...and what is the deal with schaudenfruede, anyway?

I want to make smores over a campfire right now.
Decades of life lived in the kindling going up before me, and my stomach rumbles.
Two firefighters share a hearty laugh over some waterbottles while another flirts with a paramedic with prominent cheekbones and dark, laughing eyes.
Your house is burning down while you laugh and play in Sea Ranch
and your Grandmother cries and worries about what to tell you
and I stand on a hill and watch the wood pile fall over, a warm bonfire that mostly just makes me hungry.

Reorganized and Slightly Fictionalized Excerpts of a Conversation Had in Barnes and Noble.

"Wait, so you're saying that you take an unusual position on sex."

"No no, what I'm saying is that the way we talk about sex in the church is absolutely nonsensical- taking a "position" on sex, if we are honest about what sex is, is like taking a position on food! There may be a way to deal with food that affirms eating in its fullness and a way that promotes unhealthiness, and the same may be said of the way we deal with sex, but surely we cannot consider separately the concept of pizza from the whole experience of a life dependent on nourishment any more than we can separate the act of intercourse from the whole experience of sexual relationships and consider it independently."

"Ok."

"Why then, is our entire dialogue as a church enslaved to a discussion of parts as removed from a whole? Dealing only with intercourse is like labeling a 3 square mile section of ocean on a map and expecting that distinction to be meaningful as anything other than a label on a map. I am not interested in claiming that sex "does not matter." Instead, I am saying that the way we deal with sex, the way we look to interact sexually in a way that affirms life as a weighty affair, cannot begin and end with our idolatrous focus on a single act as a sort of behavioral test of Christianity. We take the act of intercourse and call that sex, and talk about it, take positions on it, build up systems around it, all while ignoring the fact that sexuality is a part of life that is deeply ingrained in our way of interacting with the world around us. Clearly, I am no longer speaking of sex, and speaking of the range of human life and relationships, which we seem to want to separate into pieces so that we might more easily consider the merits of those pieces independent of context. I consider this crazy talk."

"I think that makes sense. In a way it is highly representative of our desperate need to grasp (I use the word grasp to deliberately bring to mind both understanding and possessing/controlling, because for us, our need to understand is very linked to our need to control) things in general. It reminds me of economics- we make models of things that are too big for us to comprehend, because it is our only way to bring them down to a size we can wrap our heads around. In a way, this is all we can do, so modelmaking isn't necessarily a problem. The problem is that we don't make our models humbly, waiting for them to be torn down, because they are models after all. instead we expect the thing we're making a model of to be limited by and act in accordance with out model, and it's very hard not to blind ourselves to the inadequacies of our models, so dependent we are on them."

"We're talking about God now, aren't we."

"When were we not?"

Format Expansion.

The purpose of this blog as it was created appears to have run its course. Since it clearly no longer serves the purpose for which it was created, I think that an expansion of focus is in order. This blog will henceforth be about whatever I want it to be about, until some kind of new unifying purpose seems to settle in.

Lyrics

Are you breaking bones?
Are you cracking skulls?

Take your tired lungs and win those weary souls!

Can you cut with us?
Can you meet with demand?

This is profit share! Heaven's treasures in hand!

A light, a neon cross, reach out for the lost.

If A Bike Falls In The Forest, Maybe No One Has To Know

In this moment I could fly I think
am flying
but could continue. Take off and soar into the heavens.
In a space of time far less than the beating of a finch's wing I know the secrets of the universe
poured out for me to see all along the gravel, getting closer and closer.
In a moment the gravel will be on me, around me, in me, but not now.
Now I am King of the Universe, ruler of all that I see.
High on a throne of pure adrenaline and terror-turned-euphoria I sit, basking in the glory of me.
Not long now. The gravel approaches like revolutionaries waiting to dethrone their king;
an uprising of the proletariat of gravity and pain.
Shredded skin, like cheese after a half-swipe of the grater.
Bright red fruit-punch fluid/embedded rocks like pizza toppings half buried in said cheese.
The time for these things will come, but it has not yet arrived.

The King makes his last graceful movement.
Curls like a tumbling dancer as he rolls across the ground, textbook.
A 747 landing in Paris, just as it has hundreds of times before. A pro.

Now the peasants revolt, and the pizza imagery finds fruition.

Conversations With The Sea

Last night I spoke with a shark
who grinned a toothy grin and told me about
seas and wonders of the deep.
I asked him if he was planning to eat me
because it seemed a natural concern and he just smiled
and said he gets asked that all the time. It must get annoying,
for everyone you meet to assume you are a killer, but that is the way of things
and perception
I guess, because we all make assumptions, and sometimes those assumptions
and judgements
save us, and sometime those assumptions eat us alive. Like sharks.

And there I go, being totally racist, in the most literal sense of the word, how embarrassing.

Anyways, I asked him if he or a bear would win in a fight, but I woke up before I could get an answer.

Rethinking.

So I haven't been writing every day. Obviously. I'm realizing as Rachel is that I am too wary of letting people in to work that is "unpolished". So here it is- from here on out I make no claims as to quality. Also this will not just be for writing but for music, photography, design- any artistic expressions.

Anyways, today is music:

Paul Over James? from Sean Capener on Vimeo.