Things my Kids Will Never Experience (Part Two)

This one was suggested by my friend Deb: rotary telephones. Remember those?

My parents had a rotary phone until I was nineteen. For you kids who never experienced one, here's how it worked: forget buttons. The only buttons on a rotary phone were the line cutoffs, which were generally two little plastic pegs about the size of pencil erasors that stuck up through two holes in the center of the cradle for the headset. When you hung the headset on its cradle, it pushed the pegs down and they operated a secret gizmo that broke the connection. Thus the term "hung up", as in, "that mean, insensitive girl whose phone number I got off the bathroom wall hung up on me!" So named because the act of hanging up the headset ended the call. Had telephone evolution skipped the rotary-dial/manual-cutoff days and jumped straight to cell phones, the term for ending a call would be something different, like "He powered-off on me!" or "That jerk gave me the click!" Which sounds vaguely dirty and sexual, so maybe it wouldn't have been that one, but you get the point.

Anyway, no buttons on a rotary phone. Instead, you called someone by sticking your index finger (or if you were cool and talented, any other finger, or a pencil or pen, etc.) into one of nine holes ringed around the circumference of a plastic dial. Each hole had a number- one through nine, then zero- imprinted on the phone beneath the dial. Using your finger (or the implement of your choice if you were cool and talented) inside the little hole, you turned the dial clockwise with a tiny clockwork ratcheting sound as something in the mechanism of the phone measured the length of the turn. When your finger (or cool implement) met the little metal hook that stopped the turn, you let go and the released dial would ratchet quickly and more noisily back to its starting point. You did this for each digit in the phone number you were dialling (another anachronistic term, "dialling"; since no phones actually have dials anymore, it would be more accurate to say that one punched up a number or buttoned a number).

Then you held the headset, which was a heavy plastic thing shaped like a bent dumbbell with a set of super-mod salt and pepper shakers molded onto the ends, to your ear and waited for the call to connect. The headset was always attached to the phone by a spiral plastic cord. Cords came in a variety of lengths, from not-quite-long-enough-to-reach-the-fridge to just-short-enough-to-keep-you-from-sitting-on-the-floor. The spiral of the cord was designed to allow it a degree of stretch, but the result was that strange tangles and snarls were always getting lodged in them, making weird alien shapes which had a perverse life of their own. For instance:

Imagine you were on a rotary phone with the need to jot down an address. The pen and paper were always on the other side of the kitchen or office, so you clutched the headset between your shoulder and ear and, igor-like, lurched across the room, stretching the spiral cord as far as you'd think it could reach, pulling it so painfully taut that it looked like a vibrating tightrope connecting your ear to the wall. You'd crane your arm as far as you could until you'd barely, barely, get the pad of one finger on the notepad and hook it to you. Success! It never occured to you, in that moment, to take the pad and pen back to the phone base. Instead, you'd stand there at the furthest desperate length of the cord, pen and paper in hand, and say something like, "OK, I'm ready, what's the address again?" And that's when the little tangle in the phone cord would suddenly spring loose, adding another six inches to its length, and making the headset pop smartly off your shoulder. Always, always, this resulted in a desperate and deceptively slow comic ballet as you bobbled the headset in your hands, trying not to drop the pad or the pen, getting your wrists tangled in the cord, yelling for the person on the phone to hold on, hold on, I dropped the phone, ah crap, and of course, inevitably dropping the phone on the floor.

The only good news was that you could retrieve it without bending over, since the cord was still tangled around your wrist; you simply reeled it back in shaking your head and cursing under your breath.

Mothers were expert at rotary telephone ergonomics. My Mom could cook an entire meal in the kitchen with the phone clutched between her ear and shoulder. It was like watching some retro robot that had to be plugged in to operate. Dads had no patience for it. Watching Dad on the phone was a study in verbal economics. A typical phone call would go like this:

RING! RING!

Mom: Hello? Oh hi. Hold on. (yelling) Hon! It's Wally!

Dad: Hi.

Dad: Yeah.

Dad: The green one.

Dad: When?

Dad: Bye.

Mom (twenty seconds later): What did he want?

Dad (from the living room): Who?

Books and Covers...

I have a judgemental nature. I know, I know, admitting something like that in the current social climate is akin to admitting one is a direct-line descendent of Adolph Hitler, or that one target shoots at kittens for fun. That's a topic for another day, though. For now let's just attend to the idea that I am admittedly pretty quick to pass judgements about people based on generally pretty flimsy and circumstantial evidence. I want to be better about that, but I need some help. I'd appreciate suggestions. Here is the trouble:

When I was attending college for that one bemused semester at Liberty University (just one of my various college experiences), my best friend Matt and I had a nasty little habit (based, I am sure, on our own insecurities about suddenly being in a somewhat intimidating social environment) of giving certain kinds of people labels. These labels were never positive, and they were always based on totally superficial judgements. There was, to be specific, the Long-Coated Kid with the Hat. So named because no matter where he went, no matter what the weather, he wore a long duster-type coat and a cowboy hat. His label was pretty definitive, and not particularly mean. It was simply evident to us that he felt that that combination of apparel defined him in some meaningful way he was proud of, and we simply took it to its logical, rather absurd conclusion, defining him by absolutely nothing else. Then there was the Red-Haired Kid with Glasses. Again, not a mean label on the surface, but the unstated code about him was pretty plain between us. The Red-Haired Kid with Glasses was mean and nasty, a spiritual hyper-prude intent on pulverizing fun wherever he went. We didn't know this by experience. We'd never spoken to him. Somehow, it was just on his face, in his expression, the way he dressed and walked most everywhere alone with that purposeful, stiff, crane-like gait. But it got worse. There was Stupid One and Stupid Two. Both were weightlifter types who wore their baseball caps backwards and held their arms perpetually, slightly out from their sides, as if the sheer mass of their hypertrophied physiques made it impossible for them to reach their belts (I always wondered how they got into their pockets to pull out their IDs when they went to the cafeteria to bulk up on protein shakes). We didn't label them "stupid" because they were muscleheads. We decided, on quick observation, that they were arrogant, thoughtless, mean-spirited bastards with nothing but pride where their souls should be. We didn't need evidence. We weren't convicting these people in a court of law, or even a court of public opinion (apart from the public that occurred between Matt and me), we were just taking what seemed evident based on first inpressions and... extrapolating.

