn't work as war against the weblog, but don't overdo it.

"some people wake up on Monday mornings
barring maelstroms and red flare warnings
with no explosions and no surprises
perform a series of exercises"
"Simple X" - Andrew Bird

on april's effort to match the joy of my anticipation

2007-04-22T13:48:00.000-07:00

Today is a beautiful day. The mercury is rising and the clouds have all but departed; the ones left are the pillowy kind–the cotton candy kind. And, it all seems suited to the voices of my favorite singers and songwriters, because that is what a good day does in reinforcing.

And, as I come to a place nearer the place I will soon be in Uganda, I heave big, big sighs because I am going from one place and state of mind to another very different place. I want to learn all about it, and I want to leave this place in good spirits and in good standing with the people I cherish.

So, here I go in going out!

on the changing weather and my disposition

2007-04-02T08:56:00.000-07:00

I don't take much pride in the fact that the weather, especially days like today, the unexpected snow during the first week of April, directly influence my state of mind. What a shitty day. The clouds have conspired against the sun and the ground is freezing cold. It is as though April never showed at all ... save Monday when it was 60 degrees and quite nice.

I have never longed for Monday before. Not once, and this entry will be the first time I long for a day such as Monday. Mondays are reminders that we repeat instead of progress. I spend so much energy longing that I can't adequately make myself present. I sense that acute longing when I look at this campus or when I walk in between the aisles of a supermarket or when I wait in line behind someone at an ATM or when I hear someone's music from two cars over at a stoplight. We are all groping against it, and we can't quite articulate what to call it.

And, when we can't name it, we can't claim it. To name is to call into existence, because language–it will save us. The Word become flesh, and a bevy of phrases come to mind: the Incarnation! The Incarnation? To call it a name, to believe, to long, to look with expectation, these are things we call the human impulse. Language doesn't suffice. So, why would we pull the Word into the world of language and make language to suit the Word?

When I can't find the language, the words, the phrases to match my disappointment in a world that requires war–where men kill men and women, I doubt it–all of it–so profoundly that I let it disappear into concretions and only concretions: a woman riding a bike, a table holding a plate full of spaghetti, a book made from the widdling away of trees, a fingernail clipping that can be divided into molecules and particles then quarks until we are all comprised of energy, a space in which we exchange symbols–crude representations of what we mean.

But, the Word! What does He do? What does the Incarnation mean to peace? to meaning? to equillibrium? All things moving toward some good? Those who love him?

There: community. All things moving toward community; being known and being loved, it must be where we are going.

On having been there without being here

2007-03-25T14:39:00.000-07:00

I find it increasingly difficult to stay present on campus. Though I had a fabulous time at the Latin Dance (yes, I salsa'ed, and no you cannot handle my hip-shaking) and though I am generally enjoying myself, I constantly find myself imagining the time to come in Uganda.

I've confirmed my internship with an organization called FOCUS in Kampala. And, I'm beginning my e-mail correspondence accordingly. And, I feel ready to go. I'm getting shots; I'm booking flights; I'm cleaning out my drawers; I'm daydreaming about city streets packed from side to side with mini-buses and clay soil. I daydream about clay, because every picture I see online or in travel books the roads, the rows of dirt in between maize or coffee, the underbelly of the foothills, all of them are red-brown. And, I imagine myself caking my fingertips with it after the rain and playing soccer atop it (even though I am a terrible footballer).

How in the context of such fits of imagination could I possibly remain in one mental place–much less a college campus? It seems an unfair stretch to dangle the immensity of a six month internship abroad in front of yourself and expect to be fully engaged with your surroundings. Well, apparently I've been unfair to myself, and I'll just continue to be.

And, even now as I clean my apartment, I am more drawn by the prospect of listening to the new Explosions in the Sky album and closing my eyes to imagine what it will be like, in as much sensuous capacity as I can create with my collective experience.

But, there are things! things to do! spaces to clean! events to plan! and attend! So, here I go.

"the street heats the urgency of sound"

On the state of being

2007-02-17T20:29:00.000-08:00

It is hard to post without some sort of instant of stimulus. I must not be the blogger that gets cut off in traffic and angrily marches to his computer and says, "So, this guy on 294 just whips his sedan into my lane ..."

No, no, I'm not nearly that confessional. (If I am confessional, like Plath, I'll do it in a parenthetical and it will make the whole thing seem trivial. I could say things like: I have no idea what it means to love, I am insincere, I am cripplingly averse to commitment and I don't like that, I try to make myself like music that isn't that good if it's obscure. But, because I've placed it here--in this parenthetical--it is negligible. A remarkable way to distance myself from you, right?) If I were to confess, it'd be something useless like I put an empty ice tray in the freezer. Do you see now why I keep things away from the blogosphere?

