a little personal history

Lee and Matt wriggled free of the crowd as the chapel steadily disgorged it’s congregation into the fountain square.
“So, where are you going tonight and with who?” Lee asked.
“Have no idea.” Matt scanned the crowd.
“Oh, I see, you haven’t decided yet, you’re just looking the roster over for options.”
“More or less.” Matt responded slowly.
“It’s nice not to have to worry about that.” Lee spoke to the night air, since he knew Matt wasn’t really listening.
He was, though.
“What about Karen Smith?”
There it was again. He fervently wished Mr. and Mrs. Smith had never met. The result was causing him problems.The sooner this scuttlebutt died, the happier he would be. It couldn’t be long now. He’d avoided her like the plague for the last two weeks, trying to starve the rumor. In that way, and some other ways, rumors were like jackrabbits. Born easy, die hard. Not to mention the way the way they hopped around and popped up out of nowhere when you least expected them.
“What about her?”
“I heard you were- well, Angie was telling me-”
“You’ve been talking to Angie.” Lee cut him off crisply, glancing up at the moon.
“Yeah.”
“What else has Angie told you that you took for truth and gospel?”
Matt chuckled.
“Point taken. So. . .find somebody else.”
“I knew you weren’t listening when I said it was nice not to have to worry about that.”
“I was listening.”
“Then what’s your point?”
Matt shrugged, zipping his coat up before belaboring the point “Isn’t it a little depressing,” he smiled in his own inscrutable way, “-not to even think about women? I mean, less trouble, yeah, but what fun is it?”
“For you. Females for you have pros and cons. For me, it’s all cons. Why should I regret not having something I don’t want?”
Matt saw a blonde head in the distance and conceded the argument quickly. “I suppose you should suit yourself.”
“I am suiting myself, thank you very much.” he muttered to Matt’s departing back.
Having said that, he suddenly found himself in the near vicinity of an entourage of Karen Smith admirers; three of them, orbiting like Saturn, Venus, and Jupiter around the same sun.
He looked purposefully elsewhere, his eyes rolling involuntarily. He stopped short when his gaze settled back into place and locked onto a pair of large green eyes.
The minute their eyes met, she spoke, charmingly sarcastic.
“Oh, look. There’s Karen and all her men.”
He bristled in spite of his resolve to let the whole matter die of starvation. This insidious, casual rumor had gone far enough, and nobody was going to stop it but him. Time to put it to the sword.
He stepped closer, turning his back on the Smith solar system, and looked down into a face that was even prettier up close, and the eyes bigger.
“Do me a favor,” he requested in a tersely intimate tone, “and do not refer to me as one of Karen Smith’s ‘men.’”
Behind him, Venus laughed at something the Sun had said.
She looked up at him with just a touch of sobered remorse, but still saucy, and said, “I’ll be your girl for tonight, if you want me to.” Just like that.
His initial feeling was mild panic. The sudden dryness in his mouth was not what he wished to experience when being flirted with, given his self-confirmed and somewhat prideful independence of . . . And furthermore, it was unsettling, coming from her. Everything he had ever seen in her pointed to sincerity, not given to friendly flirting. In fact the first time he’d ever spoken to her, it was to say, “If you get your nose any higher in the air, and it rains, you’ll drown.” Such was her reserved, indifferent air to males; an attitude not easily reconciled with the coy insolence that saturated her enticing remark.
He weakly resisted until it came to him that it would take a better man than he to laugh and move on.
“We’re going out, somewhere.”
Sellout, he told himself
“Why don’t you come along, both of you.” he gestured towards her friend Dory who was regarding Natalie with what he would recall later as a shocked look.
Natalie now looked slightly bewildered. “Where?” she finally asked, supremely unsure of herself now.
“Not sure. Gotta find everybody. I’m supposed to meet em over by the post office. Hang on, I’ll go see if they’re there.”
He moved off through the crowd, while she turned away with a dismayed look in her eyes.
Ten minutes later, he returned to the same spot.
She wasn’t there. Neither was Dory.
He meandered through the idling crowd, until he saw his cousin.
“Hey, you seen Natalie?”
“’I think I saw her headed toward the dean of women’s office.”
What’s she doing in there?
“Would you go get her, we’re supposed to go to Covington and her and Dory were gonna come.”
“I’ll try.”
She returned shortly with the two of them in tow; Natalie, reluctantly, it appeared, accompanied by Jack Alder.
“He coming?”
“Yeah,” his cousin volunteered, “They’re gonna ride with him.”
Whatever for?
Since it appeared that Natalie was not going to look directly at him, he shrugged and dug his keys out of his pocket.
“Hey, can I ride with you?” Shelby asked. “Manuel said he’d be by later. so he can bring me back.”
“Sure.”
He and Shelby arrived last, since he never could find anything, not a gas station, much less a specific restaurant to which he’d never been, without at least three wrong turns and an occasional jaunt the wrong way down a one way street, pedal pressed to the floor, desperately racing to dart down a side street scant feet before the shocked, indignant glares of drivers coming the opposite direction, clearly offended at having to take their foot off the accelerator. And since his parents never could find it regardless of how many wrong turns and how much frenzied speeding down one-way streets, they never made it at all.
He and Jack sat opposite Natalie and Dory. He opposite Natalie, Jack opposite a nervous Dory. It appeared there were something afoot there, also. Chad and his brother and his brother’s perpetual fiancee sat to Lee’s right.
Chad, leaning into Lee’s peripheral vision from the opposite end and side of the table, flashed a downright smug smile at Lee, shifting his look significantly towards Natalie, then back at Lee.
What?
Chad then went back to conversing with his brother in hushed tones, with Lee and Natalie obviously the topic, judging from the sideways jerks of the head, and the glances down their direction that never quite reached them.
Sometime between the main course and dessert, Lee found himself intrigued. Not impressed, for he’d already been impressed. There was an abundance of impressive traits; beautifully shaped eyes, perfect mouth that needed no lipstick, auburn hair, endearing little mannerisms.
But what was intriguing was her complete lack of pretense. Sincerity, that was the word. She didn’t ooze goodwill, or exude enthusiasm or coquetry. She was just sitting there talking, not embarrassed, shy, or overconfident, yet apparently interested in him. He was definitely off balance. Every girl he’d ever known up to this point had served to reinforce his conviction that females were all well and good, just not for him. He was a little disgusted. Not very disgusted, just disgusted enough to be amused at his disgust. What sort of way was this for a woman to act? Just when he’d been completely content to categorize all women essentially the same, and just as content to leave them be as they were and go on his merry way without them, no hard feelings, thank you, this enigma casually stepped into his path and looked him full in the face. No pretense, no designs, just plain, undisguised interest. He’d never seen anything like it. And so, as one does with a novelty, he stopped to look.
When they had done with supper, and curfew loomed large, he got up to pay for his meal. When he returned to the table, he was disappointed to find them already gone. Manuel had since arrived and left, taking Shelby with him, so Lee got in his truck alone and blundered his way back to the college, five minutes past curfew, and meandered up the stairs to his room. He pulled his tie and dress shirt off and sat down at the desk in his khakis and t-shirt to spellcheck the essay due the next day. Halfway through, Matt eased the door open and ambled in.
“Where you been, boy?” Lee drawled.
“Went out with James Tackett and Levi and some girls.”
Lee chuckled. “I think I’ve finally got you figured out. You never go out with the same bunch twice in the same month. I don’t even know anybody named Tackett.”
“Linda’s cousin.”
“Linda?”
“Yeah, you know, blond hair. . .”
Lee put his pen down and twisted in his chair. “Blonde, really?”
A sheepish little smile flitted across Matt’s face. He dove onto his bunk. “So, what’d you do all night? Plot the violent overthrow of the marriage institution?”
“I went to Uno’s pizzeria.” Lee replied cryptically, turning back to his essay.
“By yourself, or with another bachelor?”
Lee doodled in the margin and said nothing.
“Oh, I see. By yourself.” Matt gripped the edge of his blanket and rolled toward the wall, thus relieving Lee of the burden of explanation.
The next morning, Lee’s eyes opened at seven o’clock. Just as he started to close them again, a thought nudged him awake.
He dressed quickly with the light off, leaving Matt and Jim still asleep and hurried downstairs and across campus to the cafeteria.
He came in the side entrance and searched the cluster of students down at the far end.
Sure enough, there she was.
He sauntered down the other side of the room, picking up a glass of juice and a muffin and headed for her table.
The closest seat available appeared to be three seats down from her, so he sat down, grateful when Shane Crosby across the table and four seats down hollered, “Well, look who’s up at this unearthly hour.”
He watched out of the corner of his eye and saw Natalie lean forward and look his way.
Fifteen minutes and some general commiseration about finals passed by and Natalie stood, leaving.
Lee gulped the last of his juice and shoved his chair back directly in front of her, unsure of what he was doing, just not ready to give up so easily.
“And where are you going?”
She never missed a beat, pulling a chair out from the opposite table and sat down, scant inches away from him.
She leveled that saucy sincerity at him and smiled. “Did you want to talk to me?”
Well . . . at least she cut through all that preliminary nonsense.
He smiled too, if a little shakily, and came right back, deciding that honesty, in the end, was bound to be the best policy.
“That’s what I came down here for.”
When the thirty minute conversation was over, he couldn’t remember exactly what it was they talked about, only that as they both departed the cafeteria for eight o-clock class, she asked, “When do you eat lunch?”
“Around one o’clock.”
“Okay.” she replied without inflection in her voice, leaving Lee with the pleasant impression that she simply took it for granted that they would see eachother at lunch.
Which they did.
And as they were leaving again, she asked about his finals, and why didn’t he bring his books down to the lounge and study there?
Finals more or less took a back seat as it will when two people who want to get to know eachother attempt to “study”together.
“So, when are you going home?” Lee asked, closing his philosophy book, finally conceding to himself the folly of trying to study while drinking in this new pleasure that was Natalie.
“My mom is supposed to pick me on Thursday, but . . .the old blue van hasn’t been running so well, so . . .”
Lee felt he had been around long enough to spot a hint like that one. But . . .no sense tackling conclusions.
“How are you gonna make it home if your Mom can’t make it?” he asked bluntly.
He nailed her. Her eyes went down and her pencil rolled in drunken circles in the margin of her notebook. Lee smiled inside. She had that same look last night after she had offered her company for the evening.
He quickly relented. “I could take you.”
He always gave up too easy. So did she.
He liked the way she gave up the charade; with a little smile in her eyes when she said, “Oh, but that’s way out of your way.”
“Oh, I think I could spare the time.”
The smile appeared on her lips. “I’d like that.”
I’ll just bet you would.

