tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10671579798323111222024-03-08T17:07:36.605-06:00measured out in coffee spoonsLelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11712925098849491009noreply@blogger.comBlogger17125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1067157979832311122.post-43083872440932068512008-06-10T16:52:00.002-05:002008-06-10T17:03:42.146-05:00On Summer<p>The phone rang today while I was still sprawled across my bed, squinting up at the dimpled ceiling and wondering whether being awake was something I was quite yet committed to. My apartment is charming. Charming is another way of saying "without central heat and air." Sweat was just beginning to crawl across my ribs.</p><br /><p><em>Hey.</em></p><br /><p>Hey. I rolled over and rubbed my upper lip dry on the sheet. What's up?</p><br /><p>We hadn't talked for a few weeks. We used to talk everyday. We used to live in the same city and, before that, in the same building. And for a while there we nearly lived in the same skin. Weeks pass between our phone calls now, and there are many reasons for that. And now we talk about the weather.</p><br /><p><em>It's so damn hot here. </em></p><br /><p>Yeah. It's getting that way here. Summer.</p><br /><p><em>I hate it.</em></p><br /><p>I talked about the summer I walked half a mile to work everyday and arrived slick and red-faced and had to go to the bathroom to splash water all over myself to feel human again. He talked about the sick dizziness running too far in too much heat brings about. We talked about the weather.</p><br /><p>Somehow I've always taken the weather personally. Winter is a challenge, an affront, as if the wind's trying to blow me away and prove me to be as unsubstantial I sometimes feel and as if the snow's trying to hide me completely. I love the way wind stings my cheeks and snowflakes melt against my eyelashes. I stomp off alone down the streets in red scarf and a black coat and argue my existence to the gray skies. <em>I freeze my ass off, therefore I am. </em> My breath smokes reassuringly. </p><br /><p>Summer's different, though. Maybe it's all the heat-caused partial nudity. Maybe it's that the temperature around my body is so near the temperature inside it. I wear cotton skirts and men's undershirts and feel the borders of my personality fuzz. I lose the sense of where I stop and the world begins. I melt a little.</p><br /><p>And I want to spend my evenings on a porch swing drinking beer and counting stars. I want to quit my job and spend my days climbing trees like I'm still nine years old. I want to dance too close to a jukebox played to loud. I want to wear cotton dresses and no shoes. Summer makes me want to drive with the windows down and without stopping until I reach the ocean and then run into the waves, and it makes me forget one or two of my many reasons for all the things I have reasons for. </p><br /><center><br /><object height="355" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/Qx9br5ISRpo&hl=en"><param name="wmode" value="transparent"><br /><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/Qx9br5ISRpo&hl=en" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="425" height="355"></embed></object></center><br /><center> </center><br /><div align="left">Sometimes when I walk down the street on summer nights I close my eyes and feel the heat from the sidewalk through the soles of my three dollar shoes and the evening breeze against my neck. I close my eyes and feel we're all adrift in a great wide sea. Our heads are small and dark above the waves. We drift toward one another and away. The water is as warm as blood, and the moon is white and low in the sky.</div>Lelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11712925098849491009noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1067157979832311122.post-14712877210532347222008-04-28T16:46:00.010-05:002008-12-02T14:52:51.155-06:00To the Man Chasing Me with a Knife: a love letterRight before I ran my second marathon, one of my friends posted a comment on my <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">Facebook</span> page: <em>I've never understood running... unless, of course, someone is chasing you with a knife. IS someone? </em>I told her that I'd shared her attitude--and expressed it in the same words--right up to the day I started running. But that response wasn't the first one that came to mind: <em>Of course there is a man chasing me with a knife! </em>I was surprised because, well, I don't usually think in exclamation points.<br /><br />My feet point in different directions. Neither of those directions is forward. I've been told by people who don't really understand the gestation methods of birds that I run like a pregnant duck. I'm horribly, horribly slow. Picked last for teams in PE in elementary school slow. Outrun by chubby woman in her forties in college health class. You know, slow. And I look like a hot mess while doing it. For most of my life I've avoided running like... like something people avoid. Hard. <em><br /></em><em></em><br />Then I met the man with the knife. He sorta tapped my shoulder a time or two in college, and I put on a pair of trainers and made a few big silly loops around the university fitness center. <em>I'm going to catch you, </em>he hollered after me as I <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1">gallumphed</span> around the track, <em>and I'm going to make you <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2">FAAAAAAAAAT</span>. </em>But then I got all sweaty and gross-feeling. I was listening to a lot of <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3">Sleater</span>-Kinney then and quickly convinced myself a sensible punk rock feminist would go shower and have a big bowl of rice <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4">chex</span>. So I turned my back on the man with a knife and did just that. <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_5">Mmm</span>. Rice <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_6">chex</span>.<br /><br />The man with a knife showed back up after college. My boyfriend then ran a lot. Sunday afternoons I'd hang out in his apartment or, more specifically, in his bathtub accompanied by Mr Bubble and a library book, while he ran a dozen miles or something. The boyfriend. Not Mr Bubble. Then he'd shower and we'd go get dinner. I ate a lot Wendy's then, and the man with a knife started whispering in my ear <em>I'm going to make you <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_7">FAAAAAAAAAT</span> and unhealthy. You'll wheeze <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_8">every time</span> you climb stairs. You'll get that delicious dill sauce from your Wendy's veggie pita all over your third chin--and no one will tell you. </em>Then he'd laugh maniacally. A few times a week I'd go outside and run up and down my absurdly long-named street and feel the tickle of his hot, dill-saucy onion breath on my sweaty neck.<br /><br />The boyfriend and I broke up. I moved across the city. He moved across the country. I changed jobs, and I moved again. The man with a knife must've sneaked into my new building when I buzzed in the pizza delivery guy. <em>I'm going to make you FAAAAAAAAAT, so fat no one will ever, under any circumstance, want to see you naked, much less ask you out for a drink. And it's just as well, because you've got an awful personality. I'm going to make you die all alone. And while I'm at it, I'm going to stick you with a life of lousy jobs and cat tchotkes in your cubicle. </em>The knife was cold, and I could half-feel its tip against the bones of my neck. I tried to ease my tense shoulders somewhere past my ear lobes and put on my trainers and went out for a run.<br /><br />My neighborhood was full of flowering trees and wide, black asphalt. It was kind of nice, really. Families out for walks said hello. Other runners sprinted past with a cheerful <em>hey, girl, on your left.</em> Golden retrievers strained at their leashes to give my slow moving feet a friendly sniff.<br /><br />Funding came through for me to go back to school, so I headed back to Missouri for grad school. I spent a few months in my hometown, camping out in the guest room at my folks' house with my cat. The man with a knife knows his fucking geography and made his way north<em>. You live with your parents. You're such a loser. Such a FAAAAAAAAAAAT LOOOOOOOOSER. You'll suck at grad school. You'll be broke and living with your parents in this lame little town for the rest of your lame little life--and you'll wear Wal Mart stretchpants. </em>My parents had a treadmill, and I got on it and watched the miles tick by. I got off the treadmill, had a stretch and a glass of water, and hopped back on. Halfway through the summer, I charged the entry fees for my first marathon to my credit card. <em>A fuckin' poor choice for a girl who runs like a pregnant duck and who has no job. </em>My fingers shook a little when I filled in the entry form. <em>Hey, you, </em>I puffed over my shoulder to the man chasing me with a knife, <em>fuck off.</em><br /><em></em><br />My first marathon didn't go quite so well. The second one went just slightly better. But I'm signing up for a third one in December. I have a job. I go to school. I run most days, and the man with a knife is always just slightly behind me. I can hear his footsteps flagging in the distance some days. Other days he's close enough I can smell the garlic on his breath and hear him swearing and shouting his curses. He sounds a little out of breath.<br /><br />I'm not saying I'm not afraid anymore, that I'm not troubled by all those little voices that remind me I'm not as good at anything as I could be or as kind to anyone as I should be or that, no matter how often or how far I run, I will always be distinctly pear-shaped. I'm not saying I wake up every day sure there's more to my identity than my (not entirely skinny) ass in my skinny jeans, much less than that I wake up confident I bear the mark of God's unmerited good graces. I'm not saying I never feel picked last in the gym class of life.<br /><br />I'm saying that I like running. I like the way my breath sounds in my ears and feels in my lungs. I like the way my feet feel thumping against the asphalt. I like the coolness of wind in my face. I like the heat of the sun on my skin. I like sweetness of water when I'm thirsty and the richness of food when I'm hungry. There's a kind of a grace here: gratitude at finding my next breath, the wonder of discovering I can lift and lower my foot one time and then another. It's an everday grace: a billion breaths, a million steps over the course of our three score and ten.<br /><br />Some days, I stop running and gasp for breath and squint up into the sun, and the thunder of my pulse in my ears beats out any other voices. Some days I look over my shoulder and see only the looping gray road I've traveled stretching behind me. When I start moving again the one two one two of my feet on the pavement says<br /><br />amen<br /><br />amen<br /><br />alleluia<br /><br />and<br /><br />amen.Lelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11712925098849491009noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1067157979832311122.post-52202140353224973722008-03-28T00:02:00.004-05:002008-04-14T17:09:38.922-05:00"Today God gives milk/and I have the pail:" some words on EasterOn Good Fridays when I was a little girl, we came home from school, ate a hasty dinner, and put on our dressy clothes to go to church, all of which was bad. The church was too quiet and scary dark, and that was bad too. The songs we sang were slow and bad. The preacher used his baddest voice and told us everyone of those bad things those bad men did to Jesus because we we're all so bad, even if we don't always seem that way. It made me sad. We filed up to the front of the church for Communion. <em>This is body of Christ, broken for you and for many for the forgiveness of sin. </em>When I was very, very small I knelt beside my parents and big sisters with my lips pressed tight together while they received the Elements and I watched with big eyes. <em>This is the blood of Christ, poured out for you and for many for the forgiveness of sin. </em>Jesus' blood came in little clear plastic cups and smelled like grape juice, and there was a funny, bad feeling along my ribs and all up the back of my neck. On the car ride home, I always asked what made Good Friday good, and my mother's answers never satisfied. Some bad men were mean to Jesus and he died and now grownups ate and drank him up like monsters, and there was not one good thing about all that.