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| It's different from this one - a little more serious - so this is still the place to go for the fun stuff. My new blog is at headpeddler.blogspot.com. Pretty proud of the banner, if I do say so myself  | | |
| College is over, summer is soon to be over too, and Jacob has just acquired a job at Samaritan's Purse and a new favorite band (mewithoutYou), which means that inspiration is high and life is about to go much faster than before.
To commemorate the occasion, here is a new serial story! Followed by lyrics to a mewithoutYou song that blows my mind.
***
And now for the inaugural voyage of…
Edgar, SPACEMAN!
"Where am I?" thought Edgar. His head hurt, and his feet hurt, and the inside of his glassy, bulbous helmet was making a red mark where his face was pressed against it.
He began to pick himself up, only to find that his knees, his right elbow, and his spine also hurt, but in a more shooting, ornery way. He opened his eyes (carefully, but they ended up not hurting) and found that he had landed on an extremely purple planet – distressingly purple, in fact.
In all his travels, Edgar had come across planets of stark blue, but they had been the great swimming-pool planets of Beta Epsilon V, and they also had generous amounts of beaches, which made it okay. He had explored planets of emerald green, but they were, of course, made of emeralds (and one small, leafy plant… but that’s a different story), which is nothing to be upset about. He had also crash-landed on one large, yellow planet, which had distressed him at first, but when the sun when down, it turned out the large-eyed Yongs of Omikron Phi had simply become tired of living underground, and in what became known later as the Fresh Air Revolution, the natives of the once white-sanded planet had put a gigantic, synthetic lampshade over their star, which made the brightness much more tolerable for them, but just made Edgar feel the urge to curl up in an armchair and read at inappropriate times. All things considered, not a worrisome yellowness after all.
Purple, on the other hand, was distressing.
Edgar picked himself up and looked around for his spacecraft – the S. S. Marmalade – but it was nowhere to be found. He tried to take in his surroundings, but the horizon always seemed to blur with the dark sky wherever he looked. He took a few steps in one direction, and—
BANG!
“Where am I?” thought Edgar. His head hurt. More this time. Slowly his memory came back to him. He picked himself up, and suddenly he knew exactly where he was.
He was in the hold of a Lethargian Battlecruiser! His memory came rushing back to him now – the flashing purple lights behind him, his refusal to pull over (on principle, seeing as how reference points are hard to find in space, especially when it’s curved, which just makes everything hopelessly confusing), the chase, abduction, struggle, and BANG. Now he was stuck in this cell, which was a nominal form of Lethargian torture. They don’t like to deal with prisoners immediately, so they leave them in cells of insane purpleness for sometimes years on end, so that when they finally get around to interrogation, the prisoners are willing to speak at the promise of even a glimpse of another color.
But this was not Edgar’s first run-in with the Lethargians, and he knew the secret of escape.
He cleared his throat.
And from it issued a great scream of put-on agony.
A door opened in the purpleness.
An unnaturally large creature on stilt-like robotic legs waddled through. “Mmmmyezz, we can have none of that sort of racket, now can we?”
“THE PURPLE! THE PURPLE!” screamed Edgar.
“Mmmmm… horrid, isn’t it?” mumbled the Lethargian guard. Edgar knew he wouldn’t check to see how long Edgar had been in. They never do. “Alright… Mmmmizztime for this one to be questioned.” The guard went off to fetch his superior, but didn’t bother to close the door. Edgar waltzed through it—
--and into the arms of the largest Lethargian torturer he had ever seen. The creature shrieked, “OOOOH! It touched me! Kill it! Kill it!” (Lethargians have a strange gene structure in which there are ten alleles. There is one extremely recessive gene that only pokes through every now and then, and it results in extreme obsessiveness, heightened germophobia and unbearably an high-pitched voice, along with odd physical gigantification. These creatures invariably are sent to the torture chambers to live, as Lethargian society cannot bear them.)
Edgar ducked as the evil creature swatted at him wildly with both flabby, purple arms, its eyes rolling in its tall, triangular head. He leaped sideways and pressed a button in his suit that filled the corridor with an airborne sedative. The creature slumped to the ground.
Edgar jumped up the stairs at the end of the hall and bolted through the doorway.
And there was his ship! The Marmalade had several large burn marks along the side, but it looked spaceworthy. As Edgar ran, the alarms finally went off, and Lethargians all over the mammoth cruiser thought desperately of ways to avoid actually getting up and chasing him. Most decided that someone else would do it, one or two thought the military probably had some procedure for this that they didn’t know and would probably get in trouble for if they didn’t do it right, so they continued to sit and listen to lounge music, and one or two in the hangar actually stood, only to realize that the Lethargian battlecruiser had very large guns on the outside which they could use to kill Edgar if he actually escaped, so they sat back down.