We knew it was unfair. Sort of. We at least knew that there was always the possibility that our judgements were incorrect. We chided ourselves on it sometimes. But in time, something simultaneously disheartening and meanly smug happened.

We began to discover that pretty much without exception, we were right.

I'd like to be able to say (like some story from a Chicken Soup for the Judgemental Dork's Soul book) that one day we hung out with the Red-Haired Kid with Glasses and found out he was just a lonely, misunderstood guy with no friends and a heart of gold under that unfortunately severe exterior. That would certainly make a better story. What actually happened, though, was that we inevitably learned that he was, in fact, a whiny, prudish little tattle and provocateur, always looking for ways to muckrake others into trouble. What actually happened was that I went to an art class with Stupid One's girlfriend, who ended up dumping him because he was ("when you got to know him" ) a mean, arrogant, selfish prick. What actually happened was that, despite the fact that we'd chided ourselves about the potential that we could be wrong in our judgements about these people, statistically without fail they all proceeded to be pretty much exactly what we'd assumed they were on first sight.

Now one of three things is true. Either (1) Matt and I are clairvoyant, (2) it is a lot easier to judge significant things about people based on attitude, dress and expression, even in a remarkably short time, or (3) Matt and I are magical beings, sculpting the world we see in realtime with our own expectations and beliefs.

For the most part, I chose to believe number 2. Although number 3 sometimes feels like it'd be more fun.

So as I have grown up, I have attempted to fight this intrinsic tendency to pass snap-judgements on people. I try to give them the benefit of the doubt.

For instance:

There is a man I see regularly at the local Einstein Bagel joint. I go in for breakfast and coffee and to sit with my laptop and do some idle work whilst people-watching, and he is pretty much always there, sitting in a corner booth with his back to the wall chatting people up and nursing his own coffee (maybe) or herbal tea (more likely). He wears glasses and carries a meaningful-looking notebook, as if he constantly has to journal* sudden blinding flashes of the infinite, which strike him at random moments. He is a white guy that wears a multi-ethnic, multi-colored little hat that looks like a cross between a yamulca and those little pillbox-sorta hats that some African leaders wear. He is obviouly quite enlightened. I heard him speaking to a young girl once as she sat with her family having breakfast. She was probably about seven, and she was smiling at him with a mixture of shyness and attraction that was endearing and a little heartbreaking. He was saying something like this:

"You know what it is this weekend? It's Easter! You know about Easter don't you? That's when Jesus comes up out of his tomb to see if he can find his shadow. If he sees his shadow, he pops back into his tomb again and we have six more weeks of winter. I hope he doesn't get scared by his shadow this year so we can have spring, don't you? Oh, no. No, wait a minute. I'm getting Jesus confused with somebody else, aren't I?"

Secretly, I was (I'll be frank) enraged by this. Not because there isn't a little humor in what he was saying, albeit borderline blasphemous humor, depending on your beliefs about God and Jesus. I don't mind that, though. He obviously doesn't believe, and why should I expect him to revere something he doesn't personally believe in? What enraged me was the fact that he was purposefully, deliberately, planting a seed in the mind of this young girl, a kernel of an idea that Jesus is a nice thing for a kid to believe in, just like Groundhog Day and Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, but not something one would seriously carry into adulthood. Others may believe what silliness they may, if it makes them feel better, his little smile and wink and multi-ethnic little hat said to that little girl, but you and I are wise and enlightened little doggies and we know a rubber bone when we see one, don't we?

How dare he manipulate her little Tabula Rasa mind that way? How dare he snatch away that simple childlike belief (or at least potential belief) that some of us adults struggle so hard to regain? I sat and raged at him, and of course, being the opinionated but ultimately silent man that I generally am in those situations, I didn't say anything. Even now, I don't know what I could have said, although I wish I did.

But here's the point. My wife told me I was most likely over-reacting to him. I have a tendency to do that, she reminded me gently, and she is right. So I tried to cut the guy some slack. So he's got a thing against Christianity. It's understandable considering how obnoxious some Christians can be. Maybe he's just on an anti-Christian bender and he thinks its more palatable if he coats it with what he probably thinks of as gentle humor. Fine. I'll let it go.

But everytime I go to Einstein's, I notice a car in the parking lot. The car is a late-nineties Mercedes with bumper-stickers plastered all over the rear. "Coexist" says one bumper sticker, using symbols of several major religions to form the letters. This is the theme of all the stickers, all the typically trite little bumper-sticker slogans. Let's all get along, all us different religious types. Let's ignore differences and respect one another. Let's stop the petty bickering and name-calling. Christian, Jewish, Muslim, everybody. Respect. Peace. Brotherhood. And everytime I pass that car, I say to myself two things. The first is: that's his car, the dopey, smug idiot who equated Jesus to a magic groundhog, the hypocritical little putz. The second is: that's an unfair judgement and you know it. Let it go. Most likely that car belongs to an employee, since it is so frequently here in this spot. Stop trying to build your case against that guy. Stop trying to pigeon-hole him. You don't know him. You don't KNOW him.

And I gotta be honest and tell you I have done a pretty good job. I had the twin-thoughts pretty much worked out as a litany. They happened so fast this morning, as I walked past that car on my way in for a coffee and a bagel, that I was hardly even aware of them.

Feeling pretty good, I nodded as somebody walked across the parking lot ahead of me and got into the front seat of the bumper-sticker laden Mercedes, setting his coffee (or herbal tea) momentarily on the roof to unlock the door. He was wearing his perpetual multi-colored, multi-ethnic hat.

So maybe, I mean just maybe, I do know him. Maybe he is just the self-righteous, hypocritical little putz I thought he was, the little putz who says "Everybody respect everybody else's beliefs, now, and be good. Except me. I'm exempt. I can mock whatever and whoever's beliefs I want. I'm special. I'm fuckin' enlightened, you stupid, superstitious little neanderthals."

