The Man in Me

As I have celebrated four years with my amazing wife, I have been considering and mulling over in what's left of my brain, the entire institution of marriage. When I call my wife amazing, I try my hardest not to merely pay lip service to her. That's just disrespectful. But, I do mean "amazing." I have put her through the ringer, and yes, I do take a considerable amount of, rightful -- credit for her emotional devastation. She, partnered with Jesus -- takes a lot of credit for stressing me out, giving me migraines, and day by day -- growing my immature ass up.

So, the question begs to be answered, "Who gives a fuck?" You don't, probably. I know I didn't, which is precisely the reasoning behind all the consideration of this institution of marriage. I also take pause to notice that all my buddies are either divorced, separated, or seriously considering divorce. The other interesting part, and the reason I actually give a shit, is that all these dudes are professing "Christians." This is troubling because there's this thing about Jesus that in a two-handed fashion bothers me and brings me peace. It's this fact that Christ gets in the shit with you as a Christian. Once you say "Jesus, I trust you," Jesus says, "A'ight, let's do this thing." This is regardless of all your dysfunctional bullshit that keeps coming up. I, personally, have a gigantic laundry list of stupid bullshit that Jesus is still dealing with. He endlessly, tirelessly, relentlessly pursues me and gets into it with me. This is not something I have pursued. Time and time again I have shouted "Fuck you, dude," and got outta dodge. Then He shows up, tells me He knows my shit, and he's gonna keep on walking with me.

This has astronomical implications on the state of marriage. Seriously? Five years and you're out? When Margie and I started this thing, I really had no idea how this was going to play out. Mainly because, I had/have so many bat-shit-crazy issues. I was always wondering how Christ was going to redeem this mess, but he is. He's teaching me how to love my wife. I still suck at it, but he's taking me through it. If you're a christian man, your wife is probably put there by God to teach you a bunch of shit you suck at, which is probably everything.

I'm troubled by dudes who proclaim Christ and abandon their wives. My dad did that. I'm scared shitless that I'm going to do that. I need Jesus to help me stick around and be a better husband. I need so much grace, and constantly.

I'm troubled for my brothers and myself.

Boundless Grace

So I haven't written anything in awhile. I've been too busy updating everyone else's blogs. I'm not complaining. I've been blessed with more work than I can handle. I'm supporting my family by writing. I could do worse. I have a hard time with being grateful. I'm never grateful for anything. I'm learning to give credit where credit is due, and no one I know deserves any credit for anything. God has been so gracious to me, and he has proved it over and over again.

For instance, two weeks ago before my wife and I left San Francisco (yes, I moved again. What a surprise! We lived in SF, and moved PDX a few weeks ago) I got on the wrong bus out of San Francisco's Portola District, and oddly so did two policeman. I'm riding this bus into what was quite possible the worst 'hood I'd ever stepped foot in, and the bus drives to the end of this completely fucked-up neighborhood, turns off the engine and shouts "End of the line." Me and the two cops look at each other not knowing how, or why we got in this bus. I step off of the bus platform, and the two cops follow closely behind.

As I'm walking through this really, really rundown area, the thought occurs to me that this is a very, very bad situation. I see windows with bars on them, which is not an uncommon thing in San Francisco, but they are bent to hell. Bullet holes in almost every window, and shattered glass everywhere. I see kids running around with no shoes on yelling "Po Po Alert! Po Po Alert" every five seconds. I slow a bit, and I turn around and ask the cops where the nearest bus stop is. They tell me that they'll walk with me. They tell me they've shared nearly 80 bullets between the two of them in this little neighborhood alone. They also tell me that all of those bullets made their ghastly appearance in broad daylight. As I'm hanging with them we talk about where we're from. I tell them I moved to SF from Seattle. We talk about how the commonality of shitty sports teams in SF and Seattle. We talk about coffee, rain, cigarettes, microbrews and the infestation of strip clubs in SF's chinatown. They also tell me that they accidentally got on the wrong bus, and that they had no idea why they followed me out here. They both shake their heads in annoyance and disbelief. Then we part ways at the "safe" bus stop. I thank them, and the go on their merry ass-kicking, gun-slingin way.

After the cops leave, I start to shake a little bit. I become overwhelmed by this feeling of fear, gratitude and this newfound safety. It was otherworldly. It became clear in that moment that Jesus "had" me. He brought me to a place where I could have lost my life to show my the boundless length of his mercy. I could have went there alone and got served up a heavy dose of baseball bat economics, or worse, I could have been killed. These cops who work in this neighborhood reminded me over and over how "lucky" I was.