<br /><br />And then, three days later, it was Easter. My sisters and I ran across the dew-wet ground in bare feet and nightgowns, looking for the eggs my parents had hidden while we lay in our narrow pink beds. The grass was cold and sent small, thrilling aches up my legs. Then I put on new white shoes and new white socks stood up on my tippy toes to sing in my loudest voice u<em>p from the grave he arose/with a mighty triumph o'er his foes </em>at church. I was so happy that Jesus wasn't dead anymore, that he was out and about on a pretty spring morning and walking through walls and cooking breakfast for his friends who were all so happy to see him once they figured out who he was, and I was happy that I was wearing a blue dress with a wide, lace collar. I was happy because I knew the bad parts were still there but I knew they were somehow made okay on Easter morning.<br /><br />This year on Easter Sunday, my friend Melissa said a friendly "how are you?" I told her I was great--and I told her everything I've written here in some frenetic burst. Easter, I said, is my favorite holiday because it's the only one that really makes me feel that sort of happy, childlike way the people who make Hallmark cards say we're all supposed to feel periodically. Easter, I said, is the thing that I believe in. She smiled and I smiled, and we sat down and opened up our hymnals to sing the first song of the morning.Lelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11712925098849491009noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1067157979832311122.post-6671650802453093992008-03-27T13:01:00.001-05:002008-03-27T10:51:32.528-05:00five years agoIn the spring of 1989, I was seven years old. My parents had a scratchy blue couch, and I was sitting on it. I was wearing a tee shirt that used to be my older sister's; it was covered in puffy painted seashells and covered my knees. I <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">should've</span> been in bed, I think, but I was watching the news instead. People were in streets yelling and carrying signs and running. There were people with guns and angry faces. Everything looked jumpy and strange. One of the cameramen dropped a camera and someone else picked it up and kept filming. I was afraid and got up to stand, half-hidden, behind the couch. I put my cheek against the rough upholstery and kept watching.<br /><br />I was seven years old. I knew about wars. I had been to a Civil War battlefield and felt the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1">buzzy</span> boom of cannons in the bones of my chest. I knew my ancestors had fought in the American Revolution. I thought wars were fought for good reasons and to keep people safe. I never knew that governments did bad things, that they could send soldiers to shoot at teenagers for running through the streets carrying signs. I thought governments were like my parents: benevolent makers of sometimes mystifying rules. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen_Square_protests_of_1989">Watching the tanks roll into <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2">Tianamen</span> Square </a>was this terrifying moment in which I realized the world wasn't the mostly-good place I'd always believed it to be.<br /><br />In the spring of 2003, I was twenty one. My parents had a beige, over-stuffed couch then, and I was perching on its arm. I was wearing my <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3">teeshirt</span> with the firetrucks on it and watching the invasion of Iraq with a sick feeling in my stomach. I kept thinking about that day years earlier and kept thinking, over and over, <em>you can not sign my name to this fucking bad idea; you can not sign my name to this. </em><br /><br /><br /><br /><p>I love America. I do. With the same kind of love you might have for your <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4">chainsmoking</span> anti-Semitic grandparents: I know its flaws and faults, but somehow it's a relationship that goes deeper than those things. I think about the way gray highways stretch out toward the horizon and about my great-great-grandmother cursing and spitting at <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_5">yankee</span> soldiers. I think about corn dogs and tap dancing chorus lines and the Bill of Rights. I think about blues and rock and roll and Richard <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_6">Avedon's</span> <em>In the American West. </em>I think about Zion National Park, Mother Jones, and the maple trees I grew up climbing, and I find myself in the arms of a fierce and unexpected devotion<em>. </em><br /></p><p>Five years ago, Senator Robert Byrd stood in front of Congress and delivered a speech* that said many of the things I'm trying to articulate today:</p><p><em>I believe in this beautiful country. I have studied its roots and gloried in the wisdom of its magnificent Constitution. I have marveled at the wisdom of its founders and framers. Generation after generation of Americans has understood the lofty ideals that underlie our great Republic. I have been inspired by the story of their sacrifice and their strength.<br />But, today I weep for my country. I have watched the events of recent months with a heavy, heavy heart. No more is the image of America one of strong, yet benevolent peacekeeper. The image of America has changed. Around the globe, our friends mistrust us, our word is disputed, our intentions are questioned. </em><br /></p><p><em>Instead of reasoning with those with whom we disagree, we demand obedience or threaten recrimination. Instead of isolating </em><a href="http://dir.salon.com/topics/saddam_hussein/"><em>Saddam Hussein</em></a><em>, we seem to have isolated ourselves. We proclaim a new doctrine of preemption which is understood by few and feared by many. We say that the United States has the right to turn its firepower on any corner of the globe which might be suspect in the war on terrorism. We assert that right without the sanction of any international body. As a result, the world has become a much more dangerous place.<br />We flaunt our superpower status with arrogance. We treat U.N. Security Council members like ingrates who offend our princely dignity by lifting their heads from the carpet. Valuable alliances are split. After war has ended, the United States will have to rebuild much more than the country of Iraq. We will have to rebuild America's image around the globe. </em><br /></p><p><em>The case this Administration tries to make to justify its fixation with war is tainted by charges of falsified documents and circumstantial evidence. We cannot convince the world of the necessity of this war for one simple reason. This is a war of choice. </em></p><p><em>There is no credible information to connect Saddam Hussein to 9/11. The twin towers fell because a world-wide terrorist group, <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_7">al</span>-<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_8">Qaida</span>, with cells in over 60 nations, struck at our wealth and our influence by turning our own planes into missiles, one of which would likely have slammed into the dome of this beautiful Capitol except for the brave sacrifice of the passengers on board.</em></p><p><em>The brutality seen on September 11<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_9">th</span> and in other terrorist attacks we have witnessed around the globe are the violent and desperate efforts by extremists to stop the daily encroachment of western values upon their cultures. That is what we fight. It is a force not confined to borders. It is a shadowy entity with many faces, many names, and many addresses. </em></p><p><em>But, this Administration has directed all of the anger, fear, and grief which emerged from the ashes of the twin towers and the twisted metal of the Pentagon towards a tangible villain, one we can see and hate and attack. And villain he is. But, he is the wrong villain. And this is the wrong war. If we attack Saddam Hussein, we will probably drive him from power. But, the zeal of our friends to assist our global war on terrorism may have already taken flight.</em><br /></p><p><em>The general unease surrounding this war is not just due to "orange alert." There is a pervasive sense of rush and risk and too many questions unanswered. How long will we be in </em><a href="http://dir.salon.com/topics/iraq_war/"><em>Iraq</em></a><em>? What will be the cost? What is the ultimate mission? How great is the danger at home? A pall has fallen over the Senate Chamber. We avoid our solemn duty to debate the one topic on the minds of all Americans, even while scores of thousands of our sons and daughters faithfully do their duty in Iraq. </em></p><p><em>What is happening to this country? When did we become a nation which ignores and berates our friends? When did we decide to risk undermining international order by adopting a radical and doctrinaire approach to using our awesome military might? How can we abandon diplomatic efforts when the turmoil in the world cries out for diplomacy? </em></p><p><em>Why can this President not seem to see that America's true power lies not in its will to intimidate, but in its ability to inspire? </em></p><p><em>War appears inevitable. But, I continue to hope that the cloud will lift. Perhaps Saddam will yet turn tail and run. Perhaps reason will somehow still prevail. I along with millions of Americans will pray for the safety of our troops, for the innocent civilians in Iraq, and for the security of our homeland. May God continue to bless the United States of America in the troubled days ahead, and may we somehow recapture the vision which for the present eludes us. </em><br /></p><p>A few hours after these words were said, the war began. And it continues, with no clear objectives and no clear successes, gleeful presidential proclamations not withstanding. <a href="http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2003/iraq/forces/casualties/">It continues with around four thousand Americans dead and thirty thousand wounded.</a> <a href="http://www.iraqbodycount.org/">It continues with more than 80,000 Iraqis dead from violence.</a> <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/10/AR2006101001442.html">It continues as mortality rates continue to climb.</a> <a href="http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2003/iraq/">It continues as violence escalates in recent days</a>. I cannot sign my name to this tragedy. I will not sign my name to this. </p><p>I skipped my Wednesday night class to go to a peace rally. I held a candle close to my chest and stood in a circle that contained more WW II veterans than twenty-somethings. We were silent for a long moment, and I tried to pray. I found myself near tears and unable to formulate my thoughts into a petition. </p><p>I cannot escape the conviction, that <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_10">something's</span> gone horribly, horribly wrong here. And that we've watched this travesty with a sinister breed of passivity from our over-stuffed beige couches. The days after September 11, 2001 were frightening ones. They were. But we've allowed our elected officials to parlay that fear into <a href="http://www.amnesty.org/en/counter-terror-with-justice">appalling infringements of human rights of US citizens and of foreign nationals</a>, to parlay that fear into the largely unprovoked invasion of a sovereign nation, to parlay that fear into the widespread acceptance of ill-conceived, over-blown rhetoric that, at best, could be said to obscure rather than enlighten or inform.</p><p>I don't suffer from the misguided notion that the people of the US are ethically or spiritually superior to the people of other nations. But I did, with a childish feeling of familial allegiance, somehow think we could do better than this.</p><p>And it's more than time we did. Five years is five years too many. It's time to stop watching the war in Iraq recapped only on the <em>Daily Show </em>during <em>Family Guy's </em>commercials<em>, </em>to stop flipping past another story about a <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_11">carbomb</span> in search of the comics or updates on our basketball brackets, to stop pretending that none of this is happening. <a href="http://projects.washingtonpost.com/fallen/">It's time to stop pretending</a>: that girl from your high school debate team drives a Hummer in Iraq; that boy you met (and <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_12">may've</span> kissed, just a little, after your third gin and tonic) at that party is awaiting orders to ship out; your best friend's <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_13">exboyfriend's</span> old roommate is finishing up his second tour of duty. <a href="http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/56124/">It's time to stop pretending: </a>that screaming woman in that documentary you saw looks a little like your aunt without her makeup, and for all intents and purposes, she could be. Incidents of culture or geography do not compromise mutual humanity, and it's impossible to ignore the <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_14">persistent</span> and seemingly inexorable toll this conflict continues to wreak on Iraq's civilian population. As a nation, we've worked long and hard to ignore these facts and these faces--the grinning faces of the boys we knew from high school and the bloodied faces of families out for groceries when the lady next to them in line exploded in a hail of shrapnel. There's been five years of this. Five years.