"Christianity is not supposed to make you secure. Christianity is supposed to give you the courage to walk into an insecure world knowing that you’re not alone and to embrace the radical insecurity."
"
Kissing is not merely a playful obligation on the way to sex. To kiss—really kiss—is to abandon one’s literal self in an effort to become a work of art, to insatiably devour the boundary between you and your lover.
…
Good kissing is violent because its goal is not romantic. We desire to eat and be eaten, to lose ourselves and to forget the false distinction between us, to linger awhile in the perpetually paused silence of grace.
"Dance like Thom York is watching.
"Jefferson and Kant would have been bewildered at the changes that have taken place in the Western democracies in the last two hundred years. For they did not think of equal treatment for blacks and whites, or of female suffrage, as deducible from the philosophical principles they enunciated. Their hypothetical astonishment illustrates the anti-foundationalist point that moral insight is not, like mathematics, a product of rational reflection. It is instead a matter of imagining a better future, and observing the results of attempts to bring that future into existence."
Burying Dad
Next month I travel to Massachusetts to bury my father. He died in November. On the sixteenth. I found out about it on the seventeenth. On Facebook. Stephen Lee Beggs. It’s June. We’ll be putting his carbon in the ground in July. There’s too much distance between between his death and his funeral.
Funerals ought to happen as soon as possible after a person dies. It used to be that you got a guy in the ground quick because dead meat starts to rot and rotting meat stinks. This led itself well to the emotional well-being of the people left behind by the bastard who went and died. A few days later: you watched as his body was lowered into the ground, or was consumed by fire, or vultures, or the sea, or whatever. And you cursed his name or praised his memory with all the intensity the root of your freshly exposed emotion would allow.
In this case — seven months later — we have a bag full of ashes and bone fragments inside a cardboard box prepared by some white-collared furnace technician with all of the right papers prepared by the county clerk. Neat and tidy. And I’ll show up for a day, and we can have a neat and tidy Christian burial for a man who never really lived in a way that indicated he believed in anything. If it were up to me I’d put his ashes in a whisky bottle and keep him on the shelf. Nearby. Nearer than he ever was in life, but nonetheless separated from me by that bottle; his home. And by death, of course.
Cool conversation piece.
Them: What’s this?
Me: My Dad.
Them: What?
Me: My Dad’s ashes.
Them: Why are they in a whisky bottle?
Me: He was an alcoholic.
The way the rest of that conversation goes could really tell you something about the person you’re carrying on with.
If you find yourself living inside of a whisky bottle in life, you’ll end up in one after life. Let’s be clear, I’m not talking about hell-except-with-burning-liquor instead of fire. I’m talking about the hell you lived in echoing through the ages after your death. That’s about as close as I can get to heaven & hell: life + quantum physics.
Anyway, my dad’s dead and continues to be as isolated from creation and God (whatever nonobjective form of God you might know or choose not to acknowledge) as he was from me in life. I hope that I can find some connection to him on the twenty-first of July.
Bristling Divisions
Dear President Obama,
No other, single cultural factor divides Americans, one from another, more than methods of toothbrush preparation. The gulf between those who wet the bristles of their brush before inserting it into their mouth and those who do not is real. And it is wide. Of course, a divide exists within the wet-brush community itself; there are those who wet their bristles before they apply paste to brush, on one hand, and those who apply paste to brush first and then wet the whole at once, on the other. This division among wet-brush practitioners has engendered an illusion among dry-brush enthusiasts that the “Dry Party,” as they call themselves, is the more powerful group. This illusion leads the Dry Partiers to believe that they deserve special treatment by government and in society at large. However, unity is not necessarily a good in itself.
Unthinking adherence to set doctrine in toothbrushing methodology leads not only to intellectual laziness, but potentially to close-minded, xenophobic, and even jingoistic tendencies. Dry-brushers, who might otherwise learn to engage others in healthy debate, and respectful dialogue within a spirit of cosmopolitan, open-minded toleration, experience just such indoctrination at an early age. The result is that it is common for a wet-brusher to come away from encounter with a dry-brusher startled by the pig-headed unwillingness of the latter to even momentarily consider the merits of wet-brushing on its own terms.
Wet-brush bristle preparation in toothbrushing, then, must be seen as the more culturally beneficial method in democratic society, not in spite of its inner division but because of it. If we are to tackle the most fundamental political, ethical, and philosophical disagreements in our society, we need a widespread method of toothbrush preparation that prepares our future leaders to engage each other across the ideological aisle. Wet-brushing, with tension inherent to its practice, and reasonable yet passionate debate at its core, is just such a method.
I hope that you will consider the Wet-Brush Caucus a vital ally in your 2012 Presidential bid, and that you will stand with us going forward, by seeking to establish wet-brush methodologies in United States’ policy, both at home and abroad.
Best,
Logan Wilson Robertson, President, Wet-Brush Caucus International
"
My needs are few. I hope to see a good movie, well projected, with decent sound, on a good-sized screen, in the company of people who are generally in sympathy with the film. That means I don’t object, for example, when people laugh or scream if a movie calls for laughing or screaming. Movies have a way of getting the audiences they deserve.
What I object to is anything in the theater that goes against the flow. I want to give myself up to a movie and even lose myself in it. I don’t want people to talk. I don’t want to see the evil little screens of cell phones — and with stadium seating, I can see every single one. Among my many quarrels with 3D is that it removes me from the experience by introducing the unnecessary extra dimension. A 2D movie creates the illusion of 3D more effectively, because it allows our minds to cooperate, instead of hammering them with distractions.
""No introduction doesn’t speak his own name
Gonna beat them demons at they own game
The sunset rides to the end slow
Same song echoing outside of the window
You can’t grow if the skin don’t fit you
Sometimes you gotta get low just to get through
No inspiration left to do your best when
Nobody hates you more than you’re reflection
Suffer the shame until it stuffs the drain
He’s got two hands and a bucket of paint
Come on"
Atmosphere, “When Life Gives You Lemons, You Paint That Shit Gold”
"Architecturally they couldn’t be more dreary and conventional — bloated glass towers encircled by quaint town houses and suburban villas decorated in ersatz historical styles. Their gargantuan scale and tabula rasa approach conjure old-style Modernist planning efforts like the creation of Brasília in the 1950s or the colossal Soviet urban experiments of the 1930s, but these are driven by anxiety over the future, not utopian idealism."
Saudi Arabia’s new “special economic zone.”
