Don and Don

Not-so-veiled threats and old-fashioned thuggery not seen in a Don since Corleone:

"If you see somebody getting ready to throw a tomato, knock the crap out of them, would you? Seriously, OK? Just knock the hell ... I promise you I will pay for the legal fees."
- Donald J. Trump, February 1, 2016

"Get him out. Try not to hurt him. If you do, I'll defend you in court. Don't worry about it."
- Donald J. Trump, February 19, 2016

"If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people - maybe there is, I don't know."
- Donald J. Trump, August 9, 2016

"Law enforcement, military, construction workers, Bikers for Trump -- how about Bikers for Trump? They travel all over the country. They got Trump all over the place, and they’re great. They've been great. But these are tough people. These are great people. But they’re peaceful people, and Antifa and all -- they’d better hope they stay that way. I hope they stay that way. I hope they stay that way."

- Donald J. Trump, September 22, 2018

"Any guy that can do a body slam, he is my type!"
- Donald J. Trump, October 15, 2018, in reference to Rep. Greg Gianforte's attack on a reporter

"I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump – I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad."

- Donald J. Trump, March 14, 2019

"The President in no way, form, or fashion has ever promoted or encouraged violence."
- Grima Wormtongue, June 2017

This is the technique: Say the most outrageous shit imaginable, shit that would get you fired from any workplace in America. Tiptoe right up to the brink of assault and battery and murder threats. And then back away a step. Give yourself a semi-plausible out. I hope they stay that way. Then it would be very, very bad. Yoogely bad. Who, lil’ ol’ me? Why, I don’t know what you’re talking about.

This is an evil man. It boggles my mind that people who call themselves Christians support him. I want a new faith. This one isn't working very well. 

The Gospel According to Archie Bunker

In a few weeks I will celebrate/bemoan my 44^th anniversary as a Christian.  That should tell you a couple things. First, it’s a big, conflicted deal. Second, I’m still a Christian.

I know quite a few people who would call themselves ex-Christians. They would merely bemoan. And I understand that, too. It’s not particularly hard to fathom in God’s Own U.S. of A., circa 2019. I’m not Nostradamus, but nevertheless I don’t think it’s at all farfetched to think that the megachurches will be big, empty shells in 20 or 30 years, after the Boomers (yes, my generation) have died off with no younger generations to assume the mantles of leadership or Samsonite-chair sitters. From everything I see, the kids all took a good hard look at the proceedings and walked away. The hipster churches, which is where (at least in urban America) many of the kids landed will all have turned into mani-pedi spas or hair salons, possibly called Rockin’ Your Life! which will save money on having to change the sign out front. This is because the hipsters will have figured out that one guy with a goatee and one guitarist with a U2 obsession is as good as another, and that none of them are particularly worth getting out of bed for on a Sunday morning.  The Protestant mainline denominations will continue their slow descent into irrelevancy. The Catholic Church will lose people in droves because of its institutional inflexibility and its ongoing stonewalling over violations of the physical, mental, and spiritual health of its parishioners. The Eastern Orthodox Church will probably do okay if Anglo-Saxons can get past the fact that they are not, and never will be Russian, Greek, or Slovenian. All of them, to a greater or lesser extent, will be dead or dying of a self-inflicted wound.  The Christian Church in America, circa 2050, will be half as large as the current American Christian Church.

I believe that. This is not a shining era for the Christian Church in America. Some good, staunch Christians will explain this all away and tell you that it has ever been thus, and that spiritual rebellion will always lead to such consequences. They’re partly right, but they’re looking in the wrong direction. People are leaving for perfectly good reasons because churches are ridiculously, imperfectly bad. Horrible. When you’ve traded Jesus for an unfunny Archie Bunker, it’s not a good look. Ifso fatso, as Archie would say. When does it make more sense for those who wish to live a kind, moral, compassionate life to avoid Christian churches rather than be a part of them? 2019, the United States of America. That’s when. Who woulda thunk it, huh?

But in three weeks it will be the grand anniversary #44, the Born Again date, which is when everything theoretically became new. It didn’t work out that way. I am still thankful for that date, for the person I am becoming, for the person God made me to me. I am not that person many days. But some days I am, and that gives me hope. When I screw up, and I do, I try to engage in an ancient, mostly discredited Christian notion called repentance. That means saying to God, and to human beings I might have wronged, “I was wrong, and I was wrong in these specific ways. I’m sorry. I’m going to try not to do that – that specific thing that wronged you – ever again.” And I say it with a will. I put my heart and soul into it. This is Christianity 101, or so they used to tell me. It was a commonly understood truth. I wish the Christian Church in America still believed this. The bemoaning that will accompany the celebration will chiefly occur because I no longer think that the Christian Church in America has any standard of right and wrong, or any notion of repentance.

An Important Civic Announcement

It has come to my attention that so, so many people I know - adults, at that - are deeply distraught over and aggrieved by a phenomenon that continues to rock contemporary society. No, nothing so mundane as kleptocracy in America, the disintegration of objective truth, the promotion of racist beliefs and practices, or the ever-escalating fear of the other, praise God.

I refer to the commonly held belief (and I've heard it expressed in exactly these words more than once today) that "the government is stealing an hour of my sleep." To these friends, I offer soothing words of understanding and compassion. It is too late to do anything about this today, but I remind you that this same phenomenon will reappear next March. That's your opportunity. Here it is: go to bed an hour earlier. Be big boys and girls. You've got this.

Prostate Woes

"A doctor a week keeps the vacation savings away."
- Me

Without getting too graphic, I would prefer if people left some orifices alone. Sadly, those are the orifices that have been poked, prodded, and entubed of late. Good times. I have a rapidly growing prostate gland. It's unlikely that I have cancer, which is wonderful news, of course, but I have SOMETHING going on down there. And in the last few weeks I've had an MRI, something called a cystoscopy, and an ultrasound to figure out what that might be. At this point nobody knows.

I'm doing okay. These kinds of things are a clarion call, if you allow them to be, to wake up and smell both the roses and the iodine-like stuff that they pump into your veins to get a closer look at the innards. I'm trying to concentrate on the roses.

