woo-hoo

CNN says there won't be a baseball strike!

denoument

Well, I took the day off yesterday to recover from stiffness and work out the details of insurance, etc. I've got pix of the car, I'll post them (and whopefully the whole story) this weekend.

I'm typing slower, but I should get "pain and suffering" money from my decresead ablilty to blog, er, type and program. Things are well otherwise. The good news is that this whole event has broken me out of my depressive cycle. Like there was such a major break from routine, that I feel alive again. It's a very good thing.

And it's Friday!!!

Thanks for all your kind words. Forgive me if I'm slow in responding to personal mail. You try to use a mouse without your thumb!!!

film at eleven

bad accident today
totaled my car
not my fault
broke my thumb
hurts to type
burma shave

when you wish upon a URL

Look to the right! I finally built my wish list! Hurrah!

heaven

I caught him leaving my driveway. He'd knocked, but I was tied up. By the time I got to the door, he'd left his Roanoke Baptist Church flyer in my door, and had turned to leave.

"May I help you?" I said, opening the screen door, "what did you need?"

The short, aging, bald man turned and fixed my with a sure stare. He explained that he pastored the Roanoke Baptist Church, but since they had "the fire"--a fire, like the Wal-Mart, is a singular enough thing in a small town to automatically warrant a definite article--they'd moved the church closer to Columbia City.

"We're not trying to steal anyone away from a church, but if you don't have a church we'd like you to stop by."

"I have a church," I dead-panned, "I go every week."

"You do? Well, like I said, we're not out to take people away from their church. Since you have a church, can I ask you another question?"

"Sure." I'm trying to fix supper and the grill's on, but what the hell.

"Are you going to heaven tonight?"

Beat.

"God, I hope not!"

"No, I mean if you were to die tonight, are you sure you'd be going to heaven?" he apologized.

"Well..." I thought for a minute. Do I agree and get him off my drive? Do I ask him to prove that there's a God? I decided to take a third approach that'd been drilled into me by my cultish church from childhood. "No, I'm not sure." I held up a dismissive hand, "But not for the reasons you're thinking."

"Oh?" he said "Why's that?"

"I'm not a hundred percent sure anyone is going to heaven when they die. It's very likely that whatever happens won't happen at the moment of death. I believe that there will be a second coming and there will be a resurrection at that time. I'm still not sure it'll be to heaven though. I mean 'tomorrow you'll be with me in paradise?' What does that mean really? Is paradise necessarily heaven?"

"You don't believe we're going to heaven?"

"Well, I believe we'll be raised in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, when he comes as a thief in the night. I believe, as scripture says, that we will be caught up and meet him in the air, but there's still no assurance we're going to heaven. I don't even know if it's a spiritual or corporeal resurrection, I'm not sure anyone does; it certainly is not stated explicitly."

"Well, I believe that God and Jesus are in heaven and I will be with them. In heaven."

"That's nice, but is it biblical?"

"Well in Revelations it tells us there will be a resurrection and in the gospels He tells us that he goes to prepare a house with many mansions for us."

Whoa! "Revelations?" You're a minister and you just called the last book of the bible "Revelations?" I kept that to myself, I didn't want to make him cry.

"That's all well and good," I plow on, "but He doesn't say that it's in heaven."

"I believe it will be somewhere, perhaps in the new Jerusalem, whether that be in heaven or on earth." he concedes.

"Agreed." Now that wasn't so hard, was it?

"So wherever we end up in the presence of the Savior, you believe you will be there sometime after you die?"

"Sure." I smile.

"So I'll see you there, then?"

"Most likely." I relent.

As he turns to go, I put a friendly arm around his shoulders. "When you go home and pray tonight?"

"Yeah?"

"Thank God that you weren't a Mormon. I would have been a lot harder on you."

the first 3D blogger?

