The lights on the freeway are rain-blurred.
They come and go like passing pop stars.
The windshield wipers wipe like skinny robots.
On I-15 from Sandy to Salt Lake City all we can see are clouds.
Mountains don’t exist. Neither do we.
The moon hangs like polished silverware on a black wall
We talk in the car about authenticity, about what it means it means to be a real human being.
We talk about the weather. The rivers washing over the city.
We talk about love, what it means besides the back of yogurt lids.
You know,
I wanted to write you a letter.
I wanted to undress my thoughts in front of you
until I stood as naked and vulnerable as a white canvas on New York city street
I wanted to sew words like potatoes into a stew for you, feed them to us on our deathbed, bottle up all the things that went wrong between us, throw them off a cliff. Hear the glass breaking mix with the ocean’s thrashing.
Because I am boy, in a man’s body, looking for redemption, still scared to sleep without the light on.
And I am looking for reconciliation, between myself in the mirror and all the darkness in here, , between the world as it is and the world as we all want it to be.
But all I can see are cities burning and the things inside of me darkening.
Perhaps Peace is mythical creature that only comes out in the night with two sets of wings and a large snout, Perhaps redemption looks a lot like Bigfoot, blurry at best, only alive to those conspiracy theorists
Still, I am looking for God through the cracks of the fog, sifting through the moisture inside of me, trying to find peace.
I am pining for that sweet release, looking for that black hair on a perfume beach
I wanted to write you a letter but I was scared of letting you down.
So lets pretend just for tonight that I was the wine, and you the wineglass
Just you.
and Me.
In the dark
With a pen
And paper
Flicking ink on white
Flying kites on the blue
of living room blankets—
let’s melt beneath
the fabric
and live as lint.
Those cotton spent molecules clinging
Lets lives as rent
paid in full
the refrigerator whole.
Lets live as if heaven is on earth and the dirt on hearth of the
fireplace—
is slowly burning away.
Let’s practice resurrection.
Perhaps we can capture the moon, cut off a slice feed it to each other at night when the sky turns black and the stars are hiding
Lets, Lets be conspiracy theorists
Saturday, February 26, 2011
Justice
The man on meth
outside
my downtown window
tries
The man in blue
gun strapped low
arrests
—this is definitely the solution
outside
my downtown window
tries
The man in blue
gun strapped low
arrests
—this is definitely the solution
Jesus' Beard is Still Bigger Than Mine
Jesus’ Beard is Still Bigger Than Mine.
In the winter of Colorado
the snow fell perfect shapes of geometry
And I found myself outside playing Tetris with the sky
The cold of the air replaced the oxygen in our lungs
like the future cigarettes we’d smoke.
We’d hack coughs like hatchets
our nose hairs froze,
our ears as the red as our plastic sleds
—fingers numb like our parents’ marriages
This is what growing up looked like
It looked like snowforts and ugly Christmas sweaters
My father saying, “Jesus’ beard is still bigger than mine—but I’m catching up
In the third grade I was whipped with a towel in the
Pool lockeroom, it snapped like a firecracker
And stung like a wooden mixing spoon
on your behind
I was wearing Barney underwear
--You don’t wear Barney underwear in the third grade
I learned that day.
In the seventh grade I made out with a girl so hard that we had to break up
lest the school bus driver would tell her parents.
But I never forgot about her velvet lips, that squirming
tongue I wasn’t sure what to do with,
the bumps on her chest like some hypnotic spinning wheel, entrancing me.
This is what growing up felt like:
Sore asses
And spells of dizziness as she wafted through the doors of our yellow make out bus
In the eighth grade I had another girlfriend
She cheated on me by licking some other guy’s eyeball
like some sort of weird Martian space sex act I had never heard of
I would have licked your eyeball too if you would have asked I thought.
But, then I thought, would I?
Growing up now felt heavy, like cannonballs on my insides
Because we all slowly learned that growing up was not what we imagined
It was not all cowboys and Indians and snowball fights and dares to see who could jump off the most stairs
We grew up
I became as cynical as a New York brief
case filled with papers of suicide notes and receipts from liquor stores
Our faces began to look like all the adults who we never wanted to be
Like dying stars flickering out across our windshields cars
I learned then that it’s a lot easier to say to your parents, “Fuck You!” than
I forgive you
But this is only Act II and Romeo and Juliet are still in love
Because I want to live life like acrobats and diving wombats
I want to live life like the dying purple tulips in my backyard, dead for now
But alive again soon.
