My Wayward Mind

It's been a long time since I've published a blog. You'll notice I said "published" which is to say that I've written quite a few drafts but lost myself somewhere in the middle of each one and could bring myself to finish any of them. I don't know where my mind has been. As is typical for me the desire to write is there but the inspiration, or muse, or whatever you want to call it is somewhere else. So that's my excuse, enough of that.

I've been reading a lot of other peoples blogs today and all of the themes of the recent posts seem to be related, if indirectly, in my view. Mr. Oles has been writing about problems with the American government and how they are related to the deeper issue of the problems with the national, if not global, mindset. Another blog I read had a video of a George Carlin set which, while making light of the issue, was a commentary on how our society has gotten to the point where it revolves almost entirely around the acquisition, accumulation, and protection of stuff. The third blog I read was my big brother's most recent entry in which he describes a lesson from a friend one evening in the art, philosophy, and practice of calligraphy.

I find that, in my mind, the philosophy behind the practice of calligraphy is almost completely at odds with the philosophy, if it can be labeled as such, behind the accumulation of stuff. While the latter can be most basically described as a mutated instinct of survival, the former can be described as a form of meditation, or a path to it. It is a practice of peace, simplicity, tranquility, and a lesson in patience as well as humility. I think that it is possible that the panacea that Mr. Oles is looking, or maybe just hoping, for is an enormous advancement in the mindset of humanity as a whole, a facet of which can be represented, in a very small way, by the philosophy experienced recently by Luke.

I believe that this advancement is coming, one way or another, for it seems to be nothing more than a step on the evolutionary path for humanity if it is to survive. How soon is anyones guess. It is a thing which shows its' face every now and then in small ways. There are, and always have been, small sects of people looking and striving for it. Attached to this large mass of awareness are tendrils of ideas which lead to the whole and are in evidence in such forms as the green movement, religious and racial acceptance, efforts to find an answer to overpopulation, and the myriad forms of meditation. These manifestations can only be the beginnings of a much larger movement but their acceptance at this stage will be necessary before their manifestations at the next will become even remotely possible.

These a but a few facets, tiny and imperfect, of a whole that is for us, as of yet, out of reach. It is a goal. It is a key of unfathomable complication, organic and changing, to a lock even more complicated that we must hope to pick in order to open the door to perception of a better world on the other side. We're not there yet. We might not even be close. There are a great many striving for it and a great many standing in the way. It is the ultimate game. It is the game where everything in existence has an effect and plays a role.

Here's to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Even for those who aren't governed based on this piece of paper.

Emotion and Art

Emotions are a curious thing. I spend a lot of time thinking about them and the way they affect me and the way they affect other people. I think that maybe I do this a little more than most people do, or maybe it's just that they affect me in different ways. I know that my imagination plays a very large role in this. It is one of the reasons I read as much as I do, it is the main reason I don't participate much in the genre of Horror, and I believe it is why I keep myself a bit more distant than most from society as a whole. I do not enjoy my emotions being toyed with and I have a hard time letting things go in the way that most people seem to be able to. Aside from all of this, I find emotion to be one of the most interesting things about people as a whole and I think it takes a special understanding of it to be a good writer or artist of any sort.

For instance, I find that the violin effects me in a way that most instruments do not. Listening to a skilled violinist can, and often does, evoke emotions in me that run the gamut from joyful to melancholy, nervous to relaxed, and anything in between. But how does someone do that with words? There are a million different ways to describe the slow pull of a bow across strings fingered in such a way that the tones, clean and sharp, hang in the air, permeating everything they touch and causing the world itself to vibrate in time while pulling like gravity on hearts and souls and stretching them to the point where they could, and probably would, break at any moment. Yet they don't, because just before that moment comes the bow lifts, the tone fades, and the listeners let go of the breath of air that up until this moment they didn't realize they were holding. There are infinite ways to say this, but each way subtly changes the perception on the other end.

This is what connects every form of art. It is, in my opinion, the reason for the existence of art. It is how we connect ourselves to everything else. A song, a word, a smell, a taste and countless other experiences great and small can instantly connect you to or remind you of other experiences, visions, or dreams. I think, however, that while some people perceive these connections only occasionally, others recognize them so frequently that it is almost a different form of breathing. I think that these people, the minority among the masses, are the ones that we call artists or mystics. I think they are the people who find the connections in unexpected places, who make the connections that others wouldn't, and who use the mediums that they feel the most affinity with to share those perceptions with anyone who will listen.

Art is an incredibly difficult thing to learn. It is very similar to, and sometimes the same as, trying to find God. There are millions of people willing, sometimes chomping at the bit, to tell you what they think the answer is or where the path lies, but none of them can actually tell you the right way. It's not that they are necessarily wrong, although I think that most people that will tell you they have the answer have really just stopped looking, its just that there are probably as many answers as there are people and probably as many paths as stars in the sky. Whatever Being you believe in, it is probably not one that can fit into a book, a box, a church, a world, or a galaxy. That's the beauty of the search. That's the beauty of art.

How interesting would life be if someone really did have all the answers, or even The Answer? Or even better, if someone did and was willing to tell it to you, would you believe them?

Again, With the Books

I didn't actually check but I think it's been awhile since I wrote about my books. There have been some recent developments that I'm very excited about and so I thought I'd share them with you all.

I am currently reading another Charles de Lint called "Spirits in the Wires". I like it but I will say that I don't think it's his best. It may just be me, though, because I don't really like to read first person narrative and there's a lot of it in this book. Maybe it's just because one of the main characters annoys me. But, aside from all of that, I still think it's very good. I love the way Charles' mind works, and I am very impressed with the little niche that he's created for himself. I just finished another of his books called "The Onion Girl" and I did like that one a lot. My one complaint about that one is that there's not enough Joe. In all honesty, if you read enough of Charles' books, I think you will eventually agree that there's never enough Joe. He intrigues me.

After I have finished this one, however, I think I am gonna have to take a break from Charles for awhile, even though I just ordered six more of his books. I am very excited about that. Did you know that if you go to the "Used and Out of Print" section of the B&N website you can get hardbacks, good as new, for two or three dollars? I got all six of those books for a total of 38 dollars and the shipping was three quarters of the cost. I find that this discovery is not good for my addiction. I don't think Mandi's very excited about it either.

I just had to go out and buy a new bookshelf to store my treasures. This one is the biggest one yet. In my defense it isn't full yet, but it is half way full and all of the books are ones that I either haven't read or haven't finished yet. Of the ones that I'm in the middle of, there are a few on Zen, one on Tao, "Still Life with Woodpecker", "The Monkey Wrench Gang", "Life of Pi", a Neal Stephenson book that I'll never finish, and a dozen others that I've gotten distracted from for various reasons. At some point I'll come back to them. It's all about being in the right mood.

There are authors that I need to get back to and ones that I know I want to read but haven't gotten to yet. There are books I've already read but that I want to buy because they were favorites when I was a kid. Speaking of which, did you know that the lady who wrote "A Wrinkle in Time" died a few weeks ago? I had forgotten about that book until I heard the report on NPR. I remember thinking it was a really good book and I can still see a couple of scenes in my mind, but I'd like to get that so I can remember what it was all about. I have started to use my niece as an excuse to go through the kids section of the bookstores. I never finished my collection of "The Boxcar Children". I loved those growing up. I'd also like to get a nice set of the Laura Ingalls-Wilder books. I liked those a lot too. I need a copy of "The Red Pony". I also need to get the rest of the books in "The Secret of the Indian" series. I'd also like to try to find a copy of "The Yearling" and see if I can get through it now. I never could when I was in elementary school but I tried a number of times. The list goes on and on.

I've never read the "Lonesome Dove" series, but I've always wanted too. Also, when I was younger, I used to read Louis L'Amour books from time to time. I remember liking those, but there are so damn many of them that I always talk myself out of getting back into them. The man was prolific, to say the least. If anyone knows of some good westerns by anyone other than McMurtry or L'Amour please let me know. I'll get to these two on my own though. For that matter, any book or author that anyone would like to suggest or trade for one of mine please let me know. I've been working very hard recently at loosening my iron grip on the books I've read and enjoyed. But just so you know in advance, there are some that I just can't loan out. Also, if you do decide you'd like to trade (not permanently of course) please understand that it could be a good long while before I read and return the book I borrow. I do however have a shelf reserved for the books that I've borrowed from other people so that I don't forget that they are not mine.

