Thought of the Day

If there’s such a thing as a theoretical physicist then I must be a theoretical theologian.

Help Finish The Come&Live! website

Here’s a group that I strongly believe in and support. They are currently raising funds to complete their website. Even if you don’t want to give at least check them out and see what they are up to.

Reading, Writing, and Moving On

So here it is, I started this whole blog thing again. I wanted this post to be longer but I decided to leave out the full literary analysis of John Updike’s “A&P”. If thats something that would interest you I may post it at a later date upon request.

Recently I read the John Updike Story “A&P” for the umpteenth time; the first couple of times I read it was for a English Composition and Rhetoric course during my brief attendance at the local community college and last year I decided, after a long and agonizing break from writing, to hone my skills by going over some material from old textbooks I couldn’t bring myself to get rid of for the measly compensation given by the used book stores. When I got to analysis questions for this particular story I knew it was going to take me some time because from the first time I had reed this I had hated it; the story, the characters, none of it interested me. So as I knew I would, I stopped after just a few and put the notebook away. Then as I was unpacking after an unforeseen move I recovered both the textbook and accompanying notebook and decided to start again. Again, I read “A&P”, a rather short story by John Updike but this time I read something different, something new. This is a story of a young man named Sammy working in a local grocery store when one day three girls come strolling into the store clad only in the swimsuits. The story is mostly a description of these girls and how Sammy feels about them even though he has never met them. Then, upon checking out, the girls are accosted by the store manager about their appearance, they check out then leave. Sammy, seeing all this play out in his check out lane, then proceeds to quit his job and walk right out of the store as well. It seems simple; it reads boring. But upon reading this story again I now see that Sammy’s constant description isn’t just awe of the girls but what they represent, a life outside the A&P. It is presumed that this isn’t just a summer job for nineteen year old Sammy but closer to a long term job from his conversation with twenty one year old fellow check out clerk, Stoksie, a family man. Suddenly this story became about Sammy wanting to escape from his life at the A&P and his description of the ladies throughout was his recognizing the mysteries that lie behind the sliding glass doors of the supermarket. In the end, after walking out of his job and what he knew as his path in life he comments to himself, “I felt how hard the world was going to be hereafter.”
All this hit me hard about how I’ve been living my life and even though I won’t be walking out of my job I still see a need for change in my life. Something more than work, TV, and video games. I want to go out more, read more [substantial material], write more, and get back into working in the creative process on a regular basis. That’s why I resurrected my long forgotten blog and have been spending more time lying on the floor next to my record player with my sketch book open. Overall I just want more out of my life and I find no time better than the present work for that. So if you’re reading this and notice it doesn’t get updated in over a month send me a message or leave my a hateful voicemail to kick me back into practice. Thank you for your time and God bless.

Dream Theory

I’ve always had weird dreams, even as a kid. I remember alot of them too (though mostly the scarier ones). There was this one where these bubbles were chasing me and my family and were sucking up all the oxygen causing everyone around to choke to death. I woke up from that one having trouble breathing. And after I saw Jurassic Park when I was in the 4th grade my dreams consisted mostly of Velociraptors chasing me through parties and down highways until I woke up. I thnk because of the strage dreams I’ve always had my mind has conditioned itself to somewhat wake me during them while still dreaming. Now whenever something strange starts happening in a dream I realize that its a dream and start going along with it. Like the other night, after a day of arduous zombie fighting in Left 4 Dead I had a dream where my brother and I were amidst a group of people running from a rather large horde of zombies (now we’re not talking Romero zombies here, these were those incredibly fast neo-zombies that seem to populate the films these days). At one point I thought, “Dude, seriously. Zombies?” The fact that modern day horror movie zombies are not real hit me in he dream and so it turned into me fighting zombies against extreme odds and kicking some serious zombie butt. Stuff like that seems to happen to me alot in dreams. But its not like I have any real control over these dreams when I want to. Whenever I, or whatever cahracter I play in my dream, falls in love with another character we always get seperated and never find our way back to one another. Those dreams really piss me off because the rest of the time its me wandering aimlessly meeting all sorts of different people and getting frustrated. I hate getting frustrated in dreams. Back in the day I knew what I was really passionate about because of how stressed out I would get in dreams. Whether it was working at he church and nothing getting done or blanking on a quiz in school, those dreams really showed me what it was I cared about. Man, the number of times I had dreams about band stuff where nothing went right at shows all is overwhelming. Well this concludes my dream rant for now, I guess I’ll bewriting more soon now that the weird dreams are coming back. So remember if you’re ever dreaming of zombies or ressurected Velociraptors just remind yourself, it’s a dream and none of this is real. Experience has shown that this doesn’t work so well with aliens. Strange.

