"There is no adventure I would trade them for"

I read this today:

The juxtaposition of...(her subject)...sounds remote and a little absurd as she reflects on how her dying son pushed himself out of her body like an "unholy storm," moving his tiny arms and legs, alive, and as "pretty as a seashell." She shared only his brief whispers of a life, but "there is no adventure I would trade them for."

I never got to see my third child "push himself out" late in his term. By the time I got home, his "brief whispers of life" were over. But I do know that "neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord" and that I don't need to trade anything for my child's life because He already did. And I know His promise extends to my whole family, even little Will.

That doesn't mean I don't feel his loss or remember that dark afternoon with sorrow. It just means that the loss and sorrow have been redeemed and that one day my memories of his passing will be shorn of their horror and misery.

I miss him.

Look and See

After church yesterday I positioned myself near the exit as I often do.  People I know will come up and we'll talk for a few minutes. It's a great way to see people that I normally don't run into.  Only yesterday no one came up and talked to me. Not one. Oh a few people gave me an absent minded wave or 'hiya' but no one stopped.

I was about to take it personally when I saw other people that I'd never seen before, some talking, some alone, some smiling, some pensive. There were a few harried parents trying to herd their kids to the door. I saw all kinds of people from many places in this world, all heading out to their own, personal Sunday afternoons.

Then my eyes landed on a young woman walking in the distance. She was doing some cleanup chore for the church while avoiding everyone's gaze. I remembered seeing her earlier when I was walking outside and noticed that as she walked past us going the other way she moved closer to the wall, farther away from us. And I don't know why. But I want to. So I made a mental note to introduce myself the next time I saw her. I want to know her story - if she'll share it with me.

And I think I get what God was doing by rushing everyone by me: Yesterday I wasn't supposed to schmooze with the people I like and who like me because when I'm busy talking I don't notice anyone or anything else. I think God wants me to be quiet and pay more attention the way that He pays attention: to everyone regardless of how interesting I find them to be. Indeed I think he wants us pay attention to the people who don't get noticed.

Try it sometime. Just stand and watch all of the people around you. All of the beautiful souls on their journeys to eternity. See their expressions, how they walk, how they use their eyes. Imagine what it would be like to be in their shoes, living their dreams, carrying their burdens. And recognize them for the God breathed miracles that they are.

They're all around us, miracles every one.  It's the greatest show in the Universe and all we have to do to take it in is just be quiet and look and see.

I Believe

I believe in truth and love.
I believe in God above.
I believe we were made for this.
And I believe in you.

Got here by the crooked path.
So many stripes on my back.
But God's given me some things to do.
And one of them is loving you.

I don't get what you see in me.
You're so much better free.
But you ignore me when I say go.
I guess there's something we both know.

So I'll love you with heart and soul.
Love you till I'm grey and old.
Then I'll cross over when I'm done.
And wait there until you come.

I believe in truth and love.
I believe in God above.
I believe we were made for this.
And I believe in you.
Yes, I believe in you.

An email to a friend

I have a friend that's far to the left of me politically. We got to talking about gay rights, 'homophobia' and other such controversial topics. He finally asked me just what I believed (not theologically, but in terms of social interactions). I'm saving it here so the next time I get flack for being a "homophobe" or some other kind of "phobe" I won't have to redo it.  Sorry about the typos. I'm a lazy writer.

Hey no fair responding to emails from last October. That's BT (before Trump).

​​

​A coupl​e of contextual data points on me and mine:

When I was a teen my family had a live in houseboy

​ named Endang​

. He also 

​moonlighted as ​

a Banci - a gay transvestite prostitute. We'd see him in his heels and mini skirt at

​ the​

 Blok P  

​whor​

e market about 

​a kilometer away

. We used to wrestle for fun. And yes we knew. My right wing

​, then Southern Baptist ​

​

​

parents said live and let live

​ for three years​

. Until he began stealing and wearing mom's lingerie. Then he was toast.

