ideas

A little blood never hurt anyone...

Not that I'm the sort of person who TiVos sit coms or anything. Ok, well, not the sort of person who records many sit coms. Two, and first-run only, in my defense. Still, coming home late and not quite ready to sleep, 20 minutes and a little laughing out loud (as I am clearly that sort of person, the one you think may be a plant at the late night comedy club, the one who whose abs are worked out almost entirely by giggling) is a perfect fit.

I suppose I can't say life imitates art - since surely not even the writers of Scrubs think of it as quite art - but, still, at almost the exact time that the show would have been playing live, I was living a parallel embarrassment to the main character. Character Elliot is fairly high strung, quite the basketcase of nervous energy and pathology. On last week's episode, she was prepping for a job interview which she couldn't possibly go on because she got so tense at the last one that her nose starting bleeding and she promptly sneezed bloody gore all over the interviewer. Of course the same thing happens at the next interview, in the way of logical conclusions on 20-minute TV shows.

Meanwhile in a restaurant in Grandview, I was meeting a old friend I hadn't seen since college and his wife, who I had never met. For some reason, these things make me insanely jumpy. There's a scene in the Wedding Date where the female lead (not quite up to googling for the names) is standing on her tip toes at the mirror to put her make-up on. The male lead asks her if the tip toes are an old habit from ballet lessons or just from a lifetime of walking on eggshells. Female leads says she's never taken ballet lessons and kicks the door shut. That's how I feel on such occasions - unaccountably nervous from not much more than habit.

So, two glasses of wine later, my nose starts to bleed everywhere. 'Had to make some nonsense excuse to go to the bathroom twice in 10 minutes and still ended up getting blood all over my linen napkin. In the perfect parallel, I would have sneezed it all over the wife, but, lucky I didn't - she was very charming.

Lot of words for a nose bleed story, huh?

Aging

Perhaps most frequently marked by the catch in my lower back that seems to show up only after an excellent night's sleep and makes it impossible for me to sit up for a few seconds. Clearly, my structural integrity is failing me.

City of Zion, IL

Saw in the news today the tragedy in Zion. Two little girls brutally murdered in the woods. I know this strange little town, represented them at the agency I worked at in Chicago.

I coached the smalltown school teacher come part-time mayor on presenting and Q&A. He is, of course, rising admirably to the occasion. I kind of knew he would. He’s one of those people you get a feeling about – a true believer whose resolve cannot be dampened, a smart man who really could make the big dream happen. Someone who could be as easily seen reading a children’s story as he could be giving a moving civic address.

What a town to try to rescue, though. The highly religious, working class community is something of a haven for trash. Home to a closed nuclear power plant (with plenty of live rods laying around just between two public beaches), at least two landfills and several trash processing plants of various types, the city literally stinks. Even the championship golf course is built on a landfill – and smells a bit like grazing pastures in the hot sun. Their downtown has been decimated by the same prevailing trends that decimated most small towns’ main streets. And, profoundly sick people flock to the cancer institute in their borders.

It is not a heartening place and yet it is impossible not to get caught up in the promise of it. Back in 2001 or so, we managed a kick-off event for the mayor’s new economic development campaign. Fascinating, right? A bunch of PowerPoints and developers show-boating.

Nearly 300 people attended, standing room only – and, there were a number of standing ovations during the mayor’s very moving speech (um, ok, that was self serving). From the campy (a Bee’s on parade exhibit downtown) to the truly successful (new downtown streetscapes, housing developments, businesses), the mayor and his city have honestly achieved economic development by little other than sheer force of will.

They talk about themselves as a city on the hill – a community different from their neighbors. And, really, turning off the highway, just past the XXX dancers and the XXX video, toward the nuclear power museum or the local landfill, you wouldn’t expect to find people so passionate about making the place they live, a place they’d love to live. When everyone else would move away, these people are digging in. Quite an interesting place.

My contrarian soul

I want God, I want poetry,
I want danger, I want freedom,
I want goodness, I want sin.
__Aldous Huxley

Losing Religion

Sometimes naked
Sometimes mad
Now the scholar
Now the fool
Thus they appear on earth:
The free men

__Hindu verse

J once said that college robs students of their religion. Liberal campuses - urban in the way of communities that actively reject traditional expectations - and faculty systematically attack the presumptions of absolutes, demonstrate the similarity of religions over time and generally breakdown the compacts that we tacitly accept in year after year of prayer before dinner and Sunday school.