Halo 3 and METAL!!

Now I know alot of metal bands (and fans) are big-time gamers but MyChildren MyBride actually wrote a song about their favorite game. Halo, of course. Here’s a video a fan put together. Its pretty much just a montage of Halo 3 video sequences but it does show off the song rather nicely. I would’ve loved to see more gameplay in it though.

Insomnia Inducing Dreams and 393 STI

I’ve been having trouble getting to sleep at night which, in turn, has been making it harder for me to wake up in the mornings. Some of it has been due to the noise and lights seeping through my thin walls and poorly installed windows, part of it has been recent events, but the main cause of my constant tiredness has been my dreams. Now, I write about my dreams alot- how they disturb me, move me, and I am a firm believer that dreams can be a form of self-realization for life that your conscious mind may overlook. That has been the primary focus whenever I write about my dreams but that’s not what I want to do with these ones. Last night I composed something that is about the closest I’m going to come to trying to interpret these dreams.

I’m having dreams
about arcades
and group projects
dreams of
new friends
and old friends
people who are not
and will never be
dreams to peculiar
to write down
because they are
nothing but pure fluff
no purpose
no meaning
and its these dreams
that disturb me the most.

Recently I’ve been reading alot of Harry Harrison, John Wyndham, C.S. Lewis, and Aldous Huxley which has got me wanting to write another sci-fi short story (which I’ve been wanting to do for a while but just couldn’t come up with an idea for). So here’s the first part of my next short story that I’ll hopefully finish (I don’t really have the best track record when it comes to finishing stories). Please, tell me what you think and where you think the story is going. I have most of it outlined in my head but I’m missing key elements in conflict that I could use some ideas for.

And then I was there. No ZAP, Poof, cloud of smoke, or blinding white light. Nothing. It didn’t work. I’m still sitting in the chair in my makeshift lab in the basement of my house. “Dammit.” I quickly undid the leather straps attaching my ankles to the chair I was sitting in and removed the metallic braces from my wrists, careful not to pull loose any of the wires connecting them to metal box on a end table to the left of me. I stood up and looked around, wires and cables everywhere. Wires plugged into circuit boards plugged into wired plugged into miscellaneous metal boxes enclosed in glass plugged into more wires. There was little point in cleaning up and making things look nice, there was a good chance that the room would’ve imploded, exploded, or dissolved but that didn’t matter to me. I would’ve been the man to perfect instantaneous matter transference. Teleportation. I opened the door  to my would be closet turned laboratory to the same old dusty basement that I spend most of my days and nights brooding over calculation, countless years of research notes, and … waitaminute. This isn’t my basement. Its too clean. My tables piled with books, my desk isn’t cluttered, and my walls, they’re gone. Where they should be there’s just empty space expanding for several yards until it hits a pinkish gray wall. All around me and the ground I stand on, the most non-descript pink walls and above . . . light. Bright white light. Directly in front of me carved in the odd colored walls is an equally odd colored door with a flashing red light above its top right frame. There’s something definitely wrong. Despite my slight disorientation and lack of knowledge concerning my whereabouts. A flashing red light is usually a bad thing. As I take a step forward the door opens and a young woman walks through and stops immediately upon seeing me. “Oh my,” she says. Something seems odd about her that I can’t quite place and my mind’s only rationale takes notice of her height. Now I’m not a tall man, but I am by no means short either. An average 5′6″ but this woman stood at least four inches taller than me. Something was definitely wrong.

Stupid Crap Christians Buy . . .

seriously, why?

I was gonna post the trailer but even I couldn’t sit through it. Its times like these that I’m reminded of awesome comics.

Stupid Crap Christians Buy

“To Interpret and Study is to Interpret Oneself”

Follow God
like you’d follow a butterfly
as a child
through a field.
Chasing after not to know the destination
but to know the butterfly.

Know God and things will be made clear.
And if its not then its not to know.

