Learning To Stand

A stroke disconnects the pathway between thought an action. It cuts off the everyday, every moment things we never think of, cutting off the pathway to muscles that do their job without conscious thought. New pathways need to be learned. Consequently, I’m learning how to stand

When the full effect of the stroke took hold, my brain still told the muscles in my right knee how to hold me up, what pressures to exert in the complex mechanism of sinew and bone enabling it to bare my weight. My knee did not get the message. On the third morning of my hospitalization, I got up to go to the bathroom, took a step, transferring weight to a leg that no longer new how to stand.

With my job I have learned over the years how to fall, twisting through the air, riding falling ladders to the ground in ways that would make Michael Jordan, going up for a basket, proud. I managed to fall into the chair besides my bed with a minor scrape on my back. It earned me a color-coded bracelet meaning I was a fall risk. I did not get out of my bed with out help or supervision for the next three weeks. Wherever I went, it was in a wheelchair.

I learned to transfer my self from chair to bed, locking my chair, weak side close to the bed, sliding out on to the edge of the chair to get my center of gravity, pushing up with my arms, pivoting to the bed on my good leg, lowering my self down.
Even now, almost four months later, if I forget to pay attention and try and stand without thinking, I feel my instability, I hesitate, freeze in a moment in fear, abandon my attempt to stand, and I fall back in my chair.

It’s a nice metaphor for life, don’t you think?

All the things I fear making me hesitate or not even begin the attempt, feeling my instability, my lack of confidence, having learned over the years, through trial and error how to fail without too much damage.

There is something in learning to stand akin to the American Indian who went into the battle and staked himself to the ground, a powerful message to his adversaries this was where he was making his stand, was prepared to die for what he believed. Yet it also acknowledged hisfear, acceptance of his fallen nature, the human propensity to cave at the critical moment.

Life is a constant invitation to stake oneself to the ground, committing not be moved, to live in integrity, to be married faithfully, to love my wife and treat her with respect, to walk humbly with my God.

I still run from so many things, so many commitments I have not yet made, so many ways I am still learning how to stand.

The Immigration Debate

I’m getting tired of the immigration debate. First off, unless you’re pure bread American Indian you come from immigrant stock. And even they came over that lanbd bridge.

As for the Mexicans, a third of this country, from Texas all the way up to Oregon used to be a Mexican province or state or something called Aztlan. Some of the right wingers out there claim there is a plot of flooding those states with illegal Mexicans in order to annex it back to Mexico. Some of those right wingers want to annex Texas and Oklahoma so maybe they ought to put them selves on there list of people out to destroy the country.

So everybody fess up. We have to quit pointing fingers. We all got skeletons in the immigration closet. You people who have grandmothers who don’t know how to speak the language, know who I’m talking about.

And some body ought to do something about those people on 18th street; along with all the other Mexicans in the eastern two thirds of the country before they figure out they missed the boat to Aztlan, so to speak.

Oh, and I got a beef with Polish carpenters. Some of them are really good carpenters so some of them have been getting hired instead of me... I mean instead of Americans. I think we need to change this whole supply and demand thing, you know, you do a good job and you get paid a good wage. It’s clearly not working. I mean how many Americans are out of work because we treat these immigrants like people. Putting them in shitty neighborhoods and letting them kill each other off isn’t any more efficient than it’s been for any of the other foreigners we’ve let in. Eventually they become assimilated and then sometimes it’s almost imposable to tell them apart from the real Americans.

Take the clue from Arizona. It’s time to quit pussy footing around and fortify our borders, and start checking people a little too swarthy or shifty-eyed. We’ve got plenty of our own poor huddled masses we can’t to get rid of. We don’t need any more from someplace else. Let’s tear that foreign statue down and replace it with one of our own pointing back out to sea.

And don’t forget to clean out your own closet.

Memories

One time there was the screech of tires on pavement and then that unmistakable crunch. It was loud. I followed the sound. I was small, still in short pants, but with a little ribbed dago’t. I’d run a little, then walk, then run a little more. It took me forever to get there. The ambulances were gone. The cars were there. They were under a viaduct.