So what do I do, people? What do we ALL do? How do we avoid making those snap judgements that, let's face it, are so often right spang on the money? Do we rely on the few occasions when we are wrong to prove to us that, against all statistical probability, a snap judgement might be unfair? Is that all there is to it? Am I the only one that wrestles with this issue? Because when I bring it up, everybody just seems to say (with helplessly prissy disdain, and in my mind, a hint of a lisp) well, you just shouldn't do it. Being judgemental is ba-a-a-ad. You shouldn't judge a book by it's cover.

But people, we ALL judge books by their covers, quite literally! The metaphor itself is false! That's why books have covers! That's how you know a sticky novel of romantic improbability from a Stephen King horror-fest. The covers are meant to tell us things about what's inside them. Who's ever heard of a generic "book"? Isn't it more accurate to say, as an analogy for life, a metaphor for relationships, that you can judge a book by its cover? Isn't that really what the Bible means when it says a tree is known by its fruit? Isn't that what Forrest Gump's Mama actually meant when she said "stupid is as stupid does"?

Please understand this: I am not saying that it is legitimate to make value judgements about people this way. It isn't fair to judge that this person is less worthwhile to the world, or to God, or to me personally because of how they look or dress or act or speak. That is not the sort of judgement I am debating. I mean simply to say that if a person tends to get drunk, start fights, and wear tee-shirts with slogans like "white revolution" or "Let's get nekkid" you might legitimately choose not to let him babysit your twelve year old daughter. I mean that if someone claims to represent peace, brotherhood and respect between all religions, and then tells insulting and mocking stories to children about one of those religion's deities, maybe he is not to be trusted or quite believed.

I mean, at the base of our hearts, under all the posing and moralistic posturing, don't we all make those kind of judgements everyday? Aren't they, frankly, absolutely necessary?

So again, I ask. What do I do? How do I stop being so judgemental? Is there in fact a healthy and an unhealthy aspect to those judgements? How do I seperate those halves? This is a very, very ticklish subject that I think is very unfairly treated by those who just say "judging people ith wrong and you jutht thouldn't do it!"

And as usual, I have no answers about this. Just more questions. And the sense that I may, in fact, be the only person who has this problem, based on the evidence of how the rest of the world seems to handle it.

I wonder what the Long Coated Kid with the Hat would think?

*see the blog entry "Always Sticking my Ego in my Mouth..." for more thoughts on journaling.

Jerry's Kid...

I have had a very checkered and sporadic college career ranging across a fairly wide variety of vocations and locations. I went to a technical college in Ohio to be a commercial artist. I went to Bible College in Rhode Island to be a Youth Pastor (one semester of Christian hell which I will surely write about at a later date). I have at this point attended something like five or six colleges and not graduated from any of them. Fortunately for me, I work in the field of digital art and animation, which relies almost solely on ability over education as a basis for employment. As if to perfectly illustrate the irony of this fact, I, a non-graduate in my own profession, will begin teaching a college course on that profession this January. Ain't life a kick? But anyway, my point...

One of the colleges I attended (briefly) was Liberty University in Lynchburg Virginia. This is the college that Jerry Falwell founded, and as far as I know he is still the Chancellor of the school. Back in the day, Libery was called "Liberty Baptist University". They dropped the "Baptist" a few years before I attended, but as far as I could tell, the change was purely semantic. These are a few meaningless, amusing recollections from when I was one of Jerry's kids.

Jerry Falwell, I'll give him this, was very interested in the school and wanted to be personally involved with it in some key ways. One of these ways was that he insisted that he attend, and often lead, Sunday morning church services in the University gymnasium. The problem (from my perspective) was that in order to fit this in around his duties as Pastor of his own church, we students had to meet with Jerry for the University church service at the ungodly (so to speak) hour of 7:30 in the morning. These services were the first and only church services that I ever had the audacity to sleep through (they weren't the only services I ever wanted to sleep through, but in a congregation of several thousand, it was the only setting in which I could actually sleep-more-or-less unnoticed).

Jerry Falwell liked sports. In the days when I was attending, he was foreseeing the funding and building of a huge new basketball stadium. This annoyed me, because I notoriously don't like sports. I was an artist. Artist's didn't get multi-million dollar buildings to practice their skills in. Artist's definitely did not get full-ride scholarships to come to a school and play a game. But, with a sigh, I knew these were not complaints against Jerry specifically, any more than that he happily represented the collegiate world in general. That was just how the inflated sports ball of your choice bounced. But yes, Jerry liked sports, and he seemed to take great pride in how his school's teams played. And the attention that playing got.

Sunday service, some anonymous morning in the Fall of 1990, I was sitting blearily in a folding chair on the main floor of the gymnasium listening (appearing to listen, in all honesty) to Jerry's sermon. He was working toward the finishline (thankfully, with an attending congregation of several thousand, altar calls were a rarity) and finally he closed his Bible. We were already bowing our heads by the time he announced the closing prayer. And then... there was a pause. Which was odd. The entire gymnasium, thousands of bowed heads and closed eyes, all waiting. What was he doing? Did he forget his notes? Lose his place? I turned my head very slightly and opened one eye at my best friend Matt, seated next to me. He looked back at me one-eyed. I was just about to quietly glance up when Jerry finally began speaking again. "This Friday night" he said in his characteristically grave-but-jolly baritone, "ESPN will be here to broadcast the Eagles basketball game against Illinois. We hope to see you all turn out and encourage the team to an exciting victory." I was still staring one-eyed at my buddy. The look on his face mirrored mine. It was a look that said "Why is my head bowed? Did I miss a cue because I was asleep? Am I gonna look like a dweeb when I look up and everyone is carefully taking a note and chumming quietly to each other about how cool it'll be to be at a nationally broadcast basketball game?" And we looked up, simultaneously just as Jerry said, eyes closed, head slightly raised, "Our Father..." And our heads dropped back toward the floor as if weighted.