Yeah, it is a little self-absorbed.
Its my blog.

Why do I serve God?
Fear was my initial motivation. Forgiveness. . .
That was a long time ago.
What holds me, now?
I've certainly no desire or temptation of desire to forsake my Christianity.
Why is that? It may seem an odd question, but it is begotten from my distrust of human nature in general, and my own nature in particular.
I believe that I am a child of God. I also recognize my insufferable humanity.
I observe that I am impressed by Christianity.
I read books by C.S. Lewis, Ravi Zacharias, and G.K. Chesterton and am gratified by the philosophical and intellectual royalty that raises Christianity to its throne as king of religions.
I was born of Christian parents, neither of whom have ever given me the slightest reason to disrepect the heritage they have given me.
I am the grandchild of exemplary Christians, people known for their testimony.
I married a Christian woman who delights in the law of the Lord.
My sister and brother-in-law serve God.
My in-laws, uncles, aunts, cousins serve God.
What troubles me in unguarded moments is this: I have no reason to be anything other than a Christian.
Have you ever wondered how much of your experience is positive peer pressure?
Surely you have noticed how much easier it is to hunger and thirst after righteousness when righteousness is the food and drink of choice of your companions.
Surely you have noticed how much you desire humility when you observe it in others and wish I would that others could see that in me.
Surely you have noticed that prayer acquires much more fervor and reality in the presence of a saint, and how difficult it is in the presence of a sinner.
Surely you have noticed how incredulity tempers your boldness.
Falderal, whippersnapper, you may say. What of it? Count your blessings.
I don't wish to strain at gnats, but in quickly dismissing this question I sometimes feel as if I'm making a molehill out of a mountain.
Thank God for your Christian heritage, you say. Thank God for your upbringing. I truly am.
Be thankful for your Christian companion. I am too grateful for words.
Deepen your knowledge of apologetics, then, and fortify your faith with the words and writings of wiser men. Populate your world with saints and follow their example.
I intend to.
But whence cometh my motivation to serve God? From all these?
I have made my Christianity something to be enjoyed. An easy yoke it is, and yet I sometimes feel as if I've unkowingly shrugged off the yoke and trot on down the road, empty harness flapping behind me.
How positive is positive peer pressure if it props up your salvation?
What would I do if there no Lewis, no Zacharias, no Focus on the Family, no Steven Curtis Chapman, no Frank Peretti, no parents, no grandparents, no Devan?
Stripped of all the decorations I have draped over my Christianity, would it look like our artificial Christmas tree on New Years Day; miserable, naked, drab, ready to be dismembered and packed away for another year?
How deep do the roots go?
How solid is the foundation?
What would a good stiff wind leave behind?
I cannot know this. I can only prepare.
Study to show thyself approved

The Genius of Satan

As fascinated as I am by the sheer number of interpretations of religion, philosophy, and Jesus Christ, I can't help looking for the root of it all.
Searching for motives behind the formation of people's worldviews will, I'm convinced, show a common thread, more, a common foundation; "anything but God", I'll call it.
I think it is entirely fair to say most people have put no thought into their worldview. It is formed by the combination of one's likes and dislikes, needs (wants) and passing fancies and is come upon quite accidentally.
If you were to ask the first person you met in Wal-Mart, "What is the meaning of life?", you would most likely be either stunned, confused or extremely amused depending on your appreciation for cynicism.
(I daresay America is no doubt the most diverse in this area, continually melting as we are, into one sticky, insoluble mass, recognizable only as goolash, in our large culture pot.)
We are an amalgam of every book, magazine, movie, album and person we have ever known. Having begun with no blueprint, the collection of values and philosophies that have rained down on us throughout our existence lay strewn about, useless, rusting, settling into disrepair; a junkyard. But it's our junkyard, and we know where everything is, so don't come through trying to organize things. First thing you know, you'll be trying to put things in the closet or spraying disinfectant everywhere and that stuff makes it hard to breathe.
All this observation boils down to one point, I realize, and a less curious person would be content to state the bottom line, it is all breathed into existence by the Father of Lies. [simplistic and very true. After all, it may sound unseemly to say that Buddhism,for example, is Satanic, but none the less true, Buddhism being yet another manifestation of the "anything but God" thread, which is, at its root, self-based and self-centered or didn't you know that Buddha left his wife and children in search of truth and thereby embarked on one of the longest wild goose chases in history.]
But the devil is still in the details and I think it is profitable to examine the junkyard. A pattern will emerge, one of chaos, organized.
In the modern religious manual, orthodoxy is condemned. Orthodoxy is rigid, unyielding, stubborn and arrogant.
Creativity is praised. We are philosophical bohemians, running around like abstract artists flinging paint and mud and dung and ideas at a canvas, waiting for some three dimensional masterpiece to emerge so we can collect our funding.
And when I say orthodoxy, I don't just refer to orthodox Christianity, I refer to orthodox anything. Single-mindedness of purpose is admired nowhere, not in Athens, not in New York, not in San Francisco. You may be a gay transgender transvestite earth-worshipping artistic vegan living with your partner you married in Vermont and your adopted kid and that's great, just don't be dogmatic about it.
And that is the hellish genius of it. That is, if we don't approve of forcefulness or proselytizing from anyone, we can continue to feel infinitely open-minded, and continue to ignore the one snide little question, is your mind open to being closed?
And in large part, we as Christians have hamstrung ourselves.
I think an excellent example of this is the way Christians and sympathetic social conservatives used the other edge of the civil liberties sword to strike back, quite effectively, at the celebration of Christmas sans Christ. It was pointed out that it was hypocritical of civil liberties activists to restrict the religious expression of Christians celebrating Christmas. As a trend, they are coming around, Merry Christmas is acceptable once again, and Christ is allowed back in the pantheon.
And we've done ourselves no favor. The best thing we could've done is give the libertarian zeal free reign and let it rush down the slope to choke in the sea.
More later.
Much later.

Vodoo Christianity

A black hole cannot be directly observed. The size and gravitational pull is proven by what disappears into the event horizon.
A black hole is American spiritual culture.
I read (scanned) with horrified fascination a book on American vodoo, not to be confused with its darker, simpler, purer sibling Haitian vodoo.
American vodoo has become inextricably fused with charismatic Christianity, fueling my belief that the only reason Satanic Christianity has not yet made its debut is because no one has thought of it. Maybe I shouldn't bring it up.
Worship involves waiting on the Lord, waiting for a word to be shared with all the brethren. There's healing, reliant on the availability of sacrificial chickens.
We've Americanized Africa.
Pluralism does not begin to describe the convoluted maelstrom of religion that has become our state religion.
Jesus Christ isn't quite villified, just tolerated, as long as He recognizes his place in our spiritual paradigm.
The Lion of Judah is our circus animal, jumping through hoops, tamed, by us.
Don't get out of your corner.
Christianity has become festooned with dried garlic cloves and smells of incense.
It is a world populated with wandering spirit guides and departed loved ones, beckoning us upward to higher planes.
We are very spiritual, much to our detriment.
Good old fashioned materialistic atheism was baked desert soil, webbed with deep cracks that drank in hard rain. We've traded it for life underneath a flat rock, crawling like worms and centipedes through the mud and flattened, albino grass.
Plenty of moisture and no bright lights.
I don't know that we've become more sinful than previous generations, just more creative, and paradoxical.
. . . white lies, insanity pleas, no-fault divorces, mercy killings, lesser evils . . .
Guilt is something in which we indulge, rather than suffer.
I was listening to a song by Jars of Clay about the bumbling efforts of Western Christianity to try to help our Third World brothers and sisters and couldn't decide if I agreed with the message or was violently opposed to it. (This is why listening to alternative music is so entertaing. You can put a different meaning to it each time you listen to it. It is the musical equivalent of abstract art, or those 3-D paintings that everyone claims to be able to decipher.)
It did occur to me, however, that, try as we might, we'll never truly assimilate with other cultures and ethnicities. We've evolved too highly and rapidly in the area of guilt for anybody else to catch up with us.
Guilt, having become a science, is no longer a grief, because the guilt has become penance in and of itself. It is now the end, not the means. We don't have to crawl up the steps of a cathedral, but the principal remains the same.
No self-inflicted pain can ignite our soul like God's burning purity.
So we lacerate our bodies with feathers, and fast on junk food.
If you are sorry, you get a pass.
If you resolve never to sin again, you are to be pitied.
The guilt trip is a short one, if often traveled. You get good at it, and it's easy to feel really sorry for your sin without getting carried away by delusions of grandeur and imagining what life would be without it.
But humility, well, that's something of which we can all be proud.
There has never been a generation so humble as ours.
We trample each other flat getting to the back of the line.
Is there a virtue left which has not been compromised?
Man's eyes were indeed opened that he should see good and evil, only he chooses to keep them closed most of the time.

western hospitality

The boy paused, still blowing into his gloved hands.
"Are you lost?"
The gloves dropped, and the boy looked up, his blue eyes heated with a sudden strange intensity. He gazed, searching, for a long moment.
Discomfort grew on the back of Joshua's neck like hot, prickly moss.
He ventured further hospitality.
"Do you need something?"
Joshua read the answer that leaped into the boy's eyes but never made it to his cracked lips.
Desperation.
He felt Ebenezer pushing against his leg again and heard the faint whisper of conscience begging him to open the door, bring the boy in, seat him by the fire.
He stiffened his legs and broke the gaze, pretending to hear something within the house.
"Hold on." He turned and pushed the door almost closed and bustled back to the pot on the stove which was, as chance would have it, almost boiling over.
He belabored the task of moving the pot to a hotpad on the counter and turning the stove off.
He walked reluctantly back to the door, ignoring Ebenezer who stood staring at the door.
The boy was halfway down to the road when he swung the door open again.
He quelled the burst of satisfaction that spread hot guilt all over him.
"Do you-" he began, but bit it off, unsure of what to say, or what he wanted to say.
The boy, not hearing or disregarding, bounded down the slope and hit the road in a dead run, disappearing quickly.
Joshua leaned against the doorjamb, watching the last place the Dallas Cowboys parka had flashed through the trees.
The longer he stood there with the door open, letting the warmth of the house rush out like vapor into the snow, watching for, hoping against, another glimpse of royal blue, the more satisfied he became that he'd done what he could.
At last, a chill shuddering over his shoulders, he stepped back and closed the door.
It was snowing again.

