Extrication
August 16, 2009
I really put myself out there and applied for three jobs this weekend, and it’s ironic because I rented three movies on Friday afternoon. I checked out The Wrestler, Sex and the City and Stephen King’s The Mist from the library. I was anticipating having a kicked-back, lazy weekend full of cuddling, stuffed-crust pizza and Freon (because it was hot yesterday and today). But on Friday evening I still had to apply to one more job to fulfill my obligatory “3 jobs” requirement for unemployment. You see, the people down at the unemployment office don’t really care what you do (we’re all adults, right?) as long as you are applying to at least three jobs per week. And in this economy, applying for three jobs per week isn’t going to yield immediate results, but at least it provides the structure to keep you thinking like a soon-to-be employed person.
Anyways, I was really looking forward to Mickey Rourke’s performance as a guy whose not-afraid-of-getting hurt lifestyle has left him with bum knees, a Vicodin addiction and an estranged daughter (at least that is what I think the plot of The Wrestler is about). Plus, the movie won some Oscars, so it is a must-see for every person who has ever almost had an article about being a cinematic phillistine published. I checked out Sex and the City two weeks ago and didn’t really watch it. I left it playing in the background while taking a phone call from someone in Los Angeles, but I remember there being some good Tn’A sex scenes as well as a brief shot of a showering guy’s semi (for the sake of symmetry no doubt, because why would viewers of a movie that’s mostly geared towards a female audience only want to see naked women?). Since Sex and the City was a visually appealing flick, I was interested to figure out what goes on narratively in the film. Finally, Stephen King’s movie about a mysterious mist in a supermarket seemed good after having just watched M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening a couple weeks ago. There is nothing more scary than a mysterious killer which may or may not be invisible and is capable of pervading everything within and around you. I think there is already something like that in real life, it’s called tobacco. Plus, having spent more than 6 years employed as a jack of all trades at a supermarket, I am eager to see if there is anything more scary about a grocery store other than the psychosis-inducing Musak.
So there I was, all ready to enjoy my weekend as if I had worked hard all week, when suddenly I decided to go online and get applying for that last job out of the way. I didn’t glance at the jobs listings for long before my eyes landed on a librarian job at MTV. According to MTV’s website, the position duties and responsibilities entailed, “The processing, tracking and coordination of media raw stock requests into company database,” and, ”the arrangement and distribution of raw stock to MTVN user community.” The job required a bachelors degree, customer service/library experience, and computer literacy and writing/communication skills – all of which I have. Furthermore, the job didn’t look like a promotional job open only to MTV employees, so I went ahead and applied.
Still, I had my reservations. For anyone who is thinking this might be a dream job, I’m tempted to ask what could be so fun about sitting in a stock room all day loaning DVD’s out to clients? I suspect working in a video store would only be slightly less glamorous, except in this job your patrons would be media conglomerates instead of suburbanites. Still, since MTV mostly works with D-listers these days, I don’t think I would be distributing a lot of “raw stock.”
The ease with which my qualifications seemed to fit with the job’s requirements prompted me to apply for the job despite any lingering doubts I had. It felt like I was applying to the position simply to fulfill unemployment’s mandatory “3 job” requirement, and I didn’t like this. I don’t want to go about the job search in a half-assed way, as that is what the unemployment police probably suspect people will do. They think we are all a bunch of sneaky bastards who view being on the unemployment dole as some sort of extended paid vacation. And this week I unexpectedly found myself giving in to that tendency to just sit back and do the minimum in order to earn my weekly benefits.
This incipient feeling of being a corner cutter caused me to shift gears. My priorities were suddenly reversed, and I lost any interest in watching the movies which I had brought home. I felt how I did back in college when most Fridays were spent looking forward to a busy weekend of paper-writing, catch-up reading and cramming for Monday tests and quizzes. If this weekend of mine was rendered as a movie montage, it would include lots of horizontal pans of me hunched over my laptop or tugging at a jammed printer. These scenes would rotate along with shots of me tossing goldfish crackers into my mouth, watching tv or doing jumping jacks. All the while Tool’s “The Pot” would be playing. Every time there was a shot of me doing jumping jacks the speed would be sped-up 2X in ascending order, and with each horizontal pan of me at the laptop the serious look of concentration on my face would deepen. Likewise, the busted printer frustration would increase from yelling to pounding eventually climaxing with me smashing the machine at the end in the way a drummer might destroy his bass drum after a band’s brassy performance.
