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.