 Wednesday, May 25, 2005
Oh I feel scandalously alive when I write fiction! When I’m onto something! oh beauty to wake up in the morning still pregnant with dreams and birth them in the journal. Maybe even figure out what they mean. (I'm tempted to buy that dream decoder book on booksforcatholics.com). Hope entitles one to the feeling that things can be glorious tomorrow, and what is a new day but a fresh chance, writ in the heavn's by the return of the sun? I hunger at odd times to read “Worthy is the Lamb” and at other times the idea leaves me flat. I want to write beautiful, holy things, like more of the story of Nuala. Oh the joy of Ireland, of unknown lands! I see a glimmer of the refreshment Tolkien must’ve felt in writing of MiddleEarth. Vacation looms and I hope it isn’t dissipative. I want to be a holy rest, to write great stuff, to grow spiritually. Most of all I don’t want it to be a teenage lustland, a sort of “On the Road” only the road is the strip in front of our villa. Meanwhile Friday is our annual Memorial Day camp trip with the inlaws, which aught not nonplus me because it’s a 3-day weekend one week before a vacation week. There couldn’t be better timing. (0) comments • • • • • Friday, May 20, 2005
Time goes by so much faster as we age that it makes the seasons much more temporal. When I was young, winter and summer seemed experientially more or less permanent fixtures. So there was no need to gather up and treasure a warm day in May, for there were plenty more where that came from, nor any need to cling to a warm October day. It’s odd how the concept of the seasons changes over the years in that way. I read somewhere that one of the reasons this person moved south was they were tired of having to go through the whole preparation, mental and otherwise, of winter every year. And winter becomes more rigorous as I age, which is as inexplicable as food becoming more important (when I was a kid, the thought of sitting down to dinner at a restaurant when you could play tag or basketball seemed as foreign as copulation). So now I can’t hear the dulcet tones of “Roll Out the Barrell” without thinking of the cherished Oktoberfests, there in the crisp late Sept air, when we bravely face the winter and try to pretend its not going to happen with the help of happy music and German beer. Oktoberfests have become so seasonally-defined that even hearing the music in the spring seems wrong, like giving a funeral sermon at a wedding. I'm wary about the experience of my elders. Since I enjoy eating at restaurants now, I'm hip to the fact that it's likely their experiences and reactions to life will become mine. So I'm not pleased that they almost uniformly loathe winter more as they age. That lucky Billy Luse. (0) comments • • • • • I’m always looking for the correct balance to things, as if the secret to life is finding the right combination of reading, prayer, study, work, drink, poetry, non-fiction, etc. I rarely error too much on any given side of things, though I’m not positive I would know it. The grand mistake of my teens and twenties was to mistake survival as the only good. The paradigm was my first responsibility was to survive, and survival was predicated on some minimum daily requirement of pleasure. (I was far too influenced by Sol Gordon’s statement that “If we want to grow up, and not old, we should be able to intensely enjoy at least the number of things equal to our age.”) But now of course it must first be to serve God, on whom the responsibility of my survival lies.As someone with a practical bent, I’ve always looked at life in utilitarian terms: something to be endured and survived. As an eight-year old I was asking how to make it to Heaven as if it there were a ten-point plan instead of a matter of purblind trust in Christ. “Safety first” has to be the great enemy of Christianity. When told about dying poor in Africa it seemed nonsensical to own anything that didn’t sustain life; how could one own a television when it might be sold for $50 and feed a family in Africa for a month? That might sound radical but it’s actually completely utilitarian and practical: it is common sense that if you have a television and someone in Africa doesn't have food, you trade your television so that they could have food. The ideal in this case is the practical, and there’s the rub. This leads, of course, to great tension. (5) comments • • • • • Monday, May 09, 2005
Marriage means having to say you're sorry when you don't know exactly what you've done wrong. I've found that a general obsequiousness works best in the long run.Went to a niece's 18th birthday party last night. L. looks embarrassment when S. hugs her and I marvel at how most of the outlaws follow a familiar pattern: cold, non-huggers, independent souls who are attracted to a family that is hugging, warm, and fiercely dependent. (3) comments • • • • • Friday, May 06, 2005
