Cast Die

I think the greatest obstacle to my motivation and accomplishment is confidence. Perhaps overconfidence. It stems from a competitive inclination and quickly becomes an inhibition. I'm a great lover of competition, and yet I struggle mightily with correcting myself when I'm not actually "losing". In those situations where the conditions for victory remain obfuscated by circumstance or the object or opposition against which the game is played is enigmatic. And those situations where my opponent lies within myself - those I always lose. The problem is, once I've acquired some semblance of inertia, even I cannot easily gainsay my own inclination. It isn't impossible, but so much more difficult without outside motive.
When I must practice to better myself, yet without any relative comparison, I fail. I'm overconfident in my abilities and fail in the daily follow-through. One of my most difficult problems with my competitive spirit was that once I knew that I could win, I moved on. Once winning was technically within my grasp, everything else was academic. I knew I could do it; those that mattered understood I was the stronger competitor. That was my youth - never an opponent worth beating.
Except myself.
And now, forcing myself to maintain rigor, to daily accomplish various rituals of living and life, I struggle. What competitive urge forces me to eat a certain amount, exercise just so, or write a certain quantity? The competition rests in the long haul and the terms of ambiguous.
Another of my competitive angsts was in chance. I disliked games of chance and sometimes even games of dull strategem. I loved the knowledge games. Games that possessed not only a breadth of opportunity, but a depth of decision. But life contains its own fair share of frustrating chance, or seeming chance. Why does one child get cancer, and another fly free? Why does one get born into poverty and another wealth? Why does this curmudgeon survive into longevity and this kindly soul find an early grave?
The dice feels weighted against good sometimes, or most ostensibly so when those miseries occur. And the hard part for me is deciding to struggle against myself when I know that my future seems somewhat contrived and chancy rather than directed. There are too many variables.

I used to play a game with myself. I would ask myself impossible statistic questions like: "I wonder who is both the fastest, shortest, and most stylish person on this field?" The problem with questions like these is the weighting of the variables. Is "fastest" the most important? What if the fastest is also the tallest? Or the least stylish? How do you diagram that out? Even one of those seems so arbitrary and subjective. That's how life feels, except with more variables. Each person has a say in my destiny, and so does the spontaneity of factors too invisible for me to ascertain: genetics, environment, and so on.

With all this, how does one maintain motivation towards an uncertain end? It feels like that line in Annie Hall about why Alvie was not doing his homework. "Because the universe is expanding, and eventually everything is going to collapse" was the (inexact) response. That can be how it feels - a bit fatalistic. But then you can so easily get stuck in the rut of doing nothing at all, which is worse, sometimes, than mistakenly taking a wrong step. At least you can learn from a wrong step. And all this is really just a bit of rambling sophistry, but it's interesting to think about those tiny obstacles and factors that stagnate us like flies in honey. When we are our biggest enemy, who will lift us free? I think that's question answers so many others. You can tell a lot about a person by who will lend them a hand, and how many kindnesses come when the dice lands poorly.

LGBTQ in the Church (a meeting on a minute)

Is this Spirit here? Or just high spirits?
Does the Spirit split two ways? Is it a river or a hurricane? Every "leading" eddies and suffocates - which side holds the sense of truth?
How is it possible to exist so divided and so compelled and spirit-filled within the unified body? Is it possible not to? Can we? Do we?
Does anyone know, with shadowless certainty, the Truth? Or even one Truth? In such a multifaceted view, both sides tossing out vindictives and dismissives at the brick-wall-minds of the other side.
The "other side" doesn't value diversity or discussion, acceptance and unity, love, grace, or forgiveness.
Or the "other side" exists in shallow theology, being biblically naive, sitting with sinners, misrepresenting a "holy" God and wholly disregarding a depth of tradition and wisdom and practice of faith.
What middle ground between the spectrum of hell and bigotry? When it's either damnation or discrimination. Where are the enlightened sophists who have risen above the sheeple in middling belief and sit in the golden means of compromise? Surely these possess some Gnosticism worth being? But everyone is so obnoxiously right sometimes, or humbly condescending. Where are the patient listeners? The quiet dialectic?

is it friday yet / catharsis inanity

It's catharsis, no? My hands clenched so tight, my plans crushed to dust beneath the might of anxious anger. Calcium gates closing and the sinuous railroads slides back, and the bindings of cells untie like an unknitting, an unzipping of flesh inside, and the muscles unwind and breathe, slowly, relaxing. Fingernail pits mark the prints where fingers once clasped as a vice. Like chaff, confetti, or dandelion seeds the dreams are ballooning into the sky.
Some drown in the ocean, or suffocate in the stones; some birds bear home, completing their nest. A few float forever, stuck in the winds of time, or land in the desert, shrivel and die. But a few, those dreams I never knew might fly so high, join the stars, or the fireflies, or the wildflowers on the mountainsides. I'm still staring through the holes in my hands, the paths between these unclenched digits...
Where do they lead?
These blind worms never link with anything externally alive, but they harbor life so defiantly. Where are you going, dear, without your hands, without your friends of fret and floundering, the lens of life? They crush and cradle, touch and trundle, and if they callous, it's kindness or it's careless. And they sweat in the catharsis of heat, and they fight or fly with equal ease. And now, across this keyboard they rap-taptap, popping keys with the inanity of fighting destiny, but they hope, believe, and tonight that's all we need.