Other than the ridiculous cost of these procedures, and the fact that my insurance company has decided not to cover them (why should a potentially life-threatening growth be considered a legitimate medical expense, eh?), I'm fairly upbeat. I am deeply loved, and I know it. I'll let you know more once I know more.

I'm still hoping that these medical procedures will make a vas deferens.

A Taxing Day

A heads-up for those who may not have started the always lifegiving task of filling out tax forms. You may be in a for a shock. I was.

Remember the changes to the tax code that were going to allow Americans more financial freedom to purchase memberships at Costco? Here's what those changes have meant for the Andy/Kate team for 2018.

Our taxable income was roughly the same (actually slightly less, because we plowed more money into retirement accounts). Our claimed deductions were the same (1 for me, 1 for Kate). Our charitable giving increased slightly. And our tax bill went up more than $4,000 from the previous year.

There are two reasons for this. First, our take-home pay, after taxes, went up. We knew that was the short-term impact of the tax changes. We just had no idea that the end-game shock would be so great. I'm not sure if it's possible to change one's claimed deductions from 1 (self) to 0. Perhaps that's what we need to do. Second, the tax breaks for charitable deductions have been severely, and I mean severely, curtailed. Whatever breaks you may be accustomed to because you give money away are virtually gone. You can and should, for the good of your soul, give your money away. It's a good thing. But MAGA World has now assured that you're not going to see tax breaks for doing so.

Have fun.

Mark Hollis

There are certain songs - Bill Evans' "Peace Piece," Van Morrison's "Listen to the Lion," and this one  - that serve as my worship music. I have no idea of the metaphysical views of the songwriters, and they may or may not have intended them as spiritual succor. No matter. They work that way for me, and I'll take them over the entire genre of contemporary Christian music that attempts to scratch that itch.

Talk Talk, the band heard here, were the most unlikely of contemplative worship heroes. For several albums in the early-to-mid '80s they were a standard-issue synth-pop band, and they made a lot of money and wrote a lot of hits with their bleeping and boinging. Then they steered the sleek, shiny car right into the ditch. The last two albums they made, "Spirit of Eden" and "Laughing Stock," from the tail end of the 1980s and the dawn of the 1990s, respectively, were unlike any music I had ever heard. They were pensive, ruminative, deeply searching.

Mark Hollis, the singer and songwriter, and the force behind the wrecked car in the ditch, died today, just short of his 64th birthday. If you listen to him and allow him to crack your soul wide open, you might understand why I feel the need to write, to honor him, to mourn his loss.

https://youtu.be/tSg2OIFum3o

Reliving the Past

My aunt, who is in her late eighties, is in the hospital, her twentieth hospital stay in the past three years. She’s been cut open, and poked and prodded until her tiny frame is covered with bruises. And she is tiny; more tiny than I can ever remember her. She’s barely there anymore.


Yesterday she thought I was her brother, who happens to be my old man. It was probably all the medication, although it’s hard to tell. My dad has been dead for six years now, and I don’t want to be him, alive or dead. So it was a bit of an affront to be called “Bob,” although she didn’t mean it badly. She was just reliving her past. As it turned out, so was I.

I’ve avoided my extended family – both sides of my mom’s and dad’s families - for decades. It wasn’t their fault. They didn’t do anything other than treat me kindly as their grandson or nephew or cousin, whatever the case was. But my own history with my parents was so fraught with bad memories and times I’d rather forget that I consciously chose not to try to re-engage old relationships. And after a certain point – say, when your own kids move out of the house, and you haven’t seen these people since you yourself were a kid – there’s just too much that has happened to go back.

At least that’s what I thought. What changed my mind was death; my parent’s death, and other deaths. My mom has been dead for 22 years, my dad for 6, and there’s been some substantial healing in the meantime. It’s not that I’ve forgotten any of it. The memories are still fresh, and there is no forgetting. But I’m trying to forgive anyway, not because forgiveness is deserved or earned, but because it’s undeserved, and it’s what I need to do to become a more whole human being. It’s a unilateral peace offering, an extended olive branch with no hands held out to take it. And other people are dying, too; aunts and uncles, lost in the fog of dementia, cousins, dead before their time. Only a few are left. There is no more time to wait.

Over the last few years I’ve been able to spend substantial time with my aunt and uncle in Michigan. I’ve always liked them. They had a bunch of children – my cousins – and I have fond childhood memories of hanging out with them as a kid. The first time I heard Bob Dylan was when my cousin Mike pulled out his “Like a Rolling Stone” 45 and played both sides. The song, in fact, took up both sides of the record – a wondrous thing – and I’ve been smitten ever since. There were picnics and family reunions, trips to Dearborn Village, one hot summer night standing in the back yard watching a strange orange glow to the east. That was Detroit, burning down.

As my uncle, who is 90, tells me, it wasn’t always easy. He wasn’t always easy. He had a temper, and he drank too much, and he had some redneck attitudes. But I see him now – this sweet, kind old man who weeps when he remembers his dead children, and who tells me that he’s thrilled, overjoyed, to see me, and who means it – and all of that history, all of the crap from the past, melts away like snow in May. My own parents got worse. They started out, more or less in love, and their dicks and their misshapen hearts and their mental illnesses and their addictions got the better of them, and they ended up in a very dark, very bitter place. My aunt and uncle have done a 180. They’ve gotten better; old wine in old wineskins, as fine and mellow as two human beings can be. They hold each other, two shriveled bodies sharing warmth, and heat, and 66 years together, and they are deeply in love. And I am so thankful to have rediscovered these people – my past, my present. I am so glad I didn’t miss it.

My aunt is very ill. I hope I’m wrong, but I fear that yesterday was the last time I’ll see her alive. When she dies, my uncle’s heart will break. She told me yesterday – the me who might have been Andy, or might have been Bob – that she prays for me. She can call me anything she wants. Andy, Bob, whatever. She aint’ heavy. She’s my sister.

