A Fish Hook Through the Nose

2006-09-19T15:01:00.000-05:00

I discovered while cleaning out the trunk of my car today a whole yellow pad filled with what must have been the beginning of an epic poem. I stood in my apartment complex's parking lot and read through it. It spoke of a tree which begins to grow in a town, steeling away the happiness and vigor of the citizens. I am not going to assult you with my poetry, only I want to make a simple observation about a shift in my focus.

In the old days, so many years ago that they have almost danced out of my ability to count them with the fingers of one hand, I used to consider myself quite a prolific poet. I am not now discounting any of those feelings or belittling the poetic inclination. However, I used to complain (or rather, I would marvel) that though I could at moment's notice fashion up bleak scenes of death, winter and starless nights, I could not even in my best attempts form any positive poetry. I became content with my poems pointing out the bleakness of a life without God.

I could conjure up emotional numbness, but not life. Death is easy to portray, life is hard. Dull eyes can be painted with bleak words, but lively eyes, the sort that sing their own song, these are almost impossible. Any attempt at description that comes close lies open to ridicule, but to capture lifelessness with lifeless words is easy.

A group of villains might easily create a picture-perfect scene of desctruction using any number of methods. Anyone can, with enough explosives and buildings, create a set of destruction rivalling Ground Zero in its perfection. It is not hard to destroy buildings.

To create, that is the real challenge. Show me a poem that pulls down our hopes and I will show you the work of anyone with a good command of the language. Show me a poem that builds something real, no matter how imperfect, and we have begun to address the problem of what poetry ought to do.

America's Going Down the Drain

2006-09-06T14:55:00.000-05:00

Sometimes you step outside and the feel of the air makes your whole body shiver in delight. At such times, it's very hard to think about wars and persecution. We're here in a world filled with earthquakes and murders, and in the midst of all this a gentle spring day comes so that when you walk through the grass, the dew clings to your feet.

I used to sit in the back of many different churches and listen to my dad give a talk about the end of our society. The talk included many quotes from the seers of the age about how our values were draining away and the manner in which America would fall. Grim frustration would descend and I could do no better than to push it far from my mind.

Today I think these predictions still stand. I do not expect the world to suddenly improve (until the return of Christ); still we descend toward destruction. And yet, these fall days still come, tiptoeing through the turmoil. Each one is a reminder that we may not have a perfect society, but we still have a perfect God.

It washes memories from the sidewalk

2006-08-25T22:44:00.000-05:00

I'm sitting in a five dollar chair right now which my parents bought for me at Home Depot before I went to college. The drain pipe is letting down a gentle stream of roof water, and the cars on Massachusetts Street are making that classic noise of wet tires across asphalt. I am outside because of a particularly bad case of writers block.

You see, I have been on this computer of mine since about five o'clock, crafting and punching away at the rough draft of an opinion column that was due yesterday. I am nervous because it will be in the school newspaper. I should not be nervous though, chances are that more people will read this post than will ever make it all the way through my article. I'm just being so darn perfect, so exacting of each word that I cannot seem to be happy with a single turn of phrase without finding some tragic flaw within. For instance, had I just written that sentence, I would have moaned about my lack of ability to come up with anything better to describe a sentence than "turn of phrase."

There you have it, I am not a very free writer. I feel like you do when you go to a party at which you know no one, but everyone knows who you are. It's like meeting the parents for the first time. Every little thing you say, you evaluate for its general effect and potency. I'm tired of being this way, but I can't feel that I'll ever improve without some sort of writer's wd-40.

Among the Petunias

2006-08-23T08:30:00.000-05:00

I opened my eyes this morning to the roar of an industrial lawn mower, and found my face a few inches away from a marvelous bed of white Penunias before Wescoe Hall. I'm not sure that I was ever really asleep, but the mower's call and the blanketing sky filled me with that sense you get when much bigger things than you are rollicking through the world. I had just finished a breakfast meeting with Henry before his eight o'clock class and nearly succumbed to the whispers of sleep. The trees swayed overhead and occupied a good portion of the sky. I could see almost nothing of the campus buildings which sat nearby; in fact, in my panorama I noticed only the moving leaves and a cloudless radiance.

It occurs to me that you don't really notice trees unless a) you are in a forest, or b) you stop what you are doing during the course of a day and allow your eyes to wander upwards.

We are all very adept these days at picking out buildings from a map, or pointing them out on far away hills, but do we ever notice the trees above the buildings, ever-rustling, living beings, whispering of God? Perhaps life's course runs not too far from this. If we look straight ahead, we see only trunks of bark shooting up all about us. When God seems far off or non-existent, maybe our problem is not that He has vanished, but rather that we are still looking at eye-level.

The Temptation for Griping is Upon Us!

2006-08-18T23:24:00.000-05:00

I was at South Park in Lawrence a few nights ago and my friends Dave and Luke began chasing a bunny rabbit (not out of malice, I assure you). Their large bodies, hurtling forward, came nowhere close to capturing the pure changes in direction which the rabbit would make each second. It was like watching a freight train track down a Hollywood stunt car. I have had many varied and extremely exciting events occur since my last post. Unfortunately, like the rabbit, they have flitted from my mind.

Therefore, lacking a sweet experience, I find a grim character hooded in the back of my mind. He is always urging me to complain about this very blessed life that God has given me. And you know what? Most of the time I give in to him! I know, it's ridiculous, but if you had listened to me these past weeks, you might have thought that I was the most unfortunate soul ever to have crossed the weary paths of this planet. Well, just so you know, I'm not. I'm really quite a blessed man. God has blessed me with the greatest friends that a man could ask for, no, greater than anyone would think to want.

But what have I done about it? Have I thanked Him? A little bit, but not nearly enough. When was the last time I stopped in the rain to consider its wistful course through the lights above? Last night, actually; but other than that, few and far too between. I guess I'm confused by how blessed I am and how little I appreciate it. For what that's worth.

On the Dangers of Working for a Less-Than-Well-Liked Company

2006-06-27T10:22:00.000-05:00

Many children grow up with nightmarish fantasies of men with red eyes waiting for them behind street corners and smoking unfiltered cigarettes beneath their bedroom windows. I was no different myself until a few days ago when that vision of a man with red eyes suddenly changed into a woman with a pair of scissors.

It all began with a rather simple trip to my local haircutting joint. We observed all the usual formalities:

Your name?

S-c-h-n-e-i-d-e-r

Sam?

Yes.

We'll be with you in a moment.

And they were. I sat down in the chair wrapped in that shiny black cape that hair places make you wear backwards. We began searching for a subject of conversation to occupy the course of the procedure.

To my old age, I will advise my sons and everyone I meet to avoid the follies of my youth. One such piece of advice. When you get your hair cut, talk about puppies, about fields of daisies, about jolly old men and laughing children. Do not under any circumstances mention your place of work. I was unaware of this and like a blind sheep, trotted carelessly to the sheering.

In the same way that a protesting sheep makes many cries, yet no one pays any attention, I have foregone inserting my own participation in the following dialogue to keep from boring you.

She: What are your plans for today?

Me:

She: Oh, where do you work?

Me:

(I should insert that at this point in the conversation, her scissors stopped clipping and a lock of my hair fell silently to the floor.)

She: I'm never shopping there again, your manager, [name removed by Soviet censors] is a real [expletive removed by Karl].

Me:

She: If he ever came in here, I would give him such a bad haircut that we'd have to give it to him for free.

Me:

She: Yeah, I could write the letters [again the black marker squeegees through the next line] across the back of his head.

Me:

(I should note the speed with which her shears were now scything my scalp.)

She: [A long story that could be interpreted as libel or something if it were recounted, so Ivan's pen has snuffed it out] If he ever showed up on my doorstep to apologize now, it would be too late. I'd probably hurt him. I'm not like that though, but I probably would. And do you know what he did when I asked for an apology? He gave me twenty percent off coupons. Twenty percent off! I told him they were useless because we were never going to be shopping there again.

(She held up a mirror.)

She: How's it look?

Me:

She: You sure we shouldn't take any more off the top?

Me:

She: Okay, so that's a good length?

Me:

She: Really? All right, well, thanks for coming by.

And I trotted through the door in search of a baseball cap.

A Short Post, aimed mostly at easing me back into the whole blogging thing....

2006-06-26T18:53:00.000-05:00

I bought a watermelon today. I held it close to me like a newborn and rapped it gently with my knuckle. It sang.

Now I am comfortably full, resting with a cup of coffee.

Clothed Descending a Staircase

2006-05-15T09:56:00.000-05:00

I handed the test to my professor who was reclining on a couch with a stack of papers in her hands. She smiled at me, nodded that polite nod that only a professor can manage, and said, "Thanks Sam." The air outside was much cooler than I expected, and it washed away the grimy hour and half of scribbling and slanted lettering. I sat down on the stairs that descended toward campus utterly baffled at how God had steered me through the test.

On down the hill, the red roofs of KU glittered in the sunlight, equal this morning to the domes and steeples of Rome. I could hear the buses, the birds and, even the thousand feet treading paths across campus. The world brightened like a computer moniter when you turn the contrast knob. I stuffed my sweatshirt into my pack and strode down toward it all.

Stop Day Glories

2006-05-12T15:34:00.000-05:00

I woke up this morning and wallowed about in bed until I was able to sort out the direction to the door. The oatmeal I ate was not sweet and overcooked, but I paid a dollar for the canister and there was just no way I was going to waste it. Looking in the mirrors at the rec center, I could only see a few other souls, quietly pulling and hefting weights above their heads and across their bodies. I huddled myself against the May 12th cold and plunged on toward the library where I punched away keys toward my final Psychology paper until the sudden need for the bathroom caused me to abandon the whole project. I could keep adding sentences to this paragraph, but they would only swing to and fro as I tried to get a handle on the immense freedom of not worrying about classes!

An Afternoon Adventure in Watson Library

2006-05-11T14:15:00.000-05:00

I was sitting in one of the plush leather chairs in Watson Library this afteroon. I have to extend a warm thank you to whichever architect planned the layout of the foundation to the course of a May afternoon sun that perches lightly upon the picture windows. The whole place radiates the soothing voice of sleep, a voice I have been rejecting out of hand for the past week. I turned the pages in the book with a the same fever as a sick man, but I did not feel sick, only weary, dragged upon by unknown fingers upon my eyelids. . . .

I have one more walk to one more class, and then only finals!

Spondee City

2006-05-09T18:29:00.000-05:00

The Weeds grow at a furious rate outside my window. The blazing spring rains and pouring out of the sun have created a mini-jungle that reaches down a small hill to my neighbor's back privacy fence. Vines crawl up and over its lip like hair on a hippie. The branches, now full with leaves, ease up and down. I remember summers of oh so long ago when such sights meant also the smell of barbeque and the crack of baseball bats. Now they have changed, I sit upon my bed and ponder what sort of scansion Homer used in the Odyssey. Why so many spondees? Is he trying to emphasize something?

At this time of year, school breaks along two weeks, finals week and final papers week. I am immersed in word processors and am beginning to wonder how long it will be before a frisbee once again touches my hand. Abe and I played last Sunday and I got out of breath and grew dizzy. At the time I thought it was due to the massive influx of food from dinner, but now I have my doubts. Perhaps I had become giddy at the prospect of doing once again a child's activity.

The Weeks of Lighted Windows in Languishing Nights

2006-05-08T18:37:00.000-05:00

Finals is upon us again, bringing the smells of last night's coffee filters and tomorrow's unwashed bodies. I catch my face in the mirror, lined with patchy stubble and red-tinted eyes. Right now, I can't wait to make the hallowed HyVee trip for a bag of expensive apples and a week's supply of cauliflower. The distinctive crunches which accompany the aforesaid fruits run deep into every study session. The hours wither beneath the rising sun and my mind races to conclusions, both of paragraphs and of my own inevitable combustion. Yet, I wouldn't trade such an experience for all the gold in Babylon (though I might possibly trade my Political Philosophy paper).