I read endless blogs, news articles, stories, and sometimes I wonder if I should transform my rhetoric to follow the masses out there. Not necessarily as a means of subsuming my style into the majority, but as a practical means of mastering the popular. I don't think that's me, however. I don't want to argue politics or exclaim titles in all caps to garner attention, like "STUDY OF CATHARSIS: RESULTS YOU WOULDN'T BELIEVE" or "TEN WAYS TO SUCCEED AT ALL YOUR DREAMS" or something equally banal. It's these giant blogospheres that are swallowing everything smaller by mass producing material. It's like that Donald Hall quote (and essay) that I've grown to love. America has once again managed to gobble up the voice of mankind and transform it into a marketable, consumerist product.
Blogs are popular? Okay, we can "mcdonalds" that, and serve fake-meat articles a hundred times an hour - something for everyone. And we've got fast food, but no cuisine, nothing palatable. I'm fairly certain that style isn't beyond me, but I'm not writing this for the consumption of countless blithe readers. This isn't a popularity contest in the slightest, as I'm really not advertising any of these nor attempting to harvest "followers" and "likes" and "+1's", because that would probably render me more grief than pleasure.
But I do still sometimes wonder whether I should attempt to fill this space with more meaningful content, content that can be engaged with, and approached with purpose. I rarely spend the time fleshing out ideas, as I've previously considered this space a hit-and-run, freestyle writing outlet that is an alternative to journal, story, and competition writing.
It's not edited, it's not a platform for some soap-box ideology. Occasionally I share ideas or philosophy, but this is more for sophistry than philosophy, anyway. I probably should write an essay now and again, though. I think something (maybe everything) in me missed school, and the continual, forced application of research to produce an argumentative, or expository, essay. I miss those. Forcing yourself to write them without a return is more difficult.

On Perfection, Weekends, and The Philadelphia Story

For you, Matthew:

I'm going crazy. I'm standing here solidly on my own two hands and going crazy.

~ Philadelphia Story

Limn the sky with peach pie, the clouds are crushed-melted marbles and strips of grated cheesecloth, pink as cherry blossoms. How can such a mountain be: Rainier, towering twice as high as these others along the way, like arrowheads or a picket fence before the giant house, imposing and towering.

I was thinking about shapes and forms again, this weekend. I had a lot of driving. When contemplating perfection, I keep returning to the idea of perfect art. Can there possibly be a perfect art? You see, if you can objectively state that one song is better than another song, or this artistic piece is better than this one, can you not simply leap to the conclusion that there is, somehow, a perfect piece? There are a couple of counterexamples to this that I've been considering: squares. Is there a perfect square? What size is it? You see, there are a ton of different square-forms, but all squares are simply rectangles with equivalent side lengths on all sides. How long those sides are, as long as they are all equivalent with corners at right angles, is irrelevant. 

Is a similar pattern true of songs? Let's upgrade to rectangles themselves: is there a perfect concept of a rectangle, one rectangle whose lengths are "correct" or "more perfect" than every other rectangle?

So with regards to art, we've stepped up in complexity through an impossible number of layers, several orders of magnitude more complicated. My artistic merit is negligible. I can draw stick figures (maybe), I can't pretend to draw anything that actually looks realistic, or purposely surreal. (I'm sticking to sketching, painting art at the moment - art is too broad a word). 

Just looking at Picasso or Leonardo Da Vinci and anyone can see, from the smallest child to the highest authority on art, that Picasso actually knows what he is doing. More, that his work carries an artistic merit, a skill, and is more sophisticated. I would even go so far as to say: "better" than my scrawlings. 

The question is: is there an array of "perfection" and a system of tiers where everything is too nebulous to rank? Or do artistic pieces simply become "perfect enough" after a point? See, we see from a very finite point of view. But in order to receive an answer to any of these questions we can't ask with humanity in mind. We have to ask from an infinite point of view, because the very conceptualization of "perfection" is beyond us. 

So either God sees no differences in artistic merit between mine and Picasso's work, or there is some sort of standard. Is the standard creation itself, before the fall? Was it just "good" or was it perfect? But is each new painting is a rectangle to a trapezoid, a square to a circle? Or can there be a perfect painting?

More sophistry, I suppose.

My parents are making a culinary case for preventing me from returning to Oregon. My mother bought me all the delicious cider, several different types of juice (she knows my weaknesses so well), she made my two favorite dinners on Friday and Sunday (I guess Dad made dinner Sunday), and she bought more chips, salsa, guacamole than I could possibly (is that a challenge?) eat. To say nothing of the eventual Thanksgiving dinner. 

Writing is almost finished. I'm piecing together the final stitches on the last chapters of the novel, drawing them tight and prepping the climactic knot. Weekend was awesome (thanks Matthew). We watched Matthew's favorite movie, which neither I nor his fiance were aware of the existence of (The Philidelphia Story), and it was amazing. Definitely worth a placement on my non-existent list of favorite movie experiences. We drank pumpkin egg nog, wrote in a coffee shop, watched a movie, made food (more realistically, we made a mess), and discussed life, the universe, and everything.

I've driven nearly four-hundred miles, seen a ton of beautiful mountains, and glanced out over the sea. I'm ready for the week, I think.