Christmas 2012

Just didn't seem right to let a Christmas go by without writing something here, especially since I let so much self-absorbed negativity leak out in other posts. I've been assured that it's better than bottling it up, but it still feels slimy. And Christmas is always better than either.

Very much the same gig as the last several Christmases, only I remember that last year I wasn't sure what this one would look like, or if it would even be recognisable. I am ashamed to admit that I wasn't entirely immune to a little trepidation about the whole 2012 apocalypse thing. That's what happens when you cut your theological teeth on half-baked ravings from end-times junkies. God has put a lot of effort into my deprogramming, and I have done my best to cooperate, but the residue can take a long time to flush out.

There is no denying that the ride to this point in the year has been rough and wild enough for two years. I really appreciate Christmas under such conditions, but find myself wishing it was easier to hold on to the gems of love and light and hope that I manage to wrest from the tunnels that need to be dug through shootings and elections and disasters and God knows what else.

I don't want to take them for granted. No matter how impenetrable the things I want to stop doing or being, but can't, may appear, no matter how misplaced any scrap of beauty or peace may seem in my midst, no matter how loud the lunacy outside may howl, those gems are still gifts from a good God. And He knew exactly who He was giving them to. That points to hope. And as long as I have that, I am still standing and moving forward.

I don't know what else to write. I am troubled. So many people have been buried under that lunacy and I would not begin to know how to help them find their own gems even if I were in a place to do so. That hurts. I would give them mine, if I could. But the things that affect me rarely translate well to another's perspective, even if they didn't just bury a child or lose a home. I can tell of what God has done in and for me, and maybe sometimes my conduct doesn't make that a total joke, but I can't make someone else experience it for themselves.

All that is way above my pay grade. All I can do is the best I can do with what I'm given, keep learning from my mistakes, keep pointing to Christ, and hope it gets real for others like it did for me. It still happens, all over the world, in good times and bad. Even I can't muck that up. There's that hope thing again. Merry Christmas. God bless us, every one.

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.

and so this is...

Another Christmas past. This year's was better than most. Even with a couple of solid kicks in the peepee place. For all my hand-wringing fume and fret I can absorb some pretty fair blows and still stand. That would be a dandy thing to know without having to absorb them.
But I can't complain. I am saturated with gratitude. It has its roots in some odd things, but they make perfect sense to me. Christ wasn't born anywhere near this time of year. The Roman church co-opted a pagan festival, apparently. I don't know the story and I don't care. Something for others to argue about, 'cause there's nothing at all more important than debating someone else into the ground, right? I know His voice, and in spite of all the cosmoline layered on my soul I can feel His presence if it's strong enough. It is just that, this time of year, at least for me, the essential spiritual retard.
This is real to me. And that only matters to the extent that it points the way for it to be real to someone else. It was real before I happened, and it will be real long after I'm gone. It would be real if I had never happened at all. The gift He gave us demands attention. It demands a response. And yet it doesn't, because it is free. There is no gun at my head, just a surety that it would abase me to subhumanity to ignore such a gift, or worse yet to dismiss or desecrate it.
My will and ability to respond are contemptibly inadequate. I can't even touch what other humans have done for me, let alone God. What I do for them is so ludicrously disproportionate to the love and gifts and sacrifice they lavish on me that I never make it through Christmas encounters with friends and family without feeling a little slimy.
Christmas, in defiance of all the waste and nonsense our culture has heaped on it, still sees God invading our world right on schedule the same time every year. It's supposed to change us. I want it to change me, forever. I think it does. I listen to songs that I know will bring me to tears, even if I'm cleaning a rifle when I'm listening to them. I detail strip every hour of the holiday weekend and stamp the imprint of every song and gift and conversation into my soul like arsenal marks. I want those things to define me. I want to always be the tolerable creature I turn into this time of year. Even more, I want to know that I am stamping those same lovely marks into other lives, especially those who have poured so much into mine.
This is a very overdone and roundabout way of saying thanks. I have a lot to be thankful for, and I owe a great deal of thanks to a great many people. If you read this, and you think you're one of them, I won't argue. It would cost me nothing if I was wrong to think you were. I do not expect to ever scratch the surface of approaching, let alone matching what you do for me, but that's not the point. St. Paul admonishes us to owe no one but to love them, and I do not ever want to default on that. I know that I will, and that hurts, but to my eternal amazement it doesn't stop God or anyone else.
So thank you.

