X factor

Life is getting away from me. I am trapped in a tiny bubble through which I can watch others live but can’t join them. I have no passions anymore, only obsessions. Things that should inspire me to embrace them and grab them by the horns only nag at me and remind me how far behind I am at everything. Nothing I am doing is enough, or even close.

            What the hell am I here for? Such a stupid question, like something right out of the script of some godawful “outreach” effort to Reach Troubled Youth For Christ, those horribly misguided attempts of shiny happy evangelicals to make sense of the flutter they’d gotten their tits in over “Generation X.” I hail from that generation, but I’m not a troubled youth anymore. I’m forty-one years old and completely bereft of anything to offer God or the world He claims to love. I still believe His claim. I just have nothing to lend to its proof.

            I looked over my Facebook page at all the things I’ve been “liking” and posting lately, and I realized that they came from fear. Fear of having been found too lazy to stand for the things I have made so much noise about claiming to believe in, however pathetic and inconsequential any “stand” via social media may be. Fear of having nothing to bring to the party. I have to bring something, to be something, right? I know people who will call that a lie. Why can’t I believe them? Not like I haven’t tried. God, I’ve tried. I can’t do this. There is no true face. There is only a pile of masks that I have run out of ways to shuffle.

            So goddamned self-obsessed, pretentious, unreal. But it’s not unreal. It’s honest, and I should be punished for that. But I probably won’t learn, no matter how much I try. I wish they could have known how I envied them on Wednesday night, so blithely singing the praises of failure, sagaciously expounding on the human propensity to respond to pain with learning and change, as though it was some particularly engaging novel or movie plot. Yet I know they say those things because they learned them the hard way. They have earned the right to pontificate. They have come through, and I have not. So I envy them, and wish I could join them, even while their words kick and punch and shave slices off whatever I have that passes for a soul. Failure and pain, perhaps the two things I despise and fear the most, yet so familiar, constant, and defining that you’d think I’d have learned some. Fucking. Thing. By now.

the glorious Fourth

Independence Day. I am amazed at how strange and formal that sounds even to me. It’s the Fourth of July, or simply the Fourth. Fireworks and charcoal and a day off work. Why does it take so much effort to focus on the real meaning behind the holiday?

           

            I thought about how to mark this day on my Facebook feed and kept getting frustrated. There is no way to succinctly express what this means to me, or what it makes me yearn to do and to be in response, even knowing that I’m likely to fall contemptibly short. A good friend wrote a piece in his blog that I thought of sharing, but it was too easy to envision a vast snarling ocean of debate and empty commentary surging forth at the merest trigger of this or that phrase or definition or mention of a historical event. I no longer possess the energy for that, and that is very frustrating, because that seems to define us as a culture more than perhaps anything else. It may well be that said lack of energy is only proof of my falling short in my response to the freedom I have been incalculably gifted with. Nolo contendre.

            But at least we are free to do such things openly, or at least more so that the majority of people on Earth. I travel very little and must rely on the observations of people I trust for my insight into how the rest of the world lives. Their consensus is clear on this one point if on none other: this is about as good as it gets, all things considered. The Occupy movement, the Tea Party, and nearly every buzzword and media staple we take for granted would be met with drawn guns at every public event, and bloggers would disappear into whatever gulag the powers that be could contrive, were we only as “free” as the rest of the world. Just ask a Syrian. To be sure, outrages are perpetrated on U.S. citizens and their constitutionally guaranteed freedoms by all levels of government as a matter of routine, and few of us even seem to grasp that it happens at all, let alone how often or how blatantly. But for all that, it’s a bigger deal here than it would be nearly anywhere else. It’s status quo for much of the rest of humanity, and in most countries on the globe it raises few if any eyebrows beyond those who are directly and immediately involved. Abu Ghraib, the cop with the huge can of pepper spray, any scandal involving abuse of power with which Americans are familiar, is a scandal precisely because we have a deep-seated knowledge that Americans aren’t supposed to be like that.

            America is an ideal. Those ideals are plain in the documents that founded her, particularly the one drafted 236 years ago. It is chilling to see so many similarities between the grievances listed against King George III and today’s headlines. And it is heartbreaking to take any close look at our ideals and contrast them with the playing out of our history. We have fallen so tragically short of the good to which we have aspired, trampled on the very freedoms we claim to espouse, become in so many ways the things our founders bled and died to oppose. Yet we have not given up. I have not given up. I may fail every bit as badly, but I will fail forward. I am willing to live these ideals rather than preach them, share them rather than hoard them, encourage toward them rather than blame you for failing in them. If, and only if, there is no other way, I am willing to shed my blood or another’s for them.

            And that is because of love. A famous son of a Holocaust survivor has been quoted as saying, “I wasn't born here. But I have a love for this country and its people that knows no bounds...[My mother] is alive and I am alive because of America. And if you have a problem with America, you have a problem with me.” I seek to avoid or resolve conflict whenever and if at all possible. But it isn’t always possible. There is good in this world, and it’s worth fighting for, and I am freer to do that here than perhaps anywhere else. I wish and work for peace, stability, safety, and harmony. But if the choices of others put those things out of reach, then I aim to misbehave.