One was a big, boxy Buick, or Oldsmobile maybe? There was a dent in front, enough to crack the radiator and leak it to the gutter. I can’t remember the color the fluid was back then, but I remember it dripping from underneath the car. It didn’t seem all that much damage to me. It was back a car length from the other car, a little sports car it had hit head on.

I was fascinated by the way the front end was folded up and over the back of the little convertible. It seemed impossible to me the two car were in the same accident. The big one was barely damaged. The little sports car was completely destroyed. There was glass everywhere aroud it and inside on the seats. Only the taillights were still intact. Everything else was broken. I remember squinting through my glasses, crooked on my face, seeing my shattered image, like a Picasso painting in the side view mirror.

In the back seat were a decapitated armless doll without any clothes on and a crumpled magazine. On the passenger side floorboard was a scrap of a woman’s blouse in a pool of blood.

I told all my friends about it, described in detail the small V dent in front grill of the bigger car, how it almost looked like it was just parked. I told over and over how the little car looked like it had been in a different accident and there wasn’t a piece of glass on it that wasn’t broken except for the back tail lights. I told the way the car was folded over on itself like a U on its side.
I left out the scrap of blouse it the blood.

I can still see it. It was a white, silky material, a few folds up above the watery blood. I remember staring at it for a long time, how my eyes kept coming back to it, how it stayed with me afterwards like the firemen and the dead cats with the maggots crawling out of their eye sockets and nose. It’s the same way, if I want to, I can “look” and see a taught mooring line with the water drops squeezed out and dancing, and the line breaking, folding back through the air, striking like a monstrous snake, lifting a sailor off the deck of a tug and slamming him into the steel bulkhead behind him.

There’s a lot back on Peoria street to remember and sometimes it’s hard to look, to see Pete’s bloody head, to here Trixie’s toenails on a warn linoleum floor, to remember the sickly sweet smell of the plastic’s factory. You get the good with the bad I guess, like a tray of fresh baked long johns cooling in a window sill of the bakery, rosting potatoes in a campfire pretending to be hobos one night in the back corner of the truck lot with my cousin Wayne and his friend Angelo, or Old Pete coming down the street with puppies in his pockets.

I Guess

It has just occurred to me I may be living in a constant state of fret, at least while I’m writing. It’s a low level worrying. I don’t know if it’s good or bad. It’s probably more accurate to say I live in this fretfulness when the subject of writing is anywhere near.

I know I worry about the right word. The problem is I believe words, at their best, are inaccurate symbols. For object, words can get pretty close; there is a certain agreement about what objects are called. For instance, we can all agree what a square box is, but anything beyond the most basic description becomes problematic. A heavy square box or a big square box dark square box opens things of to the matter of subjectivity, if I know what that means, if you think it means the same thing as I do, the words heavy, big, and dark are subject to the experience of the person reading the word.

An Olympic power lifter, and my wife, Jackie would have different opinions and experience with the word heavy, and probably also with the word big. They could have similar thought around the word dark, though you never can tell. Context helps as neither one probably would not think the box had dark thought.

So worrying about the right word is one thing. Another is fretting about whether anyone will care. Some of this goes back to childhood and is just dysfunctional nonsense, hoping people like me and all that stuff I’ve made a great deal of progress living behind. Some of it is legitimate. I’m by far not the best speller in the world a spell check helps, but knowing how to spell is better. I do know there are dictionaries, but I am a creative guy and my ability to misspell a word is legend. Some times I give up because I can’t find them. For those of you with a similar affliction there is a little book put out by Random House called THE BAD SPELLER’S DICTIONARY.

Then there’s vocabulary. Mine’s not bad, but it’s not the best either. I know the general rule is to write as simply and clearly as you can and I try not to use ten-dollar words, but sometimes when you’re trying to talk about complex things or you need to make subtle differences, you pay what you have to pay.

