Well-timed in a sense

The cusp of a new decade seems like as good a time as any to be beset by an existential crisis. But really there's no good time for an existential crisis. It has been a year since my last one, which is a better rate than my first twenty-odd years of existence, when the knowledge of the meaninglessness of said existence would cripple me every two weeks or so. Thanks, cocktail of psychoactive medication! But that's not much consolation at the moment. I'll just go back to bed, then, and hopefully be able to wake up for longer than an hour and a half by the time grad school starts.

More than just tip-toeing

I think I've become immoderate in my Calvinism. My heart positively delighted when during a video sermon John Piper bellowed, "If you get shot, God got you shot!"

English Stivvle Vizzle. Word for word, not though for thought. Word.

I received the ESV Study Bible I ordered yesterday. A full business day earlier than had been originally projected--big ups, UPS! (Do you see what I did there?) To say, with 2500+ pages of Scripture plus commentary, maps, tables, and illustrations in hand, that I am like a kid in a candy store would probably be to overstate my piousness/studiousness. Let's just say, my cup runneth over. By they way, why do bibles always have two columns to a page? Oh. Okay, then, now I know.

I can't believe I've made it this far into the OT.

Man, there are some gems in there. Like the story of Ehud, and then the judge who came after him who slew 600 Philistines with a cattle prod. To say nothing of Samson and the donkey jaw (I find it dumb usually when people make comments like this, but doesn't Samson and The Donkey Jaws sound like a good name for a band?) Dude tosses the thing away when he's done with it. Doesn't even hold on to it as a memento. Then was struck by the description of David, as the ark of the covenant is being brought to Jerusalem, kicks it in what I imagine was a very Kevin Bacon-like manner. But then he straight rebukes you. Lays some truth on you. Actually he lays it on Michal, the ol' ball and chain, or one of the old balls and chains, anyway. But you know when you read him as a dancin' fool, even though there's a part of you that's like, "Ha, that's awesome," there's another part that's saying, "Aren't you kind of making an ass off yourself? 2 Samuel chapter 6:

¹⁴And David danced before the LORD with all his might. And David was wearing a linen ephod. ¹⁵So David and all the house of Israel brought up the ark of the LORD with shouting and with the sound of the horn. ¹⁶As the ark of the LORD came into the city of David, Michal the daughter of Saul looked out of the window and saw King David leaping and dancing before the LORD, and she despised him in her heart. ¹⁷And they brought in the ark of the LORD and set it in its place, inside the tent that David had pitched for it.^T)"> And David offered burnt offerings and peace offerings before the LORD. ¹⁸And when David had finished offering the burnt offerings and the peace offerings, he blessed the people in the name of the LORD of hosts ¹⁹and distributed among all the people, the whole multitude of Israel, both men and women, a cake of bread, a portion of meat, and a cake of raisins to each one. Then all the people departed, each to his house. ²⁰And David returned to bless his household. But Michal the daughter of Saul came out to meet David and said, "How the king of Israel honored himself today, uncovering himself today before the eyes of his servants’ female servants, as one of the vulgar fellows shamelessly uncovers himself!" ²¹And David said to Michal, "It was before the LORD, who chose me above your father and above all his house, to appoint me as prince over Israel, the people of the LORD—and I will make merry before the LORD. ²²I will make myself yet more contemptible than this, and I will be abased in your eyes. But by the female servants of whom you have spoken, by them I shall be held in honor." ²³And Michal the daughter of Saul had no child to the day of her death.

Snap! Lesson: don't be a sarcastic nag when the Lord's anointed busts a move, or you may just find yourself barren.

I don't know if I'm using dated slang like "kick it," "snap," and "bust a move" in a humorous, knowing way or if I'm actually just dated.

Winston Churchill sez...

The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it and ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is.

See...

The fact that I don't expend any energy to build about myself an online following on this blog or twitter or anything means when I come up with a really clever take on current events, I don't have the ability to drop it like a wry bomb on the public square. Case in point:

"You know what the say: 90% of winning a Nobel Peace Prize is showing up."

See? That's hilarious. Takes the Woody Allen quote about life being 90% showing up, fuses it with Obama's Nobel Peace Prize (congratulations, yea Amurica, regardless of it being an absurd decision) and produces comic gold. But what happens? I put it on facebook, maybe I got a chuckle, but basically nobody cares; I put it on twitter, where I have, I think, one follower that isn't a porn-bot. It's like throwing a diamond into a black hole, I tell you! If Jim Gaffigan had said that, it would have been retweeted like an muhfucker.