Midnight at Steak 'n Shake

2006-05-05T09:03:00.000-05:00

I grew very nostalgic last night at the thought of the many shining faces leaving for the summer. My old business partner was dousing another of our friends with pepper and I was learning the sign language alphabet from across the room. We sang the Lion King theme song and talked about the role of Creatine in ATP production. The waitress was of the sour sort. She spoke in a dry voice that made me laugh as she ventured the statement, "I'm so sorry about the wait, your food will be out shortly." But we loved her anyway because she was among us and one of us. And in two weeks, all this will vanish into the air and not descend again until the August heat spells.

Rain Through the Open Window

2006-04-30T01:15:00.000-05:00

I am listening to the rain make its random scatter of noise from outside my window. I stood out in this same rain tonight and watched it fall past the street lamp, and I felt all the damp feelings of the past week rush through me.

I have experienced lately what you might call a 'lack of purpose.' The classes have woven in and out of a schedule that sends me quite often to work on what I feel should be my free time. But this morning I asked off from work and sat in the clean light of the second floor gallery at Signs of Life Coffeeshop. We talked about economics, about communism and about my favorite guy, Whitaker Chambers. Then Mike and Liz (if you don't know them, read their blogs from my links page) came to Lawrence and we drank rather expensive drinks and talked of life and our beliefs.

This doesn't sound anything the way I wish it did, but God blessed this day. I feel like I better write it down or else I might forget.

Have I become a man?

2006-04-28T23:35:00.000-05:00

Sitting here on my couch with a laptop before me, I marvel at how much fun it is to watch the NBA Playoffs. For that past six or seven years, I have mostly neglected sports, but suddenly the fever has possessed me again, like it did when I was a little kid with my baseball cards spread across the floor.

Another observation: last night I was forced into watching The Notebook. Everyone (at least the girls) told me that I was going to bawl. I was kindof afraid that they were going to be right, but I didn't cry, I didn't even choke up. In fact, although it was an okay movie, I was largely unmoved. Please don't anyone feel like I'm attacking the movie, it was fine. I just am overjoyed to find myself proved a man.

A Post a Month

2006-04-21T13:02:00.000-05:00

It looks like a month has passed since the last time I fingered the keys and left a few paragraphs strewn across the internet. I'd like to create a few images to show what has happened in the past month.

The first image begins very near the quiet section of Anshutz Library. I am at a long table with books spread about me like maps before a sea captain. I have a banana peal laid off to my left side and I am thumbing through a blue bound book, occasionally turning to a paper and scribbling tiny notes upon it. Someone calls from a few feet away and I look up. If you know me well, you can see the embarrassment on my face about the banana peel.

The second image finds me on the side a hill amidst a crowd of perhaps thirty people, sheeted in long johns and staring at the side of a white house on which a projector shines a broad rectangle of the recently released King Kong. The air is cold, but we eat popsicles and discolor the skin around our lips.

I'll get more into this change of thinking later, but I've got to attend a few more weeks of school.

What's up with Spring Snows?

2006-03-21T06:50:00.000-06:00

I am in a class at school right now in which we discuss many current-day issues, issues which attack our planet at every moment, such as global warming. Now, back in that warm January of ours, I remember my professor in his measured voice, dragged out across our table like the wounded leg of a Saharan soldier: "People used to make fun of global warming, but now it is fact, just go outside and you can't deny it."

And who could?

I sat there stunned, helpless and feeling generally beaten by the record warmth of this blasted January. Every day I would rise, I would feel guilty, guilty that I was enjoying a warm breeze against my cheeks when even now the polar ice caps were shattering into pieces and driting toward New York where millions of people would die from the rise in sea level.

Then the weather changed. Now I am sitting on my parents' couch awaiting a verdict about whether we can leave for a three day vacation or not. The highway is closed because of snow. The highway is closed because of snow and it is March 21. The cold has closed the highway, but anyone who looks outside can't help but shake their heads and mutter, "Blast this global warming."

I have a new opinion. Global Warming is only one more way for us to feel guilty about being alive. What can take from me the joy of opening the front door to lilacs and the sound of bees buzzing through them? The future of humanity, apparently.

The Applications of Nineteenth Century Poetry

2006-02-24T02:56:00.000-06:00

I have always taken pleasure in the fact that I have fun doing things that other people find distasteful. For instance, I enjoy meaningless computer tasks and don't mind volunteering to sweep the crannies of the checkout lanes at work.

However, a few days ago, quite a strange incident occurred, one which has burned itself among my mundane memories forever.

I came home to find a yellow sheet of paper taped to the door of the utilities closet. On it, my roommate Brandon had parodied (quite nicely I might add) a few lines from the Raven,

A knocking scratching at my door.
Quoth the Rodent, "Nevermore!"

And we went to bed, wondering what strange creature was locked within the bowels of the duct work. In the morning, the furnace clicked on and there came a tremendous scratching at the door. Keaton and I looked at each other with the quizzical faces that mean so much to men, but women probably do not understand. They say that men cannot communicate without words, but sometimes we do, and in this moment we did.

I opened the door, snatching it backward as though a savage tiger were about to leap out with claws extended.

There, mired in the dust, stood a black bird with a cocked open yellow beak. He did not say, "Nevermore," but he did fly up past me with wings beating the air like a child first learning to swim. He flew toward Keaton who had opened the door, but somewhere in his animal mind, the images failed to connect where they should have and he flew straight into the window and made a terrific clattering of the blinds.

We spent the next three minutes (and three drawn out minutes they were) trying to shoo him through the open door to freedom, but from one window to the other he kept flying, smashing the blinds and falling behind them so that we had to yank them up to free him yet again.

Finally, through some miracle, he found the vast cavity of the open door and made his escape, no longer grossly out of place.

Well, I wonder if we're like that bird sometimes. We've got somewhere in life that we ought to be heading for, but instead we fly from window to window, hoping that glass will lose, just for a moment, that very quality of hardness which makes it glass.

Headdresses in the Wind

2006-02-16T17:37:00.000-06:00

You can tell that the cold has settled into campus when all the figures duck their heads like aged seers and hide their faces from each other as they pass. The gray sky mirrors itself onto the grass, the buildings, and the trees. Space grows infinite in the cold, you do not look, for your eyes water; you do not shout, for no one would hear. I was in just such a condition as this when I noticed the girl in the purple head covering.

I was only aware at first of the presence of the wind. It burned in my ears and reached across my skin with silken chill. Then a woman passed by me, she too had her head bent forward and a guarded pace to her walk. As she pulled ahead, I noticed a little girl by her side. First I only saw the vibrant purple of the shawl that covered her head, then she turned it to look back at her mother and I saw a tiny face, set behind glasses, and a smile pulled tight to her cheeks.

They were striding very quickly and the girl began to skip to keep up with her mother. There in the wind, with my whole face numbed, I watched her, a bounding form in a slow world.

Now I'm Just Stealing From Myself

2006-01-25T22:02:00.000-06:00

I put this statement up on a class discussion board for my American Lit II class. Partly because I am not feeling too original tonight and partly because I think it captures my present frame of mind quite well, I'm including it here.

Two cats have been wandering outside my apartment for the past few days. One of them has long hair, especially around its face and its forelegs. The other walks beside it and slightly behind. It has short hair and frame that suggests it was built out of wire for some junior high science fair project. I watch them through the venetian blinds and I wonder whether or not I should put out a bowl of milk in the mornings.

This dilemma does a fairly decent job of describing me. Should I fulfill my human responsibility of providing for these cats, or would I feel too guilty for stealing my roommate's milk, since mine has run out?

Other than that, I am a sophomore in the English program. I like to read business books. I used to want to go to grad school in English, but now I just want to get married, have ten children and read "Green Eggs and Ham" to them every night.

The Rhino Principle

2006-01-19T19:09:00.000-06:00

I encourage you to print from your computer a photo such as the one below and staple it to your wall, above the phone. I just read an article by Paul Johnson titled the same as my post.

Here's how he puts it:

Few people think of learning from a rhino. But I have. And when I hear of an author who cannot finish or get started on a book, I send him (or her) a rhino card. I paint a watercolor of a rhinoceros on the front of a postcard -- something I do well, as I've practiced it a great many times. And in the space next to the address I write: "Stop fussing about that book. Just charge it. Keep on charging it until it is finished. That's what the rhino does. Put this card over your desk and remember the Rhino Principle."

Think of the greatest individuals in our memory of history -- Abraham Lincoln, Ronald Reagan, Winston Churchill. Oddly, we don't remember them for their great variety of accomplishments, not for how many languages they knew or how widely they won their electoral colleges (ignore Churchill on this). We know them because they pursued one goal unflinchingly. Lincoln tried to hold the Union together, Reagan opposed the Soviets, and Churchill wouldn't give up to Hitler.

What one thing casts a pale shadow on all your other pursuits? Have you found it yet?

I don't suppose I have found mine, at least, not exactly. But I feel about it the same as I felt playing blind man's bluff as kid. I can hear the shouts of "warm, warmer, warmest . . ."

So staple this picture to the wall above your telephone and the next time I call you and ask you to a game of Hickle Pickle (inventor: Dave Schutter), or maybe a cup of tea on Mass Street, if my suggestion lies outside the path of your charge, feel free to turn me down. Be a rhino.

**If you have read Good to Great, you will recognize the similarity between the "Hedgehog Concept" and the "Rhino Principle," perhaps they are the same.

MountyWear

2006-01-14T17:00:00.000-06:00

The beginnings of a sickness have been creeping over my body for the past two days. This afternoon, I could feel the cold tendrils of sweat on my palms and I kept rubbing them off because I sure didn't want anybody to think I was embarrassed about the KU/K-State game. So, I have decided to retreat from the physical realms for awhile (basketball and vigorous athletics in general) in favor of some feinting and dodging of the mind. To this moment I have found few better ways to exercise than with a vigorous blog post.

So we come to the title of today's post. I could set up the concept of MountyWear quite extensively, but I would rather move on to my inquiries. In one sentence: a team of people, myself included, have thrown our minds together on the prospect of starting a clothing company based on comfortable, stylish t-shirts. We had a meeting the other afternoon and began to explore possibilities. I came away with excitement writhing around in my gut and I began to research the steps. Here, I began to meet some problems.

We would like to market MountyWear based on the idea of the ideal man. Picture a guy wearing a fitted T, and extending his arm toward a descending falcon. We have other ideas, centered around this concept, and indirectly attached to the idea of manly perfection that a Mountie already carries. I like the idea, in fact, I actually think we might have something people would buy, but as I said, we have some problems.

You see, everyone seems to want a piece of the clothing and fashion market. I couldn't believe how many people had posted on message boards coming from the same level of development as MountyWear. They all have burning desires to produce these clothes, and some of them even have funding to begin.

Now, I remember watching a video clip of an interview with that famous Israeli general, Moshe Dian. He wore an eye patch that reminded me of a pirate and he spoke from a face that was smoothed by years of desert sand. Dian said that to win victory, you have to find a special way to be different than your opponent. In his battles with the Arabs, he always sought some special advantage for his side.

My question is, what else needs to enter the MountyWear concept to make it take off? So far, we have some good ideas, burning passion, and a lot of motivation. So does everyone else. How to we find our special way to be different? I'd sure appreciate any suggestions.

Level 5 Power-up

2006-01-10T12:07:00.000-06:00

As part of a life change movement over the past two weeks (and because my mom successfully did the same thing), I have begun to give up coffee in favor of tea. I do not mean to say by this that my obsessive habits in the area of hot drinks have ceased, I certainly drink more tea than I ever did coffee. One thing has changed since I switched over to Orange Pekoe, my stomach doesn't ache beginning at about nine o'clock at night. In fact, the only residue left over from tea is a tinge of minty sensation in the back of my tongue.

I say this is part of a life change movement because I have been trying to convert the rest of my life over to a tea drinker's mentality since I read Jim Collins's Good to Great. Collins says the great leaders from the great companies had a different leadership style than the ones I'd always imagined. I'd thought of leaders as Alexander the Great's grandchildren, men who gave two rousing speeches in the morning and by evening had merged seven billion dollars worth of stock into their personal fortune. In short, I had assumed that great leaders had the coffee-drinker mentality.

Rather, the opposite comes out of history. Great leaders do not rouse by speeches so much as they rouse by their own actions, by their quiet determination, and their lack of desire for personal fame. Think of Abraham Lincoln and of his quiet demeanor in the taut workings of Washington. Picture his long frame on its daily trip to the post office to see what news the war fronts carried. No one knew at the time that this man with a hand on his hat in the winter wind would eventually be known as America's greatest president.

