The Prophet Boy

Coincidence? I think NOT!

2010-05-20T21:32:00.000-05:00

Has anyone ever noticed that this clip from the opening sequence of Manimal

. . . looks curiously similar to this clip from the opening sequence of Night Court?

Lunacy

2009-12-05T01:38:00.003-06:00

When in the middle of the journey of our lives we find ourselves lost in solitary woods without a guide, sometimes old, dead, Latin dudes show up and take us to hell:

Nel mezzo cammin di nostra vita, mi ritrovai per una selva oscura ché la diritta via era smarrita.

I must have heard my Renaissance professor speak those words five hundred times. I don't know any Italian, but I do know that sentence.

In the middle of the path of our life, I found myself again in the midst of an obscured wood where the right way was lost.

At some point, I suppose we all find ourselves there.

This post was going to be about how poets write crazy crap. But then I started thinking about Dante, and that first sentence of the Divine Comedy, and then I got sidetracked.

I think that is the point I was trying to make in the first place.

Amy Grant

2009-10-18T09:59:00.002-05:00

When I was eight years old, my high-school aged sisters drove two hours to see Amy Grant in concert. My mom wouldn't let me go with them.

Sorely depressed, I stayed home that night and went into my sisters' room to listen to Unguarded on LP vinyl.

I remember the record player system my parents had bought for my sisters the previous Christmas because the box in which it was packaged boldly boasted that it was equipped with a "Diamond-Pointed Needle!!!" The proclamation had really impressed my mother. It had impressed me too.

The first album I remember listening to on the system was Sandi Patti's The Finest Moments.Specifically, track 1 (back when tracks were literally tracks): "How Majestic Is Your Name." Many people I have talked to about this (it is a great topic at parties) associate the song with Amy Grant, but I swear that Sandi did it first. In fact, I don't think the song was ever actually recorded by Amy. Go to Amazon and listen to the clip.

But on the night of the concert, I wasn't listening to the overly exuberant cantillations of Sand Patty. Instead, I was sitting in a dark bedroom, lit only from the amber light of the hallway spilling through the cracked-open door, entranced in the moody and melodic -- and in retrospect, really quite depressing -- songs from Grant's seventh studio album.

Huddled alone on the floor in front of my sisters' record player, I listened as Amy sang songs directly to me. Increasingly, I began to feel as if Amy Grant had written the entire album directly to me:

Everywhere I go . . . I see your face in the crowd

Everywhere I go . . . I hear your voice clear and loud

As I listened to "Everywhere I Go," I had a sudden epiphany: I was the long-lost illegitimate child of Amy Grant. She had named me Sharayah, but she had given me up at birth to pursue her musical career. This album was her letter to me:

I've known you as long as anybody

You know me better than the rest . . .

Tell me, tell me, where do you belong?

I guess you have no idea

Tell me, tell me, where do you come from (yeah!)

Tell me, tell me, why do you pretend to know?

Sharayah . . . I care about you

Sharayah . . . I don't want to lose you.

Come with me . . . Sharayah.

Tears streamed down my face, and I had a good, convulsive meltdown. It soon had become obvious to me that the reason my mother had stopped me from going to the concert was that she did not want my birth mother to take me back.

I had gone to bed early that night, but sometime after midnight I was awakened by chattering from outside my bedroom. My "sisters" had returned from the concert, and they were talking in the kitchen, laughing, buoyant, bubbling over with satisfaction. Climbing down from my bunk bed, I went to look.

Watching them talk, snack, and reflect upon their evening experience, I realized that it had been for the best that I had not gone with them to the concert. It became clear to me that if I had attended the concert, I never would have received the message that had been intended for me. It no longer mattered that I had not been able to see Amy Grant live, in person.

I had something better than that.

Veralee

2009-06-06T06:56:00.003-05:00

I know there are a lot of you out there who think that being married to me would be the most fulfilling life a girl could ever dream of living. After all, I am funny, smart, handsome, sexy, and tender as the Spring rain.

It's true.

But in an effort to reduce the number of solicitations I have to wade through in my inbox every morning, I wanted to let everybody know one thing:

I am in love with a beautiful woman.

My wife is an amazing person. Let me tell you a little story about how we met:

When I was attending college at the University of Illinois in the late summer of 1997, my friend Donnie dragged me with him to church at the First Christian Church on John Street. It was a relatively large church, it was growing rapidly, and the people there seemed friendly enough. However, at the time I was not particularly interested in attending church with my friend. There were several churches in Champaign-Urbana that I wanted to visit. But since Donnie was my friend, I thought that I might as well start my search by attending church with him.

At this exact same time in my life, I had an obsession with the singer Jewel. A few months earlier I had been in Movie Mania (don't look for it--it's not there anymore), when Kristian-Hjort Madsen, my foreign-exchange friend from Denmark, picked up a disk on their CD rack and said in his thick, Scandinavian accent, "This girl is really hot."

I bought Pieces of You that day and took it home to my upstairs bedroom where I listened to it 6,942 times over the remainder of the summer. I also stalked Jewel on the Internet at my job at the library of the junior college where I worked when I was supposed to be shelving books. Her voice was so haunting, her blonde hair so pretty, and her full, cheeky face so innocently beautiful.

And she played the guitar.

But the end of the summer came, and I had to pack up my things, move north to Champaign, and go to church with my friend Donnie.

At this church there was a Sunday School class for college kids and young adults, so I decided that I would try it out--and I will never forget what I saw when I walked into that room.

There she was: Jewel. She was wearing a cute, homemade sun dress, and she was sitting discreetly in the corner of the room. Her face looked just as I had imagined it would: soft, full of life--and innocence--and as beautiful as the Alaskan sunset. So I did what I always did when I walked into a room with a beautiful woman. I sat in a chair on the opposite side of the room and pretended she didn't exist.

As class began, it became obvious that this girl was not only pretty, but she was smart too. Whenever you place 12 people in a room and try to start a formal discussion of any kind, it quickly becomes obvious what kind of people they are. There's the quiet and discreet one, the loud and obnoxiously arrogant one (me), the one who plays with the Gameboy, the one who is there because his parents dragged him out of bed again, and then--if you are lucky--there is the one who is never says a word, but when asked a question directly answers with a beautiful, smart, and admirably understated response that makes arrogant assholes feel like arrogant assholes. That was Veralee. And I wanted more of her.

The next Sunday my friend Donnie had a great idea to drag me with him to see Phil Guay and Kevin Goodwin in some outlier of Chicago. I didn't really want to go, but I didn't know how to tell Donnie that I wanted to stay in town to go to his church that I didn't want to go to in order to see a girl at Sunday School whom I would pretend to ignore. Yeah, it was a complicatedly stupid excuse, so I went to Chicago.

I endured the trip--and an extra week of not seeing Veralee--and anticipated the next Sunday.

When the day came, I walked into the Sunday School room again to see my Jewel. Only, she wasn't wearing a cute blouse and bouncing on a trampoline in the Alaskan sun. Actually, she was wearing an undersized, maroon, polyester pantsuit that she must have bought from a thrift store, because I am sure it must have been discontinued from JC Penney's in 1971. She was also wearing thick-soled, patent leather platform shoes that reflected the fluorescent lights of the Sunday School room ceiling. The outfit was hot, fun, and sexy, and this girl had definitely grabbed my attention.

A few minutes later the the youth minister of the church popped his head inside the room and said, "Hi, Veralee!" Then he babbled to her with a few nonsensical comments before announcing to the class: "If anybody's interested, we're looking for someone to help lead the high school worship team by playing guitar." Then he added, "Veralee helps. She sings and plays guitar."

Thump-thump . . . thump-thump . . . thump-thump . . .

So I raised my had and volunteered to join the music group. As they say, the rest is history.

Since that day in September 1997, I have grown closer and closer to one of the most beautiful women in the world. A woman who captured my heart with a gentle face, a soulful voice, an acoustic guitar, and a sexy polyester pantsuit.

She is the light of my life, and I am the luckiest guy in the world.

Roomba Meets Dog Vomit

2009-05-20T22:11:00.005-05:00

I've been wondering lately whether it is possible or impossible to escape one's nature. Can a dog train itself not to eat its own vomit?

The ascetic part of me says its possible. With enough self-flagellation I suppose anything is possible. But the realist inside me sincerely doubts that anyone can escape from himself.

My StickyFeet blogger friend recently wrote a reflection on a list of 10-year goals she wrote for herself 10 years ago. Then she wrote another list of goals for the next 10 years. It really made me want to puke . . . then eat.

I went to a grade school where every day I was required to set goals for how much work I would accomplish on the next school day. There were minimum limits, of course, but I was free to set higher goals if I wanted, and there were rewards for setting and accomplishing higher goals. However, whether you set high goals or low goals, the goals had to be accomplished, and if I didn't finish all the assignments that I had planned for myself during school on Tuesday, I had to take them home as homework to finish before school started on Wednesday.

So with the first eight school years of my life being managed completely by the discipline of goal setting, one would think that I had been trained relatively well to be a goal setter. But I am not.

I rarely set goals. And on the rare occasions that I do, I don't follow through on them.

Once, I set a goal to write a novel by age 25, the age John Irving was when he wrote Setting Free the Bears. I'm 32. Read my book yet?

But I'm digressing a bit too much. This dog vomit thing I started with isn't all about setting goals: It's about questioning whether or not it is possible to force yourself to become something that you are not.

I am equally ambitious and directionless. Some friends of ours have a Roomba. It's a little robotic vacuum cleaner that randomly sweeps the floor by bumping into table legs and walls. Every time it bumps into something, it turns around and zooms off in another direction. I could do that robot's job.

Sometimes I try to convince myself that if I just bumped into the right wall, I would suddenly stop whizzing around. But after living with myself for 32 years, I am beginning to think that I probably won't. And that is the big problem with me, and goals, and vomit--I can't set goals because I don't really know what I want. All I know is what I am.

It seems to me that there are three kinds of people who set goals:

Person 1. You enjoy accomplishing goals because you are a goal-setter by nature. The goal itself is less important than the accomplishing of the goal.

Person 2. You like the stuff that you get so much when you set goals that the goal setting is worth the payoff. It's not so much that you love the sense of accomplishment. It's that you really love the new 60-inch flat panel HDTV.

Person 3. You set goals because the private school you attend makes you set them.

You see, it's like this: If I really wanted to write a novel, I would have done it already--seven years ago. But the fact is that I haven't. It's not about inspiration. It's not about inability to compose. It's just about the Roomba. It's about the online college course I decided to teach, or the Scholar Bowl team, or the night classes, or the yearbook, or the National Board Teacher Certifcation program that I paid a $65 deposit on yesterday. There are too many damned table legs in this room.

All I need is one gigantic room without walls. Yeah, that would solve everything.

I've got a lot more to write about this topic, but I just heard on the radio that there is a job opening for an envelope stuffer.

I can make $500 a week sitting at home!

Delores (or Part 2)

2009-05-19T19:36:00.003-05:00

Okay, Delores . . .

Most people who read this blog know what kind of school I attended through eighth grade, so I won't bore you all with the details. For those who don't, suffice it to say that I had no idea what a "regular"classroom looked like until my first year of high school.

Freshman year. First semester. Health class.

The brown-tiled classroom with high ceilings contained 24 wooden student desks, and one empty teacher desk. Taped to the front of the teacher's desk was an 8 1/2 by 11 piece of white paper with a message that read: "Failure to Participate on YOUR part does not constitute and emergency on MY part." Behind the desk sat a 74-pound woman with white hair and a fearsome case of the head shakes. Her name was Delores Schmalhausen.

Behind me sat a guy named Clint. Clint had been in prison. I had been to Christian school. Ms. Schmalhausen gave us a quiz every week, and after the quiz, she made students do the "trade-and-grade," each student passing their paper to the student in front of himself. I always had to grade Clint's paper. He always got an F. I was always afraid.

Long story short--Schmalhausen gave me a B. I probably deserved it. It's not like I knew what I was doing. But on the other hand, I always found it very disfortunate that some students had to take Health with Delores Schmallhausen, while others were able to take it with Monty Forsythe. The biggest difference between the two being that Monty seemed happy to be alive.

My older brother had never received any grade lower than an A in high school. As an eighth-grader, I had appreciated my older brother's accomplishment, and considered no less from myself. But by the end of the first semester of my freshman year--thanks to Delores--I already had one B. What was I going to do: Tell everybody for the rest of my life that I got one B in high school?

That's like telling people that you've only kissed your sister once.

The B from Schmalhausen forced me to reevaluate my entire raison d'etre in high school. If I couldn't be perfect, then what could I be?

Sophomore year. First semester. Journalism.

You would think that after my experience with D.S., I would have learned my lesson about trying to follow in my brother's footsteps. Unfortunately for me, I didn't. My brother had enrolled in the high school newspaper class as a senior, and I decided that I would too--as a sophomore. When I walked into the classroom on the first day, Ms. Krugerwalker yelled at me and told me that sophomores were not allowed to take her class. Then she demanded that I go down to Guidance to have my schedule changed. So I did.

When I walked into Guidance, Ms. Boyer told me to go back to class and everything would be fine because I was smart. So I did.

When I walked back into the classroom, Ms. Krugerwalker asked me what the hell I thought I was doing, so I told her that Ms. Boyer told me that I should stay in the class. Ms. Krugerwalker looked confusedly at me, turned around, and gave me a B out of spite.

My brother as a junior and a senior participated on the academic competition team called JETS (Junior Engineering Technical Society). Dick Kessler was the sponsor. I had Mr. Kessler for Algebra during my freshman year of high school--just like my brother, who had Mr. Kessler for Calculus and Physics as a senior. But Dick retired when I was a sophomore, and he was replaced by a new teacher named Ms. Pampewinkle.

When I became a junior, I asked Ms. Pampewinkle if I could be on the JETS team. She said no--that she was only allowing seniors on the team.

I almost cried.

By the time I was a senior in high school, taking Physics and Calculus with Mrs. Pampewinkle, I had already accumulated three B's, and I had been told that I wasn't really needed on the academic team. So when it came time to complete assignments in Calculus class, me and my boy JayZ decided that we weren't really interested. Sure, we took the tests. Yes, I sometimes set the curve, and always earned A's on them. Still, because of my incomplete homework grades and my subsequent 89.67% in the class (Pampewinkle doesn't round up), I got a fourth, and final nail in my academic coffin.

On my graduation day, they announced the students with the best academic GPAs--the "Top 10"--from tenth, to valedictorian. My name was called first. I was both relieved (to actually be in the list, even with four B's) and mortified (at the people whose names were called after mine). It was a far cry from where I had intended to be when I was a freshman.

And the point of all this?

I don't know. Maybe I'll figure that out in Part 3 . . .

Traffic Survey

2009-04-24T12:43:00.002-05:00

My Honors English class is conducting research to evaluate the safety of a few intersections in Olney, Illinois.

One part of our study is an online survey. It is available at http://erhssurvey.blogspot.com/.

If you have a minute, please take the survey. Also, it would be FANTASTIC if you would link to the survey on your Facebook, MySpace, or Blogger account.

Thanks!

"Scatter-Brained"

2009-04-23T20:50:00.002-05:00

So I was taking a walk with my wife the other day, and we were talking about a person who is probably very smart. My wife had observed that this person has a very messy desk and said, "Yeah, she is very scatterbrained."

I, too, have a messy desk, and I felt a little hurt at the implication that I, too, am scatterbrained.

But then I paused for a minute to think this thing through. I've heard that it's common for "intelligent" people to have messy desks, offices, apartments, whatever. I have a student who is actually very smart, but he never knows where anything is, and I'm sure his locker is a mess. But that's the stereotype, right? Smart people are "scatterbrained."

But then it dawned on me: They aren't scatter-brained; they are scatter-everything else.

It's a misnomer. The brain is in perfect functioning order. In fact, it is the efficiency of these highly organized brains that transforms the desks and apartments of these individuals into coffee-stained landfills. There simply is no need for physical organization when they've got it all up there.