I only applied for two jobs after the MTV job, but there can oftentimes be a lot of work involved in applying for a job. First, there is the research part. This can involve hours of culling hundreds of jobs, many which the job seeker has already seen before, and some of which are cleverly disguised scams. Then comes the resume-tweaking, the carefully worded cover letters, and applying to many jobs today usually requires creating accounts with the career branch of a company or institution’s website. This can be helpful for the sake of having an application of file if you ever decide to apply for another position with the employer, but it is also time consuming. Also, I spent extra time applying to the two jobs this weekend to make up for doing the minimum this week and cutting corners by applying for the MTV job (which, let’s face it, monkies with typewriters probably apply for these types of jobs).
The two other jobs I applied to were within my related fields of education and work experience. One was an ESL lab teacher job with CUNY’s Research Foundation, and the other was a writing job at St. John’s University in Queens. The former position entails teaching non-English speaking adults in computer literacy/career skills classes, while the latter would have me writing, “Content for various projects, including but not limited to, letters, solicitations, brochures, PowerPoint presentations, event materials, advertisements,” and alumni magazine pieces and articles.
For the ESL teacher job, I’m not sure if I put myself out there too much or not. In the cover letter I wrote:
Dear HR,
I am applying for the F/T ESL/vocational computer lab teacher position in the Begin Managed Programs (BMP) department. I came across the listing for this vacancy at the New York State Department of Labor’s Job Exchange website.
I do hope you take the time to consider my candidacy for this position, as I think I closely fit the qualifications you are seeking.
As my resume indicates, I have 1 year of substitute teaching experience in a diverse public school setting. While living in [redacted], NY between 2007 and 2008, I subbed on a per diem basis at the elementary, intermediate and secondary levels. [redacted], NY is a city with a high vacancy rate which has recently been injected with new life thanks to an influx of refugees and immigrants from all corners of the world. These immigrants flood the city’s school district, creating a cross-cultural learning environment for students as well as educators. On many days I was called to sub in ESL classes that contained students from nearly every continent, and the experience was enriching and rewarding.
A two-semester long tutoring internship during college in 2006 at [redacted]’s Refugee Center, prepared me for my subbing experience in the [redacted] City School District. [redacted] College (my alma mater) participates in Project SHINE, an international program which partners colleges and communities to help recent arrivals to the United States assimilate and learn English. My role as a Project SHINE tutor in ESL classes, working with adult learners two hours per week during college, facilitated my transition to subbing in a multi-linguistic school district after college. I was also aided in both endeavors by my ability to communicate in Spanish with native speakers when English failed. I studied Spanish for two years during college and have since continued to use it on frequent enough occasions that it doesn’t go to waste.
Finally, during my most recent job at the [redacted] Public Library which I held for a year and a half, I routinely assisted patrons with use of the library’s public computers. These patrons were mostly adults, and since ¼ of [redacted]’s population . . . was born outside of the United States, I often had to overcome language barriers while helping them. These computer users displayed a wide range of computer literacy. Sometimes I had to assist people with basic interfacing, and other times I would help someone with uploading photos or videos from a flash drive onto a multimedia website. More often than not, however, people needed assistance navigating the Internet, and I was always happy to help them do this.
My resume further lists my education, work history, skills and contact information. Thank you in advance for considering my application.
Sincerely,
Timothy F. Freeman
8/15/09
Cool stuff. I will keep everyone posted on how the job search unfurls.
Is That All There Is?
July 15, 2009
or THE END BEGINNING OF DAYS
(because agnostics wrestle with faith too)
by: Me
“Eh-hem. Many of you, I am sure, had the opportunity to travel someplace last week during Spring Break. Whether you were visiting friends or family or just simply escaping this endless cold weather we’ve been having, I can assure you that none of you folks had a more exotic time than I did (chuckles from the audience). I have been bragging to everyone for the past few days that I had the pleasure this last week of officiating the Bingo tournament at the Masonic Home Senior Activities Center (uproarious laughter begins)…and…and…but that’s not the best part…(more laughter)…the best part – the real icing on the cake – was that I got to hand out prizes to the winners (the whole house now quakes with knee-slapping laughter, I start to wonder where they hid the nitrous tanks). HOW’S THAT FOR YOU DISNEY WORLDERS!!! (laughter crescendos before slowly dying down).