I want you to be that free, wherever you are, whoever you are. America may never live up to her ideals, but you don’t have to be perfect to be the best around, and you need never stop trying to improve. Never. Happy Independence Day.

after all

you're all better than me, no surprise there.

tried to run with the Solid People but ghosts can't hack the grass.

there once were signs that I was made of the same stuff, but can't see them anymore, except in other lives that should inspire but only expose, and mine gets uglier the more the light is turned up.

nothing to say but sorry and that helps no one.

When I was young I was the nicest guy I knew

I thought I was the chosen one

But time went by and I found out a thing or two

My shine wore off as time wore on

I thought that I was living out the perfect life

But in the lonely hours when the truth begins to bite

I thought about the times when I turned my back & stalled

I ain't no nice guy after all

When I was young I was the only game in town

I thought I had it down for sure,

But time went by and I was lost in what I found

The reasons blurred, the way unsure

I thought that I was living life the only way

But as I saw that life was more than day to day

I turned around, I read the writing on the wall

I ain't no nice guy after all

In all the years you spend between your birth and death

You find there's lots of times you should have saved your breath

It comes as quite a shock when that trip leads to fall

I ain't no nice guy after all

- Motorhead

beside the point

just watched The Passion of the Christ for the first time since it was released.

there is nothing to say that won't be beside the point and about a trillion miles beneath it.

makes no sense at all.

the only right thing to do in the face of what He did for us is to live the life which He endured all of that to give us.

but seeing even an imperfect shadow of what that was brings the insectile fog that i have always called life to the deadest of stops.

God humbled Himself before His venomously seditious creation to be tortured to death.

what's your story?

nothing further, Your Honour.

God forgive me. God heal me. God be kind to Yourself and forget me.

no, please don't. the forget part, not the kind part.

i'm so sorry.

God bless us, every one

This is usually the hard part, coming home after celebrating with whoever has been kind enough to adopt us this year. All the anticipating, soaking up the lights and decorations everywhere, feeling God insidiously seeping into every little corner this time of year, even here in aloof, cynical New England. Jello Biafra is probably more liturgical than me, but I think I am starting to get this Advent thing more and more every year. The waiting, the anticipation, the yearning for all of this to well and truly change me forever, is as intoxicating as it is agonising. I savour and dread it all at once. Now it's over. There's a bit of anxiety at the prospect of the battles that loom ahead to keep the fragile little flame lit just a bit longer.

I don't give a toss if I sound cliche. I have the rest of the year to be hard-edged and hopeless, and I don't really want it. I want this. All the time. This is good. My God, I wish I could keep it forever. One day I will, but the waiting sucks.

Except there's always next year. Win. Epic win. Thanks be to God for His indescribable gift. He has blessed us, every one. May you find that around the most unexpected corners.

something

I followed. There was nothing. I still followed. There was something, but I wasn't allowed to touch it. The Leader held my head under the water until I gurgled submissively and screamed in terror what He wanted to hear. That I wanted something, very badly. He smiled, and pointed to something ahead. I walked toward it with joy and passion. I felt an egg hatch in my ribcage.
Something is always out of reach. I wish I had been allowed to remember that. Nothing has moved in my ribcage for a long time now. All my shirts smell like rotting meat. No one asks why.
I followed because I loved. Now I follow because there is nothing else to do. And I am tired, and I am alone. There are others nearby, but they cannot hear me when I speak, because they are enveloped in something. And something is always out of reach.

running riot in a corner

I am listening to my iPod while making the next work-week's lunches and washing the dishes afterwards. The Ramones, the Pogues, Husker Du, R.E.M., Flatfoot 56. I'm not particularly stressed, depressed, or much of anything, unless it's possible to be such a thing as desperately content.
Discipline is up next, an Oi! band from Holland. They cover an old Cock Sparrer tune, Running Riot. I first heard it very nearly twenty-three years ago today, either just before or just after a charismaniacal hubbub in a Sheraton banquet hall slashed life into B.C. and A.D. Cock Sparrer had this and one other track on the Strength through Oi! compilation. There were a lot of great tunes on that slab of black vinyl, but that one more than any other turned my blood to boiling whiskey and made all my leukocytes and platelets grow fists and boots and and laugh and hug and bellow and brawl their way through my veins.
I remember looking at the photos on the back cover of the album, skinny British white kids with a smattering of other shades resplendent in ladder-laced Doc Martens and tight cuffed Levi's, pressed tight against each other in front of a cheap nightclub stage and leering at the camera with gleeful empty eyes, or swarming all over a busy street on the way to a gig or a football match, cars frozen on the pavement like clotting blood. There were arms around shoulders and pint glasses in fists and naked scalps and flighties and sideburns and stories and pride and pain.
I miss the boiling whiskey. I miss the brawling veins. I miss looking life in the face and flashing a crooked grin and knowing I had it sussed. Except I never did. I did, and do, know the One who does, but I wish I could hear Him like I used to. I wish it was easier to feel Him slap me on my flighty-encrusted back and hand me a jar and tell me all would be well. I wish remembering those days didn't feel so much like a taunt.
The boiling and brawling had enough power to propel me anywhere, anywhere at all, but it fizzled, and now the corner is scuffing my boots and bruising my knuckles. I'd back out of it if I knew where else to go.