</p><p>Five years means that it is, in a manner of speaking, time to get off our collective couches and take to the streets with signs in our hands. Five years means it time we no longer let our government sign our names to this war. Five years is five years too many.</p><p>______________________________________________________________________</p><p>Read up:</p><ul><li><a href="http://www.amnestyusa.org/">http://www.amnestyusa.org/</a></li><li><a href="http://thomas.loc.gov/home/multicongress/multicongress.html">http://thomas.loc.gov/home/multicongress/multicongress.html</a></li><li><a href="http://www.fas.org/man/docs/qdr/">http://www.fas.org/man/docs/qdr/</a></li><li><a href="http://www.worldpublicopinion.org/">http://www.worldpublicopinion.org/</a></li><li><a href="http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article10907.htm">http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article10907.htm</a></li></ul><p>Speak up:</p><ul><li><a href="https://forms.house.gov/wyr/welcome.shtml">https://forms.house.gov/wyr/welcome.shtml</a></li><li><a href="http://www.congress.org/congressorg/directory/congdir.tt">http://www.congress.org/congressorg/directory/congdir.tt</a></li><li><a href="http://www.onebigtorrent.org/">http://www.onebigtorrent.org/</a></li></ul><p>_____________________________________________________________</p><p><em>*reprinted from salon.com</em></p><p><em>**big thanks to Josh White, who provided most of these links.</em></p>Lelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11712925098849491009noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1067157979832311122.post-39856271153377484852008-03-27T01:42:00.000-05:002008-03-27T00:01:26.405-05:00Protestant Easter: Eight Years OldWhen he was a little boy<br />Jesus was good all the time.<br />No wonder that he grew up to be such a big shot<br />who could forgive people so much.<br />When he died everyone was mean.<br />Later on he rose when no one else was looking.<br />Either he was hiding<br />or else he went up.<br />Maybe he was only hiding?<br />Maybe he could fly?<br /><br />Yesterday I found a purple crocus<br />blowing its way out of the snow.<br />It was all alone.<br />It was getting its work done.<br />Maybe Jesus was only getting his work done<br />and letting God blow him off the Cross<br />and maybe he was afraid for a minute<br />so he hid under the big stones.<br />He was smart to go to sleep up there<br />even though his mother got so sad<br />and let them put him in a cave.<br />I sat in a tunnel when I was five.<br />That tunnel, my mother said,went straight into the big river<br />and so I never went again.<br />Maybe Jesus knew my tunnel<br />and crawled right through to the river<br />so he could wash all the blood off.<br />Maybe he only meant to get clean<br />and then come back again?<br />Don't tell me that he went up in smoke<br />like Daddy's cigar!<br />He didn't blow out like a match!<br />It is specialbeing here at Easter<br />with the Cross they built like a capital T.<br />The ceiling is an upside-down rowboat.<br />I usually count its ribs.<br />Maybe he was drowning?<br />Or maybe we are all upside down?<br />I can see the face of a mouse inside<br />of all that stained-glass window.<br />Well, it could be a mouse!<br />Once I thought the Bunny Rabbit was special<br />and I hunted for eggs.<br />That's when I was seven.<br />I'm grownup now. Now it's really Jesus.<br />I just have to get Him straight.<br />And right now.<br /><br />Who are we anyhow?<br />What do we belong to?<br />Are we a we?<br />I think that he rose<br />but I'm not quite sure<br />and they don't really say<br />singing their Alleluia<br />in the churchy way.<br />Jesus was on that Cross.<br />After that they pounded nails into his hands.<br />After that, well, after that,<br />everyone wore hats<br />and then there was a big stone rolled away<br />and then almost everyone --<br />the ones who sit up straight --<br />looked at the ceiling.<br /><br /><em>Alleluia</em> they sing.<br />They don't know.<br />They don't care if he was hiding or flying.<br />Well, it doesn't matter how he got there.<br />It matters where he was going.<br />The important thing for me<br />is that I'm wearing white gloves.<br />I always sit straight.<br />I keep on looking at the ceiling.<br />And about Jesus,<br />they couldn't be sure of it,<br />not so sure of it anyhow,<br />so they decided to become Protestants.<br />Those are the people that sing<br />when they aren't quite<br />sure.<br /><br />- Anne Sexton, from Live or Die, 1966 Houghton Mifflin Co.Lelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11712925098849491009noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1067157979832311122.post-10736470497957835072008-03-09T12:50:00.000-05:002008-03-09T12:20:20.079-05:00On Resurrection<em>Let's play Lazarus. </em>Libby was the pastor's daughter. She was two or three or four years older than me and always wore pink hair <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">barrettes</span>. She had a tight, prissy face, and I did not like her much. All the grownups were inside the church drinking coffee and talking. We were looking for ways to entertain ourselves on the church playground.<br /><br /><em>How do you play Lazarus? </em><br /><br /><em>You're Martha and I'm Mary. </em>She pointed to her brother. <em>Jamie's Lazarus. And Mary, </em>she said to my little sister, <em>you have to be Jesus. You're too little to be anything else. </em>Mary started to complain that she didn't want to be a boy, but Libby glared her into silence.<br /><br />We took off the little white cardigans we all wore over our Sunday dresses and tied them around Jamie's chest and arms. Dead Lazarus, we'd learned in Sunday school, was all wrapped up like a mummy. Then we considered the snap-together Fisher Price playground. It was made up of a series of primary-colored interlocking panels and slides that could be reconfigured, or, more accurately, disassembled by children who then lacked the strength to reattach the pieces securely. We pulled and pulled and the big yellow tube-shaped slide popped loose.<br /><br /><em>This is your tomb. Get in. </em><br /><em></em><br />The tomb was a little muddy inside. Black leaves were stuck to it. Jamie hesitated. Libby gave him a little shove. He kicked at the tube, looked at his sister, and then obediently wiggled inside.<br /><br /><em>Now we have to roll the tomb. C'mon. </em><br /><em></em><br />I bent down over the slide and next to Libby. Rolling the tomb made sense somehow. All the pictures in our Bible storybooks showed tombs shaped just like our big yellow slide. And there was something about something rolling away, wasn't there, something to do with tombs.<br /><br /><em>Our brother's dead. We're really, really sad. </em><br /><br />Okay.<br /><br />We started to push the slide uphill and chant <em>our brother's dead and we are sad boohoo boohoo</em>. Jamie was too heavy and the hill was too steep. So Libby ordered my little sister, who'd been standing off to the side being Jesus, to help us push. Jamie laughed as he tumbled around like clothes in the dryer.<br /><br /><em>What are you</em> doing? My mother was standing at the playground fence.<br /><br />Oh. We're rolling a dead body. I thought it was an obvious explanation. Of course three small girls would tie up a boy and roll him across the playground inside a slide and tell everyone he was a dead body. Of course.<br /><br /><em>You're </em>what? Mom looked shocked and disgusted. I knew I'd said the wrong thing then, that rolling Lazarus up the hill was one of those inexplicable things that must be kept secret from adults. <em>You kids need to come inside. Right. Now. </em>She turned and clipclopped back inside in her shiny black high heels.<br /><em></em><br />We stopped pushing, and Jamie wiggled out of the slide still tied up in our sweaters. He stood there, tied up in sweaters, and grinned dizzily at us all. Jamie was freckled and brown haired and a year older than me. Sometimes I chased him around the church yard and tried to kiss him. Once or twice I caught him and he smelled like Juicy Fruit and soap and mud. He took a step or two and then fell down laughing.<br /><em></em><br /><em>What is Jesus supposed to say? </em><br /><em></em><br /><em>Shut up. </em>Libby rolled her eyes.<br /><br />Don't tell her to shut up.<br /><br /><em>You shut up. </em>Mary reached out her hand, and I took it. We walked through the gate and down the sidewalk toward the church. I looked back at our Lazarus, still tied up in our sweaters and still laying on the ground laughing up at the wide blue sky of fall.Lelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11712925098849491009noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1067157979832311122.post-76292546358428322202008-02-27T18:59:00.007-06:002008-02-27T20:28:04.632-06:00On ProvidenceToday my feet were cold. Which was my own stupid fault: I'd elected to wear flipflops on a forty degree day. But it's been winter much too long, and I'm tired of wearing my winter clothes and my winter skin and my winter mood. The sun was out, so, in a fit of misguided hopefulness, I put on sandals and went about my business with very cold feet.<br /><br />As I scuffed across campus on my way to class, I happened to look down. A pair of neatly rolled tube socks were laying smack in the middle of the sidewalk. I didn't stop and pick them up and put them on. But I did laugh out loud like a crazy woman.<br /><br />In church on Sunday, we read a portion of Christ's "Sermon on the Mount," found in the Gospel of Matthew:<br /><br /><em>Therefore I say to you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink; nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air, for they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?</em><br /><em></em><br />This passage has always annoyed the crap out of me. Really. I just want to pick up a slingshot and go after those smug, self-satisfied little birdies. Birds don't reap or sow--or make big student loan payments or struggle with their career aspirations or google their medical symptoms obsessively. All they do is fly around and poop on windshields.<br /><br />Trusting God doesn't come easily for me. I lie awake in my bed and gnaw my lips and run over worst case scenarios. I take baths and go for long runs and try to pray. But, mostly, I worry.<br /><br />In the strangest moments, though, come these flashes of faith, these small acts of grace. I sigh over my cold feet and see a pair of socks and am struck by the incalcuable scandal that just maybe I'm cared for beyond my reckoning and that on days when I go out with my chin stuck out against the world I'm held small and secure in the palm of a great hand. And that knowledge is a giddy as the promise of spring.Lelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11712925098849491009noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1067157979832311122.post-26772126718660716142008-02-27T11:25:00.001-06:002008-02-27T11:28:44.518-06:00The Minor Fall (the major lift)The thing about my life outside of the city I miss the most is the music. I miss smudging on too much eyeliner and putting on my shoes and going out to see bands play. No one much comes through this corner of the midwest on tour, and I miss the way music can somehow lift up the top of my skull and carry me away somewhere.<br /><br />I have a perfect concert scenario. I like a small venue, perferrably one with an interesting history, with around a hundred enthusiastic but not too enthusiastic people. I like to drink two and a half perfectly poured drinks over the course of the evening--an amount that produces a pleasant buzzy sensation but no worrisome drunkeness. I like the band to be very, very good, and the air to be freely circulating but not super-cooled. I like to be cutely dressed and wearing comfortable shoes. I like to stand in the ideal spot, which, of course, varies with venue but is usually centered and around ten feet from the stage. And, although I do not, I like it when people can smoke. It's a configuration I crave like good chocolate or good conversation.