So in a burst of self-congratulatory indignation I let my wife know exactly how ridiculous it is to suggest that these people are scatter-brained when it is actually their desks and offices--not their brains--that are disorganized. And furthermore, I contested, it is likely that individuals who lead a highly-organized life would be more aptly described as scatterbrained because the inefficiency of their mental operating systems requires them to rely upon external organizational structures in order to assist their underdeveloped brainpower.

I took a breath.

She kept walking.

Lipstick on Your Lips

2009-03-10T06:33:00.003-05:00

So I googled myself today and found this.

Play the song.

Shakespeare and Calculus and Schmalhausen, Part 1

2009-03-05T06:38:00.005-06:00

Note: I detest reading navel-gazing blog posts that are ridiculously self-absorbed.

And that is EXACTLY what is in this post: It's a long, whiny reflection on my past that nobody in his or her right mind should want to read.

So please spare yourself. Read something worthwhile.

___________________

I come from a family of teachers.

I also come from a family of arrogantly smart assholes.

My oldest brother and sister are very intelligent, and they (without meaning to) set the tone for the six of us to follow. When I started dating and spending time with families outside my own over the holidays, I was surprised that people just talked and smiled and enjoyed laid-back communication with each other. My family always sat around, ate leftover turkey, and tried to out-smart-ass each other for two weeks.

I'm sure that everyone has trouble putting a finger on his or her identity growing up, and for me that was no different. I tell myself that my problem was particularly difficult because I was the third and youngest boy in a family of eight children. I had older and younger sisters, but trying to find yourself among a handful of girls (for me at least) was not as difficult as trying to measure up to two older brothers.

My dad was a chemistry teacher. Three of my four older siblings--including both my brothers--went to college to study chemistry. All of them went to the University of Illinois. All of them were smart.

(Gnk-Gnk: Don't feel left out. There's a whole other OCF story that we shared for you.)

In high school I did well. I took all the advanced math and science classes. I got all A's (except from a handful of crappy teachers--including my dad).

But also in high school, I became involved in a world in which I had never seen my brothers operate. I was involved in track and cross country. I was the team mascot for football and basketball games. I was the editor of my school newspaper.

I had a girlfriend.

My older brothers had been involved in their things, but their things were different than my things. And as I made this journey through high school, earning Bs and running relays, I began to feel that I wanted to be different.

The trouble is that I didn't know how "different" looked. Nobody in my family was really different, especially the male side. I had no role models for different.

And it might seem a bit wimpy to make this complaint. After all, there are plenty of people who don't have role models. People who are born first in the family. People without brothers or sisters. I understand that.

But I had something those people do not.

When I was exploring this different path, I went to U of I for a college visit. I was thinking of studying Spanish, and maybe becoming a foreign language journalist. When I talked to the adviser in the foreign language department, I told her that I was thinking about studying Spanish, but that I also had inclinations toward math and science.

Her response: "Sure. An engineer can build a bridge. But can he tell you why it's there?"

Ok. Imagine somebody saying that at Christmastime in a room filled with arrogantly smart assholes. . . .

"I think I might like to be a dentist."

"Sure. A dentist can clean your teeth. But can he tell you why they are there?"

"I think I might like to be a meteorologist."

"Sure. A weatherman can tell you when it rains. But can he tell you why it does?"

"I think I might like to examine the nature of language in the convergence of post-structural art across various media."

"Sure. A . . . . What did you say? Ok, whatever Bennie. You get right on that."

And that is the trouble I had. Not only did I have no role model for the different path I was trying to hammer out, but I also had to run the gauntlet any time I had any idea about how that path might look.

And I'm still not sure.

Recipes from Hell: Bread and Tomatoes

2009-03-03T18:23:00.004-06:00

Tonight I made a Beer Cheese Soup for dinner. It is a wonderful dish. It is simple, tasty, and requires few ingredients.

But our kids "hated it," and were happy to tell us so.

After a gentle scolding about how impolite it is to use the word hate, I told my kids about this truly disgusting food that my mom would serve at dinner: Bread and Tomatoes.

Yeah. It's grosser than it sounds. It's basically wet, soggy, slurpy, and piping hot bread that has been stewed in sweetened tomato juice. I poked around on the Internet to find a picture of it, and I discovered that it is more commonly called Tomato Pudding. I couldn't find a great picture, but the one above gives a pretty close approximation of how it looked. Apparently, many people cook it until it is mostly dried out. But my mom used to slop it on our plates like a steamy red wash rag.

Here's the recipe (Serves 10--I come from a big family):

1. Crumble up six pieces of bread (or less, nobody will eat it anyway)

2. Pour a can of tomato puree over the bread.

3. Sprinkle a tablespoon of sugar over the top.

4. Add a dash of salt and pepper.

5. Bake at 350 for 18 minutes or so (just long enough to heat up the liquids).

6. Enjoy!

Elanor's Comments

2009-02-22T13:20:00.003-06:00

Our daughter Elanor, 8, has been continuing to surprise us with her ability to read. She can read about as fast as an adult reader, with just about as much retention. Maybe even more.

In general, though, she has only been reading children's books or encyclopedic books, neither of which contain much information in the abstract.

I was wondering how well she might be keeping up with more abstract concepts in reading, so I asked her to read the latest story that I wrote, which I recently posted to The Ugly Diphthong.

I sat next to her at the computer and watched her read. I was holding the mouse, so I was in control of scrolling down. She told me to scroll just about as fast as I was reading (I was probably reading about 1.5 times as fast as she was).

She didn't make any comments or ask any questions. I wondered if she was really reading it. There are some dificult words in the story, like hibiscus, wisteria, accentuated, and wisped--words that I am pretty sure she had never seen before. But as we passed the sections that contained those words, she said nothing.

Toward the end of the story (after about 7 minutes of reading), Elanor turned to me and asked, "Dad, did you write this?"

I was suddenly filled with a lot of pride. For one, I was proud of her for being able to figure out that this story was something that I had written. I'm not sure that children are very author-conscious when reading, so I took that as a sign of some of the abstract thinking that I was looking for.

Also, I was proud simply to be sharing my stories with a new audience: my daughter. More than anything else, I think that writers want audiences. I know I do. While money, fame, recognition, and all those other markers of success would certainly be nice, they are not necessary for me to continue writing. An audience, however, is. I can't really enjoy writing for darkness.

So when she asked me if I had written the story myself, I was filled with a sudden flush of emotion that contained all of these thoughts, in a sort of consummation of a variety of desires held by me: a writer, a father.

"Yes, Elanor. I did write this," I replied. "How could you tell that I did?"

"Well," she said. "I was really just wondering if you meant to put an extra 'L' in that word."

My heart lept: She's an editor too!

(I've left the typo. See if you can find it.)

Shameless Self Promotion

2009-02-10T06:55:00.002-06:00

I have posted a story on The Ugly Diphthong. It's an older story, but one that I think has a lot of potential.

There are certainly problems with it, which I won't get into here, but in general, I think it is very tidy.

Let me know what you think.

OH MY GOD A Wii!

2009-01-04T11:38:00.005-06:00

Please watch this video. **CAUTION--MAY INDUCE VOMITING**

50 kids happy to get a Nintendo Wii for Christmas - watch more gamer videos

Thanks to Brant Hansen for this valuable information. While you are there, check out the Snuggie video at the end of the "Magic Bullet Haiku" post.

Mouseover Tales: The Liberty Island Ferry

2008-12-25T22:56:00.009-06:00

Move the mouse cursor over the pics to get the rest of the story:

When I was nine, my family took a trip to New Jersey to visit my mom's brother Larry. While we were there, we took a train to Manhattan. I remember walking down Broadway, looking at Shea Stadium from the top of the Empire State Building, and buying a hamburger joke book in one of the shops in the basement of Tower 2.

We also took a ferry to see the Statue of Liberty. As we climbed into the crown and peeped out the tiny windows, even as a small nine-year-old I felt cramped.

On the ferry's return trip, we sat among several members of a family from India. It was one of the first times I had ever had to share a close space with a group of people who were ethnically different from me. In rural Illinois, everyone is white.

But when I think back on that trip, it is not the convergence of two different cultures that I remember most.

Reason #4

2008-12-22T09:02:00.004-06:00

As you may have noticed, Prophet Boy has been going through a mid-Internet-life crisis.

The traditional mid-life crisis happens when people find themselves in a place they wouldn't have predicted when they were teenagers. They start wondering why and how they ended up in a certain station in life, and then begin making changes in order to move their lives into directions they thought they wanted when they were teenagers.

I have been having a mid-life crisis since I was thirteen, so the non-virtual crisis of my existence is nothing new to me. But my current Internet crisis is much more difficult to deal with.

It seems to me that the Internet brings to the surface questions of identity more sharply than real life ever does. On this blog, for instance, I shout into the wind knowing that a few people--my brother, for instance--will hear me, but also knowing that that nameless dude from Mexico who shows up on my Feedjit stream will eventually trip across this page as well.

It seems to me that there are at least four reasons people blog. There are more, I'm sure, but these are what seem to be the most common:

1) Goodness: They want a convenient way to keep in contact with family and friends.

2) Avarice: They want to make money.

3) Catharsis: They want to write about their experiences and make connections with people who will listen to them--without the muckiness of doing the same thing with real people.

4) Hubris: They want the world to seem them.

These reasons are not exclusive. Most people who have blogged for any length of time can probably find themselves in most of these descriptors--some more, some less. I, for example, don't really care about #1, am too lazy for #2, enjoy the unlooked for benefits of #3, while being wholly motivated by #4. Some people I know began with #3 and have moved toward #2, while others have done the opposite.

For me, though, 1, 2, and 3 are worthless compared to 4. All I want is to be seen. Maybe this comes from being the youngest of three brothers in the middle of a family of eight children. Maybe it is just a side-effect of my virility, a genetic "defect" attracting lovers who would propagate more of me (damn that vasectomy!).

However, the problem is that when I get what I want--when people begin looking at me--they actually see me. And this is where the problem arises.

When I was at the University of Illinois, I used to play a game. I would walk down the sidewalks of the Quad and try to make eye contact with every single person I passed. This was very, very hard to do because almost everybody was always either looking down at the ground or instinctively looking in the opposite direction. From time to time (that's what de vez en cuando means), someone would actually look at me and return the gaze. When this happened, I would smile, and if the other person were a girl, she would sometimes smile back. If it were a boy, he kicked my ass.

The point is that in real life it is so difficult to get anybody to notice you--and those who do are so anonymous--that crises of identity are slow in coming. On the sidewalk my audience is one. With that audience I either win or I lose. If I win, great. But if I lose, I can make a thousand excuses for why I lost: gender, weather, cell phone, insecurity, creeped-outedness, vanity, busyness, stress, blindness . . . and 991 other legitimate reasons.

But on the Internet, with a potential audience of millions and billions of people, it is difficult to cope with my losses. It is depressing not to get your ass kicked.

For someone who is wholly motivated by reason #4, creating a virtual existence creates a lot of stress. When I walked down the real sidewalks, I always lived inside my face. Though I can sorta see the sides of my nose when I try, I can't see my face without looking in a mirror. With a blog, though, I see what everyone else sees. When I'm walking down a real sidewalk and nobody smiles back, it's water under the bridge; the moment is gone and there is nothing left to do about it. With the Internet, though, anything that I do is instantly saved and flashed back at me. I can surf to uglydiphthong.com and read my stories the way other people read them. I get to walk down the sidewalk and look at myself.

And a lot of the time, I don't want to look back.

Sometimes he seems kind of creepy, and I wish he would just mind his own business.

New Prophecy

2008-12-16T07:31:00.002-06:00

Caroline Kennedy will be the next President of the United States.

Prophet Boy Update

2008-12-14T11:17:00.002-06:00

Ok. Maybe I won't kill The Prophet Boy altogether. I changed the picture on the header, and now I feel much better.

I've decided not to completely abandon Prophet Boy, but for whatever reason, I'm going to keep these spaces separate. Look for fiction and other creative stuff on The Ugly Diphthong, and sociopathological rants on Prophet Boy.

If I do continue with the Prophet Boy stories, I'll probably put them here too.

Ugly Diphthong

2008-12-14T01:50:00.004-06:00

Say goodbye to the Prophet Boy. He was depressing me.

I've started a new blog at www.uglydiphthong.com. Hopefully it will be less random than The Prophet Boy--and who knows, he may return someday. But for now I'd like to focus more on the fiction writing, and I am going to use The Ugly Diphthong for that work.

For fans of The Prophet Boy, I hope you won't become too depressed. My plan is to post at least one piece of fiction per week on the new site--but we'll see how that goes.

I am going to post a story that I wrote tonight just to get it off my chest. It's probably not really a "finished" story, but there are a lot of things I like about it, and it is a good way to get the ball rolling.

Don't feel obligated to keep track of the new site if the fiction bores you . . . z z z z . . . I'm doing it for myself.

Oprah Hero

2008-11-10T06:53:00.004-06:00

I've not done much posting lately, but waking up this morning to find both of these items on that Internet have incited me to post:

1) Advertisement: Christian Guitar Hero

2) News Headline: "Oprah Meets Man Who Let Her Cry on His Shoulder at Obama's Election Party"

I don't believe I'll do any commentary today. Sometimes, things are best just left unsaid.

Obama Pin

2008-11-03T16:01:00.004-06:00

I decided to go ahead and click on one of those Move On advertisements to get a free pin. I clicked on it about eight weeks ago.

Today, November 3, 2008, the pin arrived in the mail.

I wasn't going to vote, but now that I have my pin, I guess I will. I'd feel like an ass if I got a free pin and didn't vote.

____

Update . . . My daughter Elanor, 7, is voting for president at her elementary school tomorrow. She just said this to me:

"Tomorrow, I know for sure who my vote is going to be! I'm going to vote for John McCain! Because if he dies soon, his vice president is going to be president, and we need a woman to be president this year!"

Happy Halloween

2008-11-01T09:24:00.000-05:00

We took the kids Trick or Treating last night. Evy was Wall-E (you can see Veralee's Blog for all the details), but I thought I would post one picture to sum up the night . . .

In case you aren't quite getting the point . . .

Election

2008-10-31T18:35:00.003-05:00

I saw these two photos in an Associated Press article today.

The second picture will be in a history book. The first one will not.

Chrissy, Part III

2008-10-25T23:53:00.003-05:00

For Part II, click here.
_________________________________

It takes less than half a second for an arrow to travel a hundred feet, but in that half a second the human brain can process a lot of information.

For example, a boy can ask himself, "Why the Hell did Chrissy, just let go of that bowstring?" He can watch an arrow fly full speed through the air, dropping in a downward trajectory as the orange tail feathers slide back and forth like a '76 Chevy Nova on an iced highway, thumping to a sudden stop in the meaty part of his shin--just a centimeter or two to the left of the left tibia, eight inches below the knee. He has time to consider how odd it seems to see an arrow sticking out from the flesh--similar to arrows that protrude from the butts and thighs of cowboys in the old Westerns, but enveloped in real flesh, real skin, and real leg hairs. He can draw his attention to the jarring jolt of energy that is applied to the leg under these circumstances, like being kicked by a horse or thumped by an electric fence. And after pondering all these sensations, he still has time to ask himself once again, "Why the Hell did Chrissy let go of that bowstring?"

In the next half-second, I had fallen to my butt to sit on the grass in middle of the field where we had been "playing" and in one smooth motion pulled the arrow from my flesh. Imagine pulling a wooden spoon from an unbaked ham. When I looked up at Chrissy, my eyes asking, "Why the Hell did you let go of that bowstring?" he had dropped his bow and was holding his hands over his mouth with a with look of surprise and fear upon his face. I looked down again at my shin, where a small, arrow-sized hole had begun filling slowly with rich, dark blood, and a narrow rivulet began trickling down toward my new, white tube socks. I looked at the arrow in my left hand, then back to my shin, and then I raised my eyes to Chrissy. He was still standing with his hands over his mouth.

