Tuesday, December 29, 2009

A Cabin of Incorrigible Castigations


The wood flooring was rough and uneven. She had feet like a boy’s; soft, un-calloused, vulnerable. The walk from her place near the fireplace to the stove every morning was to her feet like staring into a welder’s torch was to the eyes. Her coffee mug always had the earthen grit of coffee grounds at the bottom, no matter how gently she poured. The bicycle ride into town was long but not unpleasant. However, the blizzard ruled that out as a possibility. She’d poured pot after pot of boiling water into the wash tub that day and it was the last time she’d bathed in this or that many days. It was supposed to be a romantic retreat. It was supposed to be a working vacation, out here in the sticks, writing with pen and paper. Her editor had recommended it. Her friends had applauded it. Stubble on your legs and under your arms tends to dissolve romantic pretensions surely and swiftly.

The papers lay strewn about the small, wobbly table, sparsely annotated here and there, ringed in Olympic rings of spilt coffee. Only her pens were in a row. She laced her boots with her back to the flames and was determined to find, out there in the cold, inspiration for this day’s writing. There would be writing today. She was sure. With her coat about her throat and her hands buried in its deep pockets, she shouldered the door open against the gathered snow. She trudged calf-deep about where she believed the trail would lead. Green and youthful pines bent supply under a weight of collected snow in their branches, like the daughters of landed gentry might before suitors at a ball, their sixteenth birthdays only so recently behind them. The hoof prints of a deer led across her projected path through the narrow and magickal clearing, culminating in a pressed bed about a fallen tree, where on a recent night the lithe and musky figure had found a break against the wind.


Upon the finishing of her walk, she stepped through the sagging gate and noticed, amongst the spread of even snow, something previously missed; a mushroom, bare itself of snow and emerged where a garden might be found in another season. She stepped wide of the slate-colored thing and crouched. She ran a bare finger along the frilled underside of its cap, like you might scratch the chin of a kitten. She sat her heels there for a long time. The dull glow of the sun behind the clouds shifted uncertainly towards the horizon. After digging away the snow towards the frozen soil and taking firm grip about its stem, she finally plucked it from the snow and held the mushroom there for a moment, its immense cap spread out like the sheltering hand of god over her own feeble fingers.


What little oil she had left went to frying the thing in its meaty, earthen flavor. Sliced across and laid about some hearty rice, she ate well and slept better.

Often enough, to save some miraculous thing precisely as it has been found is only the surest way to bring about its dissolution before the eyes of God and Man.

Sunday, December 27, 2009

Notions of the Novelistic



John asked if the Eric in the story below was the same as my other short story. In the shower, where I always feel the most ambitious, I realized that maybe it was.

And maybe... just maybe, I could write a novel about him.

So...

Shit.

Friday, December 25, 2009

A Christmas Thought

So, I'm posting this from my fancy ass cell phone, but this occurred to me on the way to Christmas dinner at my aunts. If Advent is about waiting in anticipation for something unforeseeable (see: Christ as Monstrous), what kind of posture were we supposed to be taking exactly? Advent seen this way is implicitly dialectical, but can perhaps only be known as such from the vantage of Christmas day.
No wonder we're so ambivalent about this season.

Thursday, December 24, 2009

Admirable Advent Attempts

This is what became of my attempts to write an advent story. It's a little long. And I don't have many pictures to accompany it. But here ya go. Merry Christmas to all and, to all, a good night.

At those bright, shining, over-lit way stations along the American highway, the bathrooms were somehow factory-like. Station after station to set about your work. Careening, efficient rows of urinals and stalls like at an airport or stadium. In these he’d gladly piss his caustic caffeine-driven piss. It was those damp, grey cement bathrooms he was in hope of perpetually. Something single-use and reeking of every other fellow’s bad aim. Some place with a drain in the floor and no tile or mirrors. It was in a place like this, a place with an air-dryer for your hands instead of paper towels, that Eric could turn the rickety padlock and fill his lungs, for a few moments, with heavy, ammonia-laden breaths. With his greasy jeans splayed at the fly and wracked halfway down his thighs, he’d spit in his palm and sprawl across the cool, grimy seat, rubbing one out to the thought of the last time Rebecca shared his bed. Sometimes, if someone shouted through the door, he’d clutch the hair on the back of his head the way her slender fingers had. He’d gasp a little and stare agape without seeing.

This road, like many of the others, was long and straight with a lane in either direction. The fields on either side bore the blonde, wiry stubble of cut down corn stocks. Rabbits and skunks slept mutely in boroughs along the banks of the dry irrigation ditches. The snow that lay an inch on every surface was fresh and dry and blew in wisps across the plain. Eric, driving and ensconced in all that hurtling steel, would come to drift askew a troubling angle for a hundred feet or so. The lengths of ice were invisible on the pavement, but if the wheels stayed as straight as the road, they would quickly catch rough pavement again. Eric would ease back into his lane, his eyes a little brighter and his heartbeat a little louder over the wind. Every few hours he would stop and fill the same Styrofoam cup with bitter gas-station coffee. He’d tip a few of those coins he’d fished from a fountain in Boone, Iowa out of another Styrofoam cup onto the counter next to the cash register and ask where the bathroom was.

It was a hell of a car to be driving in the winter. The heater worked, but it blew a heavy, oily air into Eric’s eyes. And though it kept his hands warm, he drove with his coat on. The coat stayed buttoned to the throat on account of the electric window motors had long ago failed at almost-closed. Each nostril was ringed in chaffed, red skin from where he’d wipe with woolen sleeves at his unending sniffle. The dry, split leather of the seats would abrade lines of pilling up the peacoat’s back. The foam-rubber headrest was crumbling and Eric would find bits of it in his hair at night, like pieces of oversized novelty dandruff. The ceiling upholstery had dangled nearly into his line of sight for days, until he cut it out with a pair of stolen scissors somewhere east of Omaha. He’d sometimes, while pumping gas, pick with the toes of his shoe at the climbing, two-dimensional stalagmites of rust on the exterior metal panels. The elderly fellow who pumped gas for him in Oregon had crouched by his rear tires for a moment and whistled one slow mournful whistle, but not said another word as he tucked a penny back into that tiny, fifth pocket of his jeans. For all of it, the car ran along well enough and unhurried, like the most of us ineligible for redemption.