He picked up Copperfield, stroking the black head between the ears until a rumbling purr pulsed against the feline's ribcage.
Dumping him lightly at his water bowl, he retrieved a bowl and spoon from the cabinet, ignoring the irriation he felt with Ebenezer who lay in front of the fireplace, head resting on his paws, ears pricked and eyes trained on the door.

With an ear tuned to the simmering pot on the stovetop, he surfed aimlessly, merging onto the billion lane cyber super freeway and cruising in the fast lane, blazing through carefully prepared sites at a dizzying speed, caught up in the attention deficit culture.
He slewed into a site with the informative url impressions.edu and spun out, carefully picking through selected information archives on Monet.
Monet was precisely his ideal of the perfect artist. Not crass enough to depict matter in it's bold reality, not presumptuous enough to think he could exactly duplicate the beauty of his subject, and yet not so temperemental as to disregard any and all semblance of reality and cast order to the wind.
Sparse were the collections of artwork in Joshua's cabin, but each one was chosen carefully for its taste and placed deliberately, fulfilling its aesthetic potential.
No computer-generated glassed-in prints of winding rivers, cheery lighted cabins, or budding roses adorned his wall.
The sound of a dog dish skittering across tile, an explosive, inquisitive bark
and the scrambling of claws across hardwood was the only preamble to a thunderous knock on the front door.
It sounded thunderous because it had never happened before. Ever.
The heavy oak door hung on brushed brass hinges by Joshua's own hands had never fallen under the summons of a human hand.
Telling it was, that the option of not answering the door never occurred to him even though perfectly social people did it all the time. It certainly would have been an acceptable quirk for a hermit.
It was what he'd been waiting for, after all. What was solitude without discovery?
Solitude was meant to be discovered. Without discovery, it grew stagnant.
This thought never occurred to Joshua overtly, still, the blood pulsed in his head as he proceeded to the door. Joshua held no hate for the human race. He wasn’t even jaded. He was simply temperamental, and in danger of becoming extremely eccentric.
Ebenezer and Trotwood hung back, disconcerted.
He unconciously cast a glance about the room, searching for imperfections, reaching for the doorknob.
He swung the door open.
He wouldn't have been so eager.
A boy, nine or ten, blue toboggan, Dallas Cowboys parka, gloves, too big, shuffling his dingy tennis shoes over the packed snow.
Ebenezer thrust his big head in between Joshua and the door, but removed it quickly when Joshua surreptitiously squeezed his head in between his leg and the door.
"Hi."
He said hi with that bright ring of expectancy that said, I think your cabin is really cool. Aren't you going to invite me in? I'll play with your dog.
With all his reclusive soul, he wished to simply step back and shut the door.
Of course he couldn't. Mostly because he couldn't simply ignore the fact that an undesirable breach of his sanctuary had occurred. A child meant others, others who had no better sense than to let children wander and disturb. What if there were more children? A vulgar vision of his yard littered with deflated, sun-bleached basketballs, a forgotten blue and yellow plastic three-wheeler, an overturned slide,
and a blue plastic swimming pool filled with stagnant water and dead leaves filled his mind.
Joshua measured his tone. "Hello."
A silent pause ensued in which the intruder inexplicably cupped his gloved hands and breathed into them.
A reluctant hint of civility crept into Joshua's voice, "What can I do for you?"
"Um. . ."
You want to come in. Because it makes perfect sense that since you exist and you are a child that you have the right and even the invitation to impose yourself on anyone and everyone.

a litle background

Fourteen e-mails promptly went the way of the recycle bin, one from his thankfully far removed editor in New York busting his chops over a deadline received a thorough reading, a snort, and the delete button, and three more, one from a brother in Colorado Springs, another from a sister in Denver, and the obligatory daily from his mother in Butte were left unopened for later consumption.
If Joshua has been misrepresented to the reader heretofor as a man without acquaintance, even a man without family as a frame for his identity, an orphan having exploded into this vast expanse of wilderness like a human Big Bang, it is the fault of the writer and must be set right.
Friends he had, of mostly past or long distance acquaintance, and family as well; family of even a markedly normal and functioning quality, family that faithfully attempted contact with him, though more and more they resorted to one-sided e-mails, to which he responded, eventually.
This family consisted of his parents, a retired sytems analyst for a small freight company, and a semi-retired nurse who still worked one day a week for insurance purposes; one brother, married, with three children and an interesting to say the least career niche chiseled out of online marketing; two sisters, one a housewife, one child, and a burgeoning E-Bay customer base, the other sister, the youngest, recently married, bearing a master's degree and no children, and a promising if not lucrative future in cataloguing southwestern cultural history and native American contributions to eventual modern society.
The family had always been close, existing with a high level of functionality, and forgiving compatibility that many families only dream of.
The in-laws got on very well, as did the cousins, minus the usual competitiveness and awkwardness that will plague several young relatives who see eachother only two or three times a year and always in the confines of a backyard, a cleared out garage or family room.
The adults fared a little better, the conversation buffered in the courtesy supplied by adulthood. The women were perfectly content to shoulder the massive food burden necessary to family gatherings, as long as the men and the children made no great nuisance of themselves, getting on very well, thank you, the interaction graced with the social kindness of the sex, and later complaining only mildly in the privacy of their allotted bedrooms of the others' rambunctious children or the inevitable dispute over the use of glass or plastic, china or paper plates.
The men oscillated between the garage, the shop, the den, and the respective vehicles in the front drive, providing there was a new one or one with a particular confounding ailment. The interaction here was easy and relaxed, lacking the stress of competition that festered among the male gender of so many extended family circles. The camaraderie had only recently been jarred by the discordant addition of the youngest sister's husband, an energetic, ambitious, supremely confident young Cingular Wireless salesman who sported a year-round tan, a regrettable lack of subtelty, a strident conversational voice, and a hearty fake laugh.
However, even this dissonance was soothed by time and the new guy's realization that his male in-laws were not quick to be impressed or possibly didn't need to be. The gusto was quieted, and the laughs were reserved for things found genuinely humorous, instead of anything and everything related to his promising career, including but not limited to anecdotal on-the-job training. When the restraint became too much, and the energy ebbed too low in the masculine discussions, this brimming chalice of sanguine-choleric personality would bolt, like a caged tiger, for the kitchen in search of wide-eyed feminine appreciation.
Perhaps no family is completely normal.
But if general compatibility can be supposed to contribute to the sum of "normal" this family functioned at ninety percent.
This nearly normal family discussed often among themselves the frequent absence of their brother, for whom they all exhibited a fondness of such a degree that was to him almost inexplicable and at times, an irritant.
Joshua hadn't always been so reclusive. At an earlier time at any family gathering, he might've been generously titled the life of the party. His poor mother, clearly the most distraught over her eldest son's "self-imposed exile", as she called it, was forever trying to place a particular point in time or circumstance to his remarkable change in demeanor and habits.
His father, less disturbed, but still puzzled, reasoned perhaps it was due to his being single, a writer, and a psychology major in college.
"Any one of the three is enough to weird a man out, Janet." he pointed out to his wife. "At any rate," he inevitably concluded, "it's a phase, just like all the others. Remember the genius phase?"
Todd, his father, was here referring to an extended phase of Joshua's thirteenth and fourteenth years, when after reading a biography of Albert Einstein, he had decided to be a genius, and had affected all the trappings. He labored intensely over each subject in school, especially math and science. But chemistry, which wasn't available until the eleventh grade, became his passion. The school library became devoid of a large segment of the non-fiction section from 323.575 to 323.975 for weeks on end. He lusted after petri dishes and test tubes but scorned the Nickolodeon chemistry set his mother purchased at Wal-greens, utilizing only the blue microscope, with smiling ameobas on either side, and only after he had scraped the ameobas off. He spent hours with an open chemistry book and various bathroom and kitchen chemicals.
At least he never blew anything up, besides maybe his hair, his father, ever the irreverent one, was fond of saying, referring to the tousled hair-do that Joshua refused to admit, but everyone speculated, was emulative of his new idol.
His expectation for every test and review quiz was nothing less than a 100% A+, and he was disconsolate when he received a B+ in science and an A- in math, and became indignant when his sister pointed out that "Einstein was an idiot in school, too."
That phase weakened gradually and eventually died, but this phase, as his father insisted it was, was now years in dying off.


Just a note. This "serial" is written sheerly for my pleasure, and with no particular drift or plot in mind. You have just as much inkling about the next turn of events as I do. Throw me a nice plot twist idea, if you like. I don't promise to take it. There is just a touch of my protagonist in me.

Hope is there, just buried deep.