Here's the thing, I'm not lucky. I repetitively get into the shittiest situations imaginable, and God pulls me out of them to demonstrate His grace to bring me to repentance. I eventually acknowledged that from time to time, even if I was forced to acknowledge it. But this, this was Jesus in pursuit. This was God saying, "I'm going to show you how much I love you, even though you will probably tell Me to fuck-off when you go home and snap at your wife for asking a simple question." This was the Holy Spirit calling me out, "Stop your bullshit, NOW!!!"

I'm still in shock. I'm still trying to humbly just keep my middle finger in my pocket. I'm praying that all my middle finger's will snap under the weight of His boundless grace.

San Francisco

A little over two months ago as Margie and I were cleaning out the rental home we lived in to move to Olympia with my parents out of necessity because I had been laid off for the millionth time in my life from a job that I hated, I had this creepy feeling in my gut..."What if this is it?" I said to myself. "What if my life has been resigned to bouncing around from job to job, town to town and my poor undeserving wife gets to come along for the ride?" This has been a haunting idea for a long time.

About a year ago, a good friend of mine advised me to move to California. I thought, in one of my few and far between moments of pure and unblemished snobbery, told him that the idea of moving to California is cliche and generic as I facetiously asked him if he would be willing to consider my bourgeoning screenplay idea. He then replied, "No, you should seriously consider San Francisco, you cocksucker." So, I began the asinine process of consideration. I thought through the pros and cons, "Well, it's not Seattle, that's a downside...um...there's a great deal of sun but it's a lot more expensive and about three times as crowded as Seattle..." At the end of thinking this thing through, I was still living in Olympia with my parents working construction with my step-dad attempting to go into business with him so we can have one big happy mormon compound in Rainier, Wa stockpiling food storage and guns. Although this neo-depressionist/pre-apocalyptic idealism was very enticing, there was an element to it that made me lose all hope for the future. So my wife and I had a very brief conversation. I asked her what she thought about San Francisco and in not so many words she said "Sure!"

Then on a whim, I began applying for various editorial internships in the bay area. One was for a semi-traditional copy-editing internship for a local weekly. The banality of that sort of job was very enticing to me. They contacted me for a phone interview and I bombed it. The other was for an internet start-up web 2.0/new journalism company that I wasn't crazy about, they contacted me for a phone interview. I nailed it. They scheduled a second phone interview. I nailed that one as well. Then they scheduled an expense paid interview in San Francisco after which they revealed the name of the company that was funding this start-up project. Then I became very excited about this prospect, but nonetheless I was very doubtful about the likelihood of my actually having a chance at getting said position. At the very least, I looked at it as a free vacation for my wife and I. So we made arrangements to drive our car to San Francisco, stay in an affordable boutique hotel in Downtown San Francisco and hang out for a week. It was an amazing experience. Never in our 3+ years of marriage have we ever rolled into a city (Note: we've collectively lived in Virginia Beach, Norfolk, Portland, Seattle, Burlington, VT, LA, SLC & Boston) and looked at each other and said "Holy Shit!" It just clicked. We made adventures to J-town, Chinatown, The Mission, The Wharf, Balboa, Golden Gate & SoMA. This was OUR city. There was this sense of belonging. We felt like ourselves. We felt stripped of all these cultural things that were expected of us and for a few moments we felt like humans again and not like ants in an assembly line. It was a liberating feeling.

Day two of our stay in San Francisco, I went in for the on-site interview and after stressing myself to the point of nausea, they offered the internship to me. I gladly accepted and agreed to be in San Francisco by the beginning of September. In addition, I'll be starting school at the end of August to finally finish my degree and to hopefully get our life started, FINALLY.

In christian circles, they say things like "I feel like I've been called to..." or "I feel led to..." but I feel those words are thrown around too much and have subsequently lost their meaning. I don't feel a sense of call, to be honest I'm not sure what that really means. In my experience, all that a "call" has represented is a justification from the divine for people to just do what they want to do. I want to take care of my wife. I want to be in a position to start a family with my wife and I want to raise that family in a diverse, major city. I have no idea what the future holds, all I know is that on August 10th, my wife and I are moving to San Francisco.