____________________________________________________

The man feeding pigeons wore one on his shoulder like a pirate. Another, speckled black across its dull white feathers, perched at the bird-man’s wrist, pecking bread crusts from his hand. The man wore layers of tired and ill-fitting clothes. His shoes were once white, though the only evidence for this was the sliver exposed by a twisted and leering tongue, bound in fraying laces. Eric watched the pigeons bob and sidle around the man in a great swarm. Some hopped about on mere stubs of limbs. Some were great big birds, with iridescent washes of purple upon their necks like they’d wandered beneath some drooling, magical beast. Eric smoked and leaned against the front bumper of the car he’d slept a frigid, fitful night’s sleep inside.

“You do this every day?” Eric spoke across the small town square to the man. No one else but a newspaper man milled about the scene.

“I’m not hurting ‘em.” Replied the man, his smile suddenly gone. Eric looked around.

“I didn’t say you were.”

“Pigeons can eat bread. It don’t hurt ‘em none.”

“Yeah, but are you here everyday?”

“Everyday. Me and them, we,” the man gestured expansively, sending the pigeon on his wrist into flight, “greet the day.”

“You greet the day?”

“Together. Yes.”

“Are they your friends?”

The man’s smile returned and, moreover, he laughed. “No. I don’t think pigeons are much for friends. No birds at all, I’d guess.”

“You know much about birds?”

“I know pigeons can eat bread and that they aren’t much for friends. Ask me something else. Maybe I’ll know it.”

“Nah, sir. I think you’ve got it about figured out.” Eric tossed his cigarette butt into the gutter and circled around to the driver door. “Give the day my greetings,” he offered over the top of the car door and the man turned back to whatever it is one says to pigeons. The coffee Eric reached to sip had ice floating in it.

__________________________________________________________

At the diner counter, he counted out four bills and a pocket’s worth of change on his paper mat before ordering. He ordered the pancakes with eggs and a cup of coffee. He sipped the coffee black and stared at his face in the greasy glass between the counter and the kitchen. His dirty black hair stood at some odd wiry angle across his forehead and grey had crept in crackling bolts. The lines coursing his forehead beneath the bangs and in the flesh around his mouth were getting worse. He’d left the city with boyish features and now there was this man who looked back at him. For some, years pass before we are strangers to our own faces. For Eric, eight months.

“I drove my baby round in that same car. Make and model.”

Eric looked down the counter at a woman his mother’s age in black slacks, a mauve blouse and graying apron. Her hair was long, but up, loosely, in a bun at the back of her head. She’d been pretty, but not for decades. She squinted nostalgically over her glasses at his Volvo. He drank from his mug while looking at her, burning his tongue.

“Fell apart around me, but didn’t I ever put that key in and it didn’t start up.”

“My experience has been selfsame.” Eric offered, looking down into his mug, accusatorially.

“Took that little girl to Sunday school, to regular school day after day with that car. Parked it out back. Near anyone round here could tell you so. Plain spooky seeing it pull up like you’ve done.”

“It was a popular car at one point, I’m told. Safe.”

The woman nodded solemnly. She looked across her shoulders at Eric.

“On your way, home, Sweety? From school?” Eric read her name tag. Hillary.

“No… No, I’m just driving.”

“Well, you in some hurry to get where you’re driving to?”

Eric laughed. “No, ma’am. I’ve had no hurry for quite a while now.”

“Alright then,” Hilary said and turned to the kitchen window and slid a piece of paper across its threshold. “Well, sweetheart, everyone calls me Hill and you’re meal will just be another few minutes.“

Soon enough, out came a stack of pancakes leaning jauntily, capped with butter. A second plate arrived with eggs and meats. A glass of orange juice found their shared counter space. Eric looked around. Hillary emerged from the kitchen.

“I can’t pay for all this, ma’am.”

“You’re certainly right. Wouldn’t have your money.”

“I’m afraid I wouldn’t be equal to this much food either.”

“Don’t you dare. You’ll insult me if you won’t eat every crumb.”

“Ma’am.”

Eric ate every crumb. He left all four dollars as a tip for the check that never came. He didn’t bother with the change and gathered it back up.

_________________________________________________

He sat for a long time on that front step, hoping someone might be on their way home. He sat until the cold cut all the way through his clothes and he couldn’t feel his toes. He wished he had a cigarette to pull at furtively. The wind blew furiously for a while, and then was still and that was all the worse. That silent plane lay out around him like some bed long ago made and never slept in. He tried all the doors and all were likewise locked. Every window was latched to its sill. Every light was out. Every car was gone. Rebecca and her people, it seemed, travelled for the Holidays and the New Year. The Christmas tree was inverted in a cardboard box by the trashcans, tinsel clinging and a few fractured ornaments strewn at the box’s bottom.

Eric wedged his fingers under the garage door and it lifted with some effort. Across the polished cement, the door to the kitchen was unlocked and Eric let himself in. He slid each shoe off his heel and left them neatly by the door like he had the year before. For a moment he heard a whole family’s chatter of joy and anxiety and conflict. He heard the skitter of canine claws across kitchen tile. The whistle of tea kettles before bed. The creak of an insomniac grandmother shuffling to the porch for early-morning cigarettes. But the inside view was still dark and everything tidy and in its place. It was all but a corpse of a home, laying in wait for a Christ-like return to resurrect it. Eric was colder now than before.

Up the stairs and into her room, he sat the edge of the bed. He turned to address the window, ensconced in frost.

“I guess…” Eric wiped at his nose with that woolen sleeve.