After that first second or two, Chrissy did run to my aid, imploring, "I'm sorry! I'm sorry! . . . Don't tell my parents!" Though grateful for the apology, I was not certain how I was going to be hiding my injury from anyone, least of all our parents. But I can't blame Chrissy for being ignorant at the time. After all, he didn't know how it felt to have the anterior of his calf muscle punctured. He was only twelve.

I looked at him stupidly, and as a queasiness began to settle upon me I asked, "How am I supposed to get home?"

"Can't you ride your bike?"

I don't think he had fully assessed the situation.

"You shot me in the leg with an arrow."

"I know," he said, and he reminded me once more about how sorry he was and how he had been aiming to hit the ground just in front of my feet, and above all, how he hoped very much that we would keep this matter between ourselves.

"I don't think I can walk."

As I sat on the ground, arrow in hand, Chrissy stood beside me contemplating his impending punishment. In an effort to bolster his defense he asked me how far the arrow had gone into my leg. No serious parent could punish a child for driving an arrow a mere half-inch into a person's body. It takes a good inch or two of penetration before any serious action is taken. As he asked, it dawned on me that I wasn't certain exactly how far the arrow had driven into my body. In the eternity of time that had passed in the two seconds between the moment when Chrissy let loose the string and when I fell to the ground, pulling out the arrow had been my most intuitive, instinctual response, and I had not fully assessed the importance of determining the depth of my injury before I dislodged the projectile. I began to wish I had not unplugged the arrow so quickly, as a sick fascination to examine the unmolested injury grew within me. Not many people could say they had ever seen an arrow sticking from their bodies, and in my one opportunity to cherish the moment I had pulled the trigger too quickly, giving myself only a few brief seconds to store the image away in the recesses of my psyche. But my other non-visual senses were telling me that the arrow had plunged two, maybe even three inches into the flat corner of my shin, and I spread out my thumb and forefinger to approximate the depth of my injury to Chrissy. He began to cry.

"Does it hurt?" he asked.

It did. That the arrow had missed my shinbone is miraculous. If Chrissy had directed the arrow a small half-inch to the left, the blunt metal tip of the target arrow would have drilled directly into the thin layer of skin covering the bone of my shin. I do not like to imagine the explosive intensity of the pain that would have accompanied such an injury. The pain of my particular injury was much duller. I would never describe it as sharp; it was more of an acutely dull ache. However, it removed all power of support from my left leg. Though it didn't "hurt" in the same biting manner that a burn does--as when you grab the handle of an overheated iron skillet and instantly all attention is focused upon the stinging intensity of pain--my wounded leg refused to work as it should, and the back side of my calf began to tighten in an intense charley horse. Chrissy helped me to my feet, but my left side was useless, and he put my left arm over his neck as we hobbled a half-mile to his house and considered our options.

TBC

I bought a new camera so you could see these pictures.

2008-10-23T22:24:00.003-05:00

I got my new Canon XSI digital SLR today. Here's some photos of the girls (and Joe) hot off the press:

Joe

Elanor

Evelyn

Emmalee

Chrissy, Part 2

2008-10-16T15:10:00.002-05:00

For Part 1, click here.

______________________

The arrow hung in the sky for six days.

But then--in a fraction of a moment--the arrow reappeared from the deep blue sky and schplooked into the sod, just feet from where we stood.

In a frenzy of delight, we aimed the arrows into the sky again and again, trying each time to land the arrows closer to where we stood. Miraculously, we never could get them to fall directly into our upturned faces. But had that happened, the adrenaline would have killed me before the arrow hit my eye.

I'm not sure whether it was our disappointment at our inability to land the arrows closer than within five feet of us, or simply that in those moments of great exhilaration and fear that we grew wisdom, but in any case, we ended our game of Indian roulette before great injury had come to either of us. Still equipped with bows and arrows, we put our minds to new endeavors.

We began a contest to see who could shoot an arrow farthest across the field. Though Chrissy shot with a compound bow, I found that I could compensate for the weaker force of my bow with more efficient angles of trajectory. Nine times out of ten, his arrows flew farther than mine, but every once in a while my wooden, orange-feathered target arrow would sail past his and stick into the earth a hundred yards or so away from where we stood.

With only a few rounds of our contest completed, we had grown tired of running hundreds of feet each time we shot an arrow, and we decided that the best remedy would be for us to stand opposite from each other on the distant sides of the field and shoot our arrows far over each other's heads.

Though this sounds ridiculous--and it was--it was much less ridiculous than shooting arrows directly upward into the sky, and it seemed much safer to watch arrows fly dozens of feet over my head than to watch them fall at my feet, so we continued shooting arrows over each others heads, twenty, even thirty feet above each other--each shooting simultaneously--and running to retrieve the arrow that the other had shot.

One time after I had run to retrieve an arrow Chrissy had shot, pulling the arrow that was camouflaged within tall, yellow grass from the dry, autumn ground, I turned around to set the arrow on my bowstring and take aim over Chrissy's head once again. However, when I turned I saw that Chrissy had already set his arrow, and had drawn his bowstring back fully, with the cantilevers of his compound bow fully engaged, pointing his arrow directly at me.

TBC

Chrissy, Part 1

2008-10-10T06:28:00.003-05:00

My best friend is Chrissy.

When we were still in junior high, Chrissy lived in a log cabin in the country. Most days after school we would ride our bikes to his house and create havoc until his single-parent mother arrived home from work around 4:30. That gave us about an hour and a half each day for all sorts of mischief.

Mostly we would scamper through the woods exploring. Once we found an unopened, but faded and dirty can of Budweiser. Chrissy opened it and drank it. We were 12.

Sometimes we would ride motorcycles in the fields and wooded trails around his house. I wasn't a very good motorcycle driver, so a lot of the time I was riding on the back of a nasty old Kawasaki 450 with lots of black spray paint and duct tape on it. As Chrissy drove the beast maniacally through a path in the woods, he rounded one corner a little too sharply and we fell over--directly into a stickerbush. I can still feel the hot muffler frying my calf as I lay on a bed of tacks.

We never grew bored as there were plenty of ways to get into trouble at his house. Since his log cabin home had a wide-open front room with a vaulted ceiling that allowed a set of black metal circular stairs to lead to an over-looking loft above, there was plenty of room for him to terrorize me with his air-pump BB gun. Chrissy would stand in the front room below with the air rifle, and any time I would poke my head from his upstairs bedroom, I would hear the spit of the BB gun followed by the ricochet of tiny copper balls as the BBs careened from one pine wall to the next.

That was lots of fun. But not as much fun as when he would chase me around the house with a loaded shot gun.

I distinctly remember one sunny afternoon in early fall when Chrissy brought out two sets of bows and arrows. One was a white, small, but dangerous compound bow with a draw strength of about 30 pounds. To put this in perspective, 45 pounds is the minimum draw strength allowed for hunting deer--it's enough force to shoot an arrow through a deer's chest cavity, which is the goal when hunting with a bow and arrow. It's not good enough just to stick an arrow into a deer because that will not effectively drop and kill the animal. The arrow has to go all the way through in order to do the job right.

So 45 pounds will drive an arrow through a deer. What would 30 pounds do?

The other bow was a small, green, recurve/long bow. It is the kind of bow you might have used in junior high or high school if you ever did target shooting in PE. It's not exactly a dangerous bow, though it will shoot an arrow with a fair amount of velocity. It was probably weighted at about 20--25 pounds of draw strength.

Anyway, Chrissy held onto the compound bow and handed me the smaller recurve, and we walked to the large, open field behind his house.

We began our entertainments by shooting blunt-ended, metal-tipped target arrows straight up into the sky.

What a rush.

We would aim the arrows as straight up into the sky as possible--and shoot. Over the course of about two seconds, the arrows would disappear into the deep blue, and we would stare upwards at them, our feet planted on the ground, our Adam's apples parallel to the sky, our eyes squinting in the brightness of the white sun . . . waiting for the arrows to fall.

TBC

Benny Atkins: 6/23/08 -- 10/4/2008

2008-10-04T21:59:00.005-05:00

Just five minutes ago I committed suicide . . . Facebook suicide.

A couple weeks ago I was talking to my friend Donnie about the phenomenon that occurs when someone dies, but then they "live on" through their online social networking accounts. When this happens, their Facebook and MySpace pages become memorials that continue to exist when the real person does not. The cyberself lives on when the real person is dead.

I started wondering what would happen if the opposite were true. What if I committed Facebook suicide? I could kill my cyberself and let the real me live on.

Naturally there are some complications with this. To be thorough I would have to deactivate all of my cyber accounts: My gmail, yahoo, twitter, amazon, and even blogger accounts would have to be terminated too if I were going to do the job right.

And maybe I will deactivate these accounts . . . someday.

As Donnie and I started talking about the idea of Facebook suicide, we very quickly convinced ourselves that it would be a fun idea to declare a Facebook Suicide Pact.

One of the problems with social networking, especially with Facebook, is that it demands integrity. Integrity means oneness. Someone with great integrity is someone who is able to be exactly the same person among very different groups. But I gotta admit, that person ain't me.

When I first signed up for Facebook, it was cool to get back in touch with people I hadn't seen for a while. Many of those people were old high school friends and acquaintances. But as the newness began to wear off, and as my social circle widened, I began to get friend requests from all sorts of different people.

I'm not an axe murderer or anything, but I'll freely admit that I don't have one persona. I am, as Paul puts it, "all things to all people."

We're all clearly aware of the idea that employers, bosses, higher-ups, Big Brother, etc. can check into our Facebook circles either directly or by proxy and see things that we post about ourselves or that others post about us that we would rather hide. This is especially true for MySpace. However, the more disturbing thing for me is not so much what a "boss" might find out about me. I'm more disturbed that that social networking sites make it impossible--or at least complicated--for me to fine tune my relationships.

Put it this way. We all have one friend out there--somewhere--who lets us drop an indiscreet expression from time to time. Who knows that we lean a little further to the left on the political spectrum than our neighbors do. Who abides our intolerance for Joe's pizza sauce. Who knows a story or two about us that would keep us from political office. We laugh about these things with these friends, and it's all good.

But then there are those other friends we have. Friendships that are built upon artificiality, superficiality, and decorum:

"How's the family, Joe?"

"Just fine. How's yours?"

"Couldn't be better!"

These are the people you run into at the supermarket, the work break room, the sanctuary, the t-ball game. It's not that you don't like these people; in fact, you might really, really enjoy the company of these people. But when these people find out that you're going to vote for Obama, when all along they had you marked for a McCain kind of guy--well, it screws things up.

I started Prophet Boy for the purpose of gaining integrity. Through this diary I am trying to present myself openly and honestly to whomever can tolerate reading it. So, I suppose it seems rather paradoxical that I would be complaining about this problem vis a vis. Facebook. However, there is one big difference: I am a person who values relationships of intimacy despite imperfections above superficial relationships that require the lubrication of space in order to function without abrasion.

If you have read this far, chances are that you too value intimacy. Someone who is willing to read all the crap above is probably someone who gets me, who at least understands my quirks, even if you don't share them. So if you are reading this, then I suppose I am comfortable with you.

The thing is, I could be comfortable with anybody. I can open myself to anyone who want to sit down and talk. But where I break down is when I have to pretend to be something that I don't want to be, just to fit into the social system.

An anecdote:

I work in a school. Every day, at least once, I am walking down an empty hallway when in the distance, a co-worker rounds the corner and walks toward me. We keep walking toward each other, steadily, until we come to within about ten feet of each other. One of us says, "Hello," but neither of us stops. We keep walking. Five feet separate us, and the other one says, "Hey, how's it going?" Again, we don't stop walking. We don't even slow down. As we pass each other, the first speaker responds, "Good, how are you?" We have now passed each other; we don't even face each other, and we continue walking at the same pace, and the distance between us increases. "I can't complain," the second person responds. Then we both continue along, in silence.

I hate that.

If you want to know me, if you want to be kind to me, if you want to have a relationship with me, then stop walking, look me in the eye, and talk to me. I know it's all cultural, and these hi-how-are-you rules have existed for a long time, but I still don't like them. And now, it seems, the same sort of rules are being played on social networking sites like Facebook, and I just don't want to play those games anymore.

Donnie said we should start a Facebook Suicide Pact group, but I searched for it today and a few groups like it already exist. They are a little silly, though, because their members generally only commit to Facebook suicide when 1,000,000 join the group or some other nonesense. Donnie and I were going to set a date, maybe put a countdown on it, and pull the plug no matter what happens. After all, it's about liberation--it's not a gimmick.

So I did it. I drank the Kool-Aid, and now I'm in Facebook Heaven (even though Facebook reminds me that I can be resurrected any time: I'm just one e-mail away).

It's kind of nice up here. I'm in a bubble, and I don't have to read about the sexy lives of people who are happier than I am, and I don't have to fret over friend requests anymore.

Someday maybe I'll get completely out of the clouds.

In 1997 Krisitan, Andrea, and I made a bet about whether or not we would use the Internet every day in ten years. Kristian said we would not be able to live without it. At the time, I thought he was probably right, but I didn't want to admit that I would have to find myself so connected to something that I couldn't do without it. So I took him up on the bet, knowing I would lose. At some point in the summer of 2007, I began owing Kristian $5,000: I do use the Internet every day. It's a good thing I haven't seen him in a while.

But maybe, by degrees at least, I will learn how to integrate my real self and my cyberself into one self. In 1997, though I had some idea that the Internet would wheedle its way into my daily life, I don't think I fully comprehended the role it would play in forcing me to confront basic notions about myself that I would not have had to confront otherwise.

So goodbye, Facebook. And yes, this is forever. I will never reactivate my Facebook account. Cyber-Benny is dead, at least in that dimension.

Maybe--in time--I will be able to kill the Prophet Boy too.

Rest in Peace.

Poor Frog

2008-10-02T00:09:00.007-05:00

One day at my grandparents' farm, I caught a toad.

It was a small toad, pale yellow-green with rough, brown warts on his back. I cupped him in both hands, and examined him while holding my eye close to the small hole formed between the index finger and thumb of my right hand.

I had captured it in the garden among the green beans, adjacent to the burning barrel where my grandparents incinerated their trash each day. It was still smoldering lightly, with pungent grey smoke wafting slowly from the rusty oil drum. Pushing myself up from the soft, deep-tilled earth of the garden, I walked to the barrel to see if there were any fire.

As I stood by the smoldering waste, the toad leapt from my hands and disappeared into the ashes. I gazed into the embers of paper, still glowing orange like the elements of an electric radiator, looking for a sudden hop, or a collapse of ash.

But I never saw another sign of the toad, and I have kept my distance from that damned barrel ever since.

400 Characters: Sly Jo

2008-10-01T06:57:00.002-05:00

Each girl at the car wash dropped her sponge as Jo approached holding a tiny baby cheetah. "What's that?" inquired Jen, "It's a cheetah," replied Jo. Rivulets of suds washed down wet thighs and knees as seven biki-clad car girls encircled him with astonished looks upon their faces. Huddling closely, each attempted to dig her fingers into the soft fur of the baby cat, their warm breath on his neck.

Updates

2008-09-30T03:00:00.005-05:00

Since most of the people who follow this blog are my friends and family, I thought I might throw out a few updates on our life from time to time. Here are a few new things to know about the Atkins family, in no particular order:

Benny

I am taking a new position at my high school: Yearbook Co-sponsor. One of my colleagues is moving on to a bigger and better life, and her friends in the English Department are going to help her out by finishing the yearbook. This will be a change for everybody, but we'll all survive--as long as Mandy doesn't kill me.

I am still teaching high school, but I also teach a night class once per week at the local junior college: Composition and Analysis (ENG 1121). In the Spring I am going to be teaching another class, either Introduction to Poetry or Introduction to Short Stories--that part hasn't been decided.

On October 6th I am taking a group of students to SIUC to participate in Scholastic Hi-Q.

Lately I have been roasting green coffee beans that I buy from Sweet Maria's. You can easily do this in an air popcorn popper, though sometimes I just use a skillet.

