dxblog . Finally getting somewhere

This blog is pretty much done for.

2005-06-12T14:13:00.000-11:00

Ease of use, Wordpress, and other important factors are leading me to change blogs yet again. It seems I can't stay a year at one place before moving. And no, don't read into that, because I know you will.

Now I am located at http://rmfo-blogs.com/daniel/ if you're at all interesting in going over and taking a gander. After a while I'm going to be autoforwarding this page (I believe I can do that, yes?) to the new one. But for now, update your links, kids. Update them.

Musings on God and blogs.

2005-06-09T16:57:00.000-11:00

Come on now, let's season this thing with salt, shall we? Let's not all become pedantics, but let's also not all pretend our lives are all that interesting. You can read about me and my bagel, or me and my Bible, but don't take me too seriously: I laugh at myself a lot. You should probably point a few fingers and laugh at me too. Maybe you could ask me probing questions about why I'm writing this right here, right now; I'll probably tell you that I have to write something, so why not this? Then, when you've put the sentences in order and assigned meaning, you can write kind replies. But giggle while you're writing.

I was excessively happy today, in a good mood for no particular reason. Maybe it's because I'm a control freak. Odd, you say? Indeed. But then, I've found loss of steering a strangely rewarding experience - I gave something up, but not what you're thinking. Not the idea, or the form, or the shape. I just gave up trying to stick my fingers in the clay while the wheel goes round and having God slap my hand out of the way, telling me to stick to counting his foot going up and down on the pedals. After all, I'm not much of an artist when it comes to shaping things that are supposed to hold water: I'm just good at pointing out the cracks and trying to glaze them over. Then some guy always comes and taps the bottom until the thing falls apart. But that was my pot I always exclaim, and he nods and tells me that's the problem. You stick to writing parables and songs about a beautiful girl, and I'll spin the wheel and let my fingers make grooves and divots. Of course, he didn't really say that: I did. He just said, "Good analogy. Write a tune for it, and let me get about my work." So maybe I'll do that - I mean, my guitar just begs to be party to another song involving potters and cracked vessels.

God's a patient fellow, to begin a new thought. Well, he's not a fellow so much as a concept to big for my pea-sized brain. I mean, I know what it's like to be three different people, but to have those personalities working together at the same time? God, you gotta teach me that trick. You're an eternally practiced three-piece band, and I'm still trying to get my annoying drummer to stick to a strong beat for crying out loud! But back to the beginning: a patient God. Thank God he's God, although that involves some sort of circle I can't fathom with that brain I was just telling you about.

Same thought - God made a lot of different people a lot of different ways. For instance, he gave me ten fingers and a keyboard, a set of analytical skills, and a heart set to music. I'm not sure where I'm supposed to go with this. Belief is hard either way: sometimes Yeshua seems like a nice psychological construct, if a distant one. Of course, he's still playing in the background, but I've got too much cotton in my ears to hear properly. The fact that he feels distant some days is enough to convince me that Adam and Eve made some sort of horrible mistake, not to mention the fact that summer is coming and I still have to wear clothes. But can you imagine being in the garden and actually walking with God? I can't, because whenever I get close enough to think I might be finally getting somewhere, an angel appears out of nowhere and slaps me with the broad side of his flaming sword. You mean I have to die to get to that there tree of life? Well, that makes the whole deal go a little sour, doesn't it? At least when I'm through with this - whether I get the girl or not - I get a crown of glory and I can stick my tongue out at those angels.

Speaking of crowns of glory, I wonder where I'm going to keep mine in this new heaven and new earth? Oh yes. At the feet of the Father. See? Belief is hard: I keep forgetting where I need to put that thing. The Spirit's coughing in the background, kind of pointing to the foot of the throne. Thanks for the nudge - I needed it. And that one too. And that one. Okay, my hip's getting a litte sore, and I keep forgetting my new name.

Yes, this has been an excessively selfish blog post. My spiritual journey (is the thing!) might seem a little diversionary at best. But maybe you can take something from this, like for instance how you keep your eyes on that cross where the burden slipped off your shoulder, and while you're at it, help me not to hop any fences. Alright, friend? Something about a threefold cord, and I'm done.

So, I was reading,,,

2005-06-09T15:17:00.000-11:00

I love the book of Ecclesiastes. There's a tension there, the preacher walking back and forth between saying wisdom is something to gain and something useless to have. Saying to live life young and grab it, to fear God, to gain friends, to be content, to work, to do all these things. But knowledge it tiresome and much wisdom is a burden - and as if to prove the point that there is really nothing new under the sun, we say that life wasn't designed for the self-aware and that those who seek deep answers get lost. The more you know, the more you know it's not all worth that much in the end.

Look at Chapter 8: "I saw the all work of God, that no one can find out what is happening under the sun. However much they may toil in seeking, they will not find it out." However, it goes on in Chapter 9: "Whoever is joined with the living has hope, for a living dog is better than a dead lion." (Genius turn of phrase - I love those.) Take life as it comes - don't try to figure too much out - don't try to know the mind of God, simply because it's too far beyond you to grasp. Work with what you're given, know as much as you can, and go from there. Same chapter: "Go eat your bread with enjoyment, and drink your wine with a merry heart; for God has long ago approved what you do... enjoy life with the wife whom you love, all the days of your vain life that are given to you under the sun." It goes on: "Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with might."

Enjoy life: nothing wrong with that, nothing at all. Back up to chapter 7: "Do not try to be to righteous, and do not act too wise; why should you destroy yourself? Do not be too wicked, and do not be a fool; why should you die before your time?" That is to say, don't be obsessed with being entirely righteous - after all, it's impossible - but don't give yourself over to dissolution because of that fact.

And a verse I especially love: "Don't listen to everything people say: you may hear your servant critisizing you." I've always wondered at people that constantly worry about what others think of them. Let's let those little things go, focus on what's important. A reputation is made with the important things: wisdom versus folly. And many a man it is whose supposed wisdom turn to ashes in the mouths of others when push comes to shove. As for reputations (cue the Derek Webb song here), chapter 7 says "A good name is better than precious ointment."

How about this: "Do not say, 'Why were the former days better than these?' It is not out of wisdom that you ask this." Point a finger straight at the 1950s revivalists and their past-tense superiority.

But in all of this, chapter 12: "Remember the creator in the days of your youth, before the days of trouble come."

It's a hard book. It's like a good jazz tune - it twists around a bit, and the notes seem random sometimes. The keys aren't all major. Someone in the background is hitting a snare lightly. But then, it still is a tune more than anything else. And you can listen, have a beer, and thank God for men, women, work, wisdom, toothpaste, and the darned vanity of it all.

The day of the bagel.

2005-06-07T13:25:00.000-11:00

Today I ate a bagel.

That is all.

Panic, sort of.

2005-06-06T15:24:00.000-11:00

You see, I've screwed something up royally without ever actually meaning to do it - of course, I never mean to screw things up. But here I am again with that scent of panic rising in the back of my head, trying to tell myself that everything will be fine. Everything is going to work out. This is a speedbump, nothing more. Oh God, I hope it is (and I'm praying out loud now).

Let me ask: are things that precarious? Are they balanced on a knife's edge ready to fall either way should someone so push them? I always wanted to think not. But apparently, they are.

I apologize for not thinking. I'm not sure what else I can do: the words are just that: words, lies, fakery, sophism. They weren't an arrow aimed so much as shot into the sky.

Post Removed

2005-06-06T08:57:00.000-11:00

This post has been removed.

Just for the record.

2005-06-06T03:58:00.000-11:00

I hate Canada Post. Their system is abysmal, their customer service is virtually nonexistant, their carriers are all on drugs, and everything they do seems to involve labyrinthine beauraucracy that I am required to navigate in order to fix their stupid mistake.

I mean, is it so difficult to simply bring a parcel to the right building? Is it? For crying out loud, all I ask is that my stuff goes to the right place at the right time - just freakin' do your jobs right!

If I have any choice in the matter, I will never, ever, ever, ever, ever ship anything with Canada Post if I can possibly help it. Never. I refuse to finance an organization that seems to exist for its own sadistic purposes.

</rant>

Deliberate.

2005-06-04T16:50:00.000-11:00

I should have been more careful, more deliberate. Less enticed to read when you weren't looking and catch a glimpse of the things kept in your pockets. I became convinced then that you don't know what you do, not really. Talking as if the words mean merely what they say, when of course they run like subteranean rivers, back and forth, though hard to tell where they'll delta. I should have covered my tracks with sage and heartbrush. I think I coloured a bit when you told me what had happened: mostly because it was me. But then, you always knew that.

I hate the fact that people aren't in my mind to query and delve into at my whim, that I have to drag out the facts and make all the connections myself. Obtuse that way, but so am I, sometimes. You might have to write the entire novel to find out what I keep on the last few pages. Can't say it'll be worth it, but maybe you'll get somewhere yourself trying to map out where I've gone. But then, I'd like to skip a few pages here and figure out a few things. Like, for instance, do these lines leep intersecting, crossing and then uncrossing? Do things fall farther out of orbit the more things change? Do we give in to entropy? Are we, after all, trying too hard?

Someone asked you a question. How did the answer go, I wonder? But then, I wondered in my head, mostly - some things aren't polite to ask - and my hypothesis is most likely correct. I always knew those sorts of things, the wording, the rhythm, the half-truths.

Hard things.

2005-06-02T16:10:00.000-11:00

God knows I've got enough sins to be forgiven. Maybe I spend too much time talking about them - the places I've come from the places I've been are marvelous if you take the time to count them. Things to deal with, but praise to be given. You can lift your eyes to heaven for a moment and thank the Weaver for them if you'd like; you've got the same thing going on I think. Pain. Movement. Pruning. Flowering. Valleys. Mountains. Achish in madness. Jerusalem in triumph.

Psalm 30, then:

To you, O LORD, I called;
to the Lord I cried for mercy:

"What gain is there in my destruction,
in my going down into the pit?
Will the dust praise you?
Will it proclaim your faithfulness?

Hear, O LORD, and be merciful to me;
O LORD, be my help."

You turned my wailing into dancing;
you removed my sackcloth and clothed me with joy,

that my heart may sing to you and not be silent.
O LORD my God, I will give you thanks forever.

Dating.

2005-06-02T13:39:00.000-11:00

I sometimes wonder if there's something wrong with our dating paradigm. Actually, I wonder this a whole lot. Not really if there's something wrong with dating itself, but probably more with our mindsets as we approach it, both children and parents.

The point of a relationship is to glorify God obviously. As is all of life - but relationships especially so. It's easy to do as friends, I notice, to encourage and strengthen one another by pointing out problems and encouraging the good that we see in eachother. Harder in a romantic relationship, I think, mostly because of the emotions and entanglements involved.

Let me spin it a different way, and you all can tell me if I'm way off base here: a dating relationship is not a time for strong commitment. I understand that it's not appropriate to date several individuals at once (you can evaluate them before you start dating), and the reason I say strong commitment is that there's obviously got to be some: relationships are entropic beasts. But if dating is an evaluation period of one person to another person - seeing if marriage is even viable - then a lot of people I know, and my self included, have got it all wrong.

See, what happens if you hit a problem in your dating relationship that you just can't solve? Let's say you're always in conflict about little things. Let's say you have disparate points of view that simply cannot be melded together. Let's say you have serious problems with a sexual side that shouldn't yet exist. Let's say you find that the relationship is seriously detracting from your spiritual life. What to do?

I would say this: if you are unwilling to give up the relationship (and call my a hypocrite if you must, but think about what I'm saying here) even though it has a systemic problem or even systemic problems, what have you done but make that relationship an idol? Systemic flaws, amplified or not by the romance, are a barrier to communion with God. And Jesus said that those who follow him must be willing to give up father and mother and possessions to follow him - a girlfriend or boyfriend follows the same principle. I say this with the knowledge that God has broken down many relationship idols in my life the hard way, and I'm better for it. I don't particularly like it when it happens, but after the suffering, it's a better way.

The entire dynamic of God aside (not that it can be, but let's just pretend), examine the relational aspects. Let's say you have a serious problem with anger that your boyfriend is exacerbating. He may be willing to deal with that right now: you're probably in the throes of a lot of really cool and exciting emotions that help deaden the affect of that, help you look the other way. Fast forward a bit. Say you get married to him and seven years down the road those really cool emotions have faded (they do that, lovebirds) and you look at this problem and suddenly it's so much bigger than it ever was before. What do you do? You're locked in. You can't just up and leave anymore. The same thing with lust. You think that your boyfriend will only ever have trouble with lust for you? Think again - even if you can never envision it, even if it seems like the remotest possibility, you have to understand that if the problem exists when you're dating, it will exist when you're married. What of his personal assistant in seven years from now when your body isn't quite as new and fresh and the experiences you had when dating have soured your memory? You think that you are the only girl he can't resist? You are wrong, damned wrong. Fast forward seven years and see what pride can do to a relationship, or inflexibility, or an inability to change, or a cold heart.

You realize, don't you, that everyone has faults. Let me quote from the back of the Psalter Hymnal: this is not meant to discourage the contrite heart of the believer. You're going to marry a completely sinful person no matter how you go about it. But that hardly means you need to be involved in a relationship that is unhelpful, that provokes you to ungodly action, that doesn't promotes godliness in you. It may seem like a small distinction, but it's one that makes all the difference. Is your relationship an idol? I was asked this once. I didn't think much about it - I dismissed it and rarely thought of the question, but I'm asking you to think about it with me now. Ask yourself honestly if you are willing to give up everything to follow Christ - car, house, money, boat, pet rock, girlfriend, boyfriend. Even those.

This brings me to one last point - and I'd absolutely love to hear feedback on this. If you are at a point in your relationship where you can simply not envision yourself apart from the object of your affections (and let's be honest, it's going to happen eventually if all goes well), your level of commitment is, frankly, at a marriage level. So why aren't you married? Dating can't be pretending at marriage without sex. It's disingenuous to think of it that way, I contend. If you think to yourself, "Yes, this is the person I'm going to marry, no questions about it, and there's nothing that can break me out of this relationship now," you've all but said the wedding vows and signed on the dotted line. I love it when people spout all kinds of bullshit about not being in the right place and such - do you really think that marriage is such a house of cards that it's going to crumble around your feet as soon as you hit a financial or social crisis? You think God isn't capable of taking care of you that way?

Anyways, enough of me talking about things I barely understand. Tell me, ladies and gentlemen - do I have a point?

Church growth.

2005-06-01T05:18:00.000-11:00

Recently on the Rumor Forum, an old hand by the name of Dano had this to say:

But yes Steve, I do[think there's a direct causal relationship between what a church does and the numbers it gets]. Compare what my church (about 2000 a week) does, to what another church in town (about 100 a week) does. The difference is actually very little to do with content. The difference is the environment which is attractive vs. one that is not so much. Same (infact, identical) message in both places, but more people hear it in one than the other.

p.s. it's the gospel of christ (the holy spirit) that's suposed to be offensive. Not the elitist and selfish attitudes of christians in "their" church.

I don't completely agree with this, not on all levels, but there's an element of truth here I think. I maintain that Christianity is an attractive religion, and there's no reason not to emphasize that fact. I could list things that make it so, but I won't for lack of time, but it is, moreso than a lot of other religions. The problem comes of course when people decide to emphasize the wrong things about the church: buildings, sound systems, superstar pastors, and worship teams that sound like U2. It becomes more a deal of numbers, and less a deal of genuine Christianity.

Another problem is the reverse, something my circles do a lot: not worrying about numbers enough. If you never have converts coming in the door, you have a problem. If you never have visitors from the community, you have a problem. If the culture shock of walking through the doors of your church is that great, it's time to change something. Not always sure what that something is, but something for crying out loud. And of course there will always be those who fear a pendulum swing the other way - but really, people. Wisdom isn't the realm of ages past; we can change now just as well as other eras, the legacy of our CRC and GKN disasters not forgotten, but gleaned from.

Updating stuff.

2005-05-31T15:37:00.000-11:00

You've resolved to do better at it. That's a good thing. I commend you. Absence does, after all, make the heart forgetful.

Nick is over at my place (he has been since Saturdayish), which is good because he makes me omelettes and stirfry. It's also forced me to clean up a kitchen that (were evolution possible) would have otherwise been spawning life forms of vast, interconnected intelligence. Also, the fridge is now empty of the "food" that's been in it for the last, oh, say six months. I don't eat at home a lot, okay?

There's nothing on TV anymore. All the season finales are done and over with, including the stirling conclusion to CSI LV's latest season. Directed by none other than Quentin Tarantino, who's an amazing director despite his films lack of substance. So no television for me.

It's also the season when the summer books hit shelves near you - you know, because you can't possibly read something with substance on the beach, can you? I defy these brainless tomes by reading philosophy on the beach, and counting the children of Abraham caught between the pages.

Do you ever wonder how well your friends really know you? I mean, not those friends you have late-night conversations with over cigars and old friends, but the ones you see maybe once a week and only ever crack jokes with. What do they see when they look at you? Do they ever really crack the surface and see what's beneath? I know a few people really well, and even fewer people know me as well as I know them - but what of those people you don't ever really trust? I know what I see when I look at them. I sometimes see shallow, abrasive, annoying, rude, prideful, overconfident, or introverted people. Strange how all the negative qualities rise to the surface, isn't it? I temper that knowledge with an understanding that there exists a deeper level where qualities are hidden that I may never get a glimpse of, those things that rise to challenges and meet difficulties head-on, bravery and sacrifice and deep love and character. Still, if I were to describe any of you as I see you, and wrote it down - would you even recognize the portait in words? Would those who really know you shake their heads at it and tell me I got it backwards?

Sunday night's sermon was about leadership in the church again, the negative qualities excluding from office and positive qualities demanded of those in office. I measure myself by that yardstick, and honestly, I don't measure up. Not that I particularly ever want to hold any sort of office (and I'm sure there's a boatload of people who are going to go "Oh my gosh, him?" and throw up a bit in their mouths), but that doesn't stop me from comparing myself to the list. Now, obviously I don't have any children, and I don't have a wife, but what about all those other things? Disheartening to say the least. But then, the Lord is on my side. Yessir.

Another thing - and this isn't a critique of the sermon at all, it was fine - but I get the feeling that our circles take the measure of a man by whether or not he's on or fit for an eldership or deaconship position. This occured to me not because of what other people have said to me, but because of how I look at men in the church myself: why such and such a person wouldn't make a good elder, or why so-an-so is so obviously disqualified from office. But the raw fact of the matter is that not everyone is called to be a deacon or an elder or a preacher or a teacher - in fact, in Romans 12, there's a list of all those members of "the body" that is the local church - and look what it says:

So in Christ we who are many form one body, and each member belongs to all the others.

We have different gifts, according to the grace given us. If a man's gift is prophesying, let him use it in proportion to hisfaith.

If it is serving, let him serve; if it is teaching, let him teach; if it is encouraging, let him encourage; if it is contributing to the needs of others, let him give generously; if it is leadership, let him govern diligently; if it is showing mercy, let him do it cheerfully.

All those things: not every man is assumed to be a leader, because clearly this isn't so. This leads to a corellary: just because one fulfils all the qualities of a deacon or elder set forth in the pastoral epistles doesn't mean one is fit to lead. You can have an obedient family (I know several men who have great families thanks almost exclusively to their wives), you can be blameless (by hiding in your house, maybe), you can be a lot of things, but still not be leadership material. I can't really put my finger on what that thing is - it's like art, I know it when I see it - but it seems to me that you need to also be granted a gift for leadership by God. And wisdom.

And I see people aspiring to be leaders: it's a good thing. But I also see people who believe they're good leaders when they're actually merely louder than everyone else, or listened to by default of position, though I haven't ever witnessed that in eldership circles per se - mostly in my interaction with my peers. I've seen people take "leadership" in a debate by clinging tenaciously to their point even when their point is stupid. I've seen people take "leadership" of a volleyball team by making all the other players feel inferior. I've seen people take "leadership" by making sure a group does what they want them to do regardless of whether it's right or not. I've seen "leadership" that doesn't understand the difference between a child and an . All this to say, leadership is a tricky thing. You can't play favorites when picking leaders. You can't lead without wisdom and a good hand at it.

The guy who does the sound at your church may never be an elder. But then, he's doing his work to. There's a guy that goes to my church, his name is Jason. Anyone of you who goes there know who he is - he can be offputting, but he's maybe the happiest person I've ever met. He's for sure never going to be an elder, but the church also wouldn't be the same church without him. You think the example absurd? I know you're thinking that right now. But it isn't - not really.

By the way, I was reading this psalm, and though you all might like to read it.

Have mercy on me, O God,
according to your unfailing love;
according to your great compassion
blot out my transgressions.

Wash away all my iniquity
and cleanse me from my sin.

For I know my transgressions,
and my sin is always before me.

Against you, you only, have I sinned
and done what is evil in your sight,
so that you are proved right when you speak
and justified when you judge.

Surely I was sinful at birth,
sinful from the time my mother conceived me.

Surely you desire truth in the inner parts;
you teach me wisdom in the inmost place.

Cleanse me with hyssop, and I will be clean;
wash me, and I will be whiter than snow.

Let me hear joy and gladness;
let the bones you have crushed rejoice.

Hide your face from my sins
and blot out all my iniquity.

Create in me a pure heart, O God,
and renew a steadfast spirit within me.

I love that psalm. It's not completely quoted above, but enough is. It's Psalm 51: go look it up.

Things that keep coming back to me.

2005-05-30T05:15:00.000-11:00

I hate to be obsessed with myself, but that is after all who I am. Maybe obesessed is the wrong word in this situation - I'm posessed with myself. I think as myself, I act as myself. But that's not the point of all this, is it? I keep coming back to things, or they keep coming back to me (I'm not quite sure about that); the days turn and resemble eachother, just with more ornamentation, or less. Something's happened during that time, and adds a layer or strips one off. Nothing ever achieves stasis.

