philosophy

stories

She survived!

She SURVIVED!!!!!

After 72 hours, Zora is safe and home. Today after school there were reports of whining coming from the top of the island. Ed busted out the binocs and got a brief visual. Jori and Ed took off, made it most of the way up the island. The final stretch was steep and difficult–but Edward persevered and made the final ascent, picked her up and began the long and difficult trip back down the island. A few hours later, Zora was safe and sound and home and happy.

Folks, this here story has a happy ending. Look at the happiness in these pictures of Owner, Dog, and Rescuer.

:)

DSCF4158

the rescuer, Edward!
the rescuer, Edward!
stories

Best Faulkner I’ve read yet. But I’m new at this Faulkner thing. Did I mention I’m on a high falooting literature kick? So anyways I’m new at this Faulkner thing, and everybody tells me that I won’t really get it before two or three re-reads, and for every great huge brilliantly crafted idea and relationship I saw, I could feel two or three sail by me entirely uncaught. So then likely I liked this one most because I caught a bit more. And now throw all that out the window, here’s the moral of the story for now: this book was GOOD.

Excerpts:

——

“Then let him go!” the boy cried. “Let him go!”
His cousin laughed shortly. Then he stopped laughing. “His cage ain’t McCaslins,” he said. “He was a wild man. When he was born, all his blood on both sides, except the little white part, knew things that had been tamed out of our blood so long ago that we have not only forgotten them, we have to live together in herds to protect ourselves from our own sources. He was the direct son not of only a warrior but of a chief. Then he grew up and began to learn things, and all of a sudden one day he found out that he had been betrayed, the blood of the warriors and chiefs had been betrayed. Not by his father,” he added quickly. “He probably never held it against old Doom for selling him and his mother into slavery, because he probably believed the damage had already been done before then and it was the same warriors’ and chiefs’ blood in him and Doom both that was betrayed through the black blood which his mother gave him. Not betrayed by the black blood and not wilfully betrayed by his mother, but betrayed by her all the same, who had bequeathed him not only the blood of slaves but even a little of the very blood which had enslaved it; himself his own battleground, the scene of his own vanquishment and the mausoleum of his defeat. His cage ain’t us,” McCaslin said. “Did you ever know anybody yet, even your father and Uncle Buddy, that ever told him to do or not do anything that he ever paid any attention to?”

——

“Why not?” McCaslin said. “Think of all that has happened here, on this earth. All the blood hot and strong for living, pleasuring, that has soaked back into it. For grieving and suffering too, of course, but still getting something out of it for all that, getting a lot out of it, because after all you dont have to continue to bear what you believe is suffering; you can always choose to stop that, put an end to that. And even suffering and grieving is better than nothing; there is only one thing worse than not being alive, and that’s shame. But you cant be alive forever, and you always wear out life long before you have exhausted the possibilities of living. And all that must be somewhere; all that could not have been invented and created just to be thrown away. And the earth is shallow; there is not a great deal of it before you come to rock. And the earth dont want to just keep things, hoard them; it wants to use them again. Look at the seed, the acorns, at what happens even to carrion when you try to bury it: it refuses too, seethes and struggles too until it reaches light and air again, hunting the sun still. And they–” the boy saw his hand in silhouette for a moment against the window beyond which, accustomed to the darkness now, he could see sky where the scoured and icy stars glittered “–they don’t want it, need it. Besides, what would it want, itself, knocking around out there, when it never had enough time about the earth as it was, when there is plenty of room about the earth, plenty of places still unchanged from what they were when the blood used and pleasured in them while it was still blood?”