back to the future

Today I went with my father and his girlfriend to three cemeteries. I saw the graves of his parents, who I knew well, and their forebears, who I did not. I learned that I am directly descended from veterans of the Revolutionary and Civil Wars, that my family has roots in this part of the world that stretch back to the seventeenth century, and that a distant ancestor was once Lord Mayor of London.
That’s a rare thing in our culture, to be grounded in so many centuries of history. It perhaps explains my peculiar slant on things, which I inherited in large measure from my parents. I saw that in new ways tonight as Dad and I discussed Stephen King and Japanese culture and the movie Grand Torino. Clint Eastwood still kicks ass. I know it’s not very Christian of me, but I hate gangbangers. I want to get my genocide on when I see them. Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.
We live by a code that so much of the world is passionate about pissing on. We are losing ground every day. We don’t care. We’ll die with rifles in our hands ass deep in brass and grenade pins, at least figuratively speaking. To the rest of the world, we’ll just fade away forgotten by all but the very closest (and not all of them), but the rest of the world will never know that every day was a fight, and every day we went to bed the same people we woke up as held victory for us and those we love. We may fall, but we will by God fall forward.
I do not need to be a racist to be proud of my heritage. I do not need to be ashamed of my ancestors to be tolerant, compassionate, or responsible. What I need even less is to be the least bit concerned about how I will be judged by the fickle, flawed opinions of a vapid, predatory commercial nonculture. The gavel is held by One, and my fathers stand behind Him and beckon me to better things. I want to spend the rest of my life answering that call.

lunch date

Friday noonish I am walking downtown to take a dear friend out to lunch. It is about right temperature-wise, perhaps a touch on the warm side. The rain that has persisted for the last day and a half has just subsided. Leaves are falling in earnest now, making sidewalks slick even for the newish ACU boots I’m wearing. I have never been to Britain, but the weather and the air and the little Connecticut city feel like Doc Martens and best bitter and shepherd’s pie and bagpipes and Sex Pistols and heart-melting accents in fetching female voices that waft from unpainted lips framed in creamy white skin. I wish I was still thin enough to wear my Levi’s 501’s and my Ben Sherman knockoff with narrow scarlet braces.
The Britishness intensifies as I near downtown. And yet it is undeniably American. There are old men who worked at Electric Boat for thirty years and hang out at the library and walk up and down State Street. There are BMWs with New York plates champing at their automotive bits at traffic lights. There are tiny convenience stores full of incense and penny candy and do-rags and cheap slippers made in China.
There is a splendid Thai/Japanese restaurant on the corner of Eugene O’Neill Drive. My friend works on the other side of that corner, and I spot her not five minutes after I get there. We hug and I compliment her on her new green corduroy coat. I make my way for the wrong door, and as I notice the sign putting me aright I also notice that there is a little plate of food and a cup of what looks like black coffee on the sidewalk just inside the doorway. Just like the last time we were here. I remember that my wife had a coworker whose parents were from Ireland, and they would leave bacon on the front steps for the faeries (na pucai, pronounced “na POOkee”) so they wouldn’t cause mischief. A paranormal gastronomic protection racket. I told my friend that story last time, so I won’t repeat it, even though she likely wouldn’t resent me if I did. I wonder what Thai faeries are like.
We haven’t hung out in quite a while. There isn’t a whole lot of catching up to do, so the conversation comes back around to relationships. We are both married to people we dearly cherish, though my wife and I for a good bit longer than her and her husband. I remember when we first got close to her, a little over five years ago. We had known her a little, but were unprepared for the vise-grip she would envelop our hearts in, which sounds maudlin and cliché if it’s never happened to you. It just happened. We went out for ice cream after a picnic with about a zillion other people, and before we knew it we couldn’t get enough of each other.
It felt naughty and wicked and exhilarating, though absolutely nothing remotely untoward was ever happening. I had been taught well by American Evangelicalism. Fear the opposite sex. Fear intimacy. Assume the worst about all desire to draw near to another person. God doesn’t use anyone but your spouse to speak to you. Because He just doesn’t. Stop asking questions. Shut the fuck up. Watch your language, God damn you.
We talk and enjoy the food and the camaraderie and the memories and the myriad ways our minds and hearts are interlaced like the vines and Celtic knots I’ll be working into the tattoo I’m designing for her, interlaced with those of our spouses and our closest friends and our Creator who designs this weird little clan a day and a life and a battle and a triumph at a time.
The tattoo will feature a bad penny, whatever I decide that looks like. I remember a time not long after that delightful season started, when I was confronted by yearnings and desires that I needed no one to tell me were evil, interlaced with the good and true so tightly that I couldn’t tell them apart, and the only thing that kept me from shutting the whole thing down and retreating back into the fortress I had so dutifully constructed to keep this from happening was that the need was just too damned huge. The cork was out of the bottle and there was no getting everything back in.
They had every right and every reason to shun me. Forgive, sure, but that doesn’t equal trust and acceptance. They saw everything I was. I saw the ugliness and depravity; they saw the desperation behind that to see it transformed into something better. And they could have turned away but they stepped forward to help that happen. She placed her hands on shoulders quaking from the release of long-repressed tears, beneath a head that was screaming silently to put a bullet into itself, and prayed aloud to a God Who had heard all of the filth and lust and evil hurled into the open, that I would see her and the others as friends who were like a bad penny – they would keep turning up.
We finish lunch and brainstorm tattoo details and I walk her back to the plaza where she works. She vents a bit about family struggles, the kind that are as old as she is but renew themselves afresh in the same tired ways. She handles them so much better now than she used to. They are annoying tickles around her face instead of tentacles that squeeze the life from her. I remember all the talks we had, all the rants I unleashed on her behalf, all the times I visited her when she worked for that buffoon up the street just to be with her and remind. To remind myself that she wasn’t just a cruel hoax. To remind her that the forces that try to grind her into oblivion pale before the love of her God and her true friends. To remind us both that there are those who will keep turning up.
It has been a well-spent hour. We hug goodbye and look forward to dinner at a pub later that night with our spouses. She goes back to her office and I turn about to walk back home. I pass the building she used to work in and I remember Chinese takeout and a purple plastic disc with the name of an Australian city inscribed on it and terror and love. I pass my workplace and see the platform behind the Quonset hut where the compactors are, the ones I fed two or three times a night when I worked on second shift and agonized that I had so little time to spend with her and a giant comic geek and his lovely pregnant elvish wife and a delightful twelve-year-old sprite who once asked me to paint a Union Jack on her face at a festival because she’s that feckin’ cool. I remember seeing my friend’s blue Honda Civic through the chain link fence two houses down from the plant every time I went out to dump the trash and cardboard, and feeling snakes with razor-blade scales twist and writhe in my guts because I couldn’t be there with her as she faced her own bottomless need. If I had only known what would be happening a year from then, and all the joy and triumph in between and afterwards. All I knew at the moment was a red haze of pain. And terror. And love.
I don’t want to forget. I don’t want to give in to fatalism. I want to keep turning up. I don’t want this to end, and I never, ever want to be fooled into thinking that it has, or that it will, if what I have been promised is true.
Donasgillin gu Brath. Bad Penny Forever.