I quit my job after 17 years (3,621 work days) on the day I realized I still had exactly 3,621 more work days left to go. The fact was too staggering to bear for a mere mortal. Other than my boss and co-workers and the nature of the work itself, I liked Orange Corporation. I liked the food at cafeteria, liked the hours, liked the credit union rates. It was 2:48pm on a Friday when I made the life-altering decision. It was easy. I was surprised at how easy! I double-clicked on the “Word” icon on my desktop and a blank note popped up at my command. I typed the following double-spaced: “Effective two weeks hence, April 24th at 5:00pm, I proclaim my liberation from Orange Corp. After 730 meetings, 4,804 cups of stale coffee and a string of bosses who made the Marquis De Sade look like a hale fellow well-met, I am ready to call it quits.” I dated it and slipped it under my bosses keyboard, near a Post-it note that said cryptically, “follow-up on new Follow-Up strategy”. The notion of freedom was intoxicating and heady. The spring mornings leading up to the 24th felt pregnant with possibility. At work I was the Dead Man Walking, seeming alive but soon to be cut off from everyone’s consciousness. But at home I was Alive Man Waking. Instead of listening to news and pontificating on what was wrong with the world, I was listening to old Statler’s Brothers tapes and eating cinnamon toast and Captain Crunch. I even made some French Toast which I hadn’t done since sick days during high school. That last morning I drove to work it was freakishly warm and sunny. I rolled down the windows of the Mustang and sang “School’s Out For Summer” at the top of my lungs. Though I quit Orange, I could not afford to retire completely. For the same reason adults dress up in costumes and become someone else at Halloween parties, I decided to change careers completely. I bought a pair of jean overalls I found at a surplus store and picked up some motor oil at 7-11 and smeared it all over my clothes. I let my face gain the bristly consistency of a 3-day beard. I was ready then. Ready for my interview with “Kreiger Auto Repair” in a small town off the outskirts of Columbus. “What ‘sperience you got in car repair?” he asked gruffly after motioning to sit down on a chair that showed some of its stuffing. “I have owned cars for nearly 20 years (I paused as I let that sink in) and I have sucessfully opened the hoods even of cars where it is tough to find the latch. I have also changed the occasional tire, put on the spare. I’ve been expert at diagnosing and correcting deficient levels of gasoline – I would say that is my specialty because few people are better at judging how much gas they have left than I.” “You’ll need training...” (0) comments • • • • • It's not widely known that Hitler didn't commit suicide but escaped to the spas of Baden-Baden where he taught German as a second language to American ex-pats.I lived their briefly in the '60s, attracted by the nearby Black Forest (which had fascinated me from my youth because of its depiction in Disney's "Snow White"). I was there also because of a family rumor that my great-grandmother had emigrated from Baden-Baden around 1880. I wanted to find ancestors and distant cousins to see how the family tree branched in the Old Country, to try and discover how geography affected our psychic and spiritual landscapes. I also wanted to know why it wasn't just called Baden. I sat in on one of Hitler's classes on a tip from a friend who'd already been there awhile; I sat in back fearfully, expecting an explosion of rage at some point, perhaps over a split infinitive. I reminded myself the camps were no longer in use. It didn't take him long to mention his past. "And yes I wanted the north countries too. Which countries are those? Does anyone know?" One girl raised her hand. "Schveeden?" "Ja! Yeah." "Norway," I said. "Auf Deutsch!" Hitler hadn't aged well and seemed a pathetic figure. He also didn't seem repentant. He boasted of taking countries as if they were fraternity pranks of a misspent youth. The deaths of so many people - did he not realize what he had done, or would that knowledge have been too much to take? "Don't you feel responsibility for the millions killed?" "I feel responsibility for teaching you German." The banality of evil. (0) comments • • • • • I’ve written previously of my new cubical mate who is fond of making loud noises to clear his nose. The problem is I begin to anticipate. I get antsy if it’s been three minutes without a clearing. I want him to get it over with so that I can resume task.My wife says there’s an Indian at her work who does the same thing so I’m beginning to assume it’s a cultural difference. I’m wishing, natch, that the cultural difference was something of a quieter variety. I miss the privacy of my old cube. It was so dead late in the day that I felt sufficiently bold to change into my workout clothes there. Saved me at least a minute or two of time. (0) comments • • • • • |
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Desperately Seeking Retirement      |
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