“I guess I though this was the piece that would make sense if I just did some stupid heroic thing. Surprise you and come inside and you’d be mad at first, but in that way you forget quickly. I’d stand here looking so tired and you’d touch my sleeve and your dad would shake my hand and your mom would pour me a secret brandy and park me next to grandma, asleep and…”

Out in a field, two deer dipped their heads to stalks that broached the snow. Eric stared at them and they seemed to notice. For a moment, Eric laid his sight at where it seemed their dark eyes were aimed. Then, they returned to their chewing and Eric found he’d slipped his hand between the pillow and its case.

Standing, Eric crossed the room to her dresser. He slid open the bottom drawer, full of sweatpants and socks. His fingers rifled a stack of cotton and came up with a grey t-shirt with a city’s outline in crackling screen printing across the breast. Unfolded before him, he breathed in its thrift store sweetness. It didn’t betray the scent of its newest owner even a little.

“It’s not like I could ever wear this again. But it just isn’t right,” Eric said, turning for the door.

He stopped short and turned back.

“Fuck it. I’ll trade you.”

Eric reached into his coat and brought to bear a folded wad of paper, splitting and softened at its edges. Inside the folds was a note she’d written that previous year on a paper table covering, just beneath the edge of her plate. It was something her mother would have hated and her father would never see. It was written in blue pen. It was a secret shared before everyone and that he’d only spoken of once, towards the end. She’d heard it mentioned and turned immediately for the door. They spoke after that, but not easily. She didn’t even know he’d saved the scrap.

But how could he not? And leaving those blue-inked words on the duvet, he descended into the broader quiet of the kitchen and out the door.

Eric pulled the garage door back down into place with a crash and climbed back into his frigid vehicle. Back in town, he bought some cigarettes and matches with his coffee at the gas station, but did not ask about the bathroom. When he refilled the gas tank, he spilled a little on the wadded up cloth at his feet. Eric sealed up the gas tank and leaned against the door to light a cigarette with his back to the breeze. He made sure the lit match fell to the wreaking rag on the cement. It smoldered and crackled, fighting against the incipient cold as he drove away.

In the end, the city of Chicago lay in ashes and Eric would see its outline resurrected on the horizon in less than a day.

Tuesday, December 22, 2009

The Way Winter Wears

Papers are finished and graded. I’m home in California, where it’s warmer by twenty degrees and considerably less snowy. The air here is damp all the time, though. Even when it’s sunny, the coastal damp hangs invisible in your sweaters. I’m colder here, by far. I wish I were more relaxed, but well, I’m not. I corralled the long-ignored tasks from the weeks of paper writing and finals stress, dumped them in a folder and now they lurk here as well. PHD applications. Student loan business. Letters I’ve been meaning to write for ages and ages. I forgot to pick up some dry cleaning last night and I woke up in a panic this morning. Old habits die hard, they say.

So, in faith, I write:

“Winter’s here,” She sighed and pulled the expanse and weight of down-filled white around her middle, “and I’ll never be warm again.”

A month before she’d filled the trunk of my car with fallen leaves so that they spilled around my ankles when it opened. She was thoughtful like that. There I stood, at a gas pump in Lancaster, Pennsylvania with the New England fall condensed about my feet, laughing to myself. The pay phone line had crackled when she told me, “You can take it with you…see!”

I still haven’t vacuumed the bits and grit from the carpeting.

Now the clouds seemed, having once been fleecy, to take a cold distance of slate-like canopy. The crisp breezy had become a harrowing howl. The leaves of autumn had long been bagged and shipped away. And all her rambunction with it. I’d returned, but she’d retreated into a cocoon of bedridden boredom. Of tea and television. Soup and solitude. She lay like seeds underground, waiting to blossom through the snow.

This morning she’d awoke in last night’s clothes. The party I’d dragged her to had murmered collectively with the fervent solemnity of deep January. Everyone smoked a little more and the drunkards’ conversation was of challenges more than triumphs. So rarely was agreement found and two young bucks had locked horns in the yard, spilling across the frost and ice. I’d got her home, but she burrowed into the bed made for guests on our sofa and would not be moved. I slept alone in her bed, most of the heavy sheets and covers pushed down to the floor. I’ve never needed to be so warm.

She’d long stopped turning her back to change and the t-shirt fell across her breasts a veil that bespeaks the covered. I sat the edge of the bed and she stood before me, a bare-skinned pilgrim, and I pressed my lips to the skin at the hollow of her hipbone, just below the hem of that shirt. She laced her fingers through my hair and clutched weakly.

“Will it be like this every winter?” she asked in that far-off way.

“Here? Maybe so.” I pressed my temple to her waist and looked across the field of empty clothes that led to the door.

“It’s harder when you leave.”

“It makes a difference if I stay?”

“I think it does.”

“I couldn’t anyways. You know that.”

“I know. ‘the cost of a future somewhere warm’” She parroted what I’d written across the collage of used-up plane tickets.

She plodded in her bare-feet to the window and pulled the shades. When she returned I spun her round and down across the bed, and for a while her hands about her hair and her thighs about my ears. Later I’d lift the shades and sit with a book over a steaming cup of coffee by the window. In a few moments, she’d emerge at the steps of the building and light a cigarette.

At the bottom of the next page, I’d look up to see her seated on the snow and crying.

When I finished that chapter, I’d looked up and she was by my side.

Wednesday, December 2, 2009

A Blessed Bestowal to the Barely Beautiful

(Trust me, eventually this post is going to be about Advent.)

Time, even in modernistic, progress-obsessed American culture, is basically cyclical. Clocks, for the most part, are round. Days, weeks, months, years are cycles within cycles within cycles. Whether you’re living by some pagan calendar or not, we’re caught up in these cycles and we demark the degrees of those circles in different ways based on what we value. We can mark it based on our political values (Labor Day, Fourth of July, etc), our economic values (Black Friday, Cyber Monday, etc), or our philanthropic values (Black history month, AIDs awareness week, etc). And though many Evangelicals might not be familiar with it, there is a corresponding calendar for the Christian life. A peculiar, not very practical, calendar for religious life.