So that's the blog on books. I hope you enjoyed it, I certainly did. Writing about stuff like this always makes me think of Levar Burton. I miss that guy. Then I think about Star Trek: The Next Generation, and then I remember that the series comes out on DVD tomorrow! Woo Hoo!

Say it with me, don't be shy, you know you want to...

"These are the voyagers of the star ship Enterprise, whose mission is to boldly go where no man has gone before, to seek out new life and new civilizations....."

As always, thanks for reading.

P.S. I like a good sea adventure story every now and then if anyone has any book suggestions in that genre.

I'm Back...a little

So it's been a long time since I wrote a blog, I know, but the writing juices have just not been flowing recently. The desire is still there, as it always is, but there just seems to be some kind of block between the desire and the act. I hate it when it gets this way. It really drives me a little crazy.

In an effort to see if maybe I can fix this dilemma I am going back to the White Mountains this weekend with my friend Ronnie. Most of you have not met him, but he's a really good guy that's been a friend at the coffeehouse for six or seven years now. Anyway, I'm hoping some wilderness time will help me to get past this block that I seem to have going on.

Sometimes everything just seems to die on the page, and sometimes it feels like murder. It can become a very depressing thing if it happens enough times in a row. I know that it is a common sentiment among writers and I continue to feel that I have probably just not been doing it long enough to have my own process worked out to the point that I can write something good, but I'm not going to get there any faster if I have to keep stopping for months on end.

The point being, Mother Nature helps. She always does. I'm not sure how it works but it just seems that every three to six months I get this pull somewhere between my stomach and chest and I just know that it's time to go. I know that it's been too long. There's a presence out there that you just can't feel here. I've grown up hearing stories about Native American spirit quests, where they would go wandering alone in the wilderness for days at a time, and the more I think about it the more I believe that all of us Anglos of European descent have just been to far disconnected for too many centuries to even know what we're missing, or what we've forgotten. When you're out there, if you really open yourself to it, you can tell that there is a lot more going on than what you can learn from books, or what's on the nature channel.

It's an experience I think that everyone needs, and that few people experience. Regardless of all of that "This is What's Wrong with People in General" theorizing, I'm headed out this afternoon and I'm hoping to find some of that mystic voodoo. Who knows, maybe it'll help me become a great writer someday. Right now I'd settle for a little less angst throughout the process.

Literary Validity

What is it that gives validity to a single book or literature as a whole? What is it that makes a book good, worth reading, worth talking about, or worth studying? I have my beliefs, I'll make my stand here, but what led me to write this blog was a debate I had last night with an old friend who just got a Masters in Literature and who is planning to get a PhD in the same area. He is also a writer.

He and his contemporaries believe that it is them, the educated professors and critics, that decide all of those things I mentioned above. It is their belief that they are the only people qualified to decide these things. He likened it to being a medical doctor, a comparison with which I have issues. The belief of these people is that only a small number of books in the genre of General Fiction or Nonfiction have any literary validity at all, and that genres such as Science Fiction and Fantasy have none. The statement made was that these genres "lack craft". This comes from a person who has read half of one book out of either the Sci-Fi or Fantasy genres. He read half of one book, and based on that dismissed thousands of others as not worth reading. This is a person who is going to be teaching kids how to write and what to read. This is a person who says that all of his contemporaries feel the same way. This bothers me a great deal. These people took their years of study and instead of understanding that they had been given the keys to try to understand why a particular piece of literature has validity, they believe that it gives them the right to decide which forms of literature are valid. If you'll look into it you'll find that most of the books they deem valid are written by them, which is a thing that I won't go into, but I feel that it says a lot. What I will go into is why I feel that these people are wrong, lost, and completely missing the point of literature in general. This is made particularly blatant by the fact that most books on writing, written by the people that do the publishing, say to forget most of the things you learned in literature class because it only makes you write badly. I'm sure the egos hate that.

First, literature is about what moves the masses. If a book has the power to move people, in great numbers or small, it is valid. It may not be perfect, no book is, but it is valid. It is the people who do the reading, even us sad little uneducated people, that lend validity to writing. It is the people in the stories that attract the readers. It is not where those people are standing, what era those people are living in, or which genre the book is classified as. The people in the stories are what make the story what it is. It still needs plot, structure, and a nice flow, but it is the people that bring all those things together. It is the willingness of the masses to read these stories and whether or not they enjoy them that makes them valid. Stories teach us about ourselves. They help us to understand who we are, why we do certain things, and why we enjoy certain things. Validity does not decrease as the level of enjoyment rises. Tragedy and drama does not equal validity. Pain, suffering, violence, hatred, angst, and all those other unhappy emotions do not by themselves mean a story is good. It is the willingness of the people to read a story that gives the aficionados a job. They might disagree, but I can prove it.

The two main places where the egos get paid to work are the University classroom and the critic's office. We'll start with the first. What makes kids going into college want to write? It was every book they read growing up, every step of the way, every year, that brought them to that class. That makes every one of those books and every one of those authors valid. That means that it was these things that gave the professor the ability to teach. It means that every one of those books influenced that young aspiring author in some way, and helped them to find their identity as a writer. That is validity. Furthermore, most of the books that the egos deem valid can only begin to be understood at the college level. In most cases it takes people a lifetime of experience to be able to read these books and understand them. It takes a lot of reading to get to that level of understanding. As a professor, you cannot dismiss everything that brought the bright young minds to you as invalid, because that would make you invalid. The end result cannot even begin to matter without every step that brought it into being. The critics? They get even less credit than the professors. They get paid to read and criticize books. Not the books that the professors deem valid, and not the books that they deem valid, but the books that the people are reading, passing around to each other, and lending their own validity to. I'll admit that the critics and jump-start a book's life or an author's career but they do not make them valid. If the people to not identify with the books that the critic is reviewing, then the critic will not have a job for long. That's the reality.

You cannot understand people until you can read what the people are reading and understand why they are reading it. This is the disadvantage of denying whole genres and all of the people that read them. The readers understand the books. They identify with the stories. To say the books are not valid is to say the people are not valid. This is not what the egos mean. What they mean is that they think most people are stupid. They think that only they can understand what is truly a good story, or at the very least this is what they tell themselves and each other. What they forget is that all of these people they look down their noses at were writing and telling stories long before the professors and critics ever came into existence. They can look down their noses all they want, but it is us that gives them validity, not the other way around. All of the dismissing without understanding that they do does not make us look stupid, it makes them look stupid. Knowledge and education, the valid kind, comes with understanding. You cannot deny what you haven't tried to understand and call yourself an expert.

There is validity in every type of writing that effects even one person on an emotional level. Until the educators understand that, they will never be able to pump out the good writers that they like to pretend they pump out. They don't understand. They're not even trying very hard. It's not about craft, criticism, or class. It is, and always has been, about people.

Prove me wrong.

For all the Writers

A fella has just contacted me about a new website he has started up that is designed like a forum and is intended to be a sort of collaborative effort for authors and writers. Anyone interested please check it out and join up if you'd like. I think it's a good idea and I think it could be very interesting. We'll see. It's new, almost brand new, so there are not very many members which kind of appeals to me. But if it's going to work then we need quite a few more people. Here's the address. www.feelswrite.com I hope some of you will find it exciting enough to join.

White Mountains in Review

Why have we never heard of this place? How is it that we don't know anyone that's ever been here before? These questions and many more we were continually asking each other throughout the whole trip. It was amazing. The area is incredible. It's only a 4 1/2 hour drive from Lubbock to the trailhead. We saw only one couple up on the mountain after we got out of the range of the dayhikers. The weather was perfect. The views were stunning. I really just can't believe that we've never heard of this area before. We'll be going back often I think.









