new year/new ideas/etc

I don't usually do this. actually, I've never done this, but a post from my uncle got me thinking that it might be a good idea to spend some time thinking about some ways to improve in 2011. not that I haven't thought of ways in the past, but I've certainly never written them down. There are only a few things that I actually write down, and most of them have to do with her, so, like I said, new territory. I would like that add that that last stat isn't entirely my fault. My Greek professor (who also taught a number of other classes I took) told us not to take notes but just remember, which I did for the most part. As an aside, the business world isn't that conducive to "just remembering". I found that out.

Ahem. *Trumpet Blast*. Here are the ways that I hope to improve this year:

Shipping


Seth Godin talks about this all the time, which means it's a good idea. Seriously though, the most important part of any idea is actually making it happen. My head is constantly full of ideas, but there are only a few things that I haven't left half-done or half-engaged during the course of my life. I just lose interest, which is often just another phrase for "I'm lazy". I'm not sure where one ends and the other begins, where personal laziness ends and being in the wrong line of work begins, but I want to get better at pulling good ideas out of my head and into reality, into a state of being. I don't just mean in my work either.

Money/Bling


I'm not very good at budgeting/saving. There are various reasons for my wanting to improve this, and while they are far from unimportant, they will be given the luxury that so many of us ought to treasure more than we do: anonymity. I've set for myself a $50/week budget. I'm not sure if I can do it, but I'm going to try. The thing about New Year's resolutions is that people usually give up when they fail the first or second or third time, which has never made any sense to me because they should be going after things that are actually helping them grow and mature, things that actually improve them, and if they are, setbacks can take on a cathartic property. She would like/laugh at that sentence. I've wondered before if all relationship wisdom could be boiled down to needing to find someone who cares about sentence structure and expression as much as you do. I'm glad it can't. The cycle of failure/assessment/struggle-to-improve is not only a human approach, it is THE human approach to anything. Imperfection breeds progress. At least when it comes to budgets. So back to the real world, all that to say, it will be hard to get myself down to $50 a week, but I'm going to try. My most recent, and most permanent, abandonment of cigarettes will certainly aid in this quest. Mark Twain once said "Quitting smoking is the easiest thing in the world to do. I should know, I've done it a thousand times". That quote always makes me laugh.

The Rest


I'm basically already tired of thinking of categories, so the rest will be Faulknerian. That was a literary reference that is intended to make you think I'm smarter than I am. Eat it up. Please. For my sake.

I want to get better at focusing on the aspects of work that suck the most. I'm so good at putting off the painful, ugly assignments that I get for work and, instead, crushing all of the more enjoyable stuff. That needs to change. Not really much else I can say about that.

Ok, I'm tired of reading this and you're tired of writing it, or is it the other way around? Either way, that's enough for now.

2011 is going to be a really big year for me, and I'm thrilled. Actually, I'm Tyler. If you got that, I'm sorry, I've looked but I don't think there's a cure for people like us. Take care, and as fuel for your New Year, I'll leave you with the send off I left my college class with, which apparently made it to our graduation video despite my rather altered state:

be brief, and be brilliant.

tonight

I miss her. It's always hard to write about her because of who she is and how I feel about her, but it's especially hard tonight. My heart is heavy with her wine, and it isn't in the talking mood.

She means more to me than I know how to write, more than I may ever know how to write, and her ache spills over my heart's mountains and suspends between it's trees.









Tonight, I'm just me drunk with her.

more

There are moments that make you word-scarce, leaving you not a dollar short, but a penny short, of the phrase that would pull your heart closer to the surface so that someone else could see it. Maybe we all spend our whole lives trying to pull our hearts closer to the surface so that anyone, even if it's only ourselves, can see it better.

The only real difference between a great writer, a mediocre writer, and a shitty writer is that great writers have the exact change for that phrase, while the rest of us are left short changed and shuffling our feet in embarrassment. I'm a mediocre writer, and that's usually more infuriating than being a shitty writer because being a penny short is always more obnoxious than being a dollar short, which you know if you pay attention to what goes through your mind at times like that. There is a discipline to art, and that discipline is learning to be unsatisfied, which sounds quite nice to just about everyone, including me, until we learn that being unsatisfied is a bit more consuming and intensive than we had hoped. It is a discipline, after all.

The difference between words and people is that words aren't people. People are like words though. She is, and she's the kind of word that is always meaning more and more and more, absorbing your thoughts and soaking into and through fears until all you can say is her. You spend a long time trying to say her in ways that get closer to what she means, and there you are, always a penny short, trying to get it all out, shuffling your feet not out of embarrassment but out of dissatisfaction because she wasn't said in the best way, and then you're off, trying again.

Find someone who doesn't stop meaning more, and whom you can't stop wanting to say like they ought to be said.





- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

slow turn

The real depth of the way things are is something you spend you're whole life sounding. If you know me, and it isn't hard to know me because I'm pretty simple, you might know that that word sounding is a play on words when I talk about trying to understand the depth of things because I love music. Music is something that I couldn't get away from even if I wanted to. I was driving in Richmond today and there were some of those skinny metal towers with lights on them that blink, and anyways the important part is that they were blinking at different times (I think two were blinking their blinks in their usual way and the third was blinking on the downbeat) and the rhythm bothered me. Not an angry bother, just a "please turn the lights down in this room a bit, my eyes are hurting" kind of bother. There isn't much in my life that isn't associated in some way with music, and I'm grateful for that.