But really this cyclical ordering of our life means we are lent towards the religious way of living anyways. We have routines that are oriented towards the recurrence of the good things and events and experiences we are primarily concerned with. Hygiene is good, so we set out time to shower and brush our teeth. Having money to buy things and services is good, so we have jobs and we work them with a religious commitment. Loving and being loved by people for whom we have affection is good, so we remember their birthdays (Happy up-coming Birthday Mom. I’ll call you on Thursday, I promise) and other important anniversaries. Even Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, those fervently (nay, religiously) anti-religion folks, are engaged in all kinds of religious behavior. They love stuff, so they wrap themselves in the cycles, the patterns that call out in hope of that stuff’s recurrence.

I’m trying to really lean into Advent this year because I’m going to live by some kind of religious, cycloid calendar no matter what. So, I figure it’s a good idea to try to get accustomed to the one that is concerned with the (re)occurrence of the good-est good thing there was, is and ever could be: that God, who’s goodness I appreciate in every good thing, would become a mere man (and yet still God… mind fuck, I know), and submit Himself to the least-good things the world has to offer. Then, with so much love and grace and patience and generosity, He would turn and redeem those least-good things from the filthy, dirty, awful bottom up. He doesn’t obliterate them. He doesn’t triumph by destruction. He triumphs by re-demption. Re-birth.

Everything is new. Again. The religious cycle is itself turned over.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, Jon,” you say, “but what the hell does Advent have to do with that?”
I’m gonna let Mari answer that one:

“Though Advent leans, aches, aspires toward Christmas, Christmas will not be the be-all-end-all of our year's suffering and fear.

However, Advent will open the doors of hope, and Christmas will charge in, with bells on. Christmas renews our faith that Christ was born, Christ has died, Christ is risen, and Christ will come again.

Even though Advent technically prepares us for Christmas, it really prepares us for Easter, when Jesus ascends to heaven and assures us his enduring peace. The Christmas story begins in a place called Bethlehem, Bet Lechem, which translates to "House of Bread." And the Christmas story ends during Easter, when Jesus breaks bread for us, then his body.”



I’ll add that Jesus gets born and wrapped in rags in some desert cave full of sheep-shit, and then is buried in some desert cave, wrapped in rags. Its the story of any lowly, refugee life. But then the story starts over. And the world is never the same again. All those lowly things get re-interpreted. Blessed are the poor, the meek, the mourning…

You know. All that religious crazy-talk.

I really do love God, except clumsily and only in a treading-water kind of way. Sometimes I pretend I don't or that I don't want to. And that's pretty too-bad. But I have hope I’m not stuck like this. And I guess that’s why I’m making Advent out to be such a big deal this year. I can’t do much to be more than the barely-not-a-villain that I am, but I can make myself available for a tiny, personal miracle: healthy, blessed, all-the-way humanness. I can wait expectantly to be “Born Again.” Created anew.

(Re)-Incarnation, you might call it.

The gift that keeps on giving, right?

Monday, November 30, 2009

The Rhythms and Metrics of Speech

I'm gonna start writing in this again...tomorrow. Yes. Tomorrow.

You can hold me to that.

Oh wait, no you can't, cuz it's the internet.

Ha.

Thursday, November 5, 2009

It's a Solace Having Friends



I love hearing these writers talk. It reminds me that someone treks through this world in the same way that I do.

In the same mess of things.

Saturday, October 31, 2009

So, All Saints Suffer?

And now, a little Halloween story...

We were the first folks in the county to get a Ford, and I’ll tell you, we were off to California. For a people emerged from the bleakness of a coal-mine into the bleakness of a Midwestern winter, to roll up shirt-sleeves on Christmas is quite the heralding image. We found our home and a parish. The new jobs were simple, but easy enough. Yes, a job each, since we thought ourselves modern. I’d not been in the Great War. She’d not had to see me go. Things were quiet enough and our world was small. We didn’t own a radio. We only got a newspaper on Sundays. A whole city began to grow around us, as others came to roll their sleeves on Christmas too. But we paid that little mind.

That day had been dark, like clouds rolling through a diamond sky. But with the dark came a hiss. Almost a hum, and with it a living roil of swarming life. The black cloud of what would prove a pestilence lifted over our city, and then dropped from the air like a balloon had burst, and lay like dust on every surface. This fine, alien dust that choked your throat and ringed your nostrils. The streets sat quiet for days as people swept and mopped with rags across their nose and mouth. And then the bleeding began.

The yellowed sheets were threadbare and loosely knit. This gauzy lens through which we saw the cathedral ceilings was lifted above our heads as soon as we arrived. No waiting for death to pull the shroud across our faces. That time weeks ago. The glossy, red stains would wick through them rapidly, like a nation fleeing toward the coasts. They all but dripped at the corners as though taps had been installed and opened wide. If the shift nurses forgot to roll you every few hours, or if things advanced considerably, you’d be wrapped in a gestalt of your own lifeblood in just a few seconds. Weighted and suffocated in a glistening, crimson death shroud. In 1918, you could drown from the inside on your own fluids, if the fever didn’t cook your mind first. But now...well, not so much the opposite as a new the-same.

Wednesday, October 28, 2009

The Repetitive Price of Purgation

Okay, okay, I feel guilty about yesterday's vacuous (if not unpleasant) photo-entry. Here's a little content for balance' sake.

I wrote this sitting outside the cafe one afternoon, using my phone and publishing immediately to Twitter. Micro-micro-fiction, I suppose. I was reading Cormac McCarthy's "The Crossing" at the time and borrowed a bit of the premise for the story from a passage in that.

a note: each sentence had to be 140 characters or less, as is Twitter's custom.

-The Cost of Things: a story (inspired by McCarthys "The Crossing")

-A man dreamt each night, less and less, of the casual beauty and her smile since losing sight at twenty-eight.

-He would feel sometimes, wandering here and there, at stranger's faces, but never pictured any but hers.

-Now old and beset only with his cane, the clothes about him and sturdy boots that cradled ancient feet, he ceased to dream at all.

-Wrecked between world and reveries, sleep having lost its lure, he called upon a man of tonics and oils.

-A tonic prescribed, promising to restore dreams and their contents, cost the same as sturdy boots, not more.