And then, whenever I talk writing, it’s like I’m talking about it for the first time, waiting to hear what come out of my mouth to see if I still agree with after I’ve said it. Come to think of it, that’s true whenever I talk. Sounds like I’m still afraid of saying the wrong thing, I guess.

mm

Truck Lot Boys And Hula-Hoops

We were truck lot boys. We played often in the cinder covered lot across the street where they parked semi trailers, backed up a against railroad ties. The trailers were parked in the form of a U bordered by Pumpilio’s garage on Huron, the elebvated Soo Line, the furniture factory, where they made office desks, and the brick two flat where Yudock lived on the first floor and Angelo on the second.

Next to the two-flat was a four-foot deep ditch littler with rubble from another brick building and years of accumulated trash and broken glass from half pints. There was room to walk between the ditch and the trailers. The trailers stopped just beyond the house. The ditch opened to the lower, grass sparse back lots behind the two-flats on that side of the street.

Behind the first two flat just down the slope was a little shed with the fifty-gallon drum where Yudock’s Mother chopped scrap wood. The grassy area ran fifty yards to the back of a furniture factory. Back in the corner of the truck lot by the factory, a two bay viaduct led to the street on the other side of the Soo Line.

There was also room to walk between Pumpilio’s high brick wall and the back end of the semis, a secret canyon path we often took through the truck lot when we were up to no good, we didn’t want to be seen, or were looking for a trailer that’s been broken into. One time we found one full of hula-hoops, the regular size, and the smaller. They appeared on the street gradually at first, a kid from the block here, one there.

“Where did you get that?” parents asked.

“I found it in the truck lot.” Technically true. We were little Catholic kids, skilled at bending the truth, leaving out details that would only complicate. Besides, it was a poor industrial neighborhood. Certain items, end tables, couches, console stereos, sometime “fell off the truck” and ended up in our living rooms.

The hula hoops, green, purple, orange, multi colored, multiplied, one little girl spinning three around her waist, another topping her, adding small ones around the arms. Pretty soon it became a contest to see who could spin the most at once, ten fifteen kids out, spinning as many or more hula hoops, some with so many going you could barely see the kid doing the spinning.

We became inventive. We played hula-hoop toss. We chased each other and used them a lassos. We swung each other around with them. We cut them apart, tied them in knots, used them as ropes and whips. We grew bored with them.

Pieces of them started to appear everywhere, in the gutter and gang ways, on the sidewalks and the truck lot to be run over by the semis, ground into the cinders until everywhere you looked were tiny little pieces of plastic mixed in, returned to the truck from where they came.

Old Pete

Old Pete lived at the bottom of the cinder pile across form Pumpilio’s garage on Huron. He lived in a hot and stuffy six by six, tin roofed shack smelling of dog, body odor, and smoke. His cot, with a moth eaten green wool army blanket hanging to the floor, took up the wall opposite the door. Sitting on the cot, Pete, forever needing a shave, lifted a flap of blanket revealing Trixie in a bed of rags suckling a litter of still blind, snuffling and mewing pups. “You can’t hold one yet,” he said is his wreak of a voice. He dropped the blanket. “Still too young. Maybe next time, after their eyes open.”

The tin plate of stew my mother gave me sat in front of him on a small round wooden barrel next to his butcher knife. He ate the stew with a big spoon he gripped like a hammer. We each had a battered tin cup he got from a medicine cabinet with no door tacked to the wall.

He had poured me water from a ceramic moonshine jug he kept on the floor next to the barrel. He drank coffee he heated on top of a little potbellied stove in the corner. Tin stove pipe ran out and up the side of his shack capped with tin, belching an occasional puff of smoke like a shack in a cartoon. He held his hot tin cup with an old wool sock.

He shoveled his stew in his mouth like there was someone looking over his shoulder. He talked with his mouth full, shoving food back in his mouth with his fingers stained with grime.