I'm grateful for a lot of things. I'm not very wise, and my friends and family know that, but I'm grateful that I'm a little bit wiser than I used to be because I haven't always been in the best waters and most of the time I was churning up those waters, though I have been under the weight of a few things that I didn't create or invent. Creation and invention are different things, that's something you should know. Another thing that I learned yesterday when I was outside was that squirrels don't run like dogs or cheetahs, they spring off of their back legs and just bounce on their front legs. Watch them sometime. Some science someone might respond and say that squirrels do run like cheetahs, and that's fine, I'm often wrong.

One thing I learned about myself over the last couple weeks is that I don't understand as much as I think I do. I don't mean about any certain thing, I just mean in the general way, like when you remember that time you told your parents in high school that you hated them because you weren't allowed to go to a party or some such thing because they wanted "family time", and then you grow up some and you realize that family time is a hell of a lot more important than whether you get to go to every social thing that ever happens. Anyways, the things is, the reason for holiness dawned on me over the last couple of weeks. I know that it did, because I did some marginally stupid things (not the kind of bad things you write down in a book or try not to watch in a movie, the kind of bad things you bring up at care group so that people have a sense of awe and wonder at your wildness. They probably don't have either of those things after hearing about it, but you hope that they do and so you say it, and you say it in a "oh, if only the Lord could get a hold of ME" kind of way. Sorry, that's just how I've been in the past.) and I was grieved by them. I mean honestly saddened. My parents just read that and rejoiced a little bit, as well they should. Anyway, holiness is like maturing which is like seeing the real value of things. I'm starting to think that sin is wrong in some ways because it steals the value that things are supposed to have, like letting the air out of a balloon a little at a time until it's not so much of a balloon anymore.

And that's the infuriating thing about grace, and why grace is the most uncomfortable thing about God when you think about it. I agree, it is maddening at times that God sends people to hell, I'm not hiding from that. But the more I learn about myself, the more I'm surprised that He doesn't send everyone to hell. I mean, I'm glad also, for the record, but the weight of grace is something else, I swear. I've asked God to strike me with lightning a number of times, including in the last few weeks, and He never does. (Ok you atheists, this is your moment to shout that He hasn't struck me because He isn't there. Ok, you're moment is over. This is my blog after all.) There are people who probably wish I'd been struck by lightning, and if any of you reading this are numbered amongst them, I'll be the first to admit that I've deserved that early and often. Instead, God brings us to His table and dresses us in his finest clothes at the very moment we wish He would order 30 lashes. 31 would be a bit harsh of course, but 30 is something we could suffer through and brag about.

Maybe God designed grace so that we can't brag about anything. And also so that we could know Him and keep on knowing Him.

I'm not sure about so many things as I used to be sure about, but I know more and more how much I care for those I really care for, and that I don't deserve to be cared for. Maybe on my tombstone, if I have one, I will ask that they write "more than anything, he was astonished by grace".


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

hereafter

this is a short post about how there's always something to fix. it hurts my head to think of all the ways that i still need to grow and mature and be less of an idiot, and the thing is, it's not so i can feel better about myself and be able to a shoot a short film about my heart and mind where everyone is smiling. it's because i'm worn out with the clamor for more more more more more more more more more more that my mind makes. i'm tired of talking to God about how serious i am this time, because even by saying that i've already missed the point. i'm tired of not trusting God enough to let Him all the way inside my heart and mind. i'm tired of being part fool part less fool.

the shift from holiness-as-burden to holiness-as-rescue has taken a long time in my heart, and it has a ways to go still.

i'd be lying if i didn't say that i wish times like this, times of pick-yourself-up-off-your-ass-and-listen, were the part of the film near the end where I throw my duffle bag in the back of the truck and drive off-screen to the voice of an old british guy talking about how from that time on, things were never the same for Tyler and were always better.

 too bad, huh?

i guess what i mean is, there is no sweet-hereafter until heaven.

porches

this is one of those nights where I feel further away from the words I mean than I want to be. have you ever noticed how you can be in the same room with someone and miss them like crazy? i don't mean that you feel detached from them, I mean that you feel like they have to be as close as they can be to you before you can settle down some. that's how i feel about my words tonight. they are across the room talking with someone else and even though I catch their eye they don't leave that conversation for mine. 

i don't think much about death, because death, no matter how close i've come to it, which is close, has always seemed across the party from me, not out of the room but out of reach. one thing that I just thought about is how we are in a relationship with death, and some people go through the motions of courtship with it and then engagement and then finally marrying it, except that when you marry death, you don't find out hardly anything about it until after you've said your I-dos. Weird huh? some people, though, have shotgun weddings with death and don't go through any of the motions. the reason I bring that up is that death sometimes scares me, because i don't really know what happens afterwards. I'm not scared of death, I'm scared of what happens afterwards, which is a line from a song that I love. we all avoid talking about it except when we have to because something terrible has happened, and we sit around rooms with hearts that are wide eyed and try to remember the times when we didn't have to have times to remember. 

this might sound bad, but sometimes when someone talks about dying for their country I think that they've seen to many movies. I don't mean the people that have died for their country, i mean the people that talk loudly at parties about dying for a country. I'm not saying I wouldn't, but I'm not saying I would either because shit dude, you're dead and you don't get to come back after you're dead and if I'm going to die for something I want it to be something that's on my mind all of the time. I'm really grateful for the country I've been able to live in, and the people who have died to make it that way, but still, dying for things is deep water and my heart can't swim so well in those waters these days. Call me whatever you want. 

