I watched the first five episodes of The Wire today, and I will say the show is indeed as good as everyone says it is. I've been thinking lately about how unfathomably complicated the world is, and while it's true that this chaos enables many terrible things to thrive and expand, it's still not an excuse not to dedicate yourself to good. I believe more firmly all the time that no matter what, the good we make with our own hands is unassailable.

I am also 3/4 of the way through the fourth Harry Potter book, and I can finally say that I know now why everyone got so hooked. The first three books were enjoyable, but it wasn't until the end of the third, and then into the fourth, that I became genuinely addicted. It's suddenly become a world I enjoy being a part of more than my own.

I have made a lot of mistakes. I wonder if I've made more or less than others. I wonder if my awareness of these mistakes is a blessing. Will my knowledge of them empower me enough to defeat the bad habits that continue to rule me without contest? Is it merely a morbid personality that will allow regret to tarnish my appreciate of my remaining life? I have suffered for my mistakes, but will I learn from them?

I don't want to be a writer anymore. I don't think I ever really did want to be a writer. What I want is to live well. What I want is to do good. What I want is to stop accumulating regrets. I feel like I have learned a lot about how to live well and how to be good. I don't want to be famous or revered any more. I want to be able to say to myself that I have taken what I have learned and put it into practice. I want to turn an extended smattering of blunders into a meaning progression.

Sometimes I think I am more attached to the past than other people I know. Sometimes I think that I live in the past too much, that I hold on to things too long, and I miss out on the present because of it. I would like to not miss out on the present so much. But I've missed it not just by a fixation on the past, but on the future as well. Sometimes I think it's important that I don't ignore the past. As I get older, the past hurts more, but that pain may be productive. It may teach me hard lessons. I think some of my worst mistakes have been when I turned my back on my past, and thereby turned my back on myself, and did things based on who I thought I was, who I thought I should be, as opposed to who I really was. I think it might make life easier to cut off connections, however tenuous, to who I've been and what I've done, but I do not think it would make life better, and I don't want my life to be easier, I want it to be better.

I know some people twice my age whose lives are sad. There were lives they wanted, and for reasons that were both their fault and not their fault, they didn't get them. It's hard not to think that this is how life goes for everyone. The thing is, these people live as though they are failures, and if the die has been cast and now they are only waiting for death. But I think the mistake may not have been the decisions they made, but their unwavering adherence to a particular definition of success and failure. Were they not fixated on their lost vision, they would realize they still had energy left to spend on different endeavors. However, it also makes me think that the decisions we make are important. Otherwise, we may very well find we have spent a long time floating downstream to somewhere we never wanted to be.

I feel wiser than I was. I hope that means I am closer to living attentively and intentionally. I don't want any more time to feel lost.

I think I have been too isolated from other people for a long time. I want to be more active in the concrete world. I want to get mixed up in people's lives, and the things that happen. I want to measure my life in day-to-day events. Less time alone, less time behind a desk, less time feeling comfortable. I am too sheltered, my perspective is too narrow, I spend too much time worrying about myself. I should learn how to work hard. I should fill my time with what's really going on around me, so I have less time for self-pity.

Jen and Dan, your posts reflect feelings that I also experienced upon being in Monroe, feelings that came up in one form or another in every conversation I had while visiting. Like many of the more profound experiences in life, returning to the place we grew up conjures up thoughts and emotions both inexpressibly personal, while at the same time, banally universal. I wallow in cliches when I try to articulate what it felt like to be back--the flood of memories that trigger both melancholy and joy, the way things are both the same as I remember them, while at the same time, different enough to be a reminder that what I remember is gone and will never return. In my saddest moments, it seemed like being back provided benchmarks by which to register the accumulated sadnesses of growing older. Time has passed, and what we have to show for it are more regrets, more scars, and perhaps more wisdom born from previously unknown pain. The intangible dissolution of memories we don't even realize we've lost, the tangible decay of places and objects, the increasing incongruity between who people are and who we think they are--these seem to be essential, unavoidable aspects of returning home. With the future so uncertain, it's tempting try and define myself by the past, but upon being in the place where the past occurred, I found my grip on everything behind me was nearly as tenuous as my grip on everything that lies ahead.

A lot of you don't know this, but I have been renting a studio space with three friends of mine since February. They are all visual artists, and I am supposed to be the writer, and together we're supposed to use the space to create art. I haven't mentioned it to many people because in my heart I knew from the beginning it would be a failure. I knew that I wouldn't actually go in there and write. And I haven't, not once since February. My other friends have not fared much better. We can't get out of our lease, so we have to pay rent through January, but two of us have already moved our things out. I have no intentions of going there before the lease is up. I just don't want to. It's a concrete, florescent lit box in an ugly old office building. Anyway, I have lots of excuses why I did not and will not go there. The point is that I never talked about it because I never believed in it.

Over the years, I have felt more and more uncomfortable talking about my artistic ambitions. It sounded more and more pathetic to me to admit I've been dreaming new versions of the same dreams but without making any concrete progress towards them. I have felt like people grew tired of me repeating myself. I have felt like I just sound increasingly deluded. I have felt like talking about my dreams just elicits pity from people. I am still very much afraid of these things.

I say all the time that I don't know what I want to do, but that's not true. I actually have a rich vision of the life I would like to lead. I know my definition of success. I want to pour my time into the pursuit of excellence and truth. I want to be part of rich community of friends who share my values and goals. I want to have a family I love deeply and invest with the time and energy to be an excellent husband and father. I want to live somewhere beautiful and safe and culturally vibrant. I want to be able to afford a comfortable, not excessively luxurious, lifestyle. I want to be well-read, wise from experience, and comforting to those around me. I want to be physically healthy. I want to always be exploring everything: the interior world and the exterior world. I want to be an inspiration.

I still believe, as I have believed for at least a decade, that the best and perhaps only way for me to achieve this is by being an artist. For a complexity of reasons that I have been thinking about for most of that same decade, creating art is the one thing I have avoided doing above all other things.

On Saturday, I set out to change that. I started a book titled THE ARTIST'S WAY and thus began a self-guided, twelve-week course in becoming unblocked as an artist and unleashing my creativity. It is going to require roughly ten to twelve hours a week, I think. I am making a commitment to concrete change in my life for twelve weeks. I am making the pursuit of art a major priority.

Do not tell me if you think this is foolish. Do not tell me if I am eliciting your pity with this post. I do not care if you do not believe this will work. I am writing this to tell you that I believe it will. I am afraid to say so, but I am saying it anyway. I am going for it. Keep me in your prayers. I will need them, of that I am certain.

I bought an XBox 360 last Saturday, and a week later, I am glad I did. It's the first time I've ever had a current generation console of my own. I'm enjoying it even more than I thought I would. On Monday, I'm lending it to a friend for a few weeks so he can play Halo 3 while his XBox is getting repaired by Microsoft, and I can tell I'm going to miss it. It's really opened my eyes to the expanding horizons of video games as a medium. I feel like the best games are blazing new territory and delivering experiences that we can't have with any other media. It's exciting to be on the cusp of something like that, witnessing the discoveries as they happen.

I have been a B-grade student of this life. For me, "good enough" has been good enough. I have talked, but I have not done. I have exceeded expectations, but expectations were very low. I have pursued comfort and ease and avoided risk and difficulty. I have always desired greatness, but I have never achieved it, because I have never worked for it. I have looked to other places and other people to take me to what I desire, but they did not because they cannot. I have not given what is demanded because I have not demanded it of myself. I am the cause of my own dissatisfaction. I am to blame. If I continue to live this way, I will continue to be a loser. I will always be one who loses. I need to change me. Otherwise I have spent all my energy bringing my greatest fear to fruition. If I want to live, I must stop not-living. I must.

My father has spent most of his life looking for rewarding, meaningful, enjoyable work, and he has never found it, but he keeps looking. The other thing he has been looking for is a community, something which he considers to be important for a satisfying life.

From my observations, community seems to be a key part of producing art of quality, at least in collaborative media. The American obsession with the individual, as well as the ideal of the isolated visionary handed down to us from Romanticism, draw attention to the auteur and away from his or her collaborators.