I don't know if I'm the first, but I'm claiming the title. My dad was snapping digital snaps of me at church yesterday (and everyone was so glad to see him!) and accidentally shot this stereogram. So, right now, under the big top, for your viewing pleasure, I present: 3-D Blogger, The First. Thank you, thank you, no applause! (That's right, buddy, no applause!).

NOTE: You may need to get close to your monitor for it to work.

whole-life stewardship and moral relativism

The title of today's sermon is "Whole-life Stewardship." Honest. The minister's giving it as I type this. I'm sitting at the sound board at church (four missed sound cues into the service now) listening for feedback. We're cranked to the max to try to overpower the racket from the floor fans. We have floor fans because we have a lame landlord who won't spend the money to condition the air properly in our rental hall. This is why they want to buy a church.

Back to the sermon.

"You stop doing the things that you don't truly believe in," he says. "All things being equal, someone who advocates the superiority of Ford will not buy a Chevy." Basically he's saying if you're falling away, perhaps you never believed with your whole soul. He is railing against those that compartmentalize religion to Sunday--a "church" compartment that is separate from home, work, hobbies, etc. He has no idea the bell of truth he's ringing in my head. Religion is a compartment with me. And it is something that I'm falling away from because I truly don't believe to the core of my being. His tack is that it's sin, I suppose. "Our lives were entrusted to us by God. We do not own our lives. We need to be good stewards of what was entrusted to us by God."

Therein lies the rub.

The rest of the sermon presupposes the congregation's assent to this notion that we are only stewards of a life given us by a Creator. All Christian teaching (apart from the apologetics) presupposes basic tenants, dogmas if you will, that someone in my situation can't concede (i.e. the thing about there being a Creator). It is exactly those dogmas that I'm struggling with.

But having sat here nearly every week for thirty years, I'm haunted by the feeling that blogging in church is a sin. My core of habit and conditioning and heritage all point in the direction of living a life (or feeling guilty about not living a life) in the "Christian" way. That makes me an odd fellow. I am (currently) a skeptic and am looking seriously at atheism, yet I am a moral absolutist. Is there some law that says that atheists must be moral relativists? Ravi Zacharias and C. S. Lewis both make the claim (Zacharias doesn't even try to prove it, Lewis makes a good argument) that if you believe in moral absolutes--a moral law--then you must believe in a lawgiver. Ergo, a mind that controls the universe--god or God. Why? Why is that necessarily the case? Can anyone tell me?

More on moral relativism later maybe.

the song of solomon



Click here if you forgot what I look like.
(Now I can write off my camcorder as a blogging expense in case that's a deduction on next year's taxes...)

christ

Jesus Dance is too funny. That's not right...but hahahaha!

tautology

Abstinence makes the heart grow fonder.

progress
this will make a lot more sense if you've read idiot (me), two posts down.

Well, I did it. I got a third good night's sleep in a row. I also had my third panic attack in three days last night. It was that panic attack that sent me driving (driving always calms me), listening to C. S. Lewis, and eventually stopping. I stopped at the gas station (yes, the one where the Psycho Psychic formally worked, she's at "The Wal-Mart" now) and carted in my $30-from-eBay laptop and made a spreadsheet of all the things that I felt pressing in on me. I have a system of prioritizing that I learned at a seminar once that works really well. Unfortunately, the hard part is listing the stuff to begin with. I start to think that I don't have time to sit down and make lists--I just have too much to do to sit down and write! Then I'm smacked with the gut-wrenchingly cliche axiom: "those who fail to plan, plan to fail" (I hear you retching out there!) and I do the thing I already knew would help me. I prioritize.*

So, from 9:00 till 10:00 last night I used my 1987 edition of Lotus 123 and programmed my prioritization scheme into it and listed my personal and work tasks. Then I prioritized them and now I've gotten a bunch done. It's a good feeling. Sleep + Lists = Calm Productivity for me. And I know that. And I've known that. And, like the drowning man who pulls the lifeguard down with him, I get too panicked to see the help in front of my face.

theology
I'm nowhere closer to theological resolution, but damn!, C. S. Lewis was a very intelligent, logical man. And an amazing writer. Almost makes me want to go back and read the Narnia books to see his fiction prose style. I recommend Mere Christianity to anyone of any faith or of no faith. If not as an apologetic work, as an exercise in (nearly) air-tight logical argument.