I used to always wonder if, when I died, Jesus would look me in the eye or just look the other way for a second so I could sneak in. If anyone should be sneaking into heaven instead of walking through the front gate it's me, and I don't care if you know it. Back when I was more in love with sorrow than I am now, I used to think of how dramatic and grand it would be to be pounding on heaven's gates asking for entrance and be unjustly cast out into Hell before the whole host of horrified, outraged humanity. Then I remembered that at a time like that everyone is too worried about their own problems to watch and be horrified by anything and anyways it doesn't work like that because there's no way to be misunderstood by God, only by yourself and other people, which scared me a lot for awhile until I read something from Peter Hitchens where he said that whether his standing with God is right or not will be up for someone who knows his heart far better than himself to decide. If Peter and I both are as genuine as we would like to be, I'm going to thank him for that.

In the end, I suppose that death is just the beginning of the real thing, whatever that ends up being. The ache that I feel for her or for finding a place or for whatever it is that we ache for that we can't describe is perhaps just the beginnings of the birthpangs and maybe death is the birth. who knows. i guess someone does but they said it in a way that made it seem unimportant, which makes sense when i'm sitting with friends or i'm with her but it doesn't seem so unimportant when i'm on my porch by myself every night. maybe what happens isn't important, it's who's waiting on the other side that's important. 

i get my best thinking done on porches. i swear, there's nothing like them. i don't know why, but the combination of the world slipping sideways into dark and either the loud quiet of your own mind or the pull of friend's conversation and laughter is one of the only things I make an effort to include every day. i've come to regret some things, but porches aren't ever one of them. she and i have spent time on porches, and it was the kind of time that you let soak into you and through you.

i hear from the Lord in churches sometimes, but I hardly ever talk with Him there. There was a time when I did I suppose, but that was before I was interested in knowing something about Him. these days, you can find He and I on my porch under the evening weight that pulls so much out of your mind and heart that you can hardly bear it. 

she's so far away right now that it hurts.

in my head, heaven is more like a porch than a church.

constant faucet

my heart is caught under the constant faucet of the depth of things these days, always filling and overflowing.

when you write words, you try to choose the ones that most mean what you mean, like how when you care for someone you aren't concerned about the kinds of expressions that you're using to show them how you care for them, you only care about them understanding your care for them. there are these people that are like diamonds, not because they are expensive or sharp, but because they have a million subtle windows and each one presents a different angle or view or piece of them, except that with people you might keep on turning them over in your heart's hand forever and never run out of new things to see or know or want to know. I know someone like that.

did you know that there is a kind of grasshopper (scientists reading this just turned a bit in their future graves because the right word is Caelifera, which is a part of the Orthoptera order. i'm sorry, i'm interested in scientific things but i like to talk about it in my own way) that has evolved pink eyes and pink nodules all over its body because the fungi that grows on the plants in its habitat is bright colors like pink and purple? that wasn't related, but it was on my mind because i like learning things like that. 

when you think about the kinds of things that stop you in your tracks, you realize that those are the types of things to spend your time with. words stop me in my tracks, or rather the way people use words. i'm not a big dictionary guy myself, although i will browse it from time to time. i'm more interested in words in peoples' hands and mouths and lungs. there are some words, though, that you shouldn't say very often, even if you think them, because it would steal something from their meaning to be said too often. the same can be said about people. there is someone that i ought not talk about much for now, because it's too much for me. i don't break down so easily, but these days that's a different story, and i mean that in the turn of phrase kind of way and because it means what i want it to mean, which is that poetry, whether it's made of words or actions or a person, breaks in on you in ways you couldn't ever expect, or hope to expect. if you've ever known the kind of silence that settles over mountains and forests and fields under snow, the kind that is so loud and heavy that you would leave if you could but you can't because you need that kind of silence, you love that kind of silence, then you know something of desire and the feeling that slips in between you and the rest of the world because of someone, and the way they are. there is an elegance to desire that is hardly ever noticed, because we spend so much time wanting someone else to take off our clothes that we forget that the really important part, the real substance of the thing, is finding someone who can take off our heart's clothes, because that's something that hardly anyone can do. 

i don't know much about hardly anything, but one thing that is true is that my heart has it's knees pulled up to its chest and is rocking the to's and fro's of desire, biting its lip and keeping it in for now, as much as one is able to keep such things in.

there are few things more inescapable and painful than joy when the gift of constant expression has been removed. 