Joe

He poops in the backyard. He digs holes in the backyard. He barks at neighbors. He's an idiot, and I need to take him on more walks.

Emmalee

She fell off the porch last night holding onto a patio chair. She cut her forehead and bled all over the place. That kind of thing happens quite a lot.

She is also becoming quite a good conversationalist. Currently her favorite thing to do is to watch the movies Speed Racer and Superdog.

Evelyn

Evy is obsessed with artwork these days. Lately she has been building 3-D animals out of construction paper. She is also active at Star Dance Studio, where she dances to Elvis Presley's "I'm in Love," aka "I'm All Shook Up." She shakes her booty.

Elanor

Elanor is fascinated with tornadoes, hurricanes, and all sorts of weather. She recently announced that her favorite state is Oklahoma. She will be moving there when she grows up in order to be a meteorologist and a storm chaser, because tornadoes are very common in Oklahoma.

She is also beginning her first few days of school. Veralee has done a very good job of homeschooling our daughters for the past few years, but we are going to experiment with a change. So far, things have gone very well, and Elanor is enjoying her new friends. But there will be plenty of bumps along the way.

Veralee

Our girls are becoming more and more active as they grow older, and Veralee is actively attempting to maintain their schedules.

The transition to elementary school is taking a toll on Veralee emotionally. It's a stressful change for a mother who has been used to the less-structured environment of homeschool.

Veralee sometimes has difficulty because she is married to an inconsiderate bastard. I offered to kick his ass, but she is afraid I will lose.

Ándrea, Part V

2008-09-29T03:00:00.000-05:00

Part IV is a flashback that separates Part III and Part V. To get the gist of the narrative, see Part III here.

_______________________

The last golden slice of the sun had just disappeared beneath green waves as I turned my Datsun onto the dusty gravel road. Though the sun had set, there was still enough fading light to see houses surrounded by solitary groups of trees in the distance, drowning in seas of corn and beans. Ándrea said I would have to drive for two miles on a gravel road before I arrived at a T, where I would take a right and continue a quarter mile until I saw a two-story house with a screened-porch and a mailbox shaped like Uncle Sam. In the four minutes it took to drive to the T, light from the sun had faded, leaving nothing but a pink stain on the horizon, and as I approached a wall of corn at the end of the road, I flipped on my headlights.

Making the right-hand turn I saw a white house in the distance and silhouette of an oddly-shaped man holding a mailbox, so I maneuvered the car along the side of the road. The shoulder of the narrow country lane was virtually nonexistent, sloping precipitously into a steep but shallow, grass-covered ditch. The car pitched suddenly as the driver-side tires found the edge of the ditch, and I had to lean sideways to maintain upward posture. Still, the car was moving forward and had been to a large degree removed from the road proper, so I stopped and pulled the parking brake. It required some effort to push the door open through the thick, un-mown sedge, and when I did manage to force it through the thick weeds the door was only partially opened when it thumped into the upward slope of grass on the other side of the ditch. Sitting askance in the car, it was easier to fall out the two-foot opening in the door than it was to step out, so I tumbled hand-first into the dry, weedy ditch.

At this point, I thought the worst thing that could have happened would be for Ándrea to see me there in the middle of nowhere at night, thirty miles from my home. The fields, the road, the telephone wires, and the country farm were the only signs of civilization in this remote corner of Jasper County, and it would have been rather difficult for me to explain to her why I was lurking around without telling her the truth: that I didn’t really know how to find the house, but I hadn't wanted to admit it. So I had decided to spend an hour driving around the countryside trying to find it. Well, at last I had found it, or at least I thought I had, and it hadn’t been as difficult as I imagined it could have been. If the shape that I thought I saw was indeed a mailbox in the shape of Uncle Sam, I was confident I had found the right place; so I walked closer, and though with each step the image of the mailbox grew bigger and more focused, the sky also grew darker, and I found that I had to come very close to the mailbox to make certain that I had found the right place. I had come within a few dozen yards of it before I was finally convinced.

It was cut from a quarter-inch piece of sheet-metal in the profile of Uncle Sam, complete with a top hat. His forearms stretched out at a ninety-degree angle from his waist, his five-fingered hands clapped together with a mailbox balanced on his upturned thumbs. In the dim, grey light of dusk, I could tell that his pants were painted in white and red longitudinal stripes and his shirt was a muted blue with white stars.

Behind the mailbox a yellow light flashed on in the screened porch, and I saw Ándrea walk out briskly, bend over to grab something off the floor, and skip back inside with two quick steps. The light turned off.

I had tread too close, and terrified that Ándrea might have seen me, I turned and ran back to my car, with the sound of deep gravel spilling with each rapid step.

Church

2008-09-28T08:41:00.008-05:00

It is Steven Spielberg's fault that I don't go to church.

The last six minutes of Schindler's List (1993) contains a scene in which the protagonist, Oskar Schindler, breaks down crying as he comes to the realization that he didn't save as many of his jewish factory workers from the hands of the Nazis as he could have saved. He looks at a car he owns and says that he could have saved ten more people by selling the car. He looks at a National Socialist button lapel pin that he wears and considers that he could have saved two more people with this golden pin, or at least one.

Considered by many one of the most emotionally charged scenes in film history, one of the central messages of the scene is this: You can do more.

Naturally, Spielberg does a masterful job at creating a tension of distance and intimacy between Schindler and the factory workers present in the scene. Though surrounded by 1,100 Polish Jews whose lives were saved by Schindler, and who have created a ring of gold for Schindler made from melted teeth fillings, Schindler is in emotional isolation in the certain knowledge that he did not do enough, that there were one, or two, or twelve faces missing from the crowd because he did not do as much as he could have done.

I thoroughly believe that the purpose of the Christian Church is to act as the physical presence of Jesus Christ in this temporal world. If a church wonders how to accomplish this, I suggest that they look at their wrists and ponder the question: What Would Jesus Do? Barack Obama and John McCain are not the only people wearing bracelets these days.

WWJD if he attended a church in your community? How would he act in committee meetings? If he served on a board of directors, how would he feel about investing $1.3 million in a youth center? How would he feel about sanctuary expansion? How would he feel about Power Point slide shows? How would he feel about the "special music" or the acoustic guitar and drums? How would he feel about nursery workers or greeters? How would he feel the quarter-million cubic feet sanctuary being heated to 78 degrees?

Generally, I think the answer to most of these questions is this: He wouldn't really care.

It seems to me that as the offering plate is passed, and the deacons are doing a head count while Sister Jane sings a song about God and her knees, that Jesus would try really hard not to get sucked in to the machinery of church.

How many of you have ever been there before? How many people do you know who have been sucked in by the cogs, gears, and wheels of church life and been spit out the tail pipe on the other side? There's a good reason they call it exhaustion.

I've been there. I've been there my whole life. The problem is, I never could reconcile to myself why is was there.

I get the big ideas at church. The biggest ideas can probably be whittled down to one phrase: self-sacrifice. Love is the ultimate goal of the Christian religion, and love is most clearly shown through self-sacrifice. So maybe the purpose of of church is to create a machine that people can walk through and die in just for the sake of convenience. Instead of making self-sacrifice personal, we make it easy, not unlike the pie maker in Peter Lord's Chicken Run (2000).

Which brings me back to Oskar Schindler. After all, it is clearly an homage to all those great films about World War II concentration camps, including The Great Escape (1963) and Stalag 17 (1953). And what better metaphor for church than a prisoner-of-war concentration camp?

But seriously, so much of a church's mission involves its self-preservation. Though the church's primary goal for its individuals is self-sacrifice, I have never entered a church that embraces this goal for itself. We lay down our lives for the sake of the church.

Now, if we were sacrificing ourselves for, say, Jesus, this might make sense. But even so, that doesn't jive with New Testament teaching: Christ died for us so that we might live. He didn't die for us so that we might die too.

If I could find a church where the people inside the church gave exactly one rat's ass about the church, then I could feel comfortable serving God with those people. If I could attend a church that didn't go into a tailspin if it couldn't find someone to sing a special song one Sunday, I could be happy. If I could sit in a sanctuary where the congregants chose to turn the temperature down or up in order to send energy savings earned that Sunday to aid workers in Indonesia, then I could find contentment.

But as long as I walk in the doors of a church, and all people see is a guitar player, a youth leader, or someone who will take the battle to the evolutionists in the public school system, then I'm afraid I'm going to have to keep my distance.

I don't want to be a pie either.

kiva.org

2008-09-26T07:09:00.004-05:00

My sister-in-law sent me a link to an interesting web site today: kiva.org .

Some very practical people have networked with small time entrepreneurs across the world who need credit but can't get it. Entrepreneurs in places like Ghana, Uganda, Cambodia, Bolivia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Azerbaijan.

These are poor people trying to raise enough money to start and sustain small businesses such as textile stores, milk sales, or poultry markets. It's just small, local economy investments for people in poor countries where credit is scarce and who live in places where usury is common.

The loans are small, from $25 to $5,000, and are repaid over the course of a year.

The people who run kiva.org claim that the loan repayment delinquency rate from people who use their service is zero. These are hard-working people who are simply looking for a hand up, not a hand out.

Consider investing in someone like Sarah Kudjo, a mother of two in Obuasi, Ghana. She needs a loan of $450 in order to maintain inventory in her grocery store.

The great thing about this kind of aid program is that it is an investment that returns dividends. Concerned individuals can lend $1,000 today and never have to lend another cent. Rather, as entrepreneurs repay their loans, the money can be re-invested in other businesses across the world.

Luke 6:34--38 (ESV):

And if you lend to those from whom you expect to receive, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, to get back the same amount. But love your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return, and your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High, for he is kind to the ungrateful and the evil. Be merciful, even as your Father is merciful. Judge not, and you will not be judged; condemn not, and you will not be condemned; forgive, and you will be forgiven; give, and it will be given to you. Good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into your lap. For with the measure you use it will be measured back to you.

The Prophet Boy, Chapter 3

2008-09-25T20:13:00.007-05:00

Simon's seat faced out the rear window of the Buick Roadmaster station wagon. The trip home after the winter revival was familiar to him; he recognized the back side of every road sign between his church and the Kinney house on Low Street. Still, every trip was something special, something new. Simon was never bored during those seven-minute trips between the church and his house. He watched in awe as a gargantuan tarantula crept up from behind and nearly swallowed his entire family before it was suddenly scared away by the lights of an oncoming car or an overhead streetlight. The entire world was behind him, and he sat in captivity to the past watching everything pass him backwards: red brake lights, fluorescent bikers, stray cats, silhouetted trees, and all the imagined things he watched cross the road a split-second after the car passed had them--all grew smaller and smaller as watched out the back window. Everything grew smaller except one thing. The blood-red moon that hung full on the horizon never grew smaller; it was always following them.

Last year the trip home had been no different for Simon. The car had been dark, of course, and he had not shared the seat with any of his sisters, and he was just as frightened by the shadowy spiders, even though he never mentioned to anyone that he had seen them. What was different, though, was that Simon slept in his own bed on this night. Last year he had spent the night at Grandma's because Jonas had "hurt himself" and mommy and daddy had taken him to the doctor.

Simon knew that Jonas had hurt himself. He was the first to know. Simon had shared a room with Jason because they were the only two boys in the four-bedroom house. In truth, the Kinney's house had only two proper bedrooms; the other two had been added after Mike spent six weeks remodeling the attic into livable space. Simon and Jonas shared the smaller of the two attic rooms while Cindy and Shelly shared the other. Jonas was supposed to have spent the night at the Ritchys that evening, but when the Kinneys returned from winter revival all the lights in the house were still switched on. Simon remembered that night, pieces of it at least, too well.

A purse and keys. A door opening. Mom and dad carrying the twins to bed. The Bible in his mouth as he scurried up the stairs on hands and feet like a dog. And the Vision. What Simon could never remember were the words he used that turned the look on his mother's face from exhaust to terror, the words that sent his dad running up thirteen stairs quicker than a whippet, the words that pronounced the spectacle revealed to an eight-year-old by a God who has no discretion.

Wailing, screaming, moaning, strange people, and general commotion were all that Simon remembered afterward. At some point, either five minutes or a thousand after he had found Jonas, Grandma arrived and took Simon to the farm. Some other people had been there too: Uncle Tom and Aunt Betty, Great-Uncle Eppert, and some old people Simon had never seen before and never remembered seeing again, even though Grandma assured him the next morning that they were his "closest kin." After sitting at the table eating the remains of a pumpkin pie while the adults stood around saying nothing, Grandma helped Simon into his pajamas and into bed. Then something memorable happened. All his life he had given his grandparents an obligatory kiss when they would leave after a Thanksgiving supper, Spring reunion, or a simple Saturday-night game of Scrabble. They were loveless pecks on loose and wrinkled cheeks; they were never what anyone might call "special" kisses. On this particular night, though, after Grandma had buried Simon beneath four layers of blankets and turned-down the lights, Grandma bent over the bed and kissed Simon on the forehead. Simon looked into her smiling eyes and saw a tear drop onto the inside of her glasses.

"Goo' night, Grandma."

"Sleep tight, baby boy."

Simon had no idea what time he actually went to bed, though he knew it was late. He remembered the white light of the full moon casting shadows outside the bedroom window, the yellow light that fell across the floor by the cracked-open door, and the deep-sounding voices that had begun to echo in the kitchen. Simon didn't know what they were saying, though he expected they must have been talking about Jonas and the hospital. Several years would pass before Simon realized how much everyone had lied to him. No one ever told him that Jonas had never made it to the hospital, or at least not alive. That he was dead less than three weeks before Christmas Day.

Every night on Christmas Eve Simon would sit in a living room lit only by the twinkling red, green, blue, and white lights of the Christmas tree. He sat for hours staring at packages wrapped in ribbons and bows, waiting for Christmas morning. Invariably, he would be the first in his family to awaken--as if by holiday magic transported to his bed--and loudly announce the arrival of Christmas Day to the members of his family, who were all much less moved by the holiday spirit. Presents, food, presents, candy, presents, cash, and presents were the reasons Simon loved Christmas Day, and why he awaited it with such great anticipation. But by December 26, Christmas was already out of his consciousness--a distant memory. The presents lost their luster, toys lay in pieces beneath his bed, and the mysterious romance of the holidays was forgotten. At least for the next twelve months.

Simon awoke on December 7, 1985 to the sound and smell of sizzling sausage. He had slept very well. Outside a white blanket of snow had fallen, and Jonas, much like Christmas mornings, had vanished from Simon's life.

400 Characters: Why the Llama Smiled

2008-09-24T15:55:00.003-05:00

In continuation of 400-Character Wednesdays, a vignette that explains why the llama smiled.

By the way, spaces count.

____________________________

On the Urumba Plain lived a poor farmer who fed a llama dry broomweed. One day when the farmer had gone, the llama walked into the house, unscrewed the peanut butter, and licked a scoop with his long tongue. Returning, the farmer observed the llama's lips circling as if to chew the cud. In pity the farmer pulled a sugar cube from his pocket, offered it to the llama, and scratched behind its ears.

Yahoo Mail

2008-09-22T19:41:00.006-05:00

I've been silent too long on this, but I'll just make one point:

vp.palin@yahoo.com?

Maybe we can get that guy to crack into osama@terrorist.net next.

Have a good day.

Apologies to the Dark Knight

2008-09-21T14:14:00.002-05:00

So a couple weeks ago I complained about some of the basic flaws irregarding the IMDB's user rating system. But you know what, I gotta take some of that back.

In general, I think that people should watch The Dark Knight (2008). It is a great movie, and you know what, who cares whether it is 3rd or 73rd on the list of the 250 top-rated movies on imdb.com?

Some of you might not be familiar with the flip side of the coin. IMDB also provides a list of the 100 lowest-rated movies, and with 13,518 people already voting that Disaster Movie (2008) is the worst movie of all time, even though it was released on August 29, I still have to be grateful. Even if it is not the worst movie of all time in the strictest sense, I am sure that it is somewhere close.

At the very least, it's one disaster I've avoided.

Thank you, IMDB.