Try to Praise the Mutilitated World

Try to praise the mutilated world.
Remember June's long days,
and wild strawberries, drops of rosé wine.
The nettles that methodically overgrow
the abandoned homesteads of exiles.
You must praise the mutilated world.
You watched the stylish yachts and ships;
one of them had a long trip ahead of it,
while salty oblivion awaited others.
You've seen the refugees going nowhere,
you've heard the executioners sing joyfully.
You should praise the mutilated world.
Remember the moments when we were together
in a white room and the curtain fluttered.
Return in thought to the concert where music flared.
You gathered acorns in the park in autumn
and leaves eddied over the earth's scars.
Praise the mutilated world
and the gray feather a thrush lost,
and the gentle light that strays and vanishes
and returns.
- Adam Zagajewski, “Try to Praise the Mutilated World”

In Iraq, they are beheading little Christian children. Why? Because they breathe. I’ve heard the feeble protests, the indignant objections. This has been going on for years, all over the globe. Why only notice now?

Just stop. It has been going on forever.

And they are beheading little Christian children. They are not better, more significant, than little Muslim children, or little Jewish children, or little children anywhere. But they are little. They are children. And they are grabbing them by their hair, stretching out their necks, testing the sharp blade of a machete – a machete! - against soft skin. They are cutting off their heads.

Carry this with you throughout your day, your days. Think about it, don’t turn away, and experience it for the unspeakable horror that it is. Cry, moan, pray.

And in your day, remember, hold up, like a rare old treasure, the slant of late summer sunlight filtered through the still green leaves of trees, the taste of good, freshly brewed coffee, the sound of Miles Davis’ trumpet, the sweet, easy company of the wife of your youth, the surprise of new friendship, new connections that defy logic and convention. Look at these ties. They do not bind. They unite. It is nothing. It is everything. It is what you have, who you are.

Remember, don’t ever forget, all the horrendous, senseless, hateful, unfathomable death down through the ages; heads on pikes and bodies stacked atop one another like cords of wood stored for the winter, the torturer’s rack, the rows of young men mown down like newly harvested wheat, bits of brain spattered against a wall, mustard gas and napalm, the mushroom cloud, the fucking sterile, efficient gas chambers of Auschwitz and Sobibor and Treblinka. This is where we live and move and have our being. Then breathe, if you can. You must. Live. Lift up, like an old treasure, your tiny shards of joy. Try to praise the mutilated world.

Blubber Songs

Chuck Cleaver, who is the impetus behind two very fine Ohio bands few people have ever heard – Ass Ponys and Wussy – recently wrote about the songs that stop him in his tracks, that reduce him to a quivering mass of blubber because of their overwhelming sadness. Some of those songs were standard mopester/unrequited love fare, and I’m fairly sure that most people can identify at least with the sentiments expressed, if not the music. Others were more surprising, and involved connections that were far more idiosyncratic and personal. Chuck listed a few of his favorites, and a couple of them happen to be my favorites, too, for much the same reasons. Given the recent spate of curse- and sob-inducing news, I thought I would compile my own highly idiosyncratic, highly subjective Top 10 Blubber Songs, in no particular order other than alphabetical.

The Blue Nile – Because of Toledo

In general, atmospheric synth bands don’t do much for me. I make an exception for Glasgow’s The Blue Nile because a) I’m a sucker for a good Scottish burr, and b) lead singer/songwriter Paul Buchanan has a wondrously supple, soulful voice that adds some needed humanity to the icy chill. All of the Blue Nile albums are worth seeking out for those qualities, but it’s the opening line of this song that slays me every time: “Because of Toledo I got sober and I stayed clean.”

I don’t know what happened in Toledo, and Paul Buchanan isn’t telling, nor is he even telling if he’s singing about Toledo, Ohio or Toledo, Spain. It doesn’t matter. But I have my own version of Toledo, which has nothing to do with Toledo, Ohio or Toledo, Spain, either, but it will do. It’s the place on the psychic map where you say, “That’s it. I have to change.” These are good if sometimes painful places to revisit, and I do every time I listen to this song.

Bruce Cockburn – The Rose Above the Sky

This song, which borrows heavily from T.S. Eliot, comes from Bruce Cockburn’s divorce album “Humans.” I’ve never been divorced, so I don’t know, but I suspect that the anger and the helplessness are much the way Bruce presents it. And sadness, infinite sadness. “Something jeweled slips away ‘round the next bend with a splash/Laughing at the hands I hold out, only air within their grasp.” At the end of a tough, harrowing album there is this song, which is perhaps the beginning of acceptance; rueful thankfulness, but thankfulness nonetheless for what has been. Occasionally you find an album that cuts through the bullshit and presents life poetically but in stark honesty. “Humans” is that album.

Bob Dylan – You’re a Big Girl Now

Another divorce album, this one from The Voice of a Generation, and arguably the greatest songwriter of the 20th century. So it’s rather ironic that the best bit of this song comes as a wordless moan. The words are certainly powerful enough; Bob Dylan recounting the parting dance, the uneasy shuffle as a husband and wife move apart from one another. The moan comes midway, his Bobness conjuring the image of his wife in bed with another man. Then comes something that can be roughly translated as “Oooohhhhhh,” but is not so much a word as an existential groan, the inarticulate speech of the heart. It’s among my favorite musical moments, even though I realize that “favorite” is a sorry excuse for a word meant to cover something so visceral and painful.

George Jones – He Stopped Loving Her Today

The reason being, of course, because he died today. By all rights, this song should not possibly work. It features country cornpone over-emoting, sappy strings, and a spoken-word interlude that is so sloppily sentimental that even the Hallmark Company would blush. It works because George Jones is the greatest of country singers, and the catch in his voice is the sound of the wind howling at 3:00 a.m. in desolate places. It also works because the sentiment is true. If you don’t know what I mean, too bad for you.

The Left Banke – Walk Away, Renee

Unrequited love, pure and simple. What makes it great is that the song was written by the then-16-year-old Michael Brown, and 16-year-old Michael Brown perfectly captured the “oh fuck, all of the meaning has just been sucked out of the universe” despair of unrequited love as only 16-year-olds can do. There are thousands of songs that express these sentiments, but this one might be the prettiest, and features a lovely little chamber-pop arrangement. Baroque ‘n roll, indeed.