<br /><br />Tonight I saw David Bazan play with Casiotone for the Painfully Alone. The show was not an expression of my perfect concert scenario. There were chairs. Folding chairs. I hate those, especially when I arrive too late to stake one out and have to stand, in heels, looking over the shoulders of those lucky comfortable shoe wearing bastards. I was with my sister, who had ignored the assortment of "do you think you'd like this?" links I'd sent her to agree to an evening with unfamiliar music, was grumpy. I was refusing to acknowledge her grumpiness, deeming it her own damn fault. There was beer, but it was suspicious and unfamiliar beer, and I did not drink any because it looked piss-colored. The levels were wonky. It was stuffy. The crowd bordered comatose.<br /><br />But it was a really lovely evening just the same. I hadn't had a drink and I wasn't with my friends or with a boy I liked and I wasn't, really, where I wanted to be. But there's a bit of transcendence in music that I struggle to find as regularly or as readily in the other arts. That I struggle to find generally. Some doorway out of myself and into something else. I stood around, alone after my grumpy sister gave up and found a couch in another part of the gallery, completely sober and in my less than comfortable shoes and had a wonderful time listening to music I enjoy played very well.<br /><br />Transcendence is a difficult thing, a thing I chase after often and through often foolish means.<br /><br />When I was a kid, I always learned in Sunday school that God forgives us if we ask, that all our smudgy sins are erased from that big, heavenly blackboard. But that forgiveness doesn't necessarily free us from the more immediate, corporeal results of our sin. In this way, I managed for years to get around some of the scandal of grace, the utter nonsense that is Christ's redeeming love. Remember Jonathan Edwards' "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" sermon? Remember the way the great righteous hand of God dangles us like spiders over the fire? I always think of that image, the vengeful God who wants me to take my medicine, to burn out all my unrighteousness while my many legs shrivel and curl over the fires of The Consequences. <em>That'll teach you to fuck things up</em>. Somehow I've made the world into my own private purgatory, the place where I get to suffer for the things I do wrong. Sure, God forgives sin, but that's all sort of in heaven and far away from me.<br /><br />Several months ago, I started making bad decision after bad decision. It doesn't matter exactly what those bad decisions were: but they were little, broken attempts at transcendence, at a way out of my own head for a a while. They were bad decisions that ought to have had some obvious and unpleasant consquences. But those consequences somehow never arrived and reminded me anew and instead that the business of Grace is so much more than I imagine, more than a heavenly tally kept and then sponged out upon request. I'm not saying we should sin that grace may abound. I'm not saying that all the other times I've fucked things up and they've stayed fucked up weren't for my own good. I'm just saying that I deserved much worse than I got and in some small and paltry way it reminded me that the love of Christ is so much bigger than I am and more mysterious than I can imagine.<br /><br />I taught a Sunday school class of first graders, and not long after I realized that I was off the so-called hook, my first graders and I talked about the Baptism of Jesus. At the moment he came up from the water, the Heavens opened and the Spirit of God descended like a dove. We were learning about God's purpose for our lives that morning, a subject I don't really feel qualified to broach with anyone, even first graders.<br /><br />We drew pictures of what we thought it looked like, pieces of Heaven poking out of the ripped open blue sky. One girl drew these remarkable black piles of birds, the Holy Spirit imagined by Alfred Hitchcock. Another girl drew a huge swirl of a sun. We talked about the pictures as we drew them.<br /><br /><em>You know how the sun is, you know, up there?</em><br /><br />Yeah.<br /><br /><em>You know how it's pretty and yellow and warm and stuff? </em><br /><br />Yeah.<br /><br /><em>Well, I think maybe it was like the sun, pretty and nice and all, but it could, you know, hurt your eyes if you looked right at it. </em><br /><br />I told her that's mostly what it says in the Bible: Moses on the mountaintop, able only to look at a wee slice of God's backside and only for a second or two. The prophet taken up to heaven and recognizing himself as a man of unclean lips and a citizen of a nation of uncleanliness with wet, black horror in the dazzling presence of holiness. The disciples watching in slack-jawed wonder while their Teacher begins to glow like an incandescent bulb.<br /><br />Then we drew pictures of ourselves, of what we want to be when we're grownups and of ourselves serving that bright and good and holy God right now. The boy who sits next to me drew himself small against a teal-colored sky, an army solidier guy with six fingers on each hand and a comically oversized gun. When his dad came to pick him up, the boy put his messy head against my shoulder for a quick second and muttered something I couldn't understand.<br /><br />Tonight I thought about those children and their pictures for a minute or two. I thought about the swell of birds and the swirl of sun and about six-fingered army soldier guy, and I thought about being small and filled with faith.<br /><br />The show ended with a Leonard Cohen cover--a song that's also been performed by Jeff Buckley and Bon Jovi and a few dozen other acts in between--but it somehow still sounds good to me.<br /><br /><em>I heard there was a secret chord<br />That david played and it pleased the lord<br />But you don't really care for music, do you<br />Well it goes like this the fourth, the fifth<br />The minor fall and the major lift<br />The baffled king composing hallelujah</em><br /><br /><br /><em>Fall 2007</em>Lelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11712925098849491009noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1067157979832311122.post-38137219925302923192008-02-18T00:21:00.006-06:002008-02-18T00:52:05.389-06:00Tell Me, Mister LoveIn the sixth grade, I was, not withstanding the braces, kinda hot. There's no way to describe the hotness of a sixth grader without sounding unbelievably creepy. But I was thinner and tanner but had exactly the same bosom I have today. It was more impressive then, let me tell you. And I wore short shorts.<br /><br />My mom was an elementary school teacher, so my younger sister and I spent every afternoon after school hanging around her classroom or on the playground. One afternoon we were playing a half-assed game of horse when an older boy, maybe in highschool, came around. He started to talk to me. It was one of those vivid and ridiculous moments of adolescence, as if life's suddenly become a Roy Lichtenstein stereotype. He was handsome and dangerous-seeming. There were small beads of sweat on his upper lip and the faintest beginnings of a moustache. He asked me my name. I was wearing short shorts.<br /><br /><em>Annie Hall, </em>I said. <em>Like in the Woody Allen movie. </em>My name's not Annie Hall. I didn't even see that movie until I was twenty three. I don't know what the hell I was thinking.<br /><br /><em>Oh. </em>He didn't say much else and, before long, loped off toward the kickball fields.<br /><br /><em>Shit, </em>I said. I was into swearing then. Even more than I am now. <em>Who the fuck'd want to date a guy who's never fucking heard of Woody Allen? </em>My sister shrugged her small shoulders before sighing and tossing me the basketball.Lelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11712925098849491009noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1067157979832311122.post-57802287586788745602008-01-30T14:03:00.000-06:002008-01-30T14:23:36.485-06:00It's a Religious Apologetic, Charlie Brown<span><p>I love Charlie Brown holiday specials. Maybe more than I love you, so don't make me choose. I like the Halloween one especially because its message is so unclear. Linus spends all his time and effort on an unrewarded act of faith. He misses all the Halloween fun and receives much mocking. When the Great Pumpkin fails to show, he is unfased and plans to wait again next year, in an even more sincere pumpkin patch. Is his faith beautiful or absurd? </p> <p>For a class in college, I wrote an Intro to Philosophy cirriculum based on feminist pedagogy. For unknown reasons it was not immediately embraced by faculty. Hmm. The course I created used most of the texts original to the class, including Sire's so-so <em>Universe Next Door, </em>as well as a number of outside readings and films<em>. </em>For Sire's treatment of Christian Existentialism, my imaginary students were forced to watch me weep copiously during <em>It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown </em>and then discuss. The show, not my tendency to cry over certain cartoon characters. </p> <p>A modernist argument for faith I've never quite bought is Pascal's Wager, the argument that what can be lost if one chooses faith is insignificant compared to what can be won if one's faith proves well-founded. In Linus'example, his loss of trick or treating--or as the Peanuts childrens insist on saying "tricks or treats"--and a Halloween party ought to prove insignificant if the Great Pumpkin arrives and brings toys and candy to the sincere boy waiting in the sincere pumpkin patch. Pascal's system, at least from what I remember from college and that episode of <em>Dougie Houser, MD, </em>seems to suggest that nothing much is lost or that what was lost is insignificant. Initially this proposition seems to suggest that the faithful ought to wager as little as possible in order to, say, hedge their bets. I'd like to give up as little of myself and my habits as possible and still gain the Kingdom. This hesitancy seems somewhat intellectually and spiritually disengenuous and all too human. I like to hope for something better, for some great, glittering faith that transforms me into a better human being with higher standards, a friendlier disposition, and clearer skin. </p> <p>Perhaps a more stoic approach was Pascal's intent. Physical pleasures are fleeting. Riches can be stolen or lost in a bad turn of the stock market. So what if you give up your life for your faith? You had to die sometime anyway. In the example of the Great Pumpkin, Linus gives up only a little of his pride--probably not the most philosophically appropriate virtue anyway--and the opportunity for candy and social interaction with mean-spirited children with outsized heads for the chance of meeting with the Great Pumpkin. He might not've gotten candy anyway: Charlie Brown got a bag of rocks. His losses were of fleeting, insignificant things, weren't they? That line of reasoning takes us to a rather bleak spot I think is more in line with Pascal's argument as a whole. </p> <p>But the Great Pumpkin never shows up. Nobody but Linus thinks he even exists. I think it's herein we encounter a uniquely postmodern set of difficulties with Pascal. Charlie Brown believes in Santa Claus as fervently as Linus does the Great Pumpkin and claims they're suffering from "denominational differences," but their disagreement is based much more on a question of ecumenicism. Are they both right? Is one of them wrong and going to get no presents at all? In the economy of their respective faiths, Linus emerges the clear loser. Charlie Brown needs only embrace the culturally approved and rather nebulously described choice of nice over naughty. If the Great Pumpkin and Santa Claus offer roughly equivalent rewards to their faithful, perhaps it's wiser to make the wager of faith that causes us to give up the least. Without particular garauntee of being right or wrong, it makes great sense to select the religious option that allows us minimal inconvenience and discomfort, in case, this world is all there is--or in case there is no mystical giver of holiday gifts.</p> <p>Let's add an additional dimension: the Easter Bunny. Imagine for a moment that Peppermint Patty and Marci reject both the Great Pumpkin and Santa Claus in favor of the Easter Bunny. My initial response would be one of cost benefit analysis: what does the Easter Bunny bring me? Hardboiled eggs, which I hate, various candies, and, once, pink and white plastic pearls. I love Easter candy more than all other holiday candy. Cadbury cream eggs. But no one gets a bicycle or tap shoes or a, dare I say, a pony for Easter. If we assign the world's religious and spiritual systems analogous holiday gift givers, can we pick the "best bet?" for ourselves and thereby arrive at an authentic, appropriate faith? For that matter, can I privelege my love of that strange, egg-colored filling inside chocolate eggs above rollerskates and eggnog and ignore the hardboiled eggs or throw them away or give them to my sister who for reasons clear only to her and God eats tons of them and so find a religious system that works? Shall I stick with Santa because the Christmases of my childhood were mostly ok and because I don't feel much like addressing the issue? Can I work it somehow to get gifts all year long, or shall I hold out for my birthday?