No, but seriously. It has been a crazy week. It began with news of the untimely death of a famous and beloved movie actor and ended with more violence in the Middle East. The death of the familiar Hollywood personality at the age of 53 reminded us that another irreplaceable piece of ourselves is forever gone, and it also caused us to clutch our chests and wonder if we too have some latent health condition that can just as quickly and easily terminate our own lives. Lynn Caine, a writer probably best known for her 1974 book Widows, wrote that, “Since every death diminishes us a little, we grieve – not so much for the death as for ourselves.” This woman, Lynn Caine, who wrote a memoir about widowhood which was subsequently turned into a made-for-TV movie that aired on one of the major networks in 1976, was later taken from us in 1987 at the age of 63.
I remember my uncle dying in 1995. He was seven years older than my father, but the two men were alike in every way. I thought of him as a typical lasting epitome of that group of people who a certain famous anchorperson dubbed, “The Tallest Generation Ever.” They were the tallest because when they stood upright, their shadows enveloped the entire globe. They were so big, this anchor person asserts, that by comparison to their stature the world seemed small and easily conquerable. They are supposedly the crowning star that sits atop the highest point of the bell-shaped arch of humankind and civilization. Everything had been leading up to them, and everything that comes after will be a downhill regression into anarchy and immaturity.
Yes, my friends, life is short. Every time somebody we know dies, a piece of us dies along with them. I remember going home after my uncle’s funeral and looking through my family’s old photo albums. My uncle stood there beside me and my parents, frozen in time inside of the 3 inch by 5 inch photographs. I followed the trajectory of his life from middle age until death within the context of my own childhood and adolescence. The memories of my uncle at Christmas Eve parties and high school graduations were still very fresh in my mind at that time. It was hard to believe that he was actually dead, like maybe he had just gone to Hawaii without telling anybody and he was never coming back.
But now when I think of these memories they seem less fresh. Just as old cars rust and accumulate scratches and dents, the memories of my uncle are losing their relevance due to their outdatedness. And it terrifies me. A big part of whatever it was that was still recent and new in my mind in 1995 is becoming vaguer with each passing year. The image of my uncle is being transformed and discolored by the patina of life. I worry that what I remember about him today is more imagined than real, that I am recreating and plagiarizing the past by injecting it with the pictures, language and sounds of my life today?
When I look at old photo albums now and see my uncle’s face staring back at me, the echoes of him are less loud. Time has moved on without him and he exists now in a place that is more foreign. A snapshot taken of my uncle in 1994 shows him proudly kneeling next to a brand new Chevy Silverado, the undetected cancer in his body having not yet ravaged his athletic physique. Everything about the truck, from its fat tires to its mobile phone antenna mounted on the roof, now looks strange due to its dowdiness. Will these things seem even stranger in ten or twenty years as our understanding of styles and trends continues to evolve?
I sometimes wonder if sepia photographs tell the whole story of the late 19th and early 20th Century. Are the smells and feelings we typically associate with hundred year old photographs accurate, or are these things somehow caused by the encrustation of time which conceals the way life really was back in those days? Were the stoic and hollow eyed men and women we see in old photographs really that stoic and hollow eyed, or has time moved on to the point that it no longer became necessary to drag their spirits along? Maybe these quaint men and women carried vivacious countenances that exuded life and vitality. Perhaps their eyes were windows to curious, wise and lustful souls. But all we see today are hollow eyed stoic gentleman in funny attire and woman wearing stern masks of preternatural judgment and repression.
The point I’m trying to make people is that we are living in God’s grace right now at this moment. Yesterday came and went and it tasted sweet, but God has a purpose for us right here and now. Take a look around…look at your neighbors…inhale the smells around you…this is life! Today was created for us, tomorrow was created for us! Yes, when we think of the past we ache from nostalgia or we feel an anchor of sadness in our stomachs that there will never be another celebrity like so-and-so, or there will never be another summer like the summer of such-and-such year. It may be true that there will never be another thing which is exactly like a thing that preceded it, but this uniqueness is the beauty of God’s creation! Each day may be similar, but God gives everything a little nudge to make our lives novel and interesting (congregation erupts in happy laughter). Right?…Am I right?…(laughter continues for half a minute before slowly quieting down).