Joni Mitchell – The Last Time I Saw Richard

Unrequited love, but with a few zingers thrown in. Joni feels bad about ol’ Richard, to be sure, and wants to be left alone to drink at the bar, but she’s not above throwing in a couple catty lines about the nondescript suburban woman he married and the stupid kitchen appliances he bought her. And really, those lines rescue the song from maudlin sentimentality. Anybody can write a song about feeling miserable and drinking alone at the bar. Only Joni Mitchell can turn that into a rant about the vacuousness of consumerism.

Pentangle – Lord Franklin
An old, old British folk song – some 200 years old now – given a bit of a folk/rock update by Trad band/hippies Pentangle in 1970. This is a sad, nay tragic love song, but it’s a sad love song told from the standpoint of a sailor mourning the loss of his captain. The captain – in this case the titular Lord Franklin – lost his life in a foolhardy expedition to sail to the North Pole. “Ten thousand pounds would I freely give/To say on earth that Lord Franklin did live.” This is the melody, by the way, that Bob Dylan appropriated/stole for his early song “Bob Dylan’s Dream.”

Sun Kil Moon – Glenn Tipton

Mark Kozelek only writes sad tunes. Really, he’s recorded dozens of hours at this point that could serve as the soundtrack for wrist slitters worldwide. But I’m particularly fond of this song, which finds him looking past his navel for once:

I know an old woman ran a doughnut shop
She stayed up late servin’ cops
And then one mornin’, baby, her heart stopped
Place ain’t the same no more
Place ain’t the same no more
Not without my good friend Eleanor

I haunt a few places like that. I’ve known a few Eleanors, and I miss them too. This song reminds me to remember the sweet people on the periphery.

Tom Waits – Kentucky Avenue

An early trashcan symphony that is part poetic childhood reverie and part surrealistic nightmare. In Tom Waits’ universe, the juvenile delinquents and hookers have hearts of gold. Here they play strip poker, spit on kids, flip the bird, slash car ties, and exhibit extraordinary sweetness and kindness:

I’ll take a rusty nail, scratch your initials in my arm
I’ll show you how to sneak up on the roof of the drugstore
I’ll take the spokes from your wheelchair and a magpie’s wing
And I’ll tie ‘em to your shoulders and your feet
I’ll steal a hacksaw from my dad, cut the braces off your legs
And we’ll bury them in the night out in a cornfield
Just put a churchkey in your pocket, we’ll hop that freight train in the hall
And we’ll slide all the way down the drain to New Orleans in the fall

Diamonds shining in the mud. It’s heartbreaking.

The Weakerthans – Elegy for Elsabet 

This being an elegy, one assumes that poor Elsabet, whoever she might be, is a personage of some stature. The guitars crank up in proper elegiac fashion, and the chorus swells grandly, celebrating … what? It turns out that Elsabet is a young woman who lives a nondescript life, browbeaten by her parents, watching too much TV, finally succumbing to something that may be no more consequential than terminal boredom. Whoever she is, she is a cypher, someone who has never really lived. The thing that I love – and the thing that I love about John Samson’s songwriting in general – is that this makes her a person worth eulogizing. Let every sound consecrate the whispering words that Betta never heard.

http://youtu.be/MBdkMulBSvc

Joe Henry - Invisible Hour

My review of Joe Henry's new album "Invisible Hour" at Paste:

http://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2014/06/joe-henry-invisible-hour-review.html

Mark Kozelek's Wayback Machine

My new essay at Paste Magazine:

http://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2014/05/listening-to-my-life-mark-kozeleks-wayback-machine.html

Glen Campbell

One of the earliest record albums I can recall purchasing, with my own money saved from allowances and occasional lawnmowing gigs, was this one, by Glen Campbell. Glen was billed as a country artist, but he really wasn’t. He was a popster, and those syrupy string arrangements and smooth, non-twangy vocals ensured that housewives in Kalamazoo would purchase his records. Truck drivers on the road between Abilene and Wichita, too. Glen had that kind of appeal.

But my parents approved of him, and when you were eleven years old and forced to play your musical purchases on the big Magnavox stereo in the living room, that was important. And, in truth, I liked Glen Campbell just fine. I didn’t know it at the time, but there were covers of Donovan and Roy Orbison and Harry Nillson on this album as well, and they were lovely things. But mostly I listened because of the title track, which was a John Hartford song, and told the tale of a guy on the road, one of those “I love ya, babe, but don’t tie me down” songs of the ‘60s that seemed to define the times. But there were such sweet lines in that song:

I dip my cup of soup back from the gurglin'
Cracklin' caldron in some train yard
My beard a roughenin’ coal pile
And a dirty hat pulled low across my face
Through cupped hands 'round a tin can
I pretend I hold you to my breast and find
That you're waving from the backroads
By the rivers of my mem'ry
Ever smilin' ever gentle on my mind

Oh, that was lovely, and still is, and although my eleven-year-old brain had no real reference points to understand such lines, already the nascent romantic in me was picking up on the poetry, and the longing and the yearning. That was a tender song, and Glen Campbell sang it beautifully.

I bought Glen’s next few albums, too, and liked them a lot, and so did my parents, and we sat around on Sunday evenings and watched the Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour on CBS, which was an old-fashioned variety show like they don’t make anymore. And so my late childhood and early adolescence is filled with memories of this man and his music. Some of it, in retrospect, was overwrought and corny. Much of it holds up just fine, and I still take pleasure in listening to it.

Today is his 78^th birthday. He has Alzheimer’s now, and it’s unclear how much of this history he recalls. The mind is a tricky and sad thing sometimes. Mine is gentle with his memory, and I’m thankful for his music.

Cowtown

There’s a great David Foster Wallace short story called “The Soul is Not a Smithy” that is set in Columbus, Ohio, 1960. I love DFW for many reasons, but one of them is that although he never lived in Columbus, Ohio, and wasn’t even alive in 1960, his story rang so true that I shook my head in disbelief.

I was alive in 1960, and living in Columbus, Ohio, in fact. And the world that Foster portrayed was precisely the world I knew; insular, solidly and stolidly Midwestern, where not much good or bad ever happened, safe, predictable, and boring. They called Columbus “Cowtown” when I was growing up, and for a lot of years you could buy a poster showing a herd of cattle lounging in a field, with the “skyline” of Columbus, such as it was, in the background. It was a real photo, taken in the days before Photoshop. Columbus was a small city surrounded by farmland, and the photo told a true story.

