Creative Non-Violence.

This is an interesting counter-act of non-violence. Using the old weapons of absurdity and play to draw attention to the fact that the emperor has no clothes. The podcast is no longer up that we did w/ one of their henchman, but it’s the only podcast I ever hung up on w/ the guest if that tells you anything about how looney bin this folks are.

The Westboro crew usually pickets all day long and causes all kinds of problem. In this case, when met with non-violent opposition, they lasted only 30 minutes before they flew back to Kansas.

Avatar Sex.

This is what happens when Anna and Marissa go see Avatar. They end up putting Marker Pen porn over the take out box and 3D glasses. For those w/out a discerning eye . . . those are Navi tales having sex w/ each other.

Dylan and I.

“The handy thing about being a father is that the historic standard is so pitifully low.” – Michael Chabon

I’m reading Michael Chabon’s reflections on Manhood, i.e. being a husband, father, and son. The first chapter sums up the mixed bag of emotions that is fatherhood. He retells a story of holding his son while in the checkout line at a grocery store. The lady behind him in line tells him what a great father he is. And he begins to think how terribly little it took to impress this lady with his great fathering skills.

Holding his child?

I feel the same. I am gone 8-10 hours a day at work. And I can come home and lay on the floor with my son for 5 minutes and I become a hero. I can carry him through a store on my shoulders and the world wants to swoon in my glory. I take him to the Aquarium or on a hike on my day off and I’m crowned some mixture of the Nobel Peace Prize and Father of the Year.

They don’t see that every day that after I crawl on the floor for 5 minutes that I’m bored and tired enough to retreat to my computer in a glaze of indifference. They don’t know that I give him a ride on my shoulders in order to avoid his stubborn fussiness from having to ride in a stroller. They don’t realize that the Aquarium and park are more for my sanity as a father than his enjoyment as a son.

Yet . . . by most standard definitions of a father, I am perceived as a good one. Minimum effort and maximum reward. This makes it all the more curious as to why most fathers suck. I give 10% effort and become a saint. If I’m giving 10%, what are the rest of these dads giving?

And yet it all pales in comparison with the real saint, the one who is closest to deity.

“I define being a good father in precisely the same terms that we ought to define being a good mother – doing my part to handle and stay on top of the endless parade of piddly shit. And like good mothers all around the world, I fail every day in my ambition to do the work, to make it count, to think ahead and hang in there through the tedium and really see, really feel, all the pitfalls that threaten my child, rattlesnakes included. How could I not fail when I can check out any time I want to and know that my wife will still be there making those dentists’s appointments and ensuring that the there’s a wrapped, age-appropriate birthday present for next Saturday’s pool party? All I need to do is hold my kid in the checkout line – all I need to do is stick around – and the world will crown me and favor me with smiles.

The daily work you put into rearing your children is a kind of intimacy, tedious and invisible as mothering itself. There is another kind of intimacy in the conversations you may have with your children as they grow older, in which you confess to failings, reveal anxieties, share your bouts of creative struggle, regret, frustration. There is intimacy in your quarrels, your negotiations and running jokes. But above all, there is intimacy in your contact with their bodies, with their shit and piss, sweat and vomit, with their stubbled kneecaps and dimpled knuckles, with the rips in their underpants as you fold them, with their hair against your lips as you kiss the tops of their heads, with the bones of their shoulders and with the horror of their breath in the morning as they pursue the ancient art of forgetting to brush. Lucky me that I should be permitted the luxury of choosing to find the intimacy inherent in this work that is thrust upon so many mothers. Lucky me.”

Irony of Irony or a Mistaken Case of We’re All a Tangled Mess.

We’re all a tangled mess. Is this not obvious? Everything we do is irony. Irony that hangs thick and heavy like a dark blanket.

All of these artists could afford to give more money to Haiti than any of their candy coated songs could ever generate (via @stephaniedrury). Make a song, sell some songs, give some money from songs to people with no homes. Maybe the Boom Boom Pow people can write something witty to sell. Or one of the cool cats with gold in their teeth. Or one of the cool people that we voted for on TV who is talented can have someone write them a song they can sing.

Said artists look like kings. Get to keep living like kings. And the poor Haitians get clean water and some bread for a few more weeks. It’s a win-win. Faux heroes get to validate the hero game they play. And the girl gets rescued from her sad, pathetic life. Only until Superman goes back to his Fortress of Solitude to not be bothered.

Or until the fancy green dollars go back to building big ass mansions, having those fancy cars that sit in garages, vacations to private islands, bottles of Crystal, $3 bottled water brought to their front door from Fiji, and parties that Ms. Lohan and friends can burn through.

But we can help the heroes. The heroes enlist our help. Quickly . . . run to our $500 phones. Text Lex Luthor’s mega-conglomerate. They will add $10 to our $150 monthly bills that we pay to have Facebook and Twitter at our fingertips. So we can ignore our friends to talk about American Idol and spy/stalk people who we hate. The great distraction has now become our greatest ally! Superman’s Hall of Justice League! The more the merrier. Strength in numbers. We grow. We grow.

We are the great Gotham. And we are all Heroes for a Day.

And I sit on my high horse and bitch and let the crushing contradictions of my life swell around me. Time for a fancy beer and a movie. And back to my ambivalence. Horror of horrors. I am the man I resent.

Nerd Theology, LOST vs Deism vs Eternalism vs Block Universe.

I moderated a comment today on this now dormant site. The original posting had to do with my thoughts on the link between God & Deism being closer than I might have originally believed. The post was over 2 years ago so a lot of my thinking has changed and e/devolved more. But as I reread the post and as I moderated the comment . . . I had just gotten finished reading, ironically enough, a comment thread on a Lost Spoiler site about a potential spoilerish analogy that one of the sources provided. Don’t worry, I did not list the spoiler. But instead a comment that is one person’s theory of what is happening on the island and in particular between Jacob and the Man in Black (MIB, Esau, Samuel, or whatever else you want to call him).

Something happened in the future regarding time travel and the results are like “letting the genie out of the bottle”, or opening Pandora’s box. You can never again put things back the way they were and can only deal with the consequences of the action. Think of it like a champagne bottle, the escaping bubbles are everywhere and have a will of their own. They really can’t be controlled. So maybe Richard is to be an eternal watcher of time to help at least keep track of the bubbles and avoid future problems.

The analogy to Lost is seen in all the character and story arcs. Once you do something you can’t go back and change it. You have to deal with the consequences, and as Locke was told in his vision, “clean up your own mess.”

Jacob is trying to fix it by giving people (bubbles) nudges and free will to carry on with at least one, new timeline. MIB is trying to keep what is left in the bottle, but setting it upright and pop as many escaping bubbles as he can to reduce the chaos of all that exploding champagne.

So whatever happened, happened – the uncorking of the champagne- and now our losties have to clean up their own mistakes while trying to help contain all those bubbles to create a new timeline.

I’m fairly confident this is not going to happen on LOST, but I think the implications of this thought are very closely tied to my evolving thoughts on the nature of good and evil and the role that humanity plays in choosing and creating “new timelines”. Teasing out the implications of this champagne bottle analogy with an exploding cork marry quite nicely for me my thoughts on God, deism, and science.