Sodom And Gomorrah

Question

Am I the only one who saw a ball of fire hurtling through the sky tonight over Syracuse?

Shows, Shows, Shows

Over the course of the past week and a half, had the good fortune of seeing The Joy Formidable, The Dillinger Escape Plan, Ribs, Team Spirit, The Primrose Path, and Royal Thunder.  Two shows.  Same venue (Upstate Concert Hall, a smallish club outside of Albany).  Five of the six I'd never seen before (for Dillinger, it was my seventh time).  Four I'd never heard of (all but the two headliners, Joy Formidable and Dillinger).  All were decent.  Some were very, very good.  All were fantastic.  If you ever need to see a guitarist playing upside down while hanging by his knees from the rafters over the stage in a club, you really should make it to a Dillinger Escape Plan show.  If you want to hear a cute blonde swear sweetly in a British accent, check out The Joy Formidable.

Anyway, here's what people sounded like:


Sound isn't so great, but you can see the side of my head!!!

You get better sound in the disturbing video for their newest single...






Old Joy Formidable...

And I was just super impressed by Royal Thunder... (Found some Team Spirit videos... but you don't want to see them. They were a blast live... but maybe a little much...)


*****

Out of curiosity, I made an alphabetized list of the bands I've gone to see over the years.   I left out any cover bands, just included original artists or bands doing a whole new spin on covers (Electric Chick Magnets, United Bootie Foundation).  Listed people only once, regardless of how often I've seen them (and many I've seen multiple times-- Candiria 10 or 11, Dillinger Escape Plan 7, Ani Difranco 7, Tool 7, Fear Factory 3, and so on and on).  And of course, there are a few I've forgotten, or whose names I never caught.  Most of those I can still picture, can still remember, just the name escapes me. 

I came up with 320.

