Stumbling Toward God?

I encounter a certain young lady from time to time, and whenever I see her, something in the back of my head tells me that we once dated. Yet how can that be? I don’t even really know her… she is just a friend of a friend or something, I do not think I have ever talked to her, much less dated.

Do you really not remember? How could you not remember? Of course I remember certain details, but it is all so hazy now… surely that must have been somebody else? Besides, this part of me that says these things is the same one that tells me that I used to be in a circus, or that I once went to school to learn how to build guitars. Having previously come to the conclusion that my heart is a wicked liar, I now consider the possibility that part of my brain is malfunctioning and perhaps just making crap up.

Infants have no concept of “object permanence,” i.e. they do not understand that things continue to exist when not perceived. An extreme form of “out of sight, out of mind,” if you will. I find myself having gone in completely the other direction, to a condition that I can only describe as, “As it is, thus it always was.” The perpetual NOW. (There’s probably a more official name for it, but I do not know it.) Things are now as they always have been. Thus, I never had a mother, or a Subaru, or a guitar with all six strings on it, and I am immediately skeptical of any evidence to the contrary.

As a weak explanation, ever since the crash, part of me has secretly suspected that I am really dead on the side of that mountain, and all of this has been a hallucination. But the fact is, it is actually everything before that point that is unclear, which opens the door for even stranger metaphysical possibilities.

So I was meaning to post yesterday on a different matter, but first I had to look-up “object permanence” to make sure that it meant what I thought it did, and as these things go, many hours later I decided that it was time for bed.

Anyway, I don’t know if folks read the comments that others leave here. In particular, I imagine that new comments on older posts would go largely unnoticed. (I’ve actually played that assumption to add “secret” footnotes on an occasion or two.) New comments are actually emailed to me so that I don’t have to go looking for them. I do not, however, check my email anywhere near as often as I used to, and even when I do, I increasingly will only read a few that are of immediate interest/relevance and leave the rest. All that is merely to say that last night, I had several new comments to read. Adding those with a half a dozen or so others I’ve gotten in the last month or two and…

I’ve been thinking of how to say this in the least rude and belligerent-sounding way possible, because I really do appreciate feedback, but people, your comments confuse me. Whether it’s because I don’t see the relevance to the post on which they occur, or that they contain such a leap in logic or perspective from what I wrote that I don’t know how to respond. Sometimes I’m just left scratching my head wondering, “Do I even know you?” Not that that is a requirement, but it is nice to know who people are.

I admit that I’ve been out of it for awhile, so maybe the problem is me. Or maybe it is merely payback for years of people wondering what the heck I was talking about.

Last weekend I did sound for a mother-son conference…

The speaker had an adopted son. At one point, she alluded to (without going into details) the challenges of being a “white woman with an African-American son.” I can only imagine that that boy must have some heavy identity issues, even above and beyond the normal challenges of being adopted and (possibly) not knowing your real family or where you “come from.” So I’m not so sure I’m on board with this cross cultural adoption thing.
Is that so?
Yes.
Really.
Oh… shut up, you.

So I started thinking about the connections. What is it that binds two people together? Mother to son, family, friends, lovers…

My answer: nothing at all. In my experience, there is no bond that time will not undo.

Awhile ago my church group was talking about the “Five Love Languages.” Which I do not want to get into a long explanation of if you are not familiar. Essentially, people show and expect to receive love in one of five ways (according to some author) and if they do not receive in “their” language then they do not feel loved, even if they get one or more of the others in abundance. I had never heard of this before, so when put on the spot, I claimed the one that went something like “spending time together” as mine. Which I think is pretty accurate, because there is a large part of me that in general seems to feel that I’ve done my part by just showing up. (There’s another part of me that thinks that is a cop-out, but let’s not get into that.)

Regardless, if indeed I show that I care by spending time with people, what sort of message am I sending when I sit alone in my house all day, every day?

I’ve been living like I’m on a summer break. Old things are over. Soon, new things will begin. But in the in between days… I can do what I want. Responsible for nothing; accountable to no one.

But I’m not on a summer break. I’m almost 30 years old but I’m still a child. I have this sense that when the time is right, things will just fall into place.