So last night I butted up against the same shore I've seen at least a thousand times now - pushing off from it seems to do little good. What leave if one keeps coming back? It's not so much that it's a bad thing. Probably not at all. It's like looking at the mirror reflection of a time not too long distant. The details are oddly reversed. (Is this what it looked like to those looking in?) Remote things are focused - sharp words strangely blunted. But it's not bad so much as just... different.

Have you ever gotten tangled in a net somehow? I have. Children, I think, revel in those sorts of things. I no longer do. I don't want to look at myself in a warped mirror and laugh at the reflection - it's too painful. Because I am warped, at odds and angles with myself, strangely shaped here and there.

Twenty-three and still looking for answers: yes, four paragraphs about different things and finally the capstone on it all. Answers. Oh, I know the answer to it all, and what his name is. That is to say, I know what my only comfort is in life and death and so on and so forth. But the fact that the world as a whole means something and draws together for a purpose doesn't help me figure out what that thing you just said to me means. What was in that look? Maybe God's trying to tell me something. The big questions are the easy ones, I think. Not easy to take hold of and wrestle with till they touch your hip and give you a good old-fashioned limp, but easy enough to assent to. The smaller questions are the hard ones. I know what the world means, but that sentence - what does it mean? In that sense, you're so much more complicated than creation. Or maybe I've got the question wrong, too.

And so much for my lunchtime. Time to get back to work.

The post about nothing. And everything.

2005-05-25T14:10:00.000-11:00

Where was I? Oh yes - I bought a book. Two, actually. All the more reading for me to do, but it's good. I like reading. After all, if my world isn't quite the way I like it (and is it ever? I'm not complaining - just saying) I can dive into someone else's less-than-perfect world and wonder at the lopsidedness of it all.

Lopsided - I love that word. And that world.

Gilmore Girls. Drama. That is, again, another world. I identify with it all every once in a while.

I spoke last time of intersections - and we've intersected again. Strangely. Even humourously. I forget at times that God has a twisted sense for that sort of thing, and he keeps forking the road, pointing at Memphis, saying something about Vampires. You didn't understand that - maybe I didn't either.

Can you believe it took me fourty-five minutes to write those four paragraphs? Neither can I.

An addendum to this all would do, I think. I have been reading Psalms this evening: perhaps if the master could calm a storm with words, these are the sentences spoken to still cloud and water, that even heart and emotion obey him.

I'll share. As a father has compassion for his children, so the Lord has compassion for those who fear him. He knows how we were made; he remember that we are dust. You may recognize those words as the 103rd Psalm; or perhaps you don't. Read it. I have no pretense of telling you why it's true - but it is, that much I know. The coil is mortal and wound at his fingertips, but wound gently. I am broken softly, falling on that rock, that cornerstone. I will pray tonight for something I don't deserve to have, a future not tuned to the past - that the intersecting lines of my life will weave a pattern, that this thread will be brightly woven. And beyond, even: word of how I am dust may reach his ears. He said them first, I merely repeat. I merely feel the places they've been chisled into this pressed stone.

They come and they go.

2005-05-24T16:09:00.000-11:00

Isn't it funny how our lives all intersect?

I wrote a song with that as its opening line. And it is funny - in a strange way. The places I have seen, the people I've met, the experiences I've had; they all come back somehow, later. Maybe a rumour you hear floating around, but you believe it. You know that person. That's the sort of thing they'd do. You sit down someplace and it flashes you back a few months, or a few years, pleasantly or maybe not so. You remember walking here, talking here, smiling here, crying there, wanting to shout someone's name there, that grass, these clouds, a frown, laughter.

We cross and keep coming back to the intersections. They're written in the synapses firing at memories half kept. They're bitterness or thankfullness. Sometimes both. Rarely neither.

Or maybe it's more like a sheet of paper with spots whited out, written over. I haven't been talking about what you think I am yet, so let me start now. I've written over feelings and conversations. My first real girlfriend: I barely remember her now, except at awkward times when something reminds me of her. But I don't mourn the loss. I prefer it that way. Maybe back then I thought I loved her - but I didn't, not really, not the way a woman or a girl deserves to be loved. It was, more than anything else, a desparate possession that I cried over less for the loss of her than for the loss if it. Shallow, very shallow. Glad in a way to see it die, to relieve the tension, to recollect the reasons and understand them and accept them. Her parents were strange in a way only parents can be. I didn't dislike them. They didn't dislike me, or at least they never told me so. They were cold watchers, referees. They disliked me taking cake from the fridge (there's a moment I can't think about without laughing) but didn't mind me kissing their daughter. I always thought that strange. I would give my kitchen to any future son who promised not to kiss my daughter. They were odd, uncomfortable people. She was an odd, uncomfortable friend. If we talked, it wasn't for long, not about anything in particular. I can analyse it, weigh it, find it wanting in the light of five years more experience. Only five years, then, and already I'm half a deck away from that card. Odd. And we never intersect in person as much as in memory - rarely, now - and I wonder what lack she finds in me, glancing back. Really, I hope she rarely does.

There - I've stood at the crossroad and glanced at the one not so much untaken as denied, barely caring that I wasn't able, perhaps even glad at the denial. I could be married now, but I'm not, thank God for that. I wasn't ready - am not ready - to stand at an altar and sacrifice my life to another. The words would be pretty words, and I might cry selfishly at the final realization of a dream, but in that way I'm sorely lacking, and admit it. I always will be, much like every one of you reading this. In that, I think, we find the grace of God enough to tear away self for a moment and become more than one, but one more than one and still one. I may stand in that grace someday, but it won't be the foolish taking I most often commit to.

One more girl, then. We intersect sometimes, rarely. I become myself with her, the brazen taker, the puller, the thief come knocking. Wrong in that, I know, enough to dread another crossing into her realm, where I become me, where I write those crooked words deep into our minds. See? I'm so different, but then again, not so different.

Not a women, now. Family. Crossing, weaving, intercrossing. What must it be like to be a parent? Knowing that this son or this daughter sees you no longer as her future, his future, but as the past? What is it like to watch a child on the cusp of becoming another's posession? Or to see one step under the doorposts with suitcase and future in hand? Many questions - I have no desire to ever be that father. But then, ironically, I have much practice in letting things go. If you were here right now, you might wonder at a bemused smile working brackets at my mouthcorners. Here, God says, you've let this love go and yet not let it go altogether - I'm making something for you. There, God says, that's they way to do it, slow learner. And maybe I will someday watch that child in another child's arms and say, "I was young once." Or maybe I'll say, "This one is your decision." That wasn't the career I wanted for you. That's not the college I would have you attend. This boy, this man is unlike me in a thousand ways that run against my grain. But then, I've laid the foundation already, and the choice is, after all, both ours. Mine to raise you, you to take that foundation and set a house on it. That's the way of love, I think - something in building cornerstones.

But I'll let my future children - if indeed they're prepared beyond the stars - sleep in peace a litte now. Also, that girl that got married a few months back. I should sit back and read something that speaks of a deep father's love. There you have it - a fragment past and possible future. See, I don't really know that much yet. But I know that much.

The end.

2005-05-21T08:59:00.000-11:00

Have you ever thought about endings? No - not just things that end here, now. The ending of it all. How will this earth end?

It's a good question. I never realized how deeply my eschatology affects my actions and viewpoints until this afternoon. Well, I did, but I never had to express them that way. Believing that Christians will be beaten underfoot until Christ returns, or that they'll be raptured secretely before all hell breaks loose, or that Christ will indeed see all his enemies laid broken before his footstool - these ends bring a person to a different beginning, and a wildly different present.

I, for instance, am a post-millenialist. Amillenialism, to me, is a zero-sum, hopeless philosophy basically saying that it's the fate of the people of God to be driven into the ground far enough by the hammer of Satan until God magically re-appears with a sword in his hand, all the glorious promises made to his people fulfilled in a place where there is no enemy. It simply doesn't make sense. There's much too much victory spoken of in the now for everything to be Future Glory.

And that means also that Christians aren't relegated to a ghetto of opression or irrelevancy. We were born to lead - to take over the world. The culture is ours, not Satan's. The world is ours to subdue, not the other way around.

I'll tell you about the night...

2005-05-11T14:00:00.000-11:00

There's something that needs to be said, as if any tongue could hold back from saying it. In my oblique way, I do it. Here, I've written a song. It includes what one might call "hope" - and as some of you seem to believe, I have none of it. Untrue of course, but that hope seems to inspire my worst works of art. Except tonight: I wrote an unfinished song, incomplete because I simply had no more words.

When you have lost it all,
and every breath seem like a fresh demise, don't let go.
You can buy time with the diamonds in your eyes, I know.
You are not so lost as you might believe.

And when you have gained it all,
and every minute wrings a new suprise, maybe smile
in the aftershock of beauty build on sand. Wait a while.
You were not so lost as you once believed.

Come on, come on, wake up, it's so beautiful.
The stories in my pocket tell of the best times,
and it's so good to be alive.
Come on, come on, he gives and he takes away,
beauty for ashes - joy for tears.
It's so good to be alive.

I'll tell you about the afternoon I had yesterday,
when spring came to life and blew this old heart away,
and it said blessed be his name forevermore.
I'll tell you about the night I had yesterday
when prayer flared to life and blazed like the break of day,
and it said blessed be his name forevermore.

And that's it - pearls burying sand, beauty from ashes - motes dancing in the breath of a Creator and Recreator. Joy for sorrows, with interest. B0rked hearts patched. The stuff of life, no?

Finally getting somewhere, part 2.

2005-05-10T16:21:00.000-11:00

I am not full of happiness. Not, of course, that I predicate that blame in any particular direction. God had his hand in it, and I think that's enough. Of course, the devil isn't in the details - that's a lie. Someone's genius is in the details, and it certainly isn't any Harvester. If I see a gentle beauty in our violence, forgive me - the good and ill come so intermingled, I sometimes call darkness light.

So there - my requiem. I see finality in all this. Drifting is, after all, part of mortality, and mortal I am. Still - the final cords. The final cords! Dare I break them? What of the sacredness of their memory?

But no, the scarlet deserves its chance to bed elsewhere. And in the moment, the cord is a pain too hot to bear alone: every child breathes its own breath. Do you see paradox in that? As do I. As do I.

I will profane the memory with the dream of another. That is the way of life. Graves bear their own witness; perhaps neglect, perhaps not. But I will not build my house in the shadow of Vesuvius and hope to prosper. I will not.

Then, accept this. Your worth is measured in diamonds - mine in dust underfoot.

Hope, then, that Yaweh breathes life again into motes and particles. The body was made to beathe, no? Then let it, free of this. Dream dreams of diamond. I will be sculpting, elsewhere.

Let me speak this into your nerve endings - with breath the Lord gives, and with breath the Lord takes away: blessed forever be his names.

Hey there, feeling sick.

2005-05-08T07:42:00.000-11:00

I didn't go to church today because I'm feeling that sort of sick where my muscles are aching and I feel like crap.

I'm listening to sermon tapes - but it's just not the same. It's hard to fellowship with a boombox.

Finally getting somewhere.

2005-05-05T13:56:00.000-11:00

You might ask what it feels like to get somewhere. Or, maybe, what it feels like to get anywhere. Sometimes the difference seems remote. Like staring at mountains - maybe one stands out, maybe one doesn't.

What does it feel like to plan a life in your head? I haven't the foggiest clue. I couldn't do it if I tried. All seven people in the world who made a plan and stuck to it, I guess they're happy. Everyone else bounces from hill to hill. Or trudges, if that's their thing.

Why isn't life more like television that way? Successful people, good at what they do, handsome or beautiful. All like walking advertisements. I never feel like an advertisement, although the movies have taught me how to swagger and brood. I just never look like Vin or Jake Gyllenhaal - I'm too much me.

Me. There's a strange thing. What am I? What's informed and formed me? Where have I come from, and where am I going? Is the me so important at the end of the day?

And why - why do I keep asking questions?

You should read this.

2005-05-05T10:57:00.000-11:00

This blog (click here) is pretty darn cool, and I mean that in the best of ways. In fact, I thought for a few moments I was reading myself write - it was a strange feeling. Feedbackish.

A note.

2005-05-03T16:02:00.000-11:00

These things are like a storm front brewing. Somewhere over the horizon - there they are, piling grey on grey, apartments, mountains, rolling, re-arranging. Of course, nobody sees them, but me. I don't live on an earth all spinning on an axis like you. Mine is flat, this basement a place to see the world, and see the world I do. There. Those clouds. You know them.

Not clouds anymore: strings. I couldn't untie these. Instead, I cut them, painful as it was. Tucked them away when I was done, under my clothes. They smile, don't they? Not the fibre of my being, I mean; the sackcloth, the ashes (the dress pants, the shoes?) Happy, almost, as if to say that I'm not feeling raw around the edges. Of course, you do the same thing. You're just not as good at the watercolours as I am. See this charcoal? It means I'm feeling fine! Someone - believe me...

You're sitting on a swing. I don't know why anyone would capture your fingers, or your arm, or half your face. Smiling, halfway. I can't tell what the rest of your face is doing, because it isn't there. My imagination tells me that right now you're looking for something good in life to smile about. What that means, of course, is that you're practicing your brushstrokes.

I'd show you - really, I would. But I'd have to get that close, and I'm sick of the photographs. I have a few undeveloped. Something about Toronto, but not three by fives. A mall, maybe? Could be. Crumbling buildings? Ah yes. A storm front gathering? Most certainly.

I crumble slowly, that's all. Gather slowly. Bits of me tumble onto the paper every now and again. You've even seen one or two. But for every one or two you've seen, I've got twenty more. Thirty, even. All bits of concrete, a wall built of me. It's over there. It's between us.

Not clouds, buildings, or strings now. Music. A minor key. Did you notice how often I use that chord? It's because it's the only one that fits into that place you were. It's almost like a limb missing.

Here, I've been honest. Did you like that? It's not that the month has cured me or something. I've got gangreen, and the aspirin doesn't really do much. Or maybe that's what's lodged here (I'm pointing at my throat).

I wrote a song today, about you, another one. Nobody knows it's about you, because I used our secret language. Oh - you thought I'd forgotten? Unlikely.

Finally, not a song. At least, not one finished playing. I'll tell myself the final movement's all been worked out, but it hasn't crossed that line yet. You'll need to push me off a building to get that point home. And yeah, I wish you'd taken me up on that offer, too. Things that good rarely come. I wonder. I wonder if they go.

Honestly...

2005-05-03T14:13:00.000-11:00

I don't love freedom. I don't like it, even. Not freedom in some etherial sense of the word, not freedom from belonging to people. I mean "freedom" in its ultimate meaning.

See, I like to talk about being free to. Or being free from. These things are, of course, fine to talk about, to wrestle with. I am free to do such and such, to enjoy such and such, or not to suffer the pain of hell.

But these things don't exist in a vacuum - and that's the difficulty. I am, in the final analysis, still thinking like a postmodern. Thinking of myself as that individual, adrift in a world of individuals. Of course, that's just ridiculous - I may live most of my life on my own, but that doesn't mean I actually am alone.

I've become convinced that being in community mean being honest, primarity. Think about it. How can you be in a true community, one that builds up good and tears down evil, if no one's honest?

A greater question, focusing less on the individual and more on the community, is how can the community promote honesty? I mean, each of us is a bad person. But the face we present to our communities isn't that of a bad person. It's a good person with occasional flaws that we like to iron out. Sometimes, we even modify our behavior to fit an ideal that we don't even believe in.

There are things about me I've never told anyone. There are things about every single person that have never left the walls of their mind. Some of those things are horrible, and some are wonderful. But mostly, they're probably horrible.

Maybe the problem is how good we feel compelled to act. Those secret things - people would be horrified to find them out. It's easier to focus on the little things. Who's been out at a bar. Who smokes. Who swore. Who listens to the radio a bit too loud. Who peeled out of the parking lot. Who watched what movie.

It's not just these people feel free to do such things - it's just a lot easier to pretend these are the marks of a true Christian. It's easier to engage eachother on that level. It's not threatening, really. If I haven't ever visited a bar, smoked, swore, there's nothing there to engage the layer underneath.

I don't really want that. A few people do. But probably most don't. It's not an easy thing to do, either individually or corporately. It needs openness on two sides. See, inside me, I have two different people. I have an adualterous woman, and I have a pharisee. One loves to sin. The other one loves to throw stones. In the middle - Jesus, working in different ways with each. He personifies the community we seek. He's telling the pharisee to shut up or put up, and commanding that woman to go and quit with the sinning already.

Like I said, I don't like freedom, if freedom means to let it all hang out.

Colours.

2005-04-28T14:04:00.000-11:00

I'm accustomed to colours. Walking downtown - colours. It's not so much the cool techno repetition of buildings, or the classical white clouds overhead. It's the faces. When I leave Mississauga, I miss those colours, miss swimming in them. Everywhere else it seems a drabness - a single note. Colour is melody, is harmony, is discord, is signal to snow, is feedback, is rhythm: colour is the music of beauty.

The entire world is beautiful. Scenes are flickering through my head like old films. Sepia. A grate, in contrasts. Tall buildings, all blue glass. Moss on the trunks of hundred year old trees, like a green sea working against gravity. The small of your back. This is the question for you then. Think of something that your soul revolves around.

Tell me about it.

Radically.

2005-04-27T14:17:00.000-11:00

In a window somewhere, a girl's watching traffic slowly disappear from the streets below. She pours herself a glass of scotch. The glass frosts. Then it clears. A bit of alcohol creeps up the side.

Across town, two lovers are having cheap chinese food. Neither of them notice the food, much. He's teaching her to use chopsticks.

A husband is lighting a candle. Coltrane's playing the background. Somewhere, his wife is parking the car, just getting home from work.

There's a girl in Starbucks, dreaming about leaving - going to England. She's drinking tea, trying different flavours. Her sketch book is almost full.

Above, overhead, the sky's blushing around the corners, clouds flecked in a brilliant death march. Someone's taking pictures.

None of these are missionaries, but they share God with eachother. One's a Pentacostal. The husband and wife attend a traditional gathering. They sing hymns. Another's a baptist. Yet another goes to a megachurch nearby.

There are questions in these scenes, of course. But there are answers, as well. They are radicals, these men and woman. Not missionaries. Not evangelists. Also, not wasting a moment. They write, they enjoy, they love, they live. There isn't a question about that in a mind of anyone who knows them.

There's a simple faith in that, a viral faith, spreading in their footsteps. They are happy - in that, not at all normal. They are vanguard teenagers, brilliant musicians, wild lovers, avid travellers.

They are a sweet smell, aren't they?

Hectic.

2005-04-26T05:35:00.000-11:00

Today has been a little crazy. And yesterday - yesterday was more than a little crazy. So, in the vein of office workers everywhere, I'm taking some time to reflect on my day. Perhaps you could say, to rest on my laurels. Sit back and watch it all work together.

On the way to work today, everything was grey. Everything. It was like someone desaturated the world and left it that way. Noon rolled around, and maybe the sky injected a vein of blue somewhere, but I didn't see it.

Someone's chasing a dollar sign again, here. Next to me, they're talking targets and totals. I'm not so concerned about those things; I figure if everyone looks at the big picture, somewhere along the way we lose the details that make things pleasant.

It's that way with life, most days. The view from the top is almost always bleak. Bottoms up, though (have some ale, won't you?), and things are a bit better.

Here I have bottled water, blue. A bright green marker. Carboard, light brown. Cream-coloured walls. A red stapler. Blue and grey cables snaking around my feet. There's a garishly coloured rug under my feet that I long ago stopped noticing for the colour. A drop ceiling, too, flecked with some designer's carefully-laid-out pattern.

Things may be a bit hectic, but wouldn't you agree there's a genius in the details? In the colours, even?

Bits of news.

2005-04-25T00:53:00.000-11:00

First things first. You know that job that Mary was interviewed for twice in the last couple weeks? Well she took it. From an email, "Just to say, I presently employed by Ferro & Company - to start on May 9th. Whoot whoot." Now, that may not sound excited to you, but trust me, she is. And so am I! When she described it to me the night before, it sounded like a great place.

Some jokes are meant not to be said from the pulpit. Let's leave it at that.

Ravi Zacharias is coming to a pulpit near me sometime in the beginning of June. I really, really, really want to see this - does anyone want to get a posse together for a great day of apologetics?

It's the viral religion.

2005-04-24T16:14:00.000-11:00

A thought crossed me today, after I re-read my post about love. Maybe it's better as a question: Why is Christianity defined by an attribute, not a symbol or a style?

I think the answer is that God planned it that way. To be a viral religion, one that changes its face everywhere it goes, but keeps the innards intact. In fact, the burqa, the turban, all these outward manifestations of religion - they require a certain culture to exist. Or a certain sub-culture. You'll notice fewer and fewer Muslims and Sihks doing these things as time goes by, simple because they want to fit in. But Christianity already has the market cornered on fitting in.

Look at us. We wear jeans, suits, tank tops. We listen to rock, pop, hip-hop, opera, whatever. We drive Fords, Lexi, Volkswagens. And our choices aren't coherent in a symbolic sense. They're coherent - or, rather, they should be - because they're bound together by principle.

In India, they worship like Indians. In China, like Chinese. In America, like Americans. All that worship with a common thread of course. It's to our God, not any other; it's worship of a holy God; it's worship of a God who died and rose again; it's worship in both extravegant joy and deep fear. Sometimes a djembe. Sometimes a harp. Sometimes a guitar. Sometimes and organ.

That seems foreign sometimes. My ears are conditioned to the notes of my Hymnal, and the praise and worship of more modern times. But my ears aren't the only thing at work here - I am joined to those Indians, Chinese, and Americans at the hip. Or, more to the point, at the heart. We share the same election, the same virus. We are products of the fall, of course, and we sing in different languages. None of us are perfect in our worship, and our choices, and our lifestyles. Some do it better than others.