</p> <p>The problems Christianity encounters in the face of postmodernism are instant and obvious. Christians are right: Christ is God incarnate. Humans are irrevocably broken save for the messy and confusing work of that God-Man on the cross and in the tomb. You're wrong if you think otherwise. You might have pleasing manners and a history of kind deeds. You might be smarter or taller than I am. But you're wrong. Postmodernism, of course, de-emphasizes authority both textual and otherwise, emphasizes personal experience, and claims the intellectual necessity of relativism.</p> <p>There are a number of responses to this encounter. An obvious one is a particular breed of Caucasian, middle class niceness in which my denomination specializes: smooth over the problem with a lot of polite assurances about culture, respect for others, and the grace of God. That particular portrayal of grace always makes God sound to me a little like some heavenly playground monitor assuring that everybody gets a chance on the slide. This issue gets a lot thornier when we apply it to questions of missions and, broadly, that most human of questions "who's in and who's out as far as heaven is concerned?" What about people who grow up in outer Mongolia with no access to the Gospel? What about dead babies who don't live long enough to get invited to Sunday School? What about Ghandi? Good questions. Good questions I don't have the time or wisdom to take on just now. The question I'm dealing with now is personal: how does my faith meet postmodernism? </p> <p>Despite various conflicts, I mostly place my faith squarely within orthodox Christianity, largely because of my affirmation of the role of scripture and of the necessity of Christ's death and resurrection as the only method to restore depraved humanity to relationship with God. But why should I believe any of that stuff?</p> <p>Certainly I've read a fair amount of Aquinas and even more Augustine. I can make a good, old fashioned intellectual argument for God and, to a lesser degree, for Christ. I once read the back cover of Lee Strobel's <em>The Case for Christ. </em>I even took an entire course in Christian apologetics, a subject, it turns out, that bores me terribly. I believe I have personal experiences that affirm my belief system. I believe the testimony of others and assign a fair measure of importance to historical Christianity and the saints that have come before me. I took some classes dealing with those subjects as well.</p> <p>But none of that matters, really. As previously discussed, postmodernism discards much of the intellectual legacy of previous generations based on some very viable complaints of bias as well as a simple desire to be more inclusive and less absolutist in viewpoint. Duns Scotis was many things including dull, friends, but none of them were relativistic. While these writings ought to be considered valid, there's no particular reason to consider them more valid than the writings of Najib Mahfuz or Shirley McClain. The experiential argument is an additional wrinkle: while I believe my own religious experience to be factual, I cannot deny that other people have had contradictory--and, in some cases, much more dramatic--experiences. Within that context, by what criteria can we distinguish between the voice of the Holy Spirit and a little pink light in the upper right hand corner of Phillip K. Dick's kitchen. Or should we?</p> <p>Linus waits and waits for a Great Pumpkin that never comes. I think there's something there that resonates with Christian experience. Certainly God has answered my prayers, and sometimes those answers have come in beautiful and unexpected ways. The presence of God has sometimes filled me with an assurance that I am beloved and somehow held trembling but secure, like a pet mouse in a wide, warm palm. <br /></p><p>But sometimes faith is waiting for something that never seems to come, for something that never happens. I pray for healing and the people I love stay sick. I pray for faith, for myself and for others, and we all continue on, racked with doubt. I pray for delivery and continue to struggle. And sometimes all the business of Christianity seems chiefly designed to keep my Friday nights as dull as possible. Linus waits in a pumpkin patch all night long to no avail. At the end of their lives, John the Baptist and Therese of Liseux found themselves quite unable to experience the nearness of God after a lifetime of fellowship. Do their experiences or ours discount the reality of our belief system?</p> <p>Someone once wrote that the opposite of faith is not doubt but rather certainty. I believe that quote is most valuable when taken within the broader context of the author's statement: that having perfect certainty, a closed worldview in which you claim to understand the ways and means of God is something not at all like faith. But faith, the mad act of believing in a God of grace and of peace and, most importantly, of love is certainity. The certainity of things hoped for, of things not seen. </p> <p>The experiential proof of faith is a difficult proposition given the very definition of faith offered by Scripture and given the experiences with doubt and disappointment in the lives of otherwise "faithful" Christians.</p> <p>Perhaps we have arrived at a faithless point now, a point without any reason to believe in the Jesus or God or the Great Pumpkin at all. Perhaps all belief is an absurd proposition, or an intellectually untenable one. Of course, there's the simple fact that my beliefs are no less absurd than yours. I may as well stick with the Jesus thing one way or the other. It makes me happy enough, I guess. I mean, I'd like a religion with a little less history of oppression, more free tampons in the ladies, and occassions to eat cake. But this one is good enough.</p> <p>I can never get away from absurdity in my personal life or in my philosophical life. Sometimes I think all this Waiting for Godot bullshit is one of the results of the Fall, that no matter how carefully we work out the details, the bits of human existence always itch us like a bunching, badly-made blazer from our twitching shoulders. Perhaps our knowledge, experience, and logic only carry us so far. Perhaps everything must fall to pieces.</p> <p>I believe anyway. Not because all my questions were answered in my apologetics class or because Aquinas solved all my quandries. Not because I can feel God's constant and, I might add, charming presence each morning when my alarm goes off. Not because I understand the Bible perfectly or teach Sunday school or was baptized as an infant. Not because I'm smarter or dumber than you are. Certainly not because I really like all the moral restraint and waking up early on Sundays for church. When I close my eyes and ask what's real and what's sure in my world, Jesus and all of that stuff is the answer I get, in a voice as small and sharp as that of a young boy, waiting alone in the dark for something he cannot see.</p> </span>Lelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11712925098849491009noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1067157979832311122.post-27325767630606291282008-01-14T20:27:00.000-06:002008-01-14T20:38:57.041-06:00One Day LateThis morning I filled in for a friend who teaches a fourth grade Sunday school class. The whole experience is surreal. I don't let the kids call me Ms O---, although maybe they're supposed to. Titles make me feel weird. Kids always change Ms to Miss or, worse, Mrs. Mrs. O-- is, after all, my mother. She's very much a "Mrs. O--," the sort of schoolteacher that populates 1950s sit-coms. Vintage wardrobe notwithstanding, I am not. Plus, I hate the gender politics intertwined with name calling.<br /><br />Once I had an upsetting dream about teaching in which my students were rebelling against my desire not to communicate marital status in my title. I was married in the dream and had cagily combined my last name with that of my spouse--without that dreadful hyphenation--and was using "Ms." If you're not bitter and single, they were shouting, why do you insist on "Ms?" They were all wearing berets and Colonel Sanders string ties. I have the strangest dreams sometimes.<br />No one much has ever asked me to work with kids in church. Or kids at all. I think I've babysat three times in my life. I may say "fuck" too much, but I haven't always said fuck this much, so that's probably not the whole reason. I don't come off as much of a nurturer maybe. But my friend asked me to cover his classes, so I did. I'm happy to do it, commitment to getting my ass out of bed on a Sunday morning notwithstanding. I like kids, believe it or not. Someone once told me that I talk to kids like I talk to other people, and I hope that's true. I remember liking to be addressed like an adult. In fact, I still enjoy it, so if you were considering calling me "honey," I'd really advise against it.<br /><br />That's why I'm suspicious of Sunday School curriculum. I always hated Sunday School as a kid. I loved my teachers, but for the most part I just wasn't up for that flannel board shit or any of the saccharine language people teach small girls wearing lacy white socks.<br /><br />When I was very young I called history, the past "back in horse and buggy days when Jesus and Indians were alive." I realized that these times were not concurrent, but I was trying to express some idea about the past I imagined, a sense of romance and of mystery and of longing for the things that somehow were lost to me before I was born. One Sunday my little sister piously reminded me that Jesus is alive--in our hearts. I wanted to punch in those tiny white teeth of hers. I know that.<br /><br />Every Sunday morning we'd gather and sing while an old woman in a white-collared dress played an upright piano: <em>Father Abraham had many sons. I am one of them, and so are you, so let's just praise the Lord. I may never march in the infantry, ride in the calvary, shoot the artillery. I may never soar o'er the enemy, but I'm in the Lord's Army! I'm inright outright upright downright happy all the time since Jesus Christ came in and cleansed my heart from sin, I'm inrightoutrightuprightdownright happy all the time!</em><br /><br />All the pictures in the picture Bible were of kind faced people dressed for a production of <em>Godspell</em>. The pages were fingered and smudged by the children who'd sat in our small wooden chairs two decades before. Joshua and Moses and Sampson and Elisha and, even those pretty girls Esther and Ruth taught us little lessons about being kind to our brother and sisters and obeying our moms and dads and being a friend to the kids no one else would play with. The Littlelordjesusnocryinghemakes laid in that piled up hay and smiled out at me. His eyes were black as beads in his pink face. My tights were snagged and my hair was tousled. I crayoned "God is Love" in fat blue letters and signed my name below.<br /><br />The other day I was listening to a mix tape or, rather, a mix cd someone made me. The next to the last song was a song called "One Day Late" sung by a woman who calls herself Sam Phillips. She started her career under a different name and on a Christian label, but her music quickly came into conflict with the ethos of her employers. She's something less than cheerful. Or something more, I suppose.<br /><div align="center"><br /><em>Help is coming one day late...</em></div><div align="center"><em>After you've given up and all seems gone,</em></div><div align="center"><em>help is coming one day late...</em></div><div align="center"><em>He'll be late.</em></div><div align="center"><em>You try to understand.</em></div><div align="center"><em>You try to fix your broken hands,</em></div><div align="center"><em>but remember there always has been good,</em></div><div align="center"><em>like stars you don't see in the day sky.</em></div><div align="center"><em>Wait for night.</em></div><div align="center"><em>Help is coming one day late--one day late.</em></div><br />I'm waiting for my bus and squinting under the sun and listening to this, wishing someone had played this for me while I was in womb. Someday, I told myself, I will play this in the nursery for my children. Then I laughed a little bit at myself: this is why you don't have children--you'd depress the hell out of them before they're old enough to walk. Toddlers dressed in black and full of ennui and Paxil.