This was only Mandi's second backpacking trip ever but she handled it like a pro. She even outdid me by not passing out for a few minutes Saturday morning. That part is still a mystery. One minute I was working on making coffee, the next minute Ryan kicked me to wake me back up. That was a new experience for me. Our best guess is maybe I stood up too fast, cause the blood which was already low on oxygen to flee the brain and the brain decided to shut down for a minute or two. Fun game, but no harm no foul. Aside from that the trip was just a walk through the Firs, Aspens, alpine meadows, and ridgline trails. It was a beautiful hike. Luke, you've really gotta check this place out. Shame on you for not being the one to tell me about it. You're supposed to be the big brother. It's your job to find these places and tell me about them. So anyway, after my episode Saturday morning we hiked up this beautiful little valley you see to your left and then climbed to to that ridge to reach the crest trail. Which has views like the one to the right for, I've read, its whole 22 mile stretch. One day maybe we'll find out for sure. That one's on the list thought. White Mountain Wilderness 22 mile Crest Trail. Now all we need to do is find the time. We walked along the crest trail for the rest of the day while being followed the whole way by a rather nasty looking storm which is pretty typical for that time of day in the mountains. As it turned out though the storm barely missed us and ended up pounding Riudoso with a few inches of hail. We found a pretty swank campsite that night that had a fire ring, some flat ground for the tents, and even an old metal horse trough that we used as a bench. You can see the beginnings of that storm in the picture to the left. After our second night we woke up and spend a very short half day hiking back down to the car and by noon we had it packed up, our clothes changed, and we were on our way to Riudoso for some much needed real food. That always seems to be the most pleasurable part about coming off the mountain. Ryan had a burger you wouldn't believe, I had enchiladas and tacos, and Mandi had a huge burrito. After all of that food we decided that we still weren't done. Mandi, as resourceful as she is, overheard directions to an ice cream shop a little down the street from our restaurant and so we went to check it out. We went to the wrong one without knowing it, but accidentally got the best five dollar banana split I've ever had. This is another place we will return to. That was our trip. We're looking forward to the next one.

Our Community is Global

I'm working through ideas, theories maybe, or at the very least something that seems to sit constantly at the back of my mind like an itch that just won't go away. Different aspects of it seem to come out in this blog for different reasons depending on the day. Sometimes anger is the reason. Sometimes it's hope. Sometimes love, frustration, misunderstanding, indifference, or maybe any other emotion. I think that this thing, this idea that I have trouble putting into words, is at the root of who I am and what I believe. I'm still working on those last two things but every day I feel like I'm a little closer to finding out. It feels to me like this truth, this incredible revelation, that's just out of reach like it's buried deep in solid rock and all I have is a tiny little hammer to chip away at what's covering it up. It feels like something I need.

The other day I had a conversation with a man about politics, media, immigration, and eventually the whole world. Today I listened to a friend who is a police officer tell a story about a teenage girl who has seen more evil in her life than most people could even comprehend. At first it seemed a little strange that the one conversation reminded me of the other but I think that there is quite a bit in common between the two situations. The man I talked to, at the end of our conversation, said that when he was done he had all sorts of big ideas like me but eventually he thinks I'll basically give up on those and settle on smaller issues. I think that there are a lot of people like him that feel the same way but that sounds to me like giving up. It seems like saying "I'm not going to worry about the big stuff anymore, I'll just deal with the things that effect me directly." It really is a perfect example of what I was telling him I believed and why I believe it.

The world is a big place, but there's only one of them. In size it remains the same but in the ways we effect each other it gets smaller every day, bit by bit. What I write on here is read in various countries on various continents, the things we buy effect different people all over the world, and the values we pursue effect everyone else too. The man I talked to was upset that there might be a change in the immigration laws that would allow people south of the border to come into the country legally to work. He is against this. It also makes him angry that they come in illegally. When I asked him what he would do if he was in their situation he said he would go through the system and get in to the states legally. When I asked him what if the system didn't work he said basically "tough shit". This strikes me as one of the bigger problems in the world. On an individual level we worry more about what we're gonna get out of a situation and we are only interested in it if it is going to give us more than we had before. This is an understandable desire. No matter what we have, or how much, we typically want more. There seem to be few exceptions to this rule. We do this on a global level as well. Our political dealings, our foreign policy, and our immigration laws all stem from this idea of "it's mine and you can't have it." We don't like to share.

We have a system set up to deal with people who can't work, people who can't pay for healthcare, people who don't pay their taxes, and various other issues. The system is broken. Instead of trying to fix the system, we are simply deciding not to let any more people into the system. Our companies our shipping jobs out to these other countries so that they can pay lower wages so we can get our stuff cheaper, and the people who are now doing this work are trying desperately to get over hear so that they can get a decent wage for what they are doing. We are basically telling them to stay where they are so that we can screw them over. Then we admonish these other countries for not dealing with their issues well enough to take care of their poor and their sick. Directly or indirectly, we effect this. Our big companies move, fire american workers who then go into the welfare system, hire cheap labor somewhere else, and we cluck our tongues, maybe, and then go buy their product because it's cheaper. We want it cheaper, because we want it. Americans in general seem to have this preconceived notion that we deserve all of this because we were born here and it's just tough luck that everyone else wasn't.

Now we're starting to see that, at least maybe, the Earth can't even take what we are doing to it. We're not trying very hard to stop doing these things. We pay lip service to the idea, and the government is starting to listen a little, but we still go and buy our cheap gas, our new cheap fashionable clothes, and all of the other knick-knacks that we can't live without from companies that are pay peanuts to their employees. I realize I'm generalizing and that not everyone and everything falls into these assessments, but it seems to be the overall theme to the world in general. It is a product of capitalism, but it is skewed by politics and selfishness. I am a big fan of Ayn Rand, but I don't think that this is what she meant by the Virtue of Selfishness. She did not mean take advantage of other people. She did not mean destroy the world in order to make a profit. What she meant was do what you believe in, what you can be proud of, without taking from other people in the process. Create something other people need, that other people can pay for, but don't steal from the livelyhood of other people in order to do it.

I don't mean that we should stop building business in foreign countries. We should pay a wage the would afford them a comparable lifestyle to that which they would have doing the same work in the US. I bet that would shake things up a bit. What I told the man that I was talking to was that as our effect on the world and the people that live on it grows larger, so must our view. It can no longer be about what it good for Americans, it must be about what is good for the whole world. This is and idea that every country must embrace. Stop hating for the sake of hating, taking because we can, and buying because it's cheap, but instead buying for the idea of where the money is going, what is being done with it, and whether the thing that we are buying is something we need. Is the price fair with regard to the work that went into making the thing. Is the thing we're buying destroying the ecosystem in some way. Will our kids and grandkids have a world that they want to live in, or even are capable of living in. Borders won't mean much if everyone is dying. Neither will the latest fashion trends, how fast your car is, how big your house is, how much money you make, or any of the other things that we think are so important.

The girl that my friend was talking about went through things that most of us never had to, that no one ever should, and that I will not repeat. The part of the story that hit me the hardest was that she still goes to school every day, still makes straight A's, still takes care of her elderly grandmother, and seems to have a spirit that will not be beaten down. How many of us had few problems if any growing up and still did as well as her? How many of us can say that we gave it everything we had even while everyone around us was trying to take it all away? How many of us have earned this lifestyle that we think of as an intrinsic right more than she has? How much have we really earned, and if you think real deeply about it, how much have we just taken? Here's what really gets me. Just because someone can't afford to say no to the amount you're paying doesn't make it a fair price. Just because the governments condone it doesn't make it ok. Just because we can afford to buy it doesn't mean it has value, and just because it is for sale doesn't mean it's not going to take away from someone else's life when you take it home.

This is the only world we have. Enmities end pretty fast when everyone is threatened by the same thing. Maybe they won't. Maybe we'll just start killing to survive, although if we deal with the problems early enough we might be able to avoid it. Just because it could be a long way off doesn't mean it's not something to think about now. Borders, language, and money don't change the fact that we all need the same things to survive, and that every one of us has just as much of a right to that survival as everyone else. There are a lot of different forms of taking, and one of the most common takes place when we buy things that are much cheaper than they should be. I think that we do nothing about these things because we think that the problems are too big, that we can't' do anything to fix them. If you think that, then think about the fact that eventually, if nothing changes, the problems will get so big that we can't fix them. At least not in a civilized way.

What do you think?

P.S. On a lighter note, the White Mountain Backpacking Blog is coming soon.