But that's hardly the point - the point is we all raise our hands to bring glory to the same Creator, whether in British Columbia or Prince Edward's Island. That, I think, is the most important thing. We have the same hallelujah coursing through our veins, us Christians, whether we realize it or not.

Somehow, I imagine God judging the timbre and cadence of our worship like an aroma. Fanciful, I know - but I see him sitting there, smelling a little curry, a little garlic, a little pepper. Watching his holy virus slowly recreating the world.

Sermon notes.

2005-04-24T06:05:00.000-11:00

Today, Pastor Vogel had a sermon about Jesus driving out the moneychangers and animal sellers from the Temple. I had a few interesting thoughts marked *BLOG THIS* in parentheses and little star thingies. So here they are.

The Temple was a physical symbol of something better, something that was to come later. This got me thinking - if all the death associated with the Temple was pointing to the something better of the Messiah, and the Jews lost sight of that, what does that say about Christians today? Perhaps the in all the hullabaloo about Jesus rising from dead and the church being formed, we've done exactly the same thing. That is to say, it doesn't end here. Our theology, our history, our church: all these things point to a future that doesn't really involve theology, history, or this church we see here. It's more the glorious now that will be, where the differences between Arminianism and Calvinism break down into a desire to just worship God, where the apex of history is Jesus, and where the church lives to party. Pretty cool place.
The Israelites went through the motions of worship, but it was vain, petty worship. It reminded me of the verse about clouds without rain. It looks good, but it's the ultimate strawmen. And the thing is, they may have done it all with great motives, stealing worship from God. And of course, the road to hell is paved with great motives.
The gentle teacher became a wrathful prophet, priest, and king, driving those moneychangers out of the temple. We focus on the love of God a lot, but lamb is also a lion. And the worship we do, it doesn't exclude fear and trembling.
Jesus (the one who would make the temple obsolete, cleaned it out before he died, leading the religious establishment to seek to kill him. I see two great ironies here. Jesus was greater than the temple, yet he stood in it, cleansed it. He was there, the thing that would eventually make the temple obsolete. But also, his very act of cleansing the temple made the leaders plot to kill hime. They plotted because they were afraid of their position - but the success of the plot, killing the Christ, made the very positions they sought to protect irrellevant.
Now we, the Church, are a temple that even the Roman armies can't destroy. And that just about said it all.

Love, love, love, love, etc.

2005-04-23T16:59:00.000-11:00

I saw this guy walking the other day, just walking down the street with a Rasta cap on. And from the instant I saw him, I thought he was Rastafarian. Maybe I was wrong. Who knows.

In the mall on Friday, I saw a woman in a complete burqa, nothing but her eyes showing. Obviously, I thought, a Muslim.

On my drive home from that same mall, I noticed a bunch of weathered old men sitting around, talking, brighly-coloured turbans on their head. Sihks, enjoying the weather.

And it occured to me that Christians don't have any of these things. Wouldn't it be nice to walk down the street and have people see that you're a Christian just from something you're wearing?

I had an epiphany, I think. It's all right there in the scriptures. We will be known, of course - but not by what we wear. By how we love. Primarily, by how we love eachother.

I forget this all the time. Maybe I think people will know me by my morality. Maybe they'll know me by my language. Maybe they'll know me by my excellent, coherent theology.

Maybe. But they should know me by my love. Can you imagine someone treating another person lovingly and being taken immediately for a Christian? Can you? Of course not - you and me, we suck at all this love stuff.

I have this feeling some days, when I know I'm downright cantankerous, or when I forget to speak rebuke with a soft edge, or when I ignore someone hurting. I have this feeling that if I never smoked, drank, cursed, or listened to my loud music, but still didn't have real love - well, frankly dear, the world wouldn't give a damn.

Yeah, so something changed.

2005-04-23T10:00:00.000-11:00

After about 12 hours of work figuring out how this all fits together, I present for your consideration my humble re-design. That's right - it's homemade. Hardcoded by yours truly, using only Wordpad, W3schools.com, and the blogger help pages.

And unless I'm horribly mistaken, everything works just perfectly.

Edit: the site still looks like crap in IE; I'm trying to figure out what exactly is the difference between the way Firefox and IE render things like CSS padding. Bear with me here. Also, a few miscelaneous fixes, such as the colour of links in post bodies. But nothing we can't deal with.

Edit Two: So, tonight I massively redesigned again, except this time I just ordered the code better and tried to avoid using padding a such. Why, you ask? Well, because IE6 calculates padding and borders differently that Mozilla Firefox (and, I might add, quite improperly). Thus, the site now looks slightly jinky in IE, but you IE users will have to live with that, along with your conscience. Get Firefox, chowderheads!

Life, and traffic.

2005-04-21T16:38:00.000-11:00

For a lot of people, driving is a pretty easy thing. You get in the car, and as long as you know enough to safely operate it, you drive somewhere. Point A leads to Point B, and if you arrive safely, you're done.

Simple, right? Wrong.

I supposed if you consider driving in an individualist sort of sense, you can really boil it down to that first paragraph; but reality being what it is, we don't drive in a vacuum, and the roads are clogged with other drivers all doing the same thing: driving.

In a very real sense, a busy road is a profoundly philosophical metaphor for life itself. There you are, in your car, surrounded by other people in their vehicles, all trying to do something, all governed by a sophisticated set of rules that some abide by and others violate.

But it's more than that, even. We're not all going to the same place, and we're not all trying to accomplish the same thing. Some people have all the time in the world, and put that fact on four wheels, all too often in the passing lane. Others are in a hurry to get somewhere, and break just about every rule trying to get to that place. Still others just love driving, and do it for the sheer love of hands-on-the-wheel, rubber-meets-the-road driving.

That road, taken collectively, is the sum of all those ideals. We take our philosophies and drive them out. You can keep going. What you drive says something about you. What are your priorities in a car? Fast? Loud? Understated? Luxurious? Practical? Indy-ready? Are you driving with someone, or are you driving alone? Is that because of circumstance, or because of choice? What do you have in the trunk?

It's not really all that important to know this before you put your foot on the pedal. Not really. But in the course of driving, maybe you'll notice it. And how profoundly it effects what you're doing. All your philosophies wrapped up like your fingers on the wheel.

And to advance a metaphor that Doug Wilson once used, driving is like being saved. You don't actually have to know anything about engines or traffic flow to drive the car. You just need a few basics. You believed. It was done. You got in. You drove. On the other hand, taking apart an engine or programming traffic lights is much like preaching that grace. You don't trust a typesetter with the monkey wrench, and you don't let the CEO program the traffic lights: that's why we have mechanics and techies, so we can drive the long roads without breaking down and running into eighteen-wheelers.

One more thing. A friend of mine broke up with his girlfriend yesterday. Suddenly, you find yourself alone in the car. You turn up the music. You keep driving.

Oh dear, we're not doing so well here.

2005-04-21T01:24:00.000-11:00

I'm evil. But at least more good than evil.

Thanks to Mark, aka Sage, for the link.

So this is where I belong!

2005-04-20T12:49:00.000-11:00

According to this quiz, I belong in:

1: Baptist (Reformed/Particular/Calvinistic) (100%)
2: Congregational/United Church of Christ (88%)
3: Lutheran (80%)
4: Presbyterian/Reformed (80%)
5: Anglican/Episcopal/Church of England (78%)
6: Church of Christ/Campbellite (78%)
7: Methodist/Wesleyan/Nazarene (72%)
8: Baptist (non-Calvinistic)/Plymouth Brethren/Fundamentalist (64%)
9: Pentecostal/Charismatic/Assemblies of God (61%)
10: Eastern Orthodox (60%)
11: Anabaptist (Mennonite/Quaker etc.) (45%)
12: Roman Catholic (44%)
13: Seventh-Day Adventist (41%)

Which is really a shame, because I've never had the desire to be a Baptist. For crying out loud, I said infant baptism, people!

DSL and monkey wrenches.

2005-04-20T11:36:00.000-11:00

My DSL is being wonky again tonight, disconnecting and re-connecting seemingly at random. This is not a pleasant experience of technology working in my favour. And here's a question for the ages: why can't Blogger perform a background publish and save me the trouble of having to sit around and watch a page refresh for twenty minutes? Just wondering.

This is for Kevin: I'm listening to the Foo Fighters right now. "Monkey Wrench" from the always-angsty "The Colour and the Shape". I like this song, in its own sort of barbaric, chaotic way.

Today was an unbelievably busy day at work. I was busy from the moment I got in at 7:30am till the time I left at 5:30. Which is just crazy talk - 10 hours of hopping. I'm taking a well-deserved break to do the laundry at home. And update my blog.

Also notice that I included a handy-dandy picture of me on the sidebar, because all the kids seem to be doing it nowadays.

And, finally, if you're looking for something to, check out my photoblog on the side, there, because it's got a pretty good photostory on it. Including a freezer that doesn't freeze, yet contains ice cream. I kid you not.

Other people say things better than I do.

2005-04-18T14:54:00.000-11:00

I found these in different places. You might want to take a gander, tell me if you disagree, be shocked. Whatever

Be positive, joyous, world-affirming; cherish great friendships, delicious alcohol, exotic marital sex, scenic locations, vanguard teenagers and red-hot music; sad-sack Christianity is oxymoronic - and moronic. Jesus reserved his harshest criticism not for harlots but for pharisees. - P. Andrew Sandlin

As I read the Bible I find in it a quite unique interpretation of universal history, and therefore, a unique understanding of the human person as a responsible actor in history. You Christian missionaries have talked of the Bible as if it were simply another book of religion. - Badrinath (Hindu Scholar)

Reason is always a kind of brute force; those who appeal to the head rather than the heart, however pallid and polite, are necessarily men of violence. We speak of 'touching' a man's heart, but we can do nothing to his head but hit it. - C.S. Lewis

You want to mess up the minds of your children? Here's how - guaranteed! Rear them in a legalistic, tight context of external religion, where performance is more important than reality. Fake your faith. Sneak around and pretend your spirituality. Train your children to do the same. Embrace a long list of do's and don'ts publicly but hypocritically practice them privately . . . yet never own up to the fact that its hypocrisy. Act one way but live another. And you can count on it - emotional and spiritual damage will occur. - Chuck Swindoll

Tolerance is the virtue of those who don't believe anything. - C.K. Chesterton

The Bible was written not to satisfy your curiosity but to help you conform to Christ's image. Not to make you a smarter sinner but to make you like the Saviour. Not to fill your head with a collection of biblical facts but to transform your life. - Howard G. Hendricks

Pray with your intelligence. Bring things to God that you have thought out and think them out again with Him. That is the secret of good judgment. Repeatedly place your pet opinions and prejudices before God. He will surprise you by showing you that the best of them need refining and some the purification of destruction. - Charles H. Brent

Speaking with tongues.

2005-04-18T04:15:00.000-11:00

To paraphrase Solomon, there's a time to speak, and a time to shut the hell up. Proverbs, always full of stuff like this, say, "A soft answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger. The tongue of the wise uses knowledge rightly, but the mouth of fools pours forth foolishness." Even James said his piece. "All kinds of animals, birds, reptiles and creatures of the sea are being tamed and have been tamed by man, but no man can tame the tongue. It is a restless evil, full of deadly poison."

That's the human race for you. So few words causing so very many problems.

It's like throwing a rock into a lake. Maybe the impact of the stone isn't that serious. But the ripples that spread outward, and they affect such a huge area it's hard to even imagine.

I've seen it time and time again. I've done it time and time again. Some stupid words, a bad mood, sarcasm. And suddenly a world of problems open up in front of you, and you wonder how they got there.

You wonder, but you always know. It's your dumb words, or your stupid attitude, or your ridiculous knee-jerk reactions. And it's easy to lie to yourself and tell yourself that they don't like you because they're all idiots anyways. They've got systemic faults. They're the ones with the stupid positions and ideas. You're an innocent victim, a martyr.

Of course, the implications are obvious. I don't need to spell them out.

On a totally unrelated note, a quote.

"You can safely assume that you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do." - Anne Lammot

There you have it.

Oh. We forgot someone.

2005-04-16T16:21:00.000-11:00

I eggregiously forgot to mention a certain person in my last post.

*slaps self*

Geof, current maintainer of the .net, is the bomb shizzle. You hear that, people? The BOMB SHIZZLE!

Now, back to your regularly scheduled programming.

Because you asked.

2005-04-16T13:07:00.000-11:00

Well, as it happens, I haven't updated for a while. But I have been thinking a few things while not updating. Some of them are interesting, some mundane. And depending on who you are, you'll find different bits those things and more.

So, some of you have been asking how I've been doing. And the answer is - quite well, thank you. The hard times have died down a bit, although there are days I feel lonely and, frankly, desparate, I'm keeping busy and I'm still surrounded by friends, whether they're from Toronto, Mississauga, Texas, Ohio, or Nashvegas. Also, the music is great. I haven't written as many songs as I have lately in a long, long time. And no, they're not all forlorn lovesongs. Those just happen to be the good ones.

I've read quite a few books lately. Ones you should pick up are "State of Fear" by Michael Crichton (a devastating, stunning treatise on global warming and the culture of fear wrapped in fiction); Tigana by Guy Gavriel Kay (high fantasy of the most distinguished sort - you really can't go wrong with Guy); The Testament by John Grisham (a generally hit and miss author, but this one's absolutely brillian); Sunstorm by Athur C. Clarke and Steven Baxter (this one's going to be a science-fiction classic... it has all the markings); and Spin by Robert Charles Wilson (the author of Blind Lake, among others; an uneven book, but the premise and the ending are interesting). Right now I'm reading The Risen Empire by Scott Westerfeld, a novel about interstellar politics, neural networks, death as an agent of progress, and how all these things might mesh together. Sort of a cyberpunk meets space opera deal. I'll tell you how this works out for me.

I've been thinking about blogging lately, and so has Jeremy Huggins, in a lecture given at Covenant College. It's interesting the things that he brings up, from the bloggers driving the church toward a more participatory function, to the blogosphere becoming a compliment to and even replacement for traditional media. Also, some of the points he makes about what sort of community bloggers inhabit are cogent, and leave me nodding my head.

One of the points he makes that I think is terribly interesting is the change in culture - again, driven by bloggers - from a behind-closed-doors, analyst-driven, pivacy culture to a cathartic though-sharing culture. It's an interesting thought. And it illustrates the divide that technology creates between generations, now, more than in the past. Most parents can't understand why their children want to blog - generalization, I know, but true as far as I can tell. Why post your thoughts on the internet? Why let people know what you're thinking, what you're feeling? Aren't you supposed to keep those things to yourself, ponder over them in private, and come to some sort of conclusion with the help of a few close friend, maybe, sometimes?

I don't know. It sure doesn't sound like that's the way it should be. I mean, back in the day when people used to live in small tribes and villages, information sharing was an essential part of existance - you worked together, or you died together. If one person had a problem, the whole tribe had a problem. That something, I think, that's been lost over the centuries - the fact that we live in community. And though I've been part of some crappy and some good communities, the fact is that it's essential to our wellbeing as humans. Bloggers, I think, recognize that; it's got to be at least part of the reason for having a blog. But bloggers have to realize that their community is largely artificial, too, much like people that go to church once a week and smile with eachother about trivialities. What's the difference? A community can't be bases on deceit, or even on neglect.

Like, when I post something here, you're seeing what I choose for you to see. Let's be honest with eachother - this is not an internal monologue. It's an external, filtered lifelogue, if there is such a word. And you don't see what I don't want you to see, unless you're an extremely talented empath. Of course, I may never lie to you on this blog. I may, however, neglect to say things about myself. Maybe I'll delete a passage because I know it might offend some who read. Maybe I tailor what I write to the people that read. Who knows? You certainly don't.

In that sense, I think the community blogging creates is artificial. I'd much rather see a community build around an existing community. For instance, if you have a message board build around a theme where like-minded people gather, meet eachother, and generally get to know eachother in a very real sense - build a network of blogs around that. It compliments the existing structure. You could do it with your church. Or your group of friends.

Take the Rumor Forum. I know a lot of people on there from talking to them on the boards, instant messaging them, and even talking to them on the phone. And at the next big .net meeting, I'm going to be there, and I'm going to meet these people face to face. I don't think I'm going to be in for any real suprises. But you know what the strange thing is? I really do care about these people. Really. There are people who live in Ohio and Nashville and Memphis that I feel closer to than most of the people in my very own church. You might think that sad - but it the reality of an age where people are as connected as we are today. When these people go through stuff in their lives, I pray for them. I feel their pain.

I ask myself the question a lot: why? Why is it that I can feel kinship with people that are 500 kilometers away from me? Is it because I'm some kind of internet loser? No. Tonnes of people have this same feeling. Is it because it's easy, and I can diconnect whenever I feel like it? I don't think so - why would I spend time thinking about them when I'm not online? Is it because we mostly have common interests that draw us together? Sometimes - and that's a good starting place, but it's not enough.

It's all very interesting. I don't know the answers. But I guess that time and the progression of technology will eventually hold them. At least in hindsight.

Back to the idea that bloggers like to participate. I'm playing hand drums and percussion at a good Pentacostal church tomorrow morning. I love doing that, not for any glory of my own, or even the rush of playing - my motive is, I think, that it makes me feel plugged in to something bigger than I am, in a way that merely singing hymns and listening to a sermon, frankly, do not. Call it postmodern of me if you will, but I have talents and gifts, and I must excersize them in some capacity. So I get out of my circles to do it. And it's good. I think the next big challenge for my church is going to be keeping the youth; but not the way it used to be - keeping them from running with the wrong circles, and keeping them from being pre-occupied with earth. It'll be more of youth feeling disenchanted with the fact that the church exists with or without them. Right now, someone saying "it wouldn't be the same without you" is merely lip service, even if it's cosmetically a truism. I think what the Blogculture is going to want is a church that is emphatically not the same without them - they're investing in the structure of the church, integrated into the core of its being, and invited to be and do what they can for it.

I once expressed these things to an elder of a church long ago. He though I was talking about recognition - the idea that my ego needs to be fed by the church. In retrospect, that kind of thinking is a tragic mistake. I don't want my ego fed, dammit! That's the last thing I want, and most certainly the last thing I need. What I, and others of my generation are looking for is primarity belonging, and a sense of being needed is one facet of that desire that manifests itself primarity before any others. It's the idea that any social structure is partly the sum of its members - and the church, although ordained by God and called to be in community, is exactly that. A social structure. It has a base of commonalities that exist through the ages, but at the end of the day, churches now don't resemble churches then simply because the society and people have changed. And that's not wrong - it's exactly how it's supposed to be.

Part of the church's mandate (as a community, not as a social structure) is to meet people's needs, and scripturally that means eachothers need first and foremost. The question, then, becomes, "How are we as a Church and as a community going to meet the needs of people who feel deeply committed to being involved?" And in my opinion, that's going the be one of the critical questions in the coming decades - one that, in fact, far surpasses questions of doctrine and procedure. Simply because doctrine does not make good communities. Nor does procedure.

Now, after all that talking, a shift of gears. This week I bought a pink shirt. It is beautiful.

I would like to give a big shoutout to all my people: Laura, Nick, Kevin, Sarah, Lori, Jamie, Mary, _Steve, and of course, the Brotherhood of Mystery. Vampy and Roger - you all make the world go round. (In another age, I would have called you my homeboys. Thankfully, that age, and the Fresh Prince of Bel Air, is long gone.)

Songs, thirty-one poems, scattered photographs.

2005-04-06T14:14:00.000-11:00

I'm listening to some songs right now that remind me of a lot of things. Goo Goo Doll's "Iris", MWS's "Love of My Live", assorted John Mayer, The Shins' "Pink Bullets".

I thought maybe the lack of contact would help. I was wrong. This is harder now than it was a month ago. No email for weeks. No church because of the weather. Just a bunch of songs, thirty-one poems, and scattered photographs.

Like the Shins said:

I was just bony hands as cold as a winter pole
You held a warm stone out new flowing blood to hold
Oh what a contrast you were
To the brutes in the halls
My timid young fingers held a decent animal.

Over the ramparts you tossed
The scent of your skin and some foreign flowers
Tied to a brick
Sweet as a song
The years have been short but the days were long.

Cool of a temperate breeze from dark skies to wet grass
We fell in a field it seems now a thousand summers passed
When our kite lines first crossed
We tied them into knots
And to finally fly apart
We had to cut them off.

Since then it's been a book you read in reverse
So you understand less as the pages turn
Or a movie so crass
And awkardly cast
That even I could be the star.

I don't look back as much as a rule
And all this way before murder was cool
But your memory is here and I'd like it to stay
Warm light on a winter day.

Over the ramparts you tossed
The scent of your skin and some foreign flowers
Tied to a brick
Sweet as a song
The years have been short but the days go slowly by
Two loose kites falling from the sky
Drawn to the ground and an end to flight.

They said it best, I think. That is all.

The right to keep alive.

2005-03-30T11:39:00.000-11:00

I don't sound off on political and social issues that often, and when I do it's usually with a bang. But this time I'll be short, mostly because I don't enjoy talking about this, and it demands a certain sensitivity.

Let Terri Schiavo die.

There, I said it. Let God do what he would have normally done - take the woman and deal with her soul. She's not alive, not by any objective standard of life. Man and medicine have managed to keep her bodily functions working, and keep her fed - but for what purpose?

I've heard people condemn those doctors who removed the tube as "playing God". Maybe. But only because someone played God before, and put the thing in. God gives, God takes away. That's a central maxim of the scriptures. One of the things he gives and takes away is life. For a reason.

Man has played God by artificially prolonging the life of a person who will die if the artificial means are eliminated. And unlike life-saving surgery or antibiotics (both of which help the body do what the body is supposed to do to a healthy person), this person, Terri Schiavo, gains nothing from it. She remains objectively dead already.