Agnostic Front
Amanda Rogers
American Headcharge
American Standard
Angel Dust
Ani Difranco
Animals As Leaders
Another Victim
Anti-Flag
Aquarium Rescue Unit
As I Lay Dying
Ascension
Ashley Cox
Atreyu
Attitude
Aztec Two Step
Bane
Banner
Bedouins
Bela Fleck and the Flecktones
Beyond the Embrace
Big Business
Bigwig
Biohazard
Birthright
Black Francis
Black Sheep Squadron
Blood Has Been Shed
Blood Stands Still
Bloodlet
Bolt
Boy Hits Car
Boy Sets Fire
Branch Manager
Brand New
Brick By Brick
Bright Eyes
Brother's Keeper
Building On Fire
Burnt By The Sun
Buzz
Candiria
Candlebox
Carry On
Catharsis
Children of Bodom
Chosen Ones
Cinderella
Clutch
Cold Sweat
Comeback Kid
Comes With The Fall
Conehead Buddha
Converge
Cooter Stew
Crash Palace
Creepjoint
Cut Throat
Damnation AD
Darling Vendetta
Day In The Life
Death Cab For Cutie
Deftones
DeGarmo and Key
Despair
Devil Doesn't Exist
Devilmaycare
Diecast
Dillinger Escape Plan
Dion
DNR
Doctor Pocket
Downset
Dracula Jones
Dream Theater
Drowning Room
Dusty Pascale
Dying Breed
Earth Crisis
Ed Gein
Eddie Money
Eighteen Visions
Elad Love Affair
Electric Chick Magnets
Element 101
Eleven
Embrace Today
Endicott
Endless Hallway
Engineer
Envy
Esmerelda
Eudora
Every Time I Die
Eye V
Fake Problems
Fall of Troy
Fantomas
Fear Factory
Feeding Affliction
Feist
Figure Four
Final Rites
Final Word
Foghat
Found Dead Hanging
Franz Ferdinand
Freya
From Autumn To Ashes
Fugazi
Full Blown Chaos
Gadflys
Garcia Band
Geoff Moore and the Distance
Get Up Kids
Ghoul
Gizmatli
God Forbid
Gorilla Biscuits
Gothic Opera
Great White
Guardrail
Gwar
Hammel On Trial
Hate Machine
Hatebreed
Hed (PE)
Held Under
Helmet
High On Fire
Himsa
His Band
Homesick For Space
Hoods
How We Are
I Am Idaho
IDMA
If Hope Dies
In Reason Rotten
Incubus
Indigo Girls
Intronaut
Iron And Wine
James
Jamie Notarthomas
Janet Drive
Jeff Jones
Jeremy Wallace Trio
Jerry Cantrell
Jo Mama and the Funk Daddies
Jonestown
Joshua
Joy Formidable
Juliana Theory
Kamikaze Hearts
Kayo Dot
Kilgore
Killswitch Engage
King Dump
Korn
Lacuna Coil
Lamb of God
Last Nationale
Limp Bizkit
Little Big Jam
LMX
Locked In A Vacancy
Long Since Forgotten
Longwave
Los Blancos
Love Is Red
Low Anthem
Mad At Gravity
Madball
Mandate of Heaven
Marley Brothers
Martha Dumptruck Massacre
Martin Sexton
Mastodon
Maudlin of the Well
Max Zero
Meat Loaf
Mellow Paws
Melvins
Meshuggah
Michael Franti and Spearhead
Michael Vincent Project
Mighty Mighty Bosstones
Minor Times
Misfits
Missy Higgins
Modern Life Is War
Monster Doggy Style
Most Precious Blood
Mountain Goats
Mouth of the Architect
Mr. Bungle
Mung
Municipal Waste
Murder By Death
Murderer's Row
Murphy's Law
My Sister's Machine
Mylon LeFevre and Broken Heart
Naj One
Negative Seaven
Nero
Nevermore
Nine Ball
Ninja Gun
No Idols
No One
Nora
Normandy
Oda Khai the Burning River
One Black Voice
One To Face
Open Eliot
Opeth
Orange 9mm
Out To Win
Path of Resistance
Patti Costas Band
Pearl Jam
Perfect Murder
Phil Cody Band
Poulain
Praecox
Premonitions of War
Primrose Path
Primus
Promise
Pryapism
Purified In Blood
Puya
Queensryche
Quicksand
Rammstein
Rancid
Red Herring
Red Hot Chili Peppers
Red Tide
Reid Paley
Remembering Never
Ribs
Rise Against
Rob Cassels Band
Rocking Horse Winner
Royal Thunder
Rush
Rusty Doves
Samantha Crain
Sarah Lee Band
Saving Throw
Scarlet
Scarlet Ending
Sekhou Sundiata
Sense Field
Shadows Fall
Shai Hulud
Shockwave
Shrinking Violets
Sick Of It All
Since By Man
Sixteen Volt
Skinless
Slackjaw
Slayer
Sleep Station
Sleeping
Slick Shoes
Slipknot
Smokey Robinson
Snake The Cross The Crown
Snediker
Snoop Doggy Dog
Soilwork
Sonic Youth
Soulfly
Soundgarden
Spineshank
Static X
Stillsuit
Strapping Young Lad
Strife
Stryper
Suffocation
Superchunk
Suspended In Dusk
System of a Down
Tad
Team Spirit
Tegan and Sarah
Terror
Terry Talbot
The End
This Afternoon
Thursday
Thy Will Be Done
Tin Fed
Tomahawk
Tool
Tricky
Trivium
Turmoil
Twelve Tribes
Ultraspank
Ulu
Undying
Unearth
Unholy
United Bootie Foundation
Violent Femmes
Vision of Disorder
Walls of Jericho
White Heart
Whitesnake
Word As A Virus
Zao

Road Dog Divas

I bolded bands that went above and beyond, who I've seen give an exceptional performance.

And I added Road Dog Divas out of alphabetical order because I forgot them till the end.  Forgot them, even though they did one of the best shows I've ever seen and recorded what is perhaps my favorite album of all time.

The Perks Of Being A Wallflower

That movie just took my heart out, gave it a long, slow look, and then crushed it.

That was quite unexpected.  I was expecting a modern-day John Hughes experience with Hermione in the Molly Ringwold role. 

Instead I got human suffering, despair, and that glimmer of hope that makes you sniffle and sigh and (in a moment here) curl up in a ball under the covers facing down the dark wonder of life.

Damn. 

Whose idea was this for a Friday night?

Fyodor

Sometimes I get intimidated by books.

It's as if I feel I'm not "worthy," somehow not ready.  I put it off and put it off and put it off.

