Which is More of the Same. But Builds Dramatically

07/11/2008 7:14 AM – 8:28 AM

I really have little interest in doing this today. Perhaps an effect of not having done it in a little while. But I don’t really feel like doing anything today. I don’t want to read either the Asimov novel that I started or the comic books I’ve brought home from the library. I didn’t wake up in an afraid mood. I just sort of woke up.

I’m thinking about the move lately. That makes sense. Two weeks as of today is my last day at work. Doh – I still have to write my letter of resignation. Later. I’m curious to see what effect the move will have on my mood. Hopefully a good one. Is it enough to move from the city to the town to lift the lingering doubts about existence or is it something that I’ll have to be working on for the rest of my life? Going to Mary’s wedding last week made me think about marriage again. Not that it’s ever far from my mind. Why is love, which is so wonderful, so short on endurance? Why can’t it change everything as I imagined it would when I was younger? Why do we slide back into normalcy? I know the answer that psychology gives – habituation, but why in the metaphysical?

I find the idea of the evolution of human psychology fascinating and terrifying. I’m drawn to it. My nearly overpowering and obsessive sense of curiosity demands that I at least make an attempt to know and understand. But eventually, we run into that wall of unknowability in every field. From an evolutionary perspective, romantic love makes sense, its time-span nearly identical to the amount of time from meeting an attractive mate to the time when the mother can raise a child alone without both of them starving. I hate the idea that this is all we are – moving mud, of no greater significance than inert mud, just mixed more complexly. The deeper you get into science; you see how powerful it is. It can find the reason for everything, but if you push it back, you find that there is no reason for anything. We’re the outcome of trillions upon trillions of rolls of the quantum dice. Our existence is neither inevitable nor impossible. In this story, we are not even god’s bastard children, cast adrift in the cosmos – we’re warmish rocks on the surface of some uninteresting planet endlessly circling an ever-dimming minor star.

To rape or to love makes no difference and no poet of science, no matter how gifted, can light a candle of meaning or mystery in a demon-banished world. We’re meaningless. Our actions are meaningless. Our hopes and dreams are meaningless. The cruelty of self-awareness is meaningless, arising from the void only to fall inevitably back into it without the slightest stirring of the cosmic waters. Vanity of vanities, everything that we value is meaningless, the mere outcomes of a semi-complex, random programming. What we call love is of no more importance than the dust stirred up by a tiny pebble striking the night-enshrouded ground on a moon of Pluto. And where now is my God?

He’s where he was when I lay twitching on the sanctuary floor, having learned to twitch from the Pentecostals who learned it from the Voodoo priestesses who learned it from the epileptics, all of us sure that this was proof of the divine indwelling. There is no proof. There cannot be. We cannot see a hand that holds us, consisting as it does of the substance of our eyes. There is only hope. Hope that love has meaning beyond the mere occasional odd propensity towards the replication of a chemical chain.

I can no longer claim with C. S. Lewis that I was dragged kicking and screaming into the Kingdom. I was stiffer-necked. My heels dug in. My fingers found purchase. The caravan moved on.

And so, alone beneath the darkening sky, I light my candle in the desert waste and say my prayers in the deafening roar of the divine silence.

Let my love mean something. Please, dear God, let my love mean something.

From Time to Time

06/29/2008 11:14 AM – 11:34 AM

I don’t know that I have any particular thing that I’m writing about. That’s the nice thing about a long, tiring run – it wipes the slate clean for a little while. I did 5.4 miles this morning in 58 minutes. I’m approaching my “mid-week” goal time. 1 hour, three times a week. 1 and a half hours, once a week.

Eventually, I’ll add lifting to the weekly schedule. Sometime, not smoking. Maybe, maybe someday, I’ll add a healthy diet. But that is not the here today. Today is this Sunday. I’ll have to figure out what to do today. Maybe figure out more moving stuff. Maybe I’ll write. Maybe I’ll read, drink beer and take a nap. It isn’t time yet to decide. And the weight of my body is pleasant and the breeze through my widow is pleasant. It is good to be here, even if it isn’t a house in the woods. This is itself and it will change eventually.