no word(s)

if you've ever been to the county fair, you know something of boredom. i've always felt detached at fairs, and i think it's because a fair is the kind of place where everything that ever happens is happening all at once. i don't mean that people are killing other people (although i'm sure that's happened at a fair) or that people are having sex at a fair (although, if Revenge of the Nerds was right, then people are somewhere), I mean that fairs usually have some form of every possible human emotion on display. fairs always make me think of radiohead's song Idioteque, and if you haven't listened to that song you ought to, for your own sake. the point is, fairs are difficult places for me because it's hard to process the human condition when you see it all at once, and even harder when you see everyone trying to make the best of it all at once.

i've never been too worried about things. that sentence talks about something that people think has always been true of me, and in a way i suppose they are right. things is a huge umbrella of a word and all sorts of people huddle underneath it to avoid the unpleasant rain of descriptive precision. at least that's how it seems to me when people say the word things. i have, however, spent an uncomfortable amount of time living under the weight of what i've taken to be the realities of the human condition. my head hurts when i think about all of the people that love other people and aren't loved back by those people, or when i think about all of the people who just had someone they love die, or all of the people who came home from the fields to find the civil war passing through their village and their families raped and/or killed. our world is broken as hell, and if my heart were a backpack, my mind and books and paintings and stories used to put a lot of heavy rocks in my backpack. so many rocks that i always felt like this:

and then after awhile, like this:

 and then, right before the end, like this:

she told me once, in her usual way of saying things that crash through my ceiling, that it was ok to let the weight of all of those things go because that was just the way the world was, and that i didn't have a heart or a mind big enough to process and handle all of the hurt that everyone everywhere was feeling. that might seem like an obvious thing to say, because like so many other insightful things it is obvious, but it wasn't obvious to me.

i think that when things happen like tsunamis or car wrecks or the whole history of pain, we just have hearts that aren't big enough to handle waters that deep and they end up flooding everything and drowning us. i think God knows that, and that that's why he decided to tell people who were in the midst of deep waters like that that He is there with them, and He's grieving too. He's not avoiding the question, He just knows that the most important thing for us to know is that His heart is big enough.

my point is, i think there are things that are incommunicable. even if you got a million tries and a million words, you couldn't think of the thing to say that would help ease the pain of things like that, but if there were a way to peel back your skin and ribs and show people your heart then you wouldn't need any words and neither would they, and that's what God did.

ours

i don't have much to write today, because this weekend was the kind of weekend you spend with the kind of person you used to lie awake wondering where they were, if they were even out there, or if, since you knew where they were and why they left, they were coming back. i don't usually spare you any details, but this is an exception because there are things, even if you write about everything, that you don't write about because they are only yours and hers and that's all.

i haven't done hardly anything right in my whole life, but this hasn't been a question of who deserves what or who gets whom because they have or haven't jumped through all the right hoops, and i don't think it's ever been about that for anyone. 

this is about how grace drops into the middle of everything and ripples in every direction, and doesn't leave anything the same, or feeling the same. 

this isn't about what we thought would happen, this is about what did happen. 

this is about us. 

I ache so bad that I can't type anymore.

thanks.

One time, awhile ago, I was in a church in Slovakia, I don't remember where, and I had one of those experiences that slip in between you and the rest of the world. What I mean is, one of those experiences that reminds you of the weight of everything, that remind you that no matter what else happens afterwards, you were close to something that you'll spend a long time trying to figure out. The power of human voices resonating off of cold church-stone is something I won't forget, even if I forget everything. That feeling, that lover-caught-mid-laugh, that ache-rising-to-the-surface, that music-off-cold-stones, is something that I can't find  much to say about, but I feel it. I feel it all.

Sometimes I wonder if all we are is simile and metaphor. I read Genesis sometimes, but not as often as other parts of the Bible, and I don't leave my reading of it knowing much more than I did when I started reading it. I do, however, leave understanding more. That's a real distinction, the one between knowing and understanding, because I don't leave early Genesis knowing much about how this whole existence thing got started, but I do leave understanding more deeply that there are some things that are incommunicable. I don't care how the world was made. I care that God understands the weight of everything. He is content to be mysterious, to leave parts of Himself to metaphor and simile. Most of Himself, actually. He is only clear about a couple really important things, and what flows out of those important things are word-picture explanations of other facts about Him. He's ok with that, and now so am I.

It's not surprising that I'm as taffy-stuck and tongue-tied in other areas too. I try to tell someone what I'm feeling, and she tries to tell me, but really all we are saying is "it's like this" or "it's as if you were" or "you are a...and i'm a" or "i miss you". My heart stumbles over things it knows, but doesn't know how to say. Maybe that's how it always is, and we just get closer and closer to saying what we mean, to saying what we feel.

It seems that these days everyone feels a need to know everything about everything. We are afraid of mystery. C.S. Lewis said one time, I don't know when exactly he said it, that love is the enemy of lust. I remember that I went through a phase, not so long ago, where I would have liked very much to be an atheist, or at least an agnostic. I had some ok arguments I guess, but I wasn't going to embark on a showy "tell everyone everywhere how I've changed" campaign where I would have laughed at all the narrow minded Christians who still "believed that shit", like lots of people my age who become atheist or agnostic do. I was just going to be one. The really unfortunate thing for my aspirations, and the fortunate thing for me, in all of this, was that God came down and whispered in my ear that the only reason I was considering such things was because I was angry about some things and because I wanted to have sex with whomever I wanted, whenever I wanted. He also said that those weren't very good reasons. It took a couple months for Him to get all of that out, and for me to hear it, but He did, and I did. The most important thing He told me, though, was that I needed to become more comfortable with His mystery. I wasn't to go stamping about because He wouldn't be what I wanted Him to be when I wanted Him to be it. What I mean is, I needed to let Him be who He is, to let Him be mysterious in the ways He wants to be.