Each day is not a thumbprint people! Monotony is an ugly word, I know we all hate it, but if we stop and think…if we think about this Sunday morning as we sit here – I know some of you are probably having déjà vu (wild laughter) – this Sunday is brand new in its own way, and next Sunday will have something new for us also. As we go about the rest of our days today we might have a fixed schedule that we follow, but nothing ever happens exactly the same…right?
WE CAN’T STAY STUCK IN THE PAST! We can’t wish, for instance, that it was the 1980s again. We can’t lament styles that have come and gone, people that have come and gone, sports teams that have come and gone, musical genres that have come and gone… All we have is this moment that we’re living in right now. It is our duty to make the most of it because this is how new memories are formed. When we let go of our worries that today isn’t turning out to be as good as, say, ten years ago was, we can begin to live and experience all that today has to offer that is new. We may find if we do this that yesterday had its own purpose, but today’s purpose is important and different in its own way.
I’m going to close by quoting a familiar phrase which you all probably know, and maybe it can be attributed to the band Aerosmith, but maybe they lifted it from somewhere. Anyway, the quotation is: “Life’s a Journey, not a Destination.” Life’s a journey….not a destination….I want you all to think about that for a moment.
Our mission shouldn’t be to get somewhere. Friends, we already are here.”
THE GOSPEL OF JOHN (Part I)
June 8, 2009
RECENTLY I traveled to St. Louis to spend a few days with my old high school friend John Jones. John and I knew each other back in 1992 when we both attended a high school in the upper middle class suburb of Fair Oaks, California. Circa 1993 John moved to the St. Louis area and I departed for upstate New York a few years later. We hadn’t kept in contact since John moved away all those years ago, and our coming together again after half a lifetime of forgotten separation is nothing short of a miracle.
***
JOHN was staring out of the window at his parent’s house which was located three hundred feet away. “When Jesus comes to reclaim his apostate church, He won’t reclaim me,” he said ominously. At 32, John is athletic with blonde hair and a bronze and slightly sun-burned complexion. His eyes are like two burnished blue spheres that seem to probe the depths of your soul and look right through you at the same time. When I met John at a Starbucks the day before, I was amazed by how little his appearance had changed since high school. Besides being a few years older and having a slightly receding hair line, he looked more or less like the 15 year old version of himself. Except now he claimed to know the truth.
“When the people asked him about heaven Jesus told them to, ‘look around them’ because heaven was much like Earth. When I look around me all I see is violence, suffering and poverty. Children are abused and neglected, injuries and illnesses afflict the righteous, and people are getting squeezed into ever tighter corners by fear and lack of resources.”
Across the street from our dark little godless meeting a much happier scene was unfolding. John’s mother was chasing two of her grandchildren around as John’s brother Kaleb and his wife Megan stared on in rapt amusement. There was sunshine, smiles, hand clapping and laughs compared to John’s dimly lit bedroom chilled by the home’s central air conditioning system. John had moved out of his parent’s house a year ago and been invited to live in a spare bedroom at his friend and next door neighbor Brian’s house. His physical proximity to his family, however, did not translate into a spiritual proximity. John had done the unthinkable two years ago and had renounced God and Jesus one night during a packed family dinner.
John humorously describes the occasion as his “coming out party.”
“I came out,” he says unabashedly. ”I told them what was what. I don’t believe in God anymore and that was it.”
“So they kicked you out for it?” I said.
“No. I made the decision to leave later on. I didn’t want to be a part of their programmed way of life anymore. I wanted to watch the TV shows that I wanted to watch and listen to the music that I wanted to listen to. You just couldn’t make those kinds of decisions when everybody is trying to sit you down and have a serious man-to-man conversation about the Bible and eternity all of the time.”
John is like a lot of thirty-somethings who were raised in fundamentalist church communities. Before John’s departure from the rest of the Jones clan, his life revolved around the fundamentalist church in his St. Louis suburb. He attended Christian rock concerts, weekly young adult functions and even participated in sports leagues which were organized by various area churches. He never had to travel farther than the five miles it was from his house to his church’s multipurpose room or soccer field. “I’ve never dated a girl who wasn’t a member of my church,” he said. He listed the names of his former sweethearts as if listing streets in a new sub development: “Kimberly, Allison, Megan.” All one had to do was put the word “Way” or “Circle” behind each name.