Even if she could, she wouldn't feel herself slowly dehydrating to death. It seems modern science has taken care of that, too.

How to lose a credit card in ten days. The sequel of the sequel of the sequel of the other two bits.

2005-03-29T01:42:00.000-11:00

So yeah. Like Emeril, I've decided to kick it up a notch. Take it to the next level. Of course, if I keep doing that, I'll end up robbing banks with a sharpened credit card. It's true, kids. Don't fool around with credit cards. You heard me.

Today, a personal message to one of my friends:

You may not know him, but he's the Big Hot. And he's Joshewah. And he didn't ask me to do this - so it's just like flowers for no reason!

Okay, I'm scaring myself.

Anyways, here's what I like to see as an "open casting call", and also a way for my beloved audience to get their hands on some of the action, if only vicariously, like watching an exciting movie about credit cards and the daring, heart-stopping adventures of the people who own them.

If you have a good idea for what I should do with my Mastercard and a pen, and that something isn't origami, I'd absolutely love to hear from you.

Look at all the pretty links!

2005-03-28T14:40:00.000-11:00

For those of you who enjoy being casual readers of this blog, I'd like to point you to all the wonderful links on the sidebar of this page. Guess what - there's all kinds of stuff going on there, too! For instance:

dxsongs features the depressing Hope: Moving, which seems to be about motion, or maybe about carrot flowers. We can't be sure.

...all horrified to find
that smile breaking through,
as if to say love you love
or you love to... (read more)

dxpoetics is looking pretty updated, seeing as Thirty is a large number and also a fiery poem.

She smoulders, struck
in a lighning second -
sputtering sabbath candles
resurrected... (read more)

Also in the news today is the fact that blogger seems to enjoy eating my posts. Perhaps because my words resemble alphabet soup or some sort of exotic lasagna. But I post onward, update after eaten update, all because I care, and because CSI: Miami isn't really on right now.

But perhaps the best part of today involves money. I got my insurance renewal, and lo and behold, I pay about $100.00 less per month to put the rubber on the pavement. Which, of course means that the amount of drunken carousing I do will rise to an amazing zero days out of one hundred, but that I will get the darn car payed off faster. Now isn't that just encouragement beyond belief? Yeah, I thought so.

Found money, spent cash, visited places - those sorts of things.

2005-03-26T14:58:00.000-11:00

This Thursday I visited my local Irish pub for some scotch. Ironic, that, but it had to be done. Just wasn't a Guinness night, you know. I spent part of the night engaged in an activity I like to call "walking in the snow", considering how spring is almost on the cusp of being here. Mississauga was actually beautiful - and it's not a city that should be described in such terms.

Working is stressful, I realize thatso much more when we have a holidy like Good Friday.

And thank God for Jesus, eh? It just popped into my head that Good Friday is actually about something other that a bunch of chocolate and children running wild and then being given meds to calm them down.

So here I am, typing up a blog post from my friend Nick's house. We fed homeless people tonight, and there were about seven hundred thousand of them there, since the end of the month always seems to be the busy time. Something about welfare cheques running out or some such nonsense. We ran out of soup, ran out to the store and made spaghetti. It was a good time, and reminded me again of how much stuff I have, and how stupid my ridiculous troubles actually are compared to just surviving.

Tomorrow, it's off to Jon's church to do some good old fashioned drumming. Yeah.

A Cynic's Guide to Dating. Round Three.

2005-03-24T16:41:00.000-11:00

Okay, fellows. Here we are. You've all survived parts one and two, and roughly ten percent of you still have no idea what I'm talking about. If you're one of these, I suggest you devote your life to taxidermy. And for the rest of you, well, if you were hoping that this last installment is going to make it all crystal clear, welcome to the world of dating: nothing, absolutely nothing, is clear.

Wading into the world of dating is sort of like walking into a burning building. You either die, get burned horribly, decide your lung can't take it and leave, or walk out a hero. And, since we've already mentioned percentages, here's how it all breaks down: 30% chance you will die, 90% chance you'll be horribly burned, 37% chance you're a coward, and approximately 20% you'll walk out a hero. Now, some of you are engineers, and you're about to tell me the figures don't add up. But see what I mean? It's just not clear.

Also, engineers, most of the world doesn't make sense, and it helps if you accept that and resist the urge to get out Autocad and start a schematic. The schematic of the female mind, for instance, vaguely resembles a plate of spaghetti wrapped in string with a large helping of duct tape and barbed wire. And, if you manage to map it all out, you'll be seventy-five, and still won't have that woman you're looking for. Or if you actually read what I wrote instead of browsing over it quickly while listening to Radiohead and reading Slashdot, the woman you are casually, oh so casually glancing for.

So here's a quick recap of where we've been so far. We've covered the field of dating in large brush strokes. What to expect of women, and what this all has to do with wombats. Did that make sense? No? Good, because you're going to get a lot of that. We also covered what women like in their men. Okay, I pointed out a few things, and there will always be exceptions, but don't worry about that, because those girls live in refrigerator boxes, or devote their lives to taxidermy.

Today we're going to wade into that minefield of what you probably want in a girl. And let me start by saying that the thing you want most in a girl, is a girl. In these modern times, depending on the circles you travel in, the girl you think is so hot may either be a transvestite, or an Italian male. This is not a good thing. Hence, it's a bad thing. And on that somewhat disturbing note, I begin.

1. You're ugly. Face it. Males weren't meant to look good, except the ones in undergarment commercials, and I wasn't meant to say they look good. But that doesn't really matter - much. It's safe to say, however, that men generally settle on the level of attractiveness that they themselves posess, except that a woman can get away with not looking like a bottle of pickels a whole lot better than you can. Considering that females are generally attractive. You may end up with a girl that makes Mona Lisa look like the Charmin bear, but let's face reality here. It isn't likely. Just because it happened to me with my last relationship doesn't mean it's going to happen to you. Got it?

2. Besides, it doesn't really matter. If your woman isn't the prettiest or hottest thing on the planet, so what? As long as you've got some sort of attraction to her, things will probably end up just fine. Because at the end of the day you're both going to look like the rear end of an elephant, at which point you'll be glad you chose the elephant that doesn't eat beans. By this, I mean that character should score some big points in your books. Your girlfriend should be the Shaq or the Jordan of character, or at least the Shrek of character. Not the Rodman or Farquad of character. Pop culture references aside, this is pretty much all you need to know.

3. Let's roll with the character train, shall we? Some things you'll probably want are a spirit of acceptance, forgiveness, and a certain amount of ass-kicking, because you as a male need all these things. You have these things we like to call "foibles" and women like to call "annoyances" that need places to fit. You will do and say stupid things to her, her parents, and puppies. You will need you ass kicked. Also, that can be fun.

4. Don't listen to people who say you need an opposite character to you. If your girlfriend is the direct opposite of you, you'll end up hating her, unless you're a total numbskull, in which case she'll hate you. You want some common interests, some common points of view, and just a few things different enough to keep you and her interested. For instance, both playing hockey is a good thing. A shared interest. On the other hand, if you're both kleptomaniacs, you're not going to be able to help eachother become better people, are you? That's because you'll always be stealing eachother's stuff. Also, pyromaniacs, stay away from eachother. Heck, anything that involved the word "maniac" is probably a bad idea.

5. Don't get involved with career women, or women that don't know what they want. Or women that still love former boyfriends. Or women with crazy fathers who don't speak a word of English. Or women with older brothers who make you look bad. Or women with pet tigers. These things all speak D. E. A. T. H. to your chances of going anywhere, okay? Girls who don't know what they want will eventually figure out it's not you; girls that love former boyfriends will break up with you and start dating their former boyfriend even though he's a skank; women with crazy fathers, well, you figure it out, Gregor Mendel; and women with The Perfect Older Brother will inevitably dump you because you just don't match up, you cad. You probably want a woman who's independant, but not too independant and doesn't have a whole lot of baggage going into the relationship. That's negotiable, of course, but if you do happen to want a co-dependant woman, I'd suggest you just move back in with your parents and call it a day.

6. Women with interests are a priceless and rare commodity. Really. A lot of girls are content to live their life putting on makeup and calling it a hobby, but let me tell you how interesting makeup is: yaaaaaaaaawn. Okay, point made. If your woman has interests, chances are she's an interesting person, except when that interest is exclusively knitting, but even then you have a chance, especially if she calls her knitting "art" and it stands up on its own. Interesting girls, guys. Don't just settle for someone you can put on your mantle beside the bowling trophy. It also helps if one of her interests is "you". Really.

7. Does this girl laugh at a good joke? Good, because you probably resemble a good joke, but if she's laugh with or even at you, it's not a bad thing. A sense of humour is critical, because one day you'll find this llama in your living room, and when it spits at you, she's either going to split a side or get mad at the thing for ruining the carpet. Again, this is just an analogy, although it's been known to happen.

8. This, my gentleman friends, is the most important thing of all (not counting, of course, that she's a Christian and has a nice set of Godly assets). She must like you. If you're just the latest thing to come around, or if she's with you - heaven forbid - because you're pretty, this thing ain't gonna last, pardner. The girl, the woman of your dreams, must must must must must be interested back. Otherwise, convince her somehow that she should, or move on to other things, like a good single malted Scotch. Thank you.

And that, guys and gals, is just about it. I've exhausted my supply of witty things to say about females. The rest of it's just bitterness and cynicism.

A word to the wise, however. You're not going to follow any of my suggestions. You're going to make an ass out of yourself. It's probably not going to work. You're going to end up broken and weeping uncontrollably while watching Sleepless in Seattle. But you're going to try, darn it! Now - get out there. Make me proud by falling on your face.

How to get in trouble with a credit card, part the fourth.

2005-03-22T02:25:00.000-11:00

This morning I decided to kick it up a notch. Take it to a place it had never gone before. And that place was the time-consuming game of tic tac toe:

As you can see, I won against myself, but only because I'm extremely clever.

As usual, the East Indian lady that served me merely checked to make sure I was, indeed, using a valid credit card, and that I wasn't wearing all black and carrying semi-automatic weapons.

I begin to despair.

What to say when you don't have anything to say.

2005-03-21T16:04:00.000-11:00

Getting the tools done is a tough business. Sometimes they just don't get done on time, and the customers chew your ear off. Sometimes you get them done on time. You lose some, you win some. And tomorrow, I will have a nice man from Nova Scotia explain to me for fifteen minutes why exactly he needs tools, and he needs them now. And I will be understanding, apologetic, and explain to him that it's all my fault. Allllllll my fault.

I want to go to England. Just once, just to travel the place and see the sights. Eat the food. Walk in places where so many famous and fictional people walked.

Have you ever wanted something you just can't have? Yeah, I bet you have. Well, right now I really want a burger. And I can't have one, because there aren't any burgers in this house. Darn.

Memories.

2005-03-21T01:42:00.000-11:00

I have memories I'd rather forget, but are too precious to let go. You know them. Last night I was in that haze between being awake and falling asleep and for some reason I remembered watching The Bourne Identity and staring across the matress at you. Nothing but your eyes, a bit of sadness like saltwater in the corners.

I can't look at you the same, now. It goes back to those minutes. Your eyes are always half-sad. Sadness like dew at the corners.

The Great Credit Card Signature Scam. Part Three,

2005-03-18T06:20:00.000-11:00

Just in case you were somehow led to believe that cashiers and clerks all around the world had suddenly become consciencious between this and my last post in this series, you would be pretty much wrong. Sorry, people taking mind-altering drugs and/or licking frogs.

No, things are the same as always: I scribble something on the paper after they've given me my card back, and everyone's happy, unless someone actually looks at what's on that paper, in which case they've already given you your card (hopefully!) and you don't get your butt hauled down to the police station for some time in a cell while cops examine your ID and credit history.

So the other day, I at with my friend Nick at this fish and chips place just around the corner from my place. Great food, nice ambiance. Terrible service. So I decided to pay with credit and insult them by signing the receipt thus:

Like, not only am I Willy Wonka, but I'm terribly excited to be him. Because of the chocolate and candy and stuff. Now any cashier in her right mind can tell that I'm not really Willy Wonka, because I don't really like chocolate. Duh. I mean, really people.

Dating: A Guide for Cynical Men, Part Two

2005-03-17T08:44:00.000-11:00

Okay, so you followed the first post in this series pretty well, and you think you're ready to do things right this time. Well, fellows, good luck with that. Here's the cold and hard facts: you suck, and you always will. You have about ten thousand flaws, approximately a hundred of which are completely obvious to everyone but you. Trust me, your woman knows this before you know she knows it, which is when she tells you she knows it in a manner known as a "fight", or if you're the diplomatic sort, a "discussion".

So you're probably wondering, with all these flaws to get around, where are you ever going to find a girl that's going to put up with all the crap? That's the tricky part, but that's why you're listening to me and not watching Friends reruns. An aside: if you're taking any cues from television about relationships and the show you're watching isn't "Homicide: Life on the Streets", you're about to have a shock along the lines of sticking your tongue in a toaster. So don't do that, okay? Just trust me. The people that write TV shows have either been separated from reality for so long they wouldn't understand it if it hit them with a skillet, or understand it perfectly and have some sadistic desire that you never do.

So you're girl hunting. And you want to know what to look for, and how to look. I'm going to break this down into two sections. If, at this point, you're really confused about what's going on here, welcome to Hotel Bachelor and enjoy your long, long stay. Okay, for those of you still with me:

1. So you're looking. The most important thing - and never underestimate this one - you can do while looking is look like you're not looking. If women smell desparation, they run, except the ones equally desparate. And goodness knows you don't want a desparate woman. Some of those would marry a dishrag if there was a diamond ring involved somewhere. The easiest way to not look desparate is pretty simple. Just don't be desparate. If it's going to happen, it's going to happen because you're going to make it happen. You're just not going to make it happen right away, because girls aren't microwave dinners or pizzas. They don't don't get delivered to your door. In fact, they're more like free-range quail. I won't explain that analogy.

2. Be comfortable with yourself, but not too comfortable. That is to say, you like yourself, but you don't have a crush on your mirror. Most girls like easygoing guys with an edge of danger and a certain hidden intensity to them, except for the girls that like dangerously intense guys that can be easygoing, or intense guys that are easygoing in a dangerous sort of way. You. Cannot. Be. Boring. Because:

3. Guys are a dime a dozen. Think you're special? Wrong. You're a New York taxi: the same colour as every other taxi out there. It's the inside of the taxi that makes the deal work, not the fact that you're a blue or red taxi. In fact, being a blue or red taxi makes a girl suspicious that maybe you're not really a taxi after all, and reluctant to find out whether or not they're right. So what do you do? Be different, but not too different. If "you" is punk rock, mohawks, and piercings, make sure that your peer group is also punk rock, mohawks, and piercings. Every once in a blue moon, this punk man will meet and fall in love with a pink-bunny-slipper-wearing girl with a crush on Ricky Martin or whoever it is that graces the cover of Grabbing My Crotch Whilst Singing magazine, but you're not looking for once in a blue moon. You're looking for reality, and trust me, clothes make a little man, but those wonderful secret little things about you are what makes the girls drool. You're like a brand name - think, marketing genious, what differentiates you from every other guy on the planet? Find something. Nurture it. Grow it. Even if you never actually get a girl, it'll be worth it anyways.

4. Be mysterious. But don't be a giant question mark. Share up to a point - and then stop. It's like saying A New Episode At The Same Time Next Week honey! Play your cards pretty close to the chest. Don't be that blubbering girl-boy that practically pees his pants in public to get noticed. Keep your best features locked away somewhere, and show the teaser trailer every once in a while in some non-obvious way. You don't need to show a girl how wonderful and special you are by landing the Goodyear Blimp on her house with you suspended beneath it playing "Feels Like Home" on a grand piano. If there's any interest at all, she'll wait for the next shot.

5. You're not a supermodel, and only seven girls out of a hundred expect you to be one. Face it, girls are interested in things like Chequebooks, Power, Faithfulness, and Strength. Don't apply if you're a wimp. Of course, this is a generalization. Some girls are interested in the fact that you really love your work and are content making nearly no money at all. Some girls just love the fact that you have what they would call a "beautiful mind". Some girls just want a nice guy. But let me tell you something, gentlemen (oh, there's another thing they like), talk to girls who have some sense in their heads, and you'll find that some of the most wonderful guys in the world are pretty darn average looking. That's most likely you, too. You're moderately attractive, and that's enough, thank you. Guys "grow" on girls as they get to know them - your personality and a hundred other things will actually make you look better or worse in their eyes, and I mean visually. Don't try to understand it. Women's minds are attached to their emotions. It's a wierd thing, but it explains why so many pretty ugly guys get those gorgeous babes. And that's the last time in my life I ever use the word "gorgeous babe".

And wow, that was long. I'll have to write that second part another time, because gee whiz, I'm feeling like ten pounds of crap in a five pound bag. I feel like crap's crap. Like I've blown six sinuses out my nose, and I'm pretty sure I don't have that many.

Dating: A Guide for Cynical Men

2005-03-16T16:52:00.000-11:00

Dating has made me something of a cynic. Call it what you will - courting, dating, whatever - any non-platonic relationship with a female will most likely end in disaster. In fact, dating is a lot like playing darts with a blindfold on in a room full of crazed wombats. That is to say, it's difficult to get right.

So, with my extensive knowlege in this field, let me give you some tips that will save you some time, money, and pain in your future relationships. These are valuable tips, but I've decided to be a Public Servant and not make you pay for them. That's right. It's all because I care.

1. There are three sorts of girls in the world, men. The ones that don't care about you, the ones that hate you, and the ones that will hate you ex post relationship. Getting group one to care is no easy task. Don't bother. Getting group two to care, believe it or not, is easy: they already hate you. Hate is pretty close to love, except that hate involves less intimacy and more bricks in purses. Group three is a write-off. Don't bother. I know you want to, but don't. Unless you suddenly become another person and that person's name is Johnny Depp, they don't want you.

2. If you're so fortunate as to find a girl who cares and doesn't hate you already, good going. You're past the easy part. I'm going to assume here that you're not a gigantic ass and that you'll ask the girl out and not wait around for both your parents to arrange the deal, or for a giant tsunami to miraculously bring you together a la Hollywood. Here's the catch: dating is an expensive, time-consuming hassle. So you need to know where this is all going. You need an objective. A purpose. Do you want to get married? That's good. Go ahead and do that, see if I care. There's a whole bunch of good reasons to date a girl. However, if one of those objectives is to "have a whole lot of sweaty sex", go get yourself chemically castrated and have a nice day.

3. Once you've got a goal in mind, you've won half the battle of half the war of the rest of your life. Next comes dating in general. Now, let me let you in on a secret: every time you do something fancy for a girl, you've set a mark. And every time post-mark you do something fancy, it needs to hit or exceed that mark - which is bad news, considering that you probably suck at doing romantic thing for your girl. So, start small. Don't be flashy from the get-go. Big things are nice memories, but the small things are what flesh everything out and really matter. Here's an example: my first girlfriend just got married. So did my third. My second girlfriend is about as close to married as a llama is to a baseball bat, but this is all beside the point. I don't have a single thing that reminds me of this first girlfriend. You know why that is? Because the biggest thing she ever gave me was this teddy bear I nearly forgot about after I doused it in gasoline and threw it out the window while driving down the 401. Okay, maybe I just burned it in the backyard. You want to leave an impression that lasts longer than it takes for a stuffed animal to burn. This leads to the next point.

4. Girls will say things they do not mean, and you must regard them as such. Girls will say things like "I don't really care about flowers," and "Valentines day isn't a big deal for me." You've probably heard it before. What these statements actually mean is "I don't expect you to do anything on Valentines Day, like bringing me flowers." Here's the catch - unless a girl was beaten by a florist on Valentines Day when she was thirteen, she cares. So go small - don't buy flowers on Valentines Day, because that's just stupid. Do something else, something memorable. And if you can't come up with any ideas, give me a call at my 1-900 number.

5. Be spontaneous. Really. Those flowers you see me talking about? Don't buy them in obvious numbers on obvious days. Do it out of the blue. Get her one red rose. On a Friday, in the middle of winter for no reason whatsoever. You know what that says? It says, "Hey, I was thinking about you the other day. Not only was I thinking about you, but I care enough about you to express that through this gift." You think that twelve roses says it better? Wrong. Look at it this way: she likes the rose you gave her, and it's beautiful because of its simplicity. You think you get twelve times the appreciation when you have twelve times the roses? No. A dozen is a fundimentally unsound financial decision. Don't do it, unless you want to set that bar higher. Remember the bar. Always, always, always remember the bar. Women have memories like you wouldn't believe.

6. Be prepared for anything at any time. Relationships, and females in particular, are like a study in quantum mechanics. Things happen, and you can're always be sure why, and you certainly can't predict when. Your job is to not start fires, and to put them out when they do. It's called taking charge. You're not a hundred pound Dungeons and Dragons-playing wuss. But here's the tricky part. Sometimes you just can't fix things. You need to know when to let go. Let things run their course. If this doesn't seem obvious to you, let me explain.

7. Women do not speak your language. They say things that don't make sense. You, my friend, are a cryptographer. You're going to break that code, because that's how much you care. Sometimes, women say things they don't mean. Sometimes they don't say the things that they should. Sometimes they just want you to shut your pie-hole and turn on your ears. Especially when they're frustrated with something - they suddenly become this giant fountain of speech that you can. not. stop. So don't try. This is when you don't try to fix things. You sit, you stand, you lie down, whatever - but you listen. Got that? Good.

8. Her parents are probably important to her. They probably hate you. Try to get along, would you? Even if that means golf, or household chores, or complimenting the absolutely awful design of the new addition to the house. Unless your girl is completely self-sufficient and approximately sixty, you're just going to darn well have to do this.