Tonight, though, I'm going for it.

I've got an hour till bed time, and I've been procrastinating long enough.

I'm going into the living room, and I'm starting Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment.

Working Titles

I have a scrap of paper in my office at home, next to a pile of notebooks and a big box of binder clips, where I jot down titles.

Working titles.

For posts that I don't have the chance, right that moment, to write.  A word or two to remind me of something I want, for that moment, urgently to say, but that I can't get to, that I don't have time for.  Sometimes I end up crossing them out.  The urgency fades, the idea blands, I forget about it.  Other times, hey, it's gold, and I eventually get there, I eventually find the time to work the thoughts through.

And so I have this list sitting next to me right now, sitting next to me on this day that I don't have to go to the office, don't have to go to work, have all the time in the world.  I have a list with "Manny's" and "Classic Girl" and "Image Problem" and "Without Wax."  With "Liberals Gone Wild" and "Conservatives Gone Wild" and "Manifesto" and "Two Strangers."

A list of working titles, and all the time in the world.

But today, in spite of all the time I say it, there's nothing to say.

I look at a screen or a page, and any words I could put there, anything I could offer, is meaningless.  Is nothing.

The day after an 8 year old boy is torn to pieces for watching his father cross the finish line, anything I might have to say about anything at all is meaningless.

On the day after that little boy's little sister loses her leg for watching her father cross the finish line, anything I might have to say about anything at all is nothing.  Is bullshit.

There aren't words.

There aren't ways to say it, there is nothing to fill that space, to give meaning, to put events in a box, with a lid, something we can point to, something we can pull out and say "I understand."

There's no way at all to say it.

My New Suit

Working in Syracuse today, got done with a meeting a little bit early this morning.  And let me tell you... it was a disaster of a meeting.  A video conference, statewide, with an almost unbelievable series of technical difficulties, human errors, bad calls, and so on.  Just a comical, SNL-style disaster.

But it got done early, and I was downtown, and my car was more than a block away, and I hadn't yet had my morning (decaf) coffee, and but God was it a beautiful day, just perfect, sunny weather.

So I went for a walk.

I went for a long walk, looking for a coffee shop, and finally found one.  And I bought my decaf soy latte, and I walked back to my car, went to lunch, eventually wandered into another coffee shop closer to home to do some work on a contract.  Sitting now, looking out this big, gorgeous window at this big, gorgeous day, still enchanted, still just reveling in it.

On that walk, though.

On that walk, I walked through some parts of downtown that I've walked through often enough.

But today I was wearing a suit.

I've been classing things up lately.  Classing me up.  At work.  Only there.

I've always been... casual.  I'm the boss, sure, and I have plans for the future that involve being the boss of whoever is doing my current job, and so on and so forth, but I've always been pretty casual.  Not hoodie and baggie shorts casual, but definitely comfortable shoes, a pair of jeans, untucked shirt casual.

About a month ago, during all that budget cut nonsense, I found myself suddenly in a room with a television camera for a news story, and I thought, geez, this would probably look better if I'd been wearing a tie.

Since that day, I've been a shirt and tie guy.  All grown-up style.

I've been a shirt and tie guy, and I went to the very formal men's store and spent an obscene amount of money on a few new suits (I'd lost enough weight that my one and only fairly old suit was starting to look a little clownish on me).

I've been a shirt and tie guy who maybe once a week or so is a full-on suit guy.

Today, suit guy.

This morning, I walked around downtown, in places where I've walked often before, looking for a coffee shop, and I caught  my reflection, wearing the black suit and dark purple shirt and nifty tie (and looking pretty damn handsome, I don't mind saying), and it occurred to me that, right there, in that neighborhood, I was one of the only white people on the sidewalk, which is fine and normal, but in addition to that, I was definitely the only person wearing a suit and tie.  Maybe, the only person on that block right then owning a suit and tie.

