Merry Thanksgiving
To them that observe.
A beautiful & similar sentiment here.
Peace out.
Damn you, Penn Jillette!
For making my try at a ‘This I Believe’ essay pale in comparison:
NPR : There is No God
Help Me Out – I’m Baffled, Too!
Scott McClellan had this to say about Congressman Murtha’s statement, notably this:
After seeing his statement, we remain baffled — nowhere does he explain how retreating from Iraq makes America safer.
Um, has anyone in the administration ever explained how occupying Iraq is making America safer?
Just wonderin’.
This I Believe
(After NPR’s This I Believe.)
Many people’s belief system is centered on their religion. Unfortunately, many times this belief mutates into something more – a separatist fanatic’s belief that theirs is the only way and everything else should be destroyed. This, despite pleas and fiery statements to the contrary, is not religion. Religions – all of them – should be welcoming to all and exclusionary to none.
I come by this view from personal experience. I was born to mixed parentage; my mom is of Lutheran stock, my dad of Jewish. Neither are practicing or devout and I was raised areligiously. In my later years, my friends have characterized me as a ‘jewtheran’ – that is, a combination of Lutheran and Jew.
I like to believe I possess many of the trademark characteristics of each religion: from the Jewish side, I am jollily mordant. From the Lutheran side, I am oddly pragmatic, perhaps best illustrated by this story about a great-aunt:
Mae was walking through the woods one day, when she saw a boot in the brush. It looked fairly new, and Mae figured she could use it somehow, even if she couldn’t find its mate.
When she looked more closely at the boot, she discovered that it was still attached to its owner – an immigrant Finnish bachelor farmer who had made his fortune and was ready to return to the old country as a rich man. Sadly, the story goes, he stopped at the local saloon for a last snort and was apparently waylaid and relieved of both his nest egg and his pesky habit of breathing by some person or persons unknown.
This is not part of the official story, but I like to think that Mae checked the corpse for a wallet as well.
In my later years, I have fallen increasingly under the sway of Buddhism, primarily for what I interpret as the importance of self-reliance in its tenets. I guess this makes me a Juddheran.
With this sort of mottled religiosity in my background, you can see why I have strong feelings that religions should be inclusionary – if they weren’t it would be likely that I would have to hate and kill myself.
Given my background, I hope it’s understandable that I have a hard time boiling my beliefs down to a concise essay length. Lately, I’ve been thinking that you could best describe me as a ‘compassionate objectivist‘, although since the recent wrongheaded appropriation of pairing the word ‘compassionate’ with any word describing a set of beliefs. I prefer the term ‘zen objectivist’.
Despite my lack of a belief in any structured religion, I do have a handful of nearly religious beliefs.
The primary deity in my world is a caped superhero (and if you think that’s hard to swallow, I ask you – how different is that from the true believer’s notion of Christ or Mohammed or Buddha as an omnipotent and omniscient being?).
My superhero goes by the name of the Karmic Regulator, and his job is simply to quietly reward good and selfless actions and to quietly punish the opposite behaviors. It’s not that different, I suppose, from the precepts of other religions – good things happen to good people, like end-game trips to a heavenly afterlife, and bad things happen to bad people, like eternal damnation (or an endless screening of the director’s cut of ‘Patch Adams’ with additional scenes).
I constantly walk a tightrope, as I think and hope most people do, between feeling I am the most awful and selfish person on the planet and feeling that I am so beatific that I walk on the air a foot or two above the ground at all times – sometimes both simultaneously. The endless self-examination this dichotomy provides for is both maddening (because constantly examining the motivations for your own behavior makes it difficult to act spontaneously, if at all) and healthy (because it helps keep your motivations sincere).
The faith that there is someone – some other thing – that I believe has my back and will make sure that the wrongs I cannot personally right will be taken care of anyway allows me to concentrate more on controlling the only thing I really can – my own actions.
Oh, sure, there are other things in my personal makeup I strongly believe in: like the redemptive power of long solo journeys, that breakfast is the most important meal of the day, that all of the people who have ever wronged me in any way are sociopathic losers en route to their own sorry end and that all of the women who ever told me to get lost or broke my heart are militant separatist latent lesbians, but it’s the Karmic Regulator who has continued to stand by my side ever since he (or she – I’ve never figured that one out) was revealed to me during a mythically tortured period in my life.
The Karmic Regulator is the best I can do.
…and this I believe.
A cute kids story.
This morning, at the breakfast table, Lynn reached over and filched one of the vegetarian sausage (NOTsage as we call it here) links from Whit’s plate.
Whit looked up and chastised his mommy: “You don’t eat your children’s food.”
I have mixed feelings: happy that my boy is so smart, sad that we won’t be able to steal his food anymore without his moral judgements.
Weird Surreal Environmental Moment
It’s blustery-ass and bright sunshiny today here in Milwaukee and as I walked to my car after work at noon, I could hear church bells bonging above the roar of the wind.
I catalogged that detail as I concentrated on successfully crossing the busy street without being knocked over by a wind gust.