black and white

A word on seeing things in terms of absolutes.
I am at a loss to reconcile with, or even fathom, the idea of truth being anything less than absolute. Something is true, or it isn't. Conditions and circumstances and other variables may change, but there is truth in the midst of all of it. Believing otherwise doesn't change that. My ability or lack thereof to prove something true does not affect its truth - or lack thereof.
So if it can be agreed that truth is absolute, then seeing reality in terms of black and white is not a bad thing, in and of itself. In fact, it's the ideal. Why, then, are we rankled so by those who do?
There are multiple factors, many related to human nature (an unsavoury subject, to be sure), but I won't focus on that. I think it's safe to opine that what we find so irritating is not the concept of seeing in black and white, but rather what seems to be an infuriating tendency to ignore the gray that seems to completely dominate our perception of reality.
If you take a colour photograph and run it through a photocopy machine, you will produce an image that is comprised almost entirely of varying shades of gray. And yet it really isn't. There is no gray. There is nothing at all there except black toner and white paper. But you need a magnifying glass to see that. In other words, you need to lend your eyes a power that they do not possess in and of themselves.
Those of us who claim to know and be known by Christ are called to live and proclaim truth. If we are going to accomplish that, then we need to avail ourselves of His power to see details and patterns and contexts that we could not possibly comprehend in our sadly limited human view. If such power is not ready to our hands (or eyes), then we had best trust Him to use it and stay out of His way. I am convinced that moral relativism is one of the greatest obstacles to the knowledge of God in our culture, but I cannot blame people for running screaming into its arms from people who claim to be divinely appointed surgeons, yet run amok with scalpels while wearing welders' goggles.
Just because something is true doesn't mean it's the right thing to say at any one point in time. Jesus told those closest to Him, who had abandoned all life as they had ever known it to follow Him, that He had many things left to tell Him that they weren't yet ready for (John 16:12). I believe that He knew exactly where each of them were regarding spiritual growth, or He trusted that His Father did, and waited until the right time to reveal those things, knowing that to do otherwise would have destroyed their faith, and perhaps their ability to ever recover it.
If our ham-handed, insensitive approach to giving away Truth drives people away from Him, we are not only failing, we are working for the enemy. We had best learn this, and fast. Humans by nature are fallen and rebellious toward God. Every one of us started out that way. We can't afford to snuff out the tiniest spark of openness to Him.