In comparison to the split level house John was currently residing in, the Joneses two story home was a constant work in progress. John said it was unusual to not see scaffolding erected along the walls, and the constant traffic of electricians, contractors, architects and plumbers he assured me was dizzying.
Besides Mr. and Mrs. Jones, John’s older and younger brothers both lived at home with their wives and children. The oldest son Mike is 33 and has a 24 year old wife named Katie. They have two children, Noah who is 5 and Eve who is 3, as well as an 11 year old child from a marriage that ended when Mike’s first wife was hit and killed by a drunk driver. The upstairs of the Jones house had been converted into a small apartment for Mike, Katie and their kids.
John’s younger 27 year old brother Kaleb lives in the large basement with his 31 year old wife Megan and their five children. Three of the children, 8 year old Noah, 6 year old Moses and 5 year old Sarah are biological, while two of the children, Elijah and Shadrack, were adopted from Ethiopia.
Mr. and Mrs. Jones occupy the first floor of the house. The living room has been converted into a master bedroom and a wall next to the family room was knocked out to build an extremely large formal dining room addition.
When I looked out the window at Mrs. Jones who was now twirling one of the grandkids around by the arms and muttering goo-goo gah-gah talk to the infant, I thought she looked like a happy and sane enough woman. Mr. Jones soon joined her and added loud and boisterous laughs to all the carefree family commotion.
This can’t be such a bad thing, I thought. Why would John want to run away from all of this?
***
TO UNDERSTAND THE SIGNIFICANCE of my meeting up with John after so many years, one needs to travel back in time to the early nineties. I was raised in a family that can best be described as religiously indifferent. We were Presbyterians but only attended church on the obligatory holidays and a few other days out the year. I never read the Bible, I couldn’t have told you who Moses was, and if you had asked me who was the Son of Man I probably would have said they were a heavy metal band that toured with Judas Priest.
Despite my theologically deprived childhood, however, I had a number of friends who were ardent evangelical Christians. My best friend who lived up the street from me was an evangelical who attended a newfangled church that incorporated ancient fire and brimstone Christianity with modern rock music and Republican Party values. It was through him that I came to meet other fundamentalists – like John.
If one had pressed me in those days to explain the unexplainable, I may have gone so far as to admit to the possibility of supernatural or spiritual phenomena existing. But ultimately I was an atheist: I saw absolutely zero evidence of God’s existence either in nature or in my head. I believed that everything had either a rational or scientific explanation, and my fear of non-existence after death was attenuated by the fact that 80 years on earth was enough time to enjoy life’s sweetness and leave some footprints to be remembered by. One would likely think it impossible, for someone of my temporal persuasions, to get by with a group of fervent Christians. Despite the limitations to our friendships – even though I played with my best friend nearly every day, I was barred admittance to his house by his stoic and suspicious mother – our social synergy was mostly buoyed and maintained by other common interests, and an agreement to disagree on theological issues also helped keep the peace (this latter pact was arrived at after several unsuccessful arguments marked by mutual stubbornness and attempted persuasion reached an impasse every single time).
The distilled sum of our various commonalities was the crazy glue that held us together, and when we were flying down hills on our skateboards or practically asphyxiating from laughing none of us cared that I was a non-believer and vice versa. But this still didn’t prevent me from becoming a fifth wheel on more than a few occasions. No matter how innocent I was, there were times when I felt no better than Dr. Faustus in the company of my Christian friends. If I said, “Let’s swim under that bridge,” I may as well have been the snake in the Garden of Eden tempting them with forbidden fruit. If I suggested we ride our bikes along the river, I was afraid they might reply the way Jesus did when he rebuked Peter saying, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me.”
My Christian friends could get so high on God at times that it would have been futile not to go along with them. Like a straight man to a group of comics, I only would have been adding fuel to their spiritual fire. So I kept quiet at these times out of a desire not to rock the boat. The Titanic was a lavish and majestic ship before it ran into that dreaded iceberg.
