Category Archives: Grace

Conflict. Sierra Nevada Anniversary Ale.

Posted on 21 January 2009 | 3 comments

I am horrible at conflict. Period.

Since I am doing this 100 beers in 6 months thing at the local bar, the Heorot, I have to try some beers I wouldn’t normally try. Today I am trying Sierra Nevada’s Anniversary Ale. I am surprised I like this ale. I usually don’t like anniversary or celebration brews, because breweries seem to go a little overboard with themselves for these special ales. I also had an old standby: Dogfish Head 60 minute IPA. Mmmm.

I feel like I deserve these beers because I ran for an hour. An hour!

That may be faulty reasoning.

In fact, I am sure it is faulty reasoning.But I really LOVE beer.

I wasn’t lying before. I really am bad at conflict. I can’t stand conflict, but I also can’t stand being made to feel stupid or inferior for things I believe. I am not intellectual 24/7. I am actually more interested in grace than intellect. Really. I am not sure that, that means I am stupid or naive. I don’t think I am either. Maybe I am. I wouldn’t mind being both on most days.

**EDIT**

I am sitting here trying to read, but I love the bar culture, especially the daytime bar culture so I am not reading much except the people around me.

I see the guy who I call the Gorton’s Fisherman. He smokes his non-filter, hand-rolled cigarettes down to his finger tips before he stands them upright in the ashtray. He sits close to the other regular. Too close. The other regular, who says fuck about every other word, keeps moving further away from Gorton.

Now he is sitting on the edge of his stool like a child watching Dora the Explorer or some other shit like that. He is I, when  little, watching Sesame Street.

Sometimes I see Gorton walking around town with a huge camera around his neck. He is always wearing too many clothes. A rain coat when it isn’t raining. A snow suit when it isn’t snowing. I can’t imagine he isn’t roasting inside all those clothes. I am sure he can smell himself wafting up from the neck of his t-shirt. Or from under the brown Dickie’s coverall he wears right now.

He has greying hair, thinning; a full beard; military or recycled glasses; and big rubber boots like the next door neighbor, Old Man Marley, in Home Alone. You know, the South Bend Shovel Slayer. Gorton wears rubber boots like that. I am waiting for him to come in pushing a snow shovel and dragging a trash can full of salt.

(Now the other regular has moved to another stool.)

I see, or more correctly hear, a girl who can’t be over 25-years old lauding the phenomenal steaks and ribs of Montana Mike’s in Anderson. She also loves Jamison. And she loves Guinness. She is an Irish girl, you know? Whiskey and beer are her staple foods.

She tells the guy sitting next to her that Monatana Mike’s has HUGE portions. Seriously, it’s phenomenal! But ridiculously expensive. Who would spend that much money on a meal!?!

Maybe that last sentiment was about a grocery store. She hasn’t been to a grocery store in forever. Why pay so much for food? Her roommates cook. She eats their leftovers. Fucking mooch.

There is a cook from Vera Mae’s who recently cut his thumb with a Japanese knife. He is a sous chef. Or so he says. He is sitting too close to the woman next to him. Like Gorton’s friend, she scoots across the stool. Wait. Now she slides closer to him. He must have done something right. Somebody’s getting lucky.

Finally, sitting right in front of me are two undergrads. Possibly, they are on a first date. I want to scream to her: run. I haven’t heard you say two words. He occupies conversation. Can you put up with that forever? Think about it. One day you may be the one inching your way across a bar stool just trying to score. Or trying to avoid it.

Everyone talks louder the more they drink. Gorton and his friend slur more. Their fucks come out more like fthuuucksssh. I wish I wasn’t so inebriated myself. I want to remember what Gorton said when he first sat down, but I can’t. His words are at the bottom of my Porter. I need to drink my way down there to retrieve them. I know it had a mix of these curse words: God damned, fuck, and shit. It may have been fucking. But I am not holding my breath.

It’s still fuckin’ work, he says now. What’s he talking about? It’s all fucking work as far as I am concerned. Now he’s not sure. Adamantly. Unsure. I’m not sure. I am not sure. Ahmnohshshuuuurrre. But he’s trying to put it in a little more delicate terms.

