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*