James Dobson sets himself up for disappointment.
As do we all.
It's called hope.
In a recent broadcast of Focus on the Family, he interrupted regularly scheduled programming to bring some pressing social concerns to the listening audience, first and foremost, a South Dakota ballot initiative to essentially overturn the recent from-out-of-the-blue state ban on abortion. The supporters of the initiative are all very democratic and American, I'm sure. After all, they just want the people to decide. Regardless of the motivation, the abortion ban, if polls are to be believed, may well share the fate of the very lives it seeks to protect. Seems the people think the governor and state legislaiture may have overstepped their bounds.
Dr. Dobson stressed the importance of this upcoming vote, urging us to fight on, because we're winning.
He gave the results of a recent study that shows abortion opponents winning the ideological battle over abortion. Some seventy percent of the American public, if polls are to be believed, think abortion is morally wrong.
We're winning this battle, he exulted, crediting advanced ultrasound technology for the ground gained.
Immediately, hope rang hollow.
The benefits of such technology notwithstanding, the victory, so called, is moral, which is another way of saying it is useless.
The reason being, there is no depth to this change of heart.
Americans are exceedingly opiniated on many, many issues, but opinions dwell on the surface, a safe distance above the deep, powerful undertow of conviction and they can be turned by no more than a gentle breeze.
If Americans are stirred to righteous indignation against abortion only by ever-advancing ultrasound technology, if it takes the clearing footage of a kicking, squirming, living fetus nestled inside the womb to sway their minds, then they can be swayed just as easily by the first agenda-driven movie director who takes it in his or her head to do a two-hour documentary featuring a rape victim in South Dakota who hadn't the funds to drive to Fargo to get an abortion.
We live by a moral code that we believe to be cohesive and structurally sound and are affronted when someone points out the contradictions and the weaknesses.
We are an amalgam of every possible belief system that exists. We have traded hateful prejudice for the guilty pleasure of complete acceptance of literally everything. There is a nice benefit to this new acceptance and tolerance. In exchange for accepting the moral shortcomings of others, we can play the intolerance card whenever someone questions our moral faults. With a tradeoff like this, tolerance feels pretty good.
You can be right, as long as the truths you hold are not in opposition to another's truth. This truth held in exclusion of all contradicting ideas becomes arrogance, and loses its place in line. It must then go to the bottom and work its way back up through the levels of truth, recognizing its obligation to be relative and not absolute, apologizing for its presumption all the while.
Truth, in and of itself, holds no direct appeal, unless it is cloaked in something exciting.
There is no demand for truth, unless it is gutsy, gritty, shocking, sizzling, rebellious, revolutionary, charming, disarming . . .
For truth to sell, it better have market appeal.
Unadorned, it will go unnoticed by the modern connoisseur of truths.
C.S. Lewis pried into the post-modern mindset in 1942 with the Screwtape Letters.
His fictional senior demon writes to his hapless nephew, "It sounds as if you supposed that argument was the way to keep him out of the Enemy's clutches. That might have been so if he had lived a few centuries ealier. At that time the humans still knew pretty well when a thing was proved and when it was not; and if it was proved they really believed it. They still connected thinking with doing and were prepared to alter their way of life as the result of a chain of reasoning. But what with the weekly press and other such weapons we have largely altered that. Your man has been accustomed, ever since he was a boy, to have a dozen incompatible philosophies dancing about together inside his head. He doesn't think of doctrines as primarily 'true' or 'false', but as 'academic' or 'practical', 'outworn' or 'contemporary', 'conventional' or 'ruthless'. Jargon, not argument, is your best ally in keeping him from the Church. Don't waste time trying to make him think that materialism is true! Make him think it is strong, or stark, or courageous-that it is the philosophy of the future. That's the sort of thing he cares about."
'Nuff said.
The only comfort I find here, and it is a comfort, is that the truth, unadorned and unaffected, will shine all the brighter in this moral fog.

continuing some more

He disliked the idea of heading home without the dog.
He stood at the crest of the mountain for a long while, facing south.
The lonely distant drone of an aircraft reached him and he looked up, just in time to see a black silhouette float through a hole in the increasing cloud cover; a charcoal triangle moving slowly across the sky, a Stealth fighter.
The image was surreal, as always,the sense of the quiet savagery of the wild, undeveloped mountains so indifferently conquered by cold technology. He had lived here for years, and still felt the chill of isolation, the science fiction sense of being stranded on an island of wilderness in the midst of a bustling world. To the north, the brooding beauty of the mountains virtually disappeared under a colorfully clashing world of tourist attractions. To the far east, the mountains weakened and broke into long, sloping plains of tall, yellow grass. To the south, a barren expanse of Army appropriated land met the concrete desert of a combined metropolitan population of 3 million souls. And to the west lay the home of the black falcon now floating through the high desert sky; an Air Force nerve center of legendary importance and secrecy.
Yet here he dwelt, in the comfort of his self-imposed exile in a land where you could walk for miles and miles through the forest and never find any more definite signs of civilization than an occasional boulder-strewn logging trail, invariably made impassable to anything other than pedestrian travel by a heaped-up burm of soil and rocks.
When he'd first moved here, the solitude, so long sought, had quickened his spirits in a hundred different ways. Now it had become a way of life, a routine that suited, not excited.
Yet some peculiar propensity for loneliness carried him quickly through the years in a pleasant fog of contentment, and the affection he harbored for his way of life and the contempt he held for the general population grew each time he was forced to leave his nest and rub shoulders with reality.
At length, and still not bearing in mind any particular course of action, he stirred and took a look around.
And took in a sharp breath.
Ten feet away, underneath a wretched, drooping pine, stood Ebenezer, watching him, head held high, gaze inscrutable.
A knifing wind froze on the trees, and Joshua felt a prickling numbness in his cheeks
A pause, and Joshua shuffled one foot forward.
The husky's shoulders hunched and his head lowered, still watching.
Joshua stood completely still, fascinated.
Until a sense of humor touched him. This was ridiculous. The pitiful excuse for a graveyard, probably some long gone backpacker's attempt at cryptic immortality had flung a smothering mantle of melodrama over that was now wearing hot and prickly.
He squatted and scooped up a handful of snow, molded it and hurled it at Ebenezer, who sprang aside deftly and landed in a playful crouch, the spell broken.

They got back to the cabin an hour later, after an uninterrupted beeline from the top of the mountain to the front steps of the cabin.
David Copperfield stirred lazily from his post on the back of the chair in front of the fireplace, shook his head, and sprang lightly in front of Ebenezer.
They greeted casually with a quick whiff, the animal equivalent of a brief nod, and Ebenezer proceeded to his water bowl, leaving an idly curious David Copperfield to watch Joshua shed his boots and coat.
This accomplished, Joshua scooped up the cat and slumped in the same chair.
Copperfield appeared to be done with sitting for a time, however, escaped and bounded toward the utility room, where he shared his eating quarters with the husky.
Joshua closed his eyes for a minute.
He opened them to behold a decidedly late evening hue of sunshine streaming through his bedroom window, spilling out into the hall, bathing the living room floor in an orange glow, and splashing over the stone fireplace in front of him.
The unscheduled length of the nap disoriented him for a few moments, as he leaned forward and rubbed his face in his hands. He looked toward the kitchen, trying to remember what he'd planned to eat.
A pot of stew, made yesterday.
Joshua dined largely on stew, soup and chili. His array of spices, measured and applied in precise amounts, were of an eclectic variety, gleaned from various cooking sources and magazines. He'd even taken to online foraging for recipes, variations on vegetable soup, and odd herbally-influenced concoctions of cider and tea. He took a great amount of care in food preparation, with special attention to appearance. If the coloration or consistency displeased, he scarcely bothered with discriminating taste, he threw it out. In this manner, he'd avoided belonging to that tired stereotypical subculture of bachelors to whom fine dining was Buffalo Wild Wings and good home cooking was Hungry Jack's.
He removed the pot of stew from the refrigerator, placed it on the stove on low and went to check his e-mail.

The Last Man

The men in our society are plagued by an ongoing identity crisis.
Some might argue that the shifting sands of society's concept of manhood is mainly a media spectacle, fashion wizards and retailers seeking to foment dissatisfaction in order to sell their product. It may have begun in that manner, but America usually becomes conflicted when we're told to.
I don't know when the plague began, perhaps with the advent of television situation comedies, but it is now a pandemic.
I remember some time ago reading an article on usatoday.com about a new surge of boisterous masculinity in country music. Toby Keith was quoted, fairly extensively, as an authority on the subject, proof that the new confidence purported in male country stars was mainly an industry allowance to be a slob with a foul mouth and a mischievous propensity for drinking yourself into mindless oblivion, all the while trolling in a mournful, goat-like vibrato.
I am glad that Toby Keith and other country stars now feel it's okay to be male.
The article served notice on me that the time for un-selfconsciousness as a man was over, had been over, in fact for some time, for the term "metrosexual" had been coined seven or eight years earlier by an astute British journalist named Mark Simpson who had taken note of the masculine meltdown of the 1990's.
The concept was largely ignored for almost ten years, until some genius marketing strategist seized upon it for gain, tweaked it, and it became a media buzz-word.
Metrosexuality, which was by Simpson's reckoning handwringing anxiety over what sort of man to be, morphed into the new rage. It was Neutrogena's wistful daydream come true. Men who were not uncouth were now expected to be finicky.
Very finicky. Manicures, skin pampering, waxing. . .Advertisers laid the guilt on like a thick layer of pore refining moisturizer.
Backwaxing?
You mean you don't? was the incredulous reply accompanied by nicely sculpted raised eyebrows.
Metrosexual mania raged on for some time, pumped up by advertising. The label rested comfortably on Hollywood favorites such as Brad Pitt, George Glooney, and Ahnald Schwarzenegger, and, perhaps even more fascinatingly, Donald Rumsfeld, in "an antediluvian way." I wonder if anyone has informed Mr. Secretary he's an antediluvian metrosexual.
At some point, however, the hand-wringing began again.
Maybe women didn't want men to spend more time at the beauty salon than they did.
One Reader's Digest article I read during that time period based on confessions of a metrosexual told of the author's wife reacting with distaste at the prospect of her husband's nails looking betters than hers did.
What an Amazon woman.
Enter the ubersexual, a term I assume wrested from Nietzche's proposal of the uberman, or "overman."
The manicures and eyebrow tweezers were tossed overboard in the turbulent seas of cultural identity.
Ubersexuals were the new man's man and, more importantly, woman's man.
Ubersexuals are immaculate without obsession, sensitive without emotional instability, and supremely confident without arrogance.
They walk a tightrope over a pit of Bengal tigers, in other words.
Interestingly, the new pr guys for "ubersexuality" were mostly former metros.
(Except for Donald Rumsfeld. I think he still plucks his eyebrows when no one's looking.)
The transformation of metro to uber came to Mark Simpson's attention to which he replied, " Any discussion in the style pages of the media about what is desirable and attractive in men, and what is 'manly' and what isn't, is simply more metosexualization."
More hand-wringing.
He goes on, "Metrosexuality -do I really have to spell it out- is mediated masculinity."
So why does a Brit have to be the one to point this out?
The snide question rose in my mind when I read the article on country music manhood,
how masculine is masculinity when it's affected?
Here we have men studying how to be men. Not how to be great men, or good men, just men.
It's a pathetic picture. Maybe they should teach classes.
And the most disturbing thing to me about the male sex identity crisis is the icons we're given.
Sports.
In our culture, who's more manly than a NASCAR driver, or a baseball player, a football player, or, deliver us, a basketball player?
Sports can no longer be considered entertainment, it is a way of life and it is the obsession of most males young and old in our society.
And this is one reason we can't decide what sort of men to be. What foundation for manhood is laid when our role models are engaged wholly in trivial pursuit?
It's a game, for crying out loud.
What is the meaning of life when the most breathless moments in America occur during the World Series, or the Indianapolis 500?
These are our shining examples of masculinity.
Men who don three foot wide shoulder pads and tight shiny pants, swagger out on a field and growl at each other through face-shields, and hold forth eloquently after the game is over, "Uh, yeah, I think-um, I think the thing was, you know the thing is, we just all, you know, really came together as a team, today, and you- we did what we needed to do cuz. . . you know we came, come out here to win, dats what the coach been tellin us. So you know, I think we did we what we came out here to do."
Dazzling analysis.
And over on the sidelines, you have the sports eunuch, the representative of male America, with his shirt off and head shaved and face painted with the team colors, shrilling and waving his arms and jumping up and down.
And the culture media has to ask why men are conflicted.
It's sad.
The problem with second-guessing your manhood should be obvious.
It's no good if you have to explain it.