Back To Nature

Thursday afternoon when we get off work Mandi, Ryan, Ward, and I will be headed to the White Mountain Wilderness for a long awaited backpacking trip. This is an area that none of us have ever packed into before and I'm greatly looking forward to it. This is also the first backpacking trip that we have done in somewhere close to a year. It's long overdue. Other vacations are nice, it's always good to get away, but theres just nothing like being deep in the wilderness, where most people don't ever go, with some of your closest friends. Last year we did a trip with a rather large crew because it was my bachelor party. It was an excellent trip into an incredible wilderness area. We saw almost no other living souls. It took us a day and a half of hiking to get up to this area where you see Ward walking by himself. The view looked much like this in all directions all around us. Aside from us you could see no sign of humanity. It took us another day and a half to get down from this point. There were wild strawberries along the trail for the whole hike. At the end of the first day we camped next to a mountain lake.
To the right is a picture of Ryan on the left and Carter on the right sitting next to the campfire at the first night's campsite. That thing Ryan is holding is his banjo. He carried it, hard case and all, along with his 60 or 70 pound pack for the whole trip. All together he was carrying somewhere around 100 pounds up and down about 3-4 thousand vertical feet for close to 20 miles. It was impressive. It was also nice to have a little banjo at nights after a long day's hike.
Almost a year ago, these seven people were spread out across two states and two countries. It took one of us getting married to bring us all together for this trip. In all honesty though, it took more than that. It took the wilderness. It took mother nature in all her rough and ragged beauty. It took the promise of a veiw never seen, a mountain never climbed, a black storm that might chase us across a high ridgeline, and the knowledge that at any moment she could throw something at us that we weren't expecting. It's always a challenge and there's always something new. Here's to mother nature, the next trip, and all of the trips that came before. I can't wait for the next one to start.

The Things We Do

Why do we do the things that we do? What makes us decide to spend our days on specific tasks instead of others? There are millions of different reasons, I'm sure, but the results are often not what we would expect. It seems like a lot of the things we do, if not almost all of them, revolve around money. Some of us spend our lives trying to make vasts amounts of this thing, this idea, that we call money. Some of us only try to make enough to get by. There are people on every point of this spectrum, but this is not the only thing that guides us. The other main guiding force seems to be happiness. We spend a great majority of our time trying to find a balance between doing what makes us happy and doing what makes money. Some are fortunate enough to get both from the same pusuit. That is the american dream. Some people give up the things that make them happy in order to make more money, and some people give up the money in order to be happier. These are two very different kinds of wealth with two very different kinds of value.

I can spend a day working out all of the numbers, plans, and programs required to build tens of thousands of dollars worth of stone countertops and then later that day spend less than five minutes making a Breve, or a Cappuccino, worth dramatically less and find some very interesting results. One is worth more money, but the other makes me happier. One might last a lifetime while the other might last half an hour, but their values are not necessarily based on time or money. Value seems to be quite unrelated to time and money. Time and money are costs, but value is a more ethereal reward. We value the things that make us happy. We worry about the things that cost us time and money. I have a friend, he writes the blog titled The Whyte Dragon, who just wrote a post very closely related to this idea. In it he talked about why he does the things he does, makes the choices he makes, based on what makes him happy. These ideas are closely related to the ideas contained within Atlas Shrugged by the late, great, Ayn Rand. I highly recomend the book to anyone who hasn't read it.

Our culture, however, seems to revolve more around the money aspect than the happiness aspect. Advertisers have spent vast amounts of money trying to convince us that they are the same thing. Spend your money on this and it will make you happy. They want us to believe that the acquisition of money, and then the spending of it on things, is how we should base our level of happiness. But things don't make us happy. They never have. Think about the things that you buy, aside from the necessities, and try to find even one that, just through the ownership of the thing, makes you happy. We can find happiness in the use of things or in the creation of things, but it is difficult to attribut happiness in just the having of the thing. It is why we get tired of the things we buy. It is why we are always replacing these things with newer and better versions. It is why our economy works the way that it does.

We buy because we think that we should, because everyone else does, and becuase we have gotten into the habit of doing it. We do not save because, as a whole, having the money doesn't make us happy but we think that trading it for goods or services will. But it is not this end result that brings with it the real reward. How different would the world be if, instead of working at a thing in order to make enough money to buy happiness, we found a pursuit that helps in some way but also makes us happy in the process? What if that pursuit could provide us with enough money to live comfortably? I think this is the true meaning behind "I do what I want." Having as many things as the neighbors means very little in the end if you acquired them by doing a thing that you hate to do. In the end, every "thing" ends up in a garage sale or the city dump. There are few exceptions.

Humanity as a whole spends a lot of time complaining about how the leaders of the world are doing a horrible job and how, in the next election, we'll vote someone in who will actually do what we want them to. We are told and assume that the vote is the power. The true power is in the money. We give the money to the businesses to pay for the politicians campaign. We are getting what we paid for. Lobbyists get their money from businesses. Tax money comes from us and from businesses. We have th power. We create the money. We say one the with our votes and quite different things with our money. Money is a means. It cannot buy happiness, but it can help us to change our way of life. With every dollar we spend, we are voting for what we really believe in. The idea is to find out, and to know, what exactly we are paying for. Want to decrease our dependence on oil? Don't buy an SUV. Buy a car that gets the highest possible gas mileage, or ride the bus, or ride a bike. Want big business to stop exporting jobs? Buy locally grown/made products. Want to discourage the big businesses from using sweat shop labor in foreign countries in order to produce their goods? Don't buy things just because they are cheapest.

Phrases like "Quality, not Quantity" and "Made in the USA" used to mean a lot more. You can hear this said almost anywhere. It's not big business that screwed up. It was us. It's doing our shopping at places like Wal-Mart and Target. We all know that politicians and businesses respond best, and most quickly, to money. Take away profits and they'll listen. Take away funding and they'll do an about face. We are more powerful than any government, but we have to hit them where it hurts. We have to get a grip on the thing that is sensative and squeeze until their eyes and ears open. We have to do it as a whole, or at least a majority. We have to take away their toys.

Talk is cheap. Money isn't.

How did we get here?

Sometimes I feel like I see the world very differently from most other people. I think that I've always been a fish out of water is some way. My whole life I've run into people on a daily basis talking about, looking for, or acquiring things that really don't make very much sense to me. I think there are a great many people that feel the same way I do but more often I think the we are greatly outnumbered. Did you know that somewhere between 25 and 35 million people watch American Idol every week? Apparently there are that many people that find this kind of thing entertaining. It sounds to me like 35 million hours wasted.

But this is our culture. Entertainment. If it's not entertaining then, inevitably, it fails. We demand that our news be entertaining which is why we almost never hear the happy stories, but the disturbing or sad stories. It is why our news media spends so much time fabricating, creating, and forcing the news. We demand that our dining experiences be entertaining and so most Americans eat most of their meals in flashy restaurants that all serve the same flashy, and tasteless, food. We spend a huge amount of ours lives working at jobs where we are creating something entertaining for someone else so that we can go out and buy entertaining things from someone else who will then use the money to go buy something entertaining and then we'll all meet at the lake once a month and talk about the new truck that is pulling the new boat. People all over the world are starving, or can't find clean water to drink, or have nowhere warm to sleep.

But don't worry, we have Shrek and Spiderman to take our minds off of it. They only cost a few hundred million dollars to make. They'll only bring in somewhere around a billion dollars before it's all said and done. Oh but before we go see that movie this weekend we should write a letter to our congressman and try to force all these illegals out. We don't want them draining money out of the system. Send them back to Mexico! Why worry about who's going to put the roof on the house, harvest the food from the fields so it can go to our Supermarket, butcher our meat, work in our factories, restaurants, hotels, and pretty much any other industry you can think of? Who's going to do these jobs when they can't get into the country? They will. What we'll do is export all of this work so that we can pay them a fraction of the price and still get our entertaining goods extra cheap. Thanks Wal-Mart!

But they're a burden to the system! But they're stealing American jobs! But we'll have to let them become eligible for all of the things that we get! It's not fair! I don't want to share! Why not. We already have a great many people living on our welfare system. I'm not really convinced that they are a burden to the system. Most of them are just looking for a job that pays well. Don't you think that if these employers could get Americans to do the work then they probably would? I do. It seems a lot simpler than hiring illegals and trying to keep anyone from trying to find out. Why don't they. I can only assume that Americans won't work for what these employers are willing to pay. Why won't they? Because they can only pay so much becuase they have to keep the product cheap becuase if they don't then they won't be able to sell it because wal-mart or target or any of the other discount stores will just buy it from someone else, someone in a foreign country, who can legally pay their employees two dollars a day or something in that ballpark. But hey, at least we saved 15 cents on the clock/radio that matches the shower curtain.