This type of leader, Collins calls the "Level 5" leader. I imagine most level 5's have a tea-drinker mentality. While I'm sure that I don't yet have that mentality, I am sure that I have the tea, so excuse me as a head to the kitchen to steep another bag.

Zen and the Art of Backing up a Semi Truck

2006-01-08T20:53:00.000-06:00

I watched a semi truck get stuck in our apartment col-de-sac tonight. Through my window, I could see the flashing yellow lights and the orange blips that outlined the frame. It would pull forward, then I could hear the warning beep as it backed up, then, just as certainly, again it would move forward. I watched in fascination for perhaps ten minutes as the ritual continued, each motion gaining perhaps ten inches of turning radius.

I share that image, because I have felt about the same with my blog the past weeks. I want to write, only, I haven't felt life in the same way as I did when I couldn't wait to rush home and dash out the latest experience. Each post is a tiresome creak of the wheels forward and back, but I'm not sure I can ever get out of this col-de-sac of uninteresting subjects.

I can't write about the same things, because I think my life goals have changed, or at least they have twisted, since last semester. I keep trying to describe them in speech, and yet I always end up saying, "Well, I can't explain it, but you know what I mean." But no, who really does know what I mean? So I think I am going to twist my blog a little bit. I want to give a few stabs at business, corporations and the human spirit.

I know very little, almost nothing, about this subject, so I expect to fail, but if I don't try, I will have nothing else to blog about, and that frightens me.

Henry Fonda

2005-12-25T23:35:00.000-06:00

I have to ask as I sit here at the dining room table, listening intently to the droll of Henry Fonda from the living room. What makes him such a reassuring person? Here he is starring as some Russian in War and Peace and I can't pull my ears away. Maybe some people out there naturally possess some sort of persona that makes them naturally acceptable and interesting to other people. I wonder, can you acquire this persona by hard work and determination? Or, does it have to do with the shape of your nasal cavaties and the path that your arms swing at your sides?

Please don't read this if you have any intention of being interested.

2005-12-22T23:39:00.000-06:00

I haven't posted for a few days and a vast convergence of unexpressed thoughts has begun to well up within my fingers. I have to ask a question about life, but must ask it without drawing to myself the wonderful comforts of life experience. So, from this point I have to provide a caution: I plan to spend the next few paragraphs writhing in this sea of philosophy like some giant fish pulled ever in by an invisible line. I have little experience in philosophy, in fact, only enough to know that if one intends to write philosophy, one should say exactly what I have just said about having little experience. Yet take me at my word and trust that I will attempt to bring in live examples whenever possible.

I will begin with my question, at least then we will have a point to launch our inquiry. At what point can a man say to himself, "I don't have every nugget of information available, but I do have enough to make my decision"? In his book Good to Great, Jim Collins says that one time his wife said to him at the breakfast table, "You know, I think I could win the Ironman Triathalon eventually." She went back to her muffins and a few years later, after having dropped grad school for training, she crossed the finish line first.

With a quick apology, allow me to step back a second and try to reassert my line of thought. I suppose we all feel at some times that life is like a chain of dominoes, with each event endlessly crashing upon the next to eternity. And still we know somehow that we have only to sidestep that domino behind us and push against another to begin a whole new train. Yet, as we contemplate this decision, we can hear the great crash behind us, see the great bulk descending, and we can see no reason why beginning another chain would improve events any more than remaining in our present course.

When do I know to sidestep the domino that so suddenly falls upon me? If I do, on what do I push instead, for the dominoes must always fall.

One word from Greek has continually befuddled me in translating. In the classical Greek, we came across the word 'pistis' and called it 'knowledge.' Epistemology, right? Then in the New Testament, I must translate the same word as 'faith.' Is faith a kind of knowledge? Or, and please point this out to me if you know, have I utterly confused my Greek?

So I seek, and have not found in this post, the answer to my question: when do I have enough evidence that points me toward action? When do I possess enough information to step out of the domino chain and begin a new one?

On Divine Providence

2005-12-13T16:21:00.000-06:00

I used to connect the words Divine Providence with a book the size of a stereo and labeled with some word combination such as Systematic Theology. Either that, or it might stoop into the real realms of life when a missionary support check comes through in the perfect time. I wouldn't have even been too surprised to find such words in my old copy of Robinson Crusoe. What did surprise me this week was my sudden urge to apply these words to a couple finals I recently took.

Let me drop back in the semester to lay down a few planks of my current position. Around about midterms, I realized that I had two classes which seemed bound to strangle the light from my eyes. The first, Ancient Greek, consisted of my nightly sessions of attemtped studying and then repeated banging of my head against the wall. Even now, I can run my fingers in the old indentation. The second, a survey of Shakespeare, has instilled beneath my eyes forever the signs of sleepless nights and 16th century speech.

A few weeks ago, I began to hum to myself on those late evenings, "You should be studying for Greek and Shakespeare." I kept this up quite dutifully, even adding in variations of the original tune. Unfortunately, I never did actually begin to study until I was several breaths into the weekend. As life tends toward stress, these two finals landed themselves on Monday with Shakespeare and Tuesday with Greek.

Sunday morning I went to church and returned to a bowl of chicken noodle soup. I listened to a message from my mother and was reminded that is was my birthday. It began with the traditional happy birthday to you, but switched inexplicably to an old song we used to sing together when I was a kid:

Children dying, people crying,
why'd you have to go and have a
happy birthday, happy birthday.

Those words couldn't have nailed my apprehensions better. The fidgeting began at about four o'clock. I went to a review for a History final later in the week and then spent an hour in the library with an old laptop, crawling across the internet for obscure historical figures. Strange as this sounds, I didn't begin to study until eight o'clock that evening.

The sheer absurdity of the situation welled over me. I tried to absorb the cast lists and minor characters from 3 Henry VI and 1 Henry IV, but the names began to swim about on the page and rearrange themselves into nonsense; I felt like Dylan Thomas unable to rhyme. I went to sleep with the sound of old Queen Margaret in my ears, "Earth gapes, hell burns, fiends roar, saints pray."

I woke up that morning, washed the sleepy seeds from my eyes, and found a few friends in the library for a few (and almost my only) hours of studying. The Greek language kept resurfacing behind Shakespeare's words, but I just shoved it away into another compartment in my mind. When we sat down for the test, I laid the sheets on my desk without looking at them and began to pray as a man might who has just received his last meal before the electric chair. Then I looked down and began to write.

If I could keep this all in a narrative description, I would; however, I can't describe what happened. It was as though the test asked only about those areas of knowledge that I possessed. The vast sea of possible test questions raged about me, but I found myself taking something quite doable. Ancient Greek happened the same way the next day, though I was even less prepared for it. I can't fit into words the great curiosity one feels when life's events turn in such an unexpected direction that one can only gasp out thanks to heaven. I guess I too must simply label it Divine Providence.

Laughing at the Snow

2005-12-09T11:36:00.000-06:00

I dialed in the numbers on my cell phone this morning while I stared out the window at the seven inches of snow layered on the ground. The sun shone off it in a white sheen that lit the whole surface like a serving of mashed potatoes. I would have liked a warm cup of coffee between my palms. The phone rang somewhere off in Lawrence and my breath caught in my throat just a bit. I counted the rings in my subconscious, willing the computer answering machine to pick up and inform me of that, "We're sorry, but we're not here right now. Please leave a message after the tone."

The ringer stopped and after a second, a real voice sounded through. "Hello?"

I stared aimlessly at the snow and tried to form some logical sentence in my head. How does one explain a week's worth of planning buried by seven inches of frozen moisture.

"Hi," I said, "this is Sam Schneider with the Royal Canadian Mounted Leaf Service."

I was planning to say more, to apologize for our inability to complete their lawn on schedule, to explain also about the missing fan system for our leaf blower, still on back order; but, after those words the voice on the other end vanished and I could only hear laughter. Then I began to chuckle, something deep from inside my chest. I could feel those old, bubbling worries pop inside of me, and release a different kind of laughter. We laughed in spite of the snow and because of the snow. When finally we stopped, we exchanged a few sentences of understanding and ended the call.

I must say, all these problems in life are often nothing more than gold dust blowing on a desert wind. I encourage you to watch that classic film The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, then throw your head back and laugh a cracked and jolly laugh.

Flowery Language

2005-12-02T20:35:00.000-06:00

I can't begin to think of a new topic for tonight. I want to say something fresh, something that perhaps, if you have already heard before, you haven't heard it for quite some time. So, pulling from a magician's hat, I will furnish you not with a lanky rabbit, but with an object I haven't seen for some time: a flower.

Flowers may be on my mind because of my customary winter boughts of depression, mabye I've been studying them too often for my low-level Biology classes. Probably though it's due to the many hours these last weeks I've spent, tramping through dormant flower beds with a leaf mulcher. But, as I said, we're moving on to fresh fields tonight and a meadow of dried leaves hardly fulfills such a requirement.

I am tempted to begin with the scientific. I could spend several of your precious minutes discussing the male and femaleness of the flower, the way the reproductive system works, or perhaps genetic blending and inheritance methods. However, were I to do that, I would be lying straight out my face, because I know absolutely nothing about any of those topics.

So let's instead start from what I do know. In my earlier years, before I found myself between jobs, classes, and showers, I spent quite a bit of time on our back porch examining the spines of a multitude of musty books. We had one called Plants are Like People, that presented me with a discolored white jacket that on removal from its shelf, displayed flowery text and and three flowers with human faces and possessed of other civilized implements too -- briefcases and mustaches, for instance.

I think that book, though it made little sense to me at the time, captures the brush strokes of what I want to say. For the flower, just as the person, rests on a simple stalk, one easily breakable between the fingers. Each flower also carries upon this frail foundation, a more extravagant personality that even a child could imagine. We have seen human ingenuity hurl itself into the forms of many gray office buildings. We marvel at Flat Screen picture technology and forget that what we have set out to achieve is only that, two-dimensional.

The flower confronts us as totally unexpected. A baterium succeeds far more by science's standards, but dare tell this to a woman when she receives a bundle of them. A flower reaches no standard of profitability; this planet would likely spin around the sun once a year without a few fields of daffodils, yet I have spun around myself much more in such field than ever I did around the sun.

I like this topic and I may continue with it tomorrow, but for now I hear dominoes falling upstairs and the sounds of enough happy voices to pry me from these few words.

Did you know Eskimos...

2005-11-29T16:28:00.000-06:00

I have decided there are two types of snow in this world -- childhood, snowman snow and Soviet prison camp snow. Today, I learned about the second. You see, our Royal Canadian Mounted Leaf Service, which you can read about a few posts ago, found a reasonable number of clients this fall. In fact, I scheduled too many in a weekend (hadn't counted on rain and sickness), and so I found myself promising Sunday afternoon that we would show up at eight this morning to get a start.

My rake turned over the sheet of snowy leaves remarkably alike to the rubbing off of an old blister. The white, wet residue showered my front and crept into the tops of my gloves so that I kept pulling them off and blowing hard onto the remains of my fingers.

The morning wind blew hard across our cheeks but did its best work in finding the crannies of our ears and tickling the neck. I have always been able to stand mosquitoes because I can swat at them, wind however, will not even remove its gentle buzz. So I did not swat but coagulated all the remains of my humanity until all that was left was a giant outcry against the elements.

Then our employer opened the door, leaned out and asked if we would like some peppermint tea with honey. A few minutes later we stood against the cold, archdeacons of mankind's progress, impervious to winter's malicious nip. I sipped my peppermint tea, tasted the honey, confused it a moment with apple cider and realized that I could again feel the tip of my nose. Surely I had never known a better time to build a snowman.

On the Uses of Greek Mythology

2005-11-26T22:08:00.000-06:00

I began to ponder today. Today, as I raked great piles of pin oak leaves and wrapped them in old bed sheets, the Universtiy of Kansas played one of our greatest football games in history. I couldn't tear my mind from the memory of the unused ticket on my car's back seat. With each stroke of the rake, I wondered how I would describe my feelings to someone who inquired about my day.