She had me at hello . . .

2008-09-20T18:50:00.009-05:00

. . . but I should have been more patient. Since that day our marriage has been a disaster, and it's all her fault:

She is constantly scheduling all of my appointments for me, keeping them on the calendar, and reminding me several days in advance of important events--but after 10 years of marriage, she still thinks I am paying attention when she tells me all of this!
Every day she expects that I will say something nice to her, something to the effect that she is pretty, or that I like her, or that her hair smells nice. Her expectations are really beginning to cramp my style.
Even though she has ALL DAY to sit at home and talk to our seven-year-old daughter, she honestly expects me to want to talk to her when I get home from work.
When I get a little pissy (not more than once or twice a week, by the way), she thinks it has something to do with her. Could somebody out there who knows me please explain this to her?
Even when I apologize for being a jerk, she still expects me to snuggle, have nice conversations, and pretend that I'm generally happy.
She NEVER lets me have Saturdays to myself. I work all week long, and she expects me to spend time with her on the weekends. Bitch.
Sometimes, she gets mad when I pour tediously over blog posts that I am writing, proofreading them for hours--even though I am not even bothering her in bed.
And speaking of bed, we bought a king-sized bed last year, and she still manages to rub her toes on the bottom of my feet every night.
Remember that one time when I flew off to Barbados with that stewardess? She totally didn't get that joke.
Sometimes she walks up to me with her hair done up in some stupid style from a fashion magazine, and she is wearing some silly outfit from one of those trendy clothing stores, and her lips are all shiny, and she smells like wildflowers. And then she says to me, "Don't you think I'm pretty?" And then, when I say, "Yeah," and go back to reading my book, she starts crying!
One time I wanted to go somewhere with my friends for a week, and she got mad that I never asked her if she wanted to go too (actually this happens A LOT!)
I don't know why she always needs my help zipping her dresses, fastening her necklaces, or unlatching her bra. I mean, figure it out already!
After living with me for 3650+ days, she still hopes that one day I will stop farting in the living room.
She's always bragging about having three kids by natural childbirth, but she has never--not even once--acknowledged how it affected me. I gained a lot of sympathy weight over those 27 months, and I still haven't lost those last, stubborn six pounds.
Our most common argument: I say, "I wish you would at least give me some credit for trying!" She responds, "Well you shouldn't have to try!" I say, "I usually don't!"
I have never--EVER--admitted that I am wrong about anything, and she just can't appreciate the level of persistence and determination that requires. It's taxing.
When I come home from work and the house is clean, and the kids are dressed, and dinner is cooking, she sometimes gets testy when I sit down in the recliner and turn on PBS. She says, "Don't you appreciate everything I do?!" What else is she gonna do all day? We don't have cable.
I have NEVER said she looks ugly, but she still asks me if I think she is pretty ALL THE TIME! I just look at her like she's crazy, but she doesn't seem to get it.

But really, the most obvious clue that our marriage wasn't going to work was that she was stupid enough to become interested in me in the first place.

I really should have known better.

The World Wide Internet

2008-09-19T22:12:00.008-05:00

Don't believe anything Barack Obama or John McCain says.

On January 28, 1998, I walked in the back door of the Assembly Hall in Champaign with the press corps. I didn't know what the hell I was doing--all I knew for sure was that I was not going to wait at the back of a line of 5,000 people who were expecting to get a seat to see President Clinton speak at an event that was scheduled to begin in five minutes.

One day earlier, January 27, 1998, President Clinton had delivered the State of the Union Address to Congress, and in part of it outlining the need for greater investments in Internet technology and education. In that speech Clinton had said:

Think of this: The first time I made a State of the Union speech to you, only a handful of physicists used the World Wide Web--literally, just a handful of people. Now, in schools, in libraries, homes, and businesses, millions and millions of Americans surf the Net every day. (Congressional Record)

Apparently, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign was a strategic place to reinforce the lies of the State of the Union Address and distract the public from the Lewinski fiasco. After all, UIUC is the birthplace of the first web browser, Mosaic, one of the first, and certainly the most influential web browsers, which expanded the Internet beyond the walls of government and university laboratories and into the homes of the general public.

On that crisp, cold day in January, Champaign-Urbana was abuzz with the news that the president would be speaking at locations on campus, and there was a scramble to obtain free "tickets" to the event. As it turned out, the tickets were unnecessary, as anyone who showed up was allowed to hear the president's speech, so long as he arrived on time.

I didn't arrive on time.

The speech was to begin at 10:00 a.m., but I had to attend a class from 9:00--9:50: Geology 107, "Rocks for Jocks." I had a ticket to the speech, though, and I had hoped that I could make the half-mile bike ride to the Assembly Hall in time to get in the doors before the speech began. But as I coasted down First Street and across Florida Avenue, it quickly became apparent that I was not going to be able to get in very easily.

The parking lot of the Assembly Hall was filled with people waiting in a line that wound back and forth for over a half-mile. Glancing at my watch, I knew it was simply impossible for all of those people to get inside in five short minutes, and my only option seemed to be to stand at the back of the line. So I continued around the stadium looking for another entry when I noticed a group of 50 or so people standing by a door at the rear of the building. They were huddled together, not standing in line. They seemed to know something I didn't, so I walked up to see if I could figure anything out. As I made my way into the huddle, the sight of cameras, notepads, and an excessive number of ties and heels suggested to me that I had found the press corps. I hadn't been standing with them for more than 30 seconds before a door opened and everyone began to walk inside, so I walked in too.

As I walked through the door, the first thing I noticed were four folding tables that had been set up in a barricade. About 15 men dressed in business suits were on the outside of the tables, and all of them were staring at me with their hands crossed in front of them. The only way forward was through a metal detector set up between two of the tables.

After the initial shock wore off, I passed through the gauntlet and into the stadium seating. I was up pretty high--C-section, Row 6--but the view was good. By the time I was in a seat, the hall was completely packed, and I felt sorry for the thousands of people who were still waiting outside, expecting to get a seat.

Within a minute or two, speakers began to address the crowd. I don't remember everyone who was there, but the four main speakers were Senators Dick Durbin and Carol Moseley Braun, Vice President Al Gore, and President William Jefferson Davis Clinton.

Now I have to admit, Republican or Democrat, it is pretty cool to see the President of the United States--alive and in person. When Clinton was announced, the crowd went wild, and the only time since then I've seen so many camera flashbulbs at one time is when Mark McGwire was standing at home plate with a full count and sitting on 61 home runs.

However, there was one thing that really, really bothered me about the event. As Dick Durbin was introducing Al Gore, the senator made a claim that precipitated the Al Gore Internet controversy: Durbin asserted that when Clinton-Gore entered the White House in 1993, there were only 50 web pages in the world, and he suggested that as a result of their administration, there were now over a million web pages in the world.

When Durbin made this claim in the Assembly Hall at the University of Illinois, the birthplace of the GUI Web, the crowd exploded, rising to its feet in thunderous shouts of applause.

I sat in my seat, flabbergasted and slack-jawed, unable to believe what I had just heard. After all, my brother had a web site in 1993. Were people really so naive?

It wasn't until over a year later that Al Gore had claimed to invent the Internet during an interview with Wolf Blitzer on March 9, 1999, and suddenly it became a big ordeal. I was a little confused at the time; I had thought that idea was old news.

On the day I saw the president in person, I understood something about the power of politics. Politicians can say whatever they want, and it will be true as long as we believe it. Regardless of the number of web sites that actually existed in 1992 (and the claim that there were 50 is a strangely arbitrary number), everyone knows it is completely ridiculous to believe that any president, vice president, senator, or congressman had anything to do with it.

Once the president left town with his entourage (leaving Air Force One behind stuck in a corn field), I reflected on the significance of what I had heard. I told everybody who would listen about the lies that were told, but nobody seemed to care much. A year later when Gore made his Internet gaff to Wolf Blitzer, the issue certainly got a lot of press coverage, but it just seemed odd to me that the President of the United States and his administration could lie so shamelessly to the American people for 13 months before anyone took serious notice.

I think that most people understand that politicians lie, but it doesn't really seem to matter when it happens on TV, or when it gets reported in The New York Times or The Washington Post. But when it happens to you personally, when the president lies to you to your face--alive and in person--it's different.

It makes you not want to believe anything anybody says.

And I don't.

Ándrea, Part IV

2008-09-19T00:01:00.004-05:00

For Part III, click here.
______________________

I had purchased the car off a used car lot with $500 I had earned almost entirely on my own by mowing lawns and painting houses during the summer. My sister Cindy, eager to put an end to my borrowing her car, contributed the last twenty bucks. So with the help of my sister I had a square five hundred—not a penny more.

The dealership, which was two blocks from my parent’s house, was owned by a small, wiry man named Stanley. His perspirated brown hair snuck out a mesh ball cap in wet wisps, while his sleeveless T-shirt displayed tanned, sinewy shoulders. He was a straight-shooter who didn’t deal in nonsense: if a car was worth five hundred bucks, he wrote it on the windshield with white shoe polish. If it was worth more, or less, he would say so. The twelve-year-old Datsun I had eyed was worth every bit of five hundred dollars, and with the sudden and unexpected contribution from my sister, I bounced down the street like a frog on crack to buy my first car.

Stanley didn’t say a word when I appeared in his shop. He was standing in the garage examining a metal cylinder that was caked in grease-dust. Becoming conscious of my presence, he stared at me: chin pointed upward and eyes squinting in interrogative annoyance. He sniffed the air and rubbed his nose with the back of his free hand.

“Hello,” I said. “I’d like to buy that Datsun.”

Without a word, Stanley disappeared into the office adjacent to his shop. When he returned he was carrying a yellow-tagged key and a set of magnetic plates. As he walked briskly past me toward the Datsun, I turned to follow him, taking a few quick, shuffling strides to catch up. Sitting sideways in the driver’s seat with both feet still resting on the parking lot gravel, Stanley leaned inside and turned the ignition. Lifters clicked like a stuck key on an electric typewriter and a cloud of blue smoke erupted from the tailpipe. Stanley’s hat hit the ceiling of the car and fell to the ground as he crunched out the front seat, revealing sweaty, black strands of hair matted to his scalp. With a wet bead rolling down the side of his face, he looked at me as if to say, “You want to drive it first, don’t you?” But he didn’t say a word.

After I had driven the car around the block, I pulled back into the lot. I wasn’t sure what a guy was supposed to test on a test-drive: the car moved forward when I pushed one pedal, and it stopped when I pushed the other. In four short minutes my test was over, and the car had been a success. Stanley had already disappeared into his garage again by the time I returned, so I parked the Datsun where it had been when I had begun my test drive and walked into the open bay where Stanley’s feet were sticking out beneath the rear end of a dusty Cavalier. With the clang of a wrench on concrete, he finally spoke:

“You still wanna buy it?” The voice seemed to be coming from the trunk, but I chose to speak politely to the boots.

“Yeah, I’ll buy it.”

Two minutes passed in silence before the wrench hit the concrete again. Stanley shuffled maggot-like from under the Cavalier. He stood next to me and wiped his hands on a brown rag that looked dirtier than his fingers did as he gaped at floor, mouth open. Suddenly, he tossed the rag on the trunk of the Cavalier and walked briskly into the office. After standing alone for about eight seconds, I thought I should follow him.

In the office that was stacked with papers, titles, bills of sale, license plates, repair manuals, and convenience mart Styrofoam cups, Stanley wrote sloppily and in triplicate on a piece of paper that seemed officiously legal for such an establishment. I was distracted by the poster of the semi-nude woman on the wall behind him.

He finished scribbling and looked up: his eyes lost somewhere between the paper and my eyes. “Sign here,” he said.

1981 DATSUN 200SX—MAROON
168,XXX MILES
PRICE: $500.00
IL TAX: $20.00
REGISTRATION: $78.00
TOTAL: $598.00
THIS AUTOMOBILE IS SOLD ‘AS IS’ NO EXCEPTIONS!!!
SIGNATURE:___________________________________

I was sixteen and had never bought a car, so tax caught me by surprise. I’d never considered license plates either.

“I’ve only got five hundred dollars,” I said, and I handed him the cash: twenty-five twenty-dollar bills. I was too naïve to realize I was bargaining, but Stanley, a savvy dealer, had smelled that on me before I'd said hello.

He looked down and counted twenty-four bills. The last one he handed back to me saying, “You need gas, don’t ya?”

I did.

He put the signed papers in an envelope and handed me the key. “You can pay the rest later,” he said, and he walked back into the shop and squirmed under the Cavalier.

A few weeks later I brought him $98.00, but he told me to keep it.

Ándrea, Part III

2008-09-18T07:02:00.006-05:00

For Part II, click here.
_____________________

Ándrea had asked me to meet her early Saturday morning at farm in Bogota where she and her host mother were spending the night. From there, I would ride with her and Jane to Allerton Park near Monticello, where we would leave Jane for a University of Illinois alumni association meeting. This is where I finally became useful: I was to chauffer Ándrea from Monticello to Champaign, guiding her to the University of Illinois campus, Strawberry Fields natural foods store (for real bread), and Krannert Center for the Performing Arts. When Ándrea had asked me to do this, I agreed without hesitation; however, I never admitted that I wasn’t exactly sure how to get to Bogota, Monticello, or the natural foods store. Relying upon my instincts, I knew I could make it.

Still, I was especially nervous about finding the farm in Bogota. I had certainly never been to Bogota, and even if I had, the farm wasn’t in Bogota; it was near Bogota.

Bogota should not be confused with Bogotá, the capital of Colombia. Bogota, Illinois is a microscopic farming community consisting of three houses and a grain elevator slightly west of the center of town (two of the houses were east of the elevator). If you have trouble imagining such a town, take a drive down a small state highway sometime, like the ones in Wisconsin that are named after dipthongs: Highway EE, or OU. Drive for an hour on one of these roads and look for a tall, cement silo. Normally, there will be a railroad track next to the silo, and a house or two within eyeshot of the seed office. If you’re lucky, the town will be introduced by a green roadside sign, but if you blink, you might miss it. Some people have complained that this is an exaggeration, but I promise it isn’t. Samsville north of Albion is one of my favorite towns of this size. I like to hold my breath as I drive past, sucking in a deep gulp of air when I pass the northbound Samsville road sign (they don’t bother with the population) and releasing it when the southbound sign appears in my rear-view mirror. It takes about twelve seconds. Smokers shouldn’t try it.

Bogota, which is smaller and more secluded than Samsville, isn’t even on a state highway: it’s on a county blacktop. Ándrea gave me directions that she had been given by Jane concerning how to find this house near Bogota with the misled understanding that I already knew how to find Bogota. As a confident American who was willing to sacrifice my time to help this poor Swiss find her way around the country (silly little Swiss girl), I didn’t want to draw attention to my inadequacy.

“Do you know how to get to Bogota?” Ándrea asked.

“Of course, my mom grew up around Bogota.”

And that was true—sort of. I knew she had lived near Bogota as a child, but it wasn’t until years later at my grandmother’s funeral that I discovered near meant within 30 miles, or so. After Ándrea had relayed the directions, and I had told her that I would be there at 6:00 in the morning. Jane forced me to lie again.

“Are you sure you can find it?” Jane asked. “It’s really in the middle of nowhere.”

“I know exactly where it is.”

I had no idea where it was, but I had twelve hours to figure it out, so on the Friday night before our trip to Champaign, I did the only thing I knew to do: I tried to find the farm. Upon locating Bogota in the index of my atlas and discovering it was a lot farther from Olney than I had thought, I filled the gas tank of my 1981 Datsun 200SX and began a 30-mile trip north on Illinois 130.

400 Characters: The Bald Frog

2008-09-17T15:42:00.007-05:00

On the Blogger profile page, you can ask for a random question. Mine said: "The children are waiting! Please tell them the story about the bald frog with the wig."

So I typed a quick story. At least I thought it was a quick story. It was only about 250 words long. But when I tried to submit it, Blogger told me the story had to be under 400 characters.

400 characters?!