Someday I will finish that project.
Someday I will write that song.
Someday I will say what I’ve kept inside, and then the world will know.

But the world doesn’t wait. Dreams don’t wait. People don’t wait.

And what if while I’m killing time, waiting for the right opportunity… it’s already too late?

Went camping at Joshua Tree this weekend. I had expressed concern beforehand that it was still going to be wicked cold at night, but was assured that would not be the case. And… it snowed.

I could not help but note that I have now been to Joshua Tree with all of my ex-girlfriends. I’m not saying that I went with girls I was dating at the time; I mean that I went there with a group of people that for one reason or another contained someone who I had previously but was no longer dating. Three times. Now how does that happen?

That could go in a lot of directions. But, speaking of the Joshua Tree, I saw U2 3D last week. It was amazing. It was almost like being at a concert without paying $90 to sit in the !@#$% rafters. Of course, my experience was dramatically enhanced by the fact that I saw it with someone who not only is a bigger U2 fan than I (because quite frankly they’ve lost me on the last couple of albums), but is a bigger U2 fan than I ever was. Now that is saying something.

Sometime ago I saw a video of U2 performing “Love and Peace or Else” in which Larry looked so cool that I was inspired to be a drummer. A goal which provided an interesting diversion for a time, but was never fully realized. A month or so ago, for reasons which still elude me, I was invited to play keyboard for the staff worship service at work. For the past several years I’ve had some interesting results playing with musical toys and pushing buttons on my computer. And of course we’ve already established that I can’t sing my way out of a paper bag… but seeing this movie made me stop to wonder, “Does anyone remember when I used to play guitar?”

Regrets, I’ve had a few… but then again, too few to mention
— Frank Sinatra

A possible line in this song that I’ve been resuscitating is “Past mistakes – I’ve already beat them.” What a peculiar phrase, and how spectacularly untrue.

I was informed last week that some of the staff where I work has been complaining that I don’t know what I’m doing. That saddened me. Worse is that there is the possibility of a full-time position opening up. Of course, I had only planned to be there temporarily until I figure some other things out, but I have to admit, the advantages of a full time job were starting to look attractive. Now… maybe not so much. Perhaps that’s for the best because I would naturally have to interview, where I could either flat out lie or:

– How would you describe your faith?
God and I aren’t on speaking terms right now.
– Then why do you want to work in full time ministry?
Because it’s there.

A cynic might ask, of all my failures why dwell on this particular one? Interpersonal relationships, for example, have been not so good across the board. There were some emails going about last week regarding someone who had had a death in the family. Though I know it’s bad, I could not quite bring myself to care. People die all the time; I have pictures of dead people all over my living space. What do you want from me?

And I think about people who used to be so close, recently or otherwise, who now are all but strangers, the mention of whose name merely brings a slight confusion as if trying to recall a long forgotten dream. Maybe I shouldn’t have said what I did. Maybe I should have said more when I had the chance. Maybe it’s not too late… And maybe it is. Have I ever had more than superficial friends? Sure I have. Have I ever been more than a superficial friend? Perhaps not.

There was this girl… and that’s actually not even important right now except that, damned if her parents don’t ask the most poignant questions! I remember very shortly after graduating, upon hearing that I had completed a degree in electrical engineering, her father asked point blank if it was a field I was interested in pursuing. I was stunned, because no one had thought to ask me that before and the answer was “no.” Yesterday, I ran into her mother at church, and after I told her where I was working these days, her first question is, “Do you find that people aren’t very Christian in that environment?” I responded that, yes, I discovered that rather quickly, then did my best to get away and avoid any more specific follow up questions. These people don’t waste any time on social mores, do they?

So yeah, I went to church this week. In case you’re wondering, I literally only went because I needed to retrieve my cell phone from someone at whose apartment I had accidentally left it. Of course, I had not been to a church service in months. I had not been to a service in the main sanctuary for something like a year. So naturally, for me to just turn up on a random Sunday… BANG… SonLight! I wanted to shoot somebody.

Someone recently asked me if there was anything as a friend that they could do to help me. (You know, because of the… stuff…) It so happens that what immediately popped into my head was, “You can buy my CD!” Followed almost instantly by, “Okay, don’t say that.” For this was a serious conversation, and that was just silly. I do not even have a CD.