And, he has moved over to the stool formerly occupied by the other guy.

Chjeessuss Chrrisstt, Gorton says,  I don’t even want to go to my house. The electric is so expenisve.

Is this a neo-slave narrative?

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Posted in Beer, CNF, Grace, Relationships, Running, Writing

This is why …

Posted on 18 January 2009 | 2 comments

I love my pastor. He started the sermon today with this video:

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Posted in Grace, Politics, Queer, Relationships, Religion

Snow and Brokenness

Posted on 14 January 2009 | 2 comments

Once a year, I like snow. Today is that day. I won’t still like it tomorrow. I wouldn’t have liked it yesterday. Today is the only day I will like it. And it is beautiful!

Falling in small concise flakes with an occasional conglomeration of them posing as a larger flake or two, the snow has made the usual greyness of Muncie a pristine white. I won’t say the snow has blanketed the city—that would be cliche.

Is it cliche to say that the snow only covers the sins of the world, but the snow doesn’t make them disappear? Is it cliche to say that the snow is a bandage with a wound festering under it? Is it cliche to wish that melting snow would leave behind healing and love?

Today’s snow may be beautiful, but its’ beauty doesn’t change the fact that the world is broken. People hurt and people suffer. We no longer live in Eden. We have yet to see paradise.

I just had a conversation with a woman who is becoming a friend. I wanted to remove her sorrow like the non-beating heart it is. I wanted to make it better, then, but I can’t. I wanted to tell her it will all be okay. I can’t promise that. Things don’t always work out. If they did, we’d have nothing to celebrate.

Today, I celebrate the snow. I celebrate Walt Whitman and his ability to understand. I refrain from singing the body electric, but “I Sit and Look Out” is one of my favorite poems of his:

I sit and look out upon all the sorrows of the world, and upon all the oppression and shame,

I hear secret convulsive sobs from young men at anguish with themselves, remorseful after deeds done,

I see in low life the mother misused by her children, dying, neglected, gaunt, desperate.

I see the wife misused by her husband, I see the treacherous seducer of young women,

I mark the ranklings of jealousy and unrequited love attempted to be hid, I see these sights on on the earth,

I see the workings of battle, pestilence, tyranny, I see martyrs and prisoners,

I observe a famine at sea, I observe sailors casting lots who shall be kill’d to preserve the lives of the rest,

I observe the slights and degradations cast by arrogant persons upon laborers, the poor, and upon negroes, and the like;

All these—all the meanness and agony without end I sitting look out upon,

See, hear, and am silent.

Walt wasn’t silent, though. He wrote it all down. Sometimes the written word resounds more fully than the spoken.

Whitman amazes me because he wrote such sad, and anguished poems as “I Sit and Look Out,” but he also wrote about beauty and life. Take for example this short poem: “I see the sleeping babe nestling the breast of its mother,/ The sleeping mother and babe—hushed, I study them long and long.” How beautiful!

Maybe a better metaphor for the snow is this: The earth is cradled in the bosom of snow. I feel cradled today. I want to study the snow long and long.

2 Comments

Posted in Grace, Literature, Queer, Relationships, Religion, Winter Weather

First Day and No Class

Posted on 12 January 2009 | 3 comments

When I was undergrad I always tried to get my schedule to work out so that I would only have class on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I remember why I loved it. Today is the first day of the new semester and I get to stay in my pajamas at home. I don’t have class until tomorrow, so I am taking advantage of my last day of vacation by walking the dogs, running, reading, writing, and basically sitting around.

This semester is even better because I only have one actual classroom class on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 330-445. The rest of my classes are independent studies or just sitting in on other classes. The bulk of my work this semester is in the form of studying for comps. I need to have my book list finished as soon as possible so I can spend the rest of the semester and the summer studying.

And, I am spending the day today waiting. Tomorrow I am going to see one of my best friends from seminary. He has lived in Texas since we graduated, pastoring a Church of God. I am pretty excited about seeing him because we were such good friends and I have missed him more than I thought I had.