Despite all of the good times we had, I also couldn’t shake the creeping suspicion that they were secretly planning to convert me. They probably realized my anarchic independence posed the biggest threat to their purity, and in order to maintain our friendship through puberty and beyond, they would have no choice but to convert me. This is why – after 7 years of having a mostly secular friendship – my Christian friends started introducing me to the religious side of their lives. I attended more Christian parties, youth groups, rock concerts and church services during my early teen years than I did during all of my previous childhood years with my family.
I was standing at the threshold of a new life. But of all the new possibilities that were forming and materializing quickly evaporated and came unraveled. In the rapidly changing world of adolescence, my Christian friends and I were soon scattered to the four winds. With all the things vying for the young mind, psychedelic drugs soon made more sense to me as a religion than Christianity ever did or could. My best friend was growing more and more serious about his guitar skills and his band than anything else. And John just sort of dropped off the radar before up and moving with his family to the St. Louis area. Other people in this Christian milieu also faded away too.
But just as drugs proved a short-lived avocation for me, my former Christian friends soon tired of their godless hobbies and each eventually found his or her way back to God. And after a brief religious epiphany in the late nineties when I was sure I had accepted Jesus as my personal savior forever, my belief and interest in discipleship slowly faded from skepticism and now – in the spectrum of religion and spirituality mindedness – is hovering somewhere between atheistic clarity and agnostic curiousness.
During my teens and twenties, after experimenting with drugs, dabbling in religion and battling addictions to nicotine, food and sex, I had finally come full circle. I was once again an ascetic practitioner of the Great and Responsible Here and Now. By my late twenties I had matured into the boy-man I always dreamed of becoming – an adult version of my 12 year old self. The only vestiges of my coming of age spiritual journeys is an awareness of and respect for the unknowable and unexplainable, and an acquired humbleness from the realization that I am mortal and insignificant in the larger picture of the universe. This is why I have traded in my naïve teenage atheism for a mantle of intellectual agnosticism.
***
JOHN UNDERSTANDS IRONY. It is all he ever seems to talk about. When he is talking about baseball it is as if he is really talking about irony. If he talks about what he is studying in college he is really indirectly expounding on irony.
“Everything I do feels like an affront to God,” John says. “And yet it’s entirely liberating, like being a millionaire.”
We are strolling through the quads and breezeways of his former church, a modern structure that looks half like a high school and half like an office park. A large pyramid-shaped building with a cross-topped copula and stained glass roof in the center of the complex is the only indication that this is a place of Christian worship. Even though it is Saturday (the day of preparation for the Sabbath), the place is practically deserted. Only a custodian and some kids on skateboards unsuccessfully attempting to hop a stairway are the only other signs of civilization besides us.
“In the mid nineties I dropped out of community college after two semesters,” John says. “What is a Christian going to do with an education?”
The actual reason John stopped attending college, however, had to do with the conflicts between a liberal arts education and the doctrines of the Bible. When religious dogma clashes with science, history and social studies, the religiously revved mind often repels any teachings that conflict with its scriptures. “The overlap between the Bible and all other fields of study is very small,” John says, “and most fundamentalists aren’t willing to yield to anything.”
“I can’t think of a single Christian I know of who aced Geology,” he adds. “In high school we all sat together and had to cheat off of each other because we just couldn’t swallow the scientists’ theory that the world was however many billions of years old.”
John says it is the same for other subjects such as political science, philosophy and even literature. He dropped his American Government 101 class after his teacher refused to admit that America was founded on Christian beliefs and principles and that the framers of the Constitution were actually devout Christian men with the same views as Pat Robertson and the late Jerry Falwell. John thought he was righteously following God by rejecting what he perceived to be the lies disseminated by higher education. He was trying to obey the 9th Commandment: Thou Shall Not Lie.
“I thought if I just sat back and pretended to learn what they were teaching me, I would be no better than a liar.”
After two years of scooping ice cream and dating a girl at his church, John got married at the age of 22. With no room at the Jones house and an inadequate income between the two of them, John and his new wife had to move in with her parents.
“It was cramped,” he said. “Screaming infants (children of his in-laws), crowded kitchen, ten people at the dinner table not to mention all the pets – it was insane.” John likened the experience to living on Noah’s Ark. “I was claustrophobic and sick to my stomach the whole time.”