---

*If anyone is interested in my super-cool method of prioritizing, leave a comment and I'll blog the method.

yada yada yada

How Are You Smart? How Are You Smart?

You are 35% geek You are a geek liaison, which means you go both ways. You can hang out with normal people or you can hang out with geeks which means you often have geeks as friends and/or have a job where you have to mediate between geeks and normal people. This is an important role and one of which you should be proud. In fact, you can make a good deal of money as a translator. Normal: Tell our geek we need him to work this weekend. You [to Geek]: We need more than that, Scotty. You'll have to stay until you can squeeze more outta them engines! Geek [to You]: I'm givin' her all she's got, Captain, but we need more dilithium crystals! You [to Normal]: He wants to know if he gets overtime. Take the Polygeek Quiz at Thudfactor.com

idiot (me)

Well, I've gotten two good nights of sleep in a row and I feel great this a.m. (Just one good night's sleep never fixes me.) I can't believe how often I come to the conclusion that good sleep is the cure for my ills and then am baffled when I get strung out because I'm short on sleep.

Just yesterday I was near the point of breakdown (after a 10-hour sleep, no less) when the kids missed the bus and I had to chase the bus down in She-who's SUV. (It was a camel-back-breaking-straw, not that stressful in and of itself.) "Overwhelmed," of course, has been my mantra. "Go to bed," should become my mantra.

I don't talk about this much, but next to sleep, the one thing that cures me of the overwhelmed/depressed cycle is to make lists of everything I feel pressing in on me to accomplish and prioritize them. The lists so help to put things into perspective and make me realize that the Big List of Things to Do is indeed finite. I need to do that today. And to be perfectly honest, one of the best times for me to do that is on the commute to and from work (1/2 hour each way). Unfortunately I find myself almost hedonistically addicted to whatever audiobook I'm listening to at the time to the exclusion of all else. Of course my book right now is Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis, the Narnia author, who was a very intelligent and logical apologist. I wanted to review his arguments in my search for theological peace.

So now I need to make a short list:

• Listen to Christian apologetics
• Make list of priorities

...and prioritize those.

clever slogans

Life is indescribably hectic. Too hectic to blog about it, as much as I'd like to. So here's something from my email that I enjoyed.

1. Sign over a gynecologist's office: "Dr. Jones, at your cervix."
2. Door to colonoscopy lab: "To expedite your visit, please back in."
3. On a plumber's truck: "We repair what your husband fixed."
4. Another plumber's truck: "Don't sleep with a drip. Call your plumber."
5. Pizza shop slogan: "7 days without pizza makes one weak."
6. At a Milwaukee tire shop: "Invite us to your next blowout."
7. Door of plastic surgeon's office: "Hello. Can we pick your nose?"
8. At a towing company: "We don't charge an arm and a leg. We want tows."
9. On an electrician's truck: "Let us remove your shorts."
10. On a maternity room door: "Push. Push. Push."
11. At an optometrist's office: "If you don't see what you're looking for, you've come to the right place."
12. On a taxidermist's window: "We really know our stuff."
13. In a podiatrist's office: "Time wounds all heels."
14. At a car dealership: "The best way to get back on your feet --- miss a car payment."
15. Outside a muffler shop: "No appointment necessary. We hear you coming."
16. In a veterinarian's waiting room: "Be back in 5 minutes.   Sit. Stay."
17. At a power company: "We would be de-lighted if you pay your bill. However, if you don't, you will be."
18. On the lawn of a funeral home: "Drive carefully. We'll wait."
19. At a propane filling station: "Tank heaven for little grills."

monday monday
Well, I had my sleep worked out till Saturday when we didn't got to bed till 6:00 and got up at 9:00 for church. Then slept 3:00-9:00 pm, watched Vanilla Sky then slept all night. I'm tired. But....