That's exciting because we can use that fifteen cents to fill up the SUV in the parking lot and go to the restaurant before we hit up the movies. It's a good thing we didn't let those foreigners in to earn some of this money that we just can't afford to pay them. We might have had to give up the five dollar bag of popcorn! The real issue is not that we can't afford to let these people into the system but that the system is so flawed that we're afraid to let anyone in if we don't have to. We don't want to fix the system. It's complicated, cumbersome, and expensive. It would take the government years of fighting to make any progress. Their constituents might lose money in the deal. Someone might not be happy. They might not get re-elected. So no, we're not going to try to fix welfare, medicare, health insurance, education, social security, the tax code, or any of those other things. We just won't let anyone else in to play. It's our ball, and we're going take it and go home.

We will, however, spend lots of time and money fighting over whether global warming is or is not happenning. If we decide that it is happenning then we will change our tactics and fight about whether or not we caused it or if it's a naturally occurring thing. Then we'll fight about whether we should start to do something about it or if we should wait until everyone else agrees to do it too and then jump on board but only do the bare minimum. We're running out of fresh water, clean air, climate stability, and the ability to depend on things being the same next year as they are this year. Have no fear though. We're fighting about it. It could be just a clever trick being pulled by the democrats and, well, millions of other people all over the world. Mother nature might be playing a trick on us. We'll just wait it out. We'll do something if we absolutely have to. Meanwhile, we'll complain about the price of gas going up, how our SUV is so expensive to fill up, how our airline tickets are so rediculously expensive, and how it's a scam that we have to pay so much money for this excess that we call the American Dream. We'll try to ignore the fact that since we're going to pay the higher rates anyway the damage we are doing is only going to get worse. We'll jump on board and try to fix the problem when we have no other choice though.

At least we have Shrek. Where would we be without our wonderful cartoons. The CGI makes them look so real now! By the way, if you didn't catch the big news of the day, Paula Abdul broke her nose this weekend when she fell down while trying to avoid stepping on her Chihuahua. But don't worry! She will still appear on the season finale of American Idol. Yep, our news media really does have it's thumb right on the pulse of what Americans want to know. Or maybe it's on our throats. I guess we'll just have to wait and see.

Life is interesting. Looking back at what has happened and what may happen in the future is an exciting thing but it can be pretty nerve racking too. I've spent a lot of time thinking about this lately and I've learned quite a bit about myself. Almost three years ago I learned that I was not meant to be single as long as I had planned to be and that I was actively letting the woman of my dreams slip through my fingers. I was lucky enough to figure that out before it was too late and now I've been married for over eight months to Mandi, whom I love desperately. I'm an incredibly fortunate person. Mandi has recently found a career path that she's excited about and that she's going to get a Master's degree in over the next few years. I'm thrilled that she's found this thing that she feels passionately about. It's a very exciting time for us. It has, however, helped me to realize a number of things about what I am doing.

All of my life I have studied and played at things that I found interesting and exciting. I took art classes throughout school before I got into college. I always loved art. I grew up doing things in the outdoors with Boy Scouts and found that not only is it something I am passionate about, it is a thing through which I met some of my best friends. In college I studied things like Anthropology, Archaeology, Economic Theory, Literature, Music Heritage, and Jazz History. All of these things I found extremely interesting and all of them were unrelated to my degree plan which I very seldom found interesting. I knew before I graduated that I didn't want a job in Accounting, which is what I got my degree in. Since I left school I've found that most of my time goes towards things that I'm good at, that I'm qualified for, and that I don't have a lot of interest for. When school ended so did the extra courses, the extra areas of study that kept me excited and interested.

I do a lot of reading, I always have, but my time for reading has seriously diminished since I got out of school. I try to continue to learn and to look for new things that spark my interest. These interests of mine are numerous and a lot of them are related to things that I studied while still in school. Instead of looking into these areas for possible careers I stuck to things that I thought would be safe, things that would ensure me a job upon graduation at a good pay rate. This is my comfort zone. I have never strayed from it. I spend all of my time thinking about the things that could go wrong and in what ways I can avoid the vast majority of these situations and this keeps me in my comfort zone. I have learned that most of the things I have done to supply myself with this level of comfort are not very compatible with my personality. I have scared myself into doing things that I do not enjoy doing.

To a certain extent we all do things that we would rather not do in order to supply ourselves and our family with a certain level of comfort and safety. I understand this very well. There is nothing wrong with this. What I think is that right now I am on a track that will eventually lead to me having to do a thing that I do not enjoy simply becuase I no longer have the time or the resources to change that path. Right now I still have the time and resources. What I do not have yet is an idea of what this new direction should be. I have never spent enough time on anything else to know what else I would like to be doing. I have found some good jumping off points to help me figure this out though.

The main thing that I have found is that the part of my personality that desires comfort has for a very long time been winning out over the part that desires inspiration, creativity, and adventure. I've spent all of this time trying to fill that hole with little bits and pieces when I need much more than that. I've been treading water. Now I'm looking for a place to swim to, because I'm getting tired.

I just saw a headline on the news which is good because I was looking for something to write about. Here's what it said.

Muslim Fundamentalism: Main Obstacle to World Peace?

My first thought was...what? This sounds a lot like "Trees: Planning a Conspiracy to Kill Us All?" or any other combination of one small contingent of beings being responsible for the actions of lots and lots of others. My next thought is that maybe, just maybe, they popped that up just for a talking point. Maybe they put that question up just to raise a little contention or a little debate. Maybe. But I don't think that this is the case. I think that there are actually people that believe this sort of thing. I think that there are lots of people that think all of the evil in the world stems from one tiny group ruining it for the rest of us. If they had said just "Fundamentalism" then maybe we'd have something to talk about. I don't think that fundamentalism causes all of the wars and killing throughout the world, but in certain circumstances is does encourage people to stop thinking and to close their mind to other possibilities. I also don't think that Muslims are the root of all evil. I don't think you can assign that kind of blame to any one person or group of people.

Fundamentalism cannot be all bad. It is the belief in a certain set of fundamentals and a following of those fundamental beliefs in order to achieve certain goals. Do all Muslims believe fundamentally in war? Do they all believe in killing everyone with different beliefs? Does any group of people believe exactly the same things? No. People have similar beliefs. People have beliefs based of the same things, but a person's beliefs are also effected by his or her perceptions. Two people can read the same book, or be told the same thing, and come away with with two very different perceptions of the same thing. If two people are told "We are the chosen people of God" one may come away with a feeling of comfort or purity while the other may come away thinking that they should kill everyone else. This is why there is contention in the world. This is why no large group of people ever agrees completely on one thing.

It would be just as accurate to say "Christianity: Main Obstacle to World Peace?" There were centuries where armies conquered and killed in the name of God. At this point in history the Christian Fundamentalists went out and killed large groups of people ostensibly becuase they held different beliefs. Hitler believed that his group of people were better than all the others. He believed that all the others should be killed. However, not everyone that he considered part of that group believed that as well. Belief is a powerful thing. Believing a lie does not make it true, even if millions of other people believe it too. Acting on that belief, or killing for it, does not make it right. Is it right for us to tell Muslims they are wrong? Are the Hindus wrong? Are the Buddhists? What about all of the other religions in the world? Are they all wrong? They don't believe what you do. They don't. Does that make you wrong? It might. Then again, it might not.

The point is this. Never, not ever, will everyone believe the same thing. We will never all agree on what religion is right or wrong, which government is right or wrong, which god is real or false, which savior is true or a lie, or really anything else for that matter. You can't prove that you are right. You can't prove that they are wrong. That's the problem with faith. It takes faith. That doesn't mean you should stop having faith. That doesn't mean you should stop trying to fix the problems with your government. It also doesn't mean that there is not someone who is right. There may be, but even if there is, there is no way to know for sure. Buddha could have been real. Mohammed also could have been real. Jesus might have been real too. They may all have said or meant very different things from what we think. Maybe everything they said was true. Maybe they were all driving at the same point.

My bet is that, fundamentally, people and their need to be right is the main obstacle to world peace. Maybe if we think to ourselves that we will never have exactly the right answer, that we will work our whole lives towards that goal, and that we will keep our minds open to possibilities that we have not yet come across then we will have a much better chance of achieving world peace. It's a nice thought. It also sounds better than "I'm right and you're wrong and lots of other people think so too so I'm just gonna go ahead and kill you since you're obviously a lost cause and you're going to burn in Hell." What an unpleasant way to view the world.

The book is coming soon. It's called "Peace? What's that?"