The thing is, C.S. Lewis was right, lust is so damn boring. x+y=z. So predictable. Love is something altogether different, something wilder, crazier, slower, deeper, more mysterious, and more real. God's love for us isn't predictable, but it's trustworthy. It isn't controlling, but it is invasive. It isn't passive, but it is patient.

When whatever happens after we die happens, and I come before the Lord, I won't have much to say except "thanks for your patience".

I don't know much about love, hardly anything really, but maybe when we tell someone that we love them, when it is true, one of the things we mean is that we are thankful for their patience.

so far

i took a break from writing for the most part last week. i've been in shambles, good shambles, and i couldn't really muster enough words to write anything that would approach a paragraph, or a blog post. things are settled a little bit, though, so i think i can write some now. there are these things that happen. they are the kind of things that you had hoped would happen back when the world was the kind of place where you thought things like that still happened, and then you spent some time wondering where it went, and then you spent a long time building a wall of reasons for it being the way it was and the thing was that after you were done, you weren't any safer than you were before, or better off, or anything. and you started not to be anything, and your world filled up with rules of "this far but no further" and "this is how this works" and "grin and bear it", like a woman giving birth to a child she doesn't want. something i've learned while i've been alive, which hasn't been for very long, is that you can talk yourself into or out of anything. i thought i knew a lot about talking myself out of things, but the thing was i was really talking myself into things, and the fear of talking myself out of things was just another big section of the wall i was building around myself. blah blah blah. i don't want to write about that anymore. the dead past can bury itself.

there's this C.S. Lewis quote that has been sinking in since i read it this morning, and will keep sinking in for some time i think. he said "no one can settle how much we ought to give. the only safe rule is to give more than we can spare". i don't really know what that means, in that i don't know yet just how far its reach is, but something that has been on my mind since i read it is that there aren't rules about how your heart should or shouldn't work when it comes to certain things. not everything, just things like who you're crazy about and what kind of music you like and what you love to do and what people you want to know more about and be around more often. there's this verse in the bible, there's a lot of them actually, but the one im thinking of has to do with Jesus, just like every other verse in the Bible is you look close enough. He says "ask anything in my name and it will be given to you". i read that when i was a kid, and i stayed awake all night one night saying things like "in the name of Jesus, bring my a new bike" and "in the name of Jesus, let me hit a home run soon" and "in the name of Jesus, let me marry Princess Leia". i seriously prayed all of those things. i did end up getting a new bike and hitting a home run, but i don't think it had anything to do with my prayers. God gave me great parents who bought me a bike for Christmas and i got better at hitting. funny how things are sometimes. in the end, it's good that i didn't marry Princess Leia. besides the fact that she wasn't real, i found out she did cocaine on the set of the Star Wars movie. i don't think i'm better than people that do cocaine, i just don't want to marry a girl who does it.  so, even though i heard a sermon at some point in late highschool about how that verse was about conforming yourself to God's will, instead of treating God like santa, that truth didn't start affecting my life until maybe 5 or 6 months ago.

you get to this place, once that Truth soaks further in, where you aren't content and at peace out of resignation, or despair. you're content and at peace because you finally start to realize that Jesus is who He says He is, which might have been something you've spent your whole life wishing you knew but you didn't, at least not like this, not in a way that calmed you down and helped you start loving the people around you instead of talking about your problems on repeat.

then sometimes, awhile later, you get to this place where someone says something to you and your heavy-with-rain-and-wind-shook heart breaks, and so does hers, in the way that you both hoped they would break, which is together.

there's a lot i don't understand. i don't know what happens when you die. i don't know what gravity actually is. i don't know how sea urchins can survive the growing acidity of the oceans. i don't know why knee ligaments tear and shins won't fix. i don't know why i'm so drawn to black and white photographs. i don't know why there are these things you can't get out of your mind, like how someone bites her lip when she wants to laugh about something that no one else will get and you know what she wants to laugh about because you are trying not to laugh about the same thing.

what i am trying to say is, there are books and books still to be written, but i wouldn't change anything about the story so far.

i wouldn't unremember anything.