And I thought, as I interpreted a couple of glances cast my way, "what do these people think of me?"  I thought, "do they think I'm privileged?  do they think that I think that I'm better than them?"  As I gripped my $5.50 cup of fancy coffee on the way back to my car, passing the same crowd, I thought, "do they think I'm one of those people?  Am I one of those people?"  "They don't know," I thought, "that when I first hung out in this neighborhood, many years ago, I was hungry.  They don't know that I got on the bus right there on an empty stomach, rode the buses talking to old black bluesmen, that that store over there is where we bought Mad Dog 20/20 to knock ourselves into oblivion, that I worked part time in a kitchen and had nothing left over for groceries and that I owned only a few shirts and a couple pairs of shorts; no suits."

I thought, "do they even know that I'm punk rock?  Hardcore?  Do they know that I'm wearing a suit because I'm a do-gooder who wants to look the part when I'm trying to get money into the budget to help people who've got nothing?"  I thought, "yeah, sure, I like my expensive coffee... but to be fair, I bought fancy coffee when I was shit-poor and couldn't afford it, too, so it's really not a sign of my privilege."

And then I thought, "why is no one asking me for change?"  I've never walked more than a couple of blocks downtown without at least a few people asking me for change.  In my jeans, in my hoodie, in an untucked shirt, I'm always prepared to hand out change, to hand out small bills.  I consider it a toll of sorts.

But no one asked me for a cent.

And I remembered my buddy Anthony and me, downtown on our way to a show one day, shaved heads and tattoos and feeling very, very hardcore, and, having handed out some cigarettes and small bills to people who'd asked, Anthony becoming very pissed off and making a comment toward one of those guys in a suit, one of the many who stepped past the people asking for change as if they were scum, as if they were beneath them, as if they didn't hear.  I remember the looks on the faces, and the sense of injustice, the accusation in Anthony's voice-- "you can't spare a dime for anybody?"

And I thought, unmolested, walking with my expensive coffee and my comfortable suit, looking awful dapper and handsome and mmm-mmm, I thought, "do they think I'll just walk by?  Is nobody asking, because they're seeing me the way me and Anthony saw those guys, and they figure it's not worth the time?"

Me And The Boy

Some days, we're arch-rivals.  Other days,  best friends.

Today, best friends. 

(A couple hours in Strong Hearts, a walk in the rain, some vegan dinner and vegan cake, a good game of Memory, a chapter from Prince Caspian, and much talk about pretty young ladies.  A very good day.)

*****

Also-- if you're looking for a good collection of short stories to read, you could do a lot worse than Nathan Englander's What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank.

 

Happy Birthday, Shakyamuni

The boy and I went to the Zen Center for Buddha's birthday today.  Thought it was just going to be a small Dharma Kids gathering (Buddhist Sunday school, basically).  Turned out to be a great party.  Lots of people, most of whom I'd never met before.  Lots and lots and lots of chanting (we like the chanting).  Kids acting out the birthday scene like a Methodist Christmas Eve nativity.  Ritual "bathing" of the baby Buddha (more chanting, some water, some kneeling).  A fantastic 100% vegetarian (and mostly vegan) potluck.  And then lots of happy kids playing in the back yard, in the woods, by the water.  Lots and lots and lots of giggling.  Guys with shaved heads and brown robes talking about last night's S.U. game.  And weather that makes you just want to give your heart to life, to fall in love with it completely.

We got to bring home the clay Buddha we made a few weeks back to help decorate for the party.  Neither Sam nor I know much about clay, but we like it. 

The Spirit Of The Disciplines

There was a moment, in the few weeks before or after my 18th birthday, when my faith in God just stopped being.  It was a long time coming, it was a work in progress, begun when I was a junior in high school with nervous questions, vague concerns.  But there was a moment, when walking around as a freshman on the campus of my conservative evangelical college, I stopped being someone that you could call a "Christian."  There was a deciding blow that day, and it had a whole lot to do with a fierce preacher and the concept of Hell.  That was the one blow too many, the proverbial straw that broke the back.  But there was more to it.  There was more before that, more that followed.

One factor in my angry fall from faith (and it was angry for a while, and it was a fall at first) finds its best expression in a Nietzsche quote:

"They would have to sing better songs," he wrote, "to make me believe in their Redeemer; his disciples would have to look more redeemed!"

The Christians I knew then-- many of the Christians I know now-- didn't sing good songs.  And they certainly didn't strike me as redeemed.