<br /><br />I wonder if the people who write songs and stories and, dare I say, Sunday School curriculum remember being children. I do. I didn't enjoy it. My childhood wasn't particularly Oliver Twisty. My family loved me, and I had toys and friends and books and trees. But I remember being disappointed a thousand times. I remember wanting to strike my small fists against the things I didn't understand, the things that seemed so unfair about life. And there were so many of those things. I tried to be good and I was bad instead. I wanted to be a princess and a ballerina and a writer and an artist, but I had too many tangles in my hair and snot dried on my lip. My knees were scabby and my ankles were scratched. I had my picture taken with Santa one year and had to wear an ugly brown sweatshirt that had once belonged to a boy. In the picture my pink mouth is stuck out and my eyes are wet.<br /><br />There were marvelous things about my childhood: dressing up in old window sheers and the wide green leaves of spring and space between the refrigerator and the wall and the way my dad tossed me in the air and caught me under my armpits.<br /><br />But I was never in-right, out-right, up-right, down-right happy all the time. Jesus didn't seem like he lived in my heart. He was on my shoulder, as persistant and sharp as an elbow, reminding me not to scratch bad words in the dirt under the swingset or plot to fill my sister's perfume bottles with wild onions or make my mother ask me nineteen times to come inside and unload the dishwasher.<br /><br />I wish someone had played me a song then about help being far away, about feeling alone, about things only getting worse. I think I would've believed them.<br /><br />In the mornings before Sunday School, the fourth graders and gather with the rest of the upper elementary classes to sing. There's no old woman and no upright piano. A middle-aged guy in a bolo tie plays the recorder, actually, and lets the kids pass around a tambourine. The kids can call out choices from a little bound book of songs, and they always want to sing spirituals or old hymns. At first I was surprised: this is a Bible church, the sort of place where people sing "Lord I Lift Your Name on High" or that dreadful song about walking around in a garden with Jesus. But I quickly realized it all makes perfect sense. <em>Prone to wander, God I feel it, prone to leave the Lord I love.</em> They sing in high voices. Someone of them don't yet realize they're far off key. In two or three years they'll duck their heads and mumble the words. Maybe these are the last months they'll sing so clearly or so unashamedly. There is a fountain filled with blood. The boys have their shirts hanging untucked in the back. The girls seem be glittering, as if the latest playground fashion is club kid circa 1995. What can take away my sin? They look serious, or at least the ones not kicking one another under the table do. The sins of children seem small, somehow, like we wish our own were.<br /><br />Back in the classroom we sit at plastic tables and read about Joshua and Moses in order to learn about paying attention in Sunday School. I sit there and wonder what dumbass thought this was the point of the story. People are dying here, and I'm supposed to pass out the stickers next. They have cartoon of little altars on them. Moses is up on a hill, watching. Joshua is in a valley fighting the Amalekites with his bloodied fists and his ragged breaths. Moses is holding up his arms to the sky. His arms get tired. The kids in the class want to try it out, so I tell them to go ahead. Their arms get tired too.<br /><br />I want to warn them that that's the least of their problems. I want to tell them about sin and doubt and failure and about having weird dreams about the ramifications of romantic love for their post-feminist worldviews. I want to warn them that someday they'll end up fighting somewhere in some red fury even though they thought all along they were too kind and too peaceful for that. I want to warn them that someday they'll hold up their arms to a sky that seems as empty as a bell and their arms will get tired and their feet will get tired and their hearts will get tired. But I think they already know all this. I think they've lived enough on the playgrounds and in the hallways and around the dinner tables of their worlds to have some idea.<br />I want to tell them help is coming. One day late. It's almost time to go, though, so I tell them it's time from prayer. I tell them they have to settle the heck down--I'm not thinking the word heck, but it's what I say--and close their eyes and their mouths and fold their sweaty little boy hands together to think about God. I pray that God will make us a little bit better people this week and that God will bless the people we love and the people we don't love. It's time to go, so I fold up the book and we go.<br /><br /><em>fall 2006</em>Lelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11712925098849491009noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1067157979832311122.post-28765249236608290712008-01-13T21:33:00.000-06:002008-01-13T23:08:53.461-06:00In the American West<div align="center">an essay for Ann</div><div align="center"><a href="http://girlfromthenorthcountry.wordpress.com/">http://girlfromthenorthcountry.wordpress.com/</a></div><br />That morning we woke early–although later than we meant to–and checked out of the motel. It was a terrible motel, really: our room's only decoration was a paper plate thumb-tacked above the bed. The paranoid man from next door stared out his window at me with his wide, bloodshot eyes while I sat in the car waiting for Richie to take a picture of the El Rancho Motel sign. The man had taped a paper American flag to his window and its corners were beginning to curl and yellow. I sat in the car with the sun too warm on my legs and wondered about the man's patriotism. If I was a middle-aged black man and addicted to drugs or sick with some disease or both and lived in some motel forty years past its prime, I’m not sure I would clip and tape up flags. But I don’t tape up flags now.<br /><br />We left Barstow and drove through more desert until, suddenly, we were in the city. Los Angeles is insulated by fat, yellow layers of suburbs. We drove past town after town a wide gray interstate choked with cars. Our trip down Rt. 66 seemed over already somehow, over because we were a thousand years removed from the narrow red ribbon of Oklahoma and the squint-eyed desert of Arizona and all the other places where we could somehow see the past flash past our open windows. Instead we were in some repeating Scooby Doo chase scene of big box stores and restaurant chains. And there were palm trees. Palm trees are never real to me. I can hardly understand that people plant palm trees in their yards like I’ve planted maple trees to grow and become part of the land familiar. Palm trees belong in someone’s movie fantasy scene. Here in California they grow in fat clumps alongside shopping centers like those "what’s wrong with this picture" game in Highlights magazines.<br /><br />We planned to eat at our first chain restaurant of the trip, to ease back into modernity with a stop at the world’s first McDonalds. Richie was maybe dreaming of a Big Mac, but mostly I just wanted one of those huge, too-sweet diet Cokes I buy on shame-filled and frequent morning McDonalds runs. We had to drive around a while only to discover it was only a museum. Dusty bits of McDonalds paraphernalia–first burger flipper, first Happy Meal box, the toys we both remembered playing with as children–were cluttered together behind glass. The museum is also the national headquarters of Pollo Loco, a Mexican-American fried chicken chain. Latina girls in baby blue poplin shirts typed fast and chattered into their headsets on one side of the building while we wandered down the aisles of the museum on the other. The bathroom was horrible: loose toilet seats and long streamers of finger-dampened papertowels hanging from the roll. There was a Mexican brand of dish soap sitting under the empty hand-soap dispenser. As we left the building, a homeless man was talking to the girl at the reception desk. I think he wanted something to eat, something from McDonalds. A girl was eating Cup O’Soup at her desk.<br /><br />In the parking lot we met the young Italian couple from earlier in the trip. We met them in Oklahoma and several times after. We lost one another in Texas. They’d taken a side trip to Las Vegas while we were lingering across Arizona. But we found them, getting out of their beige Japanese car and squinting into the sun. We exchanged addresses while catching up on one another’s travels. Richie and I didn’t have addresses, not proper ones, so we wrote his older brother’s. The girl was beautiful in the way that European girls always seem to be, with careless hair and immaculately tousled clothes. Her English was shy.<br /><br />We drove on to San Bernadino where we stopped for Mexican food at a little spot that bore the familiar red and blue sign marking Rt. 66 landmarks. The place had been there since the fifties or so and remains a family business. Our booth was covered with cracking brown Naugahyde. A busboy massaged the shoulders of an elderly woman as she took orders from a nearby table. I think she called him grandson, in Spanish. The employees shouted back and forth to one another in loud staccato voices, like the exchange of playful slaps. Our pony-tailed waiter talked to us about motorcycles and Rt. 66 and the restaurant’s planned remodel. We ate and ate. And, then, I ate some more. I decided I could never eat Dallas’ mediocre Tex-Mex again in good conscience after so much amazing Mexican food. I sweated and coughed and swore and wiped my eyes over the salsa.<br /><br />We sweated through more suburbs, including San Dimas. In San Dimas we stopped to stare at the city limits sign and shout "We! Are! Wyld Stallyns!" and stage conversations about So-crates like in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. Our list of attractions promised us ice cream, but we never found any. We did find, however, that California seems to invite one pop culture reference after another.<br /><br />Los Angeles was a peculiar sense of deja-vu. Maybe I’m the only person in the world who’s never wanted to go to California, but I’ve never liked the idea of hard plastic breasts and 75 degree winters and Lego pad lawns maintained by quick men in neon tee shirts. I’ve seen it all before, haven’t I? On tv and movies and things? Haven’t we all been to our imagined California a dozen times over?<br /><br />We passed through Beverly Hills and Bel-Aire, and they were smaller and less fabulous than I expected from tv. Sometimes when I’m far away from someone I love I imagine them, I see them in my mind. In real life, they always prove to be less attractive than I imagined them, and their heads seem frightenly small when we meet again because for so long I’ve seen only their faces. All the famous places were like that. The bars and rock clubs I’d seen in magazines, everything.<br /><br />There were beautiful old women in shoes with rundown heels waiting at bus stops, and boys with thin chests chasing one another down streets. They tilted their heads to look at the bright sky that shows between the buildings.<br /><br />We got stuck in rush hour traffic and had to make a thousand phone calls to the friends we were meeting at Santa Monica Pier. In the meantime, I called my parents and my sisters and everyone I knew to say I was in LA and looking at the Beverly Hilton or the Hollywood sign or someone potentially famous idling their Mercedes in at the light next to me.<br /><br />We finally made it to the road’s end in Santa Monica. We shouted and hugged each other hard. We made it, we screamed, we made it. We drove Rt. 66 from Chicago to LA. We did it. I don’t know what I was expecting to feel, but I didn’t feel it, whatever it was. I just wanted a cold drink on this hot, hot day and to go to the bathroom. We parked the car several blocks away.<br />I went to the worst toilet in the Western Hemisphere: no doors on stalls, no toilet paper, no soap, and a long line of women and girls tapping their sandaled feet on a floor that was wet with piss and sea water. Outside the air was wet with the salt and sweat and fishguts smell of the beach, and I was happy to breath it in.<br /><br />We took pictures of the brass plaque marking the end of Rt. 66. It was small and forgotten. A friendly woman took our picture and welcomed us to LA. She actually said "Welcome to LA," as if it were really her town. She didn’t seem to appreciate what we had accomplished, as if we’d simply driven from Chicago because we were too poor or cheap or young to fly. Richie kept trying to explain to her in his high, excited voice what an amazing thing we’d done, what amazing things we’d seen.<br /><br />That night we ate with friends in a fake ‘60s diner after wandering too long in the sun and through the sanitary carnival lights of the pier.