“Your, ma’s a good cook. Good woman. You listen to what she tells you. You hear.” I nodded. My seat was a metal milk crate turned on its side with an old towel for a cushion. Between swallows, Pete huffed to get a breath in. “Sure ya do. You listen to your ma. You’re a good boy. She’s learning you right. You’re lucky. You tell’er I said so. Old Pete.” He sopped up the gravy with a chunk of crusty Italian bread, sucking his finger clean one by one. “Old Pete,” he said again, looking off somewhere. “Been a long time. Poor old woman. You’re old man?”

His tone of voice turned colder. It scared me when he got angry. “He don’t hit you none? You tell Old Pete. That weren’t right. Old Pete knows. He knows how t’take care a things, too.” He wiped his mouth with the soiled sleeve of his overcoat, swallowed the rest of his coffee in a gulp.

“You get out of here now. Pete don’t want no more company. You gonna cry now? Go on. Git.” He grabbed his bottle of gin. I got up and hurried out the door. It was almost dark. I ran a little way and stopped to look back. He stood in his doorway gripping his gin by the bottle's neck. In his other hand was the tin plate. “Think this is?” he yelled. He pointed at me with the gin. “Git.” He threw the tin plate after me. "Think I got time t'mess with the likes a you?"

This was before the Old Polack hit him in the head with the baseball bat and he turned mean.

Alchemy

Alchemy

So, what to blog today? I’ll start writing and see what comes out. It’s how I deal with writers block, as I believe there is no such thing or at least I believe what Ralph Keyes says in “The Courage To Write”. It’s plain fear. It may be a different fear for some, but it’s fear.

For me, when I don’t want to start hitting the keys at all, it’s the fear that I’m about to write something stupid that I have no business sharing with the rest of the world. If you got it into your head to write me back to say this proves that my fears were accurate, then I’d like to thank you for proving me wrong as it at least exposes you as an ignorant person with no literary sensibilities or knowledge as to what actually goes into writing.

I suppose the next fear is that I’ll say something offensive, like calling some one and ignorant SOB, causing me to self censor myself like I did, because, getting down to the real fear, the cliché of all fears, I fear that I’ll expose myself, like some literary flasher, reveling the writer has no real words, that I’m just a fraud and a pretender and I have not faced up to the fact that all those people of yesteryear were right and I am just a dumb, scared little shit who needs to get out of the way, shut up, and stop bothering people.

This kind of thing just pisses me off these days, makes me fighting mad and the way I fight is by punching one key after another, building word upon word into coherence, thoughts others can identify with and then we can become allies in the great war, fire great salvos against those who tell little kids they’re stupid or don’t matter or nobody cares what the hell they have to say.

We can stand up together and shout, flood the world with our words, proclaim these kids matter, they’re important, they can survive and flourish. We are proof and witnesses that their pain can be summoned and crafted and turned into turned to something else.

So all you naysayers out there keep it up. You may destroy some of us with your belittling comments about our worth, but some of us survive. Some of us are alchemist. We take the lead weight of your words of destruction and write them into gold.

Peoria Street Memories

Peoria Street Memories

Sam Weller, an old classmate and Current Author and Writing instructor at Columbia College, has proposed on Facebook a 500 word a day writing regimen towards a novel for the summer. It’s supposed to start on May 17 and go through August. I don’t know about a novel or writing on Sundays, but I’m starting now and I’m writing about Peoria Street in the early to mid 50’s where I lived. It will be a fantastic exercise and exploration of material I’ve only dabbled in.

Whatever material comes out of there, it will be very gritty and bottom-end working class. It was a block of immigrants, hillbillies, and a lot of relatives in a very industrial neighbor hood. One of my friend’s mother was unwed and of dubious background, possibly a hooker. I lived in the shadow of a shoe factory, across from a big cinder covered truck lot. Across Huron was a big cinder pile guarded by a alcoholic we called Old Pete, who liver in a six by six shack with his always pregnant mutt Trixie. At the other end of the block was a scrap metal yard and just beyond that was a big ditch that would become the Eisenhower Expressway.