One person asked me why I did not make the “Trilogy in E Minor” songs available for download. The reason is that I was actually considering making and selling a professional CD. It is very possible, and as it turned out, right around the time that I was looking in to all of this, a friend of mine coincidentally did the exact thing with his band. The problem I had was a question of how much could I reasonably charge for a three song CD, and with the numbers I was coming up with, it seemed highly unlikely that I would even break even on the project. (Plus the fact that I was not planning on doing any performances or promotion of any kind, and ultimately could probably only expect to sell a handful to friends and family- if any of them would even be willing to pay for such a thing.) Of course, I could go the purely digital download route for a minimal up-front cost, but what I really wanted was to see my [stage] name on a physical product. Eventually I let the matter drop.

A couple of weeks ago, I was again in a musical sort of mind and in a flurry of inspiration began concurrently working on four new Purple Robe songs. (Technically it was only three, but one of them started developing in two different directions and I could not decide which I liked better.) Taken along with several other fragments and ideas, plus stacks of unrecorded old songs, I figure that if I actually finished everything I would have about three albums worth of material. It occurred to me that I therefore ought to be able to at least come up with one single CD of tracks that are actually worth listening to. The problem is, the sets are very distinct in my head. The “Scarecrow” songs came from a certain period and are of a particular mood, while the “Purple Robe” songs are something else entirely. As far as fictional band histories go, I like to think that “upon the disappearance and presumed death of the Scarecrow, the Creeps went on to become the Purple Robe.” As such, the Purple Robe is not about guitar or vocals, just the “other stuff.” In reality, the modus operandi of the Purple Robe is “I found this musical toy and this is what I did with it.” The third category is for ideas both new and old for “real” songs that do not exactly fit under either title, or that could be both as in the case of several unfinished songs from years ago that were of an experimental nature that at that time were limited by the available technology, but which I now have.

I feel that trying to consolidate these songs would result in something like “Kid A/mnesiac”, with a lot of good songs interspersed with a lot of “What the crap is this?”, which is something I would like to avoid. Also, to return to my earlier CD dilemma, I have been thinking of ways to add value to my three-song set, so that I could charge more in good conscience and potentially make a profit. While I obviously have no shortage of other songs that I could potentially add, I want to preserve the integrity of the “trilogy”, because I really feel that those three songs make a complete unit by themselves. I have a few different ideas toward this end, all of which have downsides, and are generally the sorts of thing that an established artist could easily pull off, but as a first (and potentially only) effort out of the gate are probably not going to fly.

I realize that I may be far too concerned with the sanctity of “the album.” Does anyone even buy CDs anymore? I have not purchased one in years (though I have been given a couple). However, I am not exactly the best judge considering that it was a such a big moment for me last month when I actually purchased “How Far We’ve Come” from iTunes, since the last song I bought was U2’s “Vertigo” … in 2004. (I tell you, that Matchbox Twenty song has single-handedly restored my faith in popular music.)

Anyway, at the end of the day, I have to remind myself that I am not entirely sure that there is actually anyone out there who even likes my music.

*As a fairly irrelevant note, I wrote this entire post with “cd” in lowercase, which my spell check did not like. I thought that “CD” looked a bit pompous, but when I typed it into Google, the first five pages of results almost unanimously had it capitalized when referring to compact discs. So if you got nothing else from all of this,there you go.

I started this post about two weeks ago, but I got distracted by various things. Last week I was reading a webcomic (like I do), when it suddenly occurred to me that I could not remember why I ever do anything. I then dozed off for awhile. A lot of times I don’t actually remember my dream, but I wake with a bizarre sentence in my head. This time, it seemed to be a bit of narration: “I don’t go to work anymore. I sit all day in the hospital, waiting for my son to come out of the coma.” Huh. Not a single piece of that statement is accurate. Anyway.

There comes a point when a man simply gets tired of lying to everyone he knows. I wonder if there are enough people that know certain parts of me and, when taken all together, would add up to the whole, but I do not think so. Even to those closest to me, I find myself confiding incomplete truths at best.