P.S. this blog post remains vague because I am contractually obligated to do so

Veritas: Part 1

It often baffles me when someone makes such an extravagant claim as, "This is true." In Mormondom, where I spent a great deal of my youth dodging guilt trips and blonde haired/blue eyed Aryan "daughters of zion," the truth is something often defended on the personal level by stating that one knows the "truth" with "every fiber of my (their) being." Seemingly, the truth is something that, at it's very surface, seems to fully exist apart from error. It is unadulterable, perfect, flawless & pure. I'm not going to go into a linguistics lesson but the very word truth is derived from the old English/Proto-Germanic word trēowe which is a direct connotation to ones faith or religious beliefs. So the very essence of the idea of truth is inseparably interconnected with faith & religion. So with that in mind, truth being homogeneous in it's relation to faith & religion, it has created a culture of right vs. wrong and good vs. evil dynamic, or rather a John Wayne-ism.

I'd like to counter the faith-based perspective (I believe in, love & follow Jesus, at a later time we will discuss how this is possible) with a perspective from a former adjunct Rhetoric professor from UC Berkeley. His name is Daniel Coffeen where he unapologetically declares, "Everything is an argument." Bertrand Russell who falls in a similar almost nihilistic school of thought argues that everything, even something simple as a coffee table--which is the example that is used in his book "The Problem of Philosophy," is valued differently by different people with differing "perspectives." Data factors such as light, individual vision & each individuals interperation as to what a coffee table is and what it is used for. A very basic example, but Russell finds a way to build an entire book built around the analyzing of this simple object whose assumed purpose is to furnish a home. Here's the one and only thing I know to be(ironically) "true"--Don't assume anything!

Truth has always been a very bizarre thing to me, especially in the asking of something or someone's integrity, as if we could actually come to know this at all. To merely ask if something is true, is to merely ask the wrong question because what you'll get is not discovery, but you will get a blanket answer and maybe a head nod or a "yeah, dude." But if you're "honest" with yourself, you're not after a yay/nay sort of situation. What you're really after is definition. I'm a journalism student, and the main reason I love journalism is because it really deals the shit life is made of on a very fundamental level. Questions and Answers. Problematically,in some cases you ask the wrong questions and get the right answers that lead you somewhere else. Or sometimes you ask the right questions but you get the wrong answers, or maybe not exactly what you were looking for. To sum up the art of living in a sentence, "It is & it isn't." Life is Yes & No. Life is True & False. Life is ambiguous and fucked up and you can't label everything...or you can. Merely asking if something is true doesn't get down to the root of a problem or intellectual, theological, perspectival dilemma. All it seems to do is give a blanket statement and it doesn't really answer the question. What you're really asking is, "What is it?" It's usually (to apply a blanket statement of my own) about defining things.

This is a particularly epistemologically perplexing idea. Especially on a day like today, when we are essentially celebrating being "right." So what are we right about? Democracy? The right to bear arms? Capitalism? What does "right" mean? What is democracy? It is totally besides the point, but it also is the point. Are we really after truth? Or is it really that we have no tangible idea about the concepts and dogmas and realities that we've latched onto from a very early age? Is it social conditioning? The herd instinct? It's neither and it's all of them. Nothing is certain and everything is ascertained.

I would also say, be careful when you ask these questions. You might not have any idea whose core belief systems you may be in the process of shattering.

Happy Independence Day.

****I understand the paradoxical nature of this argument, even in the discipline of language. Using words such as right, wrong, true & false to make an argument about their lack of existence is dichotomous at best. But try not to interpret dichotomy as being equated with being "false" or an idea that can't be considered.****

Declare Love Not War: Part 2

Do I feel some false sense of responsibility because I gave him someone's interperetation of the bible that clashed with his own worldview? Not really. I think my old friend made a series of decisions that led him to the conclusion that God doesn't exist based on a series of circumstantial events (rejection, bad sexual experiences, isolation, depression, etc) that he had pinned on the God he served. Many would argue that he was never a Christian in the first place and that is assuming that one could actually "become" a christian at all but that's another post entirely. That's not what this is about. This is about making blanket statements about things to big to be covered with a blanket and basically calling that good. "If you DO this, then it WILL yield THIS result. Or if you DON'T do THAT then THIS is the consequence." In my life experience, it's never been as cut and dry as that. My life has been "Here is a list of hundreds of things that CAN possibly happen if you pursue This option and the same thing if you choose THIS option but there is NO way of gaging what THIS outcome will be."

Let's go back to my gay friend, I was told by a spiritual authority that if I had given him hell, fire & brimstone accompanied with the message of Grace & Forgiveness that he might not respond today to "God's call" on his life but one day he would thank me for "speaking the truth in love." He never did and he probably never will. Mainly because it's too paradoxical an ideology that eternal torment and damnation works hand and hand with grace unabounding, no matter what context it is communicated in. At the very core of my discussion with my friend, he wanted to know if God would accept him, even if he was gay and there was nothing he could do about that, and my answer to him was, "No!"