​My sophomore year ​

I 

​lived in a Dorm "Pod" of six men, four of whom were gay in the stereotyped style. Including my roommate

. 

​I got some

 collateral flack

​ but it motivated me to date girls​

. 

​And​

 after the trannie hooker

​,​

 a mild mannered 

​moderate Republican ​

queer from Lawton seemed tame. He never wanted to wrestle.

​ One of them was Arturo Herrera - he's now a rather successful artist who has had solo exhibits at the Whitney among others.​ There's a PBS vignette about him at the link. He used to be much more flamboyant. I bought several of his pieces when he needed money. Somehow they got lost in the fog of divorce and collapse. Damn, damn, damn.

​Yet today I'm a "homophobe".

My ideology and religious commitments back then were more conservative than they are today - I was in the  Baptist Youth Groups both in HS and this period in College for Crissakes (really, I did it for His sake).​ I am called a homophobe by people that when I knew them would never have done something like befriend or live with a 'homo'. They are conformists, doing only what they think the people around them will approve of. But that's a common refrain of my life.

I have always been prepared to take people as I find them. What I am not prepared to do is to let people define what is 'right', what is 'moral', whether they are 'victims' or choose who the victimizers are based some arbitrary definition of their 'identity'.  There are now 50 Facebook identity options each presumably with it's own list of microagressions and political manifestos. I reject the notion that simply by clicking a different FB box you are allowed to define whether my behavior is 'acceptable' or what you get to do to me.

As I said: I take people as I find them. I expect people to take me as I am found. I expect to find conflicts with people that I meet. Conflicts of values, beliefs, politics, the definition of life, the universe and everything. Whether they're Muslim Trannie Whores or Venezuelan Artists. I expect them to respect my views and values even when they conflict with theirs. I expect them to respect my speech rights and not call me names just because I disagree with them because I have shown through my life that I will respect theirs.

It used to be called the "Liberal" position. But I don't they exist anymore, do you?

Maria

Maria (not her real name) was a friend from college. She was smart, engaging and beautiful in that Hollywood starlet way - Tall, blonde, openly sexual. From the first time I met her she was headed to LA to be in films. She was always wild and as if she was practicing for her future career, she casually slept with a number of my friends. I always felt a little like a martyr because I couldn't partake, being in a serious (and boy was it) relationship with her best friend. At school she and I were among the people who picked up and hosted speakers on campus - she insisted on handling all of the "useful" entertainment and TV people like TV honcho Ted Turner and comedian Andy Kaufman, leaving us to handle the rest. She'd introduce me to them and they'd give an absentminded wave as they maneuvered her to their limos and hotel rooms.

When she finally got to the coast, I started seeing her in bit roles in TV and movies and in a lot of daytime commercials - playing a young mother pitching disposable diapers and such. She also was occasionally in People and the Tabloids hanging off the arm of some star - most notably Cruise and Cage.  For a while my boss was in our Beverly Hills office so I got to see her - she particularly wanted my introduction to the head of our Entertainment group - PwC was the premier firm in the movie business, at least until the recent Oscars kerfuffle - so I was able to do her a good turn.  In return I got to buy her dinner and meet some of her 'friends' although they didn't seem to be particularly good friends to me.

A few years on I got a call from an old college friend who was obsessed with her:  "Bill! Maria is in a movie with Nicholas Cage!". I was busy getting married so I forgot about it. A year after that, having just moved into a new house, we were looking for a movie to watch on a Friday night and there it was. I turned to my (conservative, Christian) wife and said "we have to watch this one, my good friend is in it as the lead opposite Nicholas Cage".  On the way home I regaled her with Maria stories, telling her how good a friend she was and how much Maria reminded me of her - similar height, hair color, beauty, style, etc.