However, I have noticed recently that many of my favorite storytellers worked with the same core group of people their entire careers. This was certainly the case with Ingmar Bergman and his cinematographer and troupe of actors with which he collaborated for over fifty years. It was true of Jim Henson. It is true of Peter Jackson and WETA, who were working together for a decade before they started on Lord of the Rings. It is true of Brad Bird and Pixar. It is true of Almodovar. It seems that many of our most celebrated visionaries are not isolated at all.

I think this is because it is so difficult to birth a new idea and new ways of doing things into the world. The status quo is powerfully oppressive, and it is extremely difficult for a single person to penetrate it on his or her own. However, if you are surrounded by people you trust and who trust you, people who share your passion and your commitment to quality, you can protect each other and support each other, everyone watching everyone else's back.

This kind of community creates an environment where experimentation is safe, where what you are constantly hearing is "you can" instead of "you can't." It's a place where ideas, good and bad, can be shared easily without fear or shame. It's a place that fosters communication, which is perhaps most simply why it is so important. The better people communicate, the more they are able to take their singular energy and unify it into a greater whole.

I think one of the many reasons why all of the content coming out of LA is increasingly bankrupt of quality is because very few of these types of communities exist there any more. Good stories simply cannot be told there because even the tremendously talented and skilled individuals are surrounded by deluded, greedy, perverse people, whose priorities have nothing to do with art. In this place, these brilliant artists really are isolated, left alone on the beach to battle the tides of crap, and, in the end, the tides win.

Ever since high school I've always felt drawn towards bookstores. In all my years since then, I almost never pass a bookstore without going in. In the summers during high school I would end up at the mall at least once a week, and I always walked through Waldenbooks. My sophomore year in Boston, I passed a Barnes & Noble on the walk to and from my dorm, and there were weeks when I went in almost every day. Here in Portland, I make semi-regular trips to Powell's to sell books, and I always stop to look around while I'm there.

The thing is, I just browse. I hardly ever buy books because I own so many already that I want to read. I have so many unread books I feel oppressed by them nearly all the time. So what is the irresistible attraction of browsing through books that I'm almost certainly never going to buy or read? I take a casual glance through all the displays at the front of the store, the staff recommendations, and walk through the fiction section. I usually pick up a few with especially beautiful cover designs. For those, I used to read the back cover, but more often now I read the first two sentences. But what's the point? What am I looking for? Why am I there?

Maybe it's that the thought of going to a bookstore is always exciting. I'm always tempted by an idea that I'll magically find some book that's so brilliant, so right, so truthful that it'll save my life.

Maybe it's that bookstores are both peaceful and full of energy at the same time. There's a reverence in the space because it holds all these objects full of knowledge and wisdom, but its not stifled and quiet like a library; there's more liveliness.

Maybe it's that I like the feeling of being surrounded by so much art. It feels like such a testament to the good people can do in the world that they could fill up more books with valuable insights than could ever be read. I know it seems like that should be a daunting thought, but for some reason, just being in the same place as so many people's creations, not feeling like I have to ingest all of them, is very pleasing to me.

Maybe it's that when I was young, my father quit his job as an accountant and became a used book dealer for a couple years. We would go to used bookstores together and spend a lot of time inside. We didn't browse together; I would go off on my own and find the science fiction and fantasy section first and look for Tolkien books. Then I would go to the humor section and look for Dell paperback Peanuts collections. Then I would just wander around, maybe check out the photography section and look for pictures of naked ladies if I though I could get away with it. I feel very comfortable in bookstores and I wonder if these summer days spent with my father are why. In bookstores, time slows down, or at least, it's passing feels less significant. Petty worries aren't strong enough to get past the doors and are left outside. I feel safe there.

Maybe it's that bookstores make me feel energized, make me want to go home and read all those books I haven't gotten around to, make me want to sit down and write something of my own, make me want to be a part of the community of hearts and minds that have earned a place on those shelves.

Maybe it's just a way to waste some time without feeling too guilty because books are good for you.

Things my father said on the phone yesterday:

The question is not "How should my life unfold?" but "How will my life unfold?"

Meaningful work is work that keeps you aware of what you are doing as you are doing it, aware of your life as you are living it, present.

There are so many things we have automatic responses too, triggers that make us angry about something for always the same reason in always the same way, without us ever stopping to think about our response, or noticing how routine and repetitive our reactions are.

There are "basic truths" we inherit, such as, "work hard and you will be successful," "suffering is noble," "family first," etc. that we rarely stop to examine. Could we list all of the "basic truths" that govern our decisions and actions? Are we sure that they are all, in fact, true? Have we interpreted these truths correctly?

---

I would like to be not so easy to speak ill of people. I think it has become too easy for me to say mean things about people who aren't there--even people who are genuinely bad people, whose actions harm others. Talking trash about them with my friends doesn't change anything. It doesn't alter their behavior or comfort the people they hurt. It only diminishes me and poisons my time with anger and negativity. If I really feel that they are doing something unjust, I should speak up and try to stop what they are doing, or if I can't, then I should be helpful to the people who are negatively effected. I don't want to fight fire with fire.

Only a few weeks into my internship three years ago I noticed the overall tone of negativity in the editorial department. A quiet place where people's work was to be skeptical, be critical. A building filled with people who dreamed of doing something else, somewhere else, but their sacrifices and compromises landed them there.

Six months later when I started working there I noticed more and more pessimism about the future of the comics industry, more and more cynicism about the quality of the material being produced. For a long time I thought of these attitudes as outside of myself, separate and different from my own perspective, but lately I've become aware just how much I have internalized this negative point of view.

For the most part, I didn't even realize it was happening. You'd think I would have been more tipped off by the fact that nearly every conversation (LITERALLY!) I have had with my coworkers outside the office over the past year and a half has been bitching about work. We barely have anything else to talk about.

I'd like to be more positive. I've become really good at recognizing and articulating the problems, and I would like to spend less time reiterating them and more time focusing on creating solutions. I don't want to be a Debbie Downer. I don't want my only way to express my engagement with a piece of art to be making a list of its weaknesses and failures. I don't want to be perceived as grouchy.

Since I am writing this and you are reading it, and I am not a master of words, there are things I know that you will never know, no matter how much I want you to. Sure, there are other ways I could express myself to you, like paintings or dances, but I am not a master of those ways either. And so I am trapped inside myself, broadcasting a message that only I can fully interpret.

When two people are close, close enough to touch and see and hear, and they have been touching and looking and listening for a long time with great intensity, it seems possible for them to weaken the barrier between them and share some of their hidden knowledge. This, as all things precious, is rare and brief, and when it is over, you will wonder if it was only an illusion. Isolated again, there will be no one who could tell you otherwise.

I began this year with a companion and I ended this year without one. Simple enough. Left with memories, I wish I had more, for each moment recalled is clouded by the thought of the numerous others lost, and the knowledge that one by one those that remain will slip away, with no one to help me retrieve them, until only a representative few will reside within their impenetrable home.

In the final days of this year, I try to appreciate pain. I try to turn its omnipresence into revelry, enveloping myself in its dark, thick density in the same way I once basked in the overwhelming brilliance of joy. I tell myself that the experience of ecstatic joy and deep pain are the same. But, I do not really believe it.

Death has become closer to me this year—although expressing it that way is a failure of language, because it is not that I have felt it approach, an outside force waiting to strike me down, but rather I feel it now inside me, always there, waiting to be born. One day, through me it will make itself known to my loved ones and acquaintances, unignoreable for a short time, only to be forgotten again, bringing me with it.

Until that day, I, like everyone else, will keep living somehow. As I enter into the new year, I carry with me the year past, and all my years before that. Unable to share their true dimensions with anyone, I will be their last and solitary keeper, taking them with me as I go forward, until they and I arrive at oblivion.

We ask ourselves, "Who am I supposed to be?" as if there is some sort of ledger outside of us, where our intended purpose is written, and our goal is to find this list and discover what has been written next to our name. Partially, the question is an acknowledgment of the outside forces that shape and frame us--family, school, race, class, religion, culture. We ask because we know that we must take the measure of these many variables if we are to understand how they have impacted us, how these pieces contribute to the picture of us as a whole. We hope than if we understand enough of these fragments, we'll be able to devise a pattern, break the code, enabling us to fill in the blanks that haunt us late at night.