I want to make it clear that I'm not merely writing about homosexuality as a sin, nor am I making an argument for or against the "christian homosexual" (maybe I will in the near future). What I am pursuing is a discussion on how we arrive at such a mass generalization or judgement of pieces of our culture that will never experience God because "believers" have in large part excluded them not really from the community but rather from the grace that we claim to partake in. Rather we declare war on the deepest parts of humanity. Are we ok with that? I'm not sure if I am.

Declare Love Not War: Part 1

I'm keenly aware of the fact that whatever I think could very well be banal attempts at achieving any sort of clarity with the world I've been placed in. I understand that anything I say could make me sound like I'm completely full of shit and I'm becoming okay with that. Because my person is not built around the facade of being "right" and having the correct answers. Not really anymore.

In recent years, I have trusted in the idea that if someone holds the bible in their hand tells me something that sounds semi-rational then it must be from God. This has been a curious position to hold among someone who has spent the majority of their life reading the perspectives of such a diverse range of thinkers from Foucault to Berkely to Sartre to Hume to C.S. Lewis. So why would I think to make conclusions based on a very small isolated group of people that hold up the bible and shout out their interperetations as the ultimate authority of truth. It has brought me to a place of drawing very broad conclusions based on very little data. It has caused me to give very point-blank, black & white answers to very gray questions. Most importantly, it has caused me to draw lines in the sand and declare war in places where it was absolutely unnecessary and even harmful to do so.

What the hell am I talking about? Using Christ as a weopon. Taking the bible and interpereting it in order to fit your personal worldview. I am not saying that I don't do that or that it's right or wrong, because right and wrong is a lot more subjective than most people realize. I am just saying that it happens, everywhere. Some of the most popular instances of this happen to do with homosexuality. Yeah, at the surface, if you're a christian it seems to be a concrete issue, Homosexuality is unnatural and wrong, right? It distorts God's original design from the garden, right? Yeah, according to scripture it does. But then Jesus comes into human history as God and lives a sinless life, dies on the cross and rises three days later conquering satan, sin & death so that through Him ALL will be reconciled to the Father through Him. This is what we learn in sunday school. Then a good friend of yours, pulls you aside and says, "Dude, I totally love Jesus and I have confessed that He is God, but I'm gay, bro. But I'm totally taken with the Grace of Jesus and it informs all of my life but I'm attracted to men. Am I still going to hell because I'm not straight?" I asked a christian dude who I respected and asked this authority figure of my gay christian buddy was going to hell. He told me to tell my bro that even though he loves Jesus his homosexualtiy nullifies the Grace that he has submitted himself to. I went to my buddy and after discussing this crazy concept that his conversion wasn't enough, he cried and then he told me to go fuck myself. He is now a proud atheist.

Emoh

We all start off waking up somewhere, then after a period of time we do this coming to and slipping out of consciousness, experiencing our surroundings, becoming innundated with sensory projections of reality, and then we are told that this "place" is home. This is where we belong. We have potluck dinners, we play out in the woods, we build bridges and then we ultimately burn them down. Or maybe that's just me.

This place that has been created in my mind as the place where rednecks work on cars and the old folks stroll about town only to make the epic climax of their daily story to...check the mail(?) Where me and my buddies blow shit up out in the country. Where we swim up the river to this hidden 100 ft waterfall that only very few locals know about. This is the place where I discovered lust, pain, disappointment, sheer joy, complete loneliness and isolation. This place that felt so pure and so completely fucked up, I called it home.

Today, many years later, I walk around this ghost town feeling this deep sense of longing for this place. Even though I have taken one unrelentless step after the other running...no sprinting the fuck out of this place. There was no responsibility or obligation that kept me from leaving. I left and left but everyone was still here. Then I'd come back again a few years later and then someone would be gone. Then I'd come back again, then another person leaves until at last I find the person that has ALWAYS been here who I thought would just never change, has done just what I swore he wouldn't, he's peacing out. Kissing his family and loved ones goodbye to pursue his midwestern life with his bride to be. Now, I look around this town of ghosts and I know that this place does not exist. It is no longer here. I can't just ride my bike 3 miles up the road and go skinny dipping. It's gone. This place that I have created through experience is no more.

This is not so much about my good friend finally packing his shit and leaving. I don't have any fear or regret for him. I am unbelievably stoked for him to start his new life. I actually don't really care about that as much as I should but what this is all about is this theme that I struggle with, home. The good book says that I am a stranger here, that my home is not here. Yet, I have spent my entire life searching for that feeling of belonging. That old cliched generic feeling of residence.