Will Edgar escape? Will the Lethargians destroy his ship as it leaves the battlecruiser? Is there really any doubt about these questions?!? Find out in the next heart-stopping episode of… Edgar, SPACEMAN!
***
In a sweater poorly knit and an unsuspecting smile
little moses drifts downstream in the Nile
a fumbling reply, an awkward rigid laugh
I'm carried helpless by my floating basket raft
your flavor in my mind swings back and forth between
sweeter than any wine and as bitter as mustard greens
light and dark as honeydew and pumpernickel bread
the trap I set for you seems to have caught my leg instead!
Go plow some other field try and forget my name
We'll see what harvest yields, and, supposing I'd do the same
I planted rows of peas but by the first week of July
they should have come up to my knees
but they were maybe ankle high
take the fingers from your flute to weave your colored yarns
and boil down your fruit to preserves in mason jars
but now the books are overdue and the goats are underfed
the trap I set for you seems to have caught my leg instead!
you're a door-without-a-key, a field-without-a-fence
you made a holy fool of me and I've thanked you ever since.
if she comes circling back we'll end where we'd begun
like two pennies on the train track the train crushed into one
but if I'm a crown without a king, if I'm a broken open seed
if I come without a thing, then I come with all I need
no boat out in the blue, no place to rest your head,
the trap I set for you seems to have caught my leg instead!
I do not exist
only You exist
I do not exist
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| From Chicago, by Sufjan Stevens
...
if I was crying
in the van, with my friend
it was for freedom
from myself and from the land
I made a lot of mistakes
I made a lot of mistakes
I made a lot of mistakes
I made a lot of mistakes
you came to take us
all things go, all things go
to recreate us
all things grow, all things grow
we had our mindset
all things know, all things know
you had to find it
all things go, all things go
...
***
Sometimes, in fact usually, it's the going that gets to me.
I think everyone's forgotten how to stay.
I have, anyway.
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| Here are some things I did for the very first time over Spring Break:
1. Ate Chinese food with a plastic fork while going 80mph.
2. Listened to Sufjan Stevens' Casimir Pulaski Day on Casimir Pulaski Highway.
3. Walked in the middle of a run just to catch my breath. It must have been the mountains. And sitting on my butt for a week before exercising. I've probably done this before, but I don't remember.
4. Ate a meal that was mostly from a dumpster.
5. Saw Jakob the Liar. I just never liked the name much.
6. Went TV shopping with my uncle Nathan.
7. Learned a Ben Folds song on the piano.
8. Asked my grandma about my grandpa's battles as a preacher with PCUSA.
I also went to Rutba House, which is where I had the dumpster meal (they said it was "redeemed"). It was actually really good - chili and salad. I still managed to spill the remainder of their ranch dressing all over my hand, but I suppose I wouldn't be me if something like that didn't happen. Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove met me at the door. He had very pronounced features, olive skin, and cool hat, but I couldn't tell it was cool until later because it had designs atop the rim, and he was so tall I couldn't see over it - even when he was sitting down.
I've wanted to spend some time with the New Monastics ever since last summer when I read Shane Claiborne's book. Jonathan was actually with Shane in Iraq during the shock and awe campaign. There, he they had a car accident, and members of their party were injured. A muslim Iraqi doctor took them, Americans, back to the part of the hospital that had not been bombed out by U. S. jets. They named Rutba House after the town of Rutba in Iraq, hoping to show the same kind of kindness to the poor in Durham. They simply live as part of the community, forsaking a lot of the wasteful and needless luxuries of American life (most of the appliciances looked decades old), and share what they have - time, dinner, resources, Christ - with the poor in their area. The idea is to embody what it means to be a Christian instead of just think the right things. Truly a form of monasticism - and they enjoy ties with older monastics as well (who, Jonathan said, prefer the term "classic monasticism" to "old monasticism).
After dinner, I was invited to join a sharing time/Bible study where they sang, prayed, and shared parts of their stories (part of the way they were observing Lent). I prayed during the prayer time - something about God helping me to share Jesus elsewhere... I meant I wanted to be able to do what they were doing; I wanted to be like them. I was immediately humbled as I heard all their prayers: for the kids they taught in school, for people giving them trouble, for a man being executed, for his family, for the judge... Simply put, their center was love. My center is me - and being and doing right. When Christ is really at the center of your life, you not only do crazy things; you act differently, talk differently, pray differently. I didn't know what the community was about all through dinner and reading and sharing - I was waiting for some kind of epiphany. It came only when they prayed.
So what did I learn? I learned that I'd be of little use as a new monastic in current state of my soul. I need to do a lot more thinking about others and a lot less thinking about me before I do that. Most importantly - I need to spend more time with God.
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