Unfortunately, our identity is hardly that fixed, not merely a map with empty spots to be filled as we discover the contours that lay there all along. By asking this question, we also acknowledge our active role in the formation of our identity. We must think and work to devise our purpose. We build the picture of ourselves just as much as we uncover it. We find the pieces, but then we arrange them in numerous convincing ways with our reason. The fragments are there, undeniable, inescapable, but their meanings are not fixed, so we define them and redefine them to create the story of who we are now, how we because that person, and who we will (and sometimes "should") become.

Somewhere between discovery of what units we are made up of, and what we decide to create with those units, is ourselves. And somewhere, we hope, there is our ideal self, the perfect build that utilizes each part to its maximum efficiency but also realizes the person we dream ourselves to be were we to make it all from scratch. The perfect identity, where the sum of our component parts and the sum of our dreams are equal. The place were our capabilities and our ambitions meet. The search for this harmony between the life we are given and the life we create is a central struggle of existence. If I were a scholar, I would study how art addresses this goal--how it expresses our pursuit of it, and all the ways and reasons we fail to achieve it (perhaps some art chronicles how it is successfully achieved, although my instinct tells me those instances are more rare).

There are forces beyond our control that demarcate certain limits in our lives. Yet, if we are guided only by those forces, delineated only by those limits, we feel empty, robotic, fatalistic, like the living dead, a tool, indiscrete from the environment in which we exist, as if we could be replaced by any other human biological machine. That is why we must be creative with our lives, exploiting the forces that affect us, honing them into a form that we decide, making our experience unique and meaningful. However, to be guided solely by willful ambition is suicidal. Outside influences exist even if we choose to ignore them, and if we do so, we'll eventually end up like Icarus, plummeting to the Earth with the melted wings of our dreams. If we do nothing but resist our bonds they will eventually crush us, like the beach vs. the sea. Instead we need to harness the energy of those connections, manipulate them into something that is important to us, beautiful and powerful. To lead a successful life, we must find the balance between our limits and our ambitions; what we are talented at and what we are passionate about; what we are good for and what is good for us.

I feel like I have been living with this struggle daily for years. I don't know what I'm supposed to be doing, I don't know what I'm supposed to be, but I'm constantly thinking about it, constantly working the possibilities over and over and over. I scour my memory for clues to how I should arrange the picture of myself. Do the events of my life thus far add up to: an editor? a comic book writer? a filmmaker? a professor? something else? It's funny, in a way, I'm analyzing my life like a literary text--trying to piece together supporting evidence into the most inclusive and convincing explanation of meaning, constantly revising my thesis to see if I can find a better fit, a deeper, more satisfying reading of my own life. At the same time, I don't want to be too constrained by the Dave-components I discover. I fear that I let them dictate my future too wholly, that I am restricting my horizon, handicapping my ambitions by ruling out fantasy-selves that have little or no grounding in my experience thus far, but are none the less imaginings that have thrilled me when I have allowed myself the illusion of being able to build myself from scratch into my wildest desires. Am I being a coward? Am I giving up without even trying? Or, am I letting these pipe-dreams distract me from focusing my energies where my true strengths lie? It's so damn hard to find the balance. It's so damn hard to figure out what the fuck to do. And all the while the clock is ticking.

How do I know when something is a sign, a portent, a premonition and when it is just an event, a coincidence, a red herring?

“There’s no such thing as writing on the side,” and “Great artists are obsessed.” These are some comments I’ve heard. From my own reading about professional artists, and my own interactions with some, I believe these comments have some merit. These artists don’t make excuses. They do what they do as much as everyone else doesn’t do what they do. When you spend most of your time doing something, for a long time in a row, it only makes sense that you would be good, maybe even great, at it. When you do something more than everyone else, why wouldn’t you be the best? Your genius is that you do what you do a lot, while everyone else makes excuses, or just does something else. To be transcendent, or to make the business people want to sell you, to make the audience want to buy you, you must do what you do a lot. You must want to, some say need to, do it all the time. Otherwise you are not good enough and no one will care and no one should care. Maybe you could make a living doing less; maybe you could survive as a hack—many do. The professionals already acted like professionals before they were getting paid. They are always thinking about what they do, and doing what they do, and often forgetting to think about a lot of other things other people think about, and forgetting to do a lot of the things that other people do. But that is why they are not other people. Creating is unlike any other task you undertake. That is why you who create, and your lives, are unlike you who do not.

+++

Work is tiring. Work is boring. Work is dulling. Work is repetitive. Work is so easy it’s hard. One fills in forms, prints them out and tapes them to packages. One fills in forms and e-mails them. One receives e-mails. One sends e-mails. One makes photocopies. One paperclips pieces of paper together. One moves paper from one room to another room. One makes sure there are not marks where there should not be marks and makes sure that there are marks where there should be marks. One occasionally concerns oneself with what people will buy and what they will not buy. If one does well, one can concern oneself with that more. One can become Quality Controller of an Inferior Product. One can focus more intently on the insignificant. One can manage a project purchased by those one does not respect. But right now, mostly one fills in forms. Lots and lots of forms. Over and over and over with slightly altered information. One works with the vain and the deluded and the bitter and the lazy. One works with the naive who are occasionally mislabeled the enthusiastic. Some secretly, some not secretly, everyone one works with is “an aspiring ______”, never just “a ______.” One feels like a machine. One feels like the living dead. One does not want to disappoint. One does not want to be selfish. One has leisure. One has comfort. One has security.

I like to joke that, according to their back covers, all novels are about “the transformative power of love and the triumph of the human spirit,” but, in fact, I know firsthand that love is the most powerful anything in all of everything.

In nine days, my girlfriend Lauren will be returning to the United States after serving two years, one month, and twenty-seven days as a Peace Corps volunteer in Panama.

People always respond with surprise when I tell them how long Lauren and I have been apart. They find it incredible that two people could maintain a relationship on one phone call, one letter, and one e-mail a week, only being able to see each other ten days at a time every six months. And that’s fair; it is incredible. People always say how hard it must be. And they’re right; it is hard.

What’s difficult to explain to people is how, despite all of that, I never thought we couldn’t do it. Since the beginning, I knew Lauren was going into the Peace Corps. Very early on, it was obvious, in a lucid, penetrating way that we would do this. I didn’t mull over it, worry about it, weigh the pros and cons as I have done with pretty much every other decision I have ever made. The path was clear, I took it, and that was that.

From then on, the challenges of the undertaking, while real, could not last against us. There were the saddest, loneliest days you can imagine, bitter moments when the person you wanted most to comfort you could not, but they would come and go, while the resolve to see this through was always constant and unwavering. It was a steel framework of my life.

My grandfather says that the key to success is persistence. In this case, he seems to be right, and it was our conviction that allowed us to persist. We knew we had to communicate better over thousands of miles than most people do when they’re in the same room—we took nothing for granted, left nothing important unsaid, and now sometimes it feels like we were right there next to each other through it all.

Lauren and I have said that the reason our relationship succeeds is not that we’re perfect angels who never get fearful or frustrated or petty or angry, but that we’re committed to working everything out. Our interpersonal tools seem to compliment each other’s in such a way that between the two of us, there hasn’t been a problem we couldn’t solve.

It’s so hard to articulate how one knows something beyond knowing, Knows it with the big “K.” It’s quite the experience, and now that I’ve had it in one aspect of my life, I hope to find it in others. Now that I know conclusively that it exists, I cannot stop searching for that level of conviction in my work as well. I believe that somewhere out there, there is a task that I can dedicate myself to completely, and that the decision to do so will be easy.

After this time with Lauren in the Peace Corps, I believe more than ever that anything can be done. The Great are not born that way, they simply find something that clicks with them so entirely that they cannot help but commit themselves to always working at it, until all of a sudden they are doing things no one else has ever done. All of the noise about how hard it is just falls away, because they’re not concerned with any of that. They just do what they knew they were going to do all along.

Everybody wants to be special. Everyone wants to be the young pilot who saves the galaxy, but in reality they’re all just moisture farmers. To be an artist, an entrepreneur, a philosopher, are only a tiny few of the ways people seek to carve meaning out of life, to spend their time doing things they believe will make them worth the work expended to create them that the entropic universe will never be able to spend again. To be creative, to bring order to chaos, tempts to bring us closest to the value we crave. Those who pursue these ends tend to lend a certain nobility to these endeavors, but they still stem from a simple, widespread yearning to be “a contender.” In America, the desire to be special seems to manifest itself most ubiquitously in our society’s bottomless hunger for serving our own vanity.