-Unshod and set in thoroughfares' dust, his mind's eyes saw what carried further than feet.
And carried thus, more and more, till no more sleeping could be had.
(The End)

Tuesday, October 27, 2009

Out of Excuses

Remember when I actually wrote things here?

In the mean time...

...an exercise in admiration.


Oh, chill, it's just nipples.

Tuesday, October 20, 2009

Remembering The Revenant's Role

The dreams are always the same. The dreams are never the same. Or rather, the elements never coalesce in quite the same way twice, though there is repetition to the themes. Oh, I do wish there was some way to be clearer about all of this, but you know dreams. They are so set in their peculiar ways, and they make their own kind of sense. They have that dream-logic. You see people and they don’t look like themselves, though their identity is certain. You flash from place to place, though they might be in wholly different parts of the country. The world.

I’m beginning to suspect she doesn’t have dreams. I know, I know, everyone has dreams. And yes, its common to, having no practice in recollecting them, awake with no memory of those dreams everyone has. It isn’t her not remembering that I take as evidence, but the sort of sleeping she does. The sleep of the dead, you might say. Or the innocent, though that seems increasingly unlikely. Like a horizontal yogi, she selects some lithe position and holds it till morning. Then she’ll stretch like a cat; claws out and back arched, purring a little.

Then, 5 days out of seven, we fuck.

But that’s not the point.

In the dreams (my dreams, that is) the world is itself, only darker. And every entity presses, first, from the velvety panel of a night-time universe, then bursts into color. Into the color one can almost hear with the remarkably common synesthesia of dreams. Its nature, mostly, but sometimes buildings. Everything oddly proportioned. Not that I can see myself, but I’m present as my 13 year old self. Pre-adolescent and awkward and so aware that nothing about me is unchanging or ready yet for the world. And all the women I’ve loved begin to lurk into a clearing, only they are fawns. I mean, it’s them. We both know I know it’s them. But they are delicate, feminine deer. White tails and brown noses and dark eyes, with Bambi lashes.

It’s often now that I’ll notice there are birds singing with that spring-time urgency. Sirens, in both senses.

They stroll with varying steadiness and poise into the clearing and fold their spindly legs beneath their musky torsos. They first kneel, then lay about me in a circle, nibbling grass but mostly staring with those eyes, like ink-dipped marbles.

Then the silence is appearant, and the dead bodies of sparrows and robins rain down out of the card-paper-cut-out trees. Or, sometimes, from the pop-up-book power lines.

And that’s when I wake up. Wake up and see her sleeping still, in both senses.

Wednesday, October 14, 2009

Complacency's Placeholding Platitudes


I was going to try to come up with a clever introduction to these photos and their links, but really, I just like cool clothes, for men or women. So, here are some rather classy, herringbone gray galoshes that would look just smashing with this asymmetrical wool jacket. Also, if anyone has that model’s number, facebook me, k?

I need to put together my Halloween costume this weekend, and that means shopping, which might mean I shop for … ahem… more than just my Halloween costume.

I need more closet space.

And a haircut.

This is getting a little random...

The Parents were in town this weekend. I wish I had been a more exciting host, but mostly we hung out w/ my friends and walked about. So, I did what I normally do. We did manage to go apple picking and, while I abandoned them to go to lectures on Gadamer, they took a tour of the North End. So, not a total bust.

As a result of apple picking, I have just oodles of apple-based baked goods in my apt presently and there are only going to be more. You should come over and have some so I don’t turn into a big, apple-smelling fatty.

I’ve got a nice queue of photos all ready to write about, just have to get a spare moment to do it. So, you’ve got that to look forward too. I’m sure you’re waiting with bated breath.

Yes, that's how you spell "bated" in that usage. Bill Bryson says so.

Monday, October 5, 2009

Fall's Fortunate Foretelling

I sit here staring at a sun flower that grins a rich yellow from above my laptop screen, perched as it is in a narrow necked, fat bottomed bottle atop my desk. It's been a week or more since as kind a friend as I know in Boston bought it for a me still sick and behind and despairing. Its only curling a bit about the petals, but otherwise looking chipper and cheerful as any displaced plant ought in early October. And I admit, I find myself relating.

I would welcome a little escape, I admit. Just a little one. I read about these tear-drop trailers and thought of the desert in the Fall and longed to climb rocks, hike about, eat hearty, hot foods in the twilight. Just be present in the stuff of stuff. Be far from books and bars and burdens.

mewithoutYou has been helping me remember the meaning of the stuff of Stuff. Sleeping At Last too.

"a fumbling reply, an awkward rigid laugh
I'm carried helpless by my floating basket raft
your flavor in my mind swings back and forth between
sweeter than any wine and as bitter as mustard greens
light and dark as honeydew and pumpernickel bread
the trap I set for you seems to have caught my leg instead"

(Side note: my external hard drive with all my music: clicking. I think its gonna fail. Fuck.)

"We'll lift up the ground to see
The system of roots beneath.
Gears turn, endlessly,
To bring the world back to life
Like clockwork, when it dies.

The cadence of beating hearts,
The click of its moving parts
Grows louder and louder
From this restless earth...

Future gardens wait patiently below
somehow we smell them
blossom through the snow."

The nesting instinct is a fine thing and well enough. I don't think it a pure vanity to desire one's life is full of beauty, natural or creative. But its to be shared. This place would be a fine setting for a life-together-ed. Otherwise its all just a museum to lifeless artifice. Artifactualities.

Well, tomorrow is just the sort of day from which I need to retreat. Too full, too busy, too much. I'll face it all the better with a full night's sleep and further blogging serves that purpose not at all.

A little more Sleeping At Last before I'm sleeping, at last.

"We'll pray for heaven's floor to break
Pour the brightest white on blackest space
Come bleeding gloriously through
the clouds

and the blue

Forcing one place from two.
Killing formulaic views.

Only loves proves to be the Truth."