Unlike the other potent and fertile members of both of their families, John and his new wife were unable to conceive. It turned out that, because of a congenital birth defect, his wife’s egg supply was deficient and she had already gone through her whole supply by the time she was 19. John would later ironically identify this as his Deus ex machina moment, the divine intervention that saved him.
“Things started to go downhill in our relationship after the realization that we could never be parents,” he said. “But I think as things nosedived toward divorce, I was secretly grinning in the back of my mind the whole time. I knew that eventually I would be free.”
After 6 years of a rocky marriage, John finally moved back into his family home in 2004. But it was not the familiar home life he remembered as a teenager. His older and younger brothers were now both married with biological and adopted children of their own. Several additions had changed the architecture of the house and more were constantly being planned and added. While there may have been more room than there was at his former wife’s house, the lack of privacy was the same.
“When I first moved in I was sharing a room with my niece and nephew,” he said. “All these kids were like spies, looking over my shoulder every time I went on the computer or watching me every time I so much as took a dump.”
John felt as if he had switched boats from one Ark to another, and he was not happy. He found it hard to pray and find God in the midst of so much chaos. “A lot of jaded people think of religion as a private experience,” he said, “But in the households I had been living in it was a group experience – like a cult.”
John dreamed of the cloistered dormitories of the monks, he fantasized about wandering the countryside like an ascetic and not being turned away whenever he knocked on any door. He spent a lot of time listening to music on his iPod, reading books and magazines and watching movies on his laptop. These isolated experiences became his escape from the noisy world he was a part of. He had a job at Blockbuster for a while, and later he worked at Penguins and Borders. Oftentimes after work he would go to one of the college libraries in the area and read until closing time, which was as late as 2 am on some occasions.
John’s family members began to take notice that he was becoming increasingly more distant and exclusive. Concerned that his faith was slipping, people in John’s household began to sit him down and talk one-on-one to him about his relationship with Jesus Christ. They started praying for him, they gave him Bible passages to read, and his siblings even went so far as to corner him in an intervention style family meeting.
This show of family concern, John assures me, is when his real troubles began.
Sunday Graphic novel crap
May 18, 2009
She plopped our eggs Benedict down on the counter and stood back staring at us expectantly. “Are you guys, like, fags?” she finally asked after watching us eat for the better part of a minute. Upon hearing this my friend shot a lump of bacon through his nose, a feat he has only achieved one other time in his life (except the first time was with beer).
“Cute,” I said. “Very cute. People often ask if we’re brothers, I’ve never met anyone who thought we were lovers before.”
“So, like, what are you then?” She didn’t seem to get it - why can’t two male friends sit in a diner eating a breakfast dinner at seven in the evening and not be gay?
“We’re friends,” I informed her.
***
The man in the group stepped forward. He looked older when he emerged from the shadows, his broad forehead and hollow eyes reflecting the fire of the setting sun.
“Before you leave, ask them about Katie,” he said. “Ask them.”
His words were pure and uncorrupted, like mournful singing rising up through the pops and scratches of an old record. His commandment continued to echo in us even after we turned away and started heading back to our car.
“Ask them.”
Sunday Crap
May 3, 2009
Among the ranks of clones, one who had keen vision rose up. At first they didn’t understand him, his words made no sense to them. He spoke gibberish but he was an eloquent speaker and he had the commanding body language of a leader. His words echoed out through time and were later transcribed in many heavy and expensive volumes with cool glossy dust jackets. 24 volumes in all, each were sold at Barnes & Noble for $89.99 each. It was the beginning of the era which history has labeled The Second Great Enlightenment.
The most remarkable volume from the cannon of the great thinker undoubtedly has to be Volume 19: Great Speeches. The following is an excerpt from a speech entitled “The Awakening of the Modern Ancient Mind.”
On atavism
“Humans are a competitive species and attacking an individual’s weakness to get the upper hand is not yet hardwired into our moral DNA as being a no-no. This atavistic survival trait takes many ugly forms like age discrimination, sexism, racism and hatred of obese people, poor people, uneducated people and very, very tall and very, very short people. It is frightening sometimes to think that our moral evolution is only sophisticated enough to make us recognize discrimination as being a bad thing only when it is employed intentionally and without any compunction whatsoever.
Personally – I wish I was born thousands of years off in some Utopian future when humankind’s most purely sought-after ideals (like the ideals this nation was founded on) are fully manifested.”