I want to live life like James Bond orders Martini’s—
shaken—but not stirred.
And I’m not even sure if that is how James Bond orders martinis but that’s okay because
I don’t want to live life in the box of a television set.
I want to live in the forest where the sun rests
I am trying to grow up
and all the world is crazy, except when Jesus
stops by for breakfast
After breakfast we pull the rolling papers from our pockets
and I roll my
cigarette with my fingertips
lick the seal, praying
that I might inhale life today and not death.
And Jesus’ beard is still bigger than mine, but I’m catching up.
In the winter of Colorado
the snow fell perfect shapes of geometry
And I found myself outside playing Tetris with the sky
The cold of the air replaced the oxygen in our lungs
like the future cigarettes we’d smoke.
We’d hack coughs like hatchets
our nose hairs froze,
our ears as the red as our plastic sleds
—fingers numb like our parents’ marriages
This is what growing up looked like
It looked like snowforts and ugly Christmas sweaters
My father saying, “Jesus’ beard is still bigger than mine—but I’m catching up
In the third grade I was whipped with a towel in the
Pool lockeroom, it snapped like a firecracker
And stung like a wooden mixing spoon
on your behind
I was wearing Barney underwear
--You don’t wear Barney underwear in the third grade
I learned that day.
In the seventh grade I made out with a girl so hard that we had to break up
lest the school bus driver would tell her parents.
But I never forgot about her velvet lips, that squirming
tongue I wasn’t sure what to do with,
the bumps on her chest like some hypnotic spinning wheel, entrancing me.
This is what growing up felt like:
Sore asses
And spells of dizziness as she wafted through the doors of our yellow make out bus
In the eighth grade I had another girlfriend
She cheated on me by licking some other guy’s eyeball
like some sort of weird Martian space sex act I had never heard of
I would have licked your eyeball too if you would have asked I thought.
But, then I thought, would I?
Growing up now felt heavy, like cannonballs on my insides
Because we all slowly learned that growing up was not what we imagined
It was not all cowboys and Indians and snowball fights and dares to see who could jump off the most stairs
We grew up
I became as cynical as a New York brief
case filled with papers of suicide notes and receipts from liquor stores
Our faces began to look like all the adults who we never wanted to be
Like dying stars flickering out across our windshields cars
I learned then that it’s a lot easier to say to your parents, “Fuck You!” than
I forgive you
But this is only Act II and Romeo and Juliet are still in love
Because I want to live life like acrobats and diving wombats
I want to live life like the dying purple tulips in my backyard, dead for now
But alive again soon.
I want to live life like James Bond orders Martini’s—
shaken—but not stirred.
And I’m not even sure if that is how James Bond orders martinis but that’s okay because
I don’t want to live life in the box of a television set.
I want to live in the forest where the sun rests
I am trying to grow up
and all the world is crazy, except when Jesus
stops by for breakfast
After breakfast we pull the rolling papers from our pockets
and I roll my
cigarette with my fingertips
lick the seal, praying
that I might inhale life today and not death.
And Jesus’ beard is still bigger than mine, but I’m catching up.
Wednesday, July 14, 2010
The National and Madmen Grow Up
What the National’s new record, High Violet and Madmen have in common
This past May The National released their new, highly anticipated album, High Violet once again impressing critics almost across the board, including The New York Times and Pitchfork (seriously, wow!) The Ohio based-currently-from-Brooklyn-band, has orchestrated some of their darkest music yet, as singer Matt Berninger throats chilling poetic melodies about sorrow, love, and the not-quite-so-darkly-imagined-reality of modern adulthood. “Sorrow found me when I was young,” Berninger writes, “Sorrow waited, sorrow won,” and you get the sense from his loosely flowing images and words that this is a man grappling with something gone wrong. On “Afraid of Everyone” Berninger goes so far as to say that, “I’m afraid of everyone,” and “I don’t have the drugs to sort it out.” On their single, “Bloodbuzz Ohio,” Berninger writes in the chorus that, “I still owe money/to the money/to the money I owe,” lamenting the current financial predicament of modern living. Though it would be foolish to constrain High Violet to a single theme, it would certainly be one concerning grappling with the reality of adulthood.