There’s a lot of stories from back then and it will be very interesting to see what comes up, how much I’ll remember when I start looking at it. Like right now I can see Youdoc’s mother, a big boned polish immigrant with a babushka and peasant clothes, out behind their flat next to Pumpilio’s truck lot. She standing before an empty, over turned fifty-gallon drum swinging a hand axe with both hands and chopping wood on top the drum.

Byron’s older brother Robert, tall, thin, half Puerto Rican, maybe twelve years old, comes running at her. “Hit my Little brother,” he shouts, swinging at her. She drops the axe and grabs her broom, standing her ground to fend him off with the straw end, yelling back at him in Polish. “How do you like? How do you like it?” Robert grabs the broom and yanks it from her and starts swatting at her, chasing her around the drum. She’s covering the back of her head, blubbering now, and flees to her flat. Robert throws the broom at the door. He comes back to the drum and snatches up the axe as a trophy. “I’ll take that.”

Sometime after that a bunch of us were sitting on old car tires we used to push and roll for fun. Youdoc was sitting on one and I didn’t have one. He got up and left and I sat on the tire he was sitting on. He came back and told me to get off his tire. I told him he had left it and now it’s mine. He left again and then came back with an old mop handle and whacked me in the side. I grabbed the stick from him and chased him home. I found a paper bag and filled it full of dog shit and rocks and threw it through his front window.

About five years ago I learned Youdoc was a Jewish name. It was somewhere about 1958 when I threw the bag of shit through their window.

As Sure As Hell

Yesterday was discouraging as far as my shoulder getting better. Maybe I was already discouraged from Thursday when I went for a doctor's evaluation to determine if I’m eligible for disability. The doctor examining me said I’d hear in a few weeks. We need the income, but I’m not looking forward to being officially classified as disabled.

And then working out the other day I think I pulled a muscle in my back, trying with both arms to lift all of sixty pounds over my head on a biangular shoulder press. If the right shoulder is getting better, it is a very slow process. I’ve got an appointment with my occupational therapist to look at my shoulder to see if it's getting better.

I might have a rotator cuff tear. If I do, it means an operation, which they won’t do until July because they don’t want to take me off aspirin, which I’m taking as a blood thinner to prevent another stroke. They said an operation would take the shoulder out for six months. This would reduce me to typing with my left hand, at least for a while. A whole new level of hunt and peck.

I have my moments of discouragement. I don’t know how people with out faith get through things like this. I said discouragement and not depression. Depression is a state of hopelessness. I spent much of my life depressed, hoping to get through it without it sucking much more than it already did. It’s a bad place to live.

I’ve been rather amazed at my reaction to having a stroke. I've felt all the things you would imagine, especially during the first three days when I got progressively worse and the head neurologist started using words an phrases like major stroke, paralysis, and possible ongoing event. These are not heartening terms. On the forth day I stopped getting worse. After about a week I was very excited when I moved my big toe. What amazed me through it all, I was never without hope, even on that forth day when I told my wife, Jackie, maybe I might not get any better.

We both are people of strong faith. Life gives tests. Jackie has MS. She is familiar with life’s tests. Strange as it may seem, all through the events surrounding my stroke, along with the fear and discouragement, tears and anger, there has also been an excitement about what is to come. My wife and I believe in a God of restoration. I have been profoundly broken and with all the shitty stuff that goes along with that, I am looking forward to who I will be when my God puts me back together. I don’t know what that will look like and the fear of moving into that unknown is not insignificant.

In the old days, before my God called and took hold of me, along with the depression, I lived with a soul deadening boredom of the monotony of self-loathing. Now I definitely still need improvement, but I sure as hell aint bored anymore.

Cat Got His Tongue

I am a deeply flawed man. I would like to be more outgoing than I am, able to say with my mouth the things I can say on the page, but I don’t have the luxury of time when I’m talking. When I’m writing I am allowed to think before I speak, my hesitation and clunkiness appear as only tiny spaces between the words. My gruffness of manner is only visible when I want it to be.

On the page I can be deliberately vulnerable, and when I miss-speak, which is often, I can delete. I can rewrite for the proper amount of tenderness.