But I don't care about that worldly recognition. I store up by treasure in Heaven like. The above written notwithstanding.

This is one of the greatest videos of all time.

YouTube - MTV VMAs Remix: Kanye West Interrupts Obama's Speech (HD)

Shared via AddThis

As a solemn anniversary approaches...

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Now playing: Wilco - Country Disappeared
via FoxyTunes

Listening to Al Green

"For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us." Romans 8:18. I reread Romans, and I still find Paul to be overly dry, intellectual, theological compared to the stuff I like, 1 Peter, 1 John, which is blunt and repetitive but the more affecting for that. But my distaste for Paul's writing is growing less pronounced. And that is a good line I quoted. I get frustrated when you hear people talk about the hereafter like it's a place where you get to do all the time what you would only do on the weekends on earth. Like somebody said Ted Kennedy was at that moment sailing in heaven. No, he's not. He's experiencing the incomparable, ineffable joy of being in the presence of God. Were it not for the verse I quoted in my previous post, I would call those who are under the impression that there is golfing in heaven "fools." But I won't. Though obviously I just did, indirectly.

yes i said yes i will Yes

I want to make a record somewhere of some of my "favorite" selections from the Scriptures. "Favorite" seems frivolous, but you (who?) know what I mean. Ones that resonate.

If anyone has material possessions and sees his brother in need but has no pity on him, how can the love of God be in him? Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth. 1 John 3:17-18. I just came upon this today, coming home from a rally for health care reform legislation.

Keep falsehood and lies far from me; give me neither poverty nor riches, but give me only my daily bread. Otherwise, I may have too much and disown you and say, 'Who is the LORD ?' Or I may become poor and steal, and so dishonor the name of my God. Proverbs 30:8-9.

Ye have heard that it was said to them of old time, Thou shalt not kill; and whosoever shall kill shall be in danger of the judgment: but I say unto you, that every one who is angry with his brother shall be in danger of the judgment; and whosoever shall say to his brother, Raca, shall be in danger of the council; and whosoever shall say, Thou fool, shall be in danger of the hell of fire. Matthew 5:21-22. So much as calling a man a fool puts one at risk of hell fire...I remind myself of this while watching cable news and having horrible derisive thoughts about many of the hosts and talking heads.

I'm working my way unsystematically through the epistley part of the New Testament...I had read all the Gospels a handful of times but balked at anything else (except Revelation, for its surreal/nightmare/mystical literary attributes mostly). And I still have a skepticism about Paul. I can't explain it. I just have a Paul block. But all the letters by or attributed to Peter and John, for example, that stuff just knocks me out. It's super repetitive and simplistic in a way, but it cuts to the bone. And anyone who's ever seen a real bone will tell you how strikingly, disconcertingly white it is.

I was trying to think of a title for this post, which doesn't have a clear focus and as such doesn't lend itself to easy titling, and I just thought of the last line of Ulysses, of Molly Bloom's soliloquy. It's just so wonderful and I don't know why very much and don't care to think about why particularly. That's my rebellion against four to five years of liberal arts education. Stately, plump Buck Mulligan...I read Ulysses when I was seventeen, give or take a year. What can a seventeen-year-old, intelligent but no prodigy, get out of Ulysses? I don't know, but it was wonderful. It's one of those books where every so often you read a line and your heart flutters and you feel faint and you hold the book firmly to your chest. All the best ones do that.

Peter and John do that. Paul not so much.

I always want to read Ulysses again, because I know I'd get so much more out of it. Just like I'd get even more out of it if I read it again at the age of twenty-nine and so one. That's assuming I continue educating myself, so I can pick up references and whatnot. But I can't read. Or, rather, I can only read very sporadically. I read a couple hundred pages of Tom Jones and was liking it, but then set it aside. Started reading Norman Mailer's last, the one about Hitler, and was liking it but set it aside. Those are the most recent ones, but there's at a bare minimum a dozen books like that I've read an eighth of.

I'll ramble more later. I'll make a handful more blah gingham entries then disappear again for a few months.

"Wherefore, my beloved brethren, let every man be swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath."