That was weird. But damn weren't that funny when we all finally got out of the building and were making our way to our (required) Sunday school classes!

The time I actually met Jerry was the time I volunteered to usher for a play that was being put on in one of the much smaller theaters on campus. My friend Matt and I were dressed up in our suits, enjoying the easy bustle of being on the fringes of the churning machine of the stage. It was rumored that Mr. Falwell, who was of course a bit of a celebrity, was going to be attending one of the shows with his wife. Sure enough, they showed up at the performance we were ushering, smiling and glad-handing people tastefully. He sat on the opposite side of the theater that Matt and I were managing, but it was still sort of exciting and strange that he was there.

At intermission, my and Matt's job was to open and run the small concession booth in the lobby area. We unlocked the rear door and took our posts, selling candy and Pepsi to the patrons and making change out of a little grey lockbox. Near the end of the intermission, when the crowd was gently pushing its way back into the theater and Matt and I were closing up the booth, Jerry Falwell approached us out of the crowd. It was just us and him. He positioned his surprisingly substantial frame in front of the booth, two feet away from us, smiled that grave, somber smile of his, rocked on his heels for one dramatic little moment, and then said "Got any more Reese's Peanut Butter Cups?"

Matt and I looked at each other, suddenly called into action by the voice of the school, by the very mouthpiece of the National Moral Majority! And what were we going to do? Once again we shared a look, a look of restrained panic and frozen fear. Only this one was worse, much worse, because it was just us and him! The awful truth was upon us. We were out of Reese's Peanut Butter Cups.

"Sorry sir," One of us said; I can't remember which. "We're all out."

He nodded at us appraisingly, then clapped one of us on the shoulder. "Good job, fellas." He said. Then he turned and was gone.

I frankly didn't learn much during my time at Liberty University, my time as one of Jerry's kids. It wasn't the school's fault. I frankly wasn't there to learn, which is a whole other story. But one thing I will always remember is that at one time, at one crucial point in his life, Jerry Falwell needed something from me, and I wasn't able to give it. It may not have been much, it may not have even been for him. It was probably for his wife, in fact. But that's immaterial. I have made a solemn pledge, a vow, perhaps. The next time, I will not fail. The next time I will do what is required of me. The next time Jerry needs something from me, I will come through.

And if there isn't a next time, then I guess we're probably good anyway. Here's to you, Jerry.

Always Sticking my Ego in my Mouth...

I have realized an unpleasant truth about myself (as if that were a rare find) and I am gonna record it here.

I started this blog under the pretense that it was going to be a way for me to journal* my thoughts, sort of like a diary crossed with a day planner. There is a romantic attraction to the idea of journaling. I envision a lone thinker out on a sunwashed hill, sitting with his back against a huge, gently shushing tree, staring off into the blue and occasionally bending over a book of unlined paper and writing something deep and transcendent in slanted, effortless cursive script. With a quill pen. That, I tell myself, is journaling: recording the fleeting glimpses of the profound so that they can be mulled over and reflected on later.

So that was my proclaimed intent when I started this blog. To journal, just like I described above. Except for the sunny hilltop and the tree. And the quill pen and the book of unlined paper. And maybe the deep, transcendent thought. Well, I was gonna come close. Darn tootin'.

What I have done instead is write feverish little diatribes and giddy, humourous articles in the hopes of wowing and wooing an audience. Which has not come, by the way. I am SUCH an arrogant twit sometimes. I glibly told people, when I was starting this blog, that I didn't journal as such because journaling was the written equivalent of talking to one's self. To me, the act of writing, of communicating, is about speaking to other people. About sharing thoughts with someone more than my future self. The arrogance is that I think (no, in my selfish, gaudy, prideful little heart I KNOW) that I have all these amazingly pithy and thought-provoking ideas to share with the world at large. All I needed was ... A Voice! A forum, a stage from which to speak. And the blog, I just knew, was going to be it!

Well crap.

That didn't happen. I am one more voice in the increasingly cacophonous** mish-mash of this brave new (and noisy) world. One more thing for most people to tune out. And well they should! I'm not saying anything particularly new or groundbreaking, I have to admit. I'm not saying anything that hasn't been said better or quicker before. (am I?) I'm just here to journal, anyway. Ostensibly.

So here I am, talking to my future self, being a bit of a melodramatic whiner. Hi future self. Recognize me? Did we figure any of this out? Am I a little less arrogant by the time you read this? Did I finish that crazy Basilica 3D animation project that I've been tinkering with and not quite getting around to completing? Tell future wife I said hello. Give future kids a squeeze for me.

See what I mean? This is weird!

So anyway, to prove that I am now writing this just for myself and not for some hopeful and amorphous audience, I will make a list of things I need to do today. This is sure to be very boring. You may as well give up reading this now if you are anyone other than my future self. Go read Bored Housewife's blog. She has an audience and there is the occasional picture. Go on. See ya. All right, anyway, here goes:

1. Finish this blog entry.
2. Think about when I am going to wrap the wife's Christmas presents.
3. Perhaps actually wrap the wife's Christmas presents.
4. Send existing Basilica 3D files to programmer for debugging.
5. Work on subway train model, prepare for merchandising.
6. Email school about times and location of classes, arrange lab fee.
7. Take a nap if the kids will let me.

All right, I think that's it. I'm on the right track, future self. This one's for you.

Because the truth is, writing down everything I have written so far has actually served a purpose for me, even if very few people have read it (and even fewer have benefited from it). As I have written, I have had to examine and arrange these thoughts. Test them in the light of potential critique. And in so doing, I have pinned down a little more securely why I think some of the things I think. Now, when the opportunity arises for me to actually respond to someone who expresses an interest in my opinion on these topics, I will be much better equipped to give that opinion and be confident of it. I suppose that's the real reason I am blogging, the real reason I am keeping on with it.

Even if, in all wretched honesty, it isn't the only reason (sheepish grin).