It occurred to me then, as a kid trying to figure it out, as a kid struggling to hang on to what I had once been sure must be true, that a large proportion of the people of faith I associated with every day were not especially nice people.  Were not especially good people.  Were good or bad or nasty or self-loathing or lovable or broken or happy or joyful in exactly the same proportions as all the non-Christians I ran into every day.  They were the same sort of mix.  I could tell their faiths by their professions, or perhaps by their abstinence from this or that tabooed behavior (Christians at my school didn't dance), but I could not tell who was given to Christ and who was of the world by the joy in their lives, by their happiness, by their sense of peace.  The faith that supposedly brought peace and joy and happiness, the faith that transformed lives, that redeemed... didn't.  Didn't in any way I could see then.

It occurred to me then-- angry, casting about, trying to find a guiding star-- that if this thing was true, if God was really, truly saving people and working in their lives, then something ought to be... different.  Better.  That while no Christian would necessarily be perfect and that not necessarily all Christians would be saints, that there would at least be some noticeable difference, that I should find that the saved and redeemed and joyous were at least somewhat more likely to be nice, to be loving, to be happy.

It wasn't the case.  And so it became hard to believe.

If you tell me again and again that this is an apple tree, and year after year I see no apples, I'm going to start to wonder if maybe you're telling me stories.  It's got to bear fruit...

And then there was this, even then, but it grew more as the years went on:

It struck me that faith, for so many of the people around me, was little more than some sort of "intellectual assent."  Yes, yes, there was the following of certain rules.  Most of the time, at least.  And the guilt that came from breaking the rules when one simply couldn't help it.  But even those few rules-- no watching naughty movies, no touching ladies' parts before the holy vows, and absolutely, positively no being gay-- were only the extra, the add-ons; they weren't the real stuff.  The real stuff was all grace, apart from works.  And grace was all about intellectual assent, about believing (with the mind, as much as one might swear it was all about heart and soul) a certain set of facts, a certain cluster of statements-- "I believe that Jesus was God and he died for me and I accept him and so now I will go to Heaven."  Done.  Now you're a believer.

A mind thing, a repeating out loud or in the heart a certain set of magic words, struck me (continues to strike me) as not being much of a faith.  Saying the words and promising not to touch lady parts or be gay strikes me as not much of an improvement.  Strikes me as empty.  Is maybe connected to that not bearing fruit deal.

I occurred to me over the years that one flaw with the Christian faith I saw practiced around me was that it was all mental, never bodily.  It was a faith that had plenty of rules about the body, but one that did not engage the body.

There have been many times, even recently, where I've found myself drawn to Catholicism.  I've told people, in a seriousness that they've taken for a joke, that I'm drawn to the Catholic Church not for the doctrine, not for their concept of God, but for the candles.  For the kneeling.  For the confessional.  For the statues and incense.  For the full engagement of body and senses.  Because I'm more than mind, more than mental assent.  I'm body and taste and touch and all the rest.  If I'm going to worship, how can I worship with any less than all of me and expect to be fulfilled, expect it to have meaning?

And so, of course, over the years I was drawn first to Taoism and then, more seriously, to Buddhism. 

Buddhism has just about nothing to do with mental assent.  There are plenty of ideas.  There are plenty of things to think about.  But it's a practice more than a belief.  It's the body on a cushion, the hands in a mudra.  It's the breathing in and out.  It's the awareness of body.  It's, for me, abstinence from certain behaviors for very specific reasons.  It's incense and candles and walking meditation and chanting and bells and a full engagement of all the bits and pieces and various parts of me. 

For me, that works.  For me, that delivers a whole lot of what was missing in the faith I grew up in.

*****

In my junior year of college, as a Philosophy and Theology student, (was it possibly my senior year?  with all my dropping out and starting over it can be hard to keep track), I read a fantastic book called The Spirit of the Disciplines, by Dallas Willard.  I don't remember what class it was for.  I don't remember any discussions around it.  But for the past 19 years or so, it has kept a spot on my bookshelf, and one paragraph has kept a place in my memory.

I opened that book recently.  I found that paragraph.  And while it said exactly what I remembered it saying, I found that my memory had served me wrong.  I hadn't read The Spirit of the Disciplines.  Not much of it, anyway.  The first 40 pages or so were heavily scribbled on, underlined.  The rest had clearly never been turned.  This past week I decided to sit with the book that I remembered finding so inspiring, work through the whole thing, see what it had to say that I'd obviously missed the first time around.