Thursday, October 1, 2009

Stereophonic Phrenetics; A Stunning Stasis


The money saved on rent, on rolling her own cigarettes, on plastic-bottled liquor all went to clothes. To stylish, outlandish, belle-of-the-ball clothes. Dresses with petticoats. Jackets of varying lengths. And shoes. Dear god, those stacks of shoes. Some weeks it would all hang pristine in the hallway closet, between the galley kitchen and the sliding-glass-door-ed living room. Other times, strewn in piles of tulle and silk and wool, like some giant textile-digesting animal had been left alone in the place for a week and never walked. All of the clothes that never saw the air beyond her dry-walled world. Out there, black slacks and a green apron did the job. Sometimes that hoody from an old boyfriend that smelled like any brand of cigarettes but hers and which I fucking hated.

She never dressed up for me. Or anyone, as best I could tell.

She didn’t even own a TV and I’d never seen her cook. Grinning plastic bags declaring their thanks would leer up from the trash. Stacked forts defended the refrigerator’s interior with Styrofoam walls. I was never not surprised to discover it was day or night at the front door. If you asked me how we passed the time, I couldn’t answer. Only that we did and in whirling, haphazard stretches.

One assumes someone else has wondered that if there’s a difference between boredom and love, its not one easily pegged.

Tuesday, September 29, 2009

Entropy's Transitional Turpitude

I can remember the last summer I had. The last summer I knew (see also; the biblical sense). The heat of that summer lept up from the pavement and glared from the windshields of cars. It was the summer of the last time I rode a skateboard. The last summer when the beach of was fun. I can remember it in all its sunburned laziness. It wasn’t the last summer she’d sleep with me, but it was the last summer she’d much want to.

She’d never seen the ocean before. Sometimes I worried that maybe it was the smell of salt and kelp she loved, not my voice in the morning, the way she said. We shared the place more than we “lived together,” and the owner’s golden retriever played gracious host for 6 weeks. The place was mostly kitchen or mostly bedroom, depending on the hour. We mostly assembled sandwiches and salads, more than the other thing. I was nervous about the neighbors we didn’t know. I was the Californian, but she was at home here.

Next we made retreat (see also; the military sense) in the woods of some Midwestern place. I’d known forests, but not the dense, foreboding thicket that woods could be. Or the intransigent maze of play, as well. About there, I mostly remember the deer and the fireflies. And the odd cup of coffee sweltered through mornings that straddled thunderstorms. She had begun to notice that people set to fleeing rarely do so really together, but only in tandem. Only incidentally in the same direction. And yet, there, with no neighbors about whom to worry, we found our proper stride.

The chilled rains of deep autumn in the city broke some fever. Passion turned to good natured bemusement and our lives relaxed together. And city neighbors don’t merit much consideration.

I don’t know why I’m telling you this, except maybe to ask later which parts you think are true.

Saturday, September 26, 2009

Autumnal Anticipation of Advent

First things first; aren’t these just the most attractive white people you’ve ever seen in your life. And aren’t they just living the life? My jealousy is rather unparalleled. And my admiration.

I’m glad to see there are people out there having a lovely time. Or pretending to have a lovely time for a camera so that I can imagine that somewhere in the world, people are having a lovely time. Life has occasionally, lately, let me glimpse into the undercurrent of unremitting loveliness that God pushes intravenously into the world. But only occasionally.

Otherwise, things have been fairly difficult and unlovely. Hopes are often disappointed in life, confirming incrementally that we assume too many promises and never a realistic amount of indifference on the part of the universe. However, having hopes disappointed just in time to fall desperately ill and thereby tumble desperately behind the logistical demands of new semesters, new jobs is enough to bring a generally easy-going young man to despair of ever climbing out. Or, at least, finding a small, natural peace before the supernatural peace of Advent leaps upon us.

Gosh, Advent seems so far away. At least Autumn resides in between. Crisp, crunchy, creaky autumn. Not such an awful in-between, if I can ever get my feet back under me and into a pile of leaves.

I might start writing little pieces of micro-fiction again. I wrote a short story over May and June that I’ve submitted to Esquire’s short story writing contest. I won’t hear anything for months and my hopes are not high that they’ll think anything of it. Still, if I ever get it published anywhere, I’ll be sure to let you know.

I realized I’ve never really commented on the method for those little bits of description and place and person I’d posted here before. I’ll collect a handful of photos (whichever that strike me, for whatever reason) from blogs that I follow, much like the one’s included in this post, and bundle them together around a theme. A color. Or a place. Whatever. Then I’ll open them all up on the desktop of my computer, and just let a scene or a place or an interaction creep out and onto the page.

Then they are all posted together, as you’ve seen. Worse ways to be creative, I suppose.

Once I have a better picture of my new tattoo, I’ll post it.

Godspeed, everybody.

Tuesday, September 15, 2009

Acting Worship (Last Part)

What Do We Do Now?

Good worshiping is like good acting, only more important. And good acting takes a lot of work and practice. So, as worshipers, there is work we’ve got to do and practice to get to.

What does that work look like?

In acting, one must live a paradox, in which the words and actions are given and known in advance, but they need to be performed as if they are happening for the first time. Somehow one has to be spontaneous and authentic with words and actions that are as familiar as breathing. Well, that sounds just like the conflict between the Traditional and the Contemporary, doesn’t it?

So, first, we must become familiar with our “given circumstance.” This means reading our Bibles so that we know our shared story. This means exploring forms of worship we might not seek out otherwise. This means getting to know our history as a Church, both universal and denominational. It means acknowledging our “scripts,” which are just our own cultural expectations.

Also, we must practice “living honestly.” This means listening to the Holy Spirit, which means seeking out silence. This means we have to learn to be present for the performance, without distraction or self-consciousness. This means we have to be respectful of our fellow performers, by listening to them and being open to their innovations. Open to their honesty.

As much as we’ve all experienced bad performances in the theater or in a movie, we’ve also experienced bad performances in worship. We’ve been in services so rigid in ritual that we can’t seem to engage it with conviction. We’ve also been in services where it was so spontaneous (or messy) that we couldn’t keep up (or relax).