"Do you know the story of Prometheus?"

I would ask that first.

"He's the one that gave fire to humans and found himself strapped to a boulder to have his liver pecked out by ravens. Each night, his liver would grow back and the torn skin would close around the wound. Each morning, the ravens would return."

Then I pondered the punch line. I heaved my sheet of leaves upon the compost pile, like a fisherman, though I was neither a fisher of men nor of fish.

"Well, that Prometheus was me."

I ran through it again, turning the phrases about in my mouth. Each session, I grew more fluent until I learned the ebb and pause of the words.

"I am Prometheus."

I could feel the glum little smile begin upon my lips. I also felt something else, something rooted much deeper inside my chest -- a Dr. Seuss voice. It rose up, small and shrill: "You twit, you nit, you uncle, nuncle, you clark carbuncle. Where have you lost your soul?"

Then, sinking about me like a long looked-for smell, the situation finally registered in my brain. I was outside on a fifty-two degree, late-November day; I was dressed like a Canadian Mountie; I was raking leaves and drinking coffee with a distinguished English professor; and we were listening to a historic KU football game on a potato-sized radio.

I could only gaze at the leafless branches and thank Dr. Seuss.

I Wanna Rock Your Gypsy Soul

2005-11-24T19:17:00.000-06:00

It's now Thursday evening and up in the distance I can hear the sounds of Van Morrison on the family tape player. I'm afraid that I've looked into myself too far, like a screw twisted turn by turn into unrelenting wood. I have tried to stay away from such thoughts, pursued always by the warning of Solomon about dwelling on the former days. Van Morrison's falsetto competes with Solomon, so does the feel of a Christmas box and its scent of dust and cardboard.

I'm so glad for Walker Percy, for G.K. Chesterton, and for stories about William Faulkner punching keys to As I Lay Dying by the throb of an all night boiler. These nights, the five o'clock darknesses, make you realize how hopeless must be the man who doesn't believe in God, the one who switches on his electric light with a bowl of cereal and the notion that nothing ever went wrong in the world.

As Van says, "When that foghorn whistle blows, you know I will be coming home!" Well, the foghorn's in the future and not in the past. Let's strain our ears ahead.

The Process by Which One Warms the Fingers

2005-11-16T09:04:00.000-06:00

Doug said quite concretely in a comment what I have been thinking abstractly: "you can't go sledding in 75 degree weather. And sure, you can go for nice walks, but don't you want to have water fights sometimes?"

I've been sitting here in my room for the past five days (a bit of a stretch but only a bit), clasping my eyelids shut in frustration over a paper I'm supposed to write about King Lear and Timon of Athens. Well, here I stand. I curl my toes, prime my fingers against the gentle surface of the keyboard and begin. No stoic was meant to write, though Seneca tried and so did Epictetus. Let's all begin to live life! Let's throw ourselves upon the mercy of God and fear not.

The Stoics and Old Man Winter

2005-11-15T18:06:00.000-06:00

I left Haworth Hall and my Biology lab today and entered a world stripped of all its old virtues. The wind swept across the pavement and sent crumpled leaves scraping along, making much the same noise as did the trees that swayed their old joints. The empty sidewalks, damp with earlier precipitation, crawled usual routes.

I thought of coffee, of my newly acquired taste for tea, but also of those young days when I came inside through a puddle of old snow and burned my lips with marshmallow-soaked cocoa. The air, as did my thoughts, grew darker; I shrugged my shoulders and buried my fists deeper in my pockets. I have spent the past few winters as stoic and fought the cold with platitudes about an early spring. This year, this walk in fact, I decided to reorient myself to the ways of Chesterton.

'The wind,' thought I, 'truly is cold. I can certainly feel the half inch between my ears and my head.' As a stoic I might have shouted at the slate sky, “What of it?” But as a Chestertonian, I did not shrug; instead, it suddenly occurred to me how warm the fists within my pockets had become. I began to consider further: how ridiculous the green grass looked, set as it was against dead leaves and empty trees. The buildings themselves seemed cowed by the cold and I scorned them, not for their fear but for their drudgery.

Then I began to laugh, a quiet and yet wild laughter that sent my chin numb with the cold. I thought no longer of warm drinks and deep blankets. Now I turned to the world, the empty and waiting world, the very place that Adam's tooth first nicked the apple, and I still couldn't help from laughing.

Shakespeare Awaits and Other Observations

2005-11-12T16:09:00.000-06:00

I got to school yesterday after a few hours of raking leaves. I got out of my seat and looked in the back seat of my car, only to realize that I hadn't brought my backpack. I was still wearing my Canadian Mountie Uniform, strapped in by two leather belts. I took one look around, pulled it off, and standing naked but for a pair of blue, almost black pants and Mountie-style boots, I yanked a slightly lighter blue turtleneck over my head; I had found it discarded on the back seat.

Then I looked up and noticed a girl from Navigators driving by; but I couldn't say 'hi' because we've never been introduced.

I walked to class, looking a bit like Steve McQueen or any other sixties white guy. I sat down in my history discussion and extracted from my pocket the only school related utensil I carried, a blue Bic pen. I used it to take the quiz I had forgotten about, then I stood up and walked off campus into another leaf-filled lawn.

Fortunately the leaves blow wildly past my window now, too wildly to rake, so I have time to begin my Shakespeare paper.

What will be when Christmas comes? After the fashion of the oven-bird, I wonder, "What to make of a diminished thing."

The Scent of a Baby

2005-11-06T20:14:00.000-06:00

I have a condition in the winter time, one in which tiny white lines of dryness cover my hands and make them rough and unappealing. So, this winter, to counteract such an eventuality, I purchased a bottle of lotion from Target's clearance shelf.

Retain that image and jump back with me several years to my childhood. I used to watch my father before he'd leave to play basketball. He'd take out his gym bag and drop a pair of socks into it. With his MacGregor basketball resting by one leg, he'd cross the other leg over his knee. Then, he would take a tall container of baby powder and tap it against his hand, so that little geysers of white dust would shoot into the air. Every time, he rubbed it into his foot and ankle before he slipped a brace over the area and laced it the way a surgeon pulls stiches.

Q: Why do these memories come back so strongly?
A: Because my new, clearance-shelf lotion is chemically engineered to smell exactly liket that baby powder.

Q: Why do I keep using it?
A: I need the eggs.*

* This is a Woody Allen joke, don't worry about it unless you have seen Annie Hall.

The Dangers of Positive Thinking

2005-11-03T09:36:00.000-06:00

Now, don't get me wrong, I think that life should be so full of positive thinking that other people think something went wrong in your childhood; however, there's one case where positive thinking can't seem to do anything. I was sitting on my bed yesterday, the only place I can seem to retreat during the day for reading, and as I was talking to Keaton, we got on the subject of how soon these present toils would be past us. "Friday's gonna be here before we know it," and that sort of thing. Then, I made my great mistake, I said, "And pretty soon you'll be sitting next to the Christmas Tree at home, and it'll be glowing and hovering over dark packages with Handel's Messiah coming from the background, and this stuff will all be over."

And ever since, I haven't been able to stop thinking about it.

Orthodoxy

2005-11-01T21:14:00.000-06:00

I got home today and needed a good laugh, so I sat down in my bed with two red pillows propped behind me and finished G.K. Chesterton's great work. I never thought that a book on philosophy could make me laugh out loud, but from now on that will be my central deciding factor in all such books. At this point, I would like to write a long quote from the last two pages of the book, a passage that sent chills along my body, carried by a deep, inexpressible joy. However, as I myself usually skim such quotes in other blogs, let me leave it a great and fathomed secret, one that you will only know if you yourself open up this same book and read it. My only recommendation is the penciled words I encountered at the end of my copy, "Wow. I will be forever changed."

Laundry on a Lonely Night

2005-10-29T21:41:00.000-05:00

As I walked to my laundry building, the only point of steady light in a vibrating, Halloween complex, I wondered, 'What would it be to be complete, to be with the deepest friends I've ever known?' But of course, I've actually had that experience. Not now, not as I sit in this felt folding-chair with the noise of Starship Troopers in the background, but I have had it; and all those books on my shelves that I want to read, but would feel guilty because of impending homework, call me a coward.

There goes all of our credibility

2005-10-29T21:16:00.000-05:00

Well, for the past year, we have all been able to put on Facebook whatever nice looking photo of ourselves we wish. Until those Harvard guys created this new photo album feature, by which we can tag photos of ourselves and all our friends. There's no more filtering of the half-closed eyes or the vacant stare. We are measured now by reality and I don't think I like it.

God Can Certainly Surprise You!

2005-10-28T09:36:00.000-05:00

The Canadian Mounties are in the Lawrence news! Read the article. Watch the News Clip.

Thank You Doug Baker and G.K. Chesterton

2005-10-23T13:09:00.000-05:00

I have for a long time wanted to tell someone that I was "working on my novel"; however, I have never had the patience to logically construct engaging characters nor to infuse those characters into compelling plots. So, for the time being, I have given up the possibility of lifting up my martini and motioning it in the air as I said, "Well, really it's a coming of age story that follows a resurrection motif . . . ."

So, I have turned to poetry on Doug's advice. I have also begun reading Orthodoxy by Mr. G K Chesterton. He said, "The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits." I don't want to cram the heavens down inside my own brain anymore. I'm writing poetry now that makes very little logical sense (though perhaps more than apparent) and I think I would like to burst into fits of laughter more often. Here're two stanzas fresh from an Office Depot yellow pad:

Winter brought the tree,
Its boughs tangled with snow;
Autumn's leaves did not lie,
Nor ever faced the sun.
The frosted ground and the
Cracked cobblestones bore
'In Memory' broken
By the twisting roots.

We watched it grow
From our graves.
The earth walls, shot through
With their own roots,
Guided our work.
Our shovels tended to splinter
That season, and not only on
Rock or wood.

Royal Canadian Mounted Leaf Service

2005-10-20T16:14:00.000-05:00

I suppose that I have wanted to make this post for quite some time now. In fact, this particular business (that of the Canadians to be precise) has consumed much of my recent thought and energy.

I am planning to rake lawns this fall with a few of my buddies. We dress up and Canandian Mounties, surprise neighbors and do all the usual services of a lawn business. However, after the initial light of the name, I am confounded by new marketing ideas. Do we focus on bulletin boards around town? Or is that a waste of time? How do we really get people talking about us? Yes, people have been asking this for years, and I am only posing it again.

Here's the website: royalcanadians.com. Any suggestions?

Chunky Applesauce: A Discourse in Political Theory

2005-10-17T23:20:00.000-05:00

I went to the grocer's tonight and bought a two dollar jar of Musselman's chunky applesauce. Upon removal of the lid, I inspected the contents and found that the word chunky, unlike it its use in peanut butter, actually fulfilled its promise. I think that I have discovered a cheap and easy way to fill the empty crust of this year's Christmas apple pie.

I had no deeper thoughts than this, but as I began this piece, I realized that few of you would want to hear only about the viscosity of my applesauce, so I set out to add some extra weight to an admittedly "chunky" beginning. But here I run into a problem, as my title suggests, I would like to make an analogy between this type of applesauce and politics (an area I have been thinking a lot about recently). Unfortunately, by making this sort of analogy, I risk, no, I guarantee, losing almost every person that is still following this line of reasoning. So, as I bite my lip, stare at the very likely outcome of "0 comments," I proceed as rashly as did the Light brigade.

My weekly trip to the grocery consists of the same aisles, and the endless search for a short list of items that I can never remember their geography. I begin with the makings of salad, my staple food -- tuna, iceberg lettuce, Italian dressing and cheese. Once I find all those, and having admittedly traveled the entire length of the store, I turn again in hopes of locating a loaf of bread and an inexpensive bag of apples. In my many turns of the cart I occasionally encounter clearance items such as belts, radio players or discontinued floor mats. I confess a strong weakness for these items.

I was on just such a trip tonight, when, as I passed by the corridor of sauces, cans and the like, I noticed those pale yellow containers that have sustained me through so many studious nights. I pulled back on my cart and just managed to swing it into the applesauce shelves.