——

Until three years ago there had been two of them, the other a full-blood Chickasaw, in a sense even more incredibly lost than Sam Fathers. He called himself Jobaker, as if it were one word. Nobody knew his history at all. He was a hermit, living in a foul little shack at the forks of the creek five miles from the plantation and about that far from any other habitation. He was a market hunter and fisherman and he consorted with nobody, black or white; no negro would even cross his path and no man dared approach his hut except Sam. And perhaps once a month the boy would find them in Sam’s shop–two old men squatting on their heels on the dirt floor, talking in a mixture of negroid English and flat hill dialect and now and then a phrase of that old tongue which as time went on and the boy squatted there too listening, he began to learn. Then Jobaker died. That is, nobody had seen him in some time. Then one morning Sam was missing, nobody, not even the boy, knew when nor where, until that night when some negroes hunting in the creek bottom saw the sudden burst of flame and approached. It was Jobaker’s hut, but before they got anywhere near it, someone shot at them from the shadows beyond it. It was Sam who fired, but nobody ever found Jobaker’s grave.

——

ideas

Is it any wonder that the human condition can be summed up so short and clear by saying we all just badly need a hug sometimes. ?

ideas, other

Half a million dollars and four to five years of both full time apprenticeship AND weekend coursework. A lot of time and money. That’s the name of the game for an electricity or gas (power generation/distribution) company to take a worker from entry-level apprentice to proficient wireman. And except for the time consumed by weekend coursework, the power company eats that. All of it. After the fact, it is another five years for the company to break even on their investment. Ten years after a worker enters an apprenticeship program, it is finally worth it. It’s the same story for many other trades.

For government recognition of proficiency in education, you’re looking at two to three years of part time coursework and six months to a year of on-the-job training.

I’m an American and I’ll have my electricity reliable, please. Thanks.

 

other

The land of Israel is a small country. You can walk its length, north to south, in a few days, and from its central mountains you can see its lateral boundaries, the sea to the west and the river to the east. But it has had an importance out of all proportion to its size. Empires have fought over it. Every forty-four years out of the last four thousand, on average, an army has marched through it, whether to conquer it, to rescue it from someone else, to use it as a neutral battleground on which to fight a different enemy, or to take advantage of it as the natural route for getting somewhere else to fight there instead. There are many places which, once beautiful, are now battered and mangled with the legacies of war. And yet it has remained a beautiful land, still producing grapes and figs, milk and honey.
The New Testament has not been around as long as the land of Israel, but in other ways there are remarkable parallels. […] There are many places whose fragile beauty has been trampled on by heavy-footed exegetes in search of a Greek root, a quick sermon, or a political slogan. And yet it has remained a powerful and evocative book, full of delicacy and majesty, tears and laughter.

-N.T. Wright in The New Testament and the People of God

N.T. Wright’s series about the origins of Christianity are the easiest to read hard-to-read books I’ve read. This is the first of the series and the third one for me to read (..yeah). It’s work getting through these books, but the only good beer is beer won, not conceded; good things are earned, thankfully. He says that in writing this book he’s a fascinated amateur not an explaining expert..not sure I completely buy it, but I see where he’s coming from. I think that’ll actually help, make the book more readable. His “expert” work, the tome about the life of Jesus, definitely has a clearly expert tone. It is very dense, takes a lot of time to read, the bibliography is enormous, and at the end one is left awestruck.

other

The last few days are all so much that I don’t know how to write anything at all, but for the same reason I’ve gotta write something, so it’ll be the game of hell and earth and life and god in as few words as possible. Here’s what happened; what I feel and need to say will come later.

She was jumped and raped monday morning. For 72 hours she was in hell. When she slept she relived it over and over again until she woke up, then it’s this batshit scared broken semi-concious state where she thrashes and cries out until she realizes that it’s not all happening again, and she begs to not be alone and her friend would ask her if she needs anything, food or water, then she falls asleep back into reliving what’s far worse than death until she wakes up again. I’ve never seen something so terrifying and horrible, when I finally let it all out and cried and cried, I’ve never cried like that before in my life. Something change deep in my heart, the type of change that doesn’t happen but a few times in a lifetime.

She was completely disabled. To go to the bathroom, Jorge and I had to stand her up, at which point she’d pass out and we’d have to carry her fireman style (the two of us barely held up, she’s not a small girl) to the bathroom, where we’d leave her with a few of her friends and she’d wake up on the toilet and panic and cry again. She hadn’t eaten a meal since Sunday.