The last time I saw Feirtag was at graduation and then it was all awkward and we just wanted to get the hell out of there. I won’t ever forget how we helped each other through so much during those three years. He wasn’t the only one. But if I had to pick three people who helped me the most during those times he would be one of the three.

You know how sometimes you see someone every day and you take them for granted. Then when you don’t see them, you really don’t miss them because you took them for granted. This is how I feel about most of my friends from seminary. It is not how I feel about the actual experience of seminary. For the most part, that experience was strange, alienating, and spiritually trying. But I think if I called any one of them up today, we could take up like old times.

I guess I will see tomorrow. Today I will wait.

On another note, yesterday’s sermon was good. I mean really good. I told Bec on the way home that I could stand to trade Sundays—Matt then David—which is a huge compliment to both men.

I think I am a pretty hard parishioner to please when it comes to the sermon. I don’t deal well with gimmicky three point sermons, and I don’t want to be entertained. I want to hear the word, and to hear it wrestled with and rolled around until its meaning is fully extracted.

Preachers get extra points if they include a point that I hadn’t already considered when I read the text. Not that I think I am so smart, but if I thought of every point made in the sermon in the five minutes I had before church to consider the text, then someone (read this to be the preacher) is getting paid for doing what I could do in five minutes.

Yes, I am a little hard on ministers. After all, they are the voice of the Church and that voice should be new every morning like God’s compassion. The voice of the Church shouldn’t bring the same stale message—the voice should cry out in the wilderness bringing a new revolutionary message. As Matt said, it is then our job to go out and meet the revolution and to be transformed by its mystery and grace.

On yet another note, last Sunday Dave spoke about our goal for our church for the year: peace and grace. I think those two words are worthy of body art. Our entire mission as Christians should always be peace and grace, should it not?

This is for you David:canada_flag_peace_symbol_l

3 Comments

Posted in Grace, Relationships, Religion, School

Christmas comes but once a year.

Posted on 26 December 2008 | Leave a comment

Yesterday was Christmas.

My grandma came to my parents’ house with my Aunt Zoe and Uncle Fred. They also brought my cousin Bart.

My grandma sat demented on the couch for most of the day. She picked her lip until bled when she thought they weren’t coming back to get her. At four o’clock she began to panic. Would she make it back to the nursing home in time for dinner? She picked her lip some more.

She said that Becky talks nasty and wouldn’t sit on the couch with her.

She didn’t like the pictures of my mom that her college roommate had given to her. They were of my mom and her friends being silly in their dorm rooms in Painter. Studebaker was the same in the sixties as it was in the nineties when I lived there. It looks different now.They finally remodeled.

My cousin Bart still annoyed my brother. He still gravitated toward me. He didn’t change a bit in the 10 years—give or take a couple—that he was in prison. Now he sells Kirby vacuum cleaners door to door. I did learn how to make moonshine in a trash bag with commisary oranges and a loaf of bread. He said it tastes like hell but it’ll get you there. I wanted to ask where it took him behind those bars. I didn’t. I might one day.

The rest of Christmas was good. My family has given up buying gifts from the stores for each other. I like it. I got several bags of different types of Christmas treats, “Momma Sandy’s” dry oatmeal mix, a tie-dye shirt made by the special ed. students at the middle school where my mom teaches, a photograph taken by my brother of a viaduct with writing on it, and a candle-box with four candles and a cedar front made by my father.

The saying in the photograph is something like “Generosity isn’t measured by how much we give, but by how much we keep.” That pretty much sums up how I feel about it. The things we keep sort of point out what we aren’t willing to give up. My brother runs past that saying every day. I would like to run past it, too.

Finally, I was saddened to hear that Eartha Kitt died yesterday, but how fitting that the woman who began the Santa Baby tradition would die on Christmas. Eighty-one years is a long time to spin on this ball of dirt, and as long as she got a sable under her tree, I am sure she didn’t mind checking out on the holiday that catapulted her stardom that one last grand notch.

kitt

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Posted in Christmas, Grace, Personal, Relationships