Now here, let me begin my comparison. I think politics is something like shopping for applesauce. All of us, with a few notable exceptions, seek a clean taste, something that cools well in the fridge, and a texture that reminds us of its origins while beckoning toward wholly new realms of delight. That was what I sought as I stood transfixed before these many jars. I screwed my eyes tight as I tried to focus on the price per ounce, dashing back and forth between Always Save and Musselman's. Finally I decided on the promise of a taste I could only imagine. Chunky Applesauce sounded so like the next step in the great ascension. I despise nothing more than the smooth, the tasteless, the porridge sauce. I have been satisfied many times with regular, yet perhaps one step more was satisfaction?

Alas, the old axiom proved true. Just as you should never seek a utopia through politics, I discovered the same holds true in the applesauce aisle. The discontented masses in my mouth rose up; indeed, I have left the mug, half-filled, with two spoons skewering their final bites. Conservatism triumphs again, and the free market ethic shouts in my ear, "Seek good taste, not some dream of Thomas More. Heaven is the fulfillment, but on earth, applesauce should be bought at Aldi."

From the Moment I Wake

2005-10-15T09:35:00.000-05:00

The crisp air shot through me this morning so that I had to wrap myself in blue sweatpants and my Ireland soccer jacket. I feel as though I am homeschooled all over again, awaking at 8:30, pouring cereal, reading Proverbs on the deck with last night's leaves sticking to my socks. The Green Bay Packers mug sits on my left like a puppy with drooping eyes. I suppose its asking for more coffee.

I have decided not to remake my personality, as I had been considering (as though I ultimately controlled it), but rather, to refocus it. God has ways we know nothing of, ways of drawing us toward Him, and of drawing us toward His purposes.

Since I graduated from high school, I finally broke through the six foot plateau, a hope I had long since given up. I think we all change in other ways as well. I no longer bear the same personality into a room; it resembles my old one, but I cannot say that it is only an older version. It is strangely new. I am the same (slightly uncoordinated) person I have always been, but something inside me has changed. I must seek to use this changed person for God's purposes, not jam my old one into the path.

Snatches of Midnight Monologue

2005-10-14T00:08:00.000-05:00

The cologne bottles lined up on the mantle piece glint eerily in the light of one lamp. The kitchen, brilliant but silent, casts a yellow pallor all about itself. I am at the dining room table, savoring the soft feel of the keys and the gentle sound they make as I punch them, making random patterns like a Mid-June drizzle.

I tried to get into books today, I held my mechanical pencil and scribbled at paragraphs in the attempt to achieve a political philosophy.

My car right now sits in some sad parking lot of a repair shop, its insides gleaming with new wheel bearings, fresh oil, and clean fuel injectors. Life bursts with potential, yet its popping seems so ethereal when I sit on couches at home with bowls of cereal and unsweetened coffee. Two glasses of milk cured the evening's heartburn and now I am awaiting the critical decision - movie or book. Bed is never a possibility. Bed is depression. Life awaits, though it is dark. Yes, life is dark, yet it demands that we live it.

Matchmaking in Heaven

2005-10-12T14:14:00.000-05:00

I was sitting at a booth last night waiting for a band to go on stage. Between background grunge noises, I listened to the lead singer of this band explain to me a crush he had. I put on my most thoughtful face and asked him who it was, and then I lost my thoughtful face. I've known this girl for years and I suddenly realized they would be perfect for each other.

So, although I can't reveal any names, though some of you might guess, I would love to get suggestions on how to get them together.

Soap deposits in my shower

2005-10-08T14:28:00.000-05:00

I arose this morning at the early hour of ten and immediately lay my frame down on the living room couch and went back to sleep. Since then, I have been cleaning - dishes, sinks, toilet, paperwork. Now, I find myself strangely content while I am doing these sort of tasks. I began to wonder, as I had my head all the way into the shower, why I used to despise spray bottles and paper towels, and how now I delight in them.

When young, my main goal was to grow enough the next week to see over the top of the fridge on tiptoes. Now I can see see the dust that collects there while we sleep and go about our lives. I can see the grass growing wild in the lawn and I can see the leaves drift down from the autumn trees. In short, I am beginning to see Entropy exerting its sinewy fingers upon the earth. As a child, I fought against my imagination, now as an adult, I fight against the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

And so, as I rub off the soap scum, I smile and consider that though my limbs are aging and will soon be useless, I can win one small battle at a time with disorder.

Day by day . . . by . . . day . . . by day

2005-10-04T16:52:00.000-05:00

Remember that part from Meet the Parents? Well I sure feel as though life is happening day by day. I start panicking if I think any further ahead. Unfortunately, I need to get my head up just a bit and begin to prepare for later in the sememster. Will all of life be this stressful? If so, I've got some growing up to do.

Walker, Texas Ranger

2005-09-27T19:59:00.000-05:00

So I spent last night watching and subsequently laughing as Conan pulled the Walker, Texas Ranger lever behind his desk. I should have been asleep so that my eyes would have hung open much further today. I need to learn the art of scheduling, I think I will do a spin-off of the Art of War. Here's how it will begin:

I. LAYING PLANS


1. Sam Schneider said:  The art of scheduling 
   is of vital importance
   to the Individual.

2. It is a matter of life and death, 
   a road either
   to safety or to ruin.  Hence it is 
   a subject of inquiry
   which can on no account be neglected.

3. The art of scheduling, then, 
   is governed by five constant
   factors, to be taken into account 
   in one's deliberations,
   when seeking to determine 
  the conditions obtaining in the workday.

Amazon.com bestseller list, here I come.

Oh man...

2005-09-22T03:24:00.000-05:00

It's 3:24 according to my computer's clock. I finished the first draft of this paper here and along with it an entire bag of baby carrots. Is that good for me? I hear they have powerful antioxidants inside.

Go melt back into the night, babe

2005-09-19T09:50:00.000-05:00

Yesterday was a very encouraging day... This is a blah way to begin a blog post. It's actually a sure way to keep the comment marker at 0. Why did I start this way? Now I have to spend the rest of my time trying to make it interesting so that those of you who have already stopped reading, will be grabbed by a word later on MURDER! RAPE! ADULTRY!

So, let me be specific. Keaton and I invited a bunch of people over last night and I made chili (he made dessert and his girlfriend made potato soup that she will one day be famous for). Mom, I don't think you read this blog, but if you ever do, you should know that you recipe was amazing (oh yes, I called my mom about it). I realized at some point between crying at the onions and hearing/smelling them brown in the pan, that I definitely like/love the art of cooking. Doug, I think you should attend/start a cooking/philosophy school. It could be called the "School of Dualism" and you could teach everything from an ambivalent point of view.

Note: I will be darn busy this week, so I may not post again until the beginning of next. Until then...[catchy slogan that I would only annyoy you with]

A Spirit of Compulsion

2005-09-16T18:04:00.000-05:00

Friday afternoon has settled across our small village of an apartment complex. The neighbor has gone out for tonight's beer, and I have laid out my roll of quarters on the kitchen table in the hopes of having a clean pair of boxers for tomorrow. What I did not expect was the sudden urge to clean that possessed me.

Keaton came out into the kitchen with a bucket and lemon scented ammonia and began to rumage the mop from the front hall closet. I watched -- I believe the corners of my mouth tilted up with glee -- and then I stood up myself and began shaking out the toaster and confronting baked cheese on the oven top.

Now the fit has almost past, but as we scrubbed and made rows of cleanliness on the floor, we talked of how enjoyable such tasks can be when chosen rather than assigned. I think that life would be so much simpler if I began to apply this principle to other things, such as homework, poetry and relationships with other people. God's given us a chance to make something positive happen in the world, but most of the time I find myself waiting for the positive to happen to me.

To pull Rush lyrics out of context and fit them to my own meening, "I will choose free will."

A Half-filled Yellow Pad

2005-09-15T01:56:00.000-05:00

I've been trying to write poetry. I wake up from my saliva pool each morning or afternoon and throw myself to the floor where I keep my poetry legal pad with a waiting pen. I am trying to concoct a sweeping vision of the future, full of symbolism and overstuffed souls, but somehow each line sounds like the poetry I once glimpsed on the wall at Seaman High School back home.

Here is an example:

Red
so majestic, flowing like
rain, but not
full of acid;
cryptic
like a crossword puzzle;
delighted and yet
full of sadness;
anger in every inch
Red.

Yet another...

2005-09-11T21:15:00.000-05:00

Book Recommendation!

I am reading Malcom Gladwell's The Tipping Point right now. I almost get chills up and down my spine when I read it. Although this is obviously strange behavior, I am happy to admit it just so you will consider reading this book.

Graphic Sex

2005-09-07T22:18:00.000-05:00

This is my history prof, Today he told us, "We will be watching part of a movie about a Jesuit monk who goes to the new world, but he fails at converting the indians because after all, Christianity is a pretty hard sell. 'What,' say the Indians, 'No women or tobacco in heaven, who wants to go there?'"

I shuffled restlessly in my seat, though I am getting used to his constant smirks of this nature.

"I should warn you," he said, "that this clip contains some graphic sex, I'll try to fast forward it, but I don't know if I'll be able to. If any of you feel uncomfortable with that, you can get up now and come back afterward."

I glanced left and right at the five hundred person lecture hall. Apparently everyone felt completely comfortable with graphic sex, because nobody stood up.

I'll let your imaginations supply the rest of the scene, but suffice it to say that our professor somehow failed to even attempt a fast forward during the eight second window he had.

Note to self: never again take a class at a public university, intending to understand the ideals our country was founded on. You will only hear about how stupid, greedy and generally unlikable your ancestors were.

We Named Him Bradley

2005-09-05T17:44:00.000-05:00

Sorry about not posting for awhile, I was busy last week and spent this weekend on a ranch in Arizona with my friend Matt. I should probably write the whole thing down in the form of a poem (thanks Doug), but for now let me just share with you one moment that shines brilliantly forth as a life memory.

We had just finished a game of horseshoes and were driving back in the Gator -- that's one of those vehicles they use to drive injured football players from the field -- and Elizabeth, Matt's sister was milking all the twelve miles per hour she could from the engine. I was also up front, hardly conscious of the dour clouds beckoning all creatures to their eternal rest. The landscape about us hardly told the story of the Arizona I had pictured, one filled with cactus, cracked dirt, and deserted cowboy campfires. Off in the distance, unconscious of our passing, we could see the shapes of gentle mountains and greenery that sprawled over the entire surface of the land. I was beginning to let the landscape take hold of me when I noticed something in the road and heard Elizabeth scream.

The next moment, I could feel the brakes clamp and we rolled to a halt.

"Was that a snake?" she asked as we jumped from our seats and approached the coiled length in the road.

Matt took a step closer and the object, now obviously a snake, drew itself back, and let forth from its tail the sound I had heard in so many John Wayne movies.

"It's a rattler?"

If I had it to do over, I would never have asked such a question, but I had only seen them behind glass and never in a dirt road before.

"We have to kill it," said Elizabeth, and she leapt back aboard the gator and began to reverse over it.

"No!"

Matt stood in the road, looking down at the snake which was now easing away from us, its tail still warning.

"It'll bite a horse if we leave it," said Elizabeth. And to add power to her words, she accelerated over the snake.

We all saw the rubber of the wheel descend, and saw the scales bulge outward slightly. Then she was past and unbelievably the rattling came louder, sounding remarkably like a wasp that has been swatted at and missed.

"I didn't kill it?" yelled Elizabeth. She reversed again; again we saw the wheel bump up and descend.

"Elizabeth, let it go. You've just pissed it off."

Sure enough, the snake, tail humming angrily, slid off into the grassy embankment.

Elizabeth said, "I'll see what grandma thinks we should do," and she drove up the road toward the house.

Matt and I stood before the snake and listened to his rattle slow a bit.

"He seems injured," said Matt.

I leaned in, but I couldn't tell how bad it might be. I guessed that having a gator wheel run over him three times had caused some damage.

"I read a book once," I said, "called Chronicle of a Death Foretold. It was about a guy who gets murdered by two brothers. We know that it happens, and yet the book continues for a maddening hundred and twenty pages until they finally cut him up with butchers' knives."

"It's a perfect evening for death."