9. It's probably all a waste of time. After you've done everything right and gone to extreme lengths and been the most accepting, gentlemanly, respectful person ever, it's probably going to blow up in your face and leave you back at square one. But this is a good thing, my cynical friend. For reasons that I can't reveal due to national security concerns. But trust me, you'll become a better person after it's said and done. And if you don't care about becoming a better person, well, you don't deserve a girlfriend anyways, so go move to Nebraska and pan for gold or something.

Some people make me want to cry.

2005-03-15T16:03:00.000-11:00

Read this web community's posts for a little while. Imagine what it must be like to be that way. To set your entire life in motion around a desire to look like something no human being outside famine zones should resemble.

One of the avatars on that site says "I desire perfection". The picture: protruding ribs, flat stomach, rail figure. And that's "perfection".

well i did ok today, i wanted to try to start that soup diet but my mom wouldnt let me, she said that i dont need to go on a diet and i've already lost enough weight...that's ridiculous...im just really sick of her right now she wont leave me alone, she wont let me go on the diet i wanna go on, and i cant go anywhere cuz i dont have a car...ugh i hate this

well today i ate...

apple not sure how many cals
soup 80 cal
cheez-its 130 cal

so my total for today is 210...not bad..

Read that -- does it sound like perfection? It sounds like living hell.

You can't even blame society for that. This is somewhere far beyond what society "demands" of the female body. And a whole lot of girls are going to look at that and go, "I don't do that."

But let me ask you a question. Are you on a road that leads to that place? Where you find satisfaction in a calorie count under 400? Are you profoundly disatisfied with your body? Would you like to change something about yourself? Ten things? Fifty?

You're telling yourself a lie, and you know it. I'm not talking about being a healthy weight -- that's fine and good -- but even if no one ever looks at you and says "you have the perfect body", you're still more beautiful than you can ever imagine.

Credit card, round deux!

2005-03-11T02:03:00.000-11:00

Yep, they still don't care what I sign on that receipt. I've got proof, and that proof is a picture. But not like you might be thinking a picture of a demon-posessed wombat.

I decided that if they don't care that my name is Spoon, There is No -- they're not going to care if I just squiggle a bunch of circles on the receipt. And, suprise! Theye didn't:

Yeah, you're seeing what you think you're seeing.

Here's a song. It is perhaps the best song ever. Really.

2005-03-10T16:01:00.000-11:00

This "Two-Headed Boy" by Neutral Milk Hotel - one of my favorite bands ever. It's played mostly on the downstroke with barre chords that start on the second fret. And it rules my shoes. Lyrics, anyone?

Two-Headed Boy

Two headed boy all floating in glass,
the sun it has passed, now it's blacker than black
I can hear as you tap on your jar.
I am listening to hear where you are,
I am listening to hear where you are.
Two headed boy, put on sunday shoes
and dance round the room to accordion keys
with the needle that sings in your heart
catching signals that sound in the dark,
catching signals that sound.
In the dark we will take off our clothes
and they'll be placing fingers
through the notches in your spine,
and when all is breaking
everything that you could keep inside,
now your eyes ain't moving now,
they just lay there in their climb.

Two headed boy with pulleys and weights,
creating a radio played just for two
in the parlor with a moon across her face,
and through the music he sweetly displays
silver speakers that sparkle all day,
made for his lover who's floating
and choking with her hands across her face.
And in the dark we will take off our clothes
and they'll be placing fingers
through the notches in your spine,
and when all is breaking
everything that you could keep inside
now your eyes ain't moving now
they just lay there in their climb.

Two headed boy, there's no reason to grieve.
The world that you need is wrapped in gold
silver sleeves left beneath christmas trees in the snow.
I will take you and leave you alone,
watching spirals of white softly flow
over your eyelids and all you did will wait
until the point when you let go.

Credit card yadda yadda yadda and such.

2005-03-10T01:33:00.000-11:00

You hear stories all the time about people who use unsigned credit cards, sign wierd things, or just generally make a mockery of the system. It's been done on the internet before, I know. Someone pays for a purchase with a credit card, signs a totally ridiculous signature, and posts it on the web.

But I just have to do it for myself. The tricky part is finding a corner store or whatnot that does two things: sells good coffee and also uses double sheets of paper so I at least get to keep what I've signed.

Luckily, I have one right by my house. Just one catch: no coffee. A pretty horrible little Shell station run by people that really don't care much about anything, including their horrible little Shell station. So I figured it would be the ideal place to begin. And begin I did.

As you can see, I signed it with one of those catch phrases the Matrix spawned when I was yet a teenager. And nobody even looked at it. In fact, the girl gave me my credit card back before I had signed the receipt.

Also this morning, I was talking to this guy that regularly hangs out at the local Esso I buy my coffee at, talking about the man who lit himself on fire in the back of a rental van yesterday. And sometimes, I've wondered to myself why the man doesn't have a car, why he's maybe 50 years old and takes the bus to work every morning and spends at least twenty minutes in the morning dawdling around an Esso Station. But what he said explained all that. He said, "Now they're blaming the cops. The cops should have had their marshmallows and weiners out and toasted them on him. Why didn't they just shoot him or something?" Which I guess explains why he has a dead-end, low-paying job. Because he's an utter moron. I mean, what do you say to a guy like that?

Hey today.

2005-03-08T15:15:00.000-11:00

Today I got to tour a metalworking shop, just to get aquainted with what they do and how they use our tools. It was quite interesting, actually. An entire cell of robots doing things like spot welding, arc welding, assembling, that sort of thing.

Me and my new guitar are getting along quite well. I strum, I pick, I make tunes and words to go with them. All I need now is a microphone and an audience.

The last twenty pictures.

2005-03-07T16:15:00.000-11:00

This one was a bit too wide to fit, darnit.

As was this pic.

Today was a thing that happened in my head yesterday.

2005-03-05T16:05:00.000-11:00

I went out with Nick today. I bought a guitar, and wrote a whole bunch of not too terrible songs. It's a great guitar, black, with a round back and great action. Bright, too, just like my old one. Now, of course, I need to save up for an amp and some cords and such. But I'm very glad I bought it. I need something to invest time in right now.

Idols are interesting things, aren't they? Where they pop up, and how you can trade one for another one with such ease. You get rid of Ba'al, only to keep the building that housed him. You get rid of Asherah, but keep the grove. You're forced to give up the present, but instead end up worshipping the future.

And God works in mysterious ways. I don't understand him. I don't get the plan - and maybe I never will. Who knows. Maybe it's all way too far above my head to actually grasp in these tiny little hands. Maybe it's something to wrestle with, until it touches your hip and calls you Israel. Maybe it's a rock to lay you lay your head on and dream heavenly ladders and angels.

Maybe I'll look back on my life before I die, provided I'm granted that long, and see the overarching purpose of it all. And maybe it'll be God saying, "No, me first. Not that, not now. Me, now. Don't grow toward that. Grow toward me."

Maybe I'll die in peace, having run the course of my own river, the one that carries so many other people with it.

Something I thought.

2005-03-04T19:05:00.000-11:00

I was reading Jamie's blog, and I came to the expression "find myself". This set off a trail of thought in my head that goes a little something like this:

People are pretty much who they are by the time they're 14-16, generally. Some people a bit earlier, and some people a bit later. But the fibre of who you are is knit in those times, and you spend the rest of your life either running from that or accepting it and working with it. It's not like you can't ever change anything about yourself, but even the fact you might want to change something about yourself is probably a result of those formative years of your life.

It begs the question then. How does one find oneself? One already is oneself. How do you set off on a grand adventure to the great unknown to look for something that you aready are, only to find at the end of it all that you're still the same damn person you always were, just in a different place?

It's a good question, and needs to be asked in an age of pop-psychobabble. I think it really means something else altogether. People that set out to find themselves generally set out to find purpose, not some inner psychological place they need to get in touch with before they can lead proactive, fulfilled lives.

But how do you ever find a purpose in your life? What will you feel like fulfills you? When the adventure is over, what do you find? The things that give you purpose were already there since you were fourteen. Really what I'm saying is that your purpose is not something that determines who you are; who you are is exactly the thing that determines in what you will find your purpose. It's simply inescapable, and I think moderns and postmoderns would do well to bear it in mind.

Not to mention the fact that you'll never find a true purpose in yourself anyways! Where does a man or woman find purpose, real purpose? Well, in God, stupid. The chief aim of your life is what? Right - to glorify God and enjoy him forever. And until you do that, you can set off for a hundred different expiditions to a hundred different places and still be exactly the same person you were before, just with some new insights and experiences.

I honestly believe that most people can find fulfillment most places they look. Some places may be better tailored for certain types of people, but the plain facts are that modern man is much too provincial in his thinking. We tend to say, "Oh, well I need the perfect job, one that I love," and forget that a variety of people can be completely happy doing a variety of things if they'd just let themselves be content in the place they're at. Life partners are the same way: some of them are a perfect fit, and others aren't at all. But I'd be comfortable saying that the vast majority of people are compatible with the vast majority of the opposite sex. The defence invariably rests on "Well, don't you want better than good?" when they're completely comfortable with turning around and saying "Life is what you make it!"

Well, you can't really have it both ways. I suppose there is a bit of truth to both sides, in that you are who you are and you make your life what you make it, but the plain facts are that life is hell and most people are never going to find the perfect job or the perfect wife. And most people are never going to even know it. In fact, it's impossible that everyone have the perfect job and wife, because that implies an absolutely ridiculous one-on-one correlation to everything in the known universe.

So you want to find yourself, do you? I hope you enjoy what you find; you've known it all along, after all. And you want destiny, do you? Well here's an amazing plan for you to stick in your pipe and smoke: what if the amazing plan for your life is that you never truly find that perfect something on earth? Ever think of that? What if the plan is that everything in your life directs you to salvation and eternity by making damned sure you're not happy with the way things are? What if your life is a monument to pain? What if your life is a testament to others that putting so many chips on the perfect this or that is a bloody waste of time?

Ah, but Jamie, don't mind me. I'm a little angry right now. Confused, maybe. It's not you.

I hate romantic movies.

2005-03-04T18:09:00.000-11:00

I had the awesome experience of watching the movie "Hitch" tonight. It was good, but of course, it just had to have a huge helping of romance. I got caught up in it, and forgot about myself. It was good, just like when I played the piano Sunday morning. Singing along with Dead Poetic, those sorts of things.

I need a good long sleep. Really, I need one. I'm getting tired already, and it's just 12:14. And in other news, when I went to buy coffee today, the gas bar didn't take cashback, so I had no money.

Figure it out... it makes sense.

Earth, Again.

2005-03-03T15:08:00.000-11:00

My father is somewhere, smoking his last cigarette. Scrubbers will take the air, and we'll all breath it again. He calls it a celebration. There's irony in celebration by slow suicide. There's irony in the cargo bay, too. No tobbacco there.

The glass – I call it glass, a fond memory – is finally clear enough to see outside again, and I see it for the first time. Earth. It looks like Earth, at least. But the continents are different, the oceans and seas in different places. Three moons, not one.

I'm old enough to remember. Those born aboard are lucky to be young enough not to have to. I can compare the glory of that planet with the barreness of this one. Oh, the forests we'll have to plant. I'll die long before most of the saplings can even be called trees.

We won't be able to fish for generations. No cold mornings off the dock with tackle and a rod. Fragile ecosystems don't like fishermen, enough of a testament that things resent their creators.

I stare at the planet ahead of me. I will call it home for the rest of my life. And it looks beautiful from up here. Those young men and woman, they are blessed enough to believe the word “home” when they say it. Youth, beauty, optimism.

But I've come too far from the womb of my former world. The word will wring from my lips hollow.

There's talk of landing, settling. Many eager to leave the confines of the ship and get a taste of fresh air. There's excitement in the room, and for a moment, the scent of smoke and nicotine. The scrubbers adjust. The nostalgic smell is gone.

I close my eyes. Don't want to land, not really. I will, but not so soon. I want to close my eyes and imagine glaciers and the Yukon. Everglades. Africa. The Pacific Rim. Familiar tides.

I want to sit here for a while, sit here and pretend we had never left.

The fibre. The strings.

2005-03-03T13:59:00.000-11:00

Irony is, there are traces everywhere. These cigars. That store. This food. Today I went browsing through my banking transactions to make sure everything in order, and there they were. In order, out of order. Blacks, Toronto. The Marche, Toronto. NYF, Toronto. Somewhere, the pictures of Toronto. The courthouse. Nathan Phillip's Square. City Hall. Starbucks. The Edge studios. A grille, steam, melting snow. Transit fare. The subway. Chapters.

I can never go back to those places, not now, not ever. The intrusion would be sacreligious. The fibre of my being is knit into those places.

Starbucks in the Meadowlands. Books of art. One shelf of poetry. Pablo Neruda. Paul Auster. Robert Frost. Aerial pictures. Paris. New York. A child's first steps. A park above the city. Love. Opening the passenger door. Love. Leaves. The waterfront. Staring up at stars. A cup of tea, hardly touched. Perfection. A beach less a beach. Shells cracking beneath feet. Futures. Rocks piled on eachother. Frosty grass. Cold hands. Smiling.

The driveway. Breath white like bones. Snow squealing. A kiss goodnight. Adios.

Three

2005-03-01T14:57:00.000-11:00

Tonight I went to Laserquest for member's night... played a few good games. Maybe some of you know what it's like to not be able to sit around. Got to do something. Write. Run. Tag. Whatever.

I'm working on a short story right now. It's really going to suck due to the fact that I'm not a great writer. The only things I know to write about have already been written in various CountryWestern and Linkin Park songs. On the other hand, you can read my words backwards and become a well-adjusted individual with hardly any problems.

The phone isn't ringing. I want the phone to ring. Anyone. 905 615 8247. It's a number, and it works.

I haven't gotten any emails today, except from my former accountability partner. That felt good. "Yeah, hi. I hear you no longer need my services. That's too bad." Well, that's not the way it was, but that's the way it sounded to me, filtered through a rather backwards head. It didn't feel good, much like saying the same thing at the same time. You can give me back my stuff and we can read eachother's thoughts. Wow, I have a useless superpower. They should tattoo a big "L" on my forehead and call me Loserman or something.

I ate a meal tonight. It was horrible. I'm thinking of going IV from now on, because everything tastes bad. So hooray for today: I'm feeling a little acerbic. Don't come over; I bite.

Hello, friends.

2005-02-28T16:47:00.000-11:00

This is by far the hardest time I've ever had over a girl. By far. I feel like all the threads we've woven into eachother are being pulled out one by one. Like I was climbing a hill, only to find an unpassable mountain beyond it. Like I was brutally pulled out of the womb, and my first breaths are more painful than I could have imagined.

I feel like a failure. Again. Another one ends. Sure, this was different. Circumstances, faces, people: all these things are different. But the end result's the same. In some ways, I've lost my best friend, and any friendship beyond this is just an imitation. We'll be the ghost of what we were.

I have the pictures and the memories. For that, I'm thankful. The past has been beautiful, this four month stand. Really, it felt like forever. It was supposed to be forever - but it isn't. And going back to that place, the place where she was freshly minted in my mind as just a possibility - that's more than difficult. It's impossible.

And while my fought-for optimism fails me, I barely dare hope for a fresh beginning, that elusive someday. That's too much to ask, even of this beautiful life.

Well here's some news you can use.

2005-02-28T05:56:00.000-11:00

It's been a while since I've written anything here. It's been even longer since I've said anything substantive about myself. I finally have some news. Remember this post, way back in the day? Read it. Not so long ago, was it? Not really. Lots of words inbetween now and then. Lots of things have been said. All the good times. The bad times.

Ladies and gentlemen, the fairytale is over. After ever after, even. The short of it is that me and Mary broke up on Saturday. February 26, 2005. Cold. Our breath was in the air, white. It's hard to talk of, now, except dancing around it. Examining the event from a distance. I'll be a surgeon later.

Let it be said that she and I were gracious about it. Mature. We said the things that had to be. We left, the sea draining in both of us. It was a cruel birth, or death. But it was needful.

I can't seem to get warm anymore. I'm shivering. They tell me it's warm in here, but I doubt them - they must be lying. Turning down the thermostat. Opening doors. I haven't found sleep. Trust me, I want to - but I can't. I haven't eaten except some soup yesterday. I wanted to vomit afterwards. Not hungry, still.

I had a dream last night, and you were in it. You were happy. I told you I loved you. Woke up, and it was still true.

I feel like I'm living in a movie.

2005-02-01T13:49:00.000-11:00

Do you ever have a time in your life that feels like a movie? More specifically, one of those movies that repeats itself over and over again. I keep repeating the same lines every time; I just get better at saying them each time.

I found myself writing a song today based on a bridge from one of my old ones called "Merrygoround". I thought about the same things. I envisioned the same conversations.

But maybe I'm making progress. The lines of reason went somewhere. I learned something. I was honest with myself. These are good things.

The Post in which more than one person is present.

2005-01-23T07:31:00.000-11:00

Hello, Ladies and Gentlemen. I am writing this missive from my girlfriend's house because I'm bored out of my mind and the Rumor Forum s boring me even more. Come on, men, make the Man Board mean something! Anyways, I digress.

Today's post is authored by me and Jordan. Oh no wait, Calvin. Darnit, Caleb! Oh by the way, if you ever have children name them all really similarly so everyone will have trouble! Yeah that's a good idea.

So today's post will begin with me asking questions.

Dax: Do you like calendars?

Caleb: The only calendar I like is the one behind the toilet in the bathroom.

Dax: So, why that one?

Caleb: Probably because it's the only one I ever look at... and it has good pictures.

Dax: do you have a dream car?

Caleb: Let's say... let's go for... a Ferarri Enzo.

Dax: Okay, how about a dream girl.

Caleb: No comment.

Dax: Oh come on. Everyone want to know.

Caleb: Let's just say I don't know her name yet.

Dax; is that because you're afraid to talk to her?

Caleb: Nope. She's wears masks because she's so beautiful. That sounds gay.

Dax: Yes, yes it does. Does her name perhaps sound like how someone might write down a belch?

Caleb: Yeah, maybe sort of . A lot of her friends call her that, but um... probably not her friends.

Dax: So how about we talk about something else.

Caleb: Amen.

Dax: What's it like not to have any hockey this year?

Caleb: It sucks like crap.

Dax: You're a Leafs fan then?

Caleb: I depends what game's on... who's playing. I like Tampa Bay better.

Dax: You should go downtown and shout that out on a street corner. You'd get mauled.

Caleb: Yeah, but at least I was standing up for something I like.

Dax: I didn't hear you standing up for that girl back there.

Caleb: But maybe she's not the dream girl yet.

Dax: You mean she gets more dreamy every day until one day she'll be the dream girl?

Caleb: Yeah, maybe.

Dax: Aren't you a little young to be thinking about women?

Caleb: Um... um... yeah sure. That's the first thing that comes to mind when you say "girl".

Dax: "Um... yeah sure" is the first thing that comes to mind? Are you sure that's a good thing?

Caleb: Probably not, but as long as my family supports me.

Dax: Yes, well, your alternative lifestyle might be a shock to them. Choosing to remain single, I mean.

Caleb: Who said I was staying single?

Dax: Well then I have no idea what we're talking about. Let's talk instead about, hey, nice to talk to you, but I'm afraid I have to go.

Caleb: Yes, you were a very polite interviewer... and I'll sue you if you include anything I didn't actually say. Also, I am disfunctional and basically a boob. That's all I have to say and this interview is over forthwith!!!

Okay, I may have added a couple sentences there, but aren't you glad? Didn't it make things so much more interesting? I thought so too. Also, I'm writing this on a Mac, and I officially like the way Macs look and hate the way they function. Thank you.

Interview With a Pirate

2005-01-21T10:53:00.000-11:00

I have been interested in pirates as long as I've been a child, which is pretty interesting considering I'm no longer a child. There's a mystery there that I can't quite understand, but that's alright, because pretty much everything's a mystery, including squirrels and pizza. Think about pizza for a second. Do you understand it? I didn't think so. Who can ever know the motivations of a pizza, or fathom it's dark sayings? What is the pizza trying to say when it brings forth a beautiful olive, or speaks in tomato sauce? Are there races of pizza that war against one another? Does a Hawaiian pizza come from Hawaii, and does a meat lover pizza come from a meat lover? Is there pizza on Venus? Is there pizza on my chin? Why, yes. Yes there is pizza on my chin. Note to self: shave off long flowing beard.

Speaking of beards, pirates have them. Remember the names of the many famous pirates that have terrorized the high seas and the MPAA: Blackbeard, Blueberrybeard, Flamingbeard, and the infamous Napsterbeard. Even the pirate Nobeard had a beard, although it was made from the hair of his unfortunate prey in the hills of Montana.

I've had opportunity to speak with a pirate, a real honest-to-badness pirate, a pirate by the name of Jimbeard. I sneaked aboard a pirate ship and was being flogged for stowing away when this exchange happened.

Mebeard: So what's it like being a pirate?

Jimbeard: Pretty good, and excellent cuisine, but the managerial aspects are mind boggling.

M: Managerial aspects?

J: Yes, totaling the goods we relieve their owners of, and filing false insurance claims. I also have to keep track of something close to six hundred thousand songs I've gotten from the good ship Internet.

M: That must be tough. Do you do any swashbuckling and shouting, “Avast me mateys! Board yonder vessel!”

J: No, though you just did. Mostly, I'm ordering people around, telling them to do things like “Swap that poop deck, and make it shine.”

M: That must stink.

J: Not really. I have a very nice office chair. Ergonomic, you know.

M: I mean actually swabbing the poop deck.

J: There're worse jobs.

M: I've always wondered about poop decks, though.

J: [shrugs] Not much to them, really. Just a bunch of boards.

M: But don't you have washrooms and such?