<br /><br />All of that was months ago. I’m in Dallas and Richie’s in Boston. I don’t know what I was looking for as we drove Rt. 66, some glimpse of America maybe. We had a burned cd we named "Rt. 66 Jukebox," and I’d insisted we include Simon and Garfunkle singing about going to look for America while counting cars on a turnpike. I was looking that America that’s more real that sentimental artwork or flag-waving partisan politics or bad foreign policy or re-runs of all my favorite sitcoms, the America I could use to suss out my identity, to give shape to my soul. I hoped I’d find clarity for a million things and maybe a sense of closure with Richie. Or, let’s be honest, I hoped we’d get back together and decide to love each other until we were too old to remember one another’s names, and our vacations and arguments and pets and children were as faint in our minds as the Golden Books we were read as children. None of these things happened, of course.<br /><br />Today I was reading a collection of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s miscellaneous writings and found this quote about a couple of travelers:<br /><br /><em>They rode through those five years in an open car with the sun on their foreheads and their hair flying. They waved to people they knew, but seldom stopped to ask for directions or check on fuel, for every morning there was a gorgeous new horizon and it was blissfully certain that they find each other at twilight. They missed collisions by inches, wavered on the edge of precipices, and skidded across tracks to the sound of the warning bell. Their friends tired of waiting for the smash and grew to accept them as sempiternal, forever new as Michael’s last idea or the gloss on Amanda’s hair. One could almost name the day when the car began to sputter and slow up: the moment that found them sitting in a Sea Food place on the water-front in Washington; Michael was opening his letters, his long legs thrust way under the table to make a footstool for Amanda’s little slippers. It was only May but they were already brown and glowing. Their clothes were few and sort of pink in general effect like the winter cruise advertisements.</em><br /><em><br /></em>I have no particular sense of myself in space, of the dimensions my body occupies. Most days I fancy myself the tallest person in the room, but other times I shut up like a telescope. Sometimes, with someone’s arm around my stooping shoulders, I’m sure I’m as small as I was at five years old. The picture I carry now of Rt. 66's ending and the endings that traveled with us is of me and Richie against the bright wash of sea and sky. He’s smaller even than he is, and I am smaller still. Two nearly indistinguishable blots of brown skin and hair and dusty clothes, one a little bigger than the other, lost in all that blue.<br /><br /><em>Fall 2005</em>Lelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11712925098849491009noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1067157979832311122.post-53449305511268766642007-12-05T14:08:00.000-06:002007-12-05T14:26:16.629-06:00I Saw the Light: a story about country musicMy private hell involves an interminable line to the ladies' room and Kenny Chesney, and the other day I was going to write a whole messy screed on the subject. I was going to talk about Jimmie Rodgers and Garth Brooks and Keith Urban and Conway Twitty and every damn thing. I was going to conclude that the country and western singers of the fifties and sixties lived close to the bone and sang songs about lovin their mamas and their dead babies and the girls they left behind and that these songs represented something viable and authentic about the rural experience during that era. I was going include statistics about mortality and poverty across the south. I was going to talk about Hank Williams dead in the back seat of a big blue Cadillac parked out behind a gas station and about sanitary tales of raising hell and amazing grace sizzling from speakers in an air-conditioned Ford Explorers. It was a neat juxtaposition, the sort of essay that forms itself easily and fully in my mind, so easily that it never quite makes it to paper but just sits around in the back of my mind like a gift from a boy you never liked that well but who always liked you.<br /><br />There's been a song in my head today, a song I thought perfectly summed up some shady, pastoral corner of my soul. So I found an interview with the band on Pitchfork. The song, it turns out, was meant sarcastically, ironically. A professor I had always mentioned that the word sarcasm means, literally and in it's purest, etymological form "to tear the flesh." I'd carried the song along with me today as I went about my business, something sweeter than myself and something more hopeful. It's sarcastic, isn't it, the interviewer asked. But sincerely meant as well? The question sort of hung there a bit and disappeared in the cloud of vagueries that generally mark interviews. I sat here in front of my borrowed computer and realized that my own sweet little moment was more sarcastic than I realized, that flesh was torn, so to speak.<br /><br />The thing about me is that I effing hate hippies. One of my favorite musical moments is Kurt Cobain's come on people now/smile on your brothers/everybody get together/try to love one another/right now at the beginnings of Territorial Pissings. It's this bleak, wonderful howl of disappointment at the failure of all that idealism. Smiling on your brother seems this futile ridiculous idea, the playground nonsense of a generation who grew up to be investment bankers and chemical engineers.<br /><br />Once I got into a fairly stupid argument about postmodernism with a Boomer who clearly had no idea what postmodernism was. It has nothing particular to do with zoos, for the record. I am an enthusiastic postmodernist: I once accused a perfect stranger of being a crypto-oligarch because he discounted wikipedia. That's beside the point, I suppose. Unless the point was don't argue with me unless you'd like to be called a crypto-somethingorother. It's an insult I use all the time with necessary variants. I think it sounds dirty.The simplest definition of postmodernism, the one given by an Intro to Philosophy class in which I was once and woefully involved, is an incredulity to metanarratives. In other words, a simple refusal to believe the big story, the explanations for the stuff of life we can all believe in. Postmodernism is about decentralization, distrust, and decay. Postmodernism is also cheerfully and fatalistically concerned with pop culture. As am I, I suppose.<br /><br />In 1996, PJ Harvey recorded a splendid cover of an old Peggy Lee song: is that all there is?/if that's all there is, my friends/then let's keep dancing. Or, at the very least, let's keep listening to pop music and buying dvds of all our favorite tv shows from childhood.But pop music is disappointing, isn't it? I've long joked that Britney Spears and I have roughly the same musical talent--practically none--but she has better abs. Or did until she had all those babies and beers. So maybe it's all about promotion: business today consists of controlling crowds. Music is as slick and static as Twinkee wrappers, often the work of engineers and producers more than musicians. Plus, my sister maintains--although not in these precise these terms--that Kenny Chesney's pecs are sho nuff store bought.<br /><br />Everytime I fight with someone I love, I'm pretty sure all the words we use we've heard on past seasons of the Real World. Or in Reality Bites. Sometimes I wonder what life was like before we had movies and magazines and popular teen dramas and pop music to tell us how to feel and how to say it and what to wear while we do all of it. In college a handful of friends and I designated our Seinfeld identities over lunch and ever after--or was it long before?--we could relate the day-to-day to That Episode Where. At least we weren't the cast of Friends. Cold comfort, perhaps.<br /><br />Oh there's emo instead of punk and John Mayer instead of Sleepy John and the godawful swill about next to god of course america i love you instead of some bare if sentimental twang about subsistence living. And oh there's my friend with a job in finance who dreams up life as a hobo and my clean-handed friend who dreams of chucking his degrees in favor of farming. And oh there's me with a a coupla chi-chi beers in me singing let the thunder roll and the lightnin flash I'm doing alright for country trash. And oh maybe the Monkees will go down with the Beatles, as shaggy haired lotharios and the handiwork of careful technicians. And oh in the end it's maybe all the same.<br /><br />Is it the logical end that all the cleanest and brightest bits of ourselves will be little murky, the photocopies of photocopies? Can happiness exist untinged by ironies and a celluloid-born sense of distance? If I ask you whether you were sincere, will you say too many words without enough meaning?<br /><br />Like the essay I never wrote, this one is stalling. It's stalling because ultimately I don't believe these things. Certainly I believe myself to be a snarky little pessimist in rundown shoes and stupidly oversized sunglasses. I believe that what's on the radio is mostly shit and that I should spend time loftier pursuits than honing indie cred. And I believe that the idealism of our parents' America is ultimately absurd. I believe that Jack Nicholson snarling this ain't reality tv may as well be David Hasselhoff dancing on the Berlin Wall. But none of those things that I believe are the thing I believe.<br /><br /><em>For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I shall know just as I also am known. And now these things abide... </em><br /><br />I believe is separation and in discord, in the tearing of skin and the wrenching of bone and in the silly slow progression of days measured in coffee spoons and the dirty socks that somehow appear uninvited in my hamper and the Netflix envelopes that are so effing slow to come and console my sleepless nights. Call me a crypto-platonist, if you like. It sounds dirty, doesn't it. I told you. But the thing I believe, the thing that is most real is that we would not know the broken without the image of the whole, the copy without the idea of the original. The thing that I believe Godthefather and Thelittlelordjesusnocryinghemakes. The thing I believe in is the faith of people with terrible political convictions and with long black socks over their thick white shanks and of brown-robed students of antiquities with poor social skills and of wild-eyed adventurers picking their wives out of beer barrels. The thing I believe in is nails splintering bones and the damps of early mornings and graveyards. The thing I believe in is slick red birth and feeling of grass on my barefeet when I was very young and the way I can never think up words to describe what the sky looks like on a clear night.<br /><br />And that's what I've got. A collection of records and skinny jeans, a vocabulary of movie quotes and some modernist poets I steal from shamelessly, and a lot of haircare products. I've got enough undergraduate hours of philosohpy and church history--including a real stemwinder of an apologetics class--I could make a reasoned argument for faith. I've got a thousand unsolicted--and, all things being equal--un-read opinions about the state of the arts and politics and the human condition and a semi-surly attitude about most things. Straw.<br /><br />So in the end, I come back to a question of country music, I suppose, for that is the point where I began.<br /><div align="center"><em>I wandered so aimless a life filled with sin</em></div><div align="center"><em>I wouldn't let my dear Savior in</em></div><div align="center"><em>the Jesus came like a stranger in the night</em></div><div align="center"><em>O Praise the Lord I saw the Light.</em> </div><div align="center"></div><div align="left">Hank Williams is not the person to be getting your theology from, nor your tips for daily living. But somehow, I think it pretty much says what needs to be said here.</div><div align="left"></div><div align="left"><em>Summer 2007</em></div>Lelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11712925098849491009noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1067157979832311122.post-70674516974085448552007-12-05T14:02:00.000-06:002007-12-05T14:05:38.543-06:00In Which I Learn a Valuable Lesson about Cell Phone Time vs. Non-Cell Phone TimeToday I set my phone to silent during my class, but at some point I looked over at my bag, where my phone just happened to perch, and I noticed I had a new text. Temptation won the day, and I sneaked my phone from my bag to my lap to see who had said what to me. It was a picture, actually. A picture of a penis. I slammed my phone shut and tossed it back into my bag super quick. I spent the rest of the class wondering if anyone else had seen it and now thought I was a terrible, terrible pervert. And, for that matter, wondering who had sent me such a picture in the middle of the afternoon. Do I have a stalker? After class, I retrieved my phone and discovered that someone had sent me a picture of a newborn baby. Pixels are important, people. But later I'm going to feel weird about talking about how cute that baby is.