I googled and found a javascript character counter and went to work. I had to reduce a story of 963 characters down to 400.

I did the obvious things first: changed my character's name to a two-letter name. Removed unnecessary adjectives and adverbs. Reduced unnecessarily long sentences. And my count was reduced to about 657.

So I tried again. Taking out a few details that weren't as crucial. Combining words, restructuring sentences: 489.

OK. Almost there. I had to remove a couple more sentences that I thought were very good, but not crucial to the story, and I got it down to 412.

After finding a few more words that I could replace with shorter, albeit less descriptive words, I finally made it. 400!

After it had been on the shelf a little while, I was able to reduce it even more--but my goal is exactly 400. So reading back through it to put it on this post, I found myself struggling with the opposite problem: What do I keep?

I thought it was pretty fun, and it was certainly good practice for writing, so I might try to make a habit of it. Maybe post them on Wednesdays or something. I could start a new thing: 400-ASCII Wednesdays. Yeah, that's the ticket.

And now I present to you, "The Bald Frog" . . . er, uh . . . maybe just "Frog":

______________

Bo opened the door surprised to see a bald frog in a wig squatting on his Pottery Barn welcome mat. Cogitating for 17 seconds Bo realized the frog wanted nothing but to toy with his fragile superego, so Bo backed into the house, shut the door, and set the dead bolt. Peeping out a window, he watched the frog leap across the street, sit upon a neighbor's porch, and wait for someone to open the door.

Barack Hussein Obama

2008-09-16T21:25:00.003-05:00

If you live in places where there are Christians, chances are that you have heard the words Obama and antichrist in the same sentence. Web sites like barackobamaantichrist don't really help either.

According to Word Net Daily, Barack Obama is even a self-proclaimed Muslim, at least in a slip of the tongue Obama made in an interview with George Stephanopoulos.

No matter what the truth it--and the truth is obvious--it doesn't really matter.

First of all, I wish Obama were Muslim. Maybe if the United States put a Muslim in the White House, we could actually accomplish something meaningful in the Middle East. We Americans just don't seem to realize that much of the tension created there is of our own making. We have troubles with Muslim nations because we--with our actions--demonstrate disdain for Muslims.

Imagine if the conflict in Iraq were not actually in Iraq. If thousands of Western, British Christians were being killed by stray missile strikes, would the average American tolerate it? Certainly not.

But to take it one step further, what if the conflict was taking place in Israel, with Jerusalem at the epicenter of the violence instead of Baghdad, with thousands of civilian Jews killed by "friendly" fire. Would we condone it? No, we wouldn't.

I contend that no matter how Americans justify the war, they are missing one important detail: The Muslim world believes that we would not have stationed American troops in Iraq if the country were not predominantly peopled by followers of Islam. And the Muslim world just might be right.

If Americans elected a man by the name of "Hussein Obama," perhaps we could help to put our Muslim brothers and sisters a little bit more at ease with regard to our intentions in the Middle East. Perhaps they would be more willing to work with a leader who is able to identify and empathize with the plight of Muslims. Maybe a leader who shares their name.

But there is one more important point that I have to bring up, and it will likely get me into a lot of trouble with my Christian friends.

Where in the Bible does it say--as Christians seem to believe it does--that Islam is a false religion?

Here is what I know for sure that the Christian Bible says. Read Genesis, chapters 16--21:

1. God told Abram he would have a son.

2. Abram had sex with his wife's servant Hagar, which was normal at the time.

3. Abram and Hagar had a son and named him Ishmael.

4. God renamed Abram--Abraham--and told him he would have a son with his wife Sarah.

5. Abraham had sex with his wife Sarah, which was normal at the time.

6. Abraham and Sarah had a son and named him Issac.

7. Sarah became jealous of Hagar and told Abraham to get rid of her and Ishmael.

8. Abraham kicked them out of the house.

9. In the wilderness, God sustained Hagar and Ishmael, keeping them from death.

10. God fulfilled his promise to Abraham that his son Ishmael would become a great nation (Genesis 17:20).

Cliff notes: Ishmael's descendants become Muslims (via Muhammad); Isaac's descendants become Jews (via Moses).

Now, before anybody argues that the Jews were the "chosen" people, allow me to ask you one simple question: When did God begin breaking promises?

Why is it that David, an adulterous king who murdered infidels, is in the minds of Jews and Christians a man "after God's own heart," but Muslims, whose belief in one God "constitutes the very foundation of Islam" (Islam101.com) are bound for hell? Why does God have to fulfill his promise through Isaac, but then gets to take back what he said about Ishmael?

Don't give me a bunch of excuses regarding how Muslims had an opportunity to accept God's Word but rejected it. Or if you do, at least do me the courtesy of condemning me for the thousands of time I have rejected God's "infinite mercy."

I may be wrong, but it seems to me that Christians need to take a harder look at Islam, as most of what we believe about the faith seems to be bred out of ignorance. Seriously, I would love for someone to explain to me why the Jewish faith, the Christian faith, and the Islamic faith should not be regarded as one brotherhood of faith.

Who is my brother anyway? Certainly not a Samaritan.

Please, do some research. Or at least don't vote.

Big Guns

2008-09-15T15:37:00.005-05:00

Eleven years ago yesterday, I saw her for the first time. She was sitting in a college Sunday School class and wearing a white sundress that she had made by hand. Her hair was short, and tufts of it were pulled back by bobby pins, revealing soft, delicate cheeks surrounding thin, small lips. She spoke softly, directly, gracefully--but never to me. She was something to be observed or admired--but not to own. I regarded her as a homeless man studies shoes in a story window, detachedly appreciating their luster, but unable to apprehend their feel on the foot.

I saw her again fourteen days later. She was wearing a red polyester pantsuit that she must have purchased from Goodwill. The pant legs were too short, reaching to the top of her ankles, with argyle socks stretching downward four inches toward patent leather platform shoes. Her ruddy cheeks accentuated a sassy smile and a capacity to flirt that was more precocious than mine. She was a new, intriguing creature, not the demure home-schooled girl who had introduced herself two weeks earlier.

One of the church ministers stopped by our classroom that day. He smiled at her and asked if she were still planning to attend the music practice for the worship band later that evening. With twinkling eyes and tight-drawn lips she said she would be there. Then he turned to the rest of us and asked if anybody played the guitar.

I raised my hand.

Prophet Boy, Chapter 2, Part 2

2008-09-14T15:37:00.002-05:00

For Chapter 2, Part 1, click here.

______________________

The rest of the summer, though, was a blur. Simon couldn't remember anything else. He always had to count backwards through the years to remember details about 1985. He could figure-out that he was playing on a little league baseball team sponsored by Dairy Queen, and after every game the team would get free sundaes served in miniature upside-down helmets with Major League baseball teams on them. Simon had collected every team in the National League, but he wasn't interested in the American League helmets. Whenever he would get an American League helmet, he would trade with his teammate Karl, a Milwaukee Brewers fan.

Simon could also remember that he started third-grade that year. He remembered this because the Cardinals played the Kansas City Royals in the World Series, and he gave a report in his third-grade class on the Cardinals' season. He brought his autographed ball and miniature bat to show his classmates.

When he remembered that he was in third grade, he could remember that 1985 was the year he met Christina James. He sat next to her in Mrs. Wirth's class, and she was the first girl for whom Simon ever had feelings.

The first day of school was always scary yet exciting for Simon. Claire had established a tradition of taking Simon to Wal-Mart the night before school started to purchase all his school supplies. It was not, in this case, that Claire was a procrastinator; she just wanted to give Simon a reason to look forward to going to school. And running up and down the aisles of Wal-Mart grabbing glue-stick, scissors, and folders with the Smurfs on them certainly gave Simon a reason to be excited.

On the first day of school Simon stepped off the bus wearing a new shirt, new shorts, new socks, new shoes--even new underwear. These were his mother's night-before-school selections. On Simon's back was a Return of the Jedi backpack filled with Gremlin pencils, He-Man markers, and a Go-Bot lunch box. These were Simon's selections, and he couldn't wait to show them to his best friend Tom who was already waiting for Simon at the front door of the school looking through his own new supplies for the sixteenth time. He looked up as Simon approached.

"Where'd you get the Jabba the Hut backpack? " Tom asked. I couldn't find it anywhere!"

"Mom took me to Wal-Mart last night."

"I didn't see it at Wal-Mart, and I went two days ago," Tom protested.

"I dunno. There were bunches of them in the school-supplies section."

"Are there any more?"

"I guess so."

"I'm getting' one tonight. All I saw were the girly Princess Leia and Ewok ones."

"I like Ewoks."

"Wanna trade?"

"I don't care"

Simon really did care. Jabba was his favorite Jedi character besides Yoda, but they hadn't made any Yoda backpacks. Still, he pretended that it didn't make any difference to him, and he traded Tom packs.

"Cool! Where'd you get that bat?" Tom asked as they emptied the contents of their backpacks for the exchange.

"I got it this summer at a Cardinals game."

"Awesome! Let me see it!"

Tom grabbed the bat from Simon and ran toward the gravel parking lot. He began to pick up rocks and swing at them with the bat. He missed nearly every time. Simon didn't want Tom to swing his bat, but he didn't know how to ask him to stop, so he let him continue. Tom finally connected.

"Check it out! I sent that one sailing."

Tom was getting better at hitting the rocks. He was hitting nearly one out of every three by now, and the rocks were sailing through the parking lot.

Tweet!

"Tom Murphy!" yelled Principal Bryars as he marched toward Tom with a whistle dangling from his neck. Tom froze in place, and Mr. Bryars grabbed the red bat from his hand.

"Why did you bring this bat to school?" Mr. Bryars angrily asked Tom. "Clubs, bats, and nun-chucks are not allowed on school property. This bat belongs to me now."

Simon gasped.

"I don't care; it's not mine anyway," Tom replied.

"Not yours? Well then, whose is it?"

"Simon's."

"Simon?"

"Yes, sir. It's my bat," Simon interjected. "I brought it to show my class. I got it at a game, and it's got Joaquin Andujar and Darrell Porter on it."

Mr. Bryars held the bat up to his eyes and tilted his head back to see beneath his glasses.

"So it does. But that is no excuse for bringing it to school without permission."

Simon's face began to contort in preparation for crying. It was already beet-red.

"I'm calling your mother. She can come get this bat from me, but don't you come bringing things like this to school anymore. And Tom. You are one lucky boy that none of those rocks hit any cars in the parking lot. If I hear word that somebody's got a broken windshield or a ding in their hood, guess who'll be paying for it?"

Tom looked at the ground.

"That's enough, you two. Let's get to your classes now."

Mr. Bryars stood with the boys while they collected their belongings into their backpacks. Then, he accompanied them to their classes that were already beginning in order to explain the reason for their tardiness. They walked through the halls in a straight line. Tom went first wearing Simon's Jabba backpack, and Mr. Bryars brought in the rear, dangling Simon's bat at his side.

They came to Tom's classroom first. As they approached the open door Simon watched Tom run in yelling to whomever would listen, "Check out my new backpack!"

Simon waited by the door while Mr. Bryars told Tom's teacher why he was late. After their conference, Simon walked with the principal to Mrs. Wirth's room where Mr. Bryar's announced indiscreetly:

"Mrs. Wirth? Excuse Simon. He was outside hitting rocks with this bat."

It was the same indictment handed down to Tom, and Simon knew it wasn't true. The irony was that Tom didn't care. Simon felt very sorry for himself, though, and he walked into the classroom with his head down. Mrs. Wirth, approached Simon and knelt beside him.

"You're Simon Kinney?"

Simon nodded.

"That is your seat in the corner, next to Christina James." Mrs. Wirth was a new teacher who was only in her early twenties, but she seemed rather old to Simon. Simon went obediently to his desk and put his new Ewok backpack under the chair. As he sat down at his desk, the small blonde-haired girl in the seat nest to him whispered, "I like your backpack."

Simon normally rode the bus home, but Claire made a special trip to school that afternoon to pick-up Simon and retrieve his bat. She asked Simon why he had been hitting rocks with his special bat, but Simon had no answer. Instead, they rode home in silence, and Claire did not notice Simon's new backpack.

Except for the time Simon obtained special permission from Mr. Bryars to show his bat and ball for his Cardinals report, Simon never took the bat to school again. He put it on his dresser next to an empty goldfish bowl and seldom touched it.

Simon didn't lose the ball either, but it doesn't lie by his goldfish bowl. Simon put the ball inside a steel-blue casket on the Ninth of December, 1985.

The Prophet Boy, Chapter 2, Part 1

2008-09-13T10:00:00.008-05:00

Chapter 1, Part 1
Chapter 1, Part 2

I wasn't going to post this so soon. I thought I would get back to Andrea. However, my brother complained to me that I shouldn't have used Ricky Horton as my starting pitcher in the previous post. Well, what can I say? I love Ricky Horton. Besides, he thought I should have used Joaquin Andujar. Well Mr. I-Know-So-Much-More-About-Writing-Books-Than-You, it just so happens that Andujar shows up in Chapter 2.

Here's the thing about all these fiction posts: I wrote three chapters of Prophet Boy five years ago. Part of my reason for starting this blog was to give me a way to share what I have written so far so that I will get a fire started under my butt to finish a lot of half-baked crap. (That doesn't sound very nice, does it? Baking crap under my butt? Whatever.)

So far, I've shared Chapter 1 of Prophet Boy over two days. Because of my stupid brother, I am now going to share Chapter 2, Part 1. I'd like to share the entire chapter because Chapter 2 really needs to be read at one sitting, but that means I'll be one day closer to having to actually write more of this nonsense.

So here is the first part of Chapter 2: "The Calling." I'll post Part 2 tomorrow, I guess, but I might be holding on to Chapter 3 until I've started on Chapter 4. I don't know. Maybe I just need to get it all online as soon as possible. My butt could use a few blisters.

I still have about 50 pages of Andrea to bore you with, if you're interested . . .

_______________________

Chapter 2: The Calling

The summer before Jonas died seemed to Simon the shortest summer of the nine years he had been alive. Not much had happened that he could recall, except that the family had taken a vacation to St. Louis to see the Arch and watch a Cardinals game. Actually, none of his sisters went to the game; instead, they went shopping at St. Claire Square. He remembered the date of that trip because it was the first official day of Summer, about which the announcers at Busch Stadium made a very big deal. It was a good game to see in person too, at least if you were a kid: all fans sixteen and under with a paid admission received a miniature Louisville Slugger baseball bat. It was red, and Simon's was autographed by Joaquin Andujar and Darrell Porter. He kept it on his dresser next to his goldfish bowl, which had not contained a goldfish for two years. Simon had gotten his autographs because the Kinney's seates were along the first-base foul line in the front row, right behind the Cardinal bullpen. It was one of the best days of Simon's life.

When the game was over the Kinneys waited to see if they could catch a closer glimpse of some of the players and possibly get an autograph or two. Some of the pitching staff were meandering past the Kinney's seats to retrieve sundry items that relief pitchers leave by their folding chairs while they wait for their teammate on the hill to get tired and start throwing wildly. Simon recognized one of the men, and pointed him out to his dad.

"Well ask him for an autograph, Simon."

Simon tried to make his voice loud enough several times, but he was so scared that he couldn't get the words to come out his mouth. Finally, he blurted out, "Mr. Andujar, can I have an autograph?"

The tall dark man said nothing, but he took a permanent marker from Simon's hand and hurriedly scribbled on the red bat Simon had handed him. The man had a perpetual frown, making the experience very intimidating for the boy. Simon noticed a peculiar smell about the pitcher too: something like a cross between a fitness club and a garbage truck, and from time, when he would sense that same smell in the air, he would remember that day.

"What's up kid?" a smiling man wearing thick glasses and catcher's gear asked Simon. The man was walking toward the reticent and frowning pitcher who was busy with an autograph.

"Darrell Porter!" Simon exclaimed to Jonas and his dad. "Look! It's Darrell Porter!" Simon somehow couldn't speak directly to the baseball player and continued to carry-on about the man to his family as if he were a hundred feet away.