Land of capitalism’s great triumph, birthplace of big business, America has a long tradition of rewarding greed better than any place on earth and placing the individual above all others. Although our golden shores have already seen the apex of private enterprise come and go—having spawned the multi-national corporation, which has no allegiance to its parent, only to unmitigated consumption—we still maintain a privileged position in late capitalism, our decadence ever increasing in proportion to the worldwide decay wrought by our unquenchable children.

America suckled the corporation at its breasts, Avarice and Self-obsession, until it grew from a babe to a beast, still sucking, a deranged parasite with razor teeth embedded deep in the flesh, feeding and feeding with no regard for the fact that it will eventually murder its host. The macro reflects the micro, and our land of selfish, home of the obese, rushes with incompressible gluttony to devour everything until we encase the planet in non-degradable trash and turn ourselves into dead mountains of rotting fat.

Considering this, it seems obvious how the basic human need to feel meaningful/unique/significant could become devotion to the idol Vanity in god bless America. Some immerse themselves in celebrity worship, dreaming themselves stars of pop, rock, film, tv, where the discussion of their private lives amongst strangers would make their actions matter, where the recognition of their face amidst any crowd would make them unique, where the power wrought by their media presence would make them more significant than the voiceless, faceless, indistinguishable suffering masses. The richer you are, the more people know who you are, thus the more cemented your identity as an individual is. The poorer you are, the more invisible you become, your individual life dissolving into being merely a statistic. Fame is just one part of the pursuit of satisfaction through vanity, believing that you become worth more than others every time another person pays attention to you.

Constantly feeding the association of satisfaction and vanity is what keeps America’s economic engine (of destruction) running. If you’re rich then you must be a better, more significant person than everyone who is poorer than you. You must purchase whatever will signify your wealth—a certain car, a certain brand of clothes, etc. What you buy tells the world how much you matter. The more expensive something is, the more exclusive it is, thus equating wealth with being special. This is a deception that serves only the corporations, because it just makes people buy things, it doesn’t give them meaning.

To paraphrase The Incredibles: when everyone is extraordinary, no one is. No one actually cares what kind of car you’re driving down the highway with the thousands of other cattle herding on the daily commute. They might notice your Hummer for a moment, but never more than that. More importantly, it’ll never make anyone think you’re more important than they are.

Massive multiplayer online role-playing games have millions of players around the world. I spent a fair amount of time in one of the first ones, Ultima Online. Ostensibly, the reason one would pay a monthly subscription fee to play online is the ability to team up with other people and build a community to make adventuring more fun and dynamic than playing alone. However, once online, I quickly learned why people were really playing: to show off, get recognition, be important.

As a game genre, RPGs are classic power fantasies. They enable people who feel powerless (children, geeks/nerds, white collar slaves, the ugly, the alienated, etc.)—allowing them to imagine themselves as socially solvent, highly capable, eminently desirable, influential, commanding individuals. The constant gratification of feeling like you’re always gaining in power and significance is an integral part of any popular single-player RPG, so it makes perfect sense that increasing that perpetual affirmation would be the first thing on an RPGer’s mind when playing with other people. When you’re playing by yourself, it’s the mechanics of game design that make you feel important, but as soon as there’s other people involved, you can compare yourself to them, and imagine them being in awe of you for being so much better than them. Again, it is the appeal to vanity that serves the longing to be exceptional.

The self-centered impulse of real life in America flawlessly transposed itself on to the virtual life of Ultima Online. No one worked together, everyone killed and stole from each other as much as possible, any opportunity to cheat to get ahead was sniffed out and exploited. People dedicated endless hours to nothing but repeating actions, doing little more than clicking a mouse button thousands of times since the compelling storyline of a single-player game didn’t even exist as people were supposedly “creating their own destiny.” If the players primarily consisted of people who could not find community in their actual lives, how could it be expected that they would suddenly develop the social skills to find community in their digital one?

One time, someone figured out how to hack the program so that you could dye clothes true black rather than the gray color the game graphics normally counted as black. In order to be super cool, nearly everyone dyed their clothes true black so they would stand out. The pursuit of being recognized as unique created a visual record of how everyone was actually the same.

The grand irony of Ultima Online was that with each person so focused on having the most rare equipment, the highest stats, the most gold, so that everyone else could marvel at him or her as the true hero of Sosaria, no one gave a damn about anyone else. No one paid any attention to other players’ skills or stats or equipment. No one cared how you decorated your virtual house or what you named your virtual dog. Introducing other people into the game made them play more solitarily than they did when they were actually alone. It revealed how the basic premise of RPGs—and significance through vanity—is just an illusion. When everyone is the hero, no one is.

Of course, the consequences of dedicating one’s life to the false hope of recognition offered by the game had real consequences. Finding it easier to earn money, gain influence, and develop skills in the digital world than in the real one, some people ended up spending a lot of time playing; so much time that their real lives suffered. Plus, all of the things they spent all that time earning inside the game were valueless outside of it. There is a parallel here to all those people who sell their labor to a corporation only so that they may buy from another corporation all of the products they believe will make their lives worthwhile only to find that satisfaction eludes them and they are out of time.

In the world of vanity, you seek meaning through the recognition of others, but they, just like you, are only recognizing themselves, therefore rendering everyone worthless. No one will ever notice your new clothes more than you will. There’s so many unique outfits, that none of them are unique. No one cares. The same goes for cosmetics, and job titles, and credits at the end of the movie. When everyone only cares about everyone else paying attention to them, no one pays any attention to anyone but themselves.

Collecting is analogous. Collectors are obsessed with accumulating objects of rarity. They want property that the fewest number of other people can also possess. The more rare your collection is, the more special you are for owning it. But the objects are not intrinsically connected to you. Anyone could own them. In fact, you are what gives them meaning, not the other way around. When you die, they cease to be your collection, and return to just being objects. Collectors love to talk about the value of their collections, yet as soon as an object becomes part of a collection, it loses all value in an economic sense, because the collector is keeping it, not selling it. This is the paradox of the collector, defining the value of your collection in terms of how much you could sell it for when selling your collection would cease to make it your collection or you a collector.

Everyone wants to believe that when the asteroid comes to collide with earth, they’ll be one of the ones chosen to go into the underground bunker because their life is more valuable than so many others. But existence is not structuralist. Value is not defined in relation to others. To weigh all things on the scales of the unfathomable cosmos is to rending everything meaningless and meaningful. So it must come from somewhere else.

I like to think about how far beyond comprehension existence really is. Our feeble minds can barely grasp the smallest segment. I like to think about how every moment, everything is happening. Right now, something so unbelievably beautiful is happening that you could not imagine it in your wildest dreams, and in this same moment, something so unspeakably horrible is happening that to know its truth conclusively in your heart would plunge you into the darkest depths of madness. Heaven and hell and everything in between exist here, now and now and now.

A few Fridays ago I found myself facing an entire weekend with no one particular to do anything with and because I have a bad habit of purchasing more media than I can possibly consume, I decided to stay in and watch “The Prisoner,” a British television show I had acquired all of the episodes of over two years ago. I have books waiting for me that I bought three and four years ago, and magazine articles dating as far back as five, but I was in the mood for some serious TV.

I think the last TV show I watched regularly was the first season of Star Trek Voyager back when I was in seventh grade. I remember talking to Brian Applegate about the first episode at the back of our math class. When people ask me how I fell out of watching television, I tell them it’s because I’ve never had cable: an obvious, logical, and sweetly short answer. Certainly, it’s at least part of the reason, since it not only reduced my accessibility to programming considerably, but was also indicative of parents who failed to have a television habit to pass on to me. Without regular exposure, MTV or Comedy Central or HBO or whatever couldn’t capture me along with the rest of my demographic. Without regularly scheduled viewing over a long period of time, I just filled up my days with other things, until the idea of sitting down at a certain time every week became foreign to me, and even burdensome, because I couldn’t even get done all the things I already had on my “list” (for years I really did keep a list).

However, it’s interesting to note that while I never took up TV viewing, I did pick up the only other form of serial entertainment remaining in our culture: comics. I’m not really sure what that means, but I like to think about how the habit of buying comics weekly is as ingrained in me as the habit of watching TV is in pretty much everyone else. I realized this a couple years back, and it was essential in helping me understand a cornerstone in why the “comic book” or “pamphlet” sold through comic shops is a dead delivery system for the medium.

