December 7, 2010...

It was a typical night tonight; so full of the usual distractions that have become commonplace in my life. I watched a National Geographic segment on the White House chief photographer and then took in the mindless, over-dramatic world of Bones in which a CIA desk worker was murdered for uncovering a sinister plot.

It was cold outside to say the least. The weather app on my phone said it could freeze tonight and I believe it. I took some sheets and carefully covered some of the exterior flowers in hopes that their delicate bodies will last the night and then, inexplicably and without reason I began to walk.

I walked down my street, shoulders hunched against the cold and collar turned up, in an attempt to hold out against the invasion of frigid air. My Ipod played loudly in my ears as I walked without any purpose, without any real thought and then I turned to my left and saw the house lights reflecting on the water and I paused. There was something so peaceful, so tranquil that my mind took a picture and wished this moment could last and that everyone could somehow see it through my eyes.

Then I did something that I haven’t done in quite sometime; I took my eyes off earth and stared towards the stars. Somehow, by Divine decree, I had stopped in the one place on the street where the glow from the lamps did not inhibit the view of the sky. I felt a smallness that I had been missing in my egoist search for existential meaning. To have any experience of value in life, one must feel truly small and insignificant and a part of something beyond scope or measure.

I had been absent for so long I felt lost looking at familiar skies. I reached up and turned off my headphones and just breathed. I breathed the cold night air and heard the roar of the waves in the distance, and the subtle sounds of a sleeping town. The stars seemed so close, a collection of tiny lights at the doorway to an inky, endless expanse; so black that you forgot for a moment the sheer depth of space. These stars were friends once as a child when I would lay on my back on the cold ground in Lesotho and stare at constellations that to me had no name; but now they only stared blankly back at me.

It seemed that the more I stood there in the street, the more I stared into the constellations, I began to see more stars, faint at first and then gathering courage and peering out from the gloom. They felt more at ease in my presence and became more pronounced, the stars that had always been visible shone with a fiercer intensity. I was becoming close again and I stood there in the disquieting quiet and heard myself think and felt more than I had felt in months; that I was alive and eternal and fragile and strangely disconnected. The wonder of stars had faded in the glow of computer screens and TV sets and the indescribable wonder of my sight I was pawning away on 30 second media bytes and pointless games.

I turned and caught a glimpse of a star as it made its final, fiery dive into the cold Atlantic. It began to sink in that I am standing on just one tiny light in space as it spins and hurls through the cosmos in perfect precision; set in motion by the breath of Almighty God. Cold air rushed into my lungs and shot back out in silver clouds like smoke. I felt small, I felt insignificant…I felt. I breathed. I lived.

October 3, 2010...

I was struck with a singular thought this morning as I drank my coffee...that life with all of its chaos and sadness, is beautiful.

September 28, 2010...

Life on the road—coin laundries, cashiers and manufactured food. After sometime the locals recognize your face, but no one knows your name. You are another necessary inconvenience in a paycheck. You sit in your room and feel the bittersweet of memories replayed in your mind over and over like a black and white movie. The reels get worn and spaces of film go unaccounted for and the picture begins to pop and get a little grainy, but soon you find you need that hit of nostalgia—an addiction to your own memory.

You just discovered that your new hovel, in addition to the faint acridity of stale cigarettes and the pungency of cat urine, has a closet, which you mistook for an access to an adjoining room. You organize your life and tell yourself that it feels more at home now, but the truth is, you can organize a kitchen drawer or a janitor closet, but it won’t make the inside feel anymore like home.

You feel like tears, but they’ve been replaced by apathy. You check your creativity at the door as you go to fill the most productive hours of your day with mindless work, robotic and brutal. You try to pick it back up at the door when you come in with the sundown, but your body is scolding you so loudly that you can’t seem to remember where you left it and so it sits at night and collects dust next to the old box a/c until you see it the next morning, too pressed for time to use it.

The check is good though and every time you doubt yourself you remind yourself that you need the money. You trade your dreams for a transient and inconsistent currency. You become conscience and designated driver to a group of men you would probably avoid on a street corner or in the lobby of a cheap hotel, like the one you are sharing with them. You hear more variations of f*** then there are cloud shapes in a day.