Fully Man

Dusk pooled in the valleys, and bled up the ravines; a creeping transition from day to night.
He watched the interminable evening wear on, so slow.
Time, which existed only in thought anyway, stood almost completely still.
He felt every passing second marked only because he felt every single beat of his heart. Slow, thundering pulses flexed his eardrums with every stroke.
The part of him that felt the way others felt desperately willed the darkness to complete its conquest of the weakening day.
That part of him that felt what others felt was simultaneously terrified as the western sky paled from smoky blue to hazy orange, from ashen gray to sooty charcoal.
Watchman, how far gone is the night?
The part of him that no one knew about was untouched by the coming darkness.
Darkness did not exist, except where he allowed it to exist.
But the weakness of his humanity rose in a swelling black tide, ebony waves washing over the solid island of resolution.
Unlight swallowed light, unstoppable.
His mortality betrayed him, wheeling a monstrous Trojan horse into the protected light, and even now, the absence of light was spilling out, blotting out the light.
There was only one who knew, only one person on earth who understood.
Earlier in the evening, they had shared a look of common knowledge.
But Nombre was a comfortless confidant.
The words of prediction that set all the others in an uproar of disillusion had merely sparked the flint in Nombre's eyes.
As they looked across the table at each other, something cold and cynical glinted behind the other's eyes like a sharp rock gleaming an in inch below the surface of an icy, rushing river; indifferent, immovable, a shipwreck waiting to happen.
There was something else there, too.
A look of supreme knowledge, yes, but something else, something he'd not yet encountered in the turbulence of the last several years.
There had been disbelief. There'd been outrage. There was indignation and judgment.
There was fear, hatred, and confused anger.
There had been love, also; misunderstanding, misinterpreting love.
But Nombre knew. He understood what the plan was and he knew the motivation behind the plan.
And Nombre despised him for it.
Looking into his bold gaze now, he saw the stare of his ancient adversary superimposed on the stony eyes.
And he was the recipient of contempt for the first time in his mortal existence; burning, despising, mocking contempt.
Nombre was laughing at him. His enemy was laughing at him.
And try as he might to avail himself of the strength of God within him, his enemy's confidence set his humanity on fire with fear.
He knew better, and he did not know better, because he chose to not know better.
And now, as he had daily, hourly, every second, he gave himself to the uncertainty, the horror of the unknown, sacrificing the part of him which no one knew to the part of him that everyone knows.
He looked deeper into the eyes of Nombre, and saw what lie behind, saw even what Nombre couldn't see.
He heard the whisper Nombre couldn't have heard.
Come. Yes, come and share my lot and taste of my food and drink.
The sound slithered across him.
And you really think that you can touch me and retain your purity? You believe you can carry the filth of these people and remain clean?
. . .a look of mocking admonition and incredulity . . .
This goes against your rules! You are breaking your own law! How can you expect your structure to withstand such a violent transgression of your code?!
. . .the look of ultimate assurance that terrified. . .
Your rule will cease to exist. You will lose control.
He felt himself descending a staircase into a cesspool; a boiling fountain of raw sewage.
The stench already clung to him. It was the smell of rotting, decaying death.
. . .and the slithering whisper. . .
You cannot hope to submerge yourself in my world and ever hope to escape my company.
There it was. The final fear, the wind that drove the storm rushed over him with a incredible fury.
Yes, my comrade, my former co-habitant, my brother, come spend eternity with me in the place you made for me and mine. And you will leave all of these people twisting in the wind, lost in the netherworld.
Their eyes were locked.
It won't work. Your great scheme will fail."
. . . laughing. . .
But then, you have no choice, do you? You promised them.
Someone else was speaking now.
"Is it I?"
The question broke his heart.
He couldn't tell him.
Yes, it was him.
It was all of them.
It was everyone.
Another nightmare visited him.
A line stretched through the ages, through what they called time, a line of people.
Everyone who had ever lived, everyone who would ever live waited in line.
They all looked different, but they all had one thing in common.
They all carried hammers.
Some dangling from one hand, some gripped tightly in both hands, or hefted in one hand and tapped into the other palm, over and over.
There were a myriad of emotions displayed over every face. There were looks of hatred, looks of eagerness, straining forward to strike their blow.
There were blank stares; eyes that held no pity, no expression, just dull anticipation of swinging their hammer.
He saw everyone, and saw not one empty pair hands.
No, not one.
It hurt, it burned, it cut so deep.
He felt loneliness, he endured the isolation of hell. He was forgotten as no one had ever been forgotten.
And now, here in the grove of trees, in the smothering night that came so suddenly, he accepted it. He threw his arms wide and embraced the night. He stepped off the cliff.
He lay down on the altar.
And he felt no peace.
. . .heard only a long, sobbing cry in the distance of his mind. . .
Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?!




Just a note. Jesus was completely God and completely man. Focusing on the man led me to speculate about what temptations and feelings He must have faced in days before the Crucifixion.
And "Nombre" is Spanish, meaning betrayal.

Web Counter

...continuing...

A useless thought meandered through his mind.
What must he look like, standing there?
The focus of his imaginative vision zoomed out suddenly, and he saw himself standing on the shoulder of a mountain, determined to make something mysteriously significant of a forsaken graveyard.
Who was he, really? What was he doing here? What was he doing anywhere?
It was that sensation so seldom felt, but so unsettling, as when you are talking, out loud, and suddenly begin to listen to the sound of your own voice. The tone is unfamiliar, and the words strange and pointless. And so you trail off, discomforted.
He beheld his own thoughts, and found them deliberate. Not the reacting thoughts of an astute observer, but the predisposed pondering of a man bent on . . . . . .what?
He saw what he wished to see. His sight was tinted by his own worldview.
His thoughts, his writing, his long hikes in the woods, his cabin, his world; they all had the same murky theme, obscure even to him.
The question lay before him to be considered; why? Why did he live the way he lived, sequestered and harboring a smoldering resentment for mankind in general? To what end were his writing, his entire existence?
He stood completely motionless, scuttled in uncertainty. He was unsure of what to do next, and even more unsure of why he felt he should be doing something.
Turning from this troubling direction his thoughts had taken, he moved suddenly, turning his back on the graves and stepping off the rimrock to continue on up the mountain.
Ebenezer was yet to be found.
He reached the top thirty minutes later, breathing hard.
He was cheated out of the exhiliration of a sweeping view of the surrounding mountains and found instead a long, sloping grove of small pines shuddering slightly as the high wind whispered loudly through their branches.
The sun, after chilling his mercurial temperament with its mid-morning blaze, had deserted the early afternoon sky, hiding behind one rolling cloud after another, making its way across the sky altogether unseen.
The wind had grown steadily as he climbed higher and now stung his eyes and swept sheets of powder across the crust of the snow. He scanned the woods again for movement, looking for the familiar flash of smoky white flitting through the trees. Siberian huskies were more wolf than dog, and resltessness always lurked behind Ebenezer's ice bue eyes, but he had seldom left his master alone for this long.