I’ve been thinking a lot about that lately – about spirituality vs religion, about the theocracy movement that is gaining frightening speed, about how easy it is to have everything you think you know changed by the company you keep.

I grew up in a religious family. Sure at the time that we knew what was right – or at least what was wrong. My father still reads the Bible every day, leads Bible studies, travels to Romania and India to carry out His work. My extended family includes ministers, missionaries, evangelicals – some of whom speak about all that happens – good or bad – as God’s will.

As a teenager, I was sure. I gave sermons on youth Sundays at church, I sat on committees, penned moving speeches to raise money, championed moral absolutes.

And, I guess you could say that I lost that in college. Or, you could say that I recognized my fallibility.

It is the way of organized religion to lay claim to Right – to be so sure that their personal beliefs are Truth that they will wage war to propegate them (literally as in the crusades; figuratively as in the legion of morally-inspireds graduating from “Christian” law schools charged with forcing religious principles into all aspects of public life).

The only thing I now know for sure, is that I know nothing for sure. Like many independent souls, I have struggled over the years with what I believe on any issue – from religion to civic responsibility.

I look no farther than the evening news to see how divorced my reality is from the rest of the world. Go as far as Angola where fear and ignorance of modern medicine led to the spread of a plague and the stoning of health workers who came to help. Go as close as downtown where homeless, some plagued by mental or physical illness, wander the streets begging for something as simple as a cup of coffee. 

To be a Christian, some say, is to believe what cannot be proved, to make that leap of faith. I would argue that for many it’s much simpler than that – it’s being taught something from birth, making it as real as mathematics or any other lesson. Or it could be like any other drug, a reality that feels better than everything else. Or, the simple human want for the inclusion of community. For as many people who truly know God, I would guess there are at least of equal number who call themselves Christian for much more human reasons.

So, college … Didn’t take away my personal belief – something I have and will struggle with. Rather, it taught me that my beliefs are just that – beliefs: a theory, a world-view shaped profoundly by experience, a preference for how to answer enduring questions. I emerged a secularist – wanting to defend the independence of public spaces. To make moral choices personal choices. To enable continued exploration of what truly is Right, if such a thing can even exist.

And, so I lost my Religion – because organized religion requires absolutes – from molding laws based on derived Oughts to recruiting undecideds.  And in losing it, I gained a powerful understanding of faith, of trust and of privacy.

Mother’s Day

Happy Mother’s Day, Mom and Toni.

I used to have a little routine one night a week that I found extremely relaxing – holing up in my room to read vacuous women’s magazines, sip wine and generally block out the rest of the world. On one such misspent evening, I came across one of those reader write-in conceits where motivated souls compete for the best answer to a vaguely trite question in order to win, say, a basket of shampoos.

Three pages were filled with the alternately heartfelt and merely curious answers to “what is the most important thing your mother ever taught you?” Now it’s one thing to ponder such a question and another entirely to publicly reply with a reference to “Wind Beneath My Wings,” and, yet, I read most of them. Everything from perfectly applying lipstick to surviving grief to cultivating the elixir of self-esteem.

How to decide... Is it what you used most? What changed you most at that time? What spins the kindest tale?

Disappointingly, perhaps, the most important thing my mother taught me is rather banal, not the sort of thing that inspires, but perhaps, still, some of the best advice I know.

Stop eating when you’re full.

If I recall correctly, advice first given to her by her father. And, oddly, a guiding principle that can do most anything from keep a person thin to teach satisfaction to avoiding being owned by the things once owned by you. In a country where so many of us are born armed to the teeth with privilege, recognizing what is enough is a rare lesson indeed.

For this, warm chocolate chip cookies and homemade Halloween costumes – Happy Mother’s Day.

Took the veil and left the world

But when the self speaks to the self, who is speaking? - the entombed soul, the spirit driven in, in, in to the central catacomb; the self that took the veil and left the world - a coward perhaps, yet somehow beautiful, as it flits with its lantern restlessly up and down the dark corridors.

__Virginia Woolf