BBC NEWS | Middle East | US man returns ancient Jerusalem stone

BBC NEWS | Middle East | US man returns ancient Jerusalem stone: "Haim Shchupak of the IAA's anti-theft unit said the returns of antiquities were rare.

'It's nice that these people's consciences bothered them,' he told the Associated Press news agency."

It's a beautiful thing when Catholic guilt and Jewish guilt can live together in such perfect harmony.

In other news, I'm cold gradua-in' from college on Saturday! I have wrested a degree from this institution's sepulchral hands in the name of my family after a forty-five year long struggle!

I'm on a boat, motherfucker!

Today has been a fucked up day

Today has been a great day. I've just been feeling it like pop rocks going off in my muscles. It's a great day. The weather is beautiful. It's cool for spring, like I like it. Sometimes it starts raining, but its such a light rain. It sets off the scent of the flowers and makes everything smell like a load of newly washed clothes. The night before I got a lot of work done on a paper. My worked turned out really well and now I've got a great head-start on completing it. I'm graduating in less than two weeks. I had a class and at one point the professor threw a binder clip and inadvertently hit a guy in the forehead with it. We all laughed loud and long. Before that I worked on this story I've been working on for a long time. I finally turned a corner in the story and the writing was flowing. I was really happy with it.

When I got up today I looked at the blogs and I learned that Jay Bennett had died. This really socked me in the gut. The Jay Bennett-era Wilco was my favorite band in the whole world when I was in high school. Being There and Summerteeth and Yankee Hotel Foxtrot were the soundtrack to my late adolescence. After Jay and Wilco parted ways, I bought the first couple albums he put out, with Edward Burch and solo. I enjoyed them and listened to them a lot. In interviews and in the Wilco documentary I found him to be a likable guy. He was intelligent and funny. He was a music whiz.

Luckily in the last six months I haven't been depressed very much very often. But over the years (like, more than half of the 23 I've lived) I've become well acquainted with depression. As such, it is extremely easy for me to distinguish sadness from depression. The difference can be described in a way that is simplistic but accurate. Sadness feels like you have been hollowed out. There is an empty place in your torso...sometimes it's your stomach, sometimes your throat, sometimes chest. Depression feels like lead weights have been sewed into your clothes. You carry the weight and it makes you weary.

I am very sad about the death of Jay Bennett. His music meant a lot to me. My life has been one almost entirely untouched by the loss of people close to me. I don't know whether that has any effect upon the way I react to death of people I do not know personally but are important to me in some way.

There have been a few times during this great, happy, beautiful day that I press pause and remember that Jay Bennett has died and wonder whether I should feel guilty for having such a wonderful day. The answer is probably no, but the question still rankles.

Honestly to someone such as myself who is so well acquainted with depression, the discrete feeling of sadness can be refreshing. It is a reminder of what a healthy emotion feels like. This is what it feels like to feel bad the right way.

Have you thought about the question, would you rather feel bad or feel nothing at all? That's a question depressives sometimes have to consider because a pharmaceutical will effectively stymie the depression while also blunting every other emotion. Anyway, I would rather feel nothing at all than feel depressed. But I would rather feel sad than nothing at all.

All of this is just a way of saying: I'm having a happy day, and it's funny how big a part sadness plays in the happy day.

Mer der Mystery

Yes, sea that mysterie in Franco-German. I came 'round these parts to make a content-free posting which would, despite its lack of content renew my bindings to the ol' bloege...but then I saw that my last posting was from but four days ago! I assure, you kind reader, I have no recollection of having made any such entry! My battle against alcoholism has not been a rout on my part, but the only reasonable explanation (reasonable for me, anyways) would be a black-out. And I have had no black-outs for ages! Certainly not a mere four days ago. (To the uninitiated at the torments of dipsomania: one generally is able to recognize in retrospect the fact of having experienced anterograde amnesia, given a few hours of consciousness and, inevitably, a few clues such as unexplained wounds and missing twenty dollar bills.) How, then did this entry appear?--

Ghosts?!

No, no. That makes scant little sense. Perhaps I am just extremely forgetful, in a manner indicative of my pitiless abuse of my brain (to speak nothing of liver, heart, lungs, ankles, etc.) and my death by neurological disease at the age of, say, thirty-seven. Curious!

This blog.

It still exists.

Hey y'alls!