*which means what, exactly? People talk about this journaling thing all the time, as if they are worried that if they don't cage their thoughts somehow, they will scamper into the brush like field mice. My philosophy has generally been that if a thought or idea doesn't have enough stamina to stick in my head, then it probably wasn't worth writing down anyway. A sort of mental survival of the fittest, no? Now, what was I saying?

** and the award for best use of the word "cacophony" in a blog entry goes to...

the Jesus Brigade striketh....

I am a Christian. That means that I believe in, and am excited by, the fact that God accepts me like I am, that I am saved by His sacrifice alone and not at all by any pathetic good stuff I might (or might not) attempt, and that He, the God of the universe, likes me and wants to know me and be known by me. I think that's pretty cool and totally amazing. That makes me a Christian, right?

So why is it that I actively dislike the vast majority (or so it seems) of the rest of the Christians in this country? Why do I loathe being lumped in with them? Why am I ashamed to admit my relationship with Jesus because it simultaneously admits a relationship with Them?

We all know Them, don't we. They are the Christians who use the name of God as a sledgehammer, who use the Bible as a bludgeon. They are the ones who gasp in shock if they hear someone say "shit" but will slice someone to ribbons with gossip and backstabbing. They squabble about denominations and hate each other over tiny differences in obscure doctrinal belief. They love the righteous indignation of being offended and are constantly on the lookout for reasons to express their holy rage. They care loads about making noise proclaiming their beliefs, but not in the least about being heard by anyone in any meaningful way. They love that the world is going to hell, because it lets them feel secure in their condemnation of it and their sense of grizzled, beak-nosed superiority over it. These Christians are the members of the Jesus Brigade, blithely abusing the name of God to justify their own petty and hateful predilections, preferences and arrogances.

We all know members of the Jesus Brigade. They make sure they are known. It is their point in life. They like that they are ridiculed and hated because they believe it makes them more special to God. As if being rejected because one is an insufferable prick is somehow the same as being rejected because of one's belief in Jesus. I saw a bumper sticker on a co-workers car that reads: "Dear Lord, protect me from your followers". To this I mutter a whole-hearted (if woeful) "Amen, Brothah".

I am a Christian who, to a large degree, cannot suffer Christians.

I am instituting a new policy here on George's Running Social Commentary. We have all seen how the media has rightfully begun referring to Islamic Terrorists as "Islamists" instead of Muslims. This is a necessary way of seperating the murderous tyrants who use that faith as a justification for hatred and death from those who follow it's tenets peacefully and believe at heart that it is indeed a religion of peace (debate the distinction if you must, and I think it is a legitimate debate, but our OB-GYN is an Iraqi follower of Islam and I know it is unfair to line her up beside the bloody lunatic terrorists who kill in the name of Allah). I am going to adopt a similar approach to the distinction in the Christian world between believers like myself and the members of the Jesus Brigade. I'm going to call them Christianists. Fair enough?

So what have the Christianists been up to lately? What was it that drew my ire enough to finally record my rambling thoughts on the subject? They are picketing. I saw it on Yahoo yesterday. It's Christmastime and oooohhh, the Jesus Brigade has stirred its righteous umbrage into a frothing lather of white-hot spite at the Satanic monolith of ... wait, you've heard this, right? Yes, indeed.

Walmart.

They are picketing Walmart, trying to turn away shoppers. Why? Because of allegations that Walmart hires illegal aliens? Or that Walmart discriminates based on gender? Or that they pay an unlivable wage to their low-level employees? Or that Walmart bulldozes small business and decimates small town economies? Nah. Christianists don't care about that kind of thing, even if it is true. No, they are picketing Walmart because Walmart chose to use the phrase "Happy Holidays" in their advertising this year instead of "Merry Christmas".

That's defending the faith for ya.

Do they really think Jesus is cheering this on? Can they actually imagine Jesus coming back to earth today and spending his time picketing retail stores because of how they refer to his holiday? I mean, do they really look at the Jesus of the Bible and think that this man argued petty little offenses and howled outrage about his rights? Would Jesus fight a war over whether we taught creation or evolution in school? Would he march on city hall trying to shut down the local strip joint? Would he start a letter campaign to have the Ten Commandments installed in every courthouse? Would he organize a political rally to protest the threat to the words "under God" in the American Pledge of Allegience?

For the sake of any Christianists who might be reading this, let me answer that categorically. No! He wouldn't!

When Jesus did walk the earth, he didn't join forces with the religious warmongers. Instead, he hung out with the strippers and the drunks, the cheaters and the sluts. His band of followers was made up of working stiffs and dregs. He annoyed the religious leaders, the Christianists of his time, because he not only didn't join them in their holy wars, he associated himself with the very people they were trying to condemn and squash. He didn't come with an agenda of political upheavel and doctrinal legalism. He came with a plain and simple message for everyday peeps who were just getting by, people who didn't have the answers, who just wanted to be loved and accepted. Jesus was straight up about the people who did think they had the answers, and who were using those answers to beat others over the head. Sometimes he scoffed at them. Sometimes he embarrassed them. But mostly (and this was the worst thing of all from their perspective) he just ignored them.

So maybe I should just learn to ignore the Christianists. Maybe we all should, believer and unbeliever alike, churched, unchurched, sinner and saint. Just ignore the ever-lovin' daylights out of 'em. Maybe that really would be the worst thing of all for them, because without an audience, they don't have anyone to feel superior over. But its hard, because the God they claim to represent, that they are mocking by their pettiness and shrill whining, is a good God who not only loves people, He likes them! He likes all the people who are getting annoyed and abused and offended and hurt by the rhetoric of the Christianists. He wants to be with them and to be known by them, He wants to show them love and bring them to a place of real joy and freedom from guilt! And they are not finding that, because those that claim most noisily on this earth to represent that God are obnoxious, hateful little twits. I don't blame the world for turning away from that, but I hope they do find the real God somewhere along the line. I cling to the belief that God is bigger than those little people who abuse His name, and that His blinding love cannot be obscured by the tiny, paltry bushel-basket of Christianist propaganda.

I suppose it does do me some good to remember that the Christianists (in a different form) were out in force when Jesus walked the earth as a man, and that he more or less blew them off. I'll try to do the same thing. I really will.