Just as it seems highly unlikely to me that I will ever become a regular television watcher without a serious concerted effort, it is equally unlikely that the 99.99% of Americans who don’t buy comics every week will ever establish a habit of doing so. Actually, it is nearly infinitely more unlikely that they will ever buy comics regularly, considering that there is a TV in nearly every single home in America, yet there are only something like 1,300 comic shops in the entire country. There are entire states that don’t have one comic shop. Not only that, but the unwavering decline in movie attendance since 1953 shows that Americans are increasingly uninterested in leaving their homes for entertainment. Not only that, but 90% of the material sold in the infinitesimally small number of remaining comics shops is completely inaccessible to anyone outside of the established audience of roughly 100,000 white men, thirty to fifty years of age, whose tastes for entertainment have been so perverted by their sickening nostalgia and over twenty years of reading about the same characters (endlessly maintained by corporations that care about nothing but maintaining trademarks that can be licensed into action figures, cartoons, and now movies) as to make comics catered to them incomprehensible and repulsive to anyone without a mind as twisted as theirs. As I said to some friends over lunch at Chang’s Mongolian Grill a month or so ago, looking at “mainstream” comics is like watching a bum die of AIDS alone in a gutter. Essentially, the only way “comic books” could gain a new reader is if that person was strapped down to a chair with their eyes pried open and forced fed the last few remaining serials that don’t suck so hard they make the murder of bunnies and kittens seem soothing: definitely a much more difficult proposition than my sitting down and turning on the TV that already sits in my living room across from my comfortable couch.

Yet, do not despair as I sometimes have, because even though the incestuous horror that genre (especially, especially superhero) comic books have become is bankrupt morally, intellectually, and financially (buttressed up mostly by corporate licensing and a tiny bit by the ever dwindling ranks of the deranged cult of superhero loyalists) comics as a medium are flourishing elsewhere, slowly building a small but stable foundation that will eventually allow the industry to leave the deformed limb of “mainstream” comics a vestigial hanger-on that can one day fall off unnoticed and unmourned. Manga, translated Japanese comics, is being embraced in droves by the same kids that have been alienated for decades from the comic books that most Americans ignorantly thought were for them. Graphic novels/ art comics/ comics literature/ sequential art are being published at a greater rate than any other time in history, as a literate, art-savvy, upper-class, audience becomes increasingly aware of material that can satisfy their rarefied college-educated tastes and desire to be hip. The future of comics has a spine and comes in a bookstore. Warner Bros. can rape the ideas of Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel to death, but they cannot destroy the medium those two young men helped launch into the world.

Art and media change over time. Comics were that, and now they’re this, and soon they’ll be something else. While its easy to see this change as the erosion of culture as our decadent society degrades on the ceaseless march toward Armageddon, and while that may in fact be the truth, the change is ubiquitous enough as to be comforting with the idea, albeit probably delusional, that change is merely that, and truly the only unchanging fact since the beginning of the beginning of the beginning. Perhaps the theatre really isn’t dead. Perhaps poetry was always an inaccessible elitist medium to which no one paid any attention. Perhaps the rich need their museums and their symphonies and their ballets and their operas just as much as the poor need their NASCAR and their state fair and their rodeo and their square dance. And if there’s one thing I believe, it’s that everything and everyone is heading to the limitless, ceaseless blackness of oblivion and there’s nothing anyone can about it. So hey, whatever, live it up, right?

But I’ve gotten off topic. The Prisoner debuted in 1968. It stared an actor named Patrick McGoohan, who was just coming off an extremely popular TV show titled Secret Agent in which he surprisingly played a spy. Even though The Prisoner only consists of eighteen episodes, its one of the best known and mostly highly regarded shows in the history of television. At least, that’s what I’ve learned from reading the box. (I haven’t looked it up online at all because I haven’t finished the series yet and I don’t want to read anything that will mistakenly ruin the ending.) I’m pretty sure that’s why my Aunt bought me the first few episodes on VHS for Christmas one year and why my mom bought the rest (for herself actually-- I’m going to mail the series to her when I’ve watched all eighteen).

My perception of contemporary television vacillates somewhere between shock and disgust. The one television habit I have developed is watching for about 5 minutes at a time, usually standing up, flipping through the broadcast channels (since I still don’t have cable) until I seem something that’s embarrassing to my shared humanity or it’s all just boring and then I turn it off. On average, I’d say I do this about once a day. What I’ve garnered from these many short sessions is that TV really is the “idiot box” my grandmother used to call it.

Almost everything seems to be convincing you that you need to buy some product, not just the commercials themselves, but the programming as well, especially the morning shows like The Today Show and Good Morning America. There is never actually useful information provided in these programs at all, they’re entirely pitches for new products, fashions, or entertainments. However, the real distressing fact is that these shows are on concurrently with the local morning news, which also don’t have any useful information in them. The local news repeats the weather and the traffic over and over and over, occasionally interspersing it with a story about a local rape, murder, car accident, or funny animal story. It’s terrifying to realize that television is where most people get their news from, yet it doesn’t actually show any news. No wonder people respond so ignorantly to the machinations of our government and multi-national corporations; the have no idea what’s going on because they have no way of finding out. At least, no way that’s part of the habits in which they’ve entrenched themselves.

Whatever isn’t advertising seems to be pure spectacle, designed to stimulate people on the simplest levels: fear, lust, laughter. Reality shows, talk shows, court shows, all function on public humiliation, empowering the viewer by showing them the diminishment of others. Law shows, cop shows, hospital shows, all function on fear of death, pain, and suffering. They thrive off the alienation that’s driven everyone to the suburbs thinking cities are bad because if you’re not careful, there’s always someone around the corner waiting to rape and/or kill you and/or your family. Better stay in your ADT-protected McMansion and watch more TV. Of course, there’s sex in the reality shows and dramas and sitcoms just to keep everyone at half-mast so they associate that dull feeling of knee-jerk arousal with whatever they’re watching, and hopefully, the products being peddled during the commercial breaks. In truth, everything is a soap opera. It’s always about the soap, all the noise and bright colors in-between just empties out your mind and lets some deep-rooted animal self take over after an equally mind-numbing, soul-crushing day at your 8:30-5:30 office job with no windows. It seems as if TV has even less to offer than the gladiatorial arenas of ancient Rome where beasts and men were slaughtered to keep the audience docile, but we’ve all seen The Matrix, so there’s no reason to go there.

This is the landscape of television from which I entered into The Prisoner, and why I was stunned not only by its dramatic quality, but its constant insistence that its audience think. Never could I imagine a program showing on broadcast television today that so thoroughly challenges its viewers and questions every cornerstone of contemporary social institutions. Add to that the fact that the show was hugely popular in its time, and the whole idea just seems ludicrous. Truly, if there was ever a sign of the degradation of mass culture from then until now, this would be it.

The premise of the show is that Patrick McGoohan decides to retire from his illustrious career as a British spy. However, just after he completes his last mission, he is gassed, and wakes up in a place called the Village. In the Village, everything is named what it is: Town Hall, Restaurant, Old Folks Home, etc. and none of the inhabitants have names, only numbers. McGoohan is Number Six. Number Two (a different person every episode) is supervisor of the Village and always leading attempts to have Number Six give up the valuable information he’s acquired working as a spy. However, it is unknown who is behind the Village, his own government who now considers him a risk, or a foreign power who wants to steal his secrets. Supposedly, everyone in the Village retains similar kinds of information, except all of the people who work at the Village that are imbedded amongst the crowd, trying to glean information from the others. Of course, McGoohan is always trying to escape, but is always foiled.

Given this situation, already a fascinating meta-narrative exists, considering that McGoohan played a spy on British TV immediately before The Prisoner. There are numerous opportunities to read Number Six’s decisions as metaphorical for McGoohan’s own choices as artist, the crowd’s crucifixion of the popular attempting to leaving popularity behind, questioning the conscience of mainstream culture, trying to regain his identity as an individual when the world sees him only as a role he played, and that’s just a few of the most obvious connections.