Even my hands are tired. My fingers have little tightnesses to them that are not unpleasant. Tomorrow, I’ll go to work. In about a month, I’ll move. Somewhere, across the trees and fields and cities and roads, there is a sea. I’ll sit by it someday. Somewhere, beneath a tall tree in the middle of a forest, there is a patch of damp, mossy earth. Someday, I’ll sit on it. There is a red mesa in a dry and dusty desert. Someday, I’ll climb it. There is a pool in a river, dark and deep and still, hidden by the hills. Someday, I’ll swim in it. There is a heat, thick with water and void of breeze. Someday, I will lie still within it, feeling my breath pass hot through my lips and nose. There is this, the heavy and slow and good of being. Just being. And there is wisdom in stopping for it, from time to time.

From the (Admittedly Small) City, Towards the (Admittedly Imaginary) Country

06/24/2008 6:43 AM – 7:28 AM

Take a few days off and this gets rusty. I spent the morning reading a book about moving to the country. Oh, that is one of my favorite fantasies: the garden (big garden), the chickens, the turkeys, the goats, the big kitchen, the chopping of wood, the building of things that no one in the city in their right minds would consider building.

It’s a bit tantalizing, almost cruel to imagine myself in the country. I can’t even afford a car. Ah well, a little more hard work, a little less eating out, then a car, then some land, then a garden (big garden), then a shanty. Tin roof. Rusted. I ask myself questions that have no bearing on my now. How deep do you have to dig to build a rabbit-proof fence? Is it still viable to have a hand-dug well? Really, honestly, how much freedom do you have to do the stuff that you want to try out if you’re out in the boonies? As in, could you really build a sod house if you so desired? Not that I desire. I don’t like sharing my bed with worms this side of a coffin. But could I?

Strange dreams these, that still creep in from time to time. And so much resulting from the fact that I really don’t like being told what to do. Even now, having so many good bosses and not chafing under the lash hardly at all, and certainly not at the bosses themselves just the fact that it isn’t my recognizing a task that needs doing, but my need for money. And knowing that, once you get a little above the poverty line, the rise in happiness drops dramatically. It doesn’t fall. It doesn’t really level out. It just climbs so slightly as to require very powerful magnification equipment to recognize it. But there, in the country of my interior, there is a degree of inherently rewarding activity that makes me wonder why anyone would leave it. But that’s an easily answered question. The country of my interior and the country of reality are different places. Growing up, I never raised chickens and my garden work was trivial, if occasionally pretty. But there is something in knowing that if I hadn’t shoveled the driveway (well, I would have gotten in trouble, but aside from that), it wouldn’t have gotten shoveled (well, my brother probably would have shoveled it). But it was my driveway to shovel. The lawn to be mowed was my lawn and if, every spring, my brother and I wanted to push the lawn back into the field a few feet, we mowed the tall grass and no one really minded.

I don’t really understand the impulse to the city. I’m glad some people do. That river of capital, endlessly churning and reproducing and red-tooth-and-clawing gives me cheap used books and thrift-store clothes and perfectly good couches on curbs, but after four years in (an admittedly small) city, and I still don’t understand the seemingly a priori desire for cocktail bars and expensive gyms and clothes that can only be worn for three months. Those girls sure are purdy though. But why would you want to be looked at by so many when it’s so unlikely that you’ll be seen by even one? Does being purdy make it easier to believe that everything will turn out fine in the end? But they are purdy. No denying that.

Ah, well, back to the books. Maybe I’ll actually do some writing today.

Which Contains Many Scattered Thoughts, Including but not Limited to: God, Marrage, Actions and Rain

06/18/2008 6:23 AM – 6:45 AM

To live a life of quiet contemplation. But with sex. And occasionally, travel. To live as self-sufficiently as possible without passing up the pleasures that this life has to offer. Read, write, garden. Pray. Exercise and meditate. Eat, drink, poo, pass water. Talk. Have Sex. Watch TV and movies. Build, fix, clean. Occasionally take drugs.

I’d like to study some form of martial art, one that’s difficult but possible. I’d like to learn how to draw. I’d like to publish several novels. I’d like to get married. I’d like to build a solid building, one that will last for two-hundred years. I’d like to visit the most peaceful places of the world, ones that you have to walk a long way on your own feet to get to.