Hit Counter

An indefinite amount of time slipped by, until the inactivity of such reflection allowed the cold to spread up through his body, prompting him to rise to his feet and think of Ebenezer.
He continued on the approximately southwest course and found the going smooth.
The trees seemed to grow taller, and spread their branches wider, and farther above the floor of the forest, paving a wide path of pine needles and cones only lightly dusted by the snow.
The sun had disappeared behind a high-flying cloud bank, and only occasionally glimmered in the tops of the trees.
A mile, and Joshua strolled on, curious of Ebenezer's whereabouts, but not concerned.
Striking out on his own was not unusual for the husky, although he normally didn't range quite this far from his owner without circling back to check on his progress.
He found himself walking along and slightly on the side of a long ridge that appeared to run roughly south and north, the higher end of the ridge lying to the south, the direction he now took.
Skirting an occasional outcropping of rock bursting from the spine of the ridge, he became set on reaching the top, and his pace took on more purpose.
As is the case with climbing a mountain, several times he assumed to be approaching its peak, only to reach the horizon, and find a short plane of level ground, followed by yet another stretch of increasingly steep terrain.
At length, he started up a concave incline, a steep ramp that ran into an enormous bluff of craggy rock. The closer he came to the bluff, the more precipitous the climbing grew.
A rimrock crowned the top of the hill, like the rough gates to a lofty city, and the sight beckoned to curiosity.
To his left, he picked out a small niche in the stony stockade and strode quickly up the ever-steepening grade. At the foot of the rough staircase supplied by a series of small outcroppings and crevices was a small weather-worn patch of earth that bore a barely distinguishable paw print that corresponded with white scratch marks on the soft stone.
Ebenezer.
The climb was easy, not more than nine feet. He eased up, cautiously.
The view was startling.
In the center of a circular plateau, surrounded by a sprinkling of alien dormant flowers, two wooden slabs squatted, harsh and gothic in the surrounding beauty.
Two grave markers, rounded on top.
He pulled himself the rest of the way up and sat upon the rimrock, looking around slowly, taking in the drama of the picture in front of him.
The surrounding rimrock protruded an average of two feet around the entire perimeter of the plateau, semicircling the tiny cemetery like a fence. Directly behind the markers, a sheer face of flint reared up and back, rising forty feet or more before crumbling into boulders and young, determined pine trees.
The plateau stretched about one hundred yards in diameter, oval-shaped.
The wooden grave markers stood close to the rock face.
He was very still, afraid to breathe, and not daring to disturb the blanket of snow that rested lightly on the on the sleeping flowers and clustered like a nightcap on the curved tops, an unbroken seal of solitude.
A childishly morbid sense of delight and awe hung over Joshua, and his writer's soul staggered in every direction, drunk with the potential, yet reverence of mystery forbade his imagination to wander too far.
He looked closer, searching for an inscription on the markers. Ninety yards spanned the distance from himself to the graves, so, after consideration, he stood and began slowly working his way around the rimrock, still unwilling to break the snowy seal, but curious, very curious.
He stopped suddenly, remembering Ebenezer.
There were no tracks in the snow, in the middle of the plateau, or on the rimrock.
Intuitively, it made no sense. From all appearances below the rimrock, the dog had made his way up the same way Joshua had. And it was absurd to think that a dog, wandering in the woods, presented with two foreign objects, would ignore them.
He moved on now, distracted, but still curious of the inscriptions.
Ten more paces told the tale, and a strange one it was.
One marker bore an inscription, the other did not.
They were smooth-surfaced, but unfinished. They looked like they had been hewn from a door with a handsaw. The inscription was faint. Deep, patient scratches in the wood spelled out two words, a Christian name and a surname, indistinguishable because of the flecks of snow that rested in the shallow grooves.
No dates, no epitaph.
The enigma began to weigh in on him slightly. Joshua spent so much time alone that the existence of other humans in this wilderness was a jarring realization. Less disturbing was the fact that two of these humans had died, and fairly recently, judging from the look of the wood.
It was mostly gray, but still streaked with brown.
A breeze brushed coldly by him, bearing the faintly acrid smell of snow and pine.
He stifled an involuntary shudder, hunching his shoulders and shoving his hands deep in his pockets.

Joshua makes it outside

While donning the leather boots and rough canvas jacket at the door, (His eccentricity extended not quite as far as his clothing; minus the artful avant-garde hair and the wedge-shaped jaw he closely resembled a Cabella's magazine clothing model, the tireless efforts of fashion wizards having succeeded even in the far-flung regions of mountain grandeur.) he was joined by Ebenezer.
These daily outings were among the few pleasures that stoked the flickering fires of the dog's stoic spirit. The solemn eyes quickened and the tongue lolled out, in between impatient glances up and down at the progress Joshua made lacing his boots and buttoning his jacket.
David Copperfield assumed a lazy, sour-grapes manner as he stretched across the leather armchair in front of the fireplace.
Joshua and Ebenezer stepped outside into an effulgent light that is produced only by the fusion of snow and sun.
However gently Joshua closed the door, the slight jar commenced a small avalanche at the top of the snow-laden blue spruce that stood beside the porch. Joshua stepped out of the way quickly, avoiding all but a little powder, but Ebenezer, the fresh air already oxygenating his wolf-blood, lunged off the six-foot porch and landed in a deep drift, muscles quivering and eyes expectant; mouth widening.
Joshua shook off his coat collar and shoved his hands in his coat pockets, starting down the stairs.
Ebenezer divined Joshua's plan for today's hike, and erupted out of the drift in a geyser of glittering snow and bounded for the lane far below.
He (Joshua) held to a revolving flight plan for their excursions. It was a rigid pattern that allowed for no indulgent deviations, no favorite paths, and its express purpose was to "absorb his natural surroundings." His fondness of nature matched his taste for classical music. Both were environment; background noise. Most of his likes and dislikes were rooted no deeper in his nature than Ebenezer's indoor stoicism was rooted in his. He chose to like and dislike what he felt he should like and dislike. He played Tchaikovsky in the Sony system not because he had ever really listened to the music closely enough to fall in love with it, but because it befitted a small mountain chalet, with a stone hearth, rugged furniture, and large windows.
However, he had lately taken to Vivaldi, having decided that perhaps Tchaikovsky was sometimes over-the-top. The drums and the horns blared melodrama, and he detested melodrama as much as he detested normality. He had forsaken Yanni, a few months back, for the same reason.
Up until something over two years ago, he had roamed the woods in an ATV. In the time since, his outings had taken a turn for the naturalistic. He'd let the four-wheeler go for $4,000, built a small breakfast nook on the end of the kitchen, and taken to walking.
Hiking trails didn't exist this far out, and if they had, they would never have been trod upon by Joshua. The road less traveled was something, in his mind, to be ever sought after. He preferred to plow through the unblazed forest slowly, without being manipulated by an established thoroughfare.
His course today took a southwesterly turn about a quarter mile down the lane. As usual, no open path lay before him, just a small break in the tree line. A four foot high rend in the undergrowth provided an opening underneath a leaning Ponderosa pine into which Joshua, preceded by the intuitive Ebenezer, ducked through.
A few hundred yards in, Joshua stopped and leaned against a thick pine to take in his surroundings.
It was an unrealized addiction, this insatiable thirst for woodland silence.
He grew still, relaxing against the tree, allowing his blood to slow, and his breath to moderate.
No birds, no wind stirred. Even the thrashings of Ebenezer had faded far ahead, muffled by the snow.
The sun had yet to penetrate and the snow hung heavy and frozen on the branches above.
Minutes passed.
His back against the tree, he slowly slid, his knees buckling, until he sat motionless on the ground.
His head tilted back and he gazed up through the spidery network of branches and needles.
Complete and utter quietude rose in his ears, growing to a roar.
Hearkening back to what he had written an hour before, he was unconsciously moved, unwittingly excited, by the stillness. The nothingness accentuated. . . . . .everything.
There was nothing here, nothing but himself. The distractions of daily hermit life peeled off rapidly, dissolving into the smothered forest.

Correction: The whole trouble with sometimes getting carried away with yourself and entertaining the fancy that perhaps your professor in college was on to something when she told you that you write like William Faulkner is that you sometimes get carried away with the fourth of fifth sideline in a run-on sentence and forget the main point of the sentence. The following sentence in the last paragraph should read "He remembered it well simply because of the novelty of it and also because it slightly annoyed him that anyone, less a boy (A boy so discerned because of his unpredictable gait and the suddenness with which he turned aside, walked backwards and in other eager manner, so took in the mountain wilderness, no doubt anxious to stumble upon some phenomenon or awe-inspiring sight to share with his friends back home in the Midwest. That was the trouble with children, they could never appreciate nature for nature's sake. It always had to be something worth telling.) would breach the sanctity of his domain."


And so on . . .

For a long while Joshua had harbored this territorial attitude with complete innocence. It was only at that moment, standing in the kitchen shadows, essentially hiding from a young boy, that he realized it, mulled it over, and accepted it with only a little sheepishness. He was a writer. And what was a writer without a few endearing eccentricities? And so justifying his private turf war, he donned the mantle of the hermit, if only partially. In fact, it became the topic of frequent monologues delivered to David Copperfield, and Ebenezer. The former rarely regarded him with any interest during these tirades, but rather seemed to take it as an invitation to indulge his fondness for bathing. The latter eyed him with a cold stare. In some ludicrous way, the dog sometimes seemed a representative of the small reserve inside his conscience that still clung reluctantly to the dismally cyclical reality he eschewed. With some amount of imagination added, he could swear the blue eyes rolled heavenward every time he complained of even the slightest encroachment of those who exhibited no proper appreciation and therefore had no business trespassing, his un-paved, un-landscaped, and otherwise un-spoiled sanctuary. David Copperfield indulged his outbursts at times by leaping into his lap and rubbing hard against his chest, but he entertained the notion that the aloof Husky served as his silent detractor. And, unconsciously, it became all the easier to ignore the unwelcome voice of reason.
It wasn't that Joshua disliked people.
Or so he told Ebenezer.
A clock on the desk read 9 a.m.
Resignation propelled him off the chair and into the bedroom, a spartan expanse of polished hardwood, antique brick and rough cedar, in search of a coat and a pair of boots.
For the longest time after his solitary adult life had come of age, he had alternated between an orderly chaos and frenetic meticulousness. A deep resentment of domestic duties that plagues both sexes, but afflicts males with a greater severity, fostered perpetual procrastination, until an undesignated amount of time and an undesignated lack of order accumulated, at which time he set about straightening with a grim efficiency. Religious adherence to orderliness followed for a certain time afterwards, in which not a shoe lingered by the front door, and not a wrinkle marred the woven rug in front of the fireplace.
Impulses aren't habitual, however, and as time marched on, preoccupation with more pressing matters, and impatience with even the slightest interruption of any given literary mission flung a coat across the mantel and left kitchen chairs at odd angles with the dining table, and so on and so forth, until the wilderness took back the land.
He had, after five years, hammered out a treaty between obsession and complete disorder.
The deal was tenuous, with occasional aberrations, but a happy medium with a wide margin seemed to have been settled upon. He still went on short binges of radicalism, but the one thing that saved him from being completely given over to fanaticism was the memory of a college roommate, a choleric priest of the goddess of fussiness.
So, if Joshua was an eccentric, reclusive hermit, he was a temperate, eccentric, reclusive hermit, as one might be moderate libertarian, or a middle of the road anarchist.