When we got home I popped the movie into the player.  The first scene was Judd Reinhold in bed in ca 1900 New Orleans - French Quarter. The sun was streaming through the window and Maria, his newlywed wife, walked in and stepped out of her robe. She got up on the bed - naked - and started inexplicably jumping on it with full frontal nudity. I'm a bit slow on the uptake so my first reaction was "wow! they really do look alike" but then my mind quickly pivoted to damage control:  I turned to my wife who was staring at me with that look that wives get when you show up drunk at 2am from the "office" and said: "well, I don't know her that well". Perturbed, she left for bed while I stayed downstairs fast forwarding through every ugly scene looking for something to redeem the movie in my - and more importantly - my new wife's eyes. I failed. If  you recall the movie 9 1/2 Weeks where Kim Basinger was sexually humiliated by Mickey Rourke - it was a precursor to 50 Shades of Grey - you'll understand this Nick Cage production. Apparently he was trying to reprise 9 1/2 Weeks and Maria was the best actress he could find who was willing to be humiliated on screen.  It was a terrible, cruel film and her acting wasn't much better.

I ran into her a couple more times, once in Chicago and another time in New York when she was doing commercials. It was very strange - I thought she'd be embarrassed by her performance but she wasn't. She talked about it and her other work as if she was going from one triumph to another. I realized that as far as she was concerned I was merely her 'public' and she was presenting herself to me. So I went along, capturing every interesting story and tidbit so that I could share them with my friends.

I lost track of her until a couple of months ago.  A friend sent me an email with a Youtube clip from her last 'movie' writing "I'm sure you've seen this" because it was pretty old - but I hadn't. It was porn. I saw her in the scene and clicked it off - I couldn't bear to watch.  To see her humiliate herself again - she was my friend.

I felt great sorrow for her - she had sought fame and only gotten humiliation. It was very hard to take. But it got much harder last Tuesday.  I was with a group of friends from my Church. We were talking about the teaching from last Sunday. It's a passage from Mark's Gospel where Jesus heals a blind man.  The first time Jesus heals him the blind man says he can only see people that look like "trees" so Jesus heals him again so that he could see people as they truly were. As we talked about that passage I thought of Maria. And I realized that I had been using her. I saw her as nothing but a walking "tree". Someone who was a tool for my entertainment and aggrandizement. I didn't really care about her humiliation and sorrow except as a way for me to score points with others. I was happy to call her my friend yet let her delude herself.

I've been trying to find her. To tell her how sorry I am. I haven't had any luck yet but that may be because I'm so afraid of what I may find.

The "Optimal Prank Nexus"

News reports say that West Virginia U has become so vexed with couch burning incidents that it has banned outdoor sofaing altogether.

So why didn't we think of this? The burning, not the ban. I mean we had lots of cheap couches and most of them did need to be burned for aesthetic if not sanitary reasons. Yet we never put "a want and a need into the deed" so to speak. I suppose it was a failure to achieve the critical "Optimal Prank Nexus". The OPN was a theory of fraternal living that I developed to explain why a group of relatively intelligent young men/older boys would some times come up with absolutely brilliant forms of mischief (such as creating a giant water balloon slingshot out of a soccer goal the better to shell sorority sisters sunbathing behind their privacy fences) while at other times we - I mean they - did the most dumbass things.

Your common variety collegiate prank is trivially easy to produce. All you need to do is throw a few kegs and some high decibel Weezer in the midst of a bunch of college kids. Within minutes the combination will begin emitting a "Seemed Like A Good Idea" field from which all prank mayhem originates.

But the optimal prank only emerges from the fog of a common SLAGI field if several conditions occur at exactly the same time. For example, to come up with the brilliant, high concept prank of couch burning one must have a certain level of excitement underway - say a party or sports victory or even an abortive narcotics sweep by the local gendarmes. Then you need someone with a weak moral sense but a strong eye for fun to be sober enough to generate "the idea". Thirdly, everyone else needs to be sufficiently inebriated so that something like "hey let's burn the furniture!" seems like a swell idea rather than arson but not so pickled that they keep trying to get the couch out the door sideways and failing that decide to "light her where she lies" in the hall.