I cannot avoid the dark times, it would be wrong, but it would be wrong to prolong them, wallow in them. You need to connect to failing and learn from it. I cannot, if I honestly face the facts, prove to myself that there is a God. But absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. God can neither be proved nor disproved. The only rationale that people can give when honestly confronted with God is: 1) how can God, if he is good, allow evil and 2) people that believe in God do bad things. The problem of evil is old and excellent, but there are many answers to it, some more appealing than others, all of them admittedly difficult. The problem in the second is a fallacy of applying the attributes of a whole as if they were exclusive to a particular.

So. Lesson learned. Move on. I believe in God. I have chosen to do so because I find the idea of blessed continuance more pleasant to hope for than the idea of unjudged ending. If the materialist is right, I’ll never know it. If I’m right, everyone will be pleasantly surprised (except me, of course, and then I will say, “nanny-nanny who-who”). If the exclusivist is right, well, most people are fucked and there isn’t much I can do about it. So. Move on. Why do I like rainy days better than cloudy ones? I like cloudy days, but rainy days are just that much better. When am I grown up enough to have a wife? Is it when I can finally afford to support a pregnant wife and children? Is it when I have a house with a washer and drier? Is it when I finally start to pay my bills conscientiously on time? I realize now, that a wife will not make everything better. Only a little better and my life will be very different than it is now. I will have to find a way to schedule my life around being with her instead of around following up interesting leads. Or maybe I won’t. How does that work? I will still have dark days. I will still have marvelously light ones. But I would have talkin’ and fightin’ and huggin’ and kissin’ and sexin’ and all those other –in’ actions that require more than one player.

And the Results Are in...

My official time was 31:56, making my pace 10:18/mile. I came in at 689th place overall, and 43rd out of 64 for my gender/age group. So, meh... but not bad for my first race.

On My First Race

The official race results haven't been posted yet, but I think that I crossed the finish line at around 31:45. That would make my pace 10:15/mile. Not as fast as I wanted, not as slow as I feared. I'm happy with it. My little conceit is that they were counting from the time of the start buzzer to your finish, not the time of your crossing the starting line to your finish. If they'd done it that way, I'd be down to about an even 31. Which is still slower than I was hoping. But I'm happy with it, considering my average pace when I'm out running is about 10:45/mile.

Here's a link to the race site: the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure. At this posting, the "teams" page is disabled or I'd leave link to mine. My Circ boss, who's an awesome boss, is a breast-cancer survivor, and I was on her and her daughter's team. Her daughter is also a breast-cancer survivor. I found them briefly before the start of the race and said hello, but I went to stretch and get a little water and didn't see them again for the rest of the time. Whoops. Sorry. Thanks Kathy!

I must say that I felt horribly out a place until about ten minutes into the actual running. As the rest of the folks on my team had opted to walk the course, I was on my own, and this seemed to be an oddity at the start line. Everybody had a buddy, even the crazy people that were wearing tiny super-shiny matching runner's outfits and jumping three feet in the air, kicking their own asses with their heels to stretch those quads. I tried very hard to turn away in time whenever somebody did that, lest my incredulous grin betray me for the novice that I am. It was amazing to watch though. Jump-whack! Jump-whack! Jump-whack!

As the time ticked down to the start buzzer, which was actually a somewhat nervous sounding air-horn, I tried to find a place near the back of the line of runners but before the walkers. This was more difficult than I had imagined as the two packs were smooshed together and over-lapping where they met. As one gentleman three or four people in front of me replied to his wife when she asked if maybe they shouldn't be in the back with the other people pushing baby-strollers, "ah, why bother? It'll sort itself out." Shortly after this, I stepped out of line and edged my way in a few yards or so ahead.

I did discover a trick that helped me determine a good place to start. Before the race, anyone that wished to be timed had to go to a little tent where they were handing out small black plastic do-hickies that you attached to your sneakers by lashing them to your shoelaces with little plastic cinch-straps. Like the kind police use on "Cops" when they run out of handcuffs. But smaller. Not, however, a lot smaller. I was left with a small plastic antenna sticking up off my sneaker that reached about five inches up my shin. I discovered after the race that they had a pair of little wire cutters to trim it up for you after you'd attached it and they just used longer cinches so that it was easier to maneuver the strap around your laces before you tightened it down. I, however, not wanting to appear the novice that I am, just let them scan my race tag, imprint the timer do-hicky to my race number and hand it over, before I quickly walked away like I assumed the in-the-know, Big People racers did. After the race was over and I was handing in my do-hicky, I was pleased to see that from the evidence of numerous tall plastic antennas jutting out from the pile of returned do-hickies, I was not the only newbie dork to have run the race.