But when we bring these together, the “living honestly”(or the Contemporary) and the “given circumstance”(or the Traditional), we provide a grand performance for God. It doesn’t really matter which “script” or ritual we are packaging the Truth of our worship in. Whether my prayer is liturgical or improvised, I can be just as honest before God, if I am prepared and present. Whether the music is tried-and-true or experimental, I can approach the beauty of God through it if I am listening.

But all of this takes preparation and practice. And patience, for one another. And faith, that God will be present. And hope, that the story we’re acting will come to its full reality. And love, most of all for God and also for each other.

Indeed, our services on Sunday mornings should be a kind of rehearsal for our eternal task before the throne of God; Worship.

Saturday, September 12, 2009

Acting Worship (Pt. 4)

Imagining Honestly

So, let’s use our imaginations.

I mean ”use our imaginations” both in the sense of imagining solutions to our division, but also that imagination is the solution to our division. Imagination is the place where the traditional and the innovative are inseparable. The “play” of imagination is where we marry the old to the new.

Worship that is both Traditional and Contemporary is about imagination. It is about, for that hour on Sunday, pretending that God’s promise for the completion of the world is already here. But don’t let the word “pretend” throw you. When we pretend faithfully, God makes good on his promise and provides the very reality we are playing at. A theologian might say that we “incarnate the Eschaton.” Sunday morning worship gives us the precious chance to act like we’re living in the Kingdom of Heaven. We don’t often get to do that during the rest of the week.

In certain substance abuse recovery groups, one might hear this idea as, “fake it till you make it.”

Like it or not, worship is a ritual. Worship is a kind of community performance. Whether there are sensors and kneelers and candles or whether there are video screens and drums and spot-lights, worship is a ritual we perform. Our particular community, our particular culture shapes what that ritual looks like. Sometimes, our ritual is to tell ourselves we don’t have rituals. That’s what a philosopher would call “modernism.”

“But,” you might be thinking, “imagining, pretending, performing and acting are all fake. They are all fictional. They aren’t real.” The Contemporary will especially feel this way, right? Worship shouldn’t be a performance. It shouldn’t be inauthentic. Worship should be true!

Who says that good performances aren’t true?

Let’s take a look at another kind of performance. One that isn’t so stuffed full of our emotions. Let’s look at acting, like on a stage or in a movie.

Good acting is about “living honestly in the given circumstance .” The ‘given circumstance’ is just the script. It tells you both what to say and when to say it. It tells you where the scene takes place. It tells you what goes on in the scene.

The ‘living honestly’ is the courageous task of the actor. We’ve all seen someone who isn’t up to the challenge, right? The words that leave their lips are hollow. The way they hold their body or the way they gesture seems not-quite-right.

But we’ve also encountered the brilliant performance of an exceptional actor. Most recently, I think of Heath Ledger in “The Dark Knight” or Daniel Day Lewis in…well, come to think of it, in just about everything. What is going on there that gives us such joy? What do they do that lets us in on the Truth of the story?

On the one hand, they provide us the satisfaction of getting what we paid for. Heath Ledger’s Joker has the face paint and the scary laugh and the flamboyant clothes. We know we’re going to get that from a Batman movie. It comforts us to receive it. It would make us anxious and upset if he never walked on screen in the purple suit and smudged grease paint.

This is what the Traditional values. It desires to know we know where we are. There are familiar words and symbols that help us feel like a part of a community. Like a part of a shared story. It lets us know that when we invest our hearts into Church, we aren’t going to be deceived or left out in the cold. The sight of stained glass and the sound of the organ let me know I’m home.

On the other hand, great performances delight us with innovations and surprises. Ledger’s Joker transforms a character we thought we knew so well. He speaks with the flat, familiar monotone of a Midwesterner. He reveals a horrifying kind of intelligence. We appreciate that he surprises us, because that makes him more than a type. It makes him alive. It makes him ring true.

This is what the Contemporary provides to the performance of our worship. It toys with our expectations to remind us that our Faith is alive. It provides us with the delight of surprise . It shines light on new aspects of our Faith that we might have been underemphasizing. At worst, what we might have been ignoring. A new kind of musical instrument can evoke a new metaphor for God’s power or love. A new word or phrase can open up possibilities we hadn’t discovered.

But in the excellent performance, both of these things happen at once. We are both reassured by our fulfilled expectations and delighted by our surprise. Like when an old hymn suddenly finds new meaning because of our circumstances. Like when a new metaphor illuminates a familiar passage of scripture. This is the tension between the old and the new that siding only with the Traditional or the Contemporary against the other is guaranteed to miss. The Traditional and the Contemporary cannot be separated, even if we so easily distinguish between them.

Friday, September 11, 2009

Acting Worship (Pt. 3)

The Traditional and The Contemporary

We’ll start with the Traditional.

Some of us ache for our old beloved hymns, the long-respected creeds and liturgical prayers with their roots deep in our personal memory and the memory of our community. The reliability of well-worn words and melodies and “the way we’ve always done things” are a comfort to us as we travel through this veil of tears. In simple terms, the Traditional values what is time tested. In simpler terms, the Traditional values what is old, though our culture is very unfair to that word.

And the Contemporary?

If you’ve used a word like “relevant” or “authentic” or “spirit-lead” in the last sixth months, you are probably among the Contemporary. The Contemporary often looks over the church’s walls at the “culture” and sees new and useful tools for expressing the fundamental Truth in the Gospel. New kinds of technology or music or language that, when filled with the Truth of the Gospel and lead by the Holy Spirit can remind us of the fresh and ever-new vibrance of what God has done for us. St. Augustine calls this “pillaging the Egyptians ,” in reference to the treasure Israel carried out of Egypt during the exodus . In simple terms, the Contemporary values what is innovative. In still simpler terms, the Contemporary values what is new, though our culture thoughtlessly elevates that word.

At their best, both the Traditional and the Contemporary are good ways of thinking about worship. They both value things that are really, actually good. That is, when they are at their best. When they are at their worst, they fall to being the opposite sides of the same bad coin.

One group says, “Whatever is old is best!” The new music is too loud. The new technology is too distracting. All that casual dress and casual language is disrespectful.