And yesterday morning 72 hours later she woke up and said she needed to walk. She bathed with a little bit of help from Julia and asked for breakfast. She ate, and we went to the Catholic Church. She got into and out of the car on her own. So here I am sitting a few spots down the pew from her. She’s forgiven the four men, she’s sobbing but there’s no more pain nor fear, she’s sobbing because she’s giving thanks to God and she looks at me with a smile and says David, I need to look for the people who are most needy in this world and help them, Jesus came to me in my dream and told me he didn’t want to see me like I was, he told me to get up and walk because there’s work to do, and she says this with a smile. I need to find the most needy people in this world and help them, she said. You arrived was all I could say, and she smiled and nodded.

And yesterday morning something else changed deep in my heart, the same type of change that doesn’t happen but a few times in a lifetime. She left Barillas yesterday after going to church, she left with two of her friends in a little old plane piloted by a content old gringo who doesn’t really have any home at all and in half an hour she was in her hometown Quetzaltenango for medical tests and then went to be with her family.

You can’t make this stuff up, man.

ideas, other, photography

If you’re trying to be cool you’ve already missed the boat; the fire inside to have courage is the thing itself.

So is that if and only if or exclusive or?

What other picture could go here but Teddy and Muir

Serious studs

 

 

other

In a poor town in a developing country, something’s just not right about a fat pastor.

motorcycle

Motorcycle wrenching fun, motorcycle flying fun, motorcycle from here to there and back fun

The best motorcycle for the one is the worst motorcycle for the other is the alright motorcycle for the other.

Cliché solution #1: the best motorcycle is the one that you are riding
Cliché solution #2: the best motorcycle is the one that makes you think about God

other

1. I’ve never once regretted having gone backpacking
2. Short stories
3. Poverty — ignorant and prideful people both the poor and the rich — poverty-making suppression and abuse of people groups
4. Supermacro help and supermicro help…everything else doesn’t work
5. 1977 Yamaha 250 two-smokers are really, really really fun and loud
6. Teaching (supermicro)
7. Taking beautiful pictures with a digital camera loses it’s charm
8. Catch-22
9. Alaskan bush pilots
10. Alaskan bush pilot
11. The ocean
12. Pike Place Market mini-doughnuts
13. Native America
14. Lost times and lost people that live on in tales and stories
15. The Beatitudes
16. Mayan numbers (I can do zero to five hundred, yo)
17. Queen Charlotte Islands
18. Murtle Lake, BC
19. Princess Luisa Inlet
20. Bicycle mechanic
21. Motorcycle mechanic
22. Whiskey and tobacco
23. Stout
24. Origins of Christianity
25. Galois Theory
26. Rag chewing
27. Indoor soccer goalkeeping
28. The motorcycle wave

funny, ideas

M, this is for you.

A few days ago I realized April Fool’s day is coming up soon, and I have been thinking a lot about it. Lots of things have come into my mind and heart when I realized that April Fool’s day is something deeper, a clear window into human condition. I only realized this when the concept of birthday and the concept of April Fool’s day came together in my mind, which happened thanks to my dear friend from school and my old Troop leader from Boy Scouts,  who were both born on April 1st.

Wait, April Fool’s day? There are a lot of Holidays that are great for getting all windy about–Commercialized Christmas, unThankful Thanksgiving, Egg-riddled Easter, Baffling Boxing-Day, et cetera–but really Dave, April Fool’s day? Yes, April Fool’s day. And a birthday. Humor is one of things we still really have no clue about, and birth is the beginning of life.

Is this whole post just a hackneyed cliche? Ends and means, friend, ends and means.

In the past six months, my mind has been really occupied by this thing, human essence, human condition, or whatever you might want to call it. Living in Guatemala has been a wild experience so far–not at all what I expected, but more learning than I can shake a stick at it. Two things have been separately wandering around my mind–the celebration and remembrance of birthdays, which many don’t do here (the lower two thirds of the population, the poor, usually don’t know their date of birth), and why we find humor in the unknown and unexpected (like April Fool’s jokes).

Two days ago, in a twinkle of a moment these two things dovetailed and immediately made all the sense in the world and opened up this window, this lens that helped me understand this idea of humor and the celebration of birthdays.