The trick that I discovered about where to start was that the more serious you were about running, the more likely you were to have a strange do-hicky attached to your shoelaces and the closer you would be to the front. The less serious you were, the less likely you were to have a do-hicky and the further back you would be. Since my goal was to come in at less than 31 minutes (not quite achieved), I figured that I would be somewhere less than the front jump-to-kick-your-own-ass 5.30211 min/milers, but more than the middle I’m-here-for-the-beer-and-sausage 15 min/milers. Somewhere, I was guessing, where there was a mingling of mostly do-hickied sneakers and a few un-do-hickied sneakers but no baby strollers. Unless they were those suped-up, aero-dynamic, three-wheeled baby-strollers. I was going to stay the hell out of those people’s way. And I did.

I found a place to start that was a little further back than I might have aspired to, but this allowed me more of what I have discovered is, thus far in my experience, the greatest joy of racing: passing people. But it’s not just passing people. It’s dodging them.

At the blast of the air-horn, actually the third, the first two being sort of anemic and tentative, I started running. In place. We had to wait for those in front of us to clear out before we could even start to move. Then we got to move and pretend we were running. Kind-of like when a really tall man is “running” along with a very small child: the arms are pumping, the knees are going higher than they would if you were just walking, but your pace is about that of, well, a very small biped. Eventually, I worked up to a shuffle-run that was even slower than my regular long Sunday pace, and that was about the time that I finally crossed the start line.

At about five minutes in and having finally reached a speed that would be normal if I was just sort of taking it easy, it dawned on me that I could have started a little further towards the front. This was when I started noticing that I wasn’t just passing people (and being passed. Frequently), I was having to calculate trajectories and moments of impact and attempting to squeeze into what they call in the space shuttle launches “small windows of opportunity.”

How it would break-down was like this: let’s say that you’ve got someone on your left that’s running at the same speed as you, a group of three in front of you that are going slightly slower and up on the right, someone that is going much slower. You can’t go to the left because you smack into the person that’s keeping your pace, you can’t stay in place because you’ll smack into one of the three in front of you, and if you go to right, you’ll smack into the slow person before you can pass the ones in front. Your options then are to either slow down to the pace of the group until they pass the slow-poke or speed up and try to pass the group before they reach the slow-poke. The answer, of course, is to speed up. It’s a race, fer goodness sake! I didn’t hardly smash into anyone.

By about the fifteen-minute mark, the course had thinned out to the point that these calculations were not a constant thing but still something that one could look forward too with a reliable frequency.

What would amaze me was that even in the last half of the race, from time to time I would pass someone that looked like they were even less physically fit than me. There was a woman, at about the twenty minute mark, who had proportions vaguely similar to that of an egg, beginning at her head and ending at her knees. A largish egg. But she was still running. At the twenty minute mark. Now to really appreciate how amazing this is, you need to realize that we had all started at the same time and as I ran, I slowly increased my pace. I did the first mile in about 11:15, the second in about 10:30, and the last in about 9:30 (negative splits, thankyouverymuch). This means that at the twenty minute mark, around the time that I passed her, she had run a little more that 1.8 miles at a pace of about 10.75 min/mile. That’s a good Monday run for me. It’s sure as hell not easy for someone that tips out that scale at what the government would term “morbidly obese.”

My delight in the latter part of the race arose not just from such empathetic encounters however. There was the matter of smug glee that I experienced on the several occasions that I passed someone that was thin and in tight shiny pants that displayed their firm and shapely buttocks. Mind you, if I had firm and shapely buttocks, I’d probably wear those shiny pants constantly. Which is probably why God doesn’t let me. But the joy that I felt on those few occasions when I left ‘em in my dust was undeniably great and I will treasure them forever.