Then I thought I caught the hint of a familiar tune in the bells. I thought a moment, trying to figure out what it was. Suddenly it clicked into place and I spun around, trying to see where the ringing was coming from and looking to see if anyone else was getting the joke.
The song? “Windy” by the Association.
Memories Can’t Wait
I’m cursed with memory. Practically rotten with it. Slice me open, and the stink of it gets underneath your mask and settles over every corner of the operating theatre. The gas turns to crystal when it hits your lungs and it burns like the air outside on a bright winter day.
I wrote that, a while ago. I also wrote this:
Sometimes I play with the past. I pick it up, roll it around on my fingertips, stretch and pull at it. I roll around in it like a dog with a dead skunk. Sometimes I press it against the newspaper and lift up perfect mirror images of the funny pages beneath. I probe it with the tip of my tongue, looking for the sweet and the sour, the savory spots on it. Late at night, when no one’s around, I like to take someone else’s memories out and try them on. To look at myself in the mirror, and see if I could pass as a different man, a man with another past, but underneath, I always look like a man with the past I have.
It’s a dangerous thing, to play with the past that way, to wallow in it and let it take over your all of your waking thoughts. Sometimes I play this game where I imagine I’ve won the lottery and I begin plotting how I won’t let it change my life, I’ll bank the money and only spend it to take away this horrible pressure of living. I think about the shady house in the country and the dependable (but used) car I’d buy. I promise not to quit my job. I can go on for weeks, daydreaming about this in my idle moments, working on my speech to the media about my incredible good fortune. I phrase and rephrase my sentences until they portray just the right mix of joy and astonishment.
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about cleaning up my special little area of the basement in advance of prying little eyes and poking little hands finally overcoming their fears and parental objections and doing some exploring. And that’s made me think about memory and memories.
Lynn and I built a small (9’x12’) raised floor in a dry corner and I carpeted it to give myself a nice rumpus room to replace the bedroom I had initially taken over, soon to become Celia’s.
What’s down there? Most of the stuff I removed from that bedroom. All of my guitars and other musical stuff – some keyboards, hand percussion, a pedal steel guitar which was a birthday present to myself some years back and has remained largely unplayed since, an autoharp I inherited when my friend Jon moved, lotsa electronic stuff (effects pedals, cords, tape machines, like that). Soon the stuff that remains in this bedroom – the computers and their attendant books, the vinyl records, the stereo – will move down there as well.
There are lots of photos down there, too: old girlfriends, old crushes, old friends, about ten rolls from a class trip I took to Germany in high school (hi Cristoph, if you’re reading this; I’m guessing Robben is…). Most of them are gone away to their own lives and are far removed from the days when we shared so many events and emotions. I have loads of handwritten letters from them, as well (for I am ancient enough to have lived in the pre-email epistolary age). The letters and postcards come from San Francisco, Georgia, Ohio, Arizona, Minnesota, Iowa, Illinois, Maryland and Maine; some come from other countries like Ecuador, Spain, Hungary and Scotland.
There also about a million cassette tapes down there: some legitimate releases, generally picked out of discount or record store bargain bins, mnany more of them mixtapes I labored long over, made either for myself or as tokens of friendship or (sometimes secret) love.
Some of those people attached to these totems are still in my life and of them I have more recent artifacts, hanging on my walls and sitting here by my computer.
Obviously all of that stuff has memories attached to it: the guitars I played in the various bands I was in all give me little jolts of the past (some good, some bad); the amp that followed me from junior high until now (thank you Acoustic, now, it would appear, sadly R.I.P.); loads of gig posters and photos; lyrics and lyric ideas scribbled on whatever paper was at hand; the postcards and letters and photos; the curios from my friends and strangers. Why do I have all of that? Waiting for my induction to the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame? My long-awaited solo return? My biographers? The crack investigative team from the local constabulary?
Nah, probably not. Most likely it’s sitting there out of a combination of my own ennui and inertia as well as a feeling in the back of my mind that I really will get back to those days when I’d pick up the guitar and start noodling as unconsciously as I sit at the computer nowadays or that I’ll finally get around to writing all of those stories that are percolating in my noggin.
So that has led me to consider the nature of memories. Do I really need all of that stuff? No. As I grow older (and, one would hope, wiser), I am beginning to grasp that it’s not so much the objects that are important as the thoughts and feelings that are behind them, and those I can possess without needing space beyond what’s between my ears. If the memories require anything more, they’re probably not necessary, nor are they really memories.
And so I feel ready to move on. We’ll see where to as we go along.
Fifteen years later caught in time’s incinerator
Yesterday’s worries are today’s
But the good times are so near just sitting back and drinking beer
You know I’m halfway down the road but I know that I still ain’t there
- Soul Asylum, “Can’t Go Back” (Made To Be Broken)
UPDATE: Through the happy synchronicity of the web, I came across this link this morning – Why Do You Have So Much Junk?
Thanks, Greg!
Web Greg (soon-to-be Lawyer Greg!) hipped me to the fact that my RSS feed wasn’t really working. For you geeks out there (and I don’t mean that in a perjorative sense), it should be fixed.
Let me know.