For the record the SFB's Mercedes was parked in the cul-de-sac three out of four mornings since my "lusty oats" post. Just for the record.

And this morning was a wake-up-on-the-wrong-side-of-the-bed morning. My bedroom smells like dog urine. I don't think I've mentioned it, but I have two dogs. Portia was the second. We already had a shih tzu named "Lola" with a housebreaking problem. (She-who-must-not-be-named has brought home every one of the last four dogs we've owned without consulting me.) She wanted me to take the dogs out this morning, but the puppy is afraid of me when she's only half-awake and pees before I can get her outside. Plus one of them had an "accident" (read: owners aren't doing their jobs well). Then I couldn't find socks, then I couldn't find the hair gel that one of my daughters was using over the weekend, then there was a stack of towels and cleaning stuff the kids left out in the yard yesterday, and, and, and... I feel like I'm out of control because I have kids and dogs and none of them has any notion of self-discipline.

Oy.

exclusive spinster picture!


Happy Birthday, Mary T.!

lusty oats

The rusty cream-colored Mercedes parked in my cul-de-sac pisses me off every time I see it. I think. I think I'm pissed off, it might be more like envy. Or lust. It's most assuredly one of the seven deadly sins.

Let me explain.

It's a girlfriend car. There are two teen-aged guys that live with their parents in a white ranch with black shutters at the summit of the cul-de-sac. One of them has a girlfriend that drives this car. I've seen her--getting out of that car and macking on that kid. She is stunning. I don't know if she stunning because she's actually beautiful or simply stunning in the way that any older teen-aged girl is stunning to men in their thirties, but I'm not sure it matters in this case. And it doesn't bother me when she pulls up. I mean certainly there's a hint of envy that this guy has a girlfriend that looks like that, but that's not the visceral reaction I have when I leave for work in the morning and the German rustbucket is still parked there.

The fact that it's there means only one thing--she stayed the night. At her teen-aged boyfriend's parents' house. For the twenty-second time since the beginning of July.

Besides the obvious questions of "where's her parents?" and "what the hell are his parents thinking?" and "what's this world coming to?" is the realization that there is something really exciting(in my mind at least, greener grass?) going on three doors down that not only am I not a part of, I've never been a part of and likely never will be a part of. There you have the epitome of what my mind's eye sees when I think about the wild oats I never sowed. You have the reckless youth, the lack of responsibility, the sex with a stunning young fuck buddy. What better life is there?

Probably mine.

Everyone tells me it's my life that's the better of the two. Some people have built popular blogs around the notion that marriage and healthy, beautiful, well-behaved daughters, enough income to cover the expenses and 2,400 square feet with a lawn is the ideal goal. I have a hard time internalizing that. Maybe that's why they call it "sowing your wild oats" in such a way that implies you can actually run out of oats (or at least the inclination to sow them wildly) and move on with the whole "settling down" bit. Perhaps someone who started out by farming domestic oats properly never understands the disadvantages of sowing oats wildly. I think that's it. The oats you're not sowing always seem to be growing greener than your own crop.

the thing about religion

Okay, too many people have asked me this both in public comments and privately in email to gloss by it any longer. Y'all keep asking me "what's the rush with the whole theology bit?" The inherent implication is that there is no rush. Many of you have even said I have the rest of my life to decide. On the metaphysical plane, that's absolutely true. On the physical plane it's a whole different ball game.

the dilemma
Sherman, set the wayback machine to a time before my father even went in for tests. This is way back a couple of months ago when we had a large online (and some offline) discussion about John Edward. I am a firm believer (and it turns out that this is about my only absolute belief) that psychics, distance viewers, tarot readers, mediums and the like are all fake. Whether they know it or not, they are cold or warm reading. They are also employing the Law of Truly Large Numbers. For nearly all of my life, I never saw anything in my life that couldn't be explained. I had some things happen to me that I couldn't explain at the time, but they were eventually explainable. (Don't bother telling your ghost stories, we'll save those for a later discussion.) The only supernatural I believed in was the Father, Son, Holy Ghost, heavenly hosts and those spiritual beings cast away after Lucifer's uprising. Period. In fact, while I believed in demons, I never have seen anything attributed to demons that couldn't be explained in some other way.

