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.