July 25th is slated to mark the beginning of the fourth season of the also highly critically acclaimed T.V. drama, Madmen. A show that, also based out of New York, gives us a more than terrifying view of what we thought the 50’s/60’s were all about. Shattering our preconceptions of the Cleaver family, what Madmen does great is transcend the boundary from the 60’s to the current, on the one hand making it easy to scoff at the characters misogyny and shortcomings, yet on the other, hitting us where it hurts, because we realize that we are not so different. We may not chain smoke with the tenacity that they do, but our lungs still feel the weight of trying to stay afloat in this world; and we may not have affairs, but it doesn’t mean we don’t think about it, or even act in certain scenarios; and we may not drink whiskey like water, but it doesn’t mean we cope with our problems any better.
Both Madmen and High Violet seem to be expressing characters disillusioned with their situation. It may be their identity, their family life, the stakes at the office, their desire for status or fulfillment; but both are about the hopeless reality of when life doesn’t quite line up like you thought it was going to—and what comes next. The men at Sterling Cooper are not satisfied with their family life, consider work a higher priority, therefore sending them to seek sexual or physical fulfillment elsewhere, leaving their wives emotionally distant, who take it like sick puppies, and man, we have come so far in the past forty years.
So what do these two things, a current album, and a current T.V. show, have to say about the state of the human condition in 2010? Are they both hitting on a dark theme we rarely like to discuss, or bring up? Are our expectations of what we thought the “real world” would be like, slowly crumbling? Have we gotten so independent and idealistic that the very real worlds of bills, parenting, maintaining relationships etc., are not the epic idea of life we had preconditioned ourselves for? Or are these just examples of the rare, and really we are quite content and happy with how things are going?
I think it’s a good possibility. There definitely seems a certain sorrow to it. A certain grappling.
Honesty, Hypocrisy, and Authenticity
It has been years since the scandal of Jim and Tammy Faye Baker, four since we found out about Ted Haggard and three months since we witnessed another allegation against Evangelical George Alan Rekers who hired a gay “baggage boy” to do things like well, perhaps more than baggage carrying. There is a page on Wikipedia completely dedicated to a list of recent evangelical scandals of the past century— but these are just the big ones. There are the little ones that you may or may not ever hear about—the ones that happen in our own towns, which are whispered of in rumors like nightmares and a shake of the head. I have been given a second hand witness to two of these in the last four months in my particular city, and it is one thing to see the body count as a number on the bottom of a television—it is another thing to see bodies on your street.
It is easy for us who are obviously better Christians to begin to get angry and even hurry down the road to condemnation. On the one hand, it is our scream for justice, for the abuse and misrepresentation of the gospel we cling to. But on the other hand, while it is easy for us to look down on these people, there is a little part inside of us that squirms when we hear of affairs and rumors of affairs, because we realize we are capable of the same things. The recent affair I gave witness to happened because a man stopped loving his wife for nine years. He found out yesterday she had recently had an affair, and though he got drunk and passed out in a hotel, he awoke to the realization that he had been causing an affair for nine years. It was not just his wife’s hands that were dirty with blood, he checked out a long time ago. He had been having plenty of “emotional affairs” himself.
They have four kids, the ramifications of that alone are astounding. Even if healing and redemption happen, there will be an unbelievable body count.
My girlfriend Laura broke up with me last week. While break-ups are very complicated things, the reasons she listed on her end included “lack of emotional fulfillment,” obviously there was lack of communication as to what those were, and I like most guys, needs things spelled out in bright purple neon letters or I am just hopeless. But, regardless, I dropped the ball, I got lazy, she felt it. I realize now what I did wrong and what I can do better next time I am in a relationship, but this coupled with the previous affair I told you about, woke me up. Because If I do not examine the darkness in my own heart and have the ability to be honest, I am that guy in nine years if nothing changes. I am that guy already.
So the question always seems to come to: why? Why would someone do something like this? And every so often we’ll ask the question, “What do we do with this pandemic?” but not very often, because more than likely we sweep it under the rug, and exclaim “Too bad for them,” thinking that it has very little to do with us. I am suggesting that this is an issue that needs to be looked at, and not just thought about, but thoroughly examined with a huge freaking microscope. This should be a learning experience, because while we’d like to imagine that it could never happen to us, it’s foolish to live in some sort of self-righteous ignorance.
I would suggest that the main reason, especially with regards to Christian circles, is a lack of honesty. In many ways we have created a culture in our churches that breeds American meritocracy and superficiality rather than honest repentance and transformation. This culture bleeds into our own selves and while at first we find ourselves excited to climb the “ministry ladder” we soon find ourselves being to high up and now there is the thought that, “I can’t let people know.” I can’t let people know who I really am because if they found out that I, a leader, did such things, then, what would everyone think?