Yet, more than this meta-narrative, more than the quality of the writing and performance, more than its quirky setting, more than its exciting plot, The Prisoner astonished me when I realized that every episode is an allegory. Through variations on the theme of Number Two trying extract information from Number Six, and Number Six trying to escape the Village, pretty much every aspect of contemporary society is examined, and ultimately, torn apart. Every time I watch a new episode it challenges what I thought were the limits of mass media culture. The show’s conclusions are extraordinarily radical, yet at the same time, were beamed into millions of homes across the globe every week. Nothing escapes the scalpel in The Prisoner: education is social programming, the law is a farcical set of arbitrary rules that collapse in on itself, democratic opinion is simply blind conformity to majority norms, governing bodies are interested only in their own preservation, the subjugator and the subjugated are enslaved to each other in an endlessly reciprocal relationship, identity is simply an amalgamation of received stimuli, sanity and insanity are labels created only by group consent, and on and on and on. Truly, The Prisoner sets out to prove that nothing and no one can be trusted.

While an obvious conclusion might be that the individual is the only bastion of truth and meaning in an otherwise insane world, even this has not proven to be true. Number Six, while always undertaking revolutionary action against the Village, whatever he achieves must always be within the rules of whatever social game he gets embroiled in that episode. He cannot step outside the game, even to resist it, but more importantly, he always fails to escape. At the end of every episode, the status quo returns. While he may be able to expose the machinations of society, he cannot alter them. His individuality proves to be as meaningless as every other social construction.

At the very least, the ultimate message of the show (now that I’m 12 episodes into it) is anarchistic, and at the most, entirely nihilistic. Maybe that’s why I like it so much. But could you imagine such a message coming from mass media today? I certainly couldn’t. It definitely doesn’t make you want to buy soap. It fills your mind with ideas, rather than empties it. It forces you to ask questions, to look at the robot life you lead with a critical eye. No, the corporations have become far too savvy to let Truth slip through the cracks anymore. Sure, dissenting voices exist, but they’re so marginalized that only those who already agree with them know to seek them out. We live in a fascist era where consensus is created not by fear, but through a bombardment of propaganda so complete that the majority believe it to be reality itself. The corporations may not be able to get away with mass murder and torture of citizens to keep them in line (yet) but they can usurp their minds until they recite the party line believing it were their own name. The bad guys always want more, and are willing to do anything to get it, and they will, until everything is gone. We can, and will, rage against this dying of the light, because it’s the right and heroic thing to do, but we will lose.

Anyway, The Prisoner is a good show. You should watch it. And if you’ve already seen it, don’t spoil the ending for me.

This is a ramble. If I keep everything noiselessly bouncing inside my lonesome head, I am going to go fucking insane.

The music industry has been bitching about dropping record sales for at least 5 years now, spending most of that time blaming the internet. Apparently, cinema ticket sales have been in a steady decline since 1948. I think there's something like 1000 comic bookstores left in the US, 95% of which sell superhero comics so perverted that they're inaccessible to anyone outside the graying 100,000-150,000 white men who buy them. Certainly, prose books sell better than that, but they're still generally in the thousands, not the millions of TV.

So what is pop culture anymore? What is the mainstream? Is culture just fracturing to the point where you're only speaking to the people who already know what you're going to say? All these little groups just admiring their own reflections? Have things always been this way? With all these declining numbers, what is everyone doing, watching TV? But how can that make sense, how can TV be any kind of cultural barometer, since it seems to simply be an endless variation on carney "look at the alligator man" spectacle--an infinite barrage of watching lions munch on gladiators. There's no message there, no voice.

I have a fear that all these declines are actually a reflection of people having less time for leisure because greedy fucking monsters from hell are running the show and winning on the backs of the ignorant and the power of evil, rich men willing to do anything to keep their grasp on their power and wealth. People don't go to movies or read or whatever because they're too busy working, worrying about their shitty health insurance, worrying about the declining quality of their children's education, worrying about job security, worrying about getting blown up or drowned or whatever because the state has proven that when the shit hits the fan you can only count on yourself. Two parents working their 50 hour weeks, there's no time to think, there's no time to hear anything but the committee generated drivel pumped over the Clear Channel network into the 7-11, there's no time for being alive, let alone a little entertainment, besides the "he/she behind the curtain for a nickel" kind.

Has culture always been this fractured, has fame always been generated by the studios to make more money, have the things worth saying always been kept away from the ears of anyone besides those who are simply affirmed by its hearing? Has feudalism just been replaced by multinational corporations and the puppet governments who make sweet love to them with their behinds? Have the downtrodden always been so and will always be so? It seemed like for a while the US really was going to forge a new and better society for humanity, and be a shinning "beacon on the hill" for the world. Was this just an illusion? Was it always inevitable that the bad guys are going to be triumphant, at least until they too are gobbled up by the insatiable void? If not, how did we get off track? Where did we go wrong?

How did we get so busy with our horrible office robot lives that we forget to keep an eye on all of the unscrupulous villains that now seem to call all the shots? With culture so fractured, is it now impossible to wake the unclean beast of the masses from their Fox News, Christian Coalition, Pottery Barn opiate sleep? Can such a beast ever do anything except eat itself anyway? So here we are, everything cocked up just as bad as its ever been, maybe worse but certainly not better, where do we go now? No one is steering this ship, no one can, because everyone is, only with their eyes poked out and nails in their ears and their jaws wired shut and their hands can't ever stop moving or they'll die. So can please someone tell me, what the fuck happens next? Because the only solace I can find is the fact that the abyss will accept all of us, any everything we know, into its oblivion. All we have is hope, because that's the best people can do, because that's what the hero does, even though he knows that the real and only story is a tragedy.

On Sunday, I drove through a town that was off of a major highway that was comprised entirely of strip malls and condos. At first I thought there must be more, and as I continued to drive, I became obsessed with the idea and kept looking and kept looking until I knew for certain there was nothing else. The church across from the multiplex, the police station next to a salon, nest after gated nest of condo complexes blurring into each other all with different names that sounded the same. Bedrooms for commuters who spend their days in cubicles in glass and steel buildings making photocopies, sending e-mails, having meetings. This is my world; this is my life. You tell me what the fuck it means.

I feel like I am trapped inside myself, a me of beauty and vitality and significance imprisoned inside, clawing at a hard, dull shell of habit, routine, comfort, and following the rules. It has not broken through. Fuck this world for making me this way and fuck me for letting it. If the change I seek ever comes (for me, which will then of course change the world), I will sing its praises, Hallelujah. It is taking too goddamn long. And don't tell me how to fix it.

My last post was really conflating three separate things which have been bothering me lately:

(1) Despair about the current state of the world and the role the US is playing in it.
(2) Unanswered questions about Christianity (and religion as a whole) that have kept me from embracing it.
(3) Anger at fanaticism and fundamentalism.

So, I'd like to address these things separately, in order, because I realize that it was a mistake to mix them all up.

---

(1)
I am increasingly upset about the shape of world affairs. The main question that has been almost exclusively plaguing my discussions and thoughts in the past few weeks is: "How do we affect good in the world?" Every time I feel like I can argue that something does good, I am immediately able to come up with an argument as to why it is ineffectual. Does art and literature change the world when its audience is restricted to those who can afford museums and higher education, or, if you want to be more inclusive, those who can afford movie tickets or televisions? Does teaching change the world, when you're only 45 minutes out of 180 days of some kid's life? Does being a social/development worker change the world, when the current economic system not only creates but requires a permanent global underclass? Does being a politician change the world, when you're only a single voice in an institution that's been systematically designed to make it as hard as possible to change the status quo, that's filled with selfish interests, that's power is unofficially usurped by multinational businesses anyway? We could keep going, you get the idea.

And those are only vocations that are driven by an intentional desire to do good. What about all those people who are working just as hard, not to relieve suffering or empower others, but to decrease the corporate bottom line and increase value for shareholders? Or what about all the people that aren't even driven by greed, but simply by ignorant selfishness, who just worry about what their shoes say about them and where they will fly on their next vacation? Or what about all the people who have compromised by offering their labor to a corporation who's policies result in suffering, in order that their families at least will be spared that suffering, essentially displacing it onto someone in another place that can then be ignored? At the very best all these people are not doing any harm, but at the very worst they're helping to strengthen the incredibly unjust infrastructure of our planet.