Belief

The other day I was having a conversation with a friend about many things but at one point touched on religion. A woman at a nearby table overheard us and I suppose that something I said bothered her so a little later when I was sitting alone she asked if she could talk to me for a few minutes. She seemed nice, so I agreed. She started talking to me about religion. More specifically she started talking to me about what she thinks is wrong with what I believe. This seems to happen often. The reason I'm writing about it now is that in this instance I think I noticed at least one of the reasons that it does happen so often.

She called it doubt. She said that in the things I was saying she noticed a lot of doubt. I call it a willingness to question. Regardless of what you call it this seemed to be the main thing that was bothering her. I don't think it would have mattered what particular sect of what particular faith she followed but in this case it was Church on the Rock Christianity. Now I personally believe in Christianity, though she didn't believe me when I told her so, but it is not the whole of what I believe in. It was the starting point for what I believe in. It helped me to get to where I am today. The problem she had was that, in her opinion, if I did not believe specifically in Christianity to the exclusion of all else then I was wrong. That's it. While she told me these things she seemed very worried for me. I've noticed this pretty often too and I've never understood it. I think I do now. I think that the questioning, the searching for a larger truth, what she would call the doubt, scares people like her to death. I think that she needs that specific thing to grasp onto and to believe in wholeheartedly. I think she needs it just as much as I need to be able to look deeper, to look into more than one teaching, to find something a little less in your face and a little more natural.

I believe very strongly in God. I believe very strongly in religion. What I believe, however, bothers a great many people. I don't think religious arguments, fights, and wars will ever end. I don't think people will ever stop killing each other because they believe that they are right and everyone else is wrong. I know that not everyone feels that way about their faith but a great many people do. I'm going to tell you what bothered me the most about what this woman was telling me. She told me, with a terrifying conviction, that she was glad that we are at war in iraq, she wishes that the government would drill for oil in all of the protected areas, she hopes that we destroy this earth soon, she believes that we have no responsibility for what we do to this earth or to the people on it, and she believes that whatever our leaders tell us to do or do themselves is ok because God put them into those positions. She believes all of this because she thinks the faster we screw this world up and kill everyone off the fast Jesus will come. I asked her if she though we should all just nuke each other, cause a holocaust, and she said yes, because it would bring Jesus faster.

I am not afraid to not specifically believe in Christianity. I am not afraid to look at other religions and to see that in many of the most basic ways a great many of them say the same things. I am not afraid to see that every religion I have researched has some very deep truths surrounded by a lot of ceremony, rules, and fear. I am not afraid, and I will not believe in anything out of fear. I do not believe that God, who created everything, would tie himself down into such a tiny, complicated, conflicted, and tortuous little box. I don't think he would want such a small section of humanity to have the benefit of growing up under his grace and all the rest of the "unsaved" in this world are just unlucky in that they were born somewhere else. I believe that it is about love. I do not believe that it is about having the right book, or the right leader, or following the right ceremony. I don't mean that these are not ways to find God. I think that most of them are. I just don't think, like most of them will tell you, that they are the only way.

God is in all of us from the moment we are brought into this world until the moment we leave it. Anyone can find God. Look into yourself, look into the natural world around you. God is everywhere. I don't believe he can be confined in the ways that we have always tried to confine him. I think it helps many people to understand if He can be made a little smaller. I believe that everyone has the right to believe what they wish to believe. I don't believe that anyone is qualified to tell anyone else that their beliefs are wrong. I think that the refusal to question, the refusal to listen, the refusal to search, to look around, to look deeper, or to see or hear anything outside of the tunnel is fine, but don't tell someone else that they can't. Or shouldn't. Fear is a powerful thing, but I am not afraid. I don't not believe in believing in one faith out of fear that you might be wrong not to. I don't believe that God is that small.

I do believe in Love.

Life is short

If you don't believe that then try reading the thousands of comments that people are leaving on the myspace pages of the students that were killed at Virginia Tech a few days ago. Friends, family, and even stragers have turned what used to be sites dedicated to networking into memorials for these people. It's a stark reminder of how in such a short time a person's life can go from normal to tragic. It's hard to comprehend.

I know that the people in the media feel that they're doing their job, but sometimes it seems like they jump on tragedy with too much enthusiasm and feed on it for too long. They have all the appropriate sad faces and apologetic remarks, but the sadness doesn't seem to carry over to their voices. They are quick to assign blame. They are quick find the angle that brings up the most controversy. That are quick to point out the flaws, the all too human flaws, of those connected with the sad situations. It's hard to listen to. It just seems wrong.

I can't imagine losing a family member so suddenly, so unfairly, to what seems like such an unpredicatable and unfathomable event. I don't think it's a thing that could be imagined by anyone who hasn't experienced it. I think that at a time when the families close to those lost need peace they are instead surrounded by a media frenzy that will not end anytime soon. It's hard to understand why anyone would want to participate in that.

But, then again, who am I to judge. That's not really what I'm trying to do. I don't have all the answers. In fact, I don't have very many at all. I don't really even know how to articulate these things that I'm feeling. I'm sorry to the families that have to deal with lost loved ones not just at Virginia Tech, but every day all over the world. I'm sorry that tv, especially reality tv, has taught the world to feed on other people's emotions no matter what the cost. I'm sorry that privacy, discretion, understanding, and compassion seem to be lost when it comes to ratings and advertising revenue. I'm sorry for the people who's lives are scrutinized and then judged by a mass population who has no right to do either of these things. I'm sorry for every time I've done these things myself.

It's eye opening, however, how much you can learn from someone else's loss. On one of the myspace pages I read, a girl apologized to one of the deceased for not making the time to see him the last time he visited home. It makes me think about all the times I've done similar things out of sheer laziness. It makes me think about all the things I do, and all the things I don't do. It reminds me that there's no excuse for not doing the best I can, no matter what the task. It's a reminder that not everyone gets a chance to try to achieve their dreams. It's a reminder that even needing a reminder is a shame.

No one is perfect. Many of us say that we do the best that we can most of the time. I know that I say it a lot. Things like this make me wonder if I really do. I think about all the people, all over the world, that don't have even a fraction of the opportunity that I do and I wonder what they would think of how much I take advantage of it. I think about the loved ones that I'm surrounded by, and I wonder how many people are so fortunate. I think about all the things that I've said I was going to do and yet I simply didn't. Like everyone else, I have my flaws, but I also have the means to overcome them. I have the ability to do more with my life than I currently do. I have the choice to be a better person.

Life is short. It's easy to talk about that other people are doing wrong with theirs, but it's much harder to confront myself on the things that I am doing wrong. It's even harder to admit that I do a lot of the things that I look down on people for. It's painful even to admit to myself that I look down on people. The point is, there are a lot of ways in which I have wasted too much time judging the lives of other people when I should be spending more of it doing the things that I know I want and need to do. It is an afront to those who will never get the chance. This is not something that I believe that I owe to any individual. It is the mass conglomerate of life in general that I believe we owe this. We live in a world that is flawed, and most of these flaws were created by humanity in general. We, however, are not the only ones here. There are a great many of us that live comfortable, easy lives. A lot of the times we are doing this on the shoulders of a great many more people who are not.

I do not believe in waste, but I waste so much. I do not believe in stripping the earth for economical gain, but I contribute to that in hundreds of ways. I do not believe paying a smaller price for what I get because some company found a group of people that will work for next to nothing, but it probably happens more often than I know. I believe that what this whole train of thought comes down to is taking advantage.

We spend so much of our time and energy looking for ways to take advantage of someone else. We may do it second or third-hand, but we do it all the same. We take advantage emotionally, physically, financially and in pretty much every other way possible. I believe that we get much much more than we have actually payed for. I believe that we need to spend more of our time trying to take advantage of our own abilities, developing our own skills, and earning the things that we consume. This includes time, because life is short and there's not much of it. The point is not how perfect this theory is, nor how workable, nor how flawed. The point is that there are a great many things that we can do to save ourselves from ourselves and it isn't finger-pointing that's going to accomplish any of these things. It's not about legislation, greed, profit, or how the guy next door is worse than I am. It is about what I am. It is about what I do. It is about trying to do as little harm as possible, especially when that harm is caused by something I do not need. It is about one simple truth that will never stop being true.

I could do better.

The Other Side

I take a deep breath.
I close my eyes.
I stop thinking.

Everything is darkness. There's no sound, there's no smell, and there's no taste. I can feel nothing. My senses are shut down. This is a place where I can relax. This is a stopping point but it is also a starting point. This is where I can really think.