games

I could stay here the rest of my life
I could be happy, never be lonely
I don't need to go looking for misery
I could surround myself with my props
Playing my part, getting caught up
In a game, some game, that anyone can play

I could be proud of things I have done
Pretend I don't have to try to be someone
I could say that I've done it all before
I could get wiser, I could get jaded
I could remember, I could just fade away
In a game that anyone can play

I am so proud, I don't have to try
Never a need to justify it when
People say "Hey I was important too"
Memories go to reinforce
The things I have done, for better or worse
It's a game that anyone can play

Just when you think that all your answers are so right
You'll fade away and disappear from sight
The ones who said you're great will find another way

I could be sad, I could be lonely
I could still have some friends if I only
Didn't play the games I had to play
I was important when I was cool
Now it gets lonely playing the fool
It's a game that anyone can play

- Husker Du, Games

punked

so, mirror boy, what do you know of love? who do you think you are? if love is of God, why aren't you moving mountains? a tree is not known by its noble silhouette against a sunset sky (retch), it is known by its fruit. to hell with your poses, produce something for once.
you are pissed off because you were exposed as a rank amateur, no less a psychic vampire than those who molded you in their unholy image. you need to be needed and can't offer others the same acceptance you crave when they don't fit into your Pollyanna constructs. you bleat of love but deny it to others when they even look like they might be thinking of straying from the very path you can't even stay on yourself. you want them to embrace real faith but what the hell is it doing for you? if this is so real why does it die inside you instead of transforming you and drawing others to it?
how does anyone stay so naive in the face of so much reality?
so what will you do about it now?
my guess is the same old nothing.

I'm sorry, you were saying?

...ya know, every thought that flits through dies before it can be caught. It gets piledriven by the one behind it. Can't keep up. Read comments on the Glenn Beck rally and saw red, wanted to charge out with some ringing manifesto of defiance in the face of hate and division. Watched Shadowlands with Lisa and wanted to capture something about the importance of living and not hiding from pain, how nothing at all in this life matters if it's not centered in Christ and radiating His love outward from ourselves. Wanted to, to, to...oh well.
I do believe that I just may have followed the mirage of a transformed heart into a desert that I will probably not see the other side of. Try though I may, I am not going to change anything. All the drive and passion I ever had, every heart's cry *retch*, every yearning that threatens to explode my ribcage, is birdshot against a battleship. The truth doesn't need my telling it to still be true. Which is good, because my grasp on it is tenuous at best. God will just have to be God without my help. I'm sure He's up to it. And He could not be blamed for being happy to have me out of the way.
Nothing. Nothing at all. It was fun trying to matter, but we all gotta grow up.
It still hurts. Shut the hell up. It hurts. Your point? It hurts.
I hope that not one single person ever takes anything like this to their own heart. Don't ever listen to me.

showtime

This is one of those times when I can watch myself burn without a care in the world. No anger, no depression, no overblown sense of betrayal. Just looking through a warped lens and losing my grip on what straight looks like. And not having the energy to figure it out.
Where did I ever come up with a sense of purpose or right? What the hell do I know? Who's counting on me to get them through anything? Help as good as any I can offer is falling from the trees. I need more than damn near anyone. These pathetic words are the most profound thing I've done in weeks.
I'm good at doing what I'm told if the teller has a right to tell. Not so much if they're just being a prick. Living? Different story. Forging ahead, dreaming (gag), bringing inspiration to light and form, all that's so lost to me I have trouble believing I ever had it. I exist. So does a mushroom.
I'm not even feeling much of anything about it at the moment. Fuck feelings. They change and morph and bait and switch and tell me nothing except how far off I am from any mark that ever meant anything good. Process them. Why?
I feel (there's that goddamn word again) very much like leftover matter from a failed experiment. Oh well.
But I do indeed miss knowing that I mattered, even if what I knew was false. If truth wants to destroy me, let's be done with it already. Stationary target right here. Light me up.