My lambasting of John Edward (who, by the way, my wife believes is for real) came back to bite me in the ass. How could I insist on there being absolutely no supernatural influence (plink, plink, plink) except the supernatural associated with Christianity. Therein lies the rub. I have not experienced anything that I have attributed to God that I can't explain some other way.

I know what every single Christian reading this is saying: "that's where faith comes in. Hebrews says that 'faith is the substance of things hoped for, and the evidence of things not seen.'*" Okay. I hear you. I believe that. But wouldn't that apply to any supernatural event? What if I have faith that people go to a better place when they die? Okay, but I've seen nothing to prove it, but most people believe it. What if I have faith that David Copperfield can actually levitate a love seat using supernatural powers? My eyes see it. It's almost believable except for the bit of my brain that knows that nothing Copperfield does is real. What if I have faith that a tarot reader can predict my future or John Edward can talk to my dead relatives? Doesn't Hebrews 11 apply here? Christians will answer that the difference is that God is real. I will let you ponder that whole argument for a while. We can pick it up later. I need to explain the urgency.

the urgency
There are three major factors pushing me to decide something:

• My father's newfound conviction since his "near-death" experience.
• My church's decision to purchase a church building.
• My position as a leader and role-model in my congregation.

The first (father's conviction) is not that much of a stress except how much my mom is clearly looking forward to a family Christian synergy. It's hard for me to look my mom in the eye when she says "your father is coming back to church and wants to renew is faith, isn't that wonderful?" and agree with her. There's a distinct hypocrisy there. This is the most minor of the three.

The second (new church purchase) is stressful as I know that very soon they will be asking for pledges and then money. This is a commitment. It's a commitment that I'm not willing to take lightly. It's one I want to make heartfully or not at all. This is a moderately high stress, but nearly induces an anxiety attack every time the subject comes up.

Finally, I am a worship leader, teen band leader, special music performer and sound engineer for my church. I have no idea how many of you can relate to getting up week after week "heartfully" ministering and leading concerning a subject you're not even sure if you believe. It's a huge lie. This is a lie of commission. Lies of omission come much easier. If you're watching cable and not paying for it, it's much easier to not tell someone that you're really stealing cable than to swear to them that you are not stealing cable. Every other week I stand up in front of 100 believers and tell them to just have faith and God will do the rest. Put yourself in my place.

On the flip side, of course, is the total shock of my mother, wife, minister, friends et al if I simply say I'm not going to church. That sounds minor, but I have gone to church nearly every week for thirty years. At the same church. With the same people. This is a Very Big Deal. The bigger this deal is, the more hypocritical I feel.

The pisser of it is that I don't know. If I knew that I wasn't going to do it anymore, I could gracefully bow out of things. I guess there's no reason to tell every meatspacer I know that I'm "not sure." But something is coming to critical mass.

I'm getting verklemmpt. Discuss this amongst yourselves.

---

*Hebrews 11:1 [KJV]

proverb from Mad magazine, circa 1977

Where there is no [tele]vision, people perish.

I know it's a 'tired' thing

I know it's a "tired" thing, but God, am I depressed. My schedule over the weekend was worse than last weekend. Both Sat and Sun mornings saw me to bed at 4:00 am with a rise time on Sat of 2 pm and Sun at 10:30 am. So I'm tired. But there is so much laundry to be done (She-who washed all the sheets and comforters at the landromat today and barely touched the stack), so much budgeting to do (bounced two more checks, I was notified today), and work to catch up on (don't get me started). It's killing me. I think it's this whole religion thing that's got me the most out of sorts. I don't even know if I feel strongly enough to bring it up with meatspacers, but I know I almost said something to She-who-must-not-be-named tonight about it. That I don't think that God exists; it's all large number theory. This is such a radical change for me, and I don't want to set it in stone by telliong people if I don't completely believe it. It will change enough people's lives that I have to be sure. But the doubt is killing me.