Dallas Willard, an evangelical Christian, has a lot to say about the Christian faith.

Turns out, he thinks it's far too focused on mental assent.  It has forgotten the essential need for faith to bodily.

And because of that, the Redeemer's follows aren't looking very redeemed.

He says it without the bitterness that was coursing through the 19 year old me who wanted to scream those very same things.  He says it with love.  But he says it as well with frustration, with exasperation, with a stern sort of passion.

I found that inspiring paragraph-- a string of paragraphs, really-- beginning on page 3.  Right up front.  Underlined.  Bracketed.

"Think of certain young people," Willard writes, "who idolize an outstanding baseball player.  They want nothing so much as to pitch or run or hit as well as their idol.  So what do they do?  When they are playing in a baseball game, they all try to behave exactly as their favorite baseball star does.  The star is well known for sliding head first into bases, so the teenagers do too.  The star holds his bat above his head, so the teenagers do too.  These young people try anything and everything their idol does, hoping to be like him..."

He goes on:

"We know that they won't succeed if all they do is try to be like him in the game-- no matter how gifted they may be in their own way.  And we all understand why.  The star performer himself didn't achieve his excellence by trying to behave in a certain way only during the game.  Instead, he chose an overall life of preparation of mind and body, pouring all his energies into that total preparation, to provide a foundation for the body's automatic responses and strength for his conscious efforts during the game...

"A successful performance at a moment of crisis rests largely and essentially upon the depths of a self wisely and rigorously prepared in the totality of its being-- mind and body."

And:

"A baseball player who expects to excel in the game without adequate exercise of his body is no more ridiculous than the Christian who hopes to be able to act in the manner of Christ when put to the test without the appropriate exercise in godly living."

And from there Willard goes on to set up a sort of "theology of the disciplines."

The problem, he explains, is that Christians want to be Christ-like and following Christ without actually being Christ-like or following Christ.  "We intend what is right," he says, "but we avoid the life that would make it reality."  Believers want to be Christ-like when faced with temptation.  To be Christ-like in that moral pinch.  When faced with great need, they want to be good and generous and loving.  When faced with temptation, they want to be strong and chaste and faithful.  But generosity doesn't spring from a life that is focused day to day on the self.  Chastity doesn't spring from a life in which we allow ourselves daily to pursue all desires.

We're missing the disciplines.  We're missing the hard, bodily work of following Christ, he says.

Christ said "follow me," and where did he go from there?  Not to a couch, not to a lawn chair.  He went to the desert.  He went to solitude, silence, fasting, meditation.  Paul, who followed him, likewise spent his days in fasting, meditation, prayer, solitude, hard work for others.

Paul, and certainly Jesus, were, most would agree, more Christ-like by their very natures than Christians today.  They had, most would agree, a certain advantage over the average Christian on the modern street, in that one of them was the son of God and the other had been blinded by the spirit and received all kinds of wild, groovy truths straight from the mouth of God.  Each had a thing going that most of us don't quite get today.

And yet how did even these guys practice their faith?  Hard work.  Fasting.  Prayer.  Discipline.

"Obedience," to God's will, even for Jesus, Willard writes, "was something to be learned.  Certainly we cannot reasonably hope to do his deeds without adopting his form of life.  And we cannot adopt his form of life without engaging in his disciplines-- maybe even more than he did and surely adding others demanded by our much more troubled condition."

If it was hard work for Jesus, hard work for Paul, Willard wonders, how in Hell do we think it should be a cake walk for us?  "Sure," Christians say.  "Paul needed to deny the flesh and practice really hard to get this following God thing down.  But me, I don't need that.  I've got it.  I've figured it out in 15 minutes a day, and I never have to miss a meal."

And then, when faced with a challenge, when faced with the challenge to love a difficult neighbor or to avoid an alluring temptation, today's Christians fail.  Fail with the same frequency as the unredeemed.  Fail to treat others with kindness and love.  Fail to forgive.  Fail to say no to the neighbor's wife or the extra drink or the "it's not dishonest if I just change the books this one time."  Fail to find the joy and goodness in their lives.