I have to stay in control. I can't let too many thoughts in at once. I have to pace myself and do this one thought at a time. Where do I go from here? Sometimes it's hard to tell. Sometimes I let my mind loose to wander where it will.

They say that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. I think that I have read enough about this to know that this law is based very much on their definition of "thing." They, meaning the scientists, operate mostly in the physical world. This place where I am is not in the physical world. This is the space where my thoughts dwell. How fast does a thought travel? Where does it come from and where does it go to? They may have answers for this as far as the study of brainwaves and all that jazz, but that's not really what I'm talking about. I don't think that their place and my place are the same things. If I see myself sitting on a plain with nothing to see in all directions but the sky above and the grass below and then a moment later I am surrounded by stars, planets, and inky blackness, then what just happenned? Did I move? Did the places move? If I can discard them and then bring them back are they not real? I think that real and not real are relative. If it's real to me, then it doesn't really matter if it's real to anyone else.

This is my place. It can be whatever I wish it to be whenever I wish it to be. This is where I am when I read. This is where I am when I write. This place has no beginning and no end. It is neither empty nor full but it can be both. It is always a clean slate but also always a masterpiece. My job is to take the things here and move them to a piece of paper. It is not an easy thing to do. Sometimes this place seems like a million movies all chopped into little bits a few seconds long and then playing at random. It's hard to make sense. It takes a huge amount of effort to slow it down, keep things in order, and keep them under control. The irony is that to keep it interesting there cannot be too much control.

So there's the rub. I live in this world and my creative side lives in the other. Reading and writing are the only two things that I've found that can join the two halves. I used to think that this was just entertainment. Now I believe that this is the bridge between the part of me that I use every day and the part of me that I've been ignoring for way too long now. I think this is the part of me that I've been missing. It's the part of me that I need in order to do work that I believe in.

If it had been a snake it would have bit me.

Oh, the tangled webs...

I wrote a story awhile back about a boy. In my minds eye, the last we saw of him he was walking into a forrest that may or may not exist. I liked him. I think that wherever he went he's probably doing something interesting. I didn't really plan for his story to go any farther than it did. I think that in this case my plans might not matter.

Today I wrote an outline for a story as an assignment for a writing course I am taking. There was a different young person in this story. Originally it was a boy in the fifth grade but in this case I think I'm going to change him into a her. Just like that. That's not really the point though. The point is that in some way these two separate stories just decided to attach themselves to each other. This little girl was just given a thing, anonymously, for her birthday that allows her to look into what the previously mentioned character is doing. They're connected in some way. I'm going to have to see if I can get them to tell me now. What I do know is that there is at least one other character, an adult I'm fairly certain, that is connected to both kids. He may be good, he may be bad, I'm not sure about that yet either.

That's the start of the web. What's interesting is that lots and lots, maybe hundreds, of stories and pieces for stories that I've got filed away in my head are starting to pop up after years of disuse. They're making themselves known again and trying to attach themselves to each other in any way that they can. Some of these combinations are a little bit rediculous but sometimes they turn into interesting situations. Some of them, I think, might even be useful.

I don't think I'm going to divulge too much of this madness here because, as it doesn't really make sense to me yet, it's probably not going to make a whole lot of sense to anyone else. It's time for some organizing which is something that I've always been pretty bad about. Stream of conciousness writing doesn't work all the time. It would be nice if it did.

So, I have voices in my head. Some of them are accompanied by all the things that make a person except for existence in reality. Some of these people are also accompanied by situations and places that don't exist. It realy is a fun game.

Not all people who hear voices are crazy. Some of us are just authors. I've got loads of things on top of voices in there and I'm pretty sure that I'm still sane. Mostly anyway.

I also make countertops out of rocks.

For Andy

When I was in the seventh grade the best friend I'd ever had up to that point died. I've never told his story.

I met Andy McAuley within the first few days of the sixth grade. He and his family had just moved from Jacksonville, Florida and so he was the new kid in class. I don’t remember what it was that brought us together at first. That was the year that Pogs were a big deal so maybe our first encounter was playing Pogs together during break time. I know that like me, he was not liked by the popular kids and so we may have been thrown together for that reason. Regardless of how it happened, all I remember is that it was just this connection that formed almost instantly. I remember we sat together at lunch with our other two friends, also outcasts, named William and Eric. That year for my birthday the only two people I invited to my party were Andy and Eric. I used to have a picture of it that would pop up every now and then.

That was about the time that girls started to become interesting. Andy was better with the girls than I was. He had a very natural look about him. His hair was dirty blonde and came down to his ears. His skin was always tanned and he smiled a lot. The girls always thought he was pretty. I was the better student. That was also the year that my reading addiction really started to kick in. Andy never had much patience for reading. I don’t remember much else about our time in school. What I remember most was the summer after sixth grade.

That summer it seemed like almost every night I stayed over at his house or he stayed over at mine. If it was nice enough we camped out in the back yard and if not he had bunk beds in his room. I remember we used to write on the underside of the top bunk. During the day we would scrounge up change to go to the grocery store and buy water balloons so we could have water balloon fights. We used to walk down a dirt road near his house and shoot old beer cans, bottles, and birds with our BB guns. Don’t worry, we never killed anything. We also both had slingshots and we’d play with those when we ran out of BBs but our aim was much worse with them. Sometimes we went fishing at the lake in the park. There was a lot of construction going on in our neighborhood back then so we played in the unfinished houses when the workers went home.

I loved eating dinner at his house. His mom cooked a lot and when she didn’t we just made Ramen Noodles. I loved them back then. His mom used to make French Dip sandwiches for us all the time. Those were the first, and still the best, that I’ve ever had. I don’t remember what his mom’s job was but his dad was a retired helicopter pilot. I don’t think I ever saw his dad at home that the man wasn’t taking apart some gun, cleaning it, and putting it back together. In fact, I never saw a gun at that house; I only saw pieces of them. I always thought he was a nice man but he didn’t talk much. Andy had an older sister named Carolyn. She was in the ninth grade at the time. She was also a very nice girl and I got the impression that she was also kind of a loner.

The most interesting thing about that house was the animals. I don’t remember anymore how many there were but I do remember a lot of them. They had one room that was full to bursting with bird cages full of songbirds. They all had names and I knew them all. They had a pond in the backyard with 8 turtles in it. I used to know their names too. They had two dogs, both boxers, and an iguana which I later inherited. Those things are horrible pets by the way. In the living room there lived what I could tell the prized pet of the family which was a kind of Macaw I think. This was a really excellent bird. It used to whistle the tune from the Andy Griffith Show. Whenever someone started laughing it would start laughing too. At the crack of dawn, every morning, it would start to beat it’s beak against the wall until someone came to feed it. It was incredibly loud. It was one of the smartest animals I’ve ever seen.

Towards the end of the summer his family decided to move to Nacogdoches, Texas. I can’t remember why. They left only a few weeks before the seventh grade started and we made all sorts of deals about how we’d write and we’d visit each other the next summer. We did write a few letters at first and I sent him a birthday card with twenty dollars in it. A week or two later, I’m not sure anymore how long it was, his mother called my parents and told them that Andy had died of an extremely rare blood disease. One night he woke up with bruises and didn’t know where they had come from. Not long after that he had died. I can’t imagine how his family felt when they got my birthday card for Andy in the mail.

This experience had a big impact on me surprisingly I hadn’t thought about it in a long time. Today I saw a movie that reminded me. Andy was a good friend. At a time in my life when most kids seemed to be mean just because they could get away with it we always had each other. He wasn’t perfect but neither was I. We spent the summer together. We had fun together. We got in trouble together. For one year he was as close to me as anyone, other than family, had ever been. It’s hard for a 13 year old to lose that without warning. I still wonder about his mom, dad, and sister once in awhile. His sister should be 27 or so about now. The last time I saw her she was 15. It doesn’t seem like it’s been that long.

Life just doesn’t seem fair sometimes. He was a good person. I miss him.

One Billion

Thats BILLION, with a B. A big fat B. That I am honestly happy to say is how much J.K. Rowling is worth these days. For those of you living under a rock, this is the woman who writes the Harry Potter books. This is a woman who less than 20 years ago was apparently living on wellfare. This is a woman who has not even published her 7th book yet. That's right, she has written five books. Just five. Thats somewhere around 167 million dollars per book. Granted there were movies and all sorts of other things that she got paid for but it was the books that made all that other stuff possible. An average author pumps out a book a year. Six years of work. One billion dollars. Granted, it's not about the money. I'm just glad to see that literature can still make that kind of money. People still read. This woman is a phenomenon, an incredible writer, and one of my heroes. Way to go J.K!