But as hard as I'm trying, I ain't Jesus. And one of these days, I may just have to pop one of 'em.

Today's Blather Forecast ...

Today's Blather:

I am signed up for two blog (it's funny, but I always want to capitalize that word, "Blog", like it's a national institution or a small country populated by nerds) services. There is no obvious purpose for this. I post the same stuff on both blogs. I could explain the reason why this is the case, but it would be tedious and totally un-entertaining (but it would include a reference to my friend Sara Swinson, who introduced me to the world of blog, and whose blog is very worth looking into) so I will skip right to the non-tedious and slightly more entertaining part (if, that is, you are the sort of person who is entertained by the random ramblings of a prefessional blatherer).

I like this blog a lot better. I write everything here first, then, maybe that day, maybe the next, when I have a spare moment, I copy it over to the other one. The other blog gets very much the second-rate treatment. You wanna know why? Of course you do.

This one is better looking.

That's it. It isn't easier to use, or faster, and it doesn't get any more hits (both get about as many hits as a Canadian rap star*). It's just better looking.

It's amazing to me when I think about all the little biases and predilections I have based solely on looks. I mean, of course I married my wife because she is attractive (read: "a hottie"), but I am actually realizing that I choose even the most mundane things based on looks. I'm talking gas stations. I'm talking breakfast cereal. And which checkout lane I queue up at. And which freakin' cart I put my two pounds of frozen ground beef in. I come home from the grocery store and my wife (the hottie) asks me how much I paid for that brand of peanut butter, and I have no idea, but I know what it looked like sitting there on the shelf, gloriously more beautiful than the other everyday peanut butters sitting around it. I'm a product of my American culture, I suppose, but I can't blame it all on that. I'm a superficial bastard, I admit it. Mostly.

It must be hard-wired into us, to some extent. My son, three years old, is the same way. He likes good looking people and shuns people who are (by his standards, which are as subjective as anybody else's) less-than-attractive. I don't want to foster this, but (and this is the brutally honest, sticking-my-neck-out-there part) deep down inside of me, part of me applauds it! Why is that? Why is it that I take pride in thinking that my friends are attractive? That my kids and my wife are good-looking? That my car is snazzy, my batteries are shiny, and that I eat a sexy freakin' brand of peanut butter? Is the answer as simple as that I feel more attractive myself if I am surrounded by attractive things?

...is it?

(long, thoughtful pause)

You know, I don't think so. At least not entirely. This might be very republican of me, but I think at our base, we all, to some degree, yearn for beauty. I think it is a simple, pure, elemental desire. We all like what is nice, what is pretty, what is colorful, what is sexy. The fact that that desire has been used as a ploy, as a mask to sell us everything from soft drinks to Presidents doesn't mean that the desire itself is bad. It just means humans are good at bastardizing everything we touch. Preferring beauty doesn't make us superficial. Preferring beauty, seeking it, is the elemental soil that makes humans hope, that convinces us there is a heaven, that drives us to create. Preferring beauty makes us wish for the better, and work for it. Preferring beauty makes us more than human.

All right, that was a bit melodramatic. I apologize. I got caught up in the moment. But I'll tell you something I'd be loathe to admit at a party, in a world full of cynical, hard-nosed realists like I usually am myself:

I believe it.

* don't ask me how I know that

Empathy Can be a Dangerous Thing

In the Stephen King book From a Buick 8, a group of Pennsylvania State Highway Patrolmen (and one woman) find themselves in the possession of a very strange late model Buick. Apart from being impervious to damage and having no discernible working parts (although it does, somehow, operate), the Buick has a very unsettling habit of occasionally disgorging lifeforms from it's trunk, lifeforms both mind-bendingly alien and freakishly repulsive. In a chapter approaching the finale of the book, a small group of patrolmen meet the apotheosis of these horrors, a creature that is obviously the dominant life-form in that bizarre, alternate world from which the Buick draws. It is indescribably awful (King himself seems to have a somewhat difficult time with the task) but as the group of terrified and repulsed humans attack and eventually kill the monstrosity, something extremely unsettling happens to them. As the thing is dying, it looks at them. One of the patrolmen describes:

In the center of my head, I saw myself. I saw all of us standing around in a circle and looking down, looking like murderers at the grave of their victim, and I saw how strange and alien we were. How horrible we were. In that moment I felt its awful confusion. Not its fear, because it wasn't afraid. Not its innocence, because it wasn't innocent. Or guilty for that matter. What it was was confused. Did it know where it was? I don't think so. Did it know why we were killing it? Yes, it knew that much. We were doing it because we were so different, so different and horrible that its many eyes could hardly see us, could hardly hold onto our images as we surrounded it, screaming and chopping and cutting and hitting.

All this just to state a simple but maybe understated fact: a little empathy can go a long way, and it can be extremely unsettling.

My own experiences with empathy, ironically, foster a certain shallaqued superficiality rather than a more understanding worldview. I don't know-- this is going to sound extremely strange to some people, methinks, but maybe it'll help if I say I am an artist and (to a lesser extent) a writer of fiction. The act of creating fiction is, in its most basic form, the act of trying to see the world through other people's eyes and determining how they think and what moves them.

I think I must be eerily good at that, even if I ain't necessarily a great writer. Which I ain't.

Here's an example: I was in the kitchen a few minutes ago pouring myself a cup of coffee. We have a young woman that comes a few times a week to play with our two kids while my wife runs errands (or just plain runs), and she happened to be in the kitchen as well getting something mushy to feed* the baby. She is new to our family, and we all like her immensely, but I know very little about her apart from the fact that she is very good with the kids, easy to talk to, and has very good references. As she left the room, I was wondering about her story, her life thus far. She has a look that tells some of that story for her, and I can appreciate that it apparently hasn't all been perfectly splendid. I wondered what our home and lifestyle looks like to her, how it feels to be in our house with us and our kids. And then, for the tiniest sliver of a microsecond, almost an imperceptible blip of time, I seemed to see myself through her eyes: somewhat aloof, a tiny bit arrogant, older and distant but a little reassuringly immature, oblivious of the hair sticking up in the back, sniffling a little with a cold-- sort of a big, monolithic statue of a cartoon character, Bullwinkle maybe-- generally amusing and harmless, as long as it doesn't actully fall on you. And immediately after that moment of (what felt like) perfect perceptual empathy, I forgot, just for a fraction of a sliver of a second, which one of us I was!