It’s long, so click to read more–

Continue Reading

ideas, stories

I have always loved to goof off, it’s so great to live the happy go lucky life–I’ve thought of aspiring to be the man who’s whole life is that life.

Almost..but not. Not all the time.

When faced with bad and dark things in this world you’ve gotta let your blood boil sometimes, some days at the end of a week that is lonelier than an empty cave on a rainy day or when a friend dies, you’ve gotta cry.

Sometimes. And the rest of the time I’ll be the leprechaun on the pogo stick.

———–

This was written about a week ago, here’s what happened yesterday, a conveniently timed epilogue:

I’ve been sick for two weeks now, it started with a nasty fever and sore throat, muscle aches and all, dropped down to a mild sore throat, now it’s a runny nose and cough. So I haven’t been sleeping all that well. When I’m tired, I actually usually fare well with controlling my temper.

Yesterday was valentines day. I didn’t get to sleep till late, and at three in the morning a ****-*** *** ****-**** ***-**-*-***** ****-**** weak excuse of a man pulled up at the window of one of my housemates (whose room is adjacent to mine), and proceeded to serenade her with one abominable pop song in spanish and then another, at full volume from his Landrover with the windows down.

I woke  up. Not only did I wake up, I woke up from a good dream. You know that feeling, when you don’t really remember the dream, but you know it was a good one, and you just woke up from it? Yeah, it was that. The songs finished, finally, and the (insert a lot of asterisks here) drove away. Puchiga mucha.

So rolled to my other side and closed my eyes and tried to go back to sleep. And started to cough. And coughed more. Legit, abs-hurting real coughing.

So, at this point I’m not only utterly indignantly disgusted at this pathetic excuse of a man that doesn’t have a pair to just knock on the door to tell a girl he likes her (ok, not gonna lie, when I’m tired and sick and it’s 3am, my temper isn’t too tempered) but also mad, because I have to get up at 6 o’clock and wolf down breakfast so I can get to the office because there’s a whole bucket load of work waiting for me that I’m not entirely convinced ought to be as so.

Easy Dave..chill. It’s their way of celebrating Valentines day. Yeah it seems really weird and offensive and…well, weird, but get over yourself already. He’s probably a good guy, likely not worthy of half that many asterisk-words. You just need to stop being a judgmental gringo and go get a nice cup of tea to settle your throat and go back to sleep.

Ok, a cup of hot green tea with panela (pre-sugar sugar-cane extract. Mmmm) sounds really great. So I went to the kitchen for my mug. Now, I’m not sure if it’s a USA thing, or maybe just a Dave thing, but I have MY mug. I like MY mug, it’s from the Marine Hardware Supply store in Anacortes, one of my favorite shops in one of my favorite places in the world. I miss that shop and that town and I like my mug. Every time I use my mug, I wash it out and set it by the coffee machine; creature of habit, I like my mug. So I was alright, calm cool and collected. I’m just going to have some nice tea and go back to sleep.

I hobbled tired halfway to the kitchen–then walked back to my room and put on my hoodie, then went to the kitchen for my mug. It wasn’t there, so I looked around for it. There sat my mug dirty on the table half full with cold coffee and with sticky sugar residue on the inside and on the outside too.

So much for calm, cool and collected.

Two cups of tea and something like two hours later I fell asleep on the couch.

(insert a lot of asterisks here).

That all may not be a bad and dark thing in the world, but it takes the (asterisks) silver medal.

ideas

Take a look at the first before you read this second one,
http://wp.me/p14q4r-Rx

Also, I’m not sure whether or not I think the word god, as used here, should be capitalized or not. Thankfully the word Christian is a straight up syntax question without baggage, so it stays normal.

I don’t like to write something that’s not a story; I’m not very good at it and it feels stuffy.That said, here she goes.

The churches here in Guatemala have given me some problems, of them there’s one whopper. They made me realize something: I feel that god is for people who have good education and read lots of good books. If you don’t wonder deeply about redemption and covenant and all that and then go have a scotch and cigar and talk about all that with another  well educated book reader, if you don’t ponder infinity or make philosophical jokes about god…I feel you’re pretty much screwed.