I gotta go. Sorry.

Fuck you, John Edward.

important to me

This NYTimes article requires (free) registration at the site, but is of such vital importance to what's going on in my brain concerning religion that I recommend registering. (It doesn't take that long, M). Article: The Odds of That

It's a very well-written piece on conspiracy v. coincidence.

What are the odds? The mathematician will answer that even in the most unbelievable situations, the odds are actually very good. The law of large numbers says that with a large enough denominator -- in other words, in a big wide world -- stuff will happen, even very weird stuff. ''The really unusual day would be one where nothing unusual happens,'' explains Persi Diaconis, a Stanford statistician who has spent his career collecting and studying examples of coincidence. Given that there are 280 million people in the United States, he says, ''280 times a day, a one-in-a-million shot is going to occur.''

The law of large numbers also describes how John Edward does his job. Finally, I'm really beginning to believe that events that people point to as "proof" to them of a deity are nothing more than coincidence.

You really must read this.

curse of the spinster

Just when I thought I couldn't be more restive (not to mention overwhelmed) Mary T. resurrects Half Mad Spinster with the statement:

I could stay rooted in one place and allow the self-doubt and self-hatred that was planted so long ago completely overtake my life like kudzu.

And now, once again, her writing has inspired ("inspired" being way too positive a word) me to examine my stagnation. I've moved eleven times in as many years and every place I've lived is within thirty miles of where I was born. I've never even lived away at school. I'm thirty-five fucking years old and too riddled with self-doubt and stupid ties* to try to find my real destiny. What are the chances that my ultimate fulfillment will come within an hour of where I grew up. Even Laura Ingalls Wilder--whom one would associate with having fulfillment all in one little town--began by moving out of Wisconsin.

Welcome back Mary T. And thanks for challenging me to think.

*except the Rush Limbaugh No Boundaries tie, ironically

god.

Some people simply need to die.

Article: 45 children removed in Web porn ring bust.

Authorities say the parents traded photos of themselves sexually abusing their own children and shared tips in online chat rooms.

Fuck.

four days
The two-month stay of my mother-in-law has become only four days. I'm taking her home tonight. As time goes on, her and her daughter (She-who) get along less and less. She's a very negative person and hyper-critical of everything. This is driving us all crazy. She claims to want to go home for a half-dozen lame reasons, it being understood that The Big Reason is that it's just not working for her to be here.

I did realize something last night, though. I was in one of those vicious circle tired-depressed-more tired-more depressed moods last night. I'm overwhelmed at work, on the budget and with housework. I can deal with all of that until Mother-in-Law comes around. Then I have the added benefit of her bitching that I work too much, that I'm not paying the bills and my house is trashed. Adding insult to injury, she criticizes me for staying up late to try to catch up or how I'm doing the laundry.

We get along pretty well--till she starts into a rant about She-who-must-not-be-named and I'm the recipient who's not allowed to say anything--but enough is enough.

sex in the city

LilFluffy's got a blog now. I live in the same city, and I've never seen people having sex in a park, but he claims he's seen it many times. Here he recalls some occasions.

Very entertaining.

enlightenment
dedicated to Ezrael and Mary T. on the occasion of their epiphanies

Milarepa had searched everywhere for enlightenment, but could find no answer. One day, he saw an old man walking slowly down a mountain path, carrying a heavy sack. Immediately, Milarepa sensed that this old man knew the secret he had been desperately seeking for so many years.

"Old man, please tell me what you know. What is enlightenment?"