On another note, I am 24 years old today. That's almost a quarter of a century. It's been a good 24 years. I'm looking forward to all the ones coming up. The next few years should be very interesting.

For all of you who are interested, my writing course is going well. I just finished the first week and completed two writing assignments. These were sort of getting to know you type assignments but in some ways rather enlightening. I've made some good progress in understanding and getting past some of the issues that have been holding me back for the past few years. I've gotten some very positive feedback too. That always helps.

Here's a little story to describe my current writing position.

For the past three years it seems like I've been sitting in a room that was dark and empty of everything but me. I was left only with my thoughts. I had good ideas for writing. They would pop out of my head and fly around the room with the type of energy all new ideas seem to have but as they kept bouncing off of walls, floor, and ceiling they began to get tired. They needed to escape, to run free, but they couldn't even find a chink in my walls to squeeze through. I sat on the floor and watched these ideas, one by one, tire themselves out and drop to the floor. There they lay, drying out and shriveling up until I could no longer bear to look at them. This happened often enough so that I would try to stop creating them. I couldn't stand to watch them die. They lay there on the cold stone floor looking at me with such scrutiny and distaste. They seemed to constantly ask why I would be so cruel as to create them, these partial unfinished beings, only to lock them in a box and watch them suffocate. I think I was suffocating with them. Now there is light in my dark little cell. The mortar began to crumble out of the cracks a few months back and since then a window to the outside world has openned up. It gets bigger every day. Soon the walls will crumble, the ceiling will fall in, and the earth will reclaim this sad little floor I've been sitting on. The wind will blow all of my dead little stories away. They'll scatter all across the little valley outside my window and decompose back to where they came from. In time they'll be reborn, pure, in a way that they never were when I forced them together from mismatched bits and pieces. Their life will be stronger. It will be free. Once the hole in this wall gets a little bigger I'll be able to squeeze out of it and go wherever I want. There will be no limits. Maybe every now and then I'll come back to look at my sad little box, or what remains of it, just to remind myself of what I've inflicted on myself in the past. This is where I am now. I can see the light.

Also, on another subject, the honeybees have all been dying. I don't know if no one has noticed or if no one really cares but this seems like a bad omen to me. Doesn't it? They seem to be responsible for quite a lot of pollinating and things of that nature. I'm fairly certain that there are a lot of plants that need these services in order to propagate. They scary part is that so far as I've heard, they can't figure out why it's happening. Apparently it's not just a few either. Hives, by the hundreds, that were thriving a few months ago are dead. Most of the bees are not even around. Most of them are just gone. I only heard one little story about this on NPR a month or so ago and I've only heard someone else mention it once. Does this seem like a pretty bad thing to anyone else? If anyone has heard anything else about this I'd like to know. Drop me a line.

As always, thanks for reading.
Have an excellent weekend.

Quick Note

I hope you've noticed that I have a few new little gizmos on my website. I do realize that the ones to the right both look the same but one is supposed to show all the visitors I've ever had (from this point on) and the other one is only supposed the visitors for the current day. The daily one may turn out to be a little dull of I don't get many hits per day so if it's no fun then I'll delete that one. Hopefully they'll both be cool so I can leave them both on. The other cool new toy is a new map down at the bottom that I think may turn out to be a little cooler than the old one. We'll see. Hope you all like it!

Taking the Plunge

As of today I am enrolled in a creative writing course. That's right; I am willingly subjecting myself to the review of other people. This will be the first course I have ever taken that is devoted to the trade of writing. Beyond assignments from Literature teachers in school I have never written anything that did not come from some spur of the moment desire for a release. This is the first step, I believe, in getting past all of the previously mentioned stigmas and barriers I've created to shield myself. Well, maybe this blog was the first. This class will be the second. What made me decide to take this particular course was its name. It's called The Fear of Writing. How appropriate is that?

I have yet to get an assignment. I send the request to take the course. I was accepted. I filled out a form about myself, my goals, and what's stopping me. So far so good. I'm very interested to see what comes of this. Just the act of signing up has gotten me thinking about what sort of other courses I could take or what other avenues I could pursue that would get me a little further down the road towards being a published author. Who knows, it may happen yet.

This is also the first class I have taken in three years or so that was not required of me. The last few years of college were devoted to courses required for graduation and it has been over a year since I graduated. My degree was in accounting which is about as far as you can get from what I'm trying to do now. There is very little creativity involved in that career so far as I can tell. Regardless, I am excited to be taking a class of my own choosing once again. The last three or four classes that I took out of pure interest were archaeology and anthropology courses in college. At the time I didn't realize why they interested me so much but now I think I do. They are much more closely related to a career in writing than accounting ever was. The study of people is incredibly interesting. I've been doing it my whole life without realizing it. Whether alive or dead, you can learn a lot about people by what they surround themselves with. If the people are alive, you can learn even more by watching how they interact with their surroundings and with other people. I study these things without realizing it. I've always done this. Be quiet. Observe. People will tell you anything you want to know without ever saying a word to you.

When I was young I used this type of perception to figure out how to change other people's perception of me. In elementary school I was never the cool kid. I didn't want to be. I didn't like how those people treated each other or anyone else. I made friends with the other kids like me not because it was a last resort but because they were people who also refused to change themselves in order to be accepted. So we watched the cool kids. We learned.

When it came time to pick a middle school I chose one on the other side of town, one where I would be relatively unknown. I knew that this would be the best way to shed the preconceived perceptions of all the people I had gone to school with for the past six years. I had an extensively thought out plan. I would not change my personality, but I would not make the same mistakes that I had early on in elementary school. Children look for the quiet kid, the easy target, to vent their frustrations on. Adults do this too, but that is a whole different story. If you are that quiet kid then you only have two options. You can either take what they dish, all the time, or you can find a way to deflect their attentions elsewhere. This is not a hard thing to do but for a young person it can be terrifying. The only way to not be the target is to not be worth the trouble.

Only a week or so into competitive athletics a ritual had begun in the locker room. Ten or so of the aggressive kids would pick a target, a quiet shy kid, and one of them would pick a fight with him. It was a very natural way for kids to develop a hierarchy amongst themselves. I knew my turn was coming because if you didn't participate with the aggressive kids, you became one of the targets. Most of these confrontations consisted of pushing weaker kids into lockers for ten or so minutes until the bell for the next class started. Pushing back did no good; it only escalated the aggressive ones testosterone to the level of punching. It was what they wanted. My turn came. One guy cornered me in the locker room. I told him to leave me alone. He told me he had heard me talking bad about him. This was the ruse that they used to start the fight. I told him to go away. Meanwhile the other kids gathered in a semicircle around, cutting off escape, and getting ready for the show. At this point there is no turning back; there is only one simple choice. Be a target from this point on, or put a stop to it right here. I made the wrong choice in elementary school and I wasn't going to do that again. As soon as the other kid pushed me the first time I punched him. Right in the eye. Hard enough to give him a black eye. He fell, the bell rang, and everyone left to go to the next class.

This did a few things for me. First, I became too much trouble to be the easy target. Second, I gained the respect of every 12 year old in the locker room. Most importantly, it made them leave me alone. That's all it took. Never again was I a target. The kid I hit eventually became a friend. Adults work in very similar ways. You cannot hit them without getting sued, but you don't need to. The point of all of this is not to advocate hitting, but to realize that an understanding of basic psychology can tell you a lot about how to understand motives. It can teach you how to manipulate them.

This is what writers do. We create people and then find out how they tick. We put them in tough situations to see how they'll react. It has to be believable. Writers have to understand that every decision a character makes will depend greatly on every key event that took place in that character's life up to that point. If a character does something beyond the realm of believability then the reader will stop caring. Just like that. The psychology of the characters affects the psychology of the reader. Kids love Harry Potter because every one of them can relate to at least one character in those stories. Adults love it because they remember being able to relate in the same way.

So my psychology is this. I'm in a situation where I know what I want to do but I fear it. I have a long row to hoe but I know that it is something I need to do. So I'm going to learn how. I think I have a pretty good understanding of the basics but for what I intend to do I need to understand a lot more than that. Classes are no longer about getting my ticket punched; they are about learning how to accomplish the tasks I've set for myself. I read. I write. I will be a novelist.