I'm not nuts. Really. I don't think.

But is this entirely normal? Do other people feel that sometimes? That moment of perfect (if invented) sync with someone else's view of the world? This is a source of, among other things, terrible vanity for me, because I know what I look like to the people around me at any given time. I can look at them and imagine exactly how I appear to them. And the sad, pathetic, hopeless truth about me (poser that I am) is that I adjust myself- pose, posture, expression- to enhance that perception as much as I can. I don't like this about myself, mind you. I'd like to be utterly oblivious to the maintenance of my image and other people's perceptions of me. I'd like to practice more often the freedom to just be comfortable being me and forget there is anyone else around at all. And I am trying. But it doesn't come naturally. I take some comfort in the belief that that doesn't come naturally for pretty much anybody, I think.

But the annoying thing is, this "ability" to look at the world through someone else's eyes has not done much to make me a more generally empathetic and understanding person. I am pretty damn judgemental, in the classic "you bettah believe I'll throw that first stone" sense. Again, I don't like this about myself, so thank you for not pointing it out. Lately, I have begun attempting to use this "superpower" for good instead of, well, if not evil, at least the superficial. I have begun trying to look at people that strike me as repulsive (murderers of innocence, the haters, the mindlessly violent) and seeing the world through their eyes.

The result has shaken my world and begun a very, very uncomfortable (but necessary) shift in my perception of the world, of justice, of good and evil. I have found that I can see, just a bit, the world through the eyes of the most heinous criminal. What I have seen is that, rather than being the spontaneous anomolies of violence that I found it easy to believe these people were, they are more accurately just the tip of the tentacle, the knife in the hand of a long line of abuse, hate, violence, neglect, and inconceivable pain. I hate it, but what I see through the eyes of these people is that before they were perpetrators, they were victims. It isn't an excuse, but it makes a difference to know that these people, for the most part, weren't equipped for life like I was. They are broken, and they are passing on brokenness. They know right from wrong, I think, but they barely know how to choose between them. They don't know how not to hurt.

It doesn't mean justice shouldn't be done, or that these individuals cannot bear the blame for their horrible choices. It just means they don't bear it alone. Not by a long shot. And the sad, ugly, hateful, abominable truth is that most of the people who bear the responsibility for these tragic crimes will never bear the blame for them. Justice just doesn't work that way. It can't.

But oh if it could.

Anyway, wow, how much more comfortable my life was when I thought that the evils of society could be solved just by chopping off the ends of the tentacles. How much more satisfying it was to execute judgement on the murderers and haters when I didn't have to feel sorry for them, when I didn't know they were just the inevitable end result of a long chain of horror, much of which they experienced themselves. This must be what it means to live in a "fallen" world: to know that hate and evil doesn't just erupt spontaneously from nothing, but is instead cultivated richly and at great length in the fertilizer of humanity's essential selfishness, pettiness and pride.

I don't know what I am going to eventually do with this dawning realization, but I do know that a lot of my assumptions and confident assertions about life were at least skewed, if not completely, willfully lazy.

See what I mean? A little empathy can be a very dangerous thing.

* read: rub all over her face and let her play with

Things my Kids Will Never Experience (Part One)

Televisions with knobs that turn

My grandparents had a big ol' Zenith console television in a fake wood grain cabinet. It dominated it's corner of the living room and exuded an aura of authority and dominion that felt somehow prehistoric, as if the house had been built around it as a shrine. There was no such thing as a remote back in the days when we'd all gather around to eat dinner off folding trays while watching Hee Haw and The Osmond's (Grandparent's version of MTV back then). You had to get up off your chair, walk over to the TV, bend down, and turn a knob.

There were two knobs on Grandma and Grandpa's Zenith. Both of them were identical looking. The top one turned between the standard stations, channels one through twenty-four (the knob operated a clever little mechanism that shuttled a series of numbers behind a little, backlit window, telling you what station you were currently viewing). The lower knob was designed for that mystical land of Cable TV (back then only grandparents were allowed to have cable, on the assumption that anyone under 65 had better things to do on a Saturday afternoon than watch twenty year old B-movies and local call-in quiz shows). The lower knob turned in tiny, clicking increments between the multitude frequencies that cable TV operated on back in the day.

My kids will never know what turning the knob felt like. The knob was made of some kind of fake-metal-wonder-plastic with a chipped, chrome look. The one on Grandma and Grandpa's Zenith was a cylinder about the shape of short stack of poker chips. It had a knurled edge around the outside and a flat, thumb-smeared plate sticking out of it's front. The plate fit perfectly between your thumb and curled fore-finger and gave necessary leverage. When you turned it, there was a moment of resistance as you overcame some clockwork mechanism inside- the screen would go fuzzy as you steered the tuner out of one channel into unknown territory - then the resistance vanished and the knob turned easily, shortly, clicking over one cog and plunking into a new channel with a satisfying little thud of completion. You'd look to see what was on the screen, then turn again as needed until you found something that looked promising.

And then, if you were Grandma or Grandpa, you adopted the wait-and-see pose: hands high on the hips, bent over almost double at the waist, face set in the expression of an umpire waiting for a pitch on a full count. The wait-and-see pose was necessary, because choosing a channel was a commitment. When you walked back to your chair and sat down, you were established; there was no turning back. You were gonna watch that damn channel no matter what.

The wait-and-see pose was generally man's work.

Us kids never adopted the wait-and-see pose. We eliminated the middle-man by simply sitting on the floor within two feet of the knob, turning channels sometimes just for the fun of it. Turning channels meant control. Turning channels meant POWER.