When I was younger I often would say nothing. I ran possible scenarios of speech through my head, rejecting one after another as flawed, stupid, bothersome, and not close enough to what I was trying to say. After long years I have learned to shut that off, allowing myself speech, a voice. It is that censor I probably fear the most, still hear it’s incessant voice telling me to shut up less I say the wrong thing.

I would like to be a more complete person than the one I am. I would like to appear tender to my wife, to speak freely of intimate things, person to person. I never learned how to do this. I was taught instead my thoughts and feelings were beside the point.

The page is the only door to the cage I’ve found, or if you buy the God thing, I was given. Over time I learn little by little to open my mouth. I once taught someone how to cry, to open their mouth and let out inarticulate sound, the groan to deep for words. That, I am good at. It’s the words that stick in my throat.

Woe Is Me

In November of last year I traded in a Harley Davidson 883 Sportster for a Root beer Softail Custom. I had a sissy bar, bags, and a windshield put on. It’s got two miles on it and was in winter storage at the Harley dealer in Glenview. It’s still there.

As I mentioned I was at Lake Como on a writing project over the weekend. Pete and I called our buddy Dave and asked him if he would consider coming out so we could pick his brain, as he is familiar with our subject matter. Not only was he willing to meet us but he said he’d buy us lunch if we met him at the Starbucks in down town Lake Geneva. It was a very nice sunny day. We ate at Egg Harbor on Main Street. I had this Italian chicken sandwich with artichoke hearts, tomato and something else. It was very good, which is, for those of you who have known me for a while, an amazing thing.

But the reason I bring up Main street in Lake Geneva is because it was filled with the unmistakable rumble of Harleys going by every time I blinked, Sporsters and Fat Bobs and Dyna Glides, Street Glides, Road Kings, and of course, Softail Customs, all of them trying to pull my eyeballs out of their sockets.

Why, you ask? Why, if I have my very own Harley, why was I watching other people on there’s. Why am I not right now getting ready to ride on this soon to be sunny, eighty-degree day? Are you ready for the sad part of the story?

Last Thursday I went to Hines VA, on Roosevelt road. I’ve been going to Jessie Brown in Chicago, but Hines is where they do a driver evaluation to find out if a person can drive after he’s had a stroke, lets say. I passed my evaluation. I can drive a car. The Secretary of State was informed. There was nothing legal about my driving restriction. It was the doctor’s recommendation. It was explained it’s more precautionary. Like say I have an accident and I’m getting sued and they look in my records that it was recommended by my doctors that I not drive.
Well I’ve been officially cleared to drive a car now. My Doctor also recommended I not drive the bike until July.

I just called Glenview Harley. They said there wouldn’t be any problem leaving my bike there until July, except for the fact I cannot ride it.

Woe is me.

Chance Of Showers

I am recovering from a hard, emotionally draining, very good productive four-day weekend at a cottage in Lake Como, Wisconsin, four miles from Lake Geneva. I feel very privileged that a friend of mine has asked me to collaborate in a writing project that we expect to take, hope to take, three months to finish. I don’t want to give away too much what it’s about, but it’s about how a bunch of really screwed up people do life together. It’s something I’m very curious about, considering I’m a very screwed up person trying to figure out how to do life. There seems to be a shortage of useful manuals and the ones I do find are often very cryptic to me.

Not that we’re going to write one. Were writing fiction. We’ve spent the weekend coming up with some screw up people and there stories that got them screwed up and their motivations for screwing up some more. Then we had one of them screw up real bad and we started putting the rest of them in the same room to see what would happen. This would be all fun and games if we weren’t serious about what we’re doing, but since we are and we want to make our character believable we have to use are own screwed-upness to inform our characters and how they react to each other.

My recent stroke was help. It turns out that having a stroke effects your emotions and my stroke has brought my emotions very close to the surface. We were using me as a barometer to gauge the emotional truth of our characters reactions to the situations we put them in. The more I cried, the closer we were getting to the truth, sort of. We did quite well if you willing to trust our barometer.