J: Yes. Very sanitary. Below decks.

M: So why have a poop deck?

J: It's just the way they design ships, I think.

M: Are pirates too lazy to use the washrooms, then?

J: I've found most pirates to be quite neat. Very tidy bunks. Fresh laundry, that sort of thing.

M: Is it called the poop deck because of birds maybe?

J: Birds?

M: In the rigging. You know, the guano?

J: Sorry, I don't speak Hindustani.

M: Well, the poop must get there somehow.

J: There's no poop on the poop deck.

M: Then why the name?

J: Sadistic engineers, I imagine.

M: Speaking of sadism, why have your fellow pirates swab the deck? That must take a long time.

J: I like it to shine just so. It's the way we've always done it.

M: Do you carry a large cargo of Q-tips?

J: No.

M: So you get the swabs by raiding other ships?

J: I've never raided a swab before. The commodity market for swabs is really low-margin.

M: So then how do they swab the poop deck?

J: With a mop, usually.

M: So you're telling me that when you say, “Swab the poop deck,” the only thing in that sentence that actually exists is the deck bit?
J: I suppose, if you look at it that way. I guess it was a marketing move to make the whole thing look more “wicked” for the kids. A gross-out factor is always cool.

M: That makes absolutely no sense.

J: Neither have any of your questions.

M: You're not really what I imagined of a pirate.

J: That's because we've been actively spreading disinformation about pirates to discourage all but the most hardy of skateboarders and extreme sportsmen from entering for a position.

M: I just can't get over the fact that the poop deck has no poop on it.

J: And that we don't use swabs at all.

M: And that you use a Mac.

J: You got problems with Apple?

M: The Ipod's too expensive.

Apparently Jimbeard was a bit of an iPod zealot, and took offense to the way I spelled it with the capitalization all backwards and whatnot, because he added another twenty lashes after he was done, and made me walk the plank to be devoured by sharks. Thankfully we had just entered Lake Ontario and there were no sharks to eat me. However, I did catch a bad case of flesh-eating disease, and can cook my own food by touching it thanks to the fact that I'm ever so slightly radioactive. Also I glow in the dark.

I think the moral in all of this is that I'm not cut out to be a pirate, even though I'm now in full possession of a wooden leg, a wooden pelvis, wooden kidney, and wooden eye patch. Thankfully, I've started breeding termites to relieve the boredom of being partially immobile, which I think is a smart thing to do.

Quotes found around the shop like litter.

2005-01-21T07:36:00.000-11:00

Lisa: When you're on a diet, eating crap is a good thing to do.

Becka: I love tubing.
Me: That's why we pay you the big bucks.
Becka: I'll get out of this hole one day.
Me: We all say that.
Becka: I'm going to travel the world and stuff.
Me: Ironic. The person that's paying you to work in this hole is probably going to pay for your trips around the world.
Becka: It's just because I'm a good daughter.
Me: Trust you and Kristin to turn being a good daughter into a business.

Anonymous: Don't get in my way, or I'll give you a tapeworm... mouth to mouth.

Steve: Jerry hasn't done the coffee run yet, has he.
Me: No. These are desperate times.
Steve: Desperate times indeed.
Me: So what are you going to do about it?
Steve: Stand around and whine.
Me: How very post-modern of you.

Me: Exciting... you're officially in charge of making that part round and smaller -- at the same time.
Stu: It's nice; it gives me time to think.
Me: Let me see, what would I think about if I were you? ... Food.
Stu: Woman.
Me: Nope, definitely food.
Stu: Cars.
Me: Definitely food.
Stu: Boolean mathematics.
Me: Calculus!
Stu: [does some rapid calculations with his finger] Eureka!
Me: I've solved the universe! The answer is... 9.

Steve: I guess you've never heard of George Michael, then.
Me: I've heard of him, I've just never heard him. Aren't his songs all about sex?
Steve: All of them except the song "I Want Your Sex". That wasn't about sex.
Me: It must have been about furniture.
Steve: I think so.

Me: I heard this saying: "Not all who are of Italy are of Italy." But I like to think of it as, "Not all who are not of Italy are not not of Italy."

Fresh Disaster

2005-01-20T07:06:00.000-11:00

This was going to be a post for tomorrow on DxBxPx, but it's too good to waste over there where no one will see it. I wrote this this evening.

I am fresh of the graveless waterfront
as a groundkeeper for this beach,
at least till I am swallowed by the moon.

I am freshly alive with life not my own,
with maggots that spill from eyesockets
and insects burrowing, jaw to bone.

But I am a fresh convert to the process:
yesterday I was born a ghost,
and today I till and furrow for the flies.

I am fresh, also, of a thousand places
all equally regal, all flushed with life,
all carefully tended;

these freshly cultivated twin sisters and brothers -
I have become a thousand teeming islands,
a million writhing worlds,

a universe freshly strewn with self-consuming stars.
Here, you will grow your corn.
You will press its flesh between your teeth,
and it will not taste like disaster.

This is how people drive in Mississauga.

2005-01-19T01:25:00.000-11:00

Every time it snows, no matter how little or how much, whether a dusting or a dumping, people in Mississauga forget how to drive. I swear, they have a memory blockage, and there's nothing you can do to shake them of it. This is why I want to have small missiles mounted on the top of my car; then I can blow these annoyances aside and drive like a normal person on the perfectly clear roads. Not 40k/h. Thank you.

Interview With a Herbivore

2005-01-18T10:16:00.000-11:00

There are many benefits to being a herbivore. Not least of these is that once dead, your heart will still continue beating into the next century. This has something to do with eating fibre, though no one's quite that clear on the whole thing. Another benefit is when everyone has strands of celery hanging from their teeth, no one really cares about it. In fact, herbivorous society as a whole cares less about hygiene than your average human, excepting of course information technology fanboys, who regard celery strands hanging from the teeth rather par for course. But I digress again.

Today I will be conducting an Interview With a Herbivore, one of what will I hope be a series of interviews with famous people, animals, and plants, not to mention society groups, that will continue long after my heart has stopped beating. To conduct this interview I sneaked into the middle of a group of herbivores using the pseudonym "Bob", a newswriter for the Outdoor Life Network.

Bob: So what's it like being a herbivore?

Herb: For the most part, tasty, though not without its side effects.

B: Side effects? Such as?

H: Methane, mostly. Different coloured stool, that sort of thing.

B: I don't understand. Stool? Do you eat stools or something?

H: That's disgusting. You could catch a disease doing that.

B: I know, so many people sitting on them.

H: Most people don't sit on their stool.

B: What else would it be for? I sit on my stool. That's why I bought it.

H: You bought a stool? Why didn't you just go gather some from a field? Way easier.

B: Because I've never seen a stool grow in a field.

H: Of course not. It's left there by animals.

B: Animals don't have stools.

H: Any credible biologist would tell you animals have stools.

B: What would an animal use it for? It's not like they need a stool or anything.

H: I'm pretty sure most animals don't actually use the stool for anything. They just leave it behind in a field or something.

B: But why have stools in the first place if they're just going to leave them in a field?

H: Because that's the way animal biology works. They have stools, they leave them in the field. If they didn't, they'd get bloated and explode.

B: So the stool is inside of them?

H: Of course, until they leave it in a field.

B: Why is there a stool inside of an animal? What does it look like?

H: It's because of what they eat. And that last question is disgusting, okay? You obviously don't know shit.

B: Is that the name of the animal with the stool?

H: [leaves the interviewing area]

I have since concluded that herbivores eat a lot of hallucinogenic substances. The conversation above makes no sense, and I provide no warrantee that any of you will understand it the way it is. If, however, you are a herbivore, I urge you to write and tell me what this all means. Animals with stools inside them, bursting or leaving the stool in a field: claptrap!

But until next time, stay clean, eat meat, and don't forget: stools are for sitting, not for leaving in fields.

Laura Malloy is a cutie, and that's all there is to it.

2005-01-18T04:43:00.000-11:00

Let me let you in on a little secret: Laura Malloy is a cutie. Now, you may be thinking, "Well, yes, but so is my Scottish Terrier." But Miss Malloy isn't a cutie in the Dog sense, but in the Girl sense. That is to say, she has adorable tendencies to break out in fits of Cuteness in places you wouldn't expect to find Cuteness, like a movie theatre parking lot, or Shoppers Drugmart.

You want me to explain? Alright. Laura Malloy likes to wear hip clothing of the GRRRRRLLLL POWER variety in public. We've all seen it, and it's powerful. It's the sort of clothing that makes the wearer invincible to things like Hugs and Affection. Sometimes Miss Malloy is seen wearing t-shirts with slogans on them like, "If you so much as touch me, you horrible man-demon, I will make sure you never have children for the rest of your life, and let me tell you, that'll be doing mankind a huge favor." These are not the slogans of a Cutie.

You, however, are seeing only one side of the dime that is Miss Malloy. You're seeing the superhero denying spandex. What you don't get to look at, hopefully, is the Cutie side. That's right. When she gets home from work or Conquering the World, or whatever else it is that Miss Malloy does on a regular basis, she slips on her pink fuzzy bunny slippers, dabs green face masque on her face (duh), lights candles, and sits down with a good cup of herbal tea to read Nick Hornby novels. Sometimes she takes bubble baths -- though this is mere rumour -- with mountains of strawberry-smelling bubbles that spill over the side of the tub, where she relaxes reading Nick Hornby novels, or the occasional Harlequin romance novel.

Another thing about Miss Malloy's Cutie side is that it likes flowers. Really. It likes white flowers that come in bundles that are given to her by boys. Now, this in and of itself is unremarkable, except for the "boys" bit. You know how it is in all those horrid romance movies I swear I've never watched: invincible superhero girl falls in love with geeky square-rimmed-glasses emo boy? It's like that. Miss Malloy tries to deny it vigorously by posting images of Gay Hollywood Stars on her blog, but to no avail. Her geeky corduroy-wearing emo boy is somewhere in this world, ready to meet her under Nick Hornby-like circumstances.

There you have it. Irrefutable proof in the form of refutable slander that Miss Laura Malloy is indeed a Bonified Cutie. If you want to go somewhere to detect subtle hits of her Cutieness, read her blog, which you can get to by looking over at the sidebar to your left. Left is that way. ---->

Coffee and water.

2005-01-18T04:01:00.000-11:00

Feel free not to care much about this if you will, but drinking coffee -- though it's a liquid -- is a self-defeating proposition due to the fact that it somehow steals water from your body. So no matter how much you consume, there's always a need for just as much if not more water, thereby increasing your liquid intake, no matter which way you slice it. If you're like me and enjoy eating, this means that you are already full by the time you get to a meal, and that just steals all the joy away from it. On the other hand -- give up coffee? What? That's crazy talk. So, I suppose eating just has to go.

Goodbye, eating. I knew him, Iago.

Here's a little recipe for all you bean lovers.

2005-01-18T02:29:00.000-11:00

This morning I had a little treat that reminded me of my Bean Crazy days of yore (and I'm sure a few of you remember the ozone hole that particular time in my life created). Stu gave me some Salt and Vinegar Chick Peas. Basically, the recipe goes like this:

Get a can of chick peas.
Open the can and drain it.
Rinse the peas and drain again.
Bake at 400deg until crispy.
Roll in vinegar and shake salt over, OR
Get some sort of s/v mix from your local grocery store.

There you have it, folks. A wonderfully healthy little recipe that doesn't sacrifice taste for anything else.

OMG WTF I'm addicted to the WEB LOL BBQ

2005-01-17T14:22:00.000-11:00

Hello, my online name is Mr Poopypants, and I'm an internet addict. I've been webless for six months now, and the wonderful girl I married in the meantime is posting this message on the web for me. I still don't trust myself to post it without being sucked into that world where OMG, WFT, LOL, and BBQ actually mean things, and some of them not quite good things. My tale is one of trial and hardship, but a tale also replete with the wonder of overcoming information addictions. To start off, a little history.

I began dabbling in the world of computing when I was a youngster, probably around the age of seven. The things fascinated me. I couldn't get enough. When my father -- bless his departed soul -- bought me my first 3600 baud modem, I was in heaven. I quickly joined several local Bulletin Board Services, trading files, and downloading at will. So began my transition to a internet addict.

A friend of ours introduced us to the World Wide Web right before our awestruck eyes, promising that it was the new way to order a pizza, dude. We surfed, we linked, we learned HTML, we were Alice in Wonderland.

The sad path to my addiction became evident when I neglected all other worldly pursuits to surf the web. I would sit for hours, slackjawed in front of a screen, staring at the information I was
scrolling through. I didn't urinate anymore: it took too much time. I didn't sleep, for pretty much the same reason. I no longer tended my beautiful flower garden outside, but that was because I hated flowers, and also because I wasn't gay.

After six months of this, my parents finally noticed that I was missing, and began a frantic search through the kitchen to find me. I wasn't in the kitchen. They searched every single room until they finally found me and woke me from my trance-like information-induced semi-conscious state.

But it wasn't enough: I stumbled through my waking life as if it were a dream, longing for nothing but the loving glow of my computer. I suppose they didn't notice this a lot, except for the fact that my father kept screaming at me about how I was "addicted to computers" and such. Really, I just found them very interesting; I would always reply that he was addicted to his stupid job, which was most certainly true, but rarely appreciated. Computers and information technology dominated my life until the day I got a girlfriend. She was so interesting that for a few moments I tore myself away from my CRT screen to stare into her eyes. Eventually, I wondered if we could somehow get her some cybernetic eyes so I could stare and surf the web at the same time. Killing two birds with one stone, I think I called it.

But through this all, my internet addiction continued to increase to the point where there was no point hiding it any longer: I broke up with my girlfriend, taking solace in the hum of my hard drive. During this period, many exciting new technologies came into existence, such as the Universal Serial Bus, an operating system names Linux, and the evolution the DVD-ROM. Instead of sating my increasingly ravenous desire for new technologies, these advances merely exacerbated the problem, making me dependent on forever increasing my knowledge, constantly buying more electronics, and spending more time online in chat rooms with my Slashdot-reading geek friends, none of whose real names I actually knew.

Alas, it all came to an end in a "snow crash" of sorts, in the great electrical outage of 2003. I had no recourse but to escape the cloying recesses of my cave-like dwelling and surface for a taste of what mother nature had to offer. Little did I know that Mother Nature was more like a mafia hitman than a true mother, as I developed several nasty skin rashes, was sunburned, and found myself surrounded on a regular bases by man-eating insects of the blood-sucking variety.

It was exhilarating. Unlike online games I had been playing, the parameters were as wide as the imagination: I may have been a +3 geek, but I found my Outdoorsman and Survivalist skills sorely lacking.

I've never gone back. Oh the life! I've climbed mountains, walked the urban landscape, taking plane rides to exotic destinations, and had the time of my life, quite literally. And I'm never going back, either. Never. I will not touch the internet ever again. And I urge you to join me. Take your fat fleshy fingers off your mouse and keyboard and get back to Real Life. It doesn't matter how you do it. Just remember the advice of my father:

"You're a fat, internet-addicted slob! When I was your age, I had already learned how to fix 2 different models of cars! I nearly froze my fingers off one night fixing my car and I haven't been able to feel them since! No on in our family has ever been fat! Why are you fat, you stupid slob? You could be doing so much with your life. Look at your sister. I know she's callously manipulating me into giving her money, and that she really thinks I'm a misguided blowhard, but she's getting All This Stuff Done! All you've ever done is waste your life on computers? Where did that ever get Bill Gates? Huh?"

Yeah, that's what I'm talking about.

Tolerance: the next state religion.

2005-01-17T06:16:00.000-11:00

The Royal Bank is giving out diversity flags at their branches, but not to customers. Oh no. To their employees, as an internal show of support for diversity. Rah rah, diversity. It's the rhetoric that makes Canadian politics and society revolve, but what does it actually mean? These "diversity symbols" are causing a fracas (I like that word, by the way), naturally. What if you don't have one? Does that mean you don't support diversity? Subtitle: you rat bastard son of a communist. So everyone has to have a diversity flag and bow at the altar of peer pressure and Canadian rhetorical idolatry.

But here's the question: where's the diversity in these actions? Why should one expect uniformity of opinion when it comes to diversity? Why not diversity of opinion when it comes to diversity? Or is diversity only tolerated along narrow margins, such as if you're homosexual? Well, it's okay to be diverse and pluralistic if you're the latest en vogue cause, but not alright if you're, say, and evangelical Christian that happens to know that truth exists.

This, my friends, is why I hate plurality. It's not only incoherent, but fundamentally unlivable: you can't tolerate and accept everything as equal because you've already defined into existence the terms of your argument. There is truth, it just happens to be the One Truth to Bind Them All, that is to say that every other
so-called truth is subject to Plurality and Diversity and Tolerance and Multiculturalism.

I have no problem with people exercising their own religions around the corner from me. Really, I don't. They probably don't have much of a problem with me doing the same. We even prosoletyse each other on the odd occasion. What I dislike is the faux-intellectual postmodernist idiot coming along and telling me and my peaceably religious friends that we somehow violate their Holy Grail of Tolerance, and by doing so we have sown the seeds of war in our society.

Let's be clear: Tolerance needs terms, and it needs guardians. When you let individuals do as they please when it comes to religion as long as they're not starting jihads, you attain at least some sort of resting state, where the government need not interfere. With Tolerance, one needs to enforce it somehow. There needs to be some way of weeding out the horrid Intolerant Christians, Muslims, and whatever else comes along. Frankly, Tolerance becomes the unofficial state religion, and the state become the totalitarian guardian of that religion. Until then, Tolerance is merely another truth claim amidst a sea of truth claims; an attractive one, yes, and much more simple, but all the more easy to disprove.

And this post went on much longer than I thought it should...

Rather random thoughts. Really. Quite random. No thread here.

2005-01-12T04:11:00.000-11:00

It's odd. People in my circles tend to dislike pointing out flaws in other people. I'm not talking about nitpicking here, but when others genuinely see a fault, but don't point it out. Are we sort of post-modern this way? Afraid of genuine honesty? Scared or reciprocation? Or is it some innate understanding that if I point out an area that needs work, I'm open to the same critique? Well, I think the same principle that applies to art, music, and movies would apply here: you don't have to be a painter, musician, or film director to understand what is and is not a good film.

A survey recently disclosed that marriages based on friendship are the ones that last. And out the window goes this thing dating "experts" have been telling us for so long, that just friends should stay that way. Of course, not dating a friend is probably mostly a reflex so (in the case of society at large) you can screw them and not have to personally deal with the consequent emotional attachment; or, in some other cases, just plain fear. Date a friend, guys... it's not so hard or complex as it sounds.

Steve's children love the movie Monsters, Inc. Heck, I love that movie. It's cute, it's funny, and it has alternate dimensions and incredible imagination. That's one thing that other Pixar movies just didn't have: they followed the Disneyesque tradition of anthropomophizing anything (including clocks and candlesticks!), a pretty easy place to get when speaking in imaginary terms. It's not difficult to see how a butterfly could talk where it's quite a bit more ingenious to take a simple child's myth and turn it into a full-blown feature. They have my respect for that.

I am rejecting cool. Cool is a myth, a status symbol. It's like being Nobility in 1700s England: a positional good, something that's by nature positive. Frankly, you can never be cool. Even people trying to be anti-cool are feeding the cycle: look at how often the anti-cool has become the new cool! Even if you are "cool", you're probably just cool in your local surrounding, where cool can be anything from wearing a skinny tie to church, to buying a freaking huge rifle in Alabama. And when you are cool, you have to move on from that point, cause even if you attain that level, everyone is probably attaining it at the same time, which makes it quickly uncool. You want to be cool? Okay, but you're chasing a moving target: good luck with that. You'll probably be spending a lot of money on that ride. Here's a though: don't feed consumerism. Don't "dare" to be different. Everyone else is already different in the same way. Instead of daring to be different, dare to be the same. And if that means wearing a grey flannel suit and an undershirt, dammit, you do that.

You know, if you're a girl without a boyfriend or husband and you want one, don't be afraid to admit it. It's a good thing to want. Having a husband (unlike being cool, and only if you're a girl) is a fundimental positional good. And that was a pun. But only like six of you actually got it, and you're groaning or gagging. I don't know which.

I think I've become too reliant on smileys to tell me what emotion a piece of writing is written in. Also, to reliant on them while writing. Maybe stuff on the web should be more straightforward or something, but there you have it.

A sister of mine tells me that my blog is boring. So I'm thinking maybe I'll put up a few pictures of Colin Farrel or that elf guy from Lord of the Rings. And a loud dance track. And fashion tips. And a "what's hot and what's not" or "what's hip/what's square" or "wired/tired/fired". This paragraph has been brought to you by the Extreme Sarcasm Channel.

Oh, by the way, no one's forcing anyone to read this bloggity. Really, you don't have to.

Last thing: remember that I welcome your comments. If you're posting anonymously, please leave a name or handle so I can file your name or handle away in the appropriate file. If you're not posting anonymously, congratulations, Captain Courage. If I used smileys, there would be one there.

I am Always Right, redux.

2005-01-10T17:29:00.000-11:00

Just in case you were wondering, there was a delicious flaw in my previous post on this subject. That beautifully crafted flaw was, of course, a joke. And if you didn't get the joke, well, that's too bad; I feel sort of sorry for your obviously lacking sense of humour. Also sorry that you can't read a blog with an ethic of at least a pinch of love. But the fact that I won't dumb this whole thing down just because some ignorant cretin wanders off the internet and calls me an asshole is another issue for another time (or maybe never at all, hopefully).

The fact is, my logic was circular, and evidently so; I've admitted I was wrong in the past: that alone proves that I my axiom was false, because either I wasn't right about being wrong, or I was right about being wrong. Either way, all Cretans are liars.