I remember some months ago, a certain young lady shared with our church group about the “dark night of the soul,” which is, essentially, when God does not talk to you. (Christians consider this abnormal.) Another girl broke down in tears, as she was experiencing the same thing. A fellow was quick to comfort with “everybody” goes through that at some point. (It bears mentioning that I don’t think any of those three people have been back since.) We also had communion that night, and I happened to notice at least one person who (for whatever reason) passed the elements without partaking. And then of course, there was me. I could not help thinking that night, “Is there a single person in this room who actually believes all this and isn’t just going through the motions?”

On my 29th birthday, I took the last final for the last class of my undergraduate career. I made one last phone call. Then I checked clean out of reality and never looked back. For about four years I had tried to live with two mutually exclusive world-views simultaneously in my head. I needed two, because to be perfectly honest, neither one seemed to adequately explain observable reality.

I was actually contacted a couple of months ago about that discipleship opportunity that I had been wanting. I never called back. Heck, I didn’t call or email anybody back for a period of several months there. But in this particular case, I just didn’t know how to tell him that it was too late for me, that I was already half way to Nihilism.

In December, at our last meeting of the year, we discussed the “direction” of the ministry and how it was not meeting people’s needs. When asked for my opinion, I stated, “I don’t care.” And I didn’t, because I have been to about four or five “official” meetings exactly like that one, and I don’t even know how many private conversations on the same topic. I did not expect yet one more meeting to accomplish anything the others had not.

But it was far deeper than that. I didn’t care about the ministry. I didn’t care about Jesus. I didn’t care about life. A couple of months ago, a psychology student friend needed people to take practice tests. I volunteered for a test where I had to make up stories about ambiguous pictures. I had to sign a waiver that said that I would not be getting the results, but if it was determined that I pose a threat to myself or others, I could expect a call. I might have played it differently at another time, but on this particular day, I chose to be like (I assume) a detective on one of those crime dramas that I’ve never actually seen but seem to be all the rage, where I would look at the picture and have to come up with “the facts” of the situation. (I soon got bored of that and started going more abstract, but whatever.) At one point, I could not help but ask, “Why are all these pictures of sad people?” I don’t need a psychology degree to know what projection is. Regardless, when it was over, I asked if I “posed a threat.” I was told that I was not suicidal, at which point I could not help but laugh to myself, “Well that test doesn’t work at all, does it?”

But no, I’m not suicidal. Just bored. I never said that I was leaving my church group. I never said that I was leaving the church. I just stopped going. I am just not interested in hearing about Jesus anymore.

I think about God in the same way that I suppose someone would think about a father (my real father is nothing like this) who simply was not there when you were a child. Then, when you are grown, he calls out of the blue wanting to be part of your life but then disappears again for months or years before randomly calling again. I am not angry, I am just not interested. Cat’s in the Cradle and all that.

Of course, I have had this attitude before. It seems that whenever I get this way, some weird crap starts happening that I can not explain and think maybe I need to give this God thing another go. This time is no different. In fact, once I decided that I was serious this time, it seems as though God has been pulling out all the stops with these random emails and phone calls and books and funerals (and of course, my job). But I do not care. What kind of God only takes interest when I am trying to leave? That is not a Kingdom, that is prison.

Sometime after I came up with the title of this post, I thought through the implied metaphor of someone actually declaring, “I’ve had enough of you, Planet Earth! I’m taking my chances on my own!” What impudence.

So, I thought of a different picture. (This imagine might have come subconsciously from a movie, I am not quite sure.) I picture a man held captive in some way in an office building. He has decided to make a last ditch break for it by running down the hall and crashing out the window. He has to dodge people coming out of doors and there is lots of shouting and confusion and who knows how far of a fall it will be on the other side…

For I am tired of this up and down nonsense. This time, I want to keep falling until I actually LAND ON SOMETHING and then go from there. At least, that is what I told myself until I was hanging out at this homeless shelter like I do sometimes and it struck me that it could be a very long fall indeed. In fact, the only reason that I’m not homeless living the way I do is because my parents happen to have this empty house they let me use.

Regardless, I am still tired of the multiple world views, the going through the motions hoping that one day my beliefs will fall in line with my actions, the pretending to be something I am not. I too easily can flip right into “Jesus mode” and expound on some Biblical principle before catching myself and thinking, “That sounded pretty good… but you don’t happen to believe a word of it do you?” This is what I seek to leave behind.