So now we got a really messed up situation we’ve started bringing them to one two or three at a time, each one throwing there mess into the mix. Then we’ve got one of them to tell it all who is either the most screwed up or the least, but his particular brand of being screwed up makes him very reliable to tell what is going on in the place we put them.

If you know anything about writing characters you know you become emotionally attached to them and they don’t always do what you want them to do. They surprise the shit out of you sometimes and when they get hurt it tends to hurt you.
All this to say and warn you if we run into each other over the next three months or so and me eyes are red or I’m crying my eyes out, you don’t have to worry. It just means I’ve been writing.

Getting My Hands Dirty

I was down in the shop yesterday. I can sweep. I started cleaning up and putting thing a way. I lasted about an hour and a half and I now have a cordless drill shelf. I think I have eight or so. The fairly new little Milwaukee with the chuck is around $160 but well worth it. If your not a pro you can get away with something cheaper, but that’s what you’ll be doing, getting away with it. Pretty much, in power tools, you get what you pay for and if you’re a pro, buying top of the line is cheaper in the long run.

One of the problems with my shop is it’s too small. Usually I have a fair amount of tools “on the job.” I put this in quotes because that might mean it’s some one I work for regularly and my tools are there for an extended period of time. I had a potable table saw, among other things, for over a year. Transporting tools are the bane of a carpenter’s existence. Well, okay, maybe it’s busted up and cut knuckles and fingers. But hauling tools is up there along with bumping your head and skinning you shins and can be a real bitch. So I’ve got duplicates and triplicates. Now, with the stroke, there is no “on the job.” And I’ve been at this for quite a long time.

Over the years I’ve acquired specialty tools, you’d be surprised with the number of tool I’ve acquired over the years. I’ve already mention clamps else ware. You can never have enough. In construction, you can never have enough of a lot of things. Besides those cordless drills I have, I have six or eight corded drills, and there’s more I can still use. Like I said, I’ve been at this for a long time so I know how to get away with out them, but having them, when I go back to work that is, will make my life a lot easier and more efficient.

All this to say, I have a lot of tools, almost none of them are light, and they’re all in my shop. Don’t get me wrong. I have a decent size shop. I can push a full sheet of plywood through my table saw, but it is in my basement. I built a library down there. I started cleaning and organizing. I barely made a dent. Still, it was good getting down there again and getting my hand dirty. They’re the best they’ve looked in years.

The Not Yet

This Easter, as with every Easter, I find myself in desperate need of resurrection, with the added metaphor of having had a stroke three months ago today. They tell me in three more months I’ll have an indication of, after having had my life pulled out from under me, how much of it I’m going to get back. So I’m living through a little scaled down version of the now and the not yet, the position of every believer. I’ve seen some resurrection, but have not yet arrived at the fullness of my recovery.

It is, to say the least, disconcerting to live in the the not yet portion of my stroke. To put it bluntly, my right arm doesn’t work right and I’m doing good to lift five pounds over me head. Right now I am living with the feeling of having no identity. I used to be a carpenter. Right now, true or not, that seems impossible to me and I look ahead not knowing what the future holds. Tomorrow I’m planning on going down to my shop and start by cleaning up. It’s pretty much in a time warp down there, frozen on January fourth. I don’t even know if I can handle sweeping, if the pressure of pushing the broom across the floor will be too much for my shoulder.

Yes, I know, I am a child of God. However I have just as much confidence in my ability to clean up my life as I have in my ability to clean up my shop. “Who will set me free from the body of this death.

Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” Hear we start a new paragraph, a new thought. Unlike not knowing what my recovery from my stroke will be like three months from now, I know though faith what my recovery will be like from my body of sin and death. Through faith, with the help and by the power of the Holy Spirit, I make my way through the now towards the fulfillment of the promise of the not yet. I live in the tension between death and life, moving toward life everlasting through faith that two thousand and some odd years ago the stone rolled away and an empty tomb was revealed.

Happy Easter.

Easter

Easter is coming. Resurrection. This is the Gospel, the good news. He is risen. He is Lord.