just us

when I was younger, I remember I used to spend a lot of time wishing I could be someone else. What I mean to say is, I wanted to be everyone, at once. I wanted to know everything, I wanted to see everything, I wanted to kiss every girl and hit every home run and rob every bank and write every book and paint every painting. I wanted to be needed by everyone, all the time, and I wanted to need them back so that I wouldn't be one of those people whose story is already written while they're still young, and who don't die alone when they are old, they die alone when they are young and their bodies keep living for years and years anyways, like those boats that are sometimes in stories where they find it in the middle of the ocean with no crew anywhere. I wanted to love back, I meant to say, and I wanted everything to be so real and alive that you couldn't stop laughing and crying at the same time because if you did, you wouldn't be expressing what you felt honestly enough. I wanted everyone else to have smaller hearts than I did, because I didn't want to hear about anyone being more in love with anything than I was. I don't know why I wanted that. I guess I should feel bad, but I don't, because I think I still want that, only not in the same way, and also because I don't feel bad about too many things anymore. I don't think I'm calloused, because I don't feel calloused, I just feel like I'm taking a few steps each day further into the world I actually live in, and in that world, I've done a lot of bad things and Jesus has forgiven me for them. So anyway, back to wanting to kiss every girl. I don't know if I actually wanted that, although I may have, I think it was that I wanted the faceless girl that always used to climb the trees of my mind, and I'd tell her to come down because I was going to her house for lunch today, which was really just something to tell her to get her to come down because I was just going to take her into my tent like Isaac or whoever and marry her right then, but she wouldn't come down. Maybe she read my mind. I figured it might work even though she wasn't Zaccheus(which I was happy about), and even though I'm not Jesus(which I'm not always happy about, if I were honest). Oh well. So anyway, she never came down, and she's probably still sitting up there, hell if I know, I haven't been back to that tree in awhile. But I used to think that if she came down from her tree, if I found the perfect girl, everything would be safer again, would be easier again, would be better.

these days, I'm happy that there aren't any perfect girls, because, like Voltaire said, the perfect is the enemy of the good, or something like that, and he probably said it in French anyway, but the point is he said something just like that and I think it's true. I think that saying means that we can't really grasp the perfect, but we can go on wanting it forever, and that causes us to miss the good things that are all around us and are able to be better understood and loved than something that's perfect. I'm just talking about girls, so put your heresy pistols away. I took the clips out of them before you walked in the room anyways, just like in those spy movies that excite us because those people are able to control every situation and have things work the way they want them to just by dressing up and shooting people with silenced guns and tanks. the only people that can do that in real life don't actually exist. Sorry. I know you think the government has some secret aces up it's sleeve that it will pull out in our moment of need and save everything we love from everything we hate, but sorry, I don't think they do. I think they're just people like us.

And the girl I marry, if I do get to get married, will just be a people like me too. I don't really need any arguments to back that up, because that's the way the world is. I find it funny that we all expect so much from everything. Not the kind of funny that makes you laugh, the kind that makes you wish things were different than they are. You probably think I'm sinking into cynicism, and on the one hand you should be somewhat supportive of that if only because then you would be able to say "sinking into cynicism" over and over again when you prayed for me and that phrase goes together really nicely, listen to how it sounds when you say it aloud. I'm not sinking into that though. It's funny how love is always compared to an ocean, because I think a lot of people say that without understanding just how right they are. Love is an ocean, and we know less about the ocean than we do about outer space, and we don't even know that much about outer space. I learned today, because I looked it up, that ant eaters can eat 30,000 ants in one day, which, if you do the math like I did, comes out to be 20.833333333 ants per minute for 24 hours straight. Some people talk about love like it's an ant eater, and we know how much it takes from us, and how often, and we can put numbers to it. The problem is, you can't really. That's why, as cheesy as it is (I would say "sounds" instead of "is" but then that would imply that there could be some doubt about whether this metaphor/simile (depending on how it's expressed) has the possibility of not being cheesy, which it doesn't) love is an ocean, because we don't know hardly anything about it and it has fish that are all exoskeleton with lamp-eyes and hollow teeth and it also has whales and it also has starfish and sharks and leviathans and turtles and jellyfish(which have stung me) and dolphins and tuna and all sorts of stuff, and all sorts of stuff that we haven't found yet, and we don't want to float around on the surface, we want love to drown us. Don't you? I want it to drown me, in the way that Frost meant when he pleaded May no fate willfully misunderstand me and half grant what I wish and snatch me away. I can't find any arrangement of words that says it better than he said it right there, and I don't care anyway because it's always more important what was said than who said it. I wish more people saw that.

Someday, I hope, someone is going to breath real love into my lungs and I'll breathe it into theirs, and we will be real people who fight and run around in the grass and climb trees and drink and write books and paint each other's faces and rob banks and write music together and it will last as long as the Lord lets it last. I guess we live in a world where we want to love each other and we also die, and I don't really understand that but I'm ok with it now. I don't squirm in my seat any more, waiting for the bell to ring for my next class/station in life. I'm just me, and I'm excited to marry someone who is just themselves.

my heart

this is what my heart looks like:

peace

There are moments when you realize that everything is changing, is moving. It's like when you thought you knew about space because you knew that the earth moves around the sun at 66,700 mph but then you learned that the whole Local Cluster is moving towards somewhere from somewhere at 600km/s, and you realized more has been moving than you thought. I don't like writing the words "everything is changing" because it's one of those untrue statements that is, unfortunately, true. What I mean is, it's a statement that doesn't really express what needs to be expressed but there's no other way to say it really, except that you could say that everything is moving and that would be better because when you think about it, you can't even really define what change is, or what movement is, so maybe you shouldn't say that either.