The old man smiled at him for a moment, and swung the heavy burden off his shoulders, and stood straight.

"Yes, I see!" cried Milarepa. "My everlasting gratitude. But please, one question more. What is after enlightenment?"

Smiling again, the old man picked up the sack once again, slung it over his shoulders, steadied his burden, and continued on his way.

sleepy time

If I haven't responed to your emails in my normal prompt fashion, it's because my work/sleep schedule was all dorked up. It should be okay now. It was:

• Fri: sleep at 2:00 am (Sat)
  
• Sat: rise at 8:30 am, sleep from 5:00 to 11:00 pm, then awake for a while
  
• Sun: sleep at 4:00 am rise at 8:30 am, church, etc, sleep 5:00 to 6:00pm, work 9:00 pm to 2:00 am Monday
  
• Mon: sleep at 4:00 am, rise at 6:15 am, work 7:30 am 1:00 pm, go home to go to bed, but don't make it there till 6:30 pm sleep till...
  
• Tue: rise at 5:30 am (11 hours of sleep!)

I think I'm finally caught up. I feel good. I'll reply to those emails soon! And if you've never emailed me, feel free, I generally respond promptly.

death of a symbiont
Scott Allen Vice (1965-2002)


On July 29, Scott Vice, a grad student at University of Denver, was found dead in his apartment. I heard about it third-hand, from Mary T, who heard it from MKH. I immediately felt a loss when I heard, and it was strange. It was strange because until I heard of his passing, I'd never heard of Scott. While I've learned more now, all I knew about him at that moment was that he was a blogger. I quickly realized that he was the first blogger I'd ever heard of to die with an active blog. I felt it had to be some sort of morbid milestone, but more than that, it was like an arm had been chopped off this million-armed monster we call the "blogger community".

Steven Den Beste wrote an insightful piece on how bloggers tend to cluster yet remain all interconnected as well. Scott and I were connected in a way that only bloggers can consider connected--we both linked to another blog we enjoyed and that blog linked to both of us. By that simple mechanism of reciprocal linking, we've become part of a larger body. Not only linked to a cluster, but linked to all bloggers.

I don't mean to say that I feel the same loss or anything even in the same universe of sorrow that Mr. Vice's family and friends surely feel, and I don't mean to detract from meatspace effects of his death. I do mean to say that, while blogs come and go (live and "die", as we say), it's a natural thing. Like hair and skin and toenails on our own appendages, we expect to lose them over time. This, to me, is different. This is an amputation. But more than that, this is a symbiont ripped from it's host. Except it's not a host. It's a mass of symbionts--each with a life of their own, but each greater than itself because of connections with others. This synergism that is a mass of individual thoughts, yet somehow yields common thought. It's a self-correcting, checks-and-balances, spin-controlled being made up of all of us who might just be nothing otherwise. We are affected when one of us is lost.

This will happen again. It will happen more and more as this new form of community continues to evolve and grow. Such is the way of the universe. My universe is subtly yet unmistakably changed.

limerence link

Adultolescent Daria does a nice job of explaining limerence. I think she's got a good handle on it. I think she makes the mistake of differentiating "in love" and "limerence" (they are the same) instead of "love" and "limerence" (which are vastly different). A long, but good, read.

a hundred dollars

Last night, the band played a two hour audition (read: free) at a local bar. At the end of the last set, a regular at the bar asked if we'd play another hour. "Well, they're not paying us," I offered. "No problem," he says, "I'll get you some money." He proceed to "pass the hat" amongst audience members and collected a hundred dollars to give us to play another hour. We took him up on it. Hell, a twenty-dollar night is better than a no-dollar night. Plus, it pretty much locked us in to play there. If the crowd spontaneously throws money at you to play more, I'd say you're a hit.

personal note

Yndy, if you read this, drop me a private message or an email with your email address, m'kay?

If you're not Yndy, ignore this.

reprieve

I found out last night that my mother-in-law is only coming for two weeks. Whew.