The other group says, “Whatever is new is best!” Those old songs are boring. Those old prayers are stale and rote. All that lofty language is phony.

Once we get to that point, the conversation is dead. We’re just shouting at each other. Or, perhaps more commonly, we aren’t talking to each other at all. In a case of the all-too-apt metaphor, we end up preaching to the choir. We just roll around in our own chronological snobbery.

“Whatever is old is best!”

“Whatever is new is best!”

Still, each one’s dissatisfaction with the other is reasonable. They aren’t crazy or stupid.

The Traditional feels that the new and “relevant” worship songs and practices don’t carry the weight of meaning that a century-and-a-half old hymn has accrued since it was written. Worse, they are going to bring in those “noise makers ” and banish our beloved organ and choir to that attic.

The Contemporary looks at the traditional structures and content and feels like those things have lost their freshness and vibrance. Sure, for one time and place, they were great. After all, everything was new once. Now, however those old things are clichéd and unmoving.

That both the Traditional and the Contemporary are reasonable positions isn’t a contradiction. This isn’t a game of tug-o-war where, in order for one side to win the other has to lose. That they are both reasonable hints to us that the conflict we are experiencing isn’t necessary. That the division can be bridged.

Or better yet, closed.

That Traditional, scripted worship practices have tended towards rote and lifeless performance doesn’t mean they have to be that way forever. The Contemporary, innovative practices don’t have to let go of their ties to tradition or be completely unstructured. Those are assumptions based on the way things look right now, but they lack imagination about how the Traditional and the Contemporary can meet one another at the altar.

Thursday, September 10, 2009

Acting Worship (Pt. 2)

Worship “Wars?”

We usually mean by “worship” something like “the practice of expressing our individual and communal adoration of God through the arts, particularly song.” This way of thinking about our Sabbath gatherings is fairly new in the scope of Christian history, but hopefully this discussion of where we find ourselves will encourage us to take a look at where we come from. Of course, it is okay if that’s a different discussion for a different day.

Worship has been becoming a problem for us as evangelicals for a long time now. If you know the phrase “worship wars,” then you probably already know how we are divided over this, often by generation. We’ve, all of us, probably identified with one side of the divide or the other. Usually, we account for the division by pointing to how the “Traditional” and the “Contemporary” are in conflict.

Of course, this distinction can be found under any number of different names, and the irony of evangelical culture is that even what we label “contemporary” is very rarely all that contemporary. The same goes for our use of “traditional,” most of the time.

I want to offer hope that this conflict is escapable. It is escapable precisely because there doesn’t need to be a conflict. The division we see and feel isn’t a necessary one. A philosopher might say it is a “false dichotomy.” A philosopher also might say that the Traditional and the Contemporary are “distinct but not separable.” Let’s start by distinguishing the two and we can get to how they can’t really be separated later.

Wednesday, September 9, 2009

Acting Worship: About Imagining Honestly (Pt. 1)

Inspired by this post on the Church and PoMo blog, I'm gonna post (in installments) an essay I wrote a year or so ago about "worship." Many of you have probably already seen this, but I read it again tonight and I'm pretty happy with how it frames (and dismantles) the debate, over-simplifications and all.

Acting Worship: About Imagining Honestly
by Jonathan Heaps

The summer before I went off to college, the church where I grew up hired me as a Worship and Arts intern. I had already been volunteering during the week and on Sunday mornings, mostly creating and projecting song lyrics for our Worship services. My duties were gently expanded and I now had to attend the weekly worship planning meeting on Wednesday mornings. Very early on Wednesday mornings, as far as my teenage self was concerned.

In these meetings we would sit around a table and construct our weekly worship service. The format is, I imagine, fairly standard for evangelical churches in mostly-white, middle class America: A “Welcome” song or two while folks trickle in, a greeting, some announcements, a few more songs, the children are dismissed to Sunday school, the offering, the sermon, communion on the first Sunday of the month, another song and a benediction. Our non-liturgical liturgy, you might call it. We’d stray a little creatively here and there. There would be a skit sometimes. Occasionally we’d incorporate some sort of participatory, hands on artsy-ness now and then. But for the most part, things were done the way things were done.

And yet, even with all those week-to-week consistencies and shared expectation, those meetings would take on the character of a hardened negotiation. I always found that strange, given that we usually entered the room in a spirit of collaboration. Further, I imagined that strangeness was not lost on the others. But there we were, bartering a hymn against a praise song or debating the merits of a skit over a special music. Could an instrumental piece really be considered “worship” music? Is the choir going to get its agreed upon quota of Sundays this year? Are we giving the youth something that will keep them interested? Are we giving the seniors something that will keep them satisfied?

It seemed like there were always two parties advocating for righteous but contradictory agendas. And, if I may speak candidly, it resulted in some disjointed and rather directionless worship services. Worship services that, no doubt, the Holy Spirit used to move and change souls, despite our pulling and tugging every which way. Still, I grew tired and discouraged by this combativeness we seemed so easily to slip into. I also have a feeling I’m not the only one.

(to be continued...)

Tuesday, September 8, 2009

Gifts You Get to Gander

This was built for a soapbox derby race in Portland, Ore.


"Look Upon Thy Death" is a pretty bad-ass tattoo. And Shakespearean nonetheless!

This makes no sense, and yet I feel like I should be their friend.

Especially if they serve these:

Saturday, September 5, 2009

The Blessed And The Bled


It is a good and Christian thing, I think, to sometimes walk headlong into suffering for the hope of love.

Thursday, August 27, 2009

Dark and Daring Deeds

Part of me really likes the Olsen twins. Not in a "ooo, they're hot" way, cuz, uh no, but in a "hey, you look like you're gonna pull out of this child star business and do something w/ your life and one of you was hilarious (if a little blank-faced) in Weeds" kind of way.


Also, this picture is amazing. Hey, outdoor weddings, you're lovely/too stressful to contemplate. Plus, the high contrast is bitchin'.


Waiting to board a plane. I will NOT eat this bag full of cookies on the plane. I will NOT.