You know honestly what everyone would think? “Thank God someone here is actually a true Christian!” Have you ever felt yourself in a scenario where the most refreshing sermon or discussion you could hear involved someone stating, “This is what I struggle with, and I need help.” On the inside I weep for joy because I can’t tell you how encouraging it is to hear someone else say that they are struggling human beings too and in need of God’s grace as they stagger their way to repentance and transformation.
I think another reason could be true repentance itself. Maybe we are just pretending to be Christians. Maybe we aren’t. maybe we are those who when we get to heaven, God will say, “I never knew you,” because we are the ones that either think we are tricking God or earning our salvation on our own merits.
The true beauty of the gospel, of what we call the “Good News” is the brokenness of it. It is the broken parts inside of us realizing that we really don’t have it all together. It is coming to the end of ourselves, the ability to be fully honest, naked even, and in our drunken authenticity, find love.
It is easy for us who are obviously better Christians to begin to get angry and even hurry down the road to condemnation. On the one hand, it is our scream for justice, for the abuse and misrepresentation of the gospel we cling to. But on the other hand, while it is easy for us to look down on these people, there is a little part inside of us that squirms when we hear of affairs and rumors of affairs, because we realize we are capable of the same things. The recent affair I gave witness to happened because a man stopped loving his wife for nine years. He found out yesterday she had recently had an affair, and though he got drunk and passed out in a hotel, he awoke to the realization that he had been causing an affair for nine years. It was not just his wife’s hands that were dirty with blood, he checked out a long time ago. He had been having plenty of “emotional affairs” himself.
They have four kids, the ramifications of that alone are astounding. Even if healing and redemption happen, there will be an unbelievable body count.
My girlfriend Laura broke up with me last week. While break-ups are very complicated things, the reasons she listed on her end included “lack of emotional fulfillment,” obviously there was lack of communication as to what those were, and I like most guys, needs things spelled out in bright purple neon letters or I am just hopeless. But, regardless, I dropped the ball, I got lazy, she felt it. I realize now what I did wrong and what I can do better next time I am in a relationship, but this coupled with the previous affair I told you about, woke me up. Because If I do not examine the darkness in my own heart and have the ability to be honest, I am that guy in nine years if nothing changes. I am that guy already.
So the question always seems to come to: why? Why would someone do something like this? And every so often we’ll ask the question, “What do we do with this pandemic?” but not very often, because more than likely we sweep it under the rug, and exclaim “Too bad for them,” thinking that it has very little to do with us. I am suggesting that this is an issue that needs to be looked at, and not just thought about, but thoroughly examined with a huge freaking microscope. This should be a learning experience, because while we’d like to imagine that it could never happen to us, it’s foolish to live in some sort of self-righteous ignorance.
I would suggest that the main reason, especially with regards to Christian circles, is a lack of honesty. In many ways we have created a culture in our churches that breeds American meritocracy and superficiality rather than honest repentance and transformation. This culture bleeds into our own selves and while at first we find ourselves excited to climb the “ministry ladder” we soon find ourselves being to high up and now there is the thought that, “I can’t let people know.” I can’t let people know who I really am because if they found out that I, a leader, did such things, then, what would everyone think?
You know honestly what everyone would think? “Thank God someone here is actually a true Christian!” Have you ever felt yourself in a scenario where the most refreshing sermon or discussion you could hear involved someone stating, “This is what I struggle with, and I need help.” On the inside I weep for joy because I can’t tell you how encouraging it is to hear someone else say that they are struggling human beings too and in need of God’s grace as they stagger their way to repentance and transformation.
I think another reason could be true repentance itself. Maybe we are just pretending to be Christians. Maybe we aren’t. maybe we are those who when we get to heaven, God will say, “I never knew you,” because we are the ones that either think we are tricking God or earning our salvation on our own merits.
The true beauty of the gospel, of what we call the “Good News” is the brokenness of it. It is the broken parts inside of us realizing that we really don’t have it all together. It is coming to the end of ourselves, the ability to be fully honest, naked even, and in our drunken authenticity, find love.
Saturday, May 22, 2010
Starting Churches’ as a terrible, Morally Failing Christian
My girlfriend Laura and I went to this bar the other night. It was called The Red Room. They served cocktails and had an image of Che Guevara on the back wall, looking through the patrons onto 200 South. The back of the bar was divided up into neatly sectioned wood panels where they put the alcohol and there were a few small tables, red couches on both sides and a jazz band setting up in the lower left of the bar. When we walked in the door, a hunky man with blonde hair asked us for our ID’s. We, of course, gave them to him. He was wearing a black t-shirt and looking super ripped. But what I noticed more than this was his nametag. It was white on black like Mormon name tags, and pinned to the upper part of his chest. Now, the LDS nametags say this: Your name, followed by Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. It’s pretty standard. The guys’ nametag at the Red Room said this: Church of the depressed, broken and morally bankrupt. And I about wept for joy because I think that might have been the most beautiful things I heard all day.