They used to proclaim the gospel when a new Caesar came to power with the same words: He is lord. The good news was the empire had a king. Legionnaires went thought out the empire with the gospel that the new Caesar was Lord. It didn’t matter if you believed it or not, the legionnaires were prepared to prove it at the point of a spear.

We proclaim the good news that Jesus is Lord with the belief it doesn’t make much difference to His Lordship weather it is believed or not. I admit it is a foolish idea if you’ve not had personal experience with Him. I can’t give you proof He exist
Any more than I can give you proof the sun will come up tomorrow. I believe both things by faith. I have seen the sun come up day after day for almost sixty years now and I make the reasonable leap of faith it will do so tomorrow.

In the same way, over the years I have seen the Godhead manifest Him self or Them selves, some of it very mysterious and I make no claim to understand any more than a very small portion. Anyway, I have seen the Godhead manifested an astounding number of ways and times in the lives of fellow believers, my own life, the lives of those around me, and in the world where I live. From this I make the reasonable leap of faith and proclaim the Gospel that Jesus is Lord.

The difference with the gospel of the ancient Romans and the upstart counterpart and followers of The Way, and Christians of today if they understand the great commission they are called to, is that proving the Gospel at the point of a spear is done in direct opposition to the Gospel of Christ. Jesus said,

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me,
Because He anointed Me to preach the gospel to the poor.
He has sent Me to proclaim release to the captives,
And recovery of sight to the blind,
To set free those who are downtrodden,
To proclaim the favorable year of the Lord.”

And so it is. Amen.

A Conspiracy Of Fear

I guess I think people don’t get along good enough to hatch a grand conspiracy. What’s the track record for sustaining a secret over a long period of time? The idea there are puppet masters pulling the strings makes sense as fiction but the problem is, real life doesn’t make sense. In Fiction you need cause and effect, a leading to b leading to c. Real life doesn’t work that way. Real life follows Murphy’s Law. You know; if any thing can go wrong it will.

This is one of the things the novel WAR AND PEACE is about, all the variables it is impossible to take into consideration.
Take 9-11. The make the claim this is an inside job. Who would have to be in on this? Anybody that has to do with monitoring the skies on the east coast, air traffic controllers, civilian and military and eyes on the ground, all the people who had anything to do with the films, the people who launched the supposed missiles and their support structure, The cell phone people who over heard the calls from flight 93, Osama and the jihad’s over seas and their families, Whatever chain of command and logistics over here involved in plotting and carrying out the covert operation. And all these people would have to be willing to take out the World Trade Center, take a swipe at the Pentagon, and bungle the flight 93 part, and all of these people would have to keep it quiet before, during, and after, not a peep. What are the odds?

But that’s just part of the conspiracy we are expected to believe. It’s a plot to turn us into a police state, put us in concentration camps, and they’ve got the microchips waiting to be injected. And bankers control it all; you know what that’s code for, don’t you? And it goes back years, tens, hundreds, thousands, in depends on whom you talk to.

Now, get this. It’s been kept secret all these years, except from these guys, and they have proof, documentation, eyewitnesses, affidavits. They have all this proof. They brought it to every one they can think of, congressmen, senators, law enforcement, the media, and not one of them has examined the evidence, and said, "Holy shit. We have to do something, I know some people we can trust.” The reason people don’t do this, because all of them are either in on it or too scared to buck the system. This is the most unsupportable link in there argument.

Humans as a whole are notoriously corrupt and unable to get along over extended periods of time, but as individuals we can rise above ourselves and put others before us. The first responders, who ran into the WTC, argue against them, Nelson Mandela, Bishop Desmond Tutu, and Steve Biko argue against them. The thousands fighting in Afghanistan, the police and firemen who risk their lives every day argue against them. Gandhi, Martin Luther King, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner argue against them. Morris Dees argues against them.

They rail against the politics of fear and they are its worst offenders and finest practitioners and their own fear has led them to construct a boogeyman for adults. Hide under your beds if you must. Most of us are called to something greater than to live in a conspiracy of fear.