"My son's a big fan of yours," Mike said as he extended a hand to shake. "He plays catcher in Little League. Say hello, Simon."

Simon said nothing, but he continued to stare upward at the icon in front of him. Porter handed him a ball and said, "C'mon kid, hurl it at me!" as he squatted on the ground.

Simon threw his best fastball, and it landed in Porter's Rawlings mit with a pop. The man with the thick glasses sprung back up and trotted toward Simon again. He took the pen from Andujar and signed both the ball and the bat. On the ball he wrote, "To Simon--Follow your dreams! Darrell Porter." The catcher smiled again at Simon and waved to Mike and Jonas as he turned and walked toward a door in right-field with the other pitchers and catchers. Simon watched the man until he disappeared behind a green wall.

"How about that, Simon?" Jonas said to his little brother. "That was your man." Simon looked up at his big brother with a smile as large as the Arch. Jonas put his hand on Simon's shoulder and said, "You keep that ball, now. Don't you lose it--it's special."

Simon held that ball the rest of their vacation, and he kept reading the message that Darrell Porter had left him in permanent ink. It was a sign: Simon was destined for greatness, and he locked that idea deep in his head. There was nothing Simon couldn't do.

The Prophet Boy, Chapter 1, Part 2

2008-09-12T10:10:00.009-05:00

For Part 1, click here.

______________

Simon had been lying on the carpet for nearly an hour. He had fallen asleep waiting to he God's voice when his mother's voice startled him into consciousness.

"Come on, Simon. Your dad is waiting in the car." Mrs. Kinney had auburn hair that was long, straight, and dull--much like her wits after raising seven children. Simon was her fourth child, and he was her only son that was still living. Jonas Michael Kinney, the firstborn, died a year earlier in what Simon always called a hunting accident. To Simon it had seemed a lifetime ago. To Claire it seemed yesterday.

"Simon! Move it!"

"Didn't you know I would be with my father?" Simon asked.

"Move it, Simon. Your father is out in the car with your little sisters and the baby who need to go to bed very badly. So do you. Get your coat and let's go home."

Simon stood up from the carpet and retrieved an Indianapolis Colts Starter jacket that Claire had purchased at a rummage sale for two dollars and fifty cents. There was a dark, half-dollar sized stain on the cuff of the left sleeve.

"Zip up, now. It's cold out," his mother cautioned as she hurriedly tied the strings of Simon's blue hood into a bow beneath his chin. Mother and son walked out the double glass doors of the revamped auto sales store. Above their heads shone two flood lamps that cast shadows in the elongated shape of anyone who exited the doors. In the long shadow of mother and son holding hands, Simon noticed that his were empty.

"My Bible!"

"Simon!"

The boy had run back into the warehouse before Claire could stop him. She continued to the car rather than waiting in the ten-degree wind chill. She shuffled her feet quickly as she made her way down the long sidewalk to the old station wagon that sat running in the parking lot with its lights on. She tried the passenger door, but it was locked, so she beat on the window.

Clunk, clunk, clunk, clunk, clunk!

The electric locks worked, but they never worked on the first try. Mike was inside the warm Buick watching the passenger-side lock rise bit by bit as he pressed the unlock button with rapid-fire succession. Finally, in a sudden burst of power, the lock stood up to its full height, and Claire opened the heavy door.

"For heaven's sake, Mike! I was freezing out there. Why didn't you just unlock the door?" Claire complained.

"Well I was trying to, but these locks don't work like they used to. I guess I could have just reached over and done it by hand, but I didn't think I was going to have to."

"Lord A'mighty! I'd hate for you to have to lift your butt off the seat."

A peal of toddler laughs erupted from the back seat. A pudgy three-and-a-half-year-old stood on the back seat and leaned her body over her mother's shoulder. Her tangled and uneven hair whipped across Claire's face.

"Mommy said butt! Daddy has a butt!" More laughter followed.

"Jeana, Jessy! You sit down on the seat right now--unless you want a spankin'!"

In one motion the twins dropped from their feet and covered their bottoms with crossed hands. They sat on opposite sides of a car seat in which two-month-old Alice slept soundly. Jessy began to cry.

"No mommy! I wasn't sayin' anything. Jeana was tawkin'," Jessy whined between heaving sobs.

"Just shut it!" Claire yelled.

Suddenly there was silence. Claire heard nothing but the sound of AM radio: Jack Buck delivering the post-game summary:

In the bottom of the seventh inning, Tommy Herr hit a two-run double that put the Cards back on top. That lead would hold the Cardinals as Bob Forsch pitched a perfect eighth and ninth innings to make tonight's game a winner for the three-and-o Redbirds. For the Cardinal's Sport's Network, this is Jack Buck. We'll be back tomorrow at seven as the Cardinals start hurler Ricky Horton to face Jose DeLeon and the Pittsburgh Pirates. Until next time stay tuned to KMOX 1120 for all the . . .

"God no!" Claire suddenly screamed as she broke down into a fit of sobs. "Why did God take my son?"

Simon stopped halfway down the sidewalk when he saw through the windshield that his mother was slumped over the front seat of the car heaving convulsively in his father's uncomforting embrace. His full shadow stretched before him some thirty feet. The top of his silhouetted head climbed the grill of the Roadmaster and stopped where his forehead met the cross in the hood ornament. He stood in perfect stillness trying to keep his shadow perfectly still on the symbol in front of him and prayed that his mother would stop crying.

Suddenly, the floodlights darkened, and in the glow on nighttime snow Simon sprinted to the rear door of the Buick, opened it, and climbed into his personal rear-facing seat that doubled as the spare-tire compartment. He reached forward, pulled the heavy door shut, and yelled, "I'm in."

The Kinney's didn't have a radio that worked in the car. It stopped working after Mike had violently pounded it with his fist the April he insisted Claire stop interfering with Jonas's plan to go on hunting trip with the Ritchys. Tom Ritchy had invited Jonas to go with him and his dad out West, to Montana, to hunt elk and bighorn. Mike thought it would be a great experience for Jonas, and he knew how much Jonas wanted to go, but Claire had stood in the way from the beginning.

"I don't want him out there with guns and no supervision," Claire argued as she rode home in the car with Mike after a semi-annual trip to Evansville, Indiana where they had shopped at the mall and eaten dinner at Ponderosa Steakhouse. "I don't want him out there with guns at all, Mike."

In the bottom of the seventh inning Tommy Herr hit a two-run double that put the Cards back on top.

"Just stop your worrying. He won't be without supervision. And he'd be just fine even if he were. Jack Ritchy has been hunting all of his life, and he's a good man. He'll make sure the boys are safe."

That lead would hold the Cardinals as Bob Forsch pitched a perfect eighth and ninth innings to make tonight's game a winner for the three-and-o Redbirds.

"You can't tell me Jack is gonna keep our son from getting shot. You don't know. He may slip and fall and shoot himself, Mike. You can't say for sure what will happen to him. Even if Jack has hunted for 500 years you can't promise me nothing will happen."

For the Cardinal's Sport's Network this is Jack Buck.

"Nothing will happen."

We'll be back tomorrow at seven as the Cardinals start hurler Ricky Horton . . .

You can't say that, Mike.

. . . to face Jose DeLeon and the Pittsburg Pirates.

"Nothing will happen."

Until next time . . .

"You don't know."

stay tuned to KMOX 1120 for all the . . . .

"NOTHING WILL HAPPEN!" Mike roared as he pounded his fist on the Buick dashboard.

Silence followed. Theye did not speak for the hour-long ride home. The radio never worked again.

Jonas didn't die on the hunting trip. He didn't die until months later. His shotgun had discharged into his chest as he was packing for a deer-hunting trip with the Ritchys to Shawnee National Forest, less than 100 miles from his own home. Simon had found him in his room when they returned from last year's winter revival. It had been exactly a year ago, and he had lost so much blood.

The Prophet Boy, Chapter 1, Part 1

2008-09-11T07:04:00.007-05:00

Here's the first part of my book-in-progress (if in-progress means I started it five years ago and haven't worked on it since): The Prophet Boy.

__________

Chapter 1: The Anointing

Simon Gerald Kinney stood before God with twenty-three hands on his body and two hands of his own stretched toward a drop ceiling in a renovated warehouse.

"Yea though thou treadest through rocky lands, through barren lands, through sinful lands--even there will I follow thee!"

"Amen!"

Six of the hands were on either of his shoulders. Four more hands rested atop his head, matting thick brown hair against his scalp.

"And yea though thou runnest away from me and hide thyself under a rock--even then will my eye find you!"

"Holy!"

Other hands rested here and there across his back. They pushed his cool white shirt into beads of sweat that trickled down his adolescent back.

"And yea! Though thou cast thyself into the sea and drown thyself in its deepest depths--even there doth my hand reach."

"Glory!"

But one hand, rough and warm, clung to his face like a starfish. The hand's owner, an evangelist, spat stale breath into a crowd of supplicants. Originally dressed in a three-piece polyester suit with pinstripes, God's messenger had long since removed his jacket and unbuttoned the six gilded buttons on his matching vest. His shirt, however, was still buttoned to the top with his tie pulled tight against a neck that sagged like a pocket of change over a starched white collar. His face was ruddy as any sweat that escaped from the curly locks of his receding hairline were quickly mopped away by a white handkerchief he waved in his free and apparently powerless hand. The other began to press more firmly against Simon's temples. The evangelist began chanting, as more and more Christian brothers and sisters pushed in toward Simon, laying on hands in a tightening circle. Brother Childress shouted his prayers as the prayerful supplicants surrounding Simon responded in ecstatic affirmation.

"I will follow!"

"Hallelujah!"

"I will see!"

"Glory be to God!"

"And I will reach!"

"Amen!"

Simon smelled myrrh as the evangelist fingered the sign of the cross on the boy's forehead. It was a last-ditch effort, and Simon knew his time was coming.

"I will follow!”

"Glory!"

"I will see!"

"Glory!"

"And I will reach!"

"Glory to the Highest!"

The ten or twenty people surrounding Simon grew louder as a sudden rush of adrenaline was released into his bloodstream. His face flushed as he thought he began to grow dizzy.

"I will follow!"

"Jesus!"

"I will see you!"

"Jesus!"

"And I will reach you!"

"Thank you, Jesus!"

The red-faced evangelist pushed harder against Simon's forehead.

"Speak the name of Jesus!"

"Jesus," Simon said. His voice sounded trapped inside his head as the prayer warriors surrounding him groaned loudly in a din of tongues, songs, whispers, and voices raised toward the warehouse-turned-sancturary roof.

"SHOUT the name of Jesus!"

"JESUS!"

"BLESS the name of JESUS!"

"BLESS YOU, JESUS!"

The exchange between Simon and the evangelist became a shouting match.

"JESUS!" Childress shouted in one final yelp, sounding more like a long-jowled pit bull than a messenger of God.

Simon swooned, and various pairs of hands that had been holding his back, shoulders, and head lowered him delicately to the ground.

Alone on the floor he felt much cooler, and he noticed the difference in the quality of sound between the evangelist's voice through the PA and the way it had sounded as he shouted directly into Simon's face. The evangelist had moved to the next soul in line at the altar, as did the crowd of supplicants, and Simon lay alone on the sport-grade carpeting. He was not sure how long he was supposed to lie in that position while God ministered to him, so he tarried in his repose. At any rate, it was refreshing to recline after sitting so long through the evening's sermon. In fact, it had not only been this evening's sermon Simon had suffered through. This was the final night of a week-long winter revival. Brother Ray Childress had driven all the way from Christ's Fellowship Temple in sunny Huntsville, Alabama to bring the Word of the Lord to God's people at the frozen Community of Faith in Mt. Carmel, Illinois. Simon thought it would be foolish to pass up the free gift God was offering his people on this final night that it would be available. However, Simon had not waited to go forward until Saturday night because he was reluctant. He had waited patiently, like he had with his model rocket a month ago.

He had only one engine, and he didn't want to waste it by launching his two-foot model on a cloudy or windy day. So he waited for the weather to improve. Day after day he waited until the weather was perfect, revealing still, blue, cloudless skies. On a chilly Saturday in November, he launched it, and it flew higher than he ever could have imagined. Simon knew, just as he imagined that everyone else knew, that God's presence is always strongest on the last night of Revival, and Simon wanted to feel it in all its strength: the awesome power of the resurrected Savior moving through men, the dunamis of God's Holy Spirit that breathes fire into man's heart, the Omnipotent Presence of the all-loving Father that divides the very soul of man.

"Simon?"

"Speak, Lord, for thy servant is listening."

"Simon, get up," his mother said impatiently. "It's time to go."

2016 Campaign Slogan: "Drill Now!"

2008-09-10T07:05:00.001-05:00

Has anybody taken a look lately at the three-legged ladies from France?

No?

Of course you haven't--because there are no three-legged ladies in France. Still, the attitude of many Americans seems to be that if we increased the role of nuclear energy in the United States, more and more babies would be born with eleven toes, one ear, and six belly buttons on their backs.

In France, 80% of the electrical energy supply is derived from nuclear energy, but in America we are still trying to figure out how to solve our energy problems by burning up all of our food. Though I was born and raised in the soybean-and-corn belt and should favor any policy that props up the dying family farms that pock mark Southern Illinois, the notion that corn and soy can save us from Saudi Arabia is ridiculous.

John McCain and the Republican Party are suggesting that immediate drilling for oil in Alaska and along the shores off the west coast are positive, short-term solutions to the energy crisis.

Barack Obama and the Democratic Party are suggesting that immediate drilling for oil in Alaska and along the shores of the west coast will distract Americans from taking important steps toward producing more clean, renewable energy infrastructures.

You know what? They're both right.

America should immediately expand drilling for oil on property Americans already own. We should invest in clean coal plants that will boost economies from Eastern Pennsylvania to Southern Illinois. However, we should also invest in alternative energy sources such as wind, solar, geothermal, and yes, nuclear power. None of these energy sources are mutually exclusive, yet all of them will bring energy and jobs to Americans.

Unfortunately, because America is locked in the stranglehold of the two-party system, progress along any of these fronts is nearly impossible. Both McCain and Obama want to be president. Unfortunately, the only way either of them can convince Americans to vote for him is to oppose the other guy. And in either case, whoever loses will be stonewalled by a 50-50 Congress that will try desperately to create a platform for the losing-party candidate in 2012.

This disheartens me because I want very badly to believe both of these guys when they talk about a new kind of politics that puts the needs of the country above the needs of the parties. But neither of them has put his money where his mouth is. If either McCain or Obama truly believed that he could find solutions to America's problems by reaching across the aisle, then he would already be acknowledging the important role that investments in both oil and wind can make to our future environment, national security, and economic welfare.

In 2000, G. W. Bush said he was going to bring a new kind of politics to Washington. Remember how then-Governor Bush touted his experience in bringing Republicans and Democrats together to make important decisions for the people of Texas? Remember how he was going to bring a new spirit of cooperation to the Capitol?

Well, that certainly worked.

Let's face the facts, folks. High energy prices and short-sighted solutions to America's problems are here to stay. Partisan politics will continue to pollute our future as voters continue to tolerate the candidates offered by either of the two major national parties.

So in an election year when I think both parties are offering two of the best candidates we have seen in a long time, I will offer my first official Prophet Boy prophecy: The winner of the 2008 election will go down in history as one of the most partisan presidents of all time, and the central focus of the 2012 election will be--you got it--"Bring Change to Washington!" In the meantime, gas prices will rise, emission standards will stagnate, and the economy will continue to struggle as record-breaking billions will be spent on another election cycle.

Barack inspires me, and John has earned my vote. But this year--for the good of my country--I'm hoping for a dark horse.