When I first arrived here I first noticed that the churches are loud–the one across the street from my house is unfortunately very exemplary. They sing a lot of songs that sound much like what I imagine pagan chants sound like. They don’t sing the worship songs I know, like and am moved by. Then, when I began to visit churches and hear radio sermons, I noticed that they always preach very topically*. That’s not all, the topic almost every time hits hard on prosperity doctrine. Also, when someone prays it does not sound to me like a boy talking to his father or a woman to her mentor, what I feel prayer should be closest to. Instead it sounds like a screenplay being exagerated by an unskilled actor.

All these things together in my mind made for a single mental swing of ego and judgement: “wait-all these people are fake Christians. What’s all that   about?” If you want to duke it out with me for having thought that thought, take your best shot and see what happens.
So I notice all these things that are so different, and I am really bothered. I think to myself that I’m not like them. The next thing I think is “why?”

Why am I not like them?

I’ve come to the place I am at with respect to god by four things: (1) praying, (2) arguing about god and man, (3) thinking and (4) reading. So then I think to myself “of these four things, what makes me not like them?”

They pray here; they pray really differently, but prayer is such a complicated and peculiar thing I’m just going to leave it at “they pray here,” and so rule out number one. I’ll smoosh 2 into 3: arguing about god and man only counted when the arguement made me think, and what counted was the thinking, not the arguing. I know that the major part of how I think came from my studies at the university, and I know that very few here have had an education like mine. I’ll keep number three, with smooshed-in 2, and rename it “education.” Lastly there is reading. I’ve simply read more substantial books than the majority of churchgoers here. Through these books I’ve seen so many crazy different ideas and wild created worlds. Without doubt what I’ve read is key to how I think and a not-insignificant part of how I’ve come to where I am with respect to god. So I’ll keep number four.

So the result is that I threw out number one (prayer), smooshed number two (talking) into number three (thinking), and kept number four (reading). Education and books. So I look at these people and think to myself, they are spiritually fake and I am the real deal because of a degree I earned and the weekends and evenings I’ve whittled away reading books.

And worst of all, I have neither scotch nor cigar nor another “educated” book-reader to go argue, banter and joke about this with.

…maybe for now that’s best.

The end

———-

PS:
I implicitly cursed once. If you spotted it on the first pass, come visit me and I will make you a complex three course meal in 2 minutes flat and then give it to you.

*If you’re not familiar with preaching, there are two general ways to make a sermon. Exegesis is exposition using something resembling the “when did who say what to whom, where were they, and so why they say it like that at that moment?” It’s like this: imagine you were my boss’s coworker and needed to completely understand a very quickly-written incomplete email I’d written to him. You’d first need some knowledge of me and my job. You’d need some feel for the context of the email: was I pointing out a problem, clarifying a detail of an in-progress design job or maybe poking fun at the CEO with an inside joke? This is a good way to preach: good exegesis leaves little room for subjective error. Obviously there must still be a personal element-a preacher can’t just spew facts. But without the presence of rigorous reason and fact, sermons are at best lukewarm and at worst extremely decieving. Topical preaching is exactly what it sounds like: an arbitrary topic and an arbitrary batch of bible verses, almost always clipped out of context, that “talk” about it, where the definition of “talk” is up to the preacher’s whim. It is, at the core, the preacher expressing an idea or viewpoint in terms of phrases from the bible. If the idea or viewpoint is good, then often no harm is done.
stories

Yesterday morning at six thirty sharp I was woken up by music. This song wasn’t horrid like the title says, merely very curious. It was being played over a megaphone on top of the house kity-corner to the one I live in. It was being played very loudly, too. I didn’t really understand the lyrics, could only make out something about jesuchristo, then something about jamas asi o algo asi. Anyways, I was only bit annoyed; by now I’m accustomed to things happening unexpectedly in the morning (machine-gun-fire story coming soon). The part that mildly annoyed me was how the chorus had this terribly screechy and out-of-tune violin part.