I did have a nemesis for the race, but as I saw him only briefly towards the front while we were lining up, I must assume that he beat me soundly. He ran without a shirt and had a ring through one nipple and a tattoo around the other. He was muscular, had a dangerously low body-fat index and was thoroughly tan. He could, more than likely, beat me up without breaking a sweat. He was, in other words, exactly what I would be if I were cool. I loathed him at first sight. Luckily, it was also the last. Pssht, I could have taken him. He probably doesn’t even know what an on-line library catalogue is, much less, know how to find the comic-book price-guide with it.

Of the babes that ran, there were many. But me, being me, was awkward and uncomfortable with that much hotness surrounding. I mean, seriously, if you had some confidence, a breast-cancer benefit run would be a great place to meet women. It might be slightly in bad taste, but still, I thought I’d put it out there. It’d be, you know, for a good cause too.

By the end of the race, I was tired and in a little pain. I had a blister spring up on my pinky toe, which I don’t think I’ve ever had happen before, and, FYI, if you really must wear the free, new, sorta-stiff cotton tee-shirt that they give you when you race, make sure you band-aid your nipples first. But the last leg was not without its vicariously malicious pleasures, as when the “in-shape” member of a group turned around to run backwards as he cam-corded the less fit members of his group as they, puffy-cheeked and slack-jawed, struggled towards the end and a kid of about 14 that was sprinting towards the finish-line almost took him out with a forehead to the crotch. That was pretty awesome.

After I’d passed through the finish arch/official timing thingy, gratefully received my free bottle of water, and turned in my timing do-hicky, I walked around to cool down and then found a tree to prop myself against while I stretched my calves. I did an abbreviated version of my cool down/stretching routine, the magic un-self-consciousness of running hard having already faded by the time I got to the part where I make myself look like a horribly diseased cat.

When I’d finished trying to avoid cramps while not looking like a diseased cat, I wandered into the tent area and got myself a free fruit/yogurt/walnut dish, which was really quite good, from the McDonald’s stand and then went over to the food tent where I got a free sausage in exchange for a little corner of my running tag. It was perforated for just this purpose, though it would have been funny to see a bunch of exhausted runners trying to tear off a piece of one of those neigh-indestructible bibs in exchange for some sort of sustenance, any sustenance.

After I’d eaten my sausage and wandered around a little more, never having found either my team again or the beer tent, I decided that I wanted to go home. I was tired. I felt good. And honestly, I really, really needed a cigarette.

On Not Tame Lions

06/14/2008 7:11 AM – 7:34 AM

And my own personal “God-In-the-Gaps” theory rests in three points in time and came about as a matter of taste: something can’t come from nothing, life can’t come from non-life and consciousness can’t come from non-consciousness. Those gaps will probably be filled. Probably soon. Where then is my God?

He’s where He was when I can’t find any rational or emotion reason to believe in Him, which is the same place he is when His nearness and grace are undeniable no matter how much I wish to doubt. My feeling does not change the nature of God anymore than my feeling changed the fact of evolution back when I was a creationist. The experiments that they’ve done with prayer show, when properly conducted with blinds and control groups, no statistical difference in the results between praying and non-praying. Where then is my God?

He’s where he was when my prayers were answered, the same place he was when my prayers weren’t answered. My state of belief in God’s providence doesn’t change his actions. He does as He wills. He’s not a tame lion. And neither am I. Well, I don’t feel like one anyway. I have no idea if I’m right. I’m not going to convince anyone that my belief is correct. Sometimes I can’t even convince myself. But here is this hand. And here is another. And so I got up early this morning and read and smoked and drank coffee and in another two-and-a-half hours I will be in the starting line at my first race. I do not expect to win the proffered prize for my sex/age-group. I will have run in a race though. All two-hundred and thirty pounds will have made it 3.1 miles on a pair of smoker’s lungs. In public. At a cancer-benefit race. This is no proof of God. This is no proof that I am not a tame lion. But having awakened this morning after a sketchy night’s sleep, I choose to get out of bed and run. I choose to believe in God and the redemptive act of His only begotten Son and of life everlasting. I choose to believe that I am not a tame lion. Proof is not over-rated, but this is not proof. It merely makes me happy.