So, this guy on 294 just whips his sedan into my lane, and I ... am ... pissed.

on a growing impulse to go

2007-02-02T23:47:00.000-08:00

I heard a voice over the din of the cafeteria and the rumble of the chapel, over the iPod headphones in my ear–over it all–I heard a voice saying, "Go! Go! Go!"

And, I spend the considerable portion of my energy resisting the desire to withdraw. It is not hesitance toward going. No, it is the responsibility–the grown-up impulse–to remain here. To be here is to be present with the twenty-four hundred other people and believe in the worship songs before prayer in chapel.

–I am not gone yet, I repeat to myself to the tune of a contemporary chorus. –Give it three more months, then go, go, go!

on witnessing a team that remains from my childhood comeback from 18 points to defeat my fears

2007-01-23T22:06:00.000-08:00

Let's imagine I'm a leather ball, laced together but on all accounts bursting apart. I was thrown from endzone to endzone on Sunday, and I won. I won. I finally won.

And, I repeat to myself, "one more game," because hopes are wound up in a leather ball. I admit, I believe I could conquer the lot of my problems if and only if the Colts could win a Super Bowl. What a silly thought to have, to wrap one's hopes into a game--were it so easy. That one team could score more points than another and my disposition could be improved. Wouldn't that be a feat? Sport transcending sport and becoming a raison d'être.

No. --So foolish, I say.

--Matters of one's disposition are best rooted in the things one can control, the appropriate response would be.

--Right, right, I agree. --Best to restrain my own well-being. Reign it in and grow it so that I can harvest it on command. Best not to let it compete with something else. Best to hide it away from the vicious world of shoulder pads and cleats.

--I see where you're taking this, the appropriate responder anticipates.

--Best to hide my spirits away, I ignore the caveat and continue. --Best to bury it instead of running it up the middle on third down and two on the four-yard line, on the off-chance that the offensive line will read the defensive scheme exactly, perfectly even, and the hole will expand and I will enter the endzone unscathed, untouched, blameless.

Best to control things myself.

on beginning a new semester

2007-01-16T21:07:00.000-08:00

There is a freshness in the beginning of a new thing. It raises up in me--this newness--and fills my lungs like the sharp sting of the quick inhalation in midwinter. It is a good burn, I attest, because it means the body is being worked into submission.

It is breaking into a thousand pieces--the body that is--but my resurrector, He glues me together like a mosaic. Perhaps faith is a portrait splintered and re-constructed, and we spend the good majority of our effort as a community on the agreement of what our faith should look like: nice and packaged and well-rehearsed and presentable. Once, we were not this way; we had dirt beneath our fingernails and the blind in our arms.

Let's return to it.

I may be going to Uganda for my HNGR internship; that would be a beautiful thing and it will challenge me. Oh, it will challenge me.

on having a girl in the war

2007-01-04T23:28:00.000-08:00

So, so, so, I've been reading Dave Eggers's A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, and it is exactly that. A remarkable blend of fiction and non that is encouraging in its ability to inspire a writer to write. So, so, so, I've set out to write a simple post, that may or may not be read by the people I like. [Chances are, if you're reading this, I like you.]

But, I've nothing remarkable to say, so I won't say a thing:

on the incarnation of Him, a Savior!

2006-12-25T10:35:00.000-08:00

"Merry Christmas," I say to you, reader.

I think now about the nature of the Incarnation, that God saw fit to manifest His Grace on the world. God did, in all his fullness, in all his mercy, come among us once--beginning in Bethlehem, and on to Nazareth, and on and on until Springboro, Ohio to now as I type, each flick of my finger is drenched in the grace of a God who saw fit to send His Son.

And, I write in the moments beyond Bethlehem with the same hope of Czeslaw Milosz, that the word and the thing will someday become one and I will know that I have defended the great hope of the Incarnation.

"Oh, what a glorious revelation that will be," I say. But, I imagine it won't take the form we anticipate--that LaHaye-Jenkins sort of a trendy apocalypse full of tanks and colorfully woven world-wide governmental organizations. No, what a different form it will be!

Then, we'll really sing--we will liberate our voices from the three-part harmonies of a church service in favor of a cacophony of sound that will deafen our ears and bloody our noses.

A mixing of blood and song.

on making a switch

2006-12-20T14:52:00.000-08:00

The transition will begin now, and I will be quitting xanga for this sake.

The old things have passed away and I will be newer than before.