Chapter 1, cont.

Staring blankly at the screen, he suddenly squinted at the glare that had intensified over the last half-hour without his notice. He swiveled away from the desk and looked out the front window. The sun, after three earlier and feebler attempts had mounted the fog bank that lay low over the mountains to the east and now glared down into the valley, dissipating the icy fog and glistening on the melting frost now dripping from the spruce boughs.
His ambiance thus dissolved, he saved the last three and a half pages, and drained the last of his cider, idly lamenting the loss of the mood-setting weather and the loss of the taste of holiday cheer that resulted when hot apple cider grew lukewarm. At room temperature, apple cider, the official spirit of cold, gloomy mountain mornings, tasted disappointingly like apple juice, a common summer refreshment, and Joshua Hammond felt about summer the way an ice sculptor regarded the advent of an unseasonably warm day in January. In fact, the disregard Joshua felt for the whole world outside the cavernous, rock-slashed, spruce shrouded valley he called home was in quality the same disregard he held for the offending sun now spreading the cataract on the 17" flat panel monitor. Invasive.
Whether the contempt he held for such distant reality was owing to the time he'd spent away from it or the time he'd spent in it was of no difference to him. He didn't care to consider it. He didn't have to. Modern technology afforded him the self indulgence of seclusion he so desired. Joshua earned his keep by the broodings of his melancholic temperament. He bled those pleasantly dark musings onto a computer screen, saved it to a backup floppy, and when the daydreams assumed the rough and appropriately vague form of a story, copied it on a CD-ROM, and sent it off to his editor. Frequent correspondence with said editor arrived via e-mail, via satellite internet. The accommodating satellite was in its heaven and all was right with the world.
Four years not a soul had stepped foot in this cabin save David Copperfield, the whimsical black and some less white feline who scarcely lived up to his name, and Ebenezer, the hulking, morose Siberian Husky who bore the handle of his namesake with astonishing accuracy.
Town was a village, really, of 312, 22 miles down a gravel road. Conventional mail arrived in post office box in the village, and the numerous disciples of numerous gospels peddling their numerous creeds in the larger towns to the west had not yet considered the wild and untamed mission field that lay up the mountains to the east. The only human Joshua had seen broach the 12 miles between he and his nearest neighbor was a boy, of 12 or 14, or so it seemed at a distance of 500 yards, which was the distance between the large picture window in the front room and the gravel lane that wound on past the cabin up the ridge to the south.
He remembered it well simply because of the novelty of it and because it slightly annoyed him that anyone, less a boy, so discerned mostly because of his unpredictable gait and the suddenness at which he swung around sideways and walked backwards, eager to discover some new sight or phenomenon of the mountain wilderness no doubt with which to share with his friends back home in the Midwest. Children had no appreciation for nature simply for nature's sake. It always had to be something worth telling. He also remembered because both his animal companions had been alerted by some inscrutable sound and crowded to the front window just as the boy stopped and gazed up through the smallest opening in the trees that allowed sight between the cabin and the road. For some reason embarrassed, he called both to heel and himself eased back into the eat-in kitchen.

?

Silence is a clamorous cacophony. The chief reason modern man surrounds himself with televisions, radios, iPods, and portable DVD players is because he wishes his thoughts to be controlled by surface noise.
Joshua stabbed at the keyboard almost absentmindedly.
The moment all distractions cease and a man is alone with his thoughts, bedlam ensues. As the lingering tide of popular culture white noise ebbs, a faint drum beat of reality is heard in the distant gloom. Strange, fantastic thoughts swirl in the fog of his tangled brain. Strange because he doesn't recognize them as his own, fantastic because they resemble the bits and pieces of ludicrous dreams. Slowly, as his initial flights of fancy as to what shape these fantasies are assuming begin to be proven false, the nonsensical thoughts begin to assemble an oddly familiar pattern, a richly diverse tapestry with common themes running throughout; subconscious conscientiousness, unspoken, unrealized fears, and shocking fantasies. A spectral shape at last emerges from the fog, inch by fearful inch, and he stands finally alone on a stark white beach, between a vast ocean of useless media and a dark, shrouded jungle of unknown thoughts, alone with the most terrifying and bewildering ghost he has ever encountered, his own psyche.
Pointer on the scroll button, Joshua pondered the last phrase. Reconsidering, he highlighted psyche, and selected "thesaurus" from the tools bar. Murmuring all the while, he disqualified "personality" and "conscience" and grunted at the word "character." Psyche definitely seemed to be the lesser of four evils.


Bear with me, this will be a long, arduous journey. More later. . .

Glen Beck is carnal.

Listening to a conservative talk show host recently, (a practice I encourage only in moderation. After all, if John Wesley is right in thinking that most people cannot talk for more than twenty minutes at a time without saying something they shouldn't, it stands to reason that three hours a day is superfluous, even counter-productive) I was forcefully reminded of my disassociation with the mainstream evangelical movement in our country. The topic at hand was Jude Law, an actor, exposed in immorality with a woman employed as his nanny. The view taken by the host was that a responsible man must first check his brain at the door to employ an attractive woman in his home. The opposing view taken by his opponent in the debate was that refusal to be deliberately and often in the company of an attractive woman is an admission of an inability to control yourself. The host countered that a person on the Atkins diet doesn't go to Cold Stone Creamery. His adversary responded that if the analogy were germane (the host apparently fudges the Atkins way of life occasionally) then the host is admitting that he has a problem with fidelity. The host countered that while he has no problem being faithful, he is a man. This is approximately when I turned the radio down to background level and began to explain to my wife why I felt these two men were both completely off their rocker. The two components of the host's argument, namely, he can be faithful, but he is a man, appear to diverge completely at the outset. To say that one can be faithful, but can't, is a violation of the Rudyard Kipling doctrine, i.e., east is east and west is west and never the twain shall meet. If a man has no problem being faithful, then he has no problem being faithful, end of discussion. And the other view is completely naive, and dangerous.
Both were right. Both were wrong. The host is right because the appearance of evil is something we must avoid, and, more importantly, a married individual spending an inordinate amount of time with any member of the opposite sex, beautiful or hideous, other than their spouse, is extremely ill-advised. The reason is not complicated. "And it came about as she (Potiphar's wife) spoke to Joseph day after day, that he did not listen to her to lie beside her, or be with her. "
The host's alter ego, "Stu", is right because to assume the nature of the beast cannot be tamed and brought to bear is a dismal and depressing and disgusting view of life.
I have my doubts that "Stu" knew how right he was, or even why he was right.
It has become accepted, sometime in the last twenty to thirty years, for a responsible, faithful, loving husband and father to "look, but not touch." If the host is right, and a man is a man, infused with all the weakness and fallibility apparently inherent in the sex, then the struggle to remain faithful is completely futile, since no less than the Son of God said that to look on a woman to lust after her is to commit adultery with her.
And the unbearable sadness of all this is that when a person brings this dilemma to 99% of today's pastors, evangelists, and theologians, they are sent away with the disheartening news that they must live with the problem; a chronic illness treated with a couple of Tylenol a day to help with the symptoms.
I beg your patience as I attempt to retrace the route my thoughts took from the Glen Beck Show to the final conclusion and destination of my pondering; eternal security.
There's a side issue here to be dispatched first. There is some doubt in my mind that a man could truly be in love with his wife the way God intended a man to love his wife if he is plagued with a lustful thought life. As a married man, or a married woman, a Christian will recognize that there are other attractive people in the world, but this is as far as it goes. To entertain even for a moment flights of fancy with anyone else is, or should be, disgusting and repulsive, regardless of physical appearance or winsomeness.
One more sideline on a sideline. And I state this with permission, not inspiration. This is my personal opinion that I am quite sure I share with practically no one and I dredge up simply to wake you up. I do not feel, considering the depth and indescribable passion I have for the love of my life, that a person can be truly in love with more than one person throughout the course of their lifetime. I welcome your disagreement.
Now, on Glen Beck and the gospel of weakened salvation. The main problem Glen has if he struggles with fidelity in his thought life is carnality. And now you think you're reading an essay by J.B. Chapman or C.W. Ruth or some other late great holiness preacher. I would consider it a compliment. It is true, though. It's judgementally, unattractively, crudely true. As Snoopy would say, "How gauche." It's disconcerting to me that this truth is regarded self-righteous by most of today's leading, on-the-front-lines, in-the-trenches conservative evangelicals. They fully recognize the natural depravity of man. Great first step. But it's an incomplete composition. It's as if the Bible were written to the words, "And He gave up the ghost." and followed up immediately with the concordance, maps and the back cover.
The gift was not given so that we may accept it and put it in the closet they way we do with 75% of Christmas gifts.
Let me say I don't subscribe to the straw man fallacy that this doctrine is simply an indulgence sold for a cheap price to all who believe in it. I believe there are many people who give lip service to this belief that secretly long for an abiding Ally. At the same time, I realize these people would initially greet this imposition on their independence as an affront and resist it, as we all have, to some degree.
But the image of a sincere God-follower, one desperate to walk in the light shed by Him, being led by that light to the door between struggle and surrender, the door between war and peace, and finding no way to open it, is heartbreaking.