Ah, the cold air on my face, my arms wrapped around my body, and metal flowing through my ears

Its getting to be that time of year again. You know the one I’m talking about. The nights are getting cooler, the mornings chipper, you don’t want to leave the warmth of your bed in the morning, the urge to listen to hair metal and bad punk music overwhelms you. You know, all the usual stuff that comes with this glorious season of autumn. Music runs with the seasons for me. Summer is when the cravings for hardcore hit and is usually filled with the rosters of Facedown and Blood & Ink Records but once the air becomes cooler the cheese begins to settle in. Not that bands like Stryper, and One Bad Pig are cheese, they just aren’t for everyday consumption. You see, metal is all year round for me but this is when I really relish in these sorts of bands. I awoke this morning and turned on the TV to find an old episode of FM playing on JC-TV (because they have some issue with playing newer programming but that’s for another, more ranting blog) featuring everyone’s favorite Christian hair metal band in the studio talking about the band’s reformation back in ‘04. The interview was laced with music video clips, old songs, and fan memories of the band. Watching a full half hour of Stryper related footage really got the ball rolling for me so I dusted off the one CD of theirs I own and gave it a new home in my CD player. (Coincidentally it is also the very CD I used to christen my CD player when I first got it.) So in commemoration of my renewed love for Stryper I present to you one of the best metal songs ever written.

I found myself at a Best Buy recently holding onto a gift card I was given months ago just waiting for a CD I actually wanted to go on sale. This bargain hunting was caused after I found out that the week before I received the card that Showbread’s new double album was on sale for $7.99 each. Not wanting to miss another awesome sale I decided to not splurge on something that I didn’t need. Instead I found myself making an unusual impulse buy. Recently Between the Buried and Me performed their 65 minute epic Colors live in Nashville, Tennessee before a crowd of lucky fans. I had never been a huge fan of this band, I’d heard some songs, they were good, but not good enough for me to purchase an album. Then I heard about Colors. A 65 minute song broken up into 8 tracks that range from beautiful guitar leads to head pounding vocals. But I still wasn’t convinced. Unfortunately I had heard a track from the album without having herd the preceding and following tracks it just seemed like another metal song to me. So I found myself strangely drawn to the Colors live CD/DVD on sale that week and ended up making one of the very few impulse purchases I make. So I got home late that night, sometime right after midnight and popped the CD in while I cleaned up a bit before bed and wow, I didn’t sleep for another hour and half. I almost didn’t sleep at all but I knew that if I wanted to see what the DVD portion of this album held that I had to get some rest. So the next day I put in the DVD and was totally blown away. Not only does it contain the entire Colors album live but they also performed a second set that night of fan-picked favorites form their last few albums. Along with the live sets the DVD included the entire studio album set to a visual interpretation of the album in video featuring old black & white footage from who-knows-where, a painting for every song on the album, plus the writer’s interpretations of the tracks. I haven’t bought a metal DVD yet this year and I’m glad I waited until now. This thing is amazing. Go get it whether you’re a fan of the band or have never heard them before. I’m going to leave you with this snippet of a song from the DVD (I’d put the entire song but these ones are whoppers.)

So that’s all I have for now. I hope you all come back for more later. There will be more, trust me.

“7 Reasons Why Barack Obama is Not a Christian”

I just got one of the worst e-mails ever titled “7 Reasons Why Barack Obama is Not a Christian”. I don’t even know where to go from here. This is outrageous. This is stupid. This is idiocy at work. I received this e-mail from the Christian Anti-Defamation Commission with links to videos that describe these seven reasons. (I wish I could watch them just so I would have more stuff the yell about.) First, I’ve never heard of the Christian Anti-Defamation Commission so I had to do a little research. here is what their website has to say about themselves, “the mission of the Christian Anti-Defamation Commission is to advance religious liberty for Christians from defamation, discrimination, and bigotry from any and all sources by means of education and selected legal services including litigation, inside the United States and internationally.”
Their e-mail stated that this issue was a concern because “this is such an urgent concern for CADC is because of Obama’s insistence that he is a ‘devout Christian’. CADC believes Obama is attempting to redefine what it means to be a Christian, and in the process, he is defaming the Christian faith.” This is ridiculous, I have seen book after book on this very subject filling the shelves of Christian bookstores and have heard so many preachers offer a similar message. Why are they concerned about one man who may hold an important position for a few years who won’t be talking about his faith every day oh his life. Where were they when he was running for senator? And what are they doing about every other politician in the entire world that mentions a slight aspect of their faith? Do they have teams researching everyone who does anything of any importance for the world? That isn’t our job. We’re not here to accuse and judge people about their faith. There’s no way we can know either way.

This is worse than the blog I read earlier this month about not supporting Joe Biden because he doesn’t give as much to charity as John McCain. I understand that personal stances on charity and faith are important factors when choosing a candidate but there are more important things we can spend our time on than dragging other people’s reputations through our own horse shit. I still haven’t chosen who to support in this upcoming election but constantly reading stuff like this just pisses me off.

I cleared my head now, I think I’m going to go lay down.