<br /><br /><em>Fall 2007</em>Lelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11712925098849491009noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1067157979832311122.post-12182501315103388552007-12-05T13:45:00.000-06:002007-12-05T14:00:27.462-06:00Deep Ellum BluesSomewhere in the Arizona desert we decided to start a band. Last summer a friend and I drove Route 66, America’s first major highway, from its starting point in Chicago to Los Angeles and the sea. Richie and I had a lot of time to kill between visits to Al Capone’s favorite diner and the World’s Largest Covered Wagon, so we constructed elaborate fantasies. You might call it playing pretend. Richie had just returned from World War II, and I left my spinsterish classics department to go with him to California to drink red wine at the ocean’s edge. We were Okies. The fistfull of change that dragged my dirty jeans lower and lower on my hips each day was maybe enough for some sandwiches tied up in waxed paper. I counted it jealously before dumping it into the cupholder. We were Bonnie and Clyde, opening our slick mouths to laugh at Texas lawmen in gray western towns.<br /><br />We were thinking about being outlaws, or I was anyway, and we were thinking about music. When we weren’t talking, we played the stereo loud to fill up on sound. Rt. 66 is mostly a network of frontage roads and state highways now that it’s been replaced by slick ropes of interstates. We went hours sometimes without seeing other cars, so we played music for the empty roads and emptier skies.<br /><br /><em>We met waiting on the train. You asked me for a cigarette, which I had because in this story I smoke.</em> He turned down the music.<br /><br /><em>I was on the lam.</em><br /><br /><em>No,</em> I told him, <em>we’re musicians this time. We’d both finished shows. I’m in a girl band, the drummer. We play the music sisters would play who lived their whole lives alone in a creaky old farmhouse.</em> A Rose for Emily,<em> the musical</em>.<br /><br />He told me what music his band would play, but I’ve forgotten. Probably something that sounded like McClusky.<br /><br />He was on the lam, he insisted. He asked me to come with him there at that train station because, even though we’d just met, he knew we’d get along. I said yes because in this story I said yes to things and believed in love at first sight.<br /><br />In the Arizona desert, we sat in seats dampened with sweat and planned the band we’d start when we began our lives over again in Los Angeles.<br /><br /><em>Wait, why are you on the lam?</em><br /><br /><em>I, uh, cut down those damn trees inside Trees.</em><br /><p><em>As well you should've.</em></p><p>Trees, one of Deep Ellum’s oldest rock clubs recently closed. Deep Ellum is Dallas’ oldest entertainment district and home to a motley assortment of clubs, bars, and restaurants. Trees has a pretty good history for a rock club. A lot of your favorite bands from the ‘90s played there, probably before they were your favorite bands. Right after "Smells Like Teen Spirit" broke, a Nirvana show famously erupted in chaos. Kurt Cobain got his ass kicked. Mudhoney, the Toadies, and Radiohead all played Trees, albeit with less attendant drama.<br /><br />But now no one plays there. The doors are locked. Someone's taped up a couple of signs, and already the corners are crinkly with this damn humidity. Richie didn't chop down the trees, those big columns that--as far as I could tell--were once growing in a forest somewhere before they were brought in to support the roof, block the stage from certain angles, and give the club its name. Richie didn't kill Trees. </p><p>Or at least he didn't kill Trees any more than I did or any of Dallas' other rock fans who could be going to Deep Ellum but mostly choose to go to another part of town. Club Dada, another of the old guard, closed last month. Deep Ellum, some people fear, is not only long past its glory days of the 1980s and 90s but is fading out all together. Robert Wilonsky, a music columnist for the Dallas Observer, claims that at the very least that great rock shows will be replaced by 18 and up dance clubs, growing crime rates, and what he elegantly designates butt rock. We mustn't let that happen. Sure, there are plenty of great music venues in the city, and if Deep Ellum no longer exisited as a place to see bands, we'd still have plenty of options. But something precious would be lost. </p><p>In the 1920s Deep Ellum was the sweaty navel of the country blues universe. Blind Lemon Jefferson and Sonny Boy Williams played on street corners for the clang of nickles in their tin cups. Inside juke joints black folk and white looked on slack jawed as musicians beat their guitars like they beat their wives. The streets were slick with horseshit and mud and, on Saturday nights, blood. Seems like somebody got stabbed down there 'most every weekend. Women slipped into "pharmacies" for whiskey and cocaine while their men shot craps in the alleys. </p><p>In 1938, bluesman Robert Johnson recorded a long walk away from what used to be Trees. The building's still there. It's boarded up and crusted over with grafiti and notices from the city. Its doorways stink of piss and vomit. Dallas, one of Johnson's girlfriends recalled in a documentary, was what killed him. In Texas the kid from the Delta traveled among his people as a star ran headlong into segregation. Men had opened their flasks and wallets to him; women their thighs. In Dallas, they locked the front doors of buildings and sent him in the back way. People said he learned the guitar in exchange for his soul. </p><p>I don't know what the next several decades were like in Deep Ellum. There were warehouses, I know. Under the glossy facades of clubs and restaurants, there are signs of colorless urban past, a time when America was consumed with throwing up unlovely buildings to house and display their post-war wealth. There were drunks and junkies in the doorways when the artists and musicians came back in the eighties. But bands played on Fridays, and galleries filled up rooms where machines once clanged with bright light and strange sculpture. One developer talked about making Commerce and Elm into Bourbon Street. </p><p>Many people I know are afraid to go to Deep Ellum now. There is a good chance you'll run into panhandlers. Once a wizened man sang me some Motown song about a beautiful girl in a voice I couldn't believe, so I gave him a dollar even though the signs everywhere say not to. Another time a man blocked my way on the sidewalk and demanded money more than asked when I was walking with a friend. I was a little frightened then, but we stepped into the street and continued around him without incident. About half the stories I know about car break-ins take place in Deep Ellum. And a couple of bloody headlines have daubed the area's reputation. A couple of kids started shooting at each other outside a dance club. Two girls' father was beaten almost to death at an Old 97s concert. Cops glare at you even if you're sober and walking neatly down the sidewalk. Why on earth would anyone go to such a place? </p><p>I go to Deep Ellum because, in a city mostly dedicated to tearing down its history and putting up shiny new condos, it still wears a gypsy jumble of old architecture and new. We go to Deep Ellum to acknowledge that music is more than the shitty screamo and hardcore your hear there most weekends and even more than this week's indie darling. The corner of Elm where blues legends played is the sacred ground I can walk in my beer-damp Chucks after a Gossip show. We go to Deep Ellum because rock music at its best is no about thosands of people, upholstered seats, eight dollar beers, and a laser light spectacle. Rock music is musicians crowded up on a stage, squinting through smoke-blue air as people press close to the stage giddy on beer, yes, but on this strange closeness and music they feel in their bellies. </p><p>This weekend, go to Deep Ellum. Bring a friend. Bring twelve friends if you're worried about safety. Lock your doors, and don't leave shit laying out in your car. But go. Eat at Deep Sushi. Or, better yet, grab dinner at Angry Dog. They have some of the best burgers and hotdogs in town and, best of all, a great vegetarian sandwich. Go to the Curtain Club and the seven other clubs you can get into for one $8 cover on "Deep Fridays." You'll see some butt rock and, probably, some college freshmen who love Dave Matthews more than anyone should. But maybe you'll run into something great, something everyone'll be talking about in three years. It might be the beginnings of a story to tell your grandchildren. </p><p>Or spend fifteen bucks at the Gypsy Tearoom to see a national act. Three drinks in, you might notice the picture of Blind Lemon tacked up on the curtain is begining to smile benevolently right at you. Somehow the smells of smoke and beer and sweat are strongest here, and when you leave they'll stay in your hair and on your clothes like the ghosts of a thousand shows. </p><p>Two step with a drunk middle-aged cowboy at Adairs while twentysomethings pound out the country music your grandparents listened to. And drink some Shiner bock out of little plastic cups until, secretly and sheepishly, you start to love Texas. Close your night at the Velvet Hookah sitting on pillows with goth kids and hipsters and dance club kids and cowboys and those dozen friends you brought to save you from mugging. Drink one of the dozen or so chichi martinis they serve, and try not to leer at the belly dancer. On your way out, proposition your designated driver and hold tight to your purse. </p><p>When you wake up the nexxt morning and your ears and mouth feel packed with cotton, know that you've done your part to keep Dallas from losing what's best about itself in a crush of silicone and skyscrapers. If you don't live in our around Dallas, don't think you're off the hook. Find where local music is being made. Find where the buildings are older than you are. Find a bar or a restaurant that exists only in the town where you live and not in the movie Office Space. And go there. If in ten years, we're all saying there's a Starbucks where something cool used to be or a crack house, it will be our own faults. I'll have to turn Richie and his axe lose loose you then, and you will deserve it. </p><p><em>Spring 2005</em><br /></p>Lelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11712925098849491009noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1067157979832311122.post-870021625335951762007-12-05T13:37:00.000-06:002007-12-05T13:45:18.449-06:00I like you but...: a story about how my clothes are holding back my social lifeDuring iffy weather--that is, weather I'm not sure will make me feel chilly--I like to wear a scarf. It's surprising how keeping a warm neck warms your whole self. If the scarf fails to keep me adequately warm, it still conceals certain, ahem, evidence of chilliness. Scarves are much easier to carry around too. Lugging a coat when you walk as much as I do can be burdensome. All of this is to say, yesterday I was wore a scarf with a long sleeved tee shirt and jeans. I saw my boyfriend's four year old nephew. Or maybe he's five I don't know. Anyway Nephew and I were having a conversation about <em>Toy Story </em>when he paused and stared at me for several seconds.<br /><br />What's up, Nephew?<br /><br />I like you...<br /><br />Hey, Nephew, I like you too.<br /><br />But you're wearing a scarf. It's not winter outside.<br /><br /><em>Fall 2006</em>Lelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11712925098849491009noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1067157979832311122.post-15654620645525621302007-12-05T13:05:00.000-06:002007-12-05T13:13:32.971-06:00First Post: Sixth BlogI have a small blogging, ahem, problem. I do it, which you might consider problem enough. But mostly the problem lays (or is it lies? this is the one grammatical concept that will always elude me) in the number of blogs I have. I have one about my attempts to run marathons. I have one that shows some fiction writing in progress. I have one all about my great pop cultural loves. I have one in which I communicate daily events and personal musings to a mostly closed circle of readers. Also there's that secret one out there somewhere for the carefully disguised divulging of subjects too controversial to put on the internet with my name signed to them. Is that only five? I also have a problem with counting. No, this is the sixth. That's right.<br /><br />This blog, number six, is a depository of all of that. The greatest hits, if you will, of my writing life. The essays I'd like to hang in the hallway of my house, if I had either. So. Welcome to it.Lelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11712925098849491009noreply@blogger.com0