lighten up

Life unwinds like a cheap sweater
but since I gave up hope I feel a lot better
and the truth gets blurred like a wet letter
but since I gave up hope I feel a lot better - Steve Taylor

Hope is a lot of weight, and one wonders if it's worth carrying. This tiny world I inhabit cannot possibly be worth all this struggle, yet a larger one would choke me without a sound. I think it should.

I just wanna know--am I pulling people closer?
I just wanna be pulling them to You
I just wanna stay angry at the evil
I just wanna be hungry for the true - Steve Taylor

Hungry - check. Terrified of the hunger's object, but hungry. Angry - check. Impotent and aimless, but angry. So much for the pulling.

The kid never learns. Ever. Everyone else is so much better. Really. Too bad the admiration hurts like it does, otherwise it's be a wonderful distraction from character bankruptcy.

If He loves this thing, then He can have it.

*click*

thy name is desire

There is not enough hate in Hell for you, or for myself for being so vulnerable to you. You are the one constant I know, a perennial backdrop of torment and taunting. Your derisive laughter echoes from my earliest hours to now. Every moment of joy or so-called triumph you unmask as a snare, just another height to get knocked down from. And I am stupid enough to get back up believing it will be different this time, chasing the mirage of hope farther into a void where nothing is real but pain.
You know exactly what I need, you know I'll come back so it doesn't matter what you do to me. Your timing is impeccable. You wait until I show some faint glimmer of courage to take a step toward whatever you're dangling in front of me, then you pull it away and it's still my fault. It's always my fault.
We think we know what love is, what good means, what we were made and meant to do and have and be. Love and good and purpose are whatever the guy with the gun says they are, unless someone stronger disarms him. Who's going to disarm God?
I feel invincible in this citadel of hate, but it won't last. He will either bitch-slap me back into submission or give me another fix so I keep chasing the mirage. Either way I'll come back, but what does that make me? And what hurts is that I know He is good and I'm not.
I doubt very much I can forgive Him for allowing me to exist. People say God doesn't make junk. I say He makes anything He wants, and does whatever He wants with it. I only wish I didn't care. I deserve all His hatred, and yours. I wish I could be and deserve better, but what do my wishes have to do with anything?

change

got to get used to it.
embrace it? dunno how, too sensitive, too incorrigibly wedded to impossible ideals, amazing how I never change when everything else does, you'd think the kid would have learned by now.
it's coming, and it's constant. it will either take me down or it won't. the best decisions are swept out of its path like they were never there unless they were already made by Someone else.
get used to it. or die. really don't care, either will get you out of the way, it said to itself. it knew it was bad, and was terribly afraid God didn't know, or worse, didn't care enough to destroy it.
hate is an amazing drug.

I am very quiet. Let the months and years come, they can take nothing from me, they can take nothing more. I am so alone, and so without hope that I can confront them without fear. The life that has borne me through these years is still in my hands and my eyes. Whether I have subdued it, I know not. But so long as it is there it will seek its own way out, heedless of the will that is within me. - Erich Maria Remarque

landslide

I took my love and I took it down
Climbed a mountain and I turned around
And I saw my reflection in the snow-covered hills
And the landslide brought me down
Oh, mirror in the sky--what is love?
Can the child in my heart rise above?
Can I sail through the changing ocean tides?
Can I handle the seasons of my life?
I don't know.....I don't know...
Well I've been afraid of changing
Because I've built my life around you
But time makes us bolder; children get older
I'm getting older too....
So, take this love...take it down
Oh, if you climb a mountain and you turn around
and you see my reflection in the snow-covered hills
well, the landslide will bring you down;
The landslide will bring you down...
Well I've been afraid of changing
Because I've built my life around you
But time makes is bolder; children get older
I'm getting older too - Stevie Nicks

changing and changing and changing and not changing a bit. it all comes around to where it started, and it hurts and won't stop. time should make me bolder but it just makes me tired.
I had it all right here and now it's gone and it hurts.
wanted to see what is, not what isn't. now I don't know what's what and I'm afraid to find out.
no one could possibly be worth all this trouble.
why can't I believe anymore?