Then the song finished. Phew! I thought to myself–now onto a different song, or if I’m lucky that was just some good-morning-world greeting from friends to another friend. They have different ways of showing friendship here.

Silence…for a few moments and then the music started up again, the same song.

Uh-oh..this cannot be good, I thought. I thought right. This song, at first innocently curious, for 14 hours repeated, became horrid.

At eight-thirty p.m. yesterday I left the house to go to the office. I’d spent the better part of the day making soup and reading and was at my wits end with this horrid song. I’d tried thinking about it as a joke, and this worked for a while. I tried enjoying it, and this worked for a while. I tried making fun of it in my mind, and this too worked for a while. I finally plugged earphones into my little mp3 player and used this, but the earphones aren’t sound isolating so I had to use serious volume to overpower the neighbor’s megaphone-piped screechy-violin song. Finally at eight thirty my head hurt too much to think or really do anything, so off to the office I went, and there I found good peace and quiet–it was wonderful.  I’m ashamed of it, but I actually did have brief thoughts to wait till a bit later at night when there’s good darkness and then to hurtle a rock at this screechy-song-spewing megaphone. Honestly, I thought about it–but no, that’s not a good thing at all. I quit the ideas of destruction or violence, but remained very bitter and somewhat angry at whatever ridiculous person, the ridiculous person who thought it some sort of stupid joke to play the same horrid song all day long.

This morning at six thirty sharp I was woken up by music. Again.

Yes, you guessed it, the song with the out-of-tune screechy-violin chorus. However, there is a saving grace, and because of this saving grace I actually laughed out loud (lol!) when I heard the song pipe up. Today is the first day of work–a day I’ll spend at the office, not at home, not near this horrid, horrid song. Because of this, I laughed–those silly fools, their snarky joke today will fall on nothing but an empty house. Bahahaha. I have to say that, at the office the night before, the resident security guard Don Alvaro had mentioned that an old man had died and the music was some sort of tradition, some custom of the indigenous people–that didn’t really strike me as too important though. It paled in comparison to both my headache and the concept of this ludicrously snarky joke. By morning today, I’d practically forgotten what Alvaro had mentioned.

There’s a little tienda, this tiny snack store, a stone’s throw away from the office; I’m a ten-a.m. regular. At least two or three days out of the week I head down to the tienda to quench the jones for some sweet and salty treats; sometimes I go healthy with juice and a piece of bread, other times it’s Coca-Cola and chips.

As I was walking out of the office to the little tienda thinking about Coca-Cola and chips, I heard music. It was the screechy-violin-chorus song! I heard it faintly, growing louder; I froze in my tracks and looked to my left down the dirt road towards where the music was coming from. There was the funeral procession, forty or fifty people: family members and friends. All the men were dressed in old suits dirty with road dust and the women in traditional woven skirts and blouses, all of them somber and quiet. Towards the back of the group was a beautiful ornate coffin on the shoulders of five younger men. I walked to the side of the road and stood, cap in my hand, thoughtless. Walking next to the pallbearers was an older woman with a single candle. The small yellow flame, barely wavering in the calm breeze, was hardly a notable thing in the bright midmorning sun of a cloudless sky. One man was carrying the megaphone mounted on a tall two-by-four, another was carrying the stereo and battery, a third the cables that carried this song from the stereo to the megaphone to be sounded out in static-heavy reproduction for all to hear, as if it was transmitted from a poor radio station or a radio station in a town very far away.

They passed by me and proceeded on to the cemetery, led by a pastor with an old and worn bible in his hand.

I ate lunch at home in peace today, the song wasn’t playing any more. The man who had died was 65, I don’t know if he left behind a wife or not.

The end.

Edit:
Later, I explained this a little bit to my sorta-boss and really-mentor, Danery. As I got to the point about hearing the song and realizing that the funeral procession was passing by, I thought of my friend who died and his funeral and what it was like to see soldiers and his brothers and his coffin being carried by them and I nearly started crying right there half an hour ago. And right here as I type this in the office I’m a hairs-breadth away from falling apart into a bawling mess. Asi anda la vida.