They don't sing good songs, and they don't look very redeemed.

Willard's book-- and this is a beautiful, inspiring book; I don't do it justice here-- makes sense to me.

A couple of years ago I went to see Noah Levine speak.  

I'm a bit of a Noah Levine "fan," you could say.

Levine was a troubled street punk runaway, doing drugs, getting in fights, generally causing all kinds of trouble, watching his friends die, till he ended up in prison at a young, young age. 

While in a cell, he discovered meditation.  When he got out, after a few more mishaps, he pursued Buddhism, and now is a pretty renowned teacher and writer.  (His books Dharma Punx, Against the Stream, and The Heart of the Revolution are all very much worth reading.)  He found a certain degree of transformation and "enlightenment," without giving up his good taste in music and punk rock cred.

When he was hear speaking to a Buddhist group in Syracuse, someone asked him "what is the most important thing you've learned from meditation?"

He thought for a moment, and then gave an answer.  A powerful, perfect, beautiful answer, one that I reflect on often (daily).

"I learned in meditation that I don't have to do something just because I want to."

That, for me, is amazing.  That is what it is all about.

Not having to do something just because you want to.

Being able to say no, at will, even to yourself.

That's discipline. 

And though Willard would say that true discipline only comes through the grace of Christ, Levine's sentence is what Willard's book is really all about.

Or you could say it like Paul said it to the Corinthians.

"All things are lawful for me, but not all things are beneficial.  All things are lawful for me, but I will not be dominated by anything."

That's good stuff, stuff that all of us, regardless of our faith, regardless of the nuances of our belief, our concept of God, should take to heart.








 

Virus With Shoes

I'm in a "virus with shoes" sort of mode these days.

It's an old Bill Hicks line. 

Bill Hicks was a genius.  A funny genius.  A funny genius more than a little disillusioned with his fellow man.

I wish he was still here to guide us.  To comfort us.

I am, recently, more than just a little disillusioned with my fellow man.

It goes on and on and on and on.

Recently, it goes like this:

Just a couple of miles down the road from here, a guy grabs a mother and her daughter as they come out of gymnastics class at the mall.  He carjacks them, then binds the mother and makes her watch while he rapes her ten year old daughter.  Then he lets the daughter watch as he stabs the mother to death.

The girl lived.  She got away. 

Or it goes like this:

Two teens walk up to a woman pushing her 13 month old in a stroller in Georgia.  They say give us some money or we'll shoot your baby.  The woman has no money.  So they kill the baby.

It goes on and on and on and on and on.  The suffering, the degradation, the lack of human decency.  In big, headline grabbing ways.  In the day to day ugliness that we've come to accept as the way things are.

It goes like this:

It's hard sometimes to do that "love those that despise you" or "hate never overcame hate" or "love the sinner not the sin" thing.  It's hard to not feel the anger and the bitterness and the sheer weighty, dull, aching disappointment.

People suck, and that's my contention. I can prove it on a scratch paper and pen. Give me a fucking Etch-a-sketch, I'll do it in three minutes. The proof, the fact, the factorum. I'll show my work, case closed. I'm tired of this back-slapping "Aren't humanity neat?" bullshit. We're a virus with shoes, okay? That's all we are.

Amen.

Today, that sounds about right.

Governor Cuomo Is Basically A Piece Of Shit

I'm sure there are nicer ways to express that.  Right at this moment I don't feel like looking for one.

**************


Governor Cuomo,

Thank you ever so much for the heart warming middle finger you gave to people with disabilities in this state, and to those who work their asses off supporting them.  $350
"rebate" to purchase the votes of every middle class family with a child, even those who earn $300K per year... and $180 million cut from programs supporting (non-voting) people with developmental disabilities.

You're a true humanitarian, and your service to your fellow man will be remembered forever. 

Thanks.


**************

Projected cost of that rebate/vote purchasing program?

$350,000,000.00

I'd like to wrap mine into a nice little tube and shove it straight up...

But anyway.

Many thanks are due-- sincerely, this time-- to legislators who fought very hard against this, who held up the budget, who were by all accounts passionate and sincere and decent.  Dave Valesky and Al Stirpe come to mind.  Others as well.