My, how times have changed. The Rust Belt imploded, the factories shut down, and cities like Cleveland, Akron, Canton, Detroit, and Buffalo started hemorrhaging people. Some of them ended up moving to Columbus. Columbus was never really a blue collar town, but big corporations moved here, universities grew, government (of which there are multiple versions of the city, county, and state varieties within the city limits) expanded, people coming out of the universities stuck around and started their own companies, and immigrants started moving to, of all places, whitebread Columbus, Ohio. Astoundingly, within a few decades Columbus went from a sleepy burg of 300,000 to something like a big, cosmopolitan city of 2,000,000 people.

It’s been fascinating to watch it happen. It’s home – mostly for better, but sometimes for worse – and yes, the crime rates have gone up, the traffic has increased, and so have the taxes. And the weather is still crappy four or five months per year. But Columbus is a better place to live in almost every way. There are the usual mega-malls and big box establishments, but Columbus is a hotbed of locally-owned activity, from restaurants and coffee shops to art galleries, furniture stores, bike and scooter shops, record stores, comic book stores, tattoo parlors, neighborhood theaters, bars, concert venues, and philanthropic ventures by the dozens. Columbus is a big-hearted and good-hearted city, and there are countless organizations that have been established to simply help other people. There’s a thriving art scene. There’s a thriving music scene, and if you don’t believe me, just check out the bands and performers the national music critics are writing about these days, and where they live. There’s a thriving foodie scene and Columbus, once the tried-and-true home of the Porterhouse steak and baked potato, can now boast some of the best and most innovative international cuisine to be found in any city in America.

And then there are those immigrants. 50,000 of them are from Somalia, the second largest community of Somalians in the U.S. Tens of thousands more are from Mexico. There are sizable contingents from India, China, Vietnam, Nepal, and Bhutan. Columbus is not San Francisco, and no one would pretend that it is. But Columbus is a far more diverse city than it was a few decades ago, and I’m so thankful for the presence of neighbors from all over the world. I haven’t been able to visit everyplace I’d like to see, and there are still many countries and several continents on my bucket list. But the world has come to me.

It’s a wonderful city; imperfect, with unresolved growing pains, and too damned cold. But I’m so happy to be here, right in the middle of it. And look: no cows.

Chains

 

Every year about this time the weather gets warmer and the grass gets green and the birds start singing again, and I think about my mother. Her birthday is coming up, so it’s natural to associate that with the emergence of spring and new life. But in truth, there was little of new life in her.

My mother would have been 82 this year if she had lived. She didn’t live, though. She turned 60 and then died a few days later. So I think about the anniversary of her death at this time of year as well. The official cause of death was acute ketoacidosis, which is a fancy term that simply means that one’s body doesn’t produce enough insulin, and when it’s severe enough one goes into a coma and dies. That’s what happened with my mother, although, in truth, it’s hard to know if the coma was caused by insulin or the amount of whiskey she consumed.

My mother drank herself to death. She was an angry, bitter woman, and she spent the last 20 years of her life camped out next to a fifth of whiskey. She drank to forget, and when you drink enough you pass out and you forget. That’s the way it works. Before she passed out she used to beat on people and yank out their hair by the handful and chase them around with butcher knives, but that was all really just a prelude to the desired coma. What she drank to forget was the disappointment of her own life; her shitty father, who sexually abused her, and my dad, who routinely cheated on her, and her kids, who were a source of unending sorrow and consternation. We would never amount to anything, and she reminded us of that frequently. Anger. Bitterness. Violence. Then the blessed coma. Day after day, for decades until, finally, the coma to end all comas.

Now I’m pushing 60 myself, and since I’ve been contemplating my own mortality since, oh, kindergarten, it’s probably not too surprising that my mother’s death, and my mother’s age, figure prominently in my thoughts. I’m not angry with her anymore, although I was for a long time. She was hell to live with, but I’ve come to understand that she was simply a poor, mentally unbalanced woman who couldn’t cope with her life, and who took out all her own shit on her kids.

That sounds so simple, so clinical, so very rational. But it’s not. Getting there has taken decades, and much prayer, some therapy bills, some 12-step groups, the loving support of a spouse who cares deeply for me and who is willing to kick my ass, many late-night conversations with friends and family, and probably several hundred pages of journal entries and blog posts, because I can’t really process anything without pixels. Other than that, it was easy.

But I’m ready to let her go. It’s about time. And it occurs to me that I don’t know how much there is left.

Somewhere back in the forgotten mists of history there were people who set it all in motion. My mother was a sexually abused alcoholic. My father was a neglectful, dick-centered addict. But there were people before them, priming the pump, passing on the genes, acting like the addicts they were and forging the chains. My mother’s father was an alcoholic who sexually abused his own kids, my father’s mother was an alcoholic, and on and on and back and back it goes, perhaps as far back as Addicted Adam and Everclear Eve, who enjoyed a shot of ethyl alcohol or six in the Garden of Eden, or good ol’ Og and Nog in the cave, knocking back their gin and tonics with their brontosaurus steaks. I have no idea. But the chains extend as far back as I can trace; generation after generation of futility and waste, human beings shackled to a prison wall of their own making.

With God’s help, it ends with me. And if that happens, then every prayer, every therapy bill, every 12-step meeting, every anguished late-night conversation, will have been worthwhile. I believe it can and it will.

But here’s how it starts: with forgiveness. It has to start there, impossibly, inevitably. For every bruise, every scar, physical or emotional; for the damage that was done, which was real, and lasting; for the anger and the bitterness and the drunken stupors; for the missed Christmas dinners, the missed awards that were given to the kids who would never amount to anything, the missed parenting opportunities, the missed grandparenting opportunities, for the entire lives that were missed, there is this: forgiveness.

This is how it ends with me, this chain of chains. Every day. Over and over. And messing up, and forgiving again.

This is how it ends with me.

So I think about that on these impossibly bright April days. It’s a strange combination of internal thought and external reality, but that’s nothing new, either. I look outside and inside, and I’m thankful for the promise of new life.

