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.

Left and Leaving: A Confession

It seems as though I'm always departing from or going to some place. Usually, it's because I have devastated the tranquility that comes with "living" somewhere through my selfish pursuits. This has, for a long time, been the pursuit of art in all it's many forms. It's not only art that I've pursued, but the idyllic posture of being involved and living in the culture of those who create. Then I got married.

In 2004, I started dating Margie. At this point in my life, I was a self proclaimed agnostic. Mainly because the God I served, did not serve me (this could be another 15 blog posts so I'll just leave it at that). We started talking on the phone, and then we never stopped. We started to weave this tapestry of ideas and detailed plans for the future. We'd live in NY. She'd be a filmmaker and I'd be a writer/musician. We both loved Jawbreaker. She turned me on to The Magnetic Fields and phone sex. The romanticism is enough to make you wanna puke. But this was a dream. I had convinced her that I was this successful person, that I wasn't. I convinced her that I was a laundry list of things, that I actually wasn't. She was taken with me. She lived in Virginia and I lived in Olympia at the time. We announced our undying love for one another and then I hopped on a greyhound and took the almost 5 day bus ride to Norfolk, VA.

I was enamored with Virginia. I thought it could be a beautiful mecca to help nurture my self-proclaimed artistic genius. Little did I know that it was a hell-hole. Or rather that I was a hell-bound asshole. She had talked me into going to Church. We found a church in Virginia Beach, VA called Crosscurrent and then began the tumultuous beginnings to what would amount to us proclaiming faith in Jesus. We lived through my many a jobless state, being carjacked and kidnapped at gun point, and then on June 9th, 2006 in the classic Zeke & Margie impromptu fashion, with my friend Nik Safos as a witness, we went to the Princess Anne county Courthouse and we got married in front of Nik and a justice of the peace. Six months later, we packed our bags and left for the west coast.

After our 4 day drive we arrived in Portland. I think Margie immediately realized how much she would hate it, and how hard I would try to be cool and make it work. I worked a plethora of jobs once again, with vague promises of stability that I could never capitalize on. I pressed forward, and she grew more and more frustrated. A year later, it all came to a financial breaking point and I accepted a job in Seattle. After all that was where I always wanted end up anyway. From the day I met my wife, all I could ever talk about was Seattle. So we left Portland and moved to Seattle.

Upon our arrival in Seattle, Margie was completely taken with the city, as was I. I was so happy to be in the most beautiful city I have EVER been. We continued to struggle. I went from job to job. Margie's frustration continued to escalate. I still made excuses. "Babe, I just haven't been given the right opportunity" or "I'm the victim here." She believed it for awhile, until she noticed the one constant throughout all of our turmoil: Me. She came to a tipping point. I heard things like "you're a fucking coward" and "you are ruining our lives." All I could do is nod in agreement. What could I do to convince her otherwise that I am a responsible man? Nothing. Then she dropped the bombshell on me. She says, "God told me to marry you and to stay by you no matter what."

For those of you who are not familiar with my wife and for those of you who do know her, it will come as no surprise that she is an honest, forthright, generous and unconditionally loving woman. For those of you who know me or don't know me, I am a miserable, sarcastic, condescending, prick. That's not self deprecation, that's just an honest look at who I am. What my wife showed me in that instant where she reminded me of all the shit I inevitably put her through, is the fact that through her, God has shown me Grace unmeasurable. Margie, should have left a long time ago. She had many opportunities, many a betrayal and many a sin committed against her.

Closing in on our third year of marriage I thank Jesus for her. I thank Jesus for the Grace He has given me in a Godly wife who loves and pursues me. I thank Jesus that He is making me into a man that loves, pursues & leads my wife who has demonstrated the Gospel to me.

Romans 5: 16-17

16And the free gift is not like the result of that one man’s sin. For(B) the judgment following one trespass brought condemnation, but the free gift following many trespasses brought(C) justification. 17For if, because of one man’s trespass, death reigned through that one man, much more will those who receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness(D) reign in life through the one man Jesus Christ7