When my kids grow up, the phrase "Don't touch that dial" will mean as much to them as "Don't count your eggs before they're hatched" means to me. ("Hatched"? Who hatches eggs? I thought a hatch was what you put a rabbit in or something?) Today, we zap through a hundred channels in thirty seconds flat, all from the comfort of the couch, moving nothing more than a few insignificant finger muscles and even fewer insignificant brain cells. And it's good. I like my remote these days. If I lose my remote, I am suddenly utterly helpless, sitting on the edge of the couch and staring at the TV like a rabbit on the highway, frozen in the doomsday glare of (gasp!) a random commercial! But I like remembering the feeling of the knob. I like remembering what it was like to commit to a night's TV on one channel, come hell or high water (or a three minute commercial for Slim Whitman records). I like remembering the POWER of The Knob.

Remotes don't mean power any more than more channels mean better things to watch.

The Male Feminist Speaks

Most of my good friends are women.

Strike that. Let me say it a bit differently.

All of my friends, with a single exception, are women. There is a very good, very prosaic and basic reason for this. Men are dopes. That's the reason.

Not every individual man is a dope, per se, I admit. But Men, in terms of an aggregate whole, a stereotype and a demographic, a section of the pie-chart of humanity, are. They are self-centered, mildly deluded, insensitive, trivial, oafish, unhealthy, muscle-headed, pointlessly vain, and (this is the key) deliberately superficial little humans. They have very little, if anything at all, to offer the world in general, not to mention any self-respecting woman.

Of course, this is an opinion based on admittedly limited experience (read the first sentence of this blog again).

My female friends, however, tend to agree with me (and not nearly as shrilly as you might think). The thing is, they want to believe otherwise. They want for men to be better than all the evidence seems to suggest they are. They, being for the most part single and hetero, have a vested interest in it. And it is this fact - the fact of these beautiful, smart, glorious women and their continued, valiant but increasingly hopeless search for one decent, manly example - that proves to me the wasteland that modern masculinity has apparently become.

So what is the problem with men today? I'll answer that in a moment.

It may surprise you, dear anonymous reader, to know that while I consider myself a male feminist, I also consider myself (only slightly cheekily) the defender of male liberation. Let me 'splain.

For years, all through the forties and fifties, culture (television, radio, advertising of all kinds) treated women as silly, frilly, bubble-headed but ultimately necessary accoutrements to the obviously superior male lifestyle. Without the men in their lives to guide them, to chide them, to occasionally sit on them and steer them through life, women would obviously just degenerate to giggling lathers of inane uselessness. This approach to the culture obviously resonated with something deep in the psyche of the country, because it was incredibly pervasive.

And then, in the mid-seventies, things began to swing the other way (so to speak). By the early nineties, gender attitudes in popular culture had not just rebounded, but had completely reversed. If you are a woman reading this, you will be most likely incredulous at the suggestion, but before you get ramped up about it, spend some time paying attention to the way men are portrayed in advertising. Men, according to Madison Avenue, are brainless, silly, lumbering dolts. Without the women in their lives to watch over them, to mold them, to prod them through life, men would degenerate into grunting, clumsy (and probably dangerous) cesspools of uselessness.

And this brings us back to the question: So what is the problem with men today? The problem with men (today and always) is that they are simply all too willing to live down to their expectations. Society says you're an idiot? Fine, says the man (who beneath that overconfident shell is usually a mess of insecurity) I'm an idiot. I'm an oaf. I'm a useless tub of bad, bad testosterone. I can't be better because the thing that makes me useless has nothing to do with my actions or my attitudes. It has to do with the fact that I was born with testicles and I pee through a penis. I can't be better because I can't not be a man, no matter how hard I try.

And frankly, a lot of men try pretty hard to not be men. It's sooooo pathetic.

Back in the day, when femininity was being denegrated in the popular media, women said "Whoa there bucko. You can't say that about us. You don't know who you're messing with, do you? Call us useless? Call us silly? We'll show you, you just watch." And we did watch, and they did show us, thankfully. But now that popular culture has caught up and, as usual, overcompensated, men just hang their collective heads heads and proclaim (a la Homer) "You're right! You're right! We're SO LAME!"

I wish I had a neat way to end this. I was actually intending this to be sorta funny, sorta thought-provoking, and to end on an up note. Now that I am here, I realize it ain't funny.

And I can't think of an up note to end on.

(sigh)

Bloglodyte finally gives in...

So I have this joke.

The joke relies on people knowing me a little bit, so I'll help you out there. I am a 30-something computer artist and digital animator. Strangely enough, unlike virtually everyone else in my field, I don't know anything about computers. I don't know how many gigs of this or mega-doodles of that my computer has in it. I don't know what processor-chips or memory-thingies or driver-doohickies it has secreted away in that magic little box on the floor next to my desk. I just know when I move the mouse and click the little buttons, things generally happen, and I make something approximating art out of that. All humility aside, I am really good at what I do. I love doing it, which is why I am so good at it. Loving it is the secret, methinks, of being good at anything. So the joke I tell people is that I am a little like the professional racecar drive that knows, approximately, where the gas goes in his car. And could maybe find the cupholder.

Yeah, I know, it isn't really a funny joke. But it's a self deprecating way for me to admit something I am probably uneccesarily ashamed of.

So, being the ironically computer illiterate guy I am, I have not (until this moment) gotten on the blog bandwagon. This despite the fact that I like to write, and have, until this point, merely needed an audience to write to. Maybe technology freaks me out a bit. Maybe I just don't like to learn knew things. Maaaaybe (ahh, now I am finally getting somewhere!) just maybe I am afraid of finding an audience for my writings and musings and discovering that, lo and behold, they stink. It's possible. After all, I am used to being good at things. Hmm!

Well screw it, here I am anyway.

To whoever reads these things: Hi! And who the hell are you? Whaddaya want? Really! I wanna know! If this actually works as a means of communicating and sharing, I can't wait to be involved. And if it's just another way for me to ramble to myself and an empty room... well who am I to complain? It's what I have been doing all along anyway!

(grin!)

All right, more to come later. Maybe. We'll see.