The $77,777,777 Question

Christians face a never-ending conundrum: the promise of new life vs. the frequent reality of the same old life. The apostle Paul, ever the rabble rouser, started it all when he wrote, “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creatio...n: The old has gone, the new is here!” And ever since then Christians have been trying to figure out the implications of that statement. Why does “in Christ” sometimes look like “in divorce court, or in rehab”? Why does “new creation” so frequently look like the old disintegration and chaos? And what do we do about the disconnects between doctrine and reality?

Witness the fate of one Bob Coy, former pastor of a megachurch in Florida, recently deposed for “moral failures,” and now persona non grata. Coy resigned his position as head pastor last week. Now the church has deleted every sermon or podcast Coy ever delivered as pastor of the church, an audio and digital record that stretches back more than 30 years. His very existence has been expunged. Bob Coy? Who?

I don’t want to downplay the sadness and heartbreak that surely must be a part of this. Coy resigned because of a series of adulterous affairs, and adulterous affairs are bad news for any family, and certainly bad news for a pastor who is expected to lead by his or her moral example. Real people, including Bob Coy and Mrs. Bob Coy, whoever she might be, have been hurt by this. A marriage may have been irrevocably damaged. A church is reeling. I also understand why this scenario might have cost Bob Coy his job, and I’m not going to take the “Christians; the only army that shoots its wounded” tack that so many would take here. Sometimes when you mess up, it can cost you your job. It’s true all over, including the Church.

There is, however, a question to be asked: what’s wrong with those sermons?

Seriously, what’s wrong with those sermons? Why should they be deleted? Were they good, sound, godly teaching two weeks ago? Did they reflect the wisdom and nurture of a pastor who managed to stay employed for 30 years at the same church? If so, what changed?

Obviously, what changed is that a pastor’s sin came to light. And that brings the whole new creation/same old crap conundrum into sharp focus for me.

In Catholicism and Orthodoxy, there is a built-in corrective to the new life/same old crap conundrum. It’s called penance – confession – and there’s a sacramental dimension to it. The penitent person shows up at church, confesses his or her sins to a priest, and receives absolution/forgiveness. There is an explicit recognition that Christians can and do sin, and that they need to engage in the regular practice of confession, repentance, forgiveness, and spiritual renewal. In Protestant churches, however, no such formal rite exists. Confession is a private matter between sinner and God, with no intermediary required or desired. Sin – as a focus, as an acknowledged reality – takes a back seat (pew if you prefer) to new life.

The problem is that the new life - which is expected, taught, assumed – may or may not be reflected in the day-to-day thoughts and actions of individual Christians. And when it is not, there are few mechanisms, and certainly no formally acknowledged ones, to address the disconnect. And people end up leading double lives. Hypocrisy is alive and well in every part of society. You don’t have to look far or deep to see it. But the great irony is that Protestantism in general, and Evangelicalism in particular, may have been institutionally set up to foster it. Hypocrisy is in the organizational DNA, if you will. It’s not intentional. It’s not insidious. But it’s there. And it’s there because struggling Christians have no easy way to address the sin in their lives, hallelujah, praise God. There’s simply no room for it in day-to-day discourse, in the everyday life of the church.

At its extreme, it leads to bizarre scenes like the one just enacted in Florida. A beloved pastor with hundreds of godly sermons and podcasts literally disappears from public view. It’s like he never existed. Bob Coy? Who?

What does the church do with the disconnect? It’s the $77,777,777 question. Pay attention to how your church answers it.
 

http://www.christiantoday.com/article/bob.coy.sermons.deleted.megachurch.members.devastated.disappointed.former.pastors.messages.removed/36648.htm

Cadillac Man

The first day of my MBA program, lo these many years ago, I took a battery of personality tests. I don’t recall exactly what the categories were, or precisely what the results meant. I just recall that all my colleagues were blue and green kinds of men and women, and I was a yellow and red guy.

An academic advisor told me a few days later, “You probably shouldn’t continue with this program. These tests don’t lie. It’s not a question of intelligence. It’s a question of personality type, and your personality type indicates that you’re probably not cut out to be a business manager.”

Truer words were never spoken. I knew it before the tests. I certainly knew it after the tests. I continued anyway, and achieved pretty close to a 4.0 GPA, because I’m that kind of a guy, too. It really wasn’t that difficult, and when I put my mind to it, calculating various profitability ratios was just simple math. As they told me, it wasn’t a question of intelligence. It was a question of … what?

I’d like to tell you that the answer to that $64,000,000 question was “humanity,” simply existing as a living, breathing, thinking, and above all feeling human being on planet Earth, but that would probably just be the yellow and red parts of my personality talking. But that’s what those yellow and red categories measured. Emotional intelligence. Compassion. Empathy. I was off the charts, and in corporate America, it’s all about the charts, preferably pie and bar graph.

I have watched the commercial linked below a few dozen times. It fascinates me, and my reaction to it fascinates me. Because it is marketing, I assume that its implicit goal is to sell cars. It’s a car commercial, after all. See commercial, buy a Cadillac. That’s the Pavlovian consumerist response. But my yellow and red guy reaction is extreme. Not only does it not make me want to buy a Cadillac, it makes me want to proselytize the world, or at least my Facebook friends, and tell everyone that it would be in the best interests of humanity, world peace, God, country, kittens, puppies, all that you and I hold dear, not to buy a Cadillac. I hate this commercial, and I loathe the smug, arrogant son of a bitch who pitches the Cadillacs.

Actually, I know what it is. I have worked with this guy, and for this guy, too often in my 30+ years in corporate America. I can’t take it anymore. I don’t see red. I see blue and green. I see a number cruncher. I see a clown who doesn’t have a clue how to relate to human beings, including his wife or kids, because he’s too busy crunching the numbers that will buy the next expensive luxury car. I see a guy who lives for work instead of who works to live. And he is as alien to me as Godzilla. I can’t even begin to relate.

To be fair, I do realize that there is a continuum here on which all human beings fall. Very few people are pure, unalloyed number crunchers, ruthless automatons climbing one robotic step at a time up the corporate ladder. I know plenty of accountants who crunch numbers all day, and many of them are three-dimensional, fully realized human beings who have a variety of interests, who love their families, etc. And few people are the off-the-charts romantic dreamers and poets that my Yellow and Red Guy test scores would seem to indicate. While you’re babbling about computer nodes, I’m off writing Ode to a Node in my head. This is not normal, either.