As you can see it is these minor variations at the nexus of the deed that can turn the "brilliant" into the "dumbass" in the ten minutes it takes the fire trucks to arrive. Although I suppose West Virginia has a higher concentration of the essential nexus variables than most - which makes them particularly fiery prank innovators. Burn Mountaineers Burn

I still hear the tears

My friend is going to Haiti. She told me she's  going without the inoculations and prophylaxis that protect against Cholera and Malaria. I know I should mind my own business because she's a healthcare professional who's been there many times and knows what she's doing. But I can't help the remembering.

I remember my friend's servant returning after an absence asking for funeral money for a child taken by Cholera. I remember the sound of her tears. And I remember my friend's mother crying to us with red rimmed eyes "why didn't she come sooner?".

I remember walking in the kampung seeing the poor bathe their children downstream from the privies on stilts and shaking our heads. I remember the man who lost a knife fight slumped against the wall, bleeding out, everyone watching him die. And the sounds and smells of the electricity thief who touched the wrong wire....bacon. And the ragdoll acrobatics of a man struck by a speeding car, flopping broken to the ground. So much death, so random, so pointless.

So I can understand why she would ask "why should I be protected when all those around me live so exposed? Why should I be privileged?"

I don't know. I have no answers. All I can hear are a mother's tears. And it is the worst sound that I've ever heard.

Smiling Eyes

From time to time I get my breakfast at McDonalds. I am particularly partial to McGriddles - that classically American concoction with the bun filled with faux maple syrup - I mean who comes up with this stuff? Almost every time I come in a small latina serves me. Her face and arms are horribly disfigured - I have this image of her as a child pulling a large vat of boiling water on top of herself. When I first started coming Marta - for that's her name - wouldn't look me in the eye no matter what I did - she'd look anywhere but at my face.

I first experienced this reluctance to look directly at me among the lepers that hung out around the marketplace in Jakarta when I was a boy: I guess they found that 'whole' people wouldn't look them in the eye or if they did, their 'look' would be filled with shock and horror. So the disfigured go through life avoiding visual connection with other people lest it once again remind them that to the world they are "hideous". Of course to them, they're not. Just as when I look in the mirror I don't think I'm old - but the disfigured have learned that looking 'wholes' in the eye is a painful experience best to be avoided. It must be a strange, lonely world - so much of what is essential about us is communicated through our gaze. As Shakespeare wrote: "the eyes are the window to your soul"

Despite never looking directly at me, Marta came to recognize me - I suppose by my voice and my typically "just got out of bed" appearance. Early on I tried a number of different stratagems to 'trick' her into looking me in the eye, including introducing myself "hi, I'm Bill, what's your name?" "Marta" she said, never raising her eyes above my chest. After a while I gave up - Marta had spent her whole life dealing with her appearance - who was I to try to manipulate her just to see if I could catch her eye? This went on for the longest time - we'd talk and joke (for I am terribly perky in the morning, it's quite a burden for others) and do all the other things that familiar strangers do in an open culture like Texas, but no eye contact.

Until one day when I was so preoccupied with my own problems that I didn't even really notice her serving me. When she asked me if I wanted my "re-goo-lar" as she puts it, I didn't even hear her. Then snapping back to the real world I looked over and there they were: her eyes - gazing steadily into mine. Her smiling eyes. I felt like I'd been given a great gift - a view into a soul more closely guarded than a fortress. And it was beautiful. Because she is beautiful - much more beautiful than I'll ever be.

We're friends now - and I'm eating a lot more McDonalds breakfasts than I probably should but I can't resist those eyes. Marta's smiling eyes.

Walk in the rain - Lyrics

Do you want to walk in the rain?
Not everyone likes the wet.
But that's when I fell in love.
Fell in love with you.

Oh oh I I'm falling in love.
Oh oh I don't know what to do.
Do you?

Can't help how I feel about you.
It's all so very new.
I can't help that I love you
What do you want me to do?

Oh oh I I'm falling in love.
Oh oh I don't know what to do.
Do you?

Do you want to walk in the rain?
Not everyone likes the wet.
But that's when I fell in love.
Fell in love with you.