I find this problem crops up a lot not just in my little bursts of humour, but also amongst the secularist crowd, where this argument comes up a lot: "Well, I can't prove that God exists with science, or any other discipline, so he must not." It's as full of holes as a soup strainer, of course, because it fails its own test. How can you prove, by science or any other discipline that God must be found by science or any other discipline to exist in, through, or outside of reality? You can't. Most people, faced with this contradiction, merely become agnostic (which is like being agnostic about tsunamis until one hits your house: good luck Mr Denial).

But agnosticism is a hard line to toe. You can say that you just don't know, but don't you want to? At the end of the day, it all eventually comes back to what you pre-suppose the best way to true knowlege is. If you start from a purely materialistic, secularist standpoint (an assumption as circular as they come), you become an atheist. You've defined yourself into a corner.

The question should more legitimately be, "What is the way to find true knowlege?" In which case I'd tell you that the best way to find true knowlege is through Christian scriptures (also known as the Bible, a term I dislike, considering how it's been so often co-opted as to be almost meaningless). The agnostic's first instinct is to call that stand as circular as his, but the problem is that I agree. It is circular. It's just a bigger circle. That's the problem with logic: every bit of logic proceeds from somewhere to get somewhere. A lot of the from in our logic seems quite obvious to us until we start questioning why we can't logically prove our starting point. We can't even logically prove that we exist in the way we think we do, not even with the ubiquitous "I think therefore I am". What does "am" mean? Even if you think, even if you are, what then? How do you get from there to "the universe is a concrete place of laws and physical interactions; there is nothing else"? It just doesn't fit.

The fact of the matter is that it's right to assume that one exists; one needs to assume it to function. It's one of those things so basic to being that it needs no proof -- it's self-evident. There's several things like that, one of which would be "God", but I digress.

The point of all this is that the scriptures don't need to be proved because they are the starting point for true knowlege. While philosophers were off figuring out they existed because they could think (brilliant job there, Descartes!), the answer was under their noses the whole time. Even if you're not willing to admit to that, admit at least that the scriptures claim a sort of authority that human though cannot: that is, the authority of a divine Being who created this whole mess to begin with. Even on a purely assumptive level, without making a truth judgement, scripture has the edge.

When it goes past that level, everything else is icing on the cake. I don't believe the scriptures because they are historically correct (though they are), or philosophically sound (though they are), or poinantly beautiful (though, again, they are). I believe scripture because it is true. And the testimony of scripture is enough in and of itself to function as the basis for rational though. That is to say, I only really know because I believe, a statement that stands in stark relief to the secularist idea that one must doubt, doubt, doubt, and doubt in order to know.

Circular, you say? Yes. But a circle based on the authority of God, not the foolishness of my own unaided intellect. It all comes back to scripture, no matter how hard one tries to evade it. It is true then, that some people expect to see in order to believe, but truer yet that in order to truly see, one must believe.

Blogittyblogittyblogittyblog.

2005-01-10T16:56:00.000-11:00

You know, apart from everything that happens on the internet, one thing that bothers me is people that put their emotions, thoughts, and (mostly) problems on the internet and then get angry when anyone responds. I'm not thinking of any particular examples, just in general. The internet is like a public building, for the most part. Writing out everything about yourself on the web and getting angry at the feedback is like taking off your clothes at the post office and expecting no one to point or throw a blanket over you. Or take pictures and post them on the internet, but that distroys the analogy by making it recursive.

I mean, people, suck it up. I know that's not a particularly nice thing to say (and if you're genuinely mentally depressed, go get help), but there you have it. Talk about something else than just yourself. It helps. Unless you have the most interesting life ever -- and trust me, you don't -- why are you subjecting the denizens of the internet to it? Unless you want attention, in which case quit the whining about what people say back. Because you can't have your cake and eat it too. If you don't let people respond when and how they wish, they'll probably get pissed and stop reading.

If you want a diary or a personal journal, keep one in a notebook or in a text file on your hard drive. If you want a blog, give me some ideas or thoughts; be funny; be satirical; link to a news item you find interesting, a news item you think others like you would be interested in too; something, please, something other than your petty little gripes about the life you're squandering moping about feeling sorry for yourself.

Do you see that sort of thing on my blog? Yeah, maybe every once in a while. But not every freaking post. Frankly, my personal life isn't going to be appealing to anyone but my closest friends and a few random stalkers (who really need to pick someone more attractive and famous than me, thanks guys).

For instance, the fact that I have links on the sidebar of my blog is a tacit indication that I want people to read it, and if they find nothing of interest here, go somewhere else that just might be a little more exciting or whatever. Unless of course I'm so self-absorbed that I have my blog as my own homepage and use it as a portal outward to the great web beyong. I assure you, I'm not that narcissistic.

Anyways, enough of that for now. Just, please, think of the people that might read your blog. You have it on the internet for a reason. If you want prayers, ask for them. If you want feedback, ask for it. If you don't want anything of the sort, turn off comments, or even better, clear the blogosphere and get some real life friends.

I am always right.

2005-01-05T10:35:00.000-11:00

It's this superhuman thing I have. I'm always right. I can't think of a single time in the Exaulted History of Me when I was wrong. Never. Isn't that incredible? Wow. I'm so totally tripping out on this.

So I think, now that I've discovered this, I'll make me an axiom:

1) I am always right.
2) If you agree with me, you are right.
3) You are always right if you always agree with me.
4) If you don't agree with me, you are wrong.
5) If you always disagree with me, you are wrong.

So simple, yet so beautiful. Also, I'd like to remind you that if you think I'm not right about always being right, according to my axiom, you are wrong. And since I'm always right, my axiom must therefore also be right, so you might want to re-consider that. Yeah, you heard me. Yeah, you, I saw you there. Reconsider, and you might be right.

Re-inventing the wheel.

2005-01-04T16:25:00.000-11:00

Every once in a while, there's an invention or progression that I think is just great, because it seems so darn obvious that someone certainly must have thought of it before. introducing the Tweel. That's right, a fancy new-fangled way to make sure that I never have a flat again. Well, thank you, ladies and gentlemen of the R&D department. There's nothing quite as bad as changing a flat tire on the side of the highway in something aproximating -20 celsius: I think quite a few Canadians can identify with me here.

In other news, a tsunami destroyed Asia, or something like that. Apparently it's the largest natural disaster in all of recorded history, in both expense and expanse, and in regards to death toll. I can only imagine what might have happened if this thing had hit Toronto or something. Probably not as much death, but still, damage in the billions.

Speaking of which, even by the most conservative of estimates, World War 2 caused a total of somewhere near a million million dollars. That's a lot of money.

Hi, Steve. I don't care about your laundry room.

2005-01-04T09:12:00.000-11:00

So Steve, this guy from my work, just redid his wife's laundry room for her. And after approximately fifteen cups of coffee, he's raving like a loon about it. Like someone took the freaking Waldorf Astoria and stuffed it in there. Hey, guess what? I don't care! Not only that, he described it as "the laundry room that every woman wants". I don't suppose anyone might consider that a bit offensive? Like, oh say, everyone? Some woman want more than just laundry rooms, Steve, and by "more than laundry rooms" I don't mean a nice kitchen and to be pregnant with your children.

In other news, I am a werewolf and my girlfriend is a vampire, two clans who perpetually hate eachother in the tales of yore. How odd.

So here we are again.

2005-01-02T17:46:00.000-11:00

I'm at a friend's house, watching him watching a vapid and revolting movie, a movie named "The League of Extrordinary Gentlemen", which apparently features a League, but not much Extrordinary, and certainy no Gentlemen. Oh well. You win some, you lose some. They can't all have good taste. That's right, Nick. You have bad taste in movies.

So how about those times when the parents of your girlfriend gather around (all two of them, but still, it's like a flock of parents) and tell you stories of their youth and such? Interesting stuff, I tell you. I like hearing these things, mostly because they're hilarious half the time, and also because they tend to explain why these people are the way they are.

I got pretty mad at the sermon tonight. In fact, I've been pretty pissed off in general at the preaching and attitudes that no one seems to challenge. This is how it goes: "Oh Lord, save us from this evil culture, this godless culture, this horrible culture. Help us not to be tainted by the world. Help us not to become like them." Nothing particularly wrong there, except for my hyperbole, but if that's all we ever hear, no wonder we're so bad at evangelism. I know it's a difficult thing to be out there but not be like the people out there, to not be motivated by the same things that they are, but we have to be. Really.

To pray the prayer of the Pharisee in the temple, complete with hand-wringing over the state of the union, is not enough: if there's a problem, we need to change it. Is this not part of our mandate? To affect culture? We're salt and light in the world. We're charged with evangelizing the world. We're charged with taking control of the earth. We have the hope, like Paul says in Romans 15. It keeps talking about hope, hope, and hope; what hope do we have? Do we act like we have hope? Do we talk and walk like we have hope? We should. I should.

Not to get didactic on anyone's hind quarters, but frankly I've been wondering about the state of evangelical Christianity in Canada and the US today. It seems you have two extremes: either you're too far in the world, or too far out of it. It's either that people care way too much about the earth and things on it, or they just don't care enough.

I mean, things that we do on earth are important, and they have eternal ramifications (this is sort of a new topic, but it ties in). In our worry about whether or not we're spiritually minded, it seems that we're forgetting this fact; it seems as if we're dividing the physical and spiritual world up into two areas, labelling the spiritual good, and dissing the physical. I just don't see the warrant from scripture to do that. What a person does on earth is important, not just how hard he prays, or how many people he touches, or how many good works he does; but also how he drinks his beer, and how he paints his living room, and how he goes waterskiing. All of these things are touched by spirituality, and though one may seem as if it were more important than the other, there's a place for both.

This divide is the problem I have with John Piper. I mean, I normally agree with him, and I certainly agree with him that our primary purpose in life is glorifying God by taking pleasure in him. But that's not to say that the only way to enjoy God is to "not waste your life" indulging in petty pleasures, and instead sacrifice all the time given you to other people. It is to say that there's a time a place for everything, to help people, and to drink wine. To evangelize to the neighbors, and to enjoy reading a book. Life is enjoyable. God made it that way. There's a reason for this, and that is that your life, what you enjoy, all these things, they all testify to God and about God, and enjoying them, even revelling in them, isn't a denial of God's purpose, but an affirmation in his existance.

I know people who beat themselves up mentally because they're given so much when so many others around the world are given so little. Yes, help others. Do what you can with what you have, especially if that's something weighing on your conscience. But also remember that God gave you what you have, and God gave them what they have, and in God's plan this all makes sense. He will set the world at rights one day, but until that day there will always be inequity. Jesus himself said that there will always be poor people on the earth. They'll always be with us. And so we have compassion, but there's a place for that too, and it's not all the time. There's certainly no guilt in being rich, or richer than most. That's what God's given you. Use it wisely, like Abraham did. No one ever rebuked him for having too many camels for himself.

I think if we melded a holistic worldview like this into a postmillenial view of the coming end times (whenever that is), Christians would have a real chance to change the world, instead of just complaining about it. Isn't it true? Oy with the hand-wringing already. There's a life to live: live it the way you should. It's the most attractive lifestyle every invented. Probably because the ruler of the entire universe made it that way.

Unlikely war equipment comes to town.

2004-12-31T02:40:00.000-11:00

It's the last day of 2004. In honor of the year ending, I would like to show you some images I culled from the internet. The theme is "unlikely war equipment".

People are strange.

2004-12-30T07:57:00.000-11:00

I find people strange. Especially a lot of the people I know: maybe it's the inbreeding or something, but it seems that we have a lot of non-confrontational people going around. What I mean is people that don't merely avoid confrontation whenever possible -- which is a good thing, yes? -- but avoid it and seem to be afraid of it to the point where the confrontation that actually occurs seems more of a diversionary tactic than anything else.

I give you an example. Image you are in charge of workers at a machine shop. I happen to work in a machine shop, but this isn't necessarily an example culled from my everyday shop life. Just imagine you're in charge. Now, there's this guy running one or two of the machines, and during the run times of his machines, he's doing a crossword puzzle or something like that, something that doesn't explicitly involve work. There's also this unspoken expectation that while machines are running, people should be looking for other things to do (cleaning up, organizing, that sort of thing), but the expectation is unspoken, just merely hinted at.

What do you do? You want the guy to do something other than the crossword puzzle: what's the quickest way to get him to stop, to do what you consider to be his job? Well, of course, say something. To do anything else implies that you're afraid, for whatever reason. Or maybe you just want people to like you. Or maybe you've grown up hating confrontation because of the overagressive tendencies of your father or mother. Who knows.

All I know is, you can't always be friends with everyone, especially when those people are under you in an authority structure such as work. A marriage is different of course, on so many levels that this doesn't really apply. But at work, or even at church, you can't get anywhere without turning a few wheels. You can't make a garden without pulling a few weeds: just watch out that you're really pulling weeds before you do it.

This will, of course, bruise a few egos and get a few tongues wagging. But at least at the end of the day, if you did things right, no one's going to be right when they accuse you of bludgeoning and browbeating.

But that's the rub, isn't it? Leaders aren't perfect. In fact, the mistakes that you own up to probably make you a better one for all the trouble. No one's infallible (except God of course). That's why people who think that they're God's ordained mouthpieces on earth, whether they admit it tacitly or not, come to be disliked. That's hubris. Humility, on the other hand. That's a great thing to have.

If I could say one more thing that I've observed. Don't be defensive. Listen. If someone points out what they see as a fault, no matter how they come across, listen. Listen, and if need be, correct. And listen to yourself. In the words of an old song, My life is a radio; what songs does it know? Indeed.

Roll out the white carpet for the guests, nitwit.

2004-12-28T08:24:00.000-11:00

Okay, I'd just like to make a note to all of you people looking to renovate your house (mostly to those over sixty who're looking to renovate their houses) that white carpet is a really great thing for any room where you're entertaining guests. In fact, while you're at it, you might as well tell them how proud you are of your white carpet; then serve them coffee. Watch as hilarity ensues.

Also, you are a chowderhead.

Answer me this question, this moral question.

2004-12-22T11:04:00.000-11:00

On Slashdot.org, the greatest news source ever after maybe The Holy Observer (both are at your right, if you want to have a peek), there's a discussion of onion routing and practical internet anonymity, and whether or not it's a good thing.

Here's a pretty balanced summary: if no one knows for practical intents and purposes what people are doing on the internet (much like trying to track a convo between two mages in a +50 area of some MUD), how can we prevent child pr0n, P2P file stealing, and terrorist communications? We can't, at least not in a way that would make any sort of criminalist sense.

However, since the internet is now an open standard, it's pretty easy to track people by their IP numbers. Tracking cookies do this all the time, and it's in the interests of some websites to track the metrics of who is visiting and where they're coming from. Do you have a right to privacy on the internet? If you want privacy on the internet, is it right to merely establish your own private means of surfing? Is privacy guarunteed anywhere, period?

I mean, child pr0n is going to exist in some form no matter what you do. If it's not by HTTP, it'll be on IRC. If it's not there it'll be on newsgroups. If not there, private webrings will pass around photos and such via encrypted, anonymous email. If not there, on street corners with hardcopy. If people really want to do something, they're going to find a way to do it, no matter how hard law enforcement tries to do it.

I wouldn't mind an audience response -- and if they're good, I'll post them on the main page sometime soon -- to these questions:

1. Is privacy an invoilable right?

2. Is privacy on the internet a right?

3. Just because something can be used by evil forces, does that mean it's wrong?

4. Do you care if people know where you're surfing?

Answer any or all of these questions by clicking "Comments" below. Remember, sign some sort of name, if you prefer to remain anonymous ;)

Today in the working world...

2004-12-22T01:55:00.000-11:00

This morning I came into work all ducky, only a few minutes late. I expected to find everything much the same as when I had left: generally messy, crowded, and complete with a metal bench I use to hold tools.

Little did I know as I opened the door to the shop that I would find things still generally mess, crowded, but with one exception. My table was gone, replaced with two saw horses and a piece of plywood, none of which fit into the space it was sitting in.

I nearly threw a hissy fit, that much I will admit; however, I didn't, I merely took the sawhorses and plywood and put them back where they came from. So whose brilliant idea was this, you might ask? I don't know. Where did the table go? To the guy in the back who makes things round, so he could measure what he was doing and not have to walk ten feet to the granite block. And as good as a motive as that was, I'd prefer to have a little advanced warning, and that these things be done in front of my eyes, instead of on a day I have taken off.

That's it. I'm never taking another vacation day. Never. Hah, I bet that was the plan.

Hey, Radiohead...

2004-12-20T14:23:00.000-11:00

There's nothing to see here... go away...

2004-12-20T03:07:00.000-11:00

Christmas is an interesting season, and it seems the whole culture decides to take a left turn and be connected to our roots during it: an oddity in out change-obsessed times. We're not much for tradition, and then comes Christmas. Suddenly we get out a tree, exchange gifts, put up lights, and act like absurd fantasies such as Santa Claus actually have some relevance.

And we take our children to see the Nutcracker.

Oddly, my boss felt compelled to give everyone at work tickets to see it (though really, only those with vested interests like children or girlfriends went to see it: the "tough men" types stayed home and watched movies with a lot of senseless explosions while drinking watered-down domestic beer). So we did. I took Mary. Everyone took someone, even Matt. Even Matt. Let me repeat: even Matt.

Some thoughts on the Nutcracker. First, I wonder what the target audience was when it was first written and performed. Was it children back then as well? Or did it evolve into that over time as people gradually became aware of how absurd it could be made, and how laughable? Second, I really fail to enjoy the art form in anything more than a completely eye-candy sense: the dancing is beautiful, but superficial. Tryin to tell an actual story or make an actual point with ballet is like sending smoke signals with a lace hanky. It may look pretty, but it's especially ineffective. Maybe the art is just lost on me, and once upon a time there was a mass of uppercrust people who could instinctively interpret dance; if that was ever the case, it's long gone.

On another note, I would like very much to see a post-rock/ballet integration of some sort, where the pure physicallity of something like Godspeed You Black Emperor! or the like could be melded with the art form of ballet. I know this has already been tried at least once (with Radiohead and Sigur Ros, resulting in the album Ba Ba Ti Ki Di Do or some such Sigur Ros-ish nonsense), but I mean an actual ballet with an actual connection between the dancing and the music, and an actual score that's been written out earlier, so the ballet is reproducible.

After the ballet, me and Mary hung out in Toronto -- where the Starbucks all close at 10pm, I might add, and on a Friday night; is that not insane? -- considering we had somewhere close to five hours to kill: but I'll explain that later.

We walked around TO for a while, and finally came to the building that the Marche restaurant is in -- a joint I really want to eat at some time -- which is, I think, a bank building of some sort. Whatever it was, it was brilliant: basically an enclosed street with the original facade of some of the shorter and older building facing the inside of the walkway. We sat down on some beautiful leather sofas and read the Globe and Mail, and talked about future plans and life directions and the like.

I officially want to live in Toronto.

We picked Mary's parents up at the airport at around 2:30am (the reason we had time to kill in Toronto) as they stepped off the plane, fresh from a warm and somewhat rainy vacation to the Dominican Republic. And no, they didn't get malaria. Thanks for asking. I eventually fell asleep on her lap in the terminal. I think people were looking at me strangely, but I didn't mind: I was, after all, asleep. And I'll sleep anywhere I want to in a terminal, thank you. Except on the baggage handling thingy. I won't sleep on there.

But fear not, the weekend is not done yet. I shall add to this later.

Since the above sentence, some twelve hours have passed. I'm still at work -- I'm just not doing any work, and also not getting paid. It would be nice if I could not do any work and still get payed for it, but that dream still doesn't look much like it's materializing for me.

So I took Mary home, and her parents drove the car. I arrived back at around 4 in the morning, but thankfully I'm used to that sort of sleeping schedule, and adjusted with all the aplomb of a chameleon against a kilt.

Saturday was opening of presents and eating of food and shopping of malls and the such and the like, all things that we did. By the way, I hate Christmas time only because of the consumers and because of Santa. Both should be incarcerated.

I got a fish, some books, a belt, a bamboo shoot, and Mary gave me almost the exact replica of the ring I bought for her so very long ago, except that it's some sort of goldlike material instead of pure solid silver. It's already scratched up thanks to being at work today. But such is life, and things will gradually accumulate a variety of injuries in the course of the day.

Sunday was good, with church, the old age service, church, going to see Mary's ailing grandfather, beating Mary at Go (again!), until she finally attempted a gigantic illegal move by taking all my pieces off the board, proving once and for all that I am highly deficient when explaining a game to someone.

Oddly enough, on the Rumour Forum, Adrienne has been indicted for being a poor loser over and over again: girls in general seem to have a reputation for being poor losers. Just let me say that if Mary had no saving graces (which she does), that she's not a poor loser would be in and of itself enough for me.

Okay, so that was a bit thick, but you get the idea. And if you're sick of hearing about my girlfriend, maybe you should go somewhere where there are no girls, like Slashdot.org.

In other news, this morning was the coldest morning I have ever had the displeasure to step outside in. I got into the car and began to wonder all sorts of things, like how heated seats are a wonderful inventions, as are the heated mirrors, but one wonders why they don't have some way of heating a steering wheel: that is, after all where I put my tiny frozen little hands first thing in the morning.

Could I be a feature designer for luxury vehicles? I think so. See, I know this much: people don't know what they want. You need to show them what they need or want before they need or want it. Maybe no one has ever asked for heated steering wheels on car surveys before, and maybe the person that raised this idea got shot down at the design meeting, but really, it's something to consider, especially in these days of mass comoditization of the automobile market. Not to mention that having an incentive to buy a certain car over another car, an incentive that doesn't necessarily involve money, is always a good thing. It's the details, people. I mean, hydraulics systems and electronics are so commonplace now, one would expect that most cars would have some sort of electronically adjusting seats by now, right? But no; some cars still come with things like no air conditioning and hand-crank windows. These things should have all but disappeared by now.