And surely it was. Gray clouds hung over the distant peaks, and yet somewhere in that land was a vibrancy full of green and blue, sky and trees. I thought, This is the kind of place I want to die. I want to see the moment of death so I can soak it up just as the land will soak up my blood.

In the distance came the sound of the gator's engine starting once again.

"That is the sound of your death, snake," I said.

"I think we should call him Bradley," said Matt.

And so we did.

Excuse me, but we will be closed at eleven

2005-08-26T13:15:00.000-05:00

We were playing quite an enjoyable game of Skip-Bo last night at the Kansas Union when I heard a voice somewhere over my left shoulder.

"Excuse me."

I looked up.

"Excuse me."

A few more of the people around us began to turn their heads toward the voice that was beginning to grow to the point of barely audible.

"Excuse me, we will be closing the gates at eleven, so if you could please be out by then..."

I nodded. He trailed off as he pushed his glasses farther up the bridge of his nose.

"Okay, we'll do it," I said.

I dealt another card and paused to ask the inevitable question, "What time is it?"

To my surprise, a few quick checks of cell phones (today's version of the pocket watch) yielded the answer that we had already overstayed our welcome to the tune of 11:02. I looked up in sudden anger, but the man had disappeared with his voice and we were alone on the ground floor of the student union, feeling quite insulted.

My point is this, little man...

Here I've written this long post and am suddenly faced with the question of how to end it. Do you really need an Aesop's moral? Should the point be obvious? You readers are certainly possessed of enough intelligence to see where I'm trying to go. As in all story telling, I have failed to reach a climax, yet life is not full of climaxes. Sometimes, though you strive with every sinewy muscle cell in your body, the climax fails in every way. "So sorry," as the sixteenth century Japanese would say, "there is nothing else. Nothing. Not a bang, only a whimper."

A Hard Smack Across the Face (...that goes completely unnoticed)

2005-08-25T10:53:00.000-05:00

I've been thinking this morning, a frightful activity that has been occupying far too many days of late. Here at my curved desk in this library, I've begun to wonder how it is that you can feel sometimes as though you are succeeding so brightly, when in reality, you had failed months ago.

In fact, you may stand up and proclaim your success, nod your head and sit back down to slight applause, while everyone in the room mutters in their subconscious. It is quite possible to never know of your failure, and leave behind you the fragmenting pieces, for others to come behind, bind together and lavish with glue.

The smack in the face will come, it always does, but you may not be the one to bear it. I suppose the trick in life is to see these failures as they fly toward you and scurry away before cruel talons sink like mosquito needles into your flesh.

I write these words from some limited experience, both of my own and others. I'm not sure why I chose today to divulge them, but I certainly wish I could get good at heeding them.

The Oldest Profession

2005-08-24T08:01:00.000-05:00

I should point out that my title is not exactly accurate. No, actually, it's not accurate at all since I am only talking about the time since about 1606, but I thought I would be sensational so that people would say, "Whoa, now there's a post worth reading!" Did you say it? I thought not.

But here's why I'm talking about the time since 1606. I was told in high school that the whole idea of William Shakespeare actually having written his own plays was absolutely absurd, that there was no way a man with little formal education could have spoken so closely to the human soul. As if formal education was the path to knowing the human soul!

Well I am taking a class this semester in which the professor said that the traditional Shakespeare certainly did write his own plays. That no other author has yet been suggested that could have done it. How encouraging! I have wanted to believe this for so long and finally I have an excuse. Maybe a poor boy from down in the boondocks really can do some cool things.

good morning!

2005-08-22T09:00:00.000-05:00

I am sitting at my computer wearing a boys' size large Star Wars Yoda t-shirt and listening to Pirates of Penzance. I find this to be such an interesting combination, I wanted to point it out. Mainly I am just excited though, because facebook told me that they are going to be putting up a new design of their site. For those of you not involved, let me tell you, this is big news, almost as big as HP and HBP. For those of you still having no idea what I'm talking about, be patient, the six cups of Joe this morning are still working their way through me.

1210 Pages!

2005-08-21T16:40:00.000-05:00

Oh yes, I just finished Shogun by Mr. James Clavell. It was amazing and also the longest book I have ever read (refer to post title). I have been reading it since Christmas break, which says very little for my abilities as a speed reader, but finally I am done. Doug Baker my friend, I hope you read this. Perhaps this will be my final purge of the uncleanliness of unfinished books. Is that possible? I hope. Until next time, sayonara.

I must be blind

2005-08-19T13:34:00.000-05:00

Has a sudden realization ever come upon you? Have you ever looked all over for your belt only to find that you were wearing it? I had one of those experiences a few moments ago and I am highly embarrassed to share it now, however, so shocking was it, that I have no choice but to divulge it almost immediately.

I was walking down Jayhawk Boulevard (named for the famous mythical mascot of my university) and I noticed a girl walk by in very large sunglasses. Ha, I thought to myself, those look rather like something Faye Dunaway would wear in a movie with Steve McQueen. I kept walking, for I had to find a place with air conditioning before the daytime heat drew beads of sweat from my skin. And then I noticed another girl in the same pair of sunglasses. So odd, I thought, to what has fashion taste come? But a few moments later, I saw another, this one with leopard prints around the enormous frames. Then another, and then a multitude too numerous to count. Even an old woman had a pair hiked up on her head like solar panels as she chatted with a friend.

Then a girl walked by with what I would previously have considered a reasonable size pair of shades and I marvelled at how terribly absent from our present culture she was.

My observation is this: "Oh how fickle are the ways of women, yet even more the ways of men. For to woman is left the changing of the wardrobe, but man is born to the endless cycle of calling the new fashionable, though he finds not a rumor of fashion there."

Dead Leg

2005-08-17T10:58:00.000-05:00

The strangest thing happened to me today. I rose up from bed at about ten o'clock this morning and tried to walk four steps across my room to my computer, but as I tried to lift my left leg, I realized that I had no control of it whatsoever; it was utterly asleep. I was faced with quite the disconcerting proposition of having to swing this leg and balance on my right one. Unfortunately, I had never guessed the problem of having a useless leg: it doesn't feel as though it weighs anything. So I couldn't figure out how to compensate for the weight imbalance in swinging it.

All this to say, I made it to my computer eventually and have decided to avoid amputation at almost all costs.

Headphones and Rain

2005-08-15T15:31:00.000-05:00

It's most definitely Monday in all its forms. Last week was one of the best of the summer, but the rain seems to have sunk in for good now and the sky seems oppressively weighed down. Of course, what else can you expect from Kansas? Carin and Liz, I promise that it is not always this way, just come live here sometime...

I am listening to some mellow music, probably a bad idea, and feeling a bit obsessive about getting my room organized and clean. The Doors are not helping, so I'm going to turn them off and go hang some classy pictures in my room.

Clever Update

2005-08-14T01:02:00.000-05:00

I am finally moved into my apartment out here in Lawrence and I keep thinking of clever blog posts about it, but somehow, each one that I write seems so inadequate, that I think instead I will go to bed.

Night of Cigarette-Lighter Flame

2005-08-04T14:32:00.000-05:00

The wheels of social commentary rolled into motion somewhere in the philosophical section of my brain last night during several particularly good conversations with Doug and Mike. It comes to this, and I promise to be brief:

We are entering an age where any single person has more power than ever before. If you aren't so sure, consider that I could, right now with present commercially available data, download a 1 meter resolved satellite image of any area in the world, and after communicating with any of a million possible contacts in that area, start my own hotdog stand on that one meter, without ever leaving my computer? Oh yes, it's quite possible.

Well here we stand in the doorpost of this new age, staring like Belle about this vast, empty castle, only beginning to realize that we are not without a few beasts. You see, as we grow more powerful as individuals, the governments of the world naturally lose some of their control on us. For instance, the US Government has to be careful about too many restrictions on corporations, not because they might hurt an executive's feelings, but because he has the power to pick up his operation and move overseas. Still, wherever possible, it is the nature of governments tighten restrictions to maintain their power. After all, any judge who wants to can seize that hotdog stand of mine.

So here we are, awaiting the inevitable clash of a mighty bureaucracy and the robust, networked, human economy. What will be the outcome? My wheels of commentary haven't turned that far.... Stay tuned, but not to me. I would recommend someone who knows what he's talking about.

Movie Recommendation

2005-07-29T14:17:00.000-05:00

I watched recently the movie Shaolin Soccer. I loved it. I don't have much else to post today, nor have I for a few days. What can one speak of when life is quite enjoyable, but not overly significant?

Sehnsucht

2005-07-26T00:58:00.000-05:00

I opened my eyes to the darkening landscape and sat up. The world resumed its ritual vertical-horizontal relations as I blinked a few times. I was conscious of the absenses filling the air. The mosquitoes, for one, which had blurred the landscape all day, were gone. The hot light of midafternoon also had vanished, to be replaced by nothing. The landscape yawned into the spreading dark and I did so as well, grateful to be able to move my head at all without the reminder of my besetting altitute sickness.

We had hiked in that morning about six miles, after a full night's drive. I have never been one to acclimatize quickly and by the time I threw down my pack and found the contours of my groundpad, I was asleep. I slept to escape the sickened headache that grasped my brain and poisened my stomach.

But when I woke up, that was all gone. I felt as though I had woken in this place for the first time with no memory of how I had come there. I suspect the first opening of one's eyes in heaven will feel the same. I stood up with my Nalgene bottle in one hand and the water purifier in the other and trecked down a few gentle slopes to a lake just below us.

I still couldn't shake the feeling that I was in a whole new place; the light, so suddenly stolen by sleep, filled in gaps in my vision as my eyes adjusted. I sat down by the lake, the first sub-sixty degree breeze I felt in three months pushed at my arms as I reached into the water.

At that moment I looked up. Had I looked before? I was headily aware now that I was at the foot of a vast lake, a lake that stretched to the dark feet of the mountains. They shone glumly, yet vast snowfields on the surface seemed to gather light and indeed, like the moon that was beginning to rise, they cast a glow about me that mixed with the breeze and my cool head and the clean water. I knew then that I could fall from a cliff face to my death the very next day and still have found the trip worth that moment.

That, I believe, is sehnsucht.

Many choices, one choice

2005-07-19T19:35:00.000-05:00

Doug and I were standing outside at 1am last night like two werewolves, watching the full moon shine from behind the clouds. (Post-Harry Potter depression, sorry.)

But as we were standing there below the moon, we realized that we are tired of waiting to grow up and become men. Why not just do it now?

This is a thought that has been festering in the back of my mind, and sometimes the foreground, for quite awhile. I have been far too afraid to accept responsibility for my actions and choices. Am I paralyzed by the thought of a choice? Why? And yet, I hate to choose from a list of options. I want them all, so I get none.

Is that utterly philosophical? Absolutely. I might some day pound paper to this straw cage of mine, but for now, I leave you with only my thoughts.

Picture This

2005-07-16T09:50:00.000-05:00

I want you to imagine a scene from almost two thousand years ago. A great crowd of robed men sit in assembly. A few flies light on the onlookers, but they do not brush them off. If you hone your ears beneath the buzz of the flies and the sound of a solitary voice, you may be able to catch the echoes of teeth grinding against each other in. Coming to an apex of emotion, the speaker shouts out, "You received the law as ordained by angels, and yet did not keep it."

The sound of teeth doubles in intensity. A few of the assembled rise to their feet, their faces are scorched red beneath gray beards.

But even as this happens, the man shouts out, "Behold, I see the heavens opened up and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God."

The men who are already on their feet cover their ears and rush at the speaker. The rest of the assembly rises in turmoil, reminding of bench clearing brawls with the Yankees. The room is filled with noise, the flies are gone, the heat of the day presses down on everything and in a minute the room is empty, the only noise comes from the still-swinging door.

This is of course the trial of Stephen in Acts 7. I write it down here because I have forgotten the hate that we Christians are supposed to face in our futures. I have been so indignant that anyone would not only disagree with me, but do it with stern eyes and a laughing mouth. We Christians have had it easy for the last 300 years, but not anymore. Our time of Diet Cokes and Cracker Jacks is grinding to a halt in the teeth of the same men who killed Stephen. I have a suspicion that we are going to find ourselves in some very interesting times in these coming years.

Update (in John Lovitz's voice): Yay!