But that Cadillac guy? He gives me the willies. He creeps me right out. He raises the hairs on the back of my poetic neck.

Forbes Magazine published an article several years ago that discussed the findings of sociologist Jon Ronson, who contends that the incidence of sociopathy and psychopathy is about four times higher in CEOs than it is in the population at large. Make of that what you will. Ronson would call it science. The chief psychological factor that distinguishes sociopaths and psychopaths from the rest of “normal” society is a lack of empathy.

Every day thousands of people are unceremoniously dumped on the street, the victims of number crunching. They are told, inevitably, that it’s nothing personal. And who knew? For at least some of the people making the decisions, it really isn’t. I deeply, intuitively, non-scientifically suspect that the character played by Cadillac guy is one of their ranks. This is why I can’t stand him.

This is why I would be a lousy manager. This is why I’m a lousy corporate American. Numbers are not people. Never will be. And it is people who are ultimately impacted by the numbers, every single time. You can count on it.

Lobotomized

“It would seem that emotions are the curse, not death - emotions that appear to have developed upon a few freaks as a special curse from Malevolence. All right then. It is our emotions that are amiss. We are freaks, the world is fine, and l...et us all go have lobotomies to restore us to a natural state. We can leave the library then, go back to the creek lobotomized, and live on its banks as untroubled as any muskrat or reed. You first.”
- Annie Dillard

I am a depressive-depressive. Not manic-depressive. I don’t have episodes where I want to stay up all night cleaning, or dancing, or doing whatever manic people do. I am melancholy. I wrote the epitaph for my tombstone when I was nine years old. True story. I wrote after-the-nuclear-holocaust short stories on the elementary school playground while everybody else was playing kickball. I see the world through black-colored lenses. I brood. I fret my hour upon the stage. Occasionally I shift in my chair. That is one of my manic moments. Often I feel horrible. Not physically, although sometimes that too. Psychologically. Emotionally. Spiritually.

But I’m getting better. And sometimes better scares me.

I discovered quick fixes, as many people do. Anything to feel better. And the quick fixes work, for a while, until they end up using you instead of you using them, and you find yourself weighing the quick fix on one hand and your marriage and your kids and your sanity and everything that you claim to believe as true on the other, and you actually find yourself thinking, “Well, the quick fix doesn’t look so bad.” You’re in some deep shit by that point.

So here’s what recovery looks like with the demons in the rear-view mirror, from a little piece down the road. It looks like a lot of meetings; meetings with 12-step groups, and sponsors, and spiritual directors, and therapists. It’s a multi-pronged issue, so you approach it from several different directions simultaneously. But it also looks like a lot of sitting, because that’s what we depressive people do. The sitting sometimes looks like nothing is happening, but that’s not true. What, in fact, is happening is deep melancholy; feeling like shit, psychologically, emotionally, spiritually. And just living with it. Sitting with it. Praying with it. Pounding on a keyboard with it. Not running away from it. This can be the hardest thing in the world.

All my life I have worn depression like a badge. I haven’t necessarily liked it; many days I’ve hated it, in fact. But it’s been the dues for entrance into the artistic community. Flash the badge, and enter the club. And what I need to understand now – at this critical juncture of my life, where I’m actually approaching the time where I can put this corporate drudgery in the rear-view mirror as well, and focus all my energy on creating what I want to create, on being that ARTIST – is what to do with the melancholy. Is it part of who I am? Is it what drives me, for both good and evil? Or is it something I can cast off like shackles? Good riddance, or riddance of good? Those are the questions I grapple with. Annie Dillard’s nightmare is my nightmare, too. There is a part of me that is convinced that I need to be that freak, and that losing that is to return to the creek lobotomized, as untroubled as any muskrat or reed. And I’d rather be anything than that unfeeling, vacant drone with the lifeless eyes. In the words of the infamous bathroom graffiti, I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy. You first.

First and Best Church of Love and Jesus, Ohio Synod - Call for Members

There’s a long-standing belief in Christian circles that love and truth are inseparable. Lean too much in the direction of love and you become a wishy-washy, namby-pamby relativist who is willing to accept anything and everything. Lean too much in the direction of truth and you become a hardline, doctrinaire Pharisee without a beating heart. The greatest of these is love, but truth will set you fr...ee. You need both.

Every Christian believes, more or less, that they have these two attributes in balance. And Christianity, with its 2,000-year-old history and its 8,543,962 variations/denominations, encompasses virtually every belief imaginable, each of them sanctified as Holy Truth, even when they completely contradict one another.

So I’m fed up. I’m starting variation #8,543,963, the First and Best Church of Love and Jesus (FABCOLAJ, Ohio Synod). I’ll get it wrong, guaranteed, just as the other 8,543,962 variations have gotten it wrong. But I’d like to get it wrong in the direction of wishy-washy, namby-pamby love. I’d like to take a shot at that since precious few Christians seem interested in leaning that direction. And see, right there I’m blowing it. There it is: failure within the first minute. If I was a decent, loving megalomaniac and founder of a new religion I’d be gracious, and kind, and non-judgmental. But I’m not. You’re welcome to join me anyway.

I want to get away from the Truthers. Truthers bother the hell out of me. I wish they didn’t. Truthers are very upright, righteous people, full of beliefs, which they can enumerate at great length, and are very, very principled. They study the Bible and have worked out elaborate systems of morality. They are so principled and moral that they’d rather let little kids starve than allow a single gay World Vision worker help to keep them alive. And I want out.

So here’s the deal for you Truthers: You can keep the “Christian” label if you want it, and a minor prophet or two to be named later. You get to boycott, claim persecution, hold on to all the televangelists and Rush Limbaugh, host your paranoid Culture Wars conferences, and retain all profits and proceeds from the Christian Entertainment Industry. It’s all yours for the taking. Have at it.

But I get to keep Jesus. You can’t have him, and don’t you dare claim him, because your beliefs and actions don’t look anything like him. I’ll accept whatever label you want to call me. It doesn’t matter. I will take on the epithets of being judgmental, divisive, and cranky. Hell, yeah. And it’s true anyway. In spite of this bad beginning, anybody interested in signing up?