So then, when you balance all those people who are working for good no matter how small, against all these people who are simply trucking along with little sight beyond themselves, it seems to me that the possibility for lasting change is pretty much canceled out, thus explaining why the world seems to be going consistently downhill. Most Americans aren't profiting from the Iraq War in a direct way like Haliburton, but they're comfortable enough in the status quo that they're not interested in upsetting it in order to keep some Iraqis (or even American soldiers) from being killed. Put more simplistically, the bad guys are winning, not because there are a lot of bad people, but because there are so many people who refuse to consider little outside their immediate circumstances. That was what I meant by "willful ignorance" and the harm that it does. These are really the "zombies." It was a mistake to confuse that with the nature of faith and my concerns about Christianity, because I realize now that they're not the same thing. Although, I do think that this "willful ignorance" is a close relative of the "blind faith" of fanatics and fundamentalists, which is something else that I was angry about(see (3)). Can you see how these 3 issues got mashed together in my mind?

But, before I move on to (2), a final word and question about doing good in the world. Given this very frustrating state of affairs that I've just laid out for you--a world of increasing human suffering and decreasing natural resources--I've currently arrived at only two comforting conclusions about the fight to affect positive change in the world. 1. The only good that is possible, is the good you make with your own hands. By that I mean, that the only good that you can count, tally up, in this world is the good that you personally witness, that you personally make with your own energy. You build a house for someone, you make soup for a sick friend, you teach a child to read--it doesn't matter how fucked up the world is, no one and nothing can take away that single act of goodness which you have created with your own two hands, no matter how small it is. 2. Even if it is hopeless, what reason is there not to try? I mean, we are alive, so since we're forced to be here, why not work to do good, even if it won't change anything? Right? It doesn't matter how many selfish, deluded people there are. What the hell else are we going to do? Sit around and complain? :-)

So, I've arrived at those conclusions. Now here's my question: I want to do more. How? How can we increase the good we do in this world? How? This is the big question for me right now. Give me some ideas, cause I need help on this one.

---

(2)
I am not an atheist. I have never been able to comfortably wear that term, and there have been times in my life when I've tried. One reason is because my personal experience tells me that there is a spiritual aspect to existence. Rationality, the senses, just don't cut it. I know there's more out there, know it, not think it. That reason is emphasized by the fact that there are a lot of religions out there saying similar things. Sure, some of that repetition is a factor of societies creating an institution to serve similar needs, but despite that, with all these different people in all these different places, they must be on to something, right? Another reason is science can't explain it all. I mean, it certainly makes sense to believe there is some creative force that made it all happen, right? So, I suppose all this makes me an agnostic.

I was raised Roman Catholic (not particularly rigorously) but many years ago I stopped associating myself with that faith because of what I felt were irreconcilable differences between the doctrines of the religion and my personal values. Some of those irreconcilable differences I articulated in my questions yesterday.

This might surprise you, but I want to believe. There have been many times in my life when I have wanted to feel the sense of community that I see religions provide. Times when I have wanted to belong to a group that shares my core values, that helps articulate the unexplainable parts of existence that I experience. I am tired of being alone in my spiritual life.

But, I cannot belong to an institution that professes values that I know in my heart to be wrong. Because then I would just be faking it. Do you understand? To go through the motions, believing in some of it and not believing in other parts of it is not good enough for me. Because in that case I am still outside of the community, I am still alienated and alone, even if I say or appear like I'm part of the group.

That is why these questions are so important to me. It's like, all my life, the only thing those questions have elicited are responses with a complexity ranging somewhere between "shut up, kid" to "I don't know, that's the way it is, just have faith."

So here are some concessions (***), and much more importantly, some concerns (--->) that I'd like to hear more about:

--->It seems to me that Christianity contains a significantly misogynistic doctrine. Most troubling for me, is the belief that God is gendered male. That seems to me to be clearly biased. I cannot believe that the creator of all things would be gendered. How do you accommodate for this if it's clearly indicated in the Bible? There are other things as well, such as Eve having a subjugated role to Adam. I would venture to guess there are other instances in the Bible that mark women as inferior that I don't know about since my reading knowledge of the Bible is very limited. Something that I am unwilling to tolerate about the Roman Catholic church is the inability for women to serve as ministers. What are denominations of Christianity where this is not the case? I could not be a member of an institution that told me biased gendering was built into creation all the way up to God, because I know in my heart of hearts that is not true.

***I concede that my assumption that the Bible is sort of "ideologically edited" to fit contemporary bourgeois values was unreasonable. What I was trying to articulate was my frustration with instances that I have perceived a certain whitewashing of the Bible to make it politically correct. An excellent example of this would be someone answering my previous question about misogyny in the Bible by dismissing those passages as "outdated parts we don't really pay attention to anymore" because doing so doesn't actually answer the question. What would be even worse is if my Church leaders just never told me those passages existed and just hoped I wouldn't find them on my own and harp on them. That kind of behavior is unsatisfactory to me, because it undermines Christianity's claim on the Truth. It seems reasonable to me that Christianity must accountable, in some way, for everything that is written in the Bible.

***I also concede that my claim of parts of the Bible being disproved by science was hasty. I don't know, but it's possible no such instances may exist outside of Genesis, which in and of itself can be interpreted in a way that does not clash with certain facts of chronology. In fact, I am even willing to concede the possibility the idea of immaculate design (especially for humans) within the model of evolution. I really can accept that. However, I cannot accept that evolution is entirely bullshit. This is an argument I have had with fundamentalists (see (3)) who insist that the evolutionary model must be entirely thrown out because it conflicts with the Bible. It is true that evolution isn't proven, but that's semantics, because nothing in science is "proven." However, evolution clearly offers an extraordinarily useful and effective explanation for the development of life on Earth. Outside of those with religious agendas, it is not seriously disputed as being 100% false. That just seems to me to being a replaying of Galileo. I could not belong to an institution that insisted on such a literal interpretation of creation.

***I concede that miracles happen, although not in the prime-time TV sense. I believe that there are things that happen in the world all the time that are unexplainable by the schema of reason and science, and it was my shortsightedness to not realize that just as easily as those things that fall outside of the boundary could be labeled "madness" or "ghosts" or whatever, could just as easily fall under the rubric of "miracle."

--->Ok, I think I am willing to accept "love the sinner, hate the sin" as more than rhetoric, but I have a particular instance where I feel the church goes against this very idea. For a long time, and currently, Christianity in the United States has been involved in pushing for antiabortion legislation. Now, legislatively I am pro-choice, personally I am pro-life. Which is to say, in my own life, I would not choose an abortion. However, I believe that abortion must stay legal so that women who have them have access to real doctors and real medical facilities. I know that women will have abortions whether or not they're legal, but if they are illegal, some of those women will suffer and die horribly because they don't have access to people with medical training or sanitary facilities. For the Church to lobby for pro-life legislation is to essentially judge and condemn these women here on earth: it is saying, "If they have an abortion, and they bleed to death in an alleyway, then they got what they deserved." Does not my position adhere to "love the sinner, hate the sin," while their does not? I wish there were no more abortions, but, as long as there are, isn't it our responsibility to "love" and protect the life of these "sinners"? Sure, preach that it's a sin, work really hard to convince people not to do it in the same way you'd work to convince people not to commit any sin, but don't work to enforce laws that result in the death of these women. Isn't that just casting the first stone, as it were? However, my position immediately ostracizes me from pretty much all the churches that I know of. Do you know otherwise? There is a somewhat similar problem with churches lobbying to create antigay marriage laws. Perhaps what I'm moving towards is saying that there is a real problem when churches involve themselves with politics. Do you know of denominations that agree with this? I mean, shouldn't they be focusing on our spiritual lives?

***I concede that the imperfection of humanity, and abuse of the title "Christian" is behind the atrocities committed by the Church. What I am really saying is that I can never belong to an institution that supports any, any, any of this kind of hate-mongering in any way. I cannot tolerate any Jew-blaming, homosexual-hating, etc., or anything that even closely resembles that kind of judgment of others. I cannot go around believing that friends of mine who are homosexual partners are going to Hell when they die. I can't believe in a God who would send these people to Hell for loving each other. I just can't hold that in my heart, and I couldn't associate myself with people who could. That's REALLY important to me. I will not subscribe to a group that damns other people. I will not.