Road Rage

Why do I feel justified in bearing down relentlessly on any hapless driver who has just unwittingly pulled out in front of me and hasn't the courtesy or clue to accelerate to accommodate my current speed?
The assumption made by myself (and I suspect it's universal) is that the driver in question made a calculating decision to impede my progress. The driver in question is an arrogant, inconsiderate hack who purposed in his heart to cut me off and his punishment is to quail in the glaring daggers of my headlights (if it's nighttime) and sorrowfully regret the wicked error of his way.
One comforting school of thought is that automobiles alter or somehow negate the personality of its inhabitant and we are not to be held personally responsible for the attitudes displayed in flashing high beams and squealing tires. We all are guilty of automotive aggression and this somehow cancels out our debt of guilt as we all park and slide out from behind the wheel and remove our sunglasses and smile sheepishly at eachother. Its just those blasted cars!
If only it were true.
One discomforting school of thought is that the impersonal, anonymous identity we assume while driving behind tinted windows causes us to channel our true nature. There are no immediate consequences (hopefully) to tailgating or verbally bludgeoning the driver in front, behind or beside us. Pop psychology would tell me its just a natural healthy way of releasing the steam valve on the pressure cooker of everyday life. Pop psychology might also tell me its a symptom of some deep-seated, bottled-up anger I harbor toward the world in general. I suspect that, as usual, the diagnoses of pop psychology may accidentally contain some elements of truth. miniscule though they may be.
No doubt stress does play a part and no doubt the privacy of an automobile lends itself to a certain amount of angry honesty.
But those are sideline issues.
I realize this is somewhat of a societal ill, an affliction brought on all the habitants of earth who drive, but I'm a Christian. Shouldn't this concern me?
I certainly can't blame it all on cars, any more than I could blame the availability of the Internet if I had a propensity for pornography. Technological and industrial advances do have a way of presenting fresh new spiritual quandaries, though, don't they?
I choose to judge the glass half full, however, and view this as an opportunity to strengthen the bond with divine wisdom, rather than a conspiracy to trip me up, or, more familiarly, another sign of "these last days." I think James might not mind if we were to add an uninspired addendum to James 3:2. Any man able to bridle the tongue while driving a car is able to bridle the whole body.
There's a really blunt question fighting to be asked through all of this.
Is this private war I wage with my fellow drivers a sign of spiritual deficiency?
Is it really Christian to want this idiot who pulled out in front of me to know I think that was really stupid so I'm just gonna tailgate him for a while until he knows I'm really ticked off?
I apologize if this blog is too self-absorbed. My intention while blogging is to address an issue that affects us all, and this is one time when I would ask for responses from whoever reads this if you would be so kind. Anonymous, or otherwise, tell me, am I alone?
One thing I am sure of; the sheepish guilt that loosens my grip on the wheel when at last I roar past in the passing lane and catch a fleeting glimpse of the little white-headed grandmother, hands tightly on ten and two, peering through the top rim of the steering wheel at the terrifying and bewildering road ahead.
Oh, dear God, am I so petty?
I suppose the debate about whether or not road rage is indicative of spiritual malnutrition or spiritual immaturity is somewhat pointless, IF I resolve to remedy the situation, whether it be with a balanced spiritual diet, in the case of the former, or graduating from milk to meat, in the case of the latter.

The Great Bully

Dear Reader,

I guess I just need to blow off some steam and vent a tad-bit of frustration.
I think I need to take a careful look inside myself and ask a question, "Am I a viable, reasonably intelligent, and informed human-being; able to form thoughts and come to a concrete opinion all on my own?

I answer with a resounding and resolute reply, "Yes"!

Obviously, the vast number of free-thinking media personnel, those gods of the written word, who by the flick of the almighty pen hurl their enlightened ideas into the universe, would gladly inform me of my lowly stupidity!

Of course, which one of us is right?

Surely that man or woman, with a string of titles and degrees a mile long, would be the one with all the answers!? They are the ones who have taken the courses in journalism (the way to indoctrinate, oops, I mean "inform" those stupid, middle-class, flag-waving hicks of the way the world really is turning), environmentalism (the way to care for "Mother earth" like good, well- behaved children, never disturbing her by ripping down trees to make paper so they can spout their editorials...oops! There I go again! Pardon me!), world religion (the way to become a mouth piece for every religion, except Christianity. Learning how to defend, with all the passion and emotion inside their being, that religion the 9-11 terrorists embrace as their guiding light.)

You know, I realize that I could go on and on about the way things are, but frankly, it just all makes me sick!

When I see and hear day after day, on-the-hour-every-hour, the gripes and groans from a clearly biased media, I just want to stand up and shout back! And you cannot be truly honest to yourself and your God-given, human intelligence and tell me that the media is not biased!

But when things get so bad that it becomes abuse to pee on the Koran, while on the flip side it's art to put a crucifix in a jar filled with the same! Come on, people, you are not such a hopeless case as to still believe the media outlets, ABC, NBC, CNN, etc., are fair and balanced?!

Just the other day, my husband posed a question to a co-worker, recently returned from the battlefront in Iraq. He asked if the returning soldier thought that the USA was doing any good by being over in the Middle East. The soldier replied, without hesitation, that we were doing so much good by helping those people establish a democracy of freedom. My husband totally agreed, and then went on to personally thank the soldier for all of his sacrifice on behalf of his fellow Americans.
Okay, now here comes the zinger.
The man replied, "You know, that's the first time since I've returned, that anyone has thanked me for what I've done".

For shame, for shame America!

People, we need to get our heads out of the sand and wake up! We are at war! We were attacked! Our very existence is being threatened by these radicals terrorists! There is no negotiating with someone who believes it is their religious duty to blow up Americans, and not just Americans, but anyone who is non-whatever they claim to be! If this isn't an intolerant attitude, then I don't know what is! But, yet, our media would have us believe that we, the Americans, are the enemy! We, with our nation founded on Christian principles, are the enemy.

Please.give.me.just.a.small.break!

I don't know about you, but I am going to stand firmly behind my country, president, and military, because without them we would all be dead! God help us to not be afraid to voice our own opinions, to think for ourselves; to not be bullied into cheering for the enemy.

Yes, I am an intelligent individual who is willing to stand up and shout back. I will not be told what to think. I have in front of me the same stack of facts as the media. The only difference between me and a whole lot of others is this: I purpose to actually use my brain to think through the issues. I refuse to be bullied.

More later. Comments welcome (but only if their your own)!

Saturday

My Saturday activities are structured tightly around a central philosophy. That is, do absolutely nothing out of necessity except spend time with my wife.
Nine-thirty usually finds us mumbling morning-speak to each other while we alternate positions in the master bath. There are those two other bathrooms, one of which gets used fairly frequently because it is downstairs, providing convenient access to the lav while downstairs as opposed to trooping back upstairs to the master bath, the other of which adjoins the guest bedroom, and I only catch glimpses of as I enter and exit the guest-bedroom/computer room. I have used the guest bath occasionally, only to feel as if I'm visiting friends and had to use the facilities. Besides, there's no books in the guest bath, not to mention the toilet paper gets pilfered and relocated to the master every time we deplete the supply, as procuring a fresh roll involves trooping downstairs. Don't get me wrong, I love having three bathrooms. It gives a breadwinner a sense of accomplishment. What more could a soul want?
The above paragraph may well have been the mother of all sidelines.
Ten-thirty or eleven usually finds us at Cracker Barrel, where the maitre d' (French word for hostess) recognizes us, infusing one with the small-town warm fuzzies. Twenty minutes later we are invariably enmeshed in some fairly deep, fairly abstract discussion. (I eschew the peg game as Job eschewed evil, viewing it as yet another way to demonstrate my lack of left brain competence.)
Noon finds us at the library, a place I fantasize about sneaking in at night, just the two of us, and over-indulging my book lust. I roam the aisles with the frustration of a kid in a candy store. So many printed words, so little time. I often marvel at the poker-faced librarians. Don't they find it utterly incongruous, not to mention hilarious, that a person who would check out books by C.S. Lewis, William Golding, an expose on the 9/11 hijackers (which, by the way, will unfortunately most likely collect dust for two weeks, harsh reality having lost out to riveting fiction and philosophy) and a CD of Tchaikovsky, would also check out a video cassette of Winnie the Pooh, and another book entitled It's a Dog's Life, Snoopy ? Such professional composure leads one to believe maybe they were formerly employed at a mortuary.
Not that I consider Peanuts any less a philosophical commentary on life than William Golding. If I were a pastor, I would incorporate Charlie Brown into more sermons than not.
My personal favorite strip: Charlie Brown lies in bed in the dark with those familiar worried insomniac wrinkles around his eyes and muses, "Sometimes I lie awake at night and ask, 'Does anyone remember me?' And then a voice comes to me out of the dark that says, 'Sure, Frank, we remember you.' "
Then it's off to the city. No good reason, really, and that's one of the things I love about Saturdays. While driving, we're scuttled in another conversation regarding music, thanks to whatever CD I have chosen. Most recently, it's been classical. My wife wields a knowledge of music I lack. I prefer to think of myself as a "music-as-an-art" connoisseur.
As to music, all sorts and genres, I read once that Sigmund Freud despised music.
I find that not at all surprising. To a soul such as Freud's, that believed in nothing comforting, nothing absolutely true, music would be a unthinkable blasphemy, a feast in a mausoleum. Music would have grated against Freud's futile notion of life the way the preaching of the gospel would grate against a soul in hell; insanely cruel and presumptuous.
Back to my sideline. Our wheels carry us to a sprawling up-scale shopping center on the outskirts of Lexington. Barnes and Noble is only slightly less seductive than the public library. (The idea of exchanging filthy lucre for the privilege of reading tends to tarnish its luster.)
Nonsensical wandering through several clothing stores usually produces nothing, only toward the end of the world's shortest and cheapest shopping spree do we find something in a particular store which name escapes me. She picks out and tries on for size, and shape, and color, while I browse among the tastefully expensive home furnishings, reminding myself once again that when I own a home, I want a study, and when I have a study, it must have a globe, a leather armchair, and a painting or print, rather, of some exquisite taste.
After she puts back all the items except two, we leave and depart, with a little more purpose now, toward the lights of Wal-Mart, getting business done and heading for home again where we'll do more of the same. Hang out. Read. Watch Winnie the Pooh.
I love being married.