Actually, I don’t want to start a new religion. I just want to follow an old one. Anybody know where I can find it?

Jip Next Door

 

"At last he came out, and then I saw my own Dora hang up the bird-cage, and peep into the balcony to look for me, and run in again when she saw I was there, while Jip remained behind, to bark injuriously at an immense butcher's dog in the s...treet, who could have taken him like a pill."
- Charles Dickens, from "David Copperfield"

I like Charles Dickens for many reasons, but one of them is that a little yappy dog is a peripheral but recurring character in "David Copperfield."

This dog, Jip, has a great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great grandson by the name of Sammy who lives next door to me. I think of Dickens, and Jip, every time I see Sammy, or, more correctly, every time he sees me, because honestly I don't go out of my way to look for him. But he hones in on me with keen, radar-like precision.

Sammy sees me in a variety of contexts. I will, at times, stand at my kitchen window because that's where the sink is, and I use the sink for a variety of purposes, most involving running water. This sets Sammy off into a righteous fit of howling and yapping. I am in my house. Sammy is in his house. We are separated by two panes of glass, an expanse of lawn, and a driveway, but this is far too close for Sammy's comfort, and the thought of me filling a glass of water in my own home is apparently enough of a threat to result in bared teeth, menacing (to the extent that rat-like canines can be menacing) growling, and outraged barking. It's worse if I actually venture out of the house; to, say, put something in a trash cash, or, worse yet, walk the entire length of my back yard to my garage. This requires walking beside the fence that divides my yard from Sammy's, a 60-foot gauntlet that features a frothing-at-the-mouth, jumping, twirling, barking little ball of outraged fur every step of the way.

I like my neighbors. They are sweet, calm people. Sammy also barks and yaps at them incessantly, although perhaps with slightly less vigor and outrage than he exhibits when he sees me. I don't know how they stand it.

I like dogs, by the way. Really I do. Man's best friend, and all that. I get it. But I don't get Sammy. Apparently Dickens encountered his ancient ancestor and lived to write about it.

Noah and Other Sinners

“All of this should trouble the sort of Christian, I suppose, who imagines that the proper care of the Earth is strictly the domain of those godless liberal tree-huggers; that our readings of the Bible should never stir in us a sense of won...der or supernatural possibility; and that the only artists who could possibly extract anything of value from a religious text are those who readily subscribe to its teachings. To believe such a thing, of course, is to ignore one of the great recurring themes of Scripture, which is that God can and does use the most unlikely of individuals to glorify His name and advance His purposes, and is indeed rather fond of subverting our prejudices about who and what is good, moral and worthy of emulation.”

Hollywood has a notoriously spotty record when it comes to biblical epics. I’ve yet to see a Jesus movie that gets it right, and the succession of blue-eyed, passive, blissfully stoned versions of Jesus the Hippie that were paraded forth in the ‘60s and ‘70s have been succeeded by the rugged he-men and body building Gold’s Gym Jesus’s of the new millennium. Charlton Heston’s Moses always looked like he should be wearing a suit on Madison Avenue. And the various made-for-cable extravaganzas of the past few years have always struck me as more like The Fantastic Four (or Twelve) or Captain Israel than the folks I read about in the scriptures.

So now there’s a big Hollywood blockbuster out about Noah, called, appropriately enough, “Noah.” It’s caused a big stink among the Culture Warriors, chiefly because the Culture Warriors like to cause big stinks; massive critical flatus that spreads across the land like a spiritual miasma.

It should be noted that I have a number of Christian friends who review movies, some of them for a living, and they have written intelligently and persuasively about the film. This is not about them. This is about the professional fearmongers whose job it is to whip the faithful into an outraged moral frenzy. And they have done their job well with “Noah.” The film isn’t true to the biblical record. The film is blasphemous. Noah is not a righteous man in this film. God is grieved by the sacrilegious tone.

I’ve said it before, but it’s worth noting again: there’s precious little to go on. The story of Noah takes up a scant three and a half chapters in the Book of Genesis. We’re introduced to Noah and told that he is a righteous man. Then we encounter the story of the building of the ark, the gathering of the animals, the devastating flood, the receding waters, and the promise of the covenant. Finally, Noah leaves the ark, plants a vineyard, gets drunk, is discovered naked by his sons, and curses one of the sons who found him naked. Thus, Noah.

There’s also a bit of commentary about him in the New Testament, chiefly in Chapter 11 of the Book of Hebrews. This, for those of you who may have forgotten your Sunday School lessons, is the Heroes of the Faith/Faith Hall of Fame chapter. It’s a long summary of the lives and deeds of many saints in the Old Testament, those ancient fathers and mothers, like Noah, who were awarded God’s favor because of their faith. Again, for those who may have forgotten, it includes (among others) a coward (Abraham), a manipulative swindler (Jacob), an egotistical prick (Joseph), a murderer (Moses), a prostitute (Rahab), and an adulterer (David). Also a judgmental drunkard (Noah).

I write that list not to be contentious, and I’m fully aware that those heroes of the faith had many positive qualities as well. But sometimes I wonder if the Culture Warriors ever bother to read their Bibles. The whole point of that list, it seems to me, is not that God’s people are perfect (for surely they are not; read that list again), but rather that they are full of faith.

It’s a tricky word, that one: faith. If you’ve got it fully figured out, let me know. You could teach me a few things. But the biblical story – let me say it again, the biblical story – of Noah is that of a righteous man, a judgmental drunkard, a man of faith. This is great, good news if you’re anybody like me.

I have yet to see this new Hollywood Noah. I think, based on what I’ve read, that it’s entirely possible that I’ll like and relate to him. I think, based on what I’ve read, that this might be a biblical epic that gets it right, even with its (or perhaps because of its) creative liberties and fanciful flights of imagination. I can’t wait to see the film.

http://variety.com/2014/film/news/noah-is-the-biblical-epic-that-christians-deserve-1201150333/#See More

Why 'Noah' Is the Biblical Epic That Christians Deserve

variety.com

He who has ears to hear, let him buy a ticket to Darren Aronofsky's extraordinary movie.