Judd Gregg knew what he was doing. He knew what he was getting into from the get go and eventually he sensed he had straight path between his boots and Our President's crotch. But who gives a? Stimulus done passed, and it only took Sherrod Brown fleeing his mother's funeral to get sixty votes in the Senate. When it comes down to it, Our President is getting it done--he's just getting it done a bit sloppy. Joaquin Phoenix was the most memorable appearance on Letterman in twenty years. Hoax or heroin? I sez: forty percent drugs and sixty percent performance art. I am old enough I don't really notice my birthdays anymore. So, yeah.

Things happen.

Things happen and then the way things are aren't the way things were before those things happened.

That's only my way of saying time moves forward ineluctably.

Obama blah, recession, culture, yada.

Man Bob Dylan Made Infamous With “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” Dies : Rolling Stone : Rock and Roll Daily

I won't delve into my personal situation, which is a much confused mix of pros and cons. But what a beautiful time it is to be an American. And at the most morbid and dark end of the national mood, may I say: what a perfect time for the non-eponymous subject of the Bob Dylan song "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll," William Zan(t)zinger to have snuffed it? That's change I can believe in!

Man Bob Dylan Made Infamous With “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” Dies : Rolling Stone : Rock and Roll Daily

Problems and Priorities

That last post was, obvs, made in a bad place. My anxiety was to say the least off the charts. But now I'm doing okayish, don't feel suffocated with dread, etc. One thing that helps: the national mood! If you look at polls, people still think the country is headed in the wrong direction, and in a way they're right. When it comes to a nation's direction, it's like a huge ship or something. You can't stop all of a sudden and you can't turn on a dime. It'll take years before we can really bring the wrong direction we're heading in to a complete halt and get turned around and moving in the right direction. But it's striking the other polling numbers that are coming out right about now in regards to the national mood, the inauguration, and whatnot. Pollingreport.com is a good site to have a look at a number of polls in one place. I was especially struck by polls of what people think is the biggest national problem--the economy just dwarfs all the other issues. The reason for that is obvious and all, but to see the way that Iraq and terrorism is a complete afterthought in relationship to the economy is striking. I've also really been uber-sincerely pumped by that plane landing in the Hudson River. It's the type of story you never see, where there are real heroes (as opposed to the bastardized overuse of the word this decade) and what should have been a disaster being completely averted. It really is a beautiful accidental metaphor for the place the country is in right now, hopefully. If they give the Captain, Sully Sullenberg a ticker tape parade, then I will forever take credit for that fact--I was posting all over facebook and blogs that we should give the fellow a ticker tape parade down NY's Canyon of Heroes. And if it happens and I take credit I'll only be a little deluded. I really was the first person to publically call for it--some columnist for the New York Daily News mentioned it in an article put up at like 3:00am the next day, but I was in there like eight hours before. The internet is an incredible thing.

Problems and Priorities

Just the facts

Am nauseous from anxiety three-fourths of the day. Chinese literature is fascinating, but I would grasp it better if the subjects were named Ralph and Chuck and Jim and such. It's a miracle I've never had an ulcer. If I keep having that thought I will develop an ulcer, because I always used to point out how I'd never broken a bone and then I broke a few. That is logical. Can't do anything about it. Every time, I tell myself, "This is the time I won't be able to hack it." Then I do. But this time I won't be able to hack it.

Holy shit the decade's nearly over

It is another year. I believe that year is the two-thousand-and-ninth since the birth of Our Lord and Savior, as reckoned by a Dark Ages monk who was off by three to six years. 2008 was a bad year, speaking both personally and collectively for the nation/world. However the trend in my case was from rather bad to rather better, while the collective trend was from slightly bad to fucking terrible. So I'm hoping that my well-being and the well-being of every else as a whole is in some manner inversely related to one another, because Lord knows, the Word made Flesh approximately but definitely not exactly 2009 years ago knows, the train to Shit Town has only just pulled out of the station. I'm figuring 2009 will make the year recently concluded seem like receiving oral sex while piloting a diamond-encrusted automobile along the peppermint-paved road that weaves lazily through Teddy Bear & Hashish Forest. I base this inverse-welfare idea on nothing really, just the two opposing trajectories of 2008 and I suppose its fitting well enough with my own bilious conception of myself--suffering as others prosper, prospering as others suffer. I return to college in two days. My sabbatical will have lasted approximately 49 weeks. My fate, I feel, rests in my modest daily dose of Klonopin. And Campral. And a couple other psychoactive drugs. Science protect me!