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.
Saturday, January 15, 2011
Saturday, December 25, 2010
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.
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.
Saturday, November 13, 2010
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.
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.
Saturday, November 6, 2010
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.
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.
Sunday, October 17, 2010
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.
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.
Friday, October 15, 2010
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
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
Sunday, October 3, 2010
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.
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.
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