I have a lot of pieces of things that I still need to organize into coherent posts. Until then, something different.

I have long found it humorous to say patently absurd things completely deadpan. I have often suspected that people who do not know me must think that I am either incredibly stupid or mean, depending on the comment in question. Until recently, this never bothered me.

Lately, I’ve been having reservations. Once, at work, after one of my blatantly counter-productive “suggestions”, I received a detailed explanation as to why we do not do things that way. (I do not even remember the circumstances actually, just that the guy ought to have simply said, “That would be blatantly counter-productive,” so we could all move on.) That is not so bad really. What troubles me more is when I get home from some gathering and I get a phone call from someone who wants to discuss the “hurtful things” that I said. That’s a more serious problem.

Of course, sometimes I’m not joking at all. Lately, I feel as though every time I send an email and I’m thinking about it later, I feel like I need to send another email apologizing and explaining what I really meant. I rarely actually do though.

In my last post, I mentioned looking like a fool. I used that term because it happens to be my favorite word for describing myself, but when I wrote that, I knew it was wrong. It took a couple of days to come up with the word that really says what I intended: “scoundrel.”

These are but a few of the many cases when I am reminded that I am really just an insensitive jerk. And I do not believe that realizing after the fact that I had been unkind makes things any better. Particularly since I never apologize. I think that on some level, I merely feel, “Oh well. Maybe it will work out better the next time I have friends.”

On a loosely related note, while surfing the internet today, I happened to find a website dedicated to listing particularly stupid arguments that Christians have posted in various online forums and web pages. Some quotes made me think, “This obviously wasn’t really written by a Christian, this was written by someone satirizing Christians… right? Please?” Most just make you want to put your head down and cry.

Now, I think we all know that a lot of people say a lot of preposterous things online, so maybe this is nothing to get upset over. But the thing is, I too have a website, and the idea that someone might be reading this over and then going back to a site like that and declaring, “Hey, check out what this idiot said about God!” is extremely unsettling.

The reason for the blitz of posts last week (which disappointingly only tied, rather than set, my all time record) is because I wanted to get the frivolities out of the way and move on to the serious. For I had things to say, and things to do. But there have been external factors that have lead me to question, “You’re not seriously going to do that now are you?”

“Do you ever write stories?” I was asked recently.
What do you think I’m doing here? Oh, fictional stories. No, I really don’t. I write stories with my life. At least, I write them down, if they’re interesting. Or not.

I was also asked about a particular post from long ago, by someone who wanted to hear “the rest of that story.” Whatever do you mean? There is no more to that story. Then it hit me: Bull. Shit. For while there really wasn’t any more to add about that incident, the circumstances were but a piece of a much larger framework. In fact, it may be the key piece for which a part of me had been subconsciously searching.

I had recently reread a number of older posts while searching for something in particular. It struck me that in a number of them, while I was clearly talking about one thing, I would leave a hint, perhaps even one slightly incongruous sentence, of something else entirely. To me they were as plain as day, though I could not help but wonder if it was so obvious to others, being that I have certain inside information, as it were.

So I lay pondering all these things late at night when suddenly it all snapped into place. It was like a flashback sequence at the end of an M. Night Shyamalan film where all the isolated incidences suddenly converge, with the mocking, “How did you not see?” But I did see, of course. It’s just that each point, I chose to ignore the implication and look in a different direction. I never realized that one could stand in one place and see the whole line from beginning to end. Now that is a story. As I’ve mentioned before (#3), I do love a good story.

At least, at 4:00 am, it seemed like the greatest story I’ve ever known. In the morning… less so. Could I possibly tell such a tale without making myself a total fool? And reaction to it might be… unpredictable. So, despite the flurry of inspiration, I have yet to write a single word of it. Which I realize is a lot of hype for no pay-off whatsoever.

Which returns me to my original point of what to do now; now that there are things afoot that I could not foresee and do not yet understand? I feel as though I am poised to commit a great mistake, perhaps several in a row. Is this really the time to be burning bridges and betraying friendships? Then again, when is the best time for such things?