You see, moving out to Salt Lake City to start a church should involve have people of strength, people of moral fiber, people of great spiritual Christian character, people who would rather read the bible than watch T.V., who fast three times a week, can bench press a proverbial 300 pounds worth of Kingdom advancing, and I usually do not put myself in this category. I would like to, I really would, and it’s not like I’m not trying, but I really can’t.
I would put the other people who are involved in this church plant as those sorts of people. But not me, and I am really not trying to be like one of those guys who just moans and weeps and tries to outdo you by saying really how terrible he is, “Terrible! Terrible!” I am a terrible person he says, “You don’t even know! Seriously, you don’t even know!”
Oh, we know.
But really I feel vastly under qualified to be a part of anything religious, which is probably why I am a Christian. I have a list of vices a mile long almost all of which I partook in today, which is probably why I felt the need to write this, because I felt guilty and had to get this guilt out somehow, or maybe I’ll feel better by letting everyone know how terrible of a person I am so they will say, “No, you are not a terrible person! You are a great person!” thereby using the same ploy people have used for countless generations, which is the putting down of oneself so that others will build one up.
Since I moved to Salt Lake City to become part of a the church plant, my rate of smoking has doubled, drinking is one the rise, this girl at the coffee shop where I work offered to smoke me up and I almost took her up on it, without a girlfriend here I find myself having more of a propensity towards lustful things, I masturbate, want to look at porn, or do other things, have very little desire to get in tune with God, and I could go on, but you get the point. Not that these things are anything new, they’re daily things, but I find it somewhat ironic that they have all increased since I’ve been here.
So basically when I give into these things I feel like a complete moral failure and wonder why no one has put a restraining order on me from churches or something like that. I also feel like I serve absolutely no purpose, if anything am taking up space, so sometimes I think of the nametags.
And I think how beautiful a church of the depressed, broken and morally bankrupt would be. Not that we couldn’t use some good old transformation, but my transformation looks like shit right now on a line graph, and transformation also takes a very, very, very, very, very, very, long time.
You see, moving out to Salt Lake City to start a church should involve have people of strength, people of moral fiber, people of great spiritual Christian character, people who would rather read the bible than watch T.V., who fast three times a week, can bench press a proverbial 300 pounds worth of Kingdom advancing, and I usually do not put myself in this category. I would like to, I really would, and it’s not like I’m not trying, but I really can’t.
I would put the other people who are involved in this church plant as those sorts of people. But not me, and I am really not trying to be like one of those guys who just moans and weeps and tries to outdo you by saying really how terrible he is, “Terrible! Terrible!” I am a terrible person he says, “You don’t even know! Seriously, you don’t even know!”
Oh, we know.
But really I feel vastly under qualified to be a part of anything religious, which is probably why I am a Christian. I have a list of vices a mile long almost all of which I partook in today, which is probably why I felt the need to write this, because I felt guilty and had to get this guilt out somehow, or maybe I’ll feel better by letting everyone know how terrible of a person I am so they will say, “No, you are not a terrible person! You are a great person!” thereby using the same ploy people have used for countless generations, which is the putting down of oneself so that others will build one up.
Since I moved to Salt Lake City to become part of a the church plant, my rate of smoking has doubled, drinking is one the rise, this girl at the coffee shop where I work offered to smoke me up and I almost took her up on it, without a girlfriend here I find myself having more of a propensity towards lustful things, I masturbate, want to look at porn, or do other things, have very little desire to get in tune with God, and I could go on, but you get the point. Not that these things are anything new, they’re daily things, but I find it somewhat ironic that they have all increased since I’ve been here.
So basically when I give into these things I feel like a complete moral failure and wonder why no one has put a restraining order on me from churches or something like that. I also feel like I serve absolutely no purpose, if anything am taking up space, so sometimes I think of the nametags.
And I think how beautiful a church of the depressed, broken and morally bankrupt would be. Not that we couldn’t use some good old transformation, but my transformation looks like shit right now on a line graph, and transformation also takes a very, very, very, very, very, very, long time.
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