Global Prayer Week

And you might as well pray for Liz and I, who will be sojourning with the Amish this weekend. Not just the Amish, mind you---also a ridiculously large number of high school students, rabid and ready for the agrarian life.

My desires for this weekend:
- sleep
- to till a field with a horse-drawn plow
- to milk a cow
- to pick up hens to get at their eggs
- to not be responsible for severing anyone else's limbs

I'll let you know how it goes.

By a jumbo jet

Got my head shaved today. Not down to the quick or anything, but at least to the cuticle, if you want to think about it like a thumb.

The only reason I suggest this sort of cogitation, of course, is a direct result of the fact that thumbs are apparently a distinctly intelligible life force. I reached this conclusion after spending four and a half hours on the Galapagos Islands, studying the various lengths of birds’ beaks before feeding their owners to my beagle. My in-depth interrogation offered me the hitherto unprecedented opportunity to publish a book, and I hastily did so, with the concomitant observation that I would have been quite unsightly signing the book contract if my limbs were devoid of their opposable digits.

Hence my obeisance towards that metacarpal so stiltingly referred to as the “fifth finger.” You might as well call my newly-shined cranium an adventure in chromatology. But it really has nothing to do with being shiny for shiny’s sake—it’s actually intended as an important mechanism of self-defense.

That’s right—my penchant for an elegant coif has given way to a cheap new security system which functions in two (2) ways:

First, the casual observer may have noticed, upon first glimpse of my Elvis-shaped frontal lobe, that the extensive and flowing locks clustered high ‘round my glistering brow are actually nothing more than a clever cover-up; in a word, a comb-over. It’s true: my forehead has for some time now been a partner in climate change, making newer, narrower, longer, more extensive inlets into the geography of my scalp that should (and used to) be covered by blond hair, straight, flat, and reminiscent of day-old spaghetti. The Donald Trump strategy can only work for so long, I’ve realized, so I’ve steeled myself for the alternative: something along the lines of making a war to cover up the bodies.

Incidentally, these fjords, as it were, seem not to be utterly stifling the growth of my hair, but rather are simply the result of a general retreat taking place on my chroming crown. My neck has seen several new outcroppings of the friendly follicles, and my back has never been so woolly warm.

The second manner in which my newest hairstyle doubles as a defense stems from a growing realization I’ve had that lasers are the weapon of the future. I’m typically a meek and mild-mannered altar ego, but I’ve spat my spit-balls in the past, as it were, and think it no unrealistic precaution to make as much of my body as reflective as possible. For the same reason, I also keep a can of silver spray-paint in my pocket, just in case I need at short notice to convert myself into a mirror.

To realize these double-armed goals, I had no recourse, of course, but to depend upon my wife—heretofore referred to as my Barbarous Barberess—to cut my hair. Twice.

I have no problem with depending upon my wife—I do so quite frequently; daily, even—nor do I intend “Barbarous Barberess” in a solely derogatory sense. She was a picture of patience while I squirmed under the scissors and a model of charity for even touching my grease-ball head in the first place.

But she did hack away at my gnarled strands as if my baldness was the bride-price for some ancient Teutonic fief. My head of limp spaghetti was not, apparently, completely congruent with her aesthetic sense; it was therefore, without further ado, sundered. She started out by attacking my mane with a pair of crafting scissors, but when she stepped back to view the results, her foot started tapping rapidly, abstractedly, on the cold linoleum floor. She turned to rummage in the closet, I started cleaning up the hair scattered on the floor, and then I heard the click and whirr of the electric shaver. I knew immediately that my dome was destined for denuding.

And I’m actually okay with that. It’s not every day that you get to do laser bends with your head. Now, if I can only figure out how to shave my thumbs...

Lines written in a parking lot

Revolve around me, planets nine!
or--please forgive me--"planets eight"
(though if I gain a bit more weight,
the cosmos might be redefined).

The pursuit of people

I know you’re reading this for some other reason–boredom, compassion, or whatever–but I’m going to barrage you with a thought on life: pursue people.

Not your girlfriend, not your ex. Simply persons, as opposed to things. People, not ideas. Humans, not humanity.

They say Robespierre was a great lover of the people—but there were no specific people that he loved. After the French Revolution, everyone was wondering how a movement dedicated to “Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity” could have been so slavish, hierarchical, and selfish.

That’s why Voltaire exalted garden-cultivating with Candide and why Byron wrote his anti-epic, Don Juan—because they perceived that people who clung to ideals destroyed themselves and those around them, because blind faith in a creed not only created an idol but created a thrall of pagan worshippers.

And it’s true. Ideals will destroy you. They will make you stale. They might even make you dead.

Thank God that He isn’t just an ideal. Thank God that we don’t just believe in the Nicene Creed, but that we believe in a Person, someone with whom we can have a relationship, someone who will guide us and direct us and love us and teach us to love Himself. When we figure out our own ideals, our own truths, we aren’t figuring out natural laws and dictums inasmuch as we are figuring out who God is. Honesty, peace, justice, mercy are all dead ends if we pursue them for their own sake. They will only survive without being meaningless if we understand them as God’s attributes, if we first follow Him and then emanate into action because of our love for Him.

Realpolitik no more, please

It's too easy to poke fun at people. I've just been perusing back issues of Sojourners Magazine and, while I appreciate the perspective they provide, it seems to me that they're sliding into some of the very things they're criticizing.

I mean, they're picking apart the Religious Right--whatever that is--subtly, shyly almost. Sometimes not too shyly, as Barack Obama's cover story speech a few months back made clear. But reading it feels an awful lot like sitting in an English grad seminar--all the jokes are made at Bush's expense, all the conversation revolves around eventually to climate change and SUVs.

In other words, I'm worried that Wallis et al. are becoming just as partisan as Dobson & Co. It's easy to rip apart Bush, and it's simple to point out the big mistakes which are being made in Colorado Springs. It's way too simple. Besides, most people in America already agree.

Perhaps we'd all be better off if we stopped being so concerned about making things happen in Washington, D.C. and started being more worried about things already occurring in our own neighborhoods.

"Racecar" is a palindrome

You're all excited, I know, at this foray into the electronic. Now you can grasp whatever parts of my cyber-perspective are hurtling around in Google's basement and tunnel them through the portals of your computer screens, gulping fiction in 15-inch bites. It's like driving one of those race-car simulations, where the road twists and winds around, and trees wildly bounce off the windshield, and the sky goes 'round and 'round. All the while, though, the hood of the car stays firmly planted on the bottom of the screen--immobile, static, only crumpling when careering off a particularly large obstacle.

You may think that when we thought like a child, we raced like a child--but it's still true. At this very instant, your keyboard is your hood. You think you're flying rapidly wherever you want to go, all over this cyber-space world, but you're not going anywhere it doesn't want you to. And you're certainly not going to get off the map.

But then again, neither am I. Let's just try not to crash, OK?