You’re that guy that gets rolls of quarters. The son that rarely calls home. The boyfriend whose schedule and fatigue make him absent. That guy in the checkered shoes that comes into Panera everyday and never knows what he wants. You are a paradox.

You are the familiar stranger.

filler posts...

I am somewhat ashamed that the last post I made on what I once imagined was a 'thinking man's blog' was a consumerists advertisement...not that I am in anyway anti-capitalist, I just think it's somewhat sad.

Anyway, to the business at hand. This is a "filler post" in the sense that I am not writing anything of significance right now, but merely sending out an invitation to keep reading if I happen to still be attached to any RSS feeds or if perhaps I still warrant a small nook in your bookmarks. I am getting ready to post again.

I have been working in Massachusetts for a month now and living in a semi run down establishment under the Day's Inn banner. Room 240 and the stale smell of cigarettes have been my only respite for a few weeks in between trips to Panera across the street. There I sample the menu and write. So, not only have I eaten nearly everything on their menu, but I have also began to pen some thoughts that I plan to develop or at least spell check and post here for your thoughts and ideas. Cheers.

P.S. A short story should be in the works, that is if I ever get motivated.

gilt.com

If anyone is interested, here is a by invitation site for shopping.

Giltman

"painful, beautiful, aching madness..."

I have noticed a new trend in prayer requests. A hand goes up and information on yet another earthquake is dispensed with the tone of satisfaction that comes from being the first to proclaim ill news. I don’t know that I have ever had the privilege of knowing a more disaster-conscious group of individuals. I suppose that it stems from a quiet fear, a disquieting of soul and that nagging question that preys on us like a hound—is the end near?

I think first of all that we have a deficiency in the qualification of the terms. “Is the beginning near?” would be more accurate. We are not the reality, but the reality’s manifestation. Much the same as the Tabernacle was not a picture of a worship to come, but a system that always was and had as yet not been revealed. It is the picture Milton gave of God looking at Adam and Eve across the chasm of space and asking, “Who will redeem them?

I try to take each of these questions, these unspoken questions masked in a news bulletin with a sense of calm and lightly remark on the relative normalcy of quakes and their little known frequency. I don’t do this to give a false sense of comfort, or of time stretching infinitely towards that invisible line of the horizon; nor is it a pretense of bravado on my part. I personally feel that the end or beginning is near. I know I join centuries of Christians who say this and yet, Creation seems so restless, so full of violent wonder and trembling anticipation. Perhaps it IS a sense of false or pretentious bravado. I must confess, I do fear it, I fear it the way anyone fears the Unknown.

It is like standing at the entrance to a darkened doorway. There is a tension to that darkness that you cannot shake which is further exacerbated by a friend waiting in the shadows. You know the friend is there; you do not fear them, they are, after all, your friend. What you fear is that brief moment in Time when they leap from the shadows with a shout and all the collective tension collides in one instant of terror and then…quiet—the tension is instantly resolved. It is in every story, as in life, that the tension, much like the shape in a drop of water, keeps us in check in a sort of painful, beautiful, aching madness—longing for and fearing that last and final resolution to life’s shadows.

I am afraid I may fit into both categories of those waiting for Christ’s coming: I will be awake when he comes but fall sleep from cardiac arrest at the trumpet blast and therefore rise first after all.

idea-hating squirrels...

I know I haven't posted in awhile, but the good news is that I am rapidly breaking free from a naive assumption that is perfectly mirrored in this quote from "Finding Neverland" by Marie Ansell Barrie...or rather the script writer:

"I imagined that brilliant people disappeared to some secret place where good ideas floated around like leaves in autumn..."

If such a mythical Eden of verbiage and syntax exists then I am the poor sap who is repeatedly pelted with acorns by devious, idea-hating squirrels hidden high in the trees.

Until then, here is one more quote by that venerable Bard, a one, Edwin Arlington Robinson. Food for thought on the post-modernist's menu and perhaps I'll write more on it later:

“[the world is] a kind of spiritual kindergarten where bewildered infants are trying to spell God with the wrong blocks.”

So long. A post on the end (or the beginning) of the world coming soon.