--->Ok, this is a really big one, maybe the biggest, relating back to that last one. I didn't really get into it in my last letter, although I did touch on it in my discussion of "those who don't know about Christ going to Hell."
Now, here's my problem. If you're Christian, you must believe that the only way to Heaven is through Christ. So, doesn't this require you to believe that one who subscribes to another religion is not going to Heaven? If that's really the case, then how can any sort of interfaith dialogue exist? Because it demands that you believe that their faith is wrong, that the only Truth is Christian Truth.
See, I could understand how you could TOLERATE someone else's religion under such a belief, but it would be impossible to RESPECT their religion. Even though you never said anything, you'd always be thinking in the back of your mind that these people are going to Hell because they are not following Christ. That is not something I could live with in my daily life. I could not go around believing that all my Jewish friends, Muslim friends, Buddhist friends, etc., were going to Hell. I could not live with that kind of judgment in my heart all the time. This "one and not the other" mentality seems so obviously wrong to me, so obviously unjust that I feel it in my very core.
And I think it also underpins my concern that hate is an underlying problem with a religion that tells you there's "only one way." I realize now that hate is too strong a word, but there is something that is...negative...towards any person who does not believe as you do when you say that your way is the only way.
And here's another problem: if you say that, no, in fact other religions DO successfully address people's spiritual lives, then doesn't Christianity lose its cache? Doesn't that immediately denigrate religion into a series of moral codes? I mean, at that point, why don't you just follow the laws of your country and be done with it?
Can you see why this one is such a serious question for me? I want something that addresses spiritual truths, not just moral ones, but I am unwilling to go through my life passing judgment on people. That's not something I could ever get myself to believe in.

So, those are my concerns at the moment. To conclude this section, I have a question more personal to all of you, which would be really helpful I think, which is: How did you find a faith that fit you? I mean, most of us were born into a religion, but I can't imagine as kids most of us really knew what was really going on in any sort of complex way. At what point did you stop being the jittery kid being dragged to church by your parents and you actually made a conscious decision to be there, to listen, to believe? Did you all join the denominations they were born into? Do you think it's possible that you chose it simply because you were indoctrinated in it your entire life? Ultimately, when and how did you choose your faith? If you're a practicing Christian, but there's a lot that you disagree with in the contemporary Christian religion, how does that work? How do you reconcile the things that you disagree with still calling yourself Christian? How do you believe in some but not all?

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(3)
I generalized fanatics and fundamentalists with all devout believers and that was wrong. I was judging the bunch by a few bad apples or whatever the saying is. But, what I was trying to express was a real rage I feel about how many fucking bad apples there are. I mean, be honest people, aren't there moments when you think the world would be better off if the religions disappeared and all these people in the middle east and northern Africa lost a major excuse for killing each other? Granted, that's not really the problem or the answer, but it's something that's crossed my mind in the past.

I was also using fanatics as the point by which to compare problems I see in religion with the problems I am seeing in the world at large (see (1)). Does that make more sense? They were my lynch pin in an attempt to tie a whole bunch of different things together, that I have since realized it was not beneficial to tie together.

I think another reason I made such generalizations was that I was really on the offensive. The only other times I've ever brought up these questions to anyone other than fellow non-Christians was when I felt so insulted by a "devout" person's opinion that I could not stay silent. In the past, my doubts have been met with stone cold denials, being told that, yes, in fact, I am definitely going to Hell, or stuff like, "I feel so sorry for you." I cannot stand being treated that way. It makes me so angry, which is at least part of the reason I've been silent with these questions for so long. But once I realized that people are actually willing to talk and not fight about these things, I realized how interested I really am in getting some answers.

But to conclude, I do think that fanaticism and fundamentalism is something that we need to do something about. Just as I'd like to do something about the other forms of willful ignorance I mentioned that seem to be causing a whole lot of harm in the world. In (1), I already asked how we can do good in the world so here I'll ask: How do you combat fanaticism and fundamentalism within your faith?

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Ok, I am exhausted.

Preface: "There is No Revolution, There is Reality TV"

It seems to me lately that "willful ignorance" is the driving principle behind the contemporary American experience. Buy your toys at WalMart and your clothes at the mall and forget the sweatshop labor that produced them. Drink your milk and eat your chicken and forget the animals that were tortured to provide them. Drive your BMW and forget that we're running out of oil. Carry your Gucci bag and forget the billions of people on the planet who's exploited labor sustains your way of life. Forget that we trained the terrorists with guns we gave them to fight the commies. Forget that millions of Americans have no health insurance. Forget that there were no weapons of mass destruction.

Of course, I am stating the obvious. And that's because, it seems to me, somewhere along the line, the obvious stopped being stated. No one answered our questions, we just stopped asking them.

So, I have some obvious questions that have been re-nagging me lately, so I thought I'd re-ask them, not because I actually think anyone will answer them, but for a little pleasant catharsis on this sunny Thursday afternoon.

Willful ignorance seems to me to be particularly prevalent in Christianity. I am certain it is equally endemic in all religions, as it is essentially a tool for justifying the unjustifiable, but I have little personal experience with other religions. Furthermore, since the Christian majority seems increasingly comfortable wearing their beliefs on their sleeve in contemporary America, I feel little remorse for voicing a few simple concerns about their particular faith. No rigorous philosophy here, no deep knowledge of dogma or scripture, no extensively researched history, just some observations a child could make.

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How can the Bible be an authoritative document, the Word of God, upon which you justify your faith, while at the same time ignoring whatever it contains that contradicts contemporary middle class values? The subjugation of women comes immediately to mind, although I'd venture to guess there are others regarding eating restrictions, men growing beards, etc. Even the ten commandments says, "worship no graven image" but I'm in an art history class, and pretty much all I look at all freaking day are big freaking Jesuses and Marys covered with gold. And what about the stuff that's been proven wrong by science? I know evolution and creationism are still duking it out in Alabama, but the rest of the world just thinks that's silly. Isn't this clearly hypocrisy? "The Bible: it's all definitely, definitely true...well, expect for this, this, and this, which we'll just sweep under the rug and pretend is not there."

On a similar note, how could any educated woman actually believe in something that states over, and over, and over, that God is a man? I mean, is there any more obvious indication that religion is a social construction developed under patriarchy? Sure, people like to say "Oh, but I believe God is genderless." Well that's great, but that's not what your Bible says, and isn't that where you get all your answers?

If priests are divinely called to their vocation, why are so many of them child molesters? How did the Inquisition happen, where a whole lot of innocent people were tortured and murdered by Church officials? I'm sure there are plenty of other atrocities committed by the Church that aren't on the tip of my tongue. Again, how do you just forget this?

Speaking of which, how come no one seems to talk about how the Christian church was a centuries long supporter of the anti-Semitism that ultimately lead to pogroms in Russia or the Holocaust in Germany and all kinds of other nasty stuff happening to the Jews? I mean, pretty much up until 50 years ago, it seems clear that Jew-hating had a comfortably established place in Christian doctrine. Why is it ok to forget about that?

Why is it that when the Bible was actually happening, there were miracles all the time to get people to believe in God, but now, you just have read about them and "have faith" that they happened. Like Levar Burton on Reading Rainbow, even Jesus said "But you don't have to take my word for it" and went around healing the sick, turning water into wine, all that jazz. He didn't expect the apostles to believe until he had walked on water and all this other crap, but you're supposed to believe based on what some book tells you happened thousands of years ago. Does that make sense?

What would make you want to put your life into a hands of a God who sends to Hell everyone who had never had a chance to hear about Jesus, due to either chronological or geographical reasons? Why would he send unbaptized babies to Hell? That's not righteous, that's stupid.

How is it that the same people who are comfortable discussing Ancient Greek and Roman Gods as Mythology fail to see that their own beliefs are no less mythological? Those Greeks, those Romans, they actually worshiped Zeus and Hera just like you worship Christ. They had temples just like you have your churches. How is it that Jesus raising Lazarus was "real" but Zeus kicking some titan's ass was "not real"?

In fact, how do you account for the fact that Christianity clearly draws from (steals from) the traditions of earlier religions, even pagan ones. We all know that Christmas isn't on December 25th because that was ACTUALLY Jesus' birthday. Perfect heaven above, imperfect world below--huh, doesn't that sound a lot like Plato's ideals? But, isn't this all supposed to be a "new" plan, divinely handed down, complete and coher