And I will stop ranting about cars now. I will go to my very cold car and become very cold while trying to drive home without sticking myself to the various surfaces of my vehicle.

Things that make me happy. Also, one thing that doesn't.

2004-12-15T08:20:00.000-11:00

Oh, what an encouraging day. Not for me, for you. You get to be encouraged by reading about what makes me happy: either that, or you get to tell me to bugger off, skip the entire post, and order a pizza.

Things That Make Me Happy

1. My girlfriend. For those of you who don't have a girlfriend (like for instance if you post a lot on /.), or who are girls yourselves, let me take a minute to explain why it's wonderful to have a girlfriend. And if you're a girl, please instead visualise having a man friend. And if you're of any other persuasion, go watch Will and Grace or something. I will attempt to explain this mystery without using any antique Middle Eastern expressions like "fire of my soul", "apple of my eye", or "floppy disk of my appendix". Except that I can't quite spell it out, so just take my word for it: it's really good.

2. Coffee. It wakes me up in the morning. It warms my innards when my innards are something other than warm. It makes my life worth living, except not really.

3. That I am not my own but belong unto my faithful savior, Jesus Christ. I think Mr Stel made me memorize that one. Now I can't forget it; thank you Mr Stel, Heidelberg Catechism-bearing monster (though I mean that in the best way). In other news, I can still quote Romans 12 to you if you'd like. These are all good things, really.

4. My girlfriend. Though this sounds vaguely familiar, I think I'll go on another comedic romp through that land of candyfloss and flowers and soul-sucking vampires known as "LOVE". Or, alternately, I could imagine a bunny with a pancake on its head. So much easier.

5. Paycheques. In fact, I was just musing how if I converted my entire paycheque into pennies, it would fill something enormous, like a babies shoe. If the baby was a midget, or a doll.

6. Christmas. I love the fact that Christ was born. I love the people that took the holy day and turned it into a pagan festival of gluttony and materialism much the same way Greenpeace loves oilwells that have been built on the razed remains of ancestral forests that once housed Bambi.

7. Technology. Can you imagine a day when one toasted bread over an open flame, an open flame that wasn't, like, connected to the internet?

8. Truth. I love truth. And that's the truth. Thus, the truth being that I love truth, I must then love the truthfulness of the truth that I love truth. Unless of course I don't really love truth, in which case the the truth that I love truth is a lie, although that doesn't guaruntee that I love the lie of loving truth. But I prefer to believe that in truth, I love the truth that I love the truth. That's like two layers of truth, right there.

9. Cake. Rumor Forum people, run amok. Thank you.

10. Driving. You can tell I belong to my family that way. However, unlike the rest of my family, I spend most of my driving time actually driving, not smashing into trees, buildings, other cars, and the odd cow. Nor do I drive on the wrong side of the road in a snowstorm. I also don't exceed 60kph going in reverse, Elyssa, aka MY FENDER YOU JUST DROVE INTO MY FENDER!!!

Also, there is one thing I don't like.

One Thing I Don't Like

1. Everything else. HA HA HA. I was just kidding. Actually, it's chocolate.

Tragedy.

2004-12-15T02:11:00.000-11:00

Matty Baranovski was beated to death over a pack of cigarettes in Toronto sometime two years ago; this morning on my drive in to work, I was greeted with the news that his half-brother had died in a freak car accident with his father driving. The only problem is that the father is still in the hospital in critcal condition, unaware that another of his sons has died. I don't know if I'd want to wake up.

In other news, I got a haircut. If that seems a anti-climatic counterpoint to the above story, I would agree it is. I got a haircut, someone's son died. These things happened in the same night. While I was happily having my hair snipped, a spirit left its body. That's sobering, but it happens all the time. It's a wonder humans aren't more sober. Maybe it's a greater wonder how strong our powers of ignorance are.

A conversation that deserves to die.

2004-12-14T11:17:00.000-11:00

I think this conversation quickly crossed that line between, you know, funny and ridiculous.

Steve: Hey look, it's Danikin Skywalker.
Me: Hey look, it's Steve-3P0.
Steve: Hey look, it's R2-Dan-2
Me: Hey look, it's Darth Steve.
Steve: Hey look, it's Jabba the Dan.
Me: Hey look, it's Han Steve.
Steve: Hey look, it's Princess Dana.
Me: What's that little furry creature? It's a Steve-wok!
Steve: What's that big furry creature? It's a Chew-dan-acca.
Me: Oh yeah? Well, it's Steve-bobba Fett.
Steve: Oh yeah? Well it's the evil Emperor.
Me: That didn't even make sense.
Steve: Well, if I had said "It's the evil Dan-emperor", that would have been dumb.
Me: You're smart like a Steve-trooper.
Steve: A Steve-trooper?
Me: You know, like a stormtrooper.
Steve: I know, I got it.
Me: Well now you have to come up with something equally witty.
Steve: Whatever, young Pa-dan-wan.
Me: Hey, it's Steve Steve Binks!
Steve: It's Yo-dan!
Me: You're pretty hot, Princess Steve-adala.
Steve: It's Obi Wan Dan-obi!
Me: You're a retard, R2-Steve-2.

And that's about where it ended, thank goodness.

I don't have anything to write about.

2004-12-13T14:45:00.000-11:00

Except the fact that if I ever become a father of children, I will be so very glad that such a thing happens over a procession of years, and that I won't get, say, five of them all at once. Because that's just too much, alright? And frankly, my life wasn't made to be the plot of a sitcom.

I read a piece of literature the other day about how people need to stop and evaluate what the real effect of technology on their lives is: what will be the societal effects of the utter proliferation of computers and chips into every facet of life?

In fact, I've even heard of people talking about computer dust now: microcomputers that can be sewn into clothes, or painted onto walls; the dust is self-networking, and when together en masse formes its own operating system and does whatever you need it to do. The profound effect of having computer power everywhere is something we can't even begin to comprehend: and by the time we actually do, we'll have passed it by as a society and be on to something bigger and better. Or, as it seems we're going, smaller and better.

Speaking of smaller, I'm embarking on a rather unusual mission: to live like the Japanese. Considering how most of Tokyo's real estate is worth incredible sums of money, the people who live in, say, the technological district are forced to live in spaces that are so small they almost defy my western-born imagination, and the pure art of miniaturization in such cramped quarters is something I would love to aquire. Certainly, I have too much stuff.

But the stuff that I do need to be where it is, that stuff can be fit into more efficient spaces than it is. For instance, my desk is obscene it its proportions, and that's not even mentioning the CRT monitor and television that I have sitting almost right next to eachother. I'd love, for instance, to have a small, simple desk that could hold a 15" flatscreen monitor (remind me why I need a 19" CRT?) on which -- should I buy a new graphics card -- I could both watch what little television I watch and do my computer things.

My bookcases are another space waster: the books they contain only actually occupy about 60% of the shelf space. The rest is taken up by empty shelving. It seems as if somehow I should be able to buy or make my own bookshelves where the books come to the edge of the shelf. Of course, I'd have to bold them to the wall and everything, but that's a small inconvenience.

What in the world was my landlady thinking when she installed a wetbar down here? Obviously the basement was intended for tenants, not just for a party room and pool table, so why the bar? Is anyone living in a bachelor pad actually going to care about whether or not there's a bar? The answer: not many. In fact, the thing is a big (ugly!) waste of space, and it needs to go. But she's not going to let me do that.

Western colture is a strange creature now that I think about it; Japanese ideals are very much informed by their religion, and also by the fact that their island is only so big. Ours is informed by our materialistic non-religious society, but again by the fact that there is just so much land we don't really know what to do with it. Frankly, if I were in any position of power over such things, I'd pretty much put a stop on development: less urban sprawl, less suburbia; please, less suburbia.

Along that note, this culture simply doesn't realize that we need nature. We need the wide open spaces, and we need them close by. How cool would it be to have a city that just ends in farmland? One moment city, the next moment, fields, forests. A pipe dream, you say? Well, if the Japanese culture is informed and influenced by the size of their island, why can't ours be informed and influenced by the artificial limitations we place on ourselves? Face it, half the people living in those huge houses built smack next to eachother in horribly ugly subdivisions that go up ever year don't need that size of house except as a status symbol; I would wager that most of them never really use 90% of the floorspace they actually had.

Imagine the priorities we as a society would have to re-evaluate, living more closely together: a sense of family, a sense of peacemaking, a sense of community. The myth of our corporate psyche is that a city is neccesarily crime-ridden and dangerous. it is, however, cheaper to police a city than it is to police large areas of twisting streets and cookie-cutter houses. Why not densify? It's better for the economy, it forces people to re-evaluate the way they are living, and it certainly helps technology develop as people begin to seek technological solutions to space problems and the like.

However, some suburbanites' view of the city as a place of high crime and ghettos is probably true to a point; but the ghettos we've developed in Canada are mostly a result of poor urban planning and also of fundimentally flawed "social programs" that basically pay people to remain poor. It's a tragedy, really. There doesn't have to be a part of the city that people instinctively steer clear of; in fact, the entire city can be safe, with forward-thinking social policy that doesn't involve bleeding heart liberal chowderheads who throw money at people, as if money every made anyone's problems go away.

And that's about all I have to say about that: take it or leave it, this is only one man's opinion. Maybe it doesn't matter much to you. Maybe it strikes a chord. Tell me about it in the comment area below.

Also, to the person I called a chowderhead somewhere down there, if you're someone I know, sorry for calling you a chowderhead. Sign your name next time, thanks.

Beware, American everywhere, but more specifically in America.

2004-12-10T03:40:00.000-11:00

We have an army, and we're not afraid to use it:

I don't care what you think, and I don't care that you want me to care what you think. I hope you have a backup plan.

2004-12-09T16:39:00.000-11:00

Above is my broad thesis statement, and you are looking at it and devising ways to convince me that I should care what you think. Well let me tell you something (and please, I'm not trying to be rude: this is just the way it is), and that something is that I need to have a reason to care what you think before I think about caring what you think. If you give me one, I will care what you think.

For instance, if you happen to be in a close relationship with me, I care what you think. On a scale of one to ten, you get a ten. If you are my girlfriend, or my sister, or my best friend, I listen to you, because what you think matters to me: I care about you.

However, if you are in a close relationship to me, and you have constantly proven yourself to be a crackpot, I pick very carefully which bits to care about. You get a conditional eight.

No reason to stop now: if what you think has a profound influence on my life (for instance, if you are my pastor, my elder, my girlfriend's father, or my life coach) I care what you think, most of the time. And you can probably make me care by force if you are in any of these positions, but that's a really bad plan. Or you can persuade me that what you think is right: best plan out there. Or you can do a little bit of both. Not a bad plan, and I'll probably see where you're coming from, especially if you place some scripture in my hands. I give you an eight.

On the other hand, if you happen to be a raving right-wing nuclear afficianado, I will probably disregard this. I give you a zero.

This much I know. I am not an island, or a boat set adrift on the sea of my own opinion. If you want to see what that looks like, read Slashdot for more on people that think themselves the masters of their destinies (hint: they unconditionally hate Microsoft, George W. Bush, and Christian fundimentallists). I, however, am still a product of my influences. And if you are a person I respect -- even though I may not agree with you -- you have already influenced what I think. Congratulations, Douglas Wilson, you have profoundly shaped what I think. Kudos also flow to Derek Webb, Dan Haseltine, Augustine, Mssr Calvin (the theologian), Dr James MacDonald, and Ravi Zacharias. I don't agree with these people all the time, but they have strongly influenced who I am. That group of men get a seven.

However, if you are an American Christian Fundimentalist Gay Basher, you get a conditional zero: that is to say, sometimes I don't care what you think, and other times what you think makes me angry.

As it happens, I also don't exist outside of community. In fact, I will go so far as to say that community as a whole shapes who you really are. There will, as always in all circles, be those in the community I respect more, and respect less, but I still love you people and want to also honor you by caring about your conscience. Which explains, of course, why I don't have that lovely lip piercing that I so much liked. And why I don't listen to loud rock music at parties when I know people will be uncomfortable with it; you're still wrong, mind you, and Radiohead is still spinning in my spare time, but let me at least try to not lead you into listening to Radiohead with your murky conscience.

But let's face it, if you're a guy off the street, I really only care about your opinion if you happen to not be giving your opinion; that is to say, if you can convince me (it's not hard, really!) that you're actually right. And if you care enough to do that without driving me bonkers by insisting that Yes, Bush is the Mouthpiece of God; or that No, Bush is the Antichrist and Should Be Shot; or by being abusive; or by shouting out, "The end of the world is nigh, sinners!"

So I guess you could say that the title to this post was rather misleading. Sorry about that. But creating controversy for people that don't like to read the entire post is rather fun.

* * *

In other news, I'm pretty sure that our Reformed circles could use a good dose of future hope. Nothing against our circles, mind you, but there's always room for improvement. Yes, I actually just wrote that. Wow, I am such a rebel.

Anyways, look at Romans 8. I'm sure you'll be gratified to know I didn't just pull that out of my Happy Grab Bag of Random Opinions and decide to propigate it all across the world wide web. That is to say that as Christians, our desire to become more Christlike is not merely is not merely a response to the past actions and grace of Jesus: it's also a response to the firm assurance that there is a future hope. And that hope isn't something I picked out of Paul's Happy Grab Bag... well, you get the idea.

The past is a good thing. It had Jesus, Calvin, the Reformation, and catapults. But not only is the past a good thing, but the future is a good thing, because it also has Jesus, Calvin, more reformation, and mini-catapults known to children everywhere as "slingshots". It also holds the promise that I will one day shed this horrific skin of imperfection, and inhabit a new, glorified earth filled with the presence of God and the absence of any desire to eat forbidden fruit, covet my neighbor's oxen, or have sex with my neighbor's wife.

Side note: for any children reading this blog, sex is how babies happen; it's a biological function that happens (apparently) to be a great deal of fun, and was given to mankind so that he could fill the earth -- good job with that, mankind! It was also given to mankind so that mankind would enjoy itself on earth, much like wine was given to mankind. Wine, women, and toasters that connect to the internet. All these things are good things. Also: tomatoes.

* * *

The Supreme Court of Canada has given legislature the go-ahead to legalize gay marriage. And by "gay" I do not mean that marriages may not be a happy affair filled with laughter, wine, and later, sex; rather, I mean that homosexuals will soon be granted the "right" to be recognized as married couples.

You might expect me to be furious about this ruling. I am not. In fact, I am ambivilant. I ask this: do you not expect the heathens to act like heathens?

The country of Canada, as wonderful as it may be with its hockey, Sleeman Cream Ale, and beavers, is still a secular country founded by a bunch of guys who were nominal Christians at best. It is not founded on scripture any more than the USA is founded on scripture. In fact, the best I can say about Canada and the US is that both countries were founded amidst a sort of misplaced Enlightenment idealism that has now lead us to such things as Buying a New Television Yearly, Supersizing Our Mc"Meal"s, Pop Music That All Sounds the Same, and The New Religion of Tolerance.

Yay for the founding fathers; I feel like moving to China, the next Christian nation.

Gruesome details.

2004-12-09T03:51:00.000-11:00

Yesterday, I stabbed myself in the hand with a screwdriver. A Phillips screwdriver. Right inbetween my finger and thumb, in that fleshy bit that resembles the webbing between a duck's toes, excep not really.

Did it go through, you might ask? No, because it went straight down, but thankfully missed any important vital organs such as my kidneys and small intestine. On the other hand (so to speak) if this heals right, I'll have a convenient place to store pens and stick candy.

I was at work, see, working, and I decided that I should adjust the settings on a coolant hose had recently detatched itself from the machine. I used a screwdriver that was too small. You think that all star head screwdrivers will unscrew a star head screw right? (With the obvious exception of the screws used to hold down the earth's tectonic plates -- since they're the size of the space shuttle and/or Rita MacNiel.) Well if that's what you think, you're wrong.

There are different sizes, and Phillips screwdriver manufacturers take great pains to make sure that if you have a desire to drive in every size of Phillips screw, you'll have to leave Home Depot -- because let's be honest, there's at least seven different sizes that Home Hardware doesn't carry -- with thirty-one different screwdrivers, or a pipewrench if you ask for assistance from one of their highly-trained associates. Associates, I might add, who are really "employees" with fancy names, but who managed to pass the Home Depot Prospective Employee Quiz with flying colours, answering such questions as

Can you breath? (Mandatory)
Can you walk? (Mandatory)
Can you speak English? (Not Mandatory)
Can you recognize the difference between a 2x4 and a lightbulb? (Not Mandatory, but Somewhat Desirable)

But I digress, severely.

Let it suffice to say that my pain was great, along the order of having my hand covered in Napalm. However, the pain has abated, although I did gnaw my thumb off during the night.

Also, Lisa and Eric are engaged.

Good morning, America. Remember to fasten your nuclear seatbelts.

2004-12-07T01:42:00.000-11:00

I got in to work a half hour late, because I woke up fifteen minutes late. You may be wondering, "Hey, there seems to be fifteen minutes in that equation that have mysteriously disappeared!" Well, let me tell you where they disappeared to: I was forced to give those fifteen minutes to two turbaned Sihk men who were driving Pontiac 6000s about twenty under the speed limit. See, my problem with these men is not that they are Sihk, even though Christianity is still the one true religion; or that they were practicing their culural mores, wearing turbans, goodness know they're permitted to do that as long as they don't want to become policemen for crying out loud; or even that they were driving a prototypical Sihk automobile; no, my problems is this: they don't know how to drive.

See, everyone was driving like crazy people yesterday, when it was snowing. Now, since it was snowing, there was (as happens when it snows) snow on the road. And the snow on the road made thing slippery. Yet people drove like the Fonz. So there were lots of accidents, and with the accidents the uberconcerned voice of the police media representative on 680 news. I can only assume that every other station had a similar conncerned cop telling everyone to drive like it's 1910, because this morning, you would have though we were driving on an ice rink the way people were having a go at it. I could point out to them that the roads were salted, and the roads were sanded, and the roads had more freaking traction on them then they do in a midsummer's afternoon!

This is what I get for living in Mississauga and not taking the highway at 7:00 in the morning.

In other news, Mary didn't email me yesterday. I suppose this has something to do with school, deadlines, and computer availability, but let me just say this, girl: you're in trouble. Unless you died, in which case I'm in trouble.

Derek Webb writes a line in one of his songs that goes In our suburb, where we're safe and white. I think he should live in Mississauga with me, and he'd be writing In our suburb, where I haven't seen a white person in six years, and any that I have seen were Itallian, playing bocci ball, and saying something about Mother Mary so fast that no reasonable human being could interpret. Yeah, that's what he'd write.

Now I have stuff to do, like work, and stuff. If you're wondering what I'm going to say about America's nuclear stockpile, let me say this: Where are the American blessed-are-the-peacemakers?

A theological thought.

2004-12-06T15:25:00.000-11:00

Here's a question for you. In our church circles, we cite the Abrahamaic covenant when baptizing children (in that form that no one seems to be able to let go of, or update, or change, dratted uberconservatives). If I'm correct, that would be The Covenant, the big one, that we all live under still. The only problem is that there is the Mosaic Covenant (instituted by the Law of Moses, yes?) which has as its foundation the Ten Words of the Covenant -- so cutely named -- otherwise known as the Ten Commandments or the Ten Commands.

So here's the dilemma in my mind: Hebrews says we're under a new and better covenant, one based on love, love for Christ and love for our neighbors. Romans 7 talks specifically about how we're free from the law, and Paul goes on to name one of the Ten Commandments ("You must not covet") as part of the law that took opportunity to create sin in his members. So if, and this is the if in my mind, the Mosaic covenant has passed, if it is over, why do we still read the Ten Commandments so religiously every Sunday in our morning services? Sure, they're all -- except for one -- re-iterated in the New Testament, but have the Ten not passed with the rest of the law of Moses?

Even apart from that, our Christian tradition leads us to worship on Sunday instead of the Sabbath, a command not given in the New or Old Testaments, nor even implied in them. I mean, I've heard people say "well Jesus is Lord of the Sabbath," but that doesn't really mean anything if the Lord of the Sabbath never said to change it in the first place. In which case we don't really follow the Ten Commandments, which specifically cite the Sabbath, the last day of the week, as the day on which to worship.

To be honest, I've wondered about these things for a long time: I hope there's some flaw in my logic, or some theological consideration that I'm not taking into account; but then even our great Calvin, the man who is so often not wrong in our circles, was wrong on that point, considering that he was a utilitarian, a pragmatist, when it came to the issue. He said that worshipping on Sunday was fine, and that taking a rest on Sunday is a sensible thing to do, but he never actually went so far as to say we must have a Sabbath-like rest, or that there's some sort of Christian Sabbath, or anything like that. Far be it from me, of course, to claim that Calvin was right all the time -- he was a fallible human being, and made human errors like we all do -- but this seems a rather fundimental point that he missed; and maybe he missed it because he considered it irrelevant using some of the same logic I've used above.

But there are other Sunday considerations as well: most among us dislike buying gas on Sunday, much less eating out or something like that. Some people are quite strict about these things, and I understand if you're working on Sunday yourself and its violating your conscience, don't do it. Especially if you believe that the laws about the Sabbath haven't passed, and that we're still bound to the regulations such as not working, resting, et cetera. But even then, how is it wrong to simply do a monitary transaction on Sunday? If the Ten Commandments are the basis of the Covenant, a covenant given to God's chosen people, how am I adding to the condemnation of a heathen who isn't bound by that covenant? Paul even goes as far as to say that people ignorant of the Law will be judged by the law inside them -- their conscience -- and not by the Law proper. Is there any precident for saying that a Sabbath observance is written on people's consciences? Or even the Ten Commandments proper? It's a biological necessity, yes, but is it written in their minds and on their hearts?

That's some food for thought.