Idealism

2008-09-09T06:11:00.007-05:00

Who knows what effect the blue scarf played upon the heart of the young man as it danced in the bus stop wind? Imagination reveals more detail than eyes can fix within the mind. It may have been the graceful dance of ballerinas gliding in grande jeté à la seconde across the spot-lit stage. Or it may have been a banner waving over the battlements stormed in gunfire and bayonets that gouged and bled hundreds at the Battle of San Juan Hill. Perhaps it was simply the undulating sea, who waits for no one and swallows deeply all memories and dreams. When it dropped, though, the clouds froze in their endless journey across the welkin, and the screeching brakes of the bus were muted like the screams of thousand babies behind a sound studio wall. If he had waited for his eyes to confirm what his heart had already believed, he would have known it was only frayed polyester in a street puddle, and not his brain beneath the heavy tires.

Borat & Jesus

2008-09-08T16:34:00.007-05:00

I'll save you some time. This post is a little long, light on humor, and heavy on instruction. I wrote it for people who think of themselves as Christians but are a little frustrated with church.

You are not alone.

My wife has been trying to convince me to start following Brant Hansen's blog: Letters from Kamp Krusty. If you have ever been to church, you will enjoy Brant's blog. If you have never been to church, you are really missing out on an entire world of good, clean humor.

Much of what is ridiculous about the modern American church is being "documented" by Joel Kilpatrick in a monthly newsletter called Lark News, which Christianity Today compared to The Onion. It contains articles such as "Small Group Members Decide to Stop Feigning Interest in Each Other," "Obama Heals Hundreds," and "Church Transforms into Coffee Chain."

As someone who has become rather disenchanted by the way church works In the Year of Our Lord 2008, I really enjoy this kind of humor. I like to poke fun at things (people are things, right?), so these not-so-veiled attacks on the modern phenomenon we call church is right up my alley.

However, part of the reason for--or the need for--this kind of humor is that many churchgoers simply do not understand how ridiculous their institutions seem to people who are outside the box. I grew up in church, so I am well aware of the navel gazing that happens in so many of them, and I think maybe it is necessary to explain to my churchgoing friends why the church has suddenly become the butt of so many jokes.

First we'll need a brief lesson on deconstructive postmodernism:

There are different ways of looking at the world. Some people, for example, try to imagine the world through the lens that explores how living in the world is related to gender identity. This is generally called feminist criticism. This is just one way of looking at things--there are many others besides this.

Another way of looking at the world puts all the pieces together in order to build, or "construct" meaning about the world. This is called constructivism. This philosophy made a lot of sense to people living in the 1800s, around the time of what Church historians call The Restoration Movement. This movement in Western theology spawned the Baptist and Church of Christ churches in America that dominated the Bible Belt during the 20th Century. People who are influenced by this philosophy believe that they can "construct" meaning from sources--in the case of Christians, the Bible. To Christian constructivists, it is important to have reliable information in order to make good decisions, so they fiercely defend the idea that the Bible is the infallible Word of God.

Due to social and historical influences beyond our control, many people have begun to leave behind the constructivist philosophical approach. At the beginning of the 20th Century, some thinkers began to try to take things apart, or to "deconstruct" ideas in order to find meaning. This is called deconstructivism, or deconstruction, and it heavily influences what we call post-modern thinking.

There is actually a system to thinking about things deconstructively that involves the creation of binary oppositions. It works like this:

First, make any statement. We'll call this Statement A.

Statement A: Jane is pretty.

Second, make a statement that directly contradicts Statement A. We'll call this Statement B.

Statement B: Jane is ugly.

Now that we have made two opposite statements, it is easy to see that the "meaning" behind these statements has less to do with Jane than it does an individual's interpretation, understanding, and definition of the words pretty and ugly. If we begin to think too hard about it, we might start to realize the truth: that there is no spoon.

And that's where Borat comes in.

Sacha Baron Cohen ruthlessly criticizes modern institutions with equal opportunity: churches, the government, the fashion industry, and even professional sports have fallen victim to Cohen's relentless mockeries.

But Cohen's characters--and more notably his broad appeal--is simply evidence of the pervasive influence of deconstructive thought. For example, when Cohen's character Ali G interviewed a panel of religious experts about the existence of God, asking, "Isn't God just an over-hyped David Blaine?" he is using the deconstructive technique as follows:

Statement A: God is God.

Statement B: God is David Blaine.

The result is that we have to question what we mean when we talk about God. In this manner, Cohen illustrates that the notions we have constructed about "God" over the past several centuries are simply constructions, and though we cling to them tenaciously, perhaps we are missing the point all together.

Sites like Letters from Kamp Krusty and Lark News are helping to illustrate that the way we have been thinking about church over the past 100 years does not fit into our new post-modern paradigms. Hopefully, they are helping all of us to think more critically about what we mean when we talk about faith.

To tell you the truth, watching Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006) often made me cringe--on a human level, not as a Christian. And I am not suggesting that renting the movie is going to ease all of your frustrations about being involved in a church. However, it does provide an excellent opportunity for us to think about how Christians are perceived by others, and it might give us an impetus to take our focus off our navels.

In the meantime, enjoy reading Brant's blog.

Ándrea, Part II

2008-09-07T21:18:00.004-05:00

If you haven't read it yet, here is Part I.

________________

I’m really not sure why she tolerated me: my ignorance was devastating. But I suspect it was in that particular moment that she decided to take me as her special project. After she had accepted the shock that her American adventure would take place in the vast, flat cornfields of Illinois—a markedly different experience than she had anticipated after seeing Quentin Tarrantino’s Pulp Fiction, which she tried to convince me was a cinematic masterpiece (I hadn’t seen it)—she purposed that she would not spend the remainder of her stay grieving her tragic misfortune. Instead, she began the arduous task of educating America about what the rest of the world already knew.

She had been in America for almost two months when I met her, and had just reached the end of her grieving process, so my participation in her experiment was merely coincidental: if I had been anybody else at that particular moment, I am certain that she would have adopted him instead of me. Strictly speaking, I mattered very little to her, but since she could not educate all of America—or even all the residents of one hick-town in Illinois—she decided to focus her efforts on one person, and at that inauspicious moment I unwittingly became her pupil.

Certainly the idea did not come to her completely in that moment, and in fact I seriously doubt the idea ever fully surfaced above her subconscious. If I had pointed out to her that the only reason she kept me around was to experiment with the simplistic, puritanical, and grossly moronic American experience on a more personal level, I am confident she would have denied it wholeheartedly. On one level it was simply convenient for her to have relationships with Americans: they had cars and knew which roads went to places like Chicago and San Francisco. If she admitted to anything—and she wouldn’t—she would admit that the reason she talked to me was that she needed a tour guide. Even if this were true, she did a good job of making me feel otherwise, keeping my ego from being completely crushed. But it wouldn’t have mattered anyway. All that really mattered was that an exotic specimen of European eroticism, had asked me, a 19-year-old junior college student from the Corn Belt, to drive her to Champaign for the weekend.

As it turned out, she didn’t really need me to drive her to Champaign; her host-mother had attended the University of Illinois and would be driving to the college’s Allerton Park in nearby Monticello for a class reunion. What she really wanted was a chauffer: someone who knew Champaign well enough to escort her around campus and help her locate the natural foods store where they made real bread while her host-mother attended the reunion. I didn’t know what she meant by “real” bread, but I did know my way around Champaign, and I had even heard of the store she was talking about. I wasn’t sure I knew how to get to Champaign from Monticello, but I didn’t reveal that much to her.

Ándrea, Part I

2008-09-05T22:59:00.006-05:00

When I was a freshman at my local junior college, I became close friends with a group of foreign exchange students, most of whom were from Europe. As I mentioned two days ago in my "Audacity of Hope" post, I have slowly been evolving from a neo-con into a card-carrying liberal over the years, and much of that transformation began in my interactions with that group of students. About a year ago, as I was trying to work through my own thoughts about how this change had developed within me, I decided to put some of my experiences with Andrea, Kristian, Jelle, and the others into words. What ensued was something that was about half memoir, half fiction (ok fine, nine-tenths memoir, one-tenth fiction--but I'll never admit which is which).

Here's where I started. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed living it . . .

----

If I had tried to better understand the differences between romance and Romanticism earlier in my life, perhaps I wouldn’t have looked like such a fool to Ándrea. While she was a Swiss-German foreign exchange student who wore hip-defining Calvin Klein jeans and cashmere turtlenecks revealing broad, yet delicately feminine shoulders, and I was a valedictorian of a rural American high school who wore oversized t-shirts from the clearance rack at Wal-Mart and blue-jean shorts from a second-hand consignment shop called The Garage Sale Store, I didn’t feel that those differences should be exacerbated by the fact that I was a dumbass and she was not.

“In America,” I explained to her, “being romantic means that you love somebody, or at least that you buy them flowers.” I spoke loudly and with unnatural cadence, like I did when I visited my great-grandmother at the nursing home.

Ándrea thought we were having trouble communicating, that her English was deficient; so she bit her thin, lower lip, moved her face closer to mine, and with the three middle fingers of her right hand jabbing repeatedly into the flattened palm of her left hand, she attempted in vain to bridge the imaginary language gap between us.

“I’m not meaning romantic love,” she explained in a deep, sultry voice; her breath hit my lips in cool bursts of honeyed air. “Rather, on the other hand, I mean the Romanticism Movement in the arts and in literature that praised the power of Nature over Science—the power of the human spirit over the intellect.” Her dimpled smile invited me to excuse her deficiencies in English as she pronounced each letter with sensual concreteness—pronouncing the final three letters of intellect in three discrete syllables. But I was having none of it: I allowed her to believe that complexities of language had obviated communication, or at least that the movement that had swept eighteenth-century Europe had been stalled by the Atlantic Ocean. Perhaps if Romanticism would have escaped New England, my own notions of romantic love would have been better served, for at that moment my natural impulse was to place one hand behind her neck and the other at the small of her back, draw her to me, and taste her deliciousness.

“So what part of Germany are you from?” I asked.

“I’m not German.”

“But I thought you said you were.”

“I’m Swiss-German.”

“Oh. Where’s that?”

“Switzerland.”

“Oh,” I said.

To be continued . . .

The Dark Knight

2008-09-04T21:42:00.004-05:00

The Internet Movie Database is a fantastic resource for finding information about movies, television, and gaming. One tool that is particularly useful is their list of the Top 250 movies. For the past couple years, I have used this reliable source for identifying good, timeless movies for long, rainy nights.

However, I am troubled that The Dark Knight (2008) has skyrocketed to the #3 slot on the IMDB's list not even two months after its release.

Heath Ledger gave a very, very good performance in Christopher Nolan's film, but I firmly believe that his performance should not have earned this film the extraordinarily high rating that it has earned in such a short time.

The top two movies listed on the IMDB are The Shawshank Redemption (1994) and The Godfather (1972). Both of these movies are unquestionably timeless films that have earned their position on the list, maintaining average scores of 9.1/10 among over 300,000 votes (Shawshank has over 370,000). For movies that are 14 and 36 years old, respectively, this is quite a feat by any estimation.

But The Dark Knight has garnered a score of 9.0/10 since its July 2008 release--with over 260,000 votes. I cannot believe that such an overwhelmingly positive response to this movie puts this film in its proper historical context among the greatest films of all time--especially when it is forced to sit next in line to The Godfather.

So I'll come right out and say it: people liked The Dark Knight because Heath Ledger is dead.

Though much has been made of Heath Ledger's performance as the Joker, and it was certainly a great performance, it is unreasonable that over a quarter-million people have rated this film as competitive with other movies of much higher caliber and longevity.

But here's my real problem: I don't care that people want to like this movie because an actor died. That's what people do. People get emotional, and that's just fine. My dilemma is that I really, really like to use the IMDB Top 250 list to make informed decisions about movies. The trouble is that movies released in the Internet age will always be judged by a different set of rules than movies released in the previous millennium.

IMDB's #5 movie of all time, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966) has earned just over 105,000 votes since its release 42 years ago, and it shares the same 9.0/10 rating as Ledger's film. But I cannot imagine a scenario in which 250,000 people will respond in two months' time to cast votes for the Clint Eastwood classic.

I suppose my only hope is to live for another 100 years as I watch Nolan's movie creep down the list like a splat pig on a wall.

In the meantime, I'm giving The Dark Knight an 8.

The Audacity of Hope

2008-09-03T21:48:00.003-05:00

Before you give me more credit than I deserve, I've never read any books by Barack Obama.

In fact, like many other Americans, the first time I laid my eyes on Obama was during the 2004 presidential campaign when he delivered his now famous "The Audacity of Hope" speech. Watching his speech live, I said to my wife, "You are looking at our next president."

The title of this blog notwithstanding, I am not trying to pass myself off as prescient--that's not really my point. However, in those moments during Obama's speech at the 2004 convention, I felt for the first time in my life a stirring of emotion that I had never--ever--felt as a result of a political speech.

Raised in a Christian, conservative, anti-abortion, pro-gun environment, I was 15 years old when "Slick Willy" snuck into the White House with the help of Ross Perot, and I endured eight years of his "scandalous" presidency during my very impressionable late-teen years. Most, if not all, of the political commentary I digested during those years came from the lips of Rush Limbaugh, whose radio program was always available over the noon hours of AM radio stations across the Southern Midwest. Thanks to Limbaugh, I had developed a Pavlovian response to Republican talking points such as abortion, gun control, religion, school prayer, homeschool, and a strong military. Immersed in that world-view and primed with instructions from Rush in "How to Talk to Liberals," I found it difficult to listen to any Democrat speak without strong feelings of cynicism.

But then Obama happened.

By 2004, I had begun to understand that many of the issues that conservatives espoused were more complicated than Rush Limbaugh had led me to believe they were, but in general, I still considered myself a Republican. In 2004, I voted for George W. Bush because of one issue: I wanted a republican president to nominate Supreme Court Justices. I voted for Bush despite my strong opposition to No Child Left Behind, which affects me personally in my career as a high school teacher. I voted for Bush because I believed that my needs, namely the need for greater freedom to be able to educate my students, was secondary to my nation's need to have wise judges sitting behind the supreme bench of justice in our nation. I cast my vote for a Republican president in 2004 with a clear and confident conscience.

Still, long before I cast my vote on that first Tuesday in November, three months earlier as I listened to Obama deliver the keynote address in Boston, I felt something changing within me. Something basic. And even as early as July 2004 I began to feel that I might feel safe putting the hands of this young, eloquent, and above all hopeful man, who made me feel good about my country in a way that nobody since Ronald Reagan had.

Last week, listening to the speeches being delivered at the 2008 Democratic National Convention, I felt myself feeling again many of the emotions I had felt on that July night in 2004. But this time, by some mysterious transformation within me, some of those feelings emerged as I listened to people like Al Gore, Joe Biden, and--can I even admit it?--John Kerry. Strangely, my Rush Limbaugh filter had malfunctioned, and I tried to understand how I could have changed so drastically from the person I had been in 2004, a person who had delighted in the flip-flops of Kerry, but now found myself laughing at Kerry's flip-flop jabs at Senator McCain.

So tonight, as I watched the second (or third) night of the Republican National Convention (thank you Jim Lehrer), I tried to remember the person I had been in 2004, 2000, 1996, 1992, 1988, and yes even 1984--my earliest memory of any convention. Ronald Reagan stood up against bad guys like Jesse Jackson. I was 7. But instead of the familiar feelings of self-righteousness that used to accompany proclamations about abortion, religion, and the flag, I simply found myself feeling very confused. I was amazed at the fervor of the speakers and delegates at the convention, and I was disconcerted by the self-righteousness with which they spoke against the platform of the Democratic ticket. And I found that I could not reconnect to those emotions that I had felt so strongly for most of my life. The faces of the delegates at the RNC were stern, angry, impasssive, determined, and arrogant. Sarah Palin's remarks, though direct and forceful, also seemed rather direct and forceful. The smiles, the laughter, and the sprit of cooperation that seemed to pervade the DNC had been eaten away by a spirit of Republican divisiveness in an excessively red convention hall that often seemed to glow like the Gates of Hell.

And to top it all, Stevie Wonder didn't perform.

Perhaps I'm naive. Or maybe I'm just plain stupid. But I want to believe in the Audacity of Hope. I'm just so tired of being angry.