2005-07-11T18:13:00.000-05:00

I am no longer unhappy with good old KU. They reduced my fine by $150 (see previous post)! Thank you my favorite university. You are the best. I am not being sarcastic, I am truly happy to be there.

Had a great weekend with some of my college friends down in Wichita. I also have revised my previous opinion about that town. I like it now.

Book Recommendation

2005-07-07T12:35:00.000-05:00

I just finished listening to a business book called Facing Reality. I got through it while I have been cleaning my room for the past few days. Yes my room is that dirty.

As I listened, I kept pondering the problem of how a small business has any hope of competing with Wal-Mart and Home Depot. In the past, the government could just put restrictions on these large companies and saddle them down with price controls (not that it was a good idea), but now if they were to do this, someone else would come in from another country and offer the item at a lower price. Ma and Pa don't have to compete with just Wal-Mart anymore; if it's not Wal-Mart, it's Shanghai Mart or Beijing Depot.

The world has changed. I think we should accept this and try to figure out a way, not to slow down the big guys, but to be better than them at the little things. Now more than ever, the world wants some bit of personable flavor. We won't find it on the internet and we won't find it in aisle five; the one to give us that flavor will succeed at almost any price level.

Confronting Reality, or, The Long Dark Tea Time at the End of the Universe

2005-07-04T23:27:00.000-05:00

We got back from Oklahoma last night after a lovely two days prowling about their more interesting highways and more confusing turnpikes. I came to two realizations during that time.* In the first, I discovered that my brain and my stomach have communication problems. For instance, brain says to stomach, "I am a tad bit dizzy." Stomach responds by sickening for the next two days and wining about every motion, such as sitting still and reading. The other, and slightly more important realization, is that I have a month and half of summer left and no solidly visible way that I will spend it.

I can no longer rely on the unquestioning sound of my alarm's buzzer. Now that sound will tell me that I can arise if I so choose, however I will only eat breakfast and once again ponder the possiblities of more sleep.

What does one do with the fearful dearth of indecision? Read Jane Austin? Perhaps. Read the Gulag Archipelago? Perhaps again. Suggestions would be helpful.

* Upon further consideration, I came to more realizations than two, but I am writing a blog post and not revising the General Statutes of Kansas, so I will end with two.

Infections Found: 1432

2005-06-27T20:25:00.000-05:00

Yet another post about my computer. I wouldn't spend so much time talking about him if we weren't such good friends. I think our friendship comes from our both being pretty regular guys who like to sit about and drink coffee on the internet (I do the drinking, he does the internet). I had been worried about my friend for a few days because his health seemed to have failed completely, so I ran a spyware check and found 1432 infections. This reminds me of the time when I was a kid and my parakeet died from starvation (actually it was a sickness that I suspect was brought on by starvation). I don't know what else to say since 1432 infections speaks for itself. It speaks very loudly indeed....

"W"

2005-06-21T22:42:00.000-05:00

Sometimes parents sit at their kitchen tables and marvel at how far their children have drifted from the innocence they were supposed to possess. While my parents may have shared a cup of coffee over me at some time, I think the kitchen will be empty for my eight-year-old brother Calvin. Tonight, while we watched the Spurs lose to the Pistons, Calvin gave us a menu at the beginning of the game. When we yelled out "W," he would come running with another clipboard on which he wrote down orders for popsicles, light butter popcorn, full butter popcorn, juice, and a few off-menu items like egg white omelets. At the call of "T," he took away our trash.

I am posting this for those of you who will become parents someday. If someday you find your kid doing similarly, something in parenting is going well.

The end surely is at hand

2005-06-17T18:18:00.000-05:00

I have long believed that life straightened itself out if you simply gave it time. I always assumed that by cracking open an egg I could extract a yoke, that by putting out my foot I would step forward. But all those hopes and dreams are gone now. I sit here facing the hard, dusty tile of the matter. Mankind has no hope for survival.

Don't put out your hand like a schoolyard traffic director. If you had opened the envelope that I opened today, and if you had read what I read today, you too would realize that the end is near, the temple is being built and the woman and the dragon will soon sweep across the earth in their maddening pursuit.

Do you know why I know this? Here's why:

We made a few nicks in the walls of dorm room during the year when we tried to move our bunkbeds. Two long scrapes, that is all. I should have just left them there and assumed that no one would notice them, but I could not. I still held to that higher standard, that code that says "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." So I bought some spackling and filled those holes in the wall. The wall was then flat, it looked good, it needed only a slight touch up in paint to cover the spackling. Sadly -- and this is my great mistake -- I did not put the paint on myself. That was all. I thought that perhaps I would be fined a few dollars for my impartial fix, but that I might receive at least a thank you note from an overworked maitenance guy.

But today I know the truth. I opened a letter from the Department of Student Housing (surely a leftover from the old communist regimes) and read to my surprise, that I owe the University of Kansas $250 for trying to fix their walls! Yes, that deserves an exclamation point.

So now this may be my final post. I have decided that since I can no longer have faith in human kind, I am moving to the mountains where I will tend flocks of sheep and share the companionship of a very white and large dog who will chase away the university bill collectors that will soon be coming for me.

Look Who Got the Looks in the Family!

2005-06-12T23:37:00.000-05:00

My fantastically cute, youngest brother.

The Glory Years

2005-06-09T23:23:00.000-05:00

My six year old brother Davy said today that his glory years were when he was three. How funny that no matter where we are in life, we can always look back and say that some other time was better.

But enough of philosophy, I am not in the mood tonight. There are too many crickets chirping to have a good Kantian walk, so I will be practical. Here are two pieces of advice you might like to know, one is from me, the other from a friend's grandma.

I have discovered an elixir brewed from the very headwaters of the fountain of life. It is a mixture of iced tea, lemonade and shot of cherry juice. For the alcoholics among us, a shot of any Bacardi product will substitute for the cherry juice. Drinking this drink and eating a very seedy watermelon, as I am doing now, will give you such a fine feeling, that you may swear to have never experienced a better one, except for that time when you were three...

The other piece of advice is not really advice so much as an observation that you could turn into advice if you felt like it. I was standing in a kitchen with my friend Mark's grandma and she began to talk about her husband and the way he mowed the lawn and kept the flowerbeds. Finally she said, "God has blessed us so much; we're both still alive and we still love each other. Did you know that when we walk in the yard, we hold hands so that if the Lord comes back, we'll fly off together?"

That my friends sounds like a pretty good finish to life. If I can say the same thing in forty-five years, I can make no complaints.

The Opening Lines

2005-06-08T20:25:00.000-05:00

I recommend that you not read this post tonight. In fact, I raise my right hand and swear that you will most likely leave with an insatiate taste in your mouth. There is a reason: I am going to be boring today, boring and self-absorbed. I am going to post a possible opening to a novel I have been thinking about starting for some time now.

When he saw the firefly punched out of the air by the passing truck, and just lying there, its light throbbing as it died, Shadwell had a feeling this would not be his favorite night of twelve years' existence. He bent down to examine the light, which he thought would be failing by now, but it was radiating more light with each new pulse. The night had been dropping its black threads for the past half hour and as he gazed at this spectacle, he made a decision.

That's all I have for now. I need to spend more time plotting for awhile. I think I may be one of those guys who needs a specific scene by scene in order to get anywere. I actually do have a kind of plan, but I'm just babbling now, which is what I probably should avoid. There's nothing worse than babbling, excepting referring to babbling, which is pretty self-referential, which is also pretty self-absorbed. So, sorry.

Down in the Dump

2005-06-07T20:13:00.000-05:00

I pushed the door open with tentative fingers and was hailed by the insurgence of a smell that I can only describe as the worst possible combination of Tide with bleach and Dirty Diapers. The ground was a strange mixture of milk cartons, Frito Lay wrappers, and dirt. When I put my foot on the ground and it sunk down, I couldn't help but think of the scene from Empire Strikes Back when Han and Leah think they are walking on the astroid, but it is really a giant worm's tongue.

I held my breath as we emptied the trailer and imagined a picture I saw in a book on Forensic Pathology of a dectective drinking a Dr. Pepper in a pit of freshly uncovered corpses. Why I thought that would help is a greater mystery than Deepthroat ever was. I should have concentrated on the validation of the second law of thermodynamics that I was witnessing.

But that's only the literal part of today's title. I really am in the cliche dumps. A great and very fond illusion of mine has been shattered. Wait for it...

Baby carrots are not good for you?

Has anyone else heard this? I swear that I spent last semester eating so many bags of them that if my toenails had fallen off, I could have used them as orange contact lenses.

UPDATE: Actually did a small amount of research just now (two sites on Google)....Nobody said they were all that bad for you. Maybe it is just a rumor.

I Accept the 80s.

2005-06-06T00:48:00.000-05:00

A monumental shift of my mind took place this weekend. I have always despised that decade of my birth. I cringe at the hair, the music, the pink fanny packs and the light blue, wide-brim ball caps. Those were the days the Royals wore powder blue and basketball players didn't double with modeling and rap albums (I think that was bad).

At any rate, my whole opinion shifted last night.

I think that the surge had been building in me for some time, a bit like the way water does against a bridge during a flood, pulling and surging about the supports until one massive rush settles the matter. Well, Doug and I watched Say Anything last night with John Cusack.

Not only was the movie a true product of the 80s, it was funny and delightful (yes, I feel comfortable as a man saying that word). I began to think about the good that came out of that decade. There was Regean and pretty much the fall of communism, although it didn't fully happen till early 90s. We lost no major wars. Indiana Jones and two Star Wars movies played in theaters.

And now Say Anything. The eighties were so feel good it hurts. Lanky people like me used to be allowed the full motion of their limbs when they danced, and our long arms fit around boomboxes really well. Classic rock was okay, computers were still so 'out there' people didn't label you a nerd if you liked them. (I made that last thing up, I'm pretty sure you were still a nerd.)

I'm all for improvement and noble strides into the future. But I just want to give you something to think about next time you step into a thrift store. Picture yourself among those white metal shelves with their Jonny Mathis tapes and tell me you are not satisfied.

I've gotta go, I've got to do a show

2005-06-04T06:25:00.000-05:00

I'm off in five minutes to spend the day under a tent, handing unpainted bowls to kids and then packing away painted bowls. I would type more, but sadly, the rest must be your imagination.

Please Don't Stop Raining

2005-06-03T07:34:00.000-05:00

I strain my ears for the sound of rain, but it is faint now. The slap of water droplets on cement has dropped away so far as to be drowned by a siren rushing to some rain-caused accident. I wish it would keep raining. When the rain stops, the phone will ring and I will be carrying sheetrock.

Mind you, I don't mind carrying sheetrock, or screwing it onto the wall, but waking up this morning with the prospect of a few cups of coffee and a book was so sweet in my mind that I can hardly bring myself to put on those heavy pants and paint-stained Jayhawks cap.

Then again, if I don't work at all today, I might begin to feel the terror of inactivity, which is far worse.

Night Lights

2005-06-02T10:03:00.000-05:00

We were sitting on a picnic table, sipping 2 liter bottles of coke and watching a helicopter scan the midnight landscape with a searchlight, when two figures approached us through the dark. Our conversation had run a course through the familiar topics of school and life's meaning, and Doug was coming to a climax of a story from the previous semester.

Sounds are louder at night. The other senses take over where sight leaves off its work. So as we listened to Doug, we couldn't help but notice the sound of grass being pushed into the ground by rubber soles and the way clothing moves across the body when a person is walking. With each sentence, his voice faded softer and softer until one word ended and the next did not begin.

We had been trying to ignore the thought that had sprung fully grown into all of our heads, yet it had become unavoidable as we looked up and found ourselves with two dark shapes no more than four feet away. In the gloom we strained our eyes, trying on various builds of our friends, though none quite fit. The wind, which we had not noticed before, blew in our ears.

The silence had become an amirable sound in of itself. It chased into our minds and swirled the dark thoughts that tend to brew on dark nights. I couldn't take it, so I filled the night with the sound of my own, rather irritating voice.

"Hey, what's up guys," I said, "we don't know each other."

"Oh," one of them said, "we thought you were some of our friends."

"What're you here for?" I asked, though they could have asked the same of us.