 All you can really say is 

now now now now now now now now now now now now now now now now now now nownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownownow

 and keep on saying that until you're dead I guess. What I mean is, it's a waste of time to say everything's changing because by the time you said it it's already changed again, kind of like when you take a picture of something. You don't have a picture of a person, you have a picture of a usedtobeaperson. You don't have a picture of a place, you have a picture of a usedtobeaplace, because the person or the place has already changed. These are just things I think about. Like how the epidermis replaces itself every 35 days, which means that you're touching someone different every month, or at least a newly-skinsuited someone. Maybe that's why people kiss so much or have sex over and over and over for their whole lives, besides the fact that they want to. Maybe they want the new cells of the person that they love to know everything the old cells knew.


I don't want to miss anything. I don't want to wake up a long time from now when I'm still young and realize how simple it all is, or was, or could have been. What I was saying in all those words was I don't want to miss the point, like how there are lots of people who think war is like this:

but it's not. 


It's like this:

and it's like this:

and it's like this:

and anyways that's how everything in life is. Not uglier than we think. Heavier than we think. 

I used to be afraid of living under the weight, because I thought I was missing out on something, or some place, where there wasn't a weight, and if I just waited long enough or prayed enough of the right things I would get a bus ticket in the mail and instructions on where to go to catch the bus to that place. That wasn't true. It still isn't true, and I don't suspect that that will be true for quite some time. What I mean is, I think we all live under the weight.

We live under the weight of this:

and this:

 and this:

and this:

and this:

and this:

and this:

and this:

and this:

 and this:

 and this:

  

and also under the weight of love.

I don't think too much about the future. Most of the time, these are the things that are on my mind and I've tried to explain that to some people and they understood, they said, but what they really were saying was, I'm willing to try to understand that because I like you, and I'm not saying that's wrong I'm just saying that I can't live like that, but don't ask because I don't know how I can live, I just have a list of ways I can't live and that's enough for now and even if it weren't enough I wouldn't care because that's all I've got and there isn't any more. I guess I go around saying now now now now now now now now now now now now now now now with my brain because I don't want to miss more than I've already missed, and if you asked me if theres any place in particular that I would like to be right now I'd shrug my shoulders and say no but thanks for asking. I'm not becoming stoic, I'm just not going to pretend my life is something other than what it is, and what it is is simple and it's in black and white. It won't always be that way, but it is for now.

The kind of peace that I have is the kind that reminds you
that even though you think that you'll either end up like this:

 or like this:

 or like this:

 or like this:

 you'll actually end up like all of those pictures squeezed into one and if you don't like that then you can leave, except that Frost was right when he said that Earth is the best place for love, and that it isn't likely to go better anywhere else.

I don't know how to say this except by saying that maybe learning to be at peace is learning to live, and love, under the weight instead of trying to get out from under the weight. I don't know what's going to happen, and I don't know if I'm going to find what I'm looking for, or if you will. I'm tired of talking about what I want, and hearing about what other people want.

What I've been trying to say this whole time is












peace is an ache

slowed-down

There's always a moment in songs or poems or movies or books or people that move you when the world slows down. Maybe that's what being moved feels like, and we don't really know how to say it except to say that for a moment the world slowed, or stopped, or turned on its axis, or fell in on itself. Most of those sayings are too loud to mean what people should mean when they are trying to say they were moved. Our worlds really only stop a few times during our lives. Most of the time they just slow down. Time takes a deeper breath and exhales more slowly. 

When you think about it, we expect a lot out of life. I don't really know how else to measure people's huge expectations except by the dramatic amount of disappointment that seems to exist not only in our culture but in the people I know. Usually people would say not only in the people I know but in our culture as a whole, but I think the people that we know are more important than the culture that's out there somewhere, and that somewhere is nowhere if you think about it, its just a bunch of groups of people that people know. I guess I've spent a lot of my life disappointed, and I'm trying to get away from that. My friend's dad just posted something about a book his wife bought, and it made me laugh. It's title is "What Did You Expect? Redeeming the Realities of Marriage". It made me laugh because whoever wrote that title gets it. They get everything. They get what I wish I had gotten when I was younger. It's strange for you to hear someone who is twenty two talk about things I wish I knew when I was younger, but I don't care. I wish I had asked myself "what did you expect?" when my first girlfriend broke up with me, or when I hurt my knees, or when all my other minor tragedies happened. If I were to write a book about this, it would be called  Of Minor Tragedies and their Prostitute Wives (that's a play on a David Bazan song title. My world slows when I listen to his music, and it slowed when I got to talk to him). Most of the time, when people ask "what did you expect?", they mean that in a it's-one-tragedy-to-the-next kind of way. I don't mean it that way. I mean it in the sense that we live in a world that is a certain way, and our expectations ought to align with that reality. The things that are the most true about the world are the things that are the most quiet, I think. It's not that slogans about living as if today is your last day, blah blah blah, etc, don't necessarily have a tiny piece of truth in them somewhere far out of sight, it's just that they make me want to drown myself in soup. My friend Patrick said something that made me laugh and that was true. I probably laughed because of how true it was, which is why we usually laugh if you think about it. He said that he saw a waitress with a "Save the Dolphins" button on and he wanted so badly to ask her how many dolphins she had saved by wearing that button. Sometimes I want to ask people how many times their slogans have fixed anything. 