"Nothing, just gonna do some s---."*

"Cool," I said, "just go back in the trees." And I pointed over my shoulder as far away as is possible with that kind of gesture.

Then they left and the night was complete again, except for the whir of helicopter blades and the sweep of its searchlight.

* I have an odd habit of being unable to write certain words in blog entries, even though they would add quite a bit to the flavor and tone. My apologies.

Sun Tzu was not a sissy

2005-06-01T17:17:00.000-05:00

Tonight is our military strategy night. It's the night a group of guys gathers around in a living room to talk about The Art of War. I've found this book to be about the most fun I've ever had in such a tiny volume (outside of the Bible). I encourage all of you to read it, but especially those ones who plan to do anything important in life.

sammo@cox.net has 3232 new messages

2005-05-31T07:07:00.000-05:00

I noticed that my old e-mail account has been getting a bit full these past few days. In fact, I think that I am getting several thousand spam emails a day. I don't know what it was that I did, unsuspecting on the internet one day, but it was like dangling a porkchop in a pirrhana pool.

Sometimes I wonder whether anyone has ever bought anything from one of those emails. "Do you please your wife?" Tells me that although I can't trust you to keep my identity safe, I can swallow unmarked white tablets from an unmarked yellow envelope.

Of course, I would have no problem if they started putting jokes in those emails, or maybe scenes from Woody Allen movies. Can you imagine going through a list of 3232 knock knocks? I would be killer in social situations for a month.

The Smell of Bleach

2005-05-30T19:19:00.000-05:00

People die quite often. In fact, it has become a habit of mine to contemplate my own death whenever I can. I like to imagine the sky as I lie on my back. I think the clouds will move more perceptibly then, and the pain in my chest will be somewhere in the background, enhancing the sky. I hope I die outside; I hope I can hear the sounds of nature.

I am afraid that I will die in a hospital bed, that I will find myself staring up at a ceiling with a stain above my head. I can't bear the thought of the raging torrent of my life ending on a stack of loosly fitted sheets and blankets. And yet, how many people really have the privelege to die in the sun, with the feel of grass blades poking their necks? I've never known anyone who did it, although I have seen it in a few old westerns.

Then I follow my thoughts back and look at my real fear: I am afraid that on that hospital bed, my whole life will have amounted to no more than the austere cleanness of the hospital fabric.

If I die on such a bed, I pray that I carry with me not the memory of a life spent in such a state, but one that spanned far beyond, one that was lived under the sun.

Star Gazing

2005-05-06T18:19:00.000-05:00

I was just thinking, as I looked up at a Lawrence washed sky, about the time Doug and I rode our bikes along deserted country roads and stopped by empty fields to watch meteors slash the sky for an instant. Then we would ride on and turn our heads into the wind so that it would whistle in our ears. I wonder if you could live a full life with that kind of furious pursuit of enjoyment.

No, probably not. Things happen. Like, I just went camping and got this enormous spider bite on the back of my neck and since I have a few hypochondriach tendencies, I've been thinking all day that the poison is working itself into my spinal column.

Claustrephobia

2005-05-04T12:50:00.000-05:00

The Spring has brought with it a few recent boughts of Claustrephobia. I have experienced problems with this before at this time of year. I can usually tell by the itch in my feet to spring out of my shoes and the feeling that my ribcage is far to small to contain all the matter within.

Any number of things can bring on this condition.

Yesterday I was sitting in class and I realized that I didn't understand any of the words that were shooting back and forth across the room. I almost lost confidence in my ablitity to speak English. Deconstructionism as a word is bad enough, but once you incorporate the myriad army that accompanies it, you will have slipped into a blue funk.

And today at my computer I was suddenly overcome by the knowledge that my room could be photographed as the example of hell for a collectors' edition of Dante's Inferno. I sprayed Windex until I felt better and my hands still smell of it.

Nervous energy and I and go back for a long while. Perhaps that is part of the reason I drink three pots of smart juice a day.

Dashed Hopes

2005-04-25T15:42:00.000-05:00

I keep seeing a guy in between the weight machines. He holds a clip board in his hand and usually an old lady is with him. I finally figured out that he is the personal trainer. He probably signed up for the job so that he could show cute college girls around and tell them how to sculpt their abs and their calves. But word must have got out among at some faculty breakfast, because his only clients are school adminstrators and professors. I guess he learned a life lesson.

A Ladybug and a Hill

2005-04-22T14:46:00.000-05:00

I was waking up a hill on campus today and I grew tired, so instead of walking up it more, I laid down on the side of it.

I felt symbiont with the universe.

A little later a red ladybug landed on my shirt and I wiped her off with a brush of my hand.

I no longer felt symbiont.

Street Preaching

2005-04-20T15:10:00.000-05:00

We had a street preacher at school today. He sat on a foldable stool at the top of the stairs and rattled and railed at a group of gathered students. His voice reminded me of a plane from a WWII movie in the way it dove and stalled in the air. Some people laughed at him, one girl behind me said to someone on her phone, "I'll put you on speaker phone so you can hear, this guy's really funny."

But they all stayed. I wondered if perhaps his voice, piercing as it was, had dropped down below the range of the anti-aircraft guns.

One time when he was here, two students ran past him shouting, "We're fags, we're fags, we're fags." They were laughing. I wondered why they did it then. Why did anyone stop? Was he just the next in a string of life's oddities? On a campus where meaning in life is scorned, why do so many stop to hear themselves condemned?

The Changing Face of the Breeze

2005-04-19T16:25:00.000-05:00

Wind steals away my resolve in the winter, but in the Spring, it infuses me with promises. I leave this thought on the page because I don't know where to categorize it, only that living in a windy state is not so bad if it's warm outside.

The Split Personality of Reality

2005-04-18T21:34:00.000-05:00

This is the beginning of an essay I'm writing for a class this semester. If anyone still reads this blog after my siesta of several months, my day would be fully complemented by a smattering of comments.

Until we recently painted the walls of my house a sickly blue and subsequently removed all the pictures from the hallway, I used to be able to trace my entire family history on the walk from the kitchen to the bathroom. The first thing you might have seen along your right side were two pictures of my parents running along the beach. I was apparently asserting my personality even then, for my mother appears to be heavily laden with my prenatal self. A friend of my mother's made pictures for each child in our family on which she wrote a name in calligraphy and below it, placed a Bible verse to match. These pictures, hang in a column laid downward in a diagonal fashion with my name hidden near the ceiling. A picture of a baby, presumably myself, begins to appear just after this, and for the next few feet, I see this early Samuel in front of Sears studio backdrops and between the two people a few feet before who were on the beach (this time my mother is much thinner). Every person I know seems to have the same experience of finding themselves as infants on walls, though very few of them seem to have any memory of the experience. I suppose one might even say that we take the entire experience of infancy on the word of our parents.

Perhaps eleven inches farther on, as the ruler measures, my eyes snatch immediately an image of me in a mud pit with my brother. It rests on the bottom row of one of those many-shaped conglomerate picture frames which you can purchase for five dollars at any store that sells such things. I am a bit ashamed to admit it, but in the confessional tone of Montaigne, I can't deny that when it used to hang on the wall there, I would examine it almost every time I glimpsed it upon passing. Sometimes, when everyone in the house had gone to bed, I would stand there entranced by the two square inches of childhood it contained.

Its magnetism is not in my younger brother flexing his wiry frame and scowling with the casual intensity of a little boy, nor is it my bearded father, smiling from the background at this scene of youth. No, the image which steals my eyes is my own; after all, who looks through photos with his friends and does not immediately seek his own face to make sure it's not doing anything silly.

What's So Hard About Belief?

2005-04-13T12:58:00.000-05:00

I talked to a friend today out in the Spring sunlight. He was sitting on a bench, the kind you find in parks, made of cement and very uncomfortable if any part of your skin rests there for an extended period of time. As I looked down, I kept squinting as though I were looking into the sun, but I was not. A bee kept buzzing behind me and landing on my jacket.

He, my friend that is, was saying to me that each one of us humans must wear a pair of Kantian sunglasses with which to interpret the universe. As beings, we can know nothing except that we exist, but as humans we also feel the need to make judgements.

Here we were, two beings teetering on the edge of human existence. We stood strata above those layers of grinding magma the scientists tell us are below the earth, and we talked about what we can actually know. My friend argued that we shouldn't try to make any moral judgements about things because right and wrong lie in a realm whose existence is questionable. Our Kantian sunglasses alone give us the ability even to hold a tape measure and trust that the inch measurings haven't changed since the last time we examined them.

I think he has held his eyes closed so long above this cavern of existence that even the tiniest slit hurts. He can only move by cracking the lid of one eye and by the pattern in grass, guess if a cliff lies before him or not.

I find Kant's sunglasses to be irritable on the nose, not to mention, so very dark that I can only see the vaguest shapes of things. A tree might be a large house or it might be a small water tower.

Light through these sunglasses comes as so precious that even the recognition of the least clear shapes is a joy. Through them you can hobble upon the grass, whose brilliant golden green now appears to have been coated in volcano ash. I suppose that this hobbling is better than standing with your eyes screwed shut; you can still smoke a cigarette by feel and see to tie your shoes.

But imagine the joy of switching to clear lenses. If you can find it in your heart to trust the light not to deceive you, then you can run with all the speed of human limbs and for the first time feel the sound of the wind whistling in the ears.

Babylon

2005-03-04T11:21:00.000-06:00

The goat's head is brought to Babylon;
Death follows behind, staring at the twisted flesh.
The mouth gapes awry, goat-lips smeared with paste
Below the bestial nose which sniffs the blood
Carried along in the smooth air.

Here is the intersection, the place of bone
Rotted by drought and the years of flesh. Here
The place where gnats and flies lose hope.
The dry bone among the lilies, found even
Between the planted crocus.

The goat's head twists its smile, lips churn
In death. The dry air, air sweet and fetid, moves
By the mouth, stirs the saliva. The goat speaks.
Does the goat speak? The throated voice cracks,
And bids them eat.

The Unchaste Land

2005-02-28T16:16:00.000-06:00

March is the cruelest month, breeding
Red shirts and blue, mixing
Hope and enchantment, stirring
Dry papers in chill wind.

I would do more, but I feel cheap. The wind was cold today. I haven't felt so cold for almost a month. I wonder if I would appreciate the confident spring day as much if I hadn't spent so much time marching through the wind.

Jean Jacques wipes tears from his eyes

2005-02-26T13:06:00.000-06:00

I suppose I know now how Rousseau must have felt, always writing about children. Where, in those chubby, awkward faces that stare out from our picture albums, do we desktop ponderers find so many keys to life? I don't think it's in those faces, but perhaps it is mixed in with yesterday's mud, underneath the dirty fingernails and tied up in the ratty laces.

Once, when I was seven, I had a competition with my dad to see if I could stay up all night. At about 11:oo I was playing the game Sorry all by myself and enjoying it immensely, when the thought -- I am not making this up -- came into my head, that as an adult, I would no longer enjoy a pleasure such as this gray board and its gaily colored pieces. I wondered what it was that grown-ups actually did enjoy, and I couldn't think of anything. I went to sleep a few minutes afterward and lost the challenge.

Then it was only a fleeting question, one which for some reason has clung to the strands of my memory; now, I see an Ecclesiastes problem: as the capacity for enjoyment increases, so does the demand for something to fill it. For though we wait all of our youth to acquire a taste for wine, we lose in so doing, our love of koolaid. I suppose that in heaven our enjoyment capicity expands to infinity, but always the joy waiting to fill it is greater.

Worn Pavement

2005-02-24T16:51:00.000-06:00

I was walking on a street in the wind today with my head down, and I took notice of the weathered look the pavement below me had acquired. Suddenly memories shot through my head of the days when instead of slacks, my short legs were jammed into straight-cut jeans from the bottom of which poked shoes that were an amalgamation of gray, white and brown.

My cousins had a driveway of the same exhausted texture. We used to bounce five dollar basketballs on it and play underneath the stained rim. In those days, details such as weathered black top and oil stains stood out to me as the signposts of my existence. My day ordered itself around the taste of summer sweat in my mouth. Not now, not when the demands of the mind weigh upon me. These days, detail makes my day, but sometimes I wish it still were my day.