I guess that to some extent, we all have buttons that we wear. We all blow on our abortion kazoos or our atheism kazoos or our holiness kazoos or our indie music kazoos or our fashion kazoos or our money kazoos, we all blab about things that make us forget to love each other. My friend Sean said that they older he gets, the more aware he is that there are things that he doesn't know, and he is becoming more and more comfortable saying that he doesn't know. I don't know what Jesus would do about the issue of abortion, but if I had to guess, I think He would be sitting next to the girl in the abortion clinic waiting room telling her that He loves her, and that love would change things. I don't think He would be outside the clinic blowing his abortion kazoo. I don't want to blow my kazoo about button-wearers and kazoo-blowers. I want us all to stop. Just stop. 

There's a movie that I love called "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind". I used to blow my kazoo about it, but not anymore, I just love it now. I couldn't describe to you the effect it has on me. One thing I could tell you though is that there's a moment in the movie when the two main characters are in a hallway, I can't remember if they are sitting or standing, but you'll see in a moment that that doesn't matter. The guy(Joel) wants to try fix his relationship with the girl(Clementine) and start over. He says "I can't see anything that I don't like about you" and she responds "But you will! But you will! You know, you will think of things. And I'll get bored with you and feel trapped because that's what happens with me". Joel looks at Clementine and says "Okay" and she, a bit taken aback, hesitates and then says "Okay". 

Maybe we go on having that conversation with everything, with everyone, for our whole lives. Some things, and people, say okay. Some say no. I don't know much more than that, and I don't expect to.

blue like jazz movie

So, I don't usually promote things. Not sure why, but it's probably because people who are always telling me about things I need to sign up for/support/get as crazy about as they are annoy me. This is an exception to that rule. I love Donald Miller's writing and what he stands for (blog-post-like books about the intersection of the gospel and real life). If you have read his book "A Million Miles in a Thousand Years", you know that a Blue Like Jazz movie is in the making. Several investors (not all) have backed out of the movie and they need to raise $125,000 to make up the difference by October 25th.

You can read here to learn more about what is going on

You can go here if you've already heard enough about it and want to donate.

I think everyone would be enriched by this project finishing and being released in theaters. You may or may not agree. I donated to this. I think you should too.

slowupwardspiral

Sometimes, I think that everything that's ever been written can be reduced to the word help. I think that if we were all more honest, and less concerned about the things we always concern ourselves with, we would write help all over our bodies and clothes, because when you think about it that's what you want to say the most to people, as in "I'm Tyler, please help". That's what I say to Jesus over and over and over and over. Not like a mentally-ill patient who keeps repeating "black cat bean" because his head isn't tied to his heart, or to itself, in the way it used to be, but like how people who mean it say "I love you" over and over because it means a little bit more, a little bit deeper, each time. 

When I'm alone, which is often, ache begins it's slow, upward spiral. It used to drive me wild, and cause my heart to lean it's weight again, and this time harder, against the restraints Reality, in her matter-of-fact way, had put on me. "If   I fill myself with enough want..." I hoped. I don't think it's maturity, I don't know what it is, but I've become more quiet and content to ache. Maybe it's that I know now that things like love and death are complicated, and that I'm only one person, and that my heart is only as big as it is, and can only hold as much as it can hold. I think I used to spend a lot of my time thinking about all the unlocked potential inside of me as if there actually were some, as if the world of My Bright Future were real. I used to listen to my high school teachers talk about how we were all going to save the Republic and whatever, as if Jesus were American. They meant well, and I probably didn't always understand what they were really saying. It's not wrong for teachers to try and inspire their students. I appreciate those teachers a lot, it's just that when a teacher tells you that someone else in the high school said that they were called by God to be President, my first response shouldn't have been jealousy, it should have been to say "turn that down, please. I'm 16 and I don't know shit about myself, much less about being President". I'm not saying that God doesn't call people to that. I'm just saying that I wish that instead of that, they had been telling me to listen to what the Lord is saying and to have a good time at my soccer game and to be nice to my girlfriend, because those are the first hurdles people have to get over, not figuring out what your domestic policy will be in the future world that doesn't exist. But maybe they were saying all of those things, and my cynical 17-year-old brain only picked up on the things that I could lash out at. 

The world that I actually live in isn't called My Bright Future. It's called Present. I live there with some friends of mine and my family. I eat pasta and salad and fired chicken when I can there, I smoke after work cigarettes on my porch there, I listen to music and it makes me ache, and I write music and the ache doesn't leave. I write words there and sometimes the ache leaves, but then it comes back and I realize I didn't solve anything, ache just stepped out to get a half-pound of coffee at the corner store and has just stepped back inside, brushing the snow-melt from her shoulders and hair, and she tells me she's back and asks how my cigarette was. Ache is a girl I would get over if I could, if I wanted to. Ache falls quiet, and quiet, and it covers things and it melts in the necks of my boots and turns my mind back toward home except I don't know where home is, in the way that no one really does when they think about it, and I don't know if I even want to go there because I'm always afraid that finding home won't be as good as wanting it. I don't know if having if better than wanting. 

Fall is here, and it's weather is sure to follow soon. I want the kind of weather that turns your mind to drinking cider from a mason jar, to older leaves, to that just-warm-enough-in-the-cold feeling. I want to smell like wood-fire. I want to be around girls that smell like wood-fire. I want days measured out in music. I want to be under the weight. I want my heart to breath deep, and take its time. 

nexttwelvemonths