Today walking to the library, I decided to experiment.
With hardcore drugs. Just kidding.
There’s a straightaway connecting campus, as there are is on most campuses, I suppose, where you can walk for a good quarter mile or so and be doing something completely mindless before you actually get anywhere. At OBU, it was between the Bible building and the student center; at Baylor, it’s between the library and the middle of campus. So, on this exceedingly dull piece of real estate, I’m tromping along towards another marathon stretch of rifling through dusty books, and decided, I was tired. So, I closed my eyes while walking.
15, 16, 17, 18…open. It became a game to see how far I could walk on this completely straight, complete desolate piece of concrete with my eyes shut before opening them again. On one attempt, I nearly went to sleep, I think.
18, 19, 20, 21….open. This was as far as I’d let myself walk: a 21-count with no idea what was in front of me. When your sight goes out, you become keenly aware of every little sound; every sense heightens with the anticipation of running into something. The slightest bump in the concrete became an excuse to open my eyes and carefully dart them around to see if perhaps I’d run over a small child in mid-game.
Any excuse to look around, any excuse to open the eyes up and take in what was going around me, to remind me that I wasn’t alone, that I wasn’t going to fall off a path that was big and straight and devoid of trees. As I walked with my eyes closed, I wondered about how Bono could have written an album like Joshua Tree at age 27, or how it feels like my sister is taking on the role of the oldest child, or why my beard has gotten so much coarser in the last two years. I let my mind roam everywhere, and then with the slightest provocation from my feet, things snapped back into focus with the one purpose:
Don’t fall down.
I remember when Mom went missing nearly a year and a half ago for a day, and how everything snapped into focus. If that day had ended badly, that would have been the day I would have completely fallen off of the road, knees bleeding, having run over by a tree. I remember the days when love was unreturned, and how those felt more akin to being pushed off into the asphalt. I think about days when I was walking, in a straight line, eyes closed, and the slightest bump turned into a lion’s roar.
And how those days will come again. But not today. Today, I walk eyes closed, to the library, to the phone, to my car, to my life, mulling over conversations with youth, conversations with the East coast, conversations with family, and smell the grass. Some day, the lion will roar again, and I will be face down in the gravel, eyes blinking in the sun, knees bloody and sweat stinging.
But not today.
This is worth the six minutes of your life it’ll take. Get a cup of tea and start your weekend. I’ll be delving into Dante. Enjoy.
It’s October. Late October, in fact, and it’s no less than 80 degrees outside. For those of you who loooove the hot, good on you. As for me and mine, my body has spent the last 28 years building up a resistance to the heat. Beginning in my youth, spending hours upon hours at the pool, to the teen years sweating it out in the sun behind a lawnmower, to college working in a warehouse without A/C–I have put in my dues. It’s time for me to rely on the skills of human ingenuity, and to start donning clothes.
When you’re cold, you can always put something else on. When you’re hot, they’re just some social situations when partial nudity is not an option.
**
Two weekends ago, I was enjoying a brisk New England afternoon, enjoying the sun coming down, while I wore a wool sweater, hands in pockets, zipper to the neck. I remember thinking, “This is how it should be. Autumn= cool weather.” Granted, I’ve never lived through a New Hampshire winter, and don’t know the joy of shovelling snow off my porch for six months straight. But there’s something refreshing to being in a place where you get at least three of the four seasons. For every blazing summer, there is a deathly cold winter, and it’s as it should be. C.S. Lewis once noted that seasons were God’s way of keeping humanity from getting bored with sameness. Something to that, I think, that rythym is a happy medium between bland sameness and wild, unconnected randomness.
So today, in lieu of any help from my natural surroundings, I celebrate rhythms: the happy mediums that are never the same, but always faithful:
1) Fresh vegetables. You can always get a tomato, even in the dead of winter. God bless ‘em.
2) Morning poops. God bless regularity.
3) Eternally recurring allergies. Knowing that you need five minutes of running before you’ll be clear: priceless.
4) Stories from panhandlers. I’ve started giving money if the story’s good. I don’t tell them that, but if the story’s the tired one about needing “three dollars of gas”, I ask if I can give them a ride. Dude told me one the other day about how he recognized me from campus and how he used to be a track star with his name on a plaque and everything. It was worth at least three bucks, but I only had two to give him.
5) Dog piss on my carpet. No matter how long I live in this house, I can always count on one of the dogs having come into the room and peed on a book if leave the door open while I’m out. Dorothy Day was the last casualty.
6) Baseball. Thank you, Jesus, that I live in a college baseball town, so that there’s only a three month drought every year of being able to watch the greatest spectacle humanly constructed.
7) “the NEXT BIG THING“. By this, I mean, whatever book is about to change someone’s life, or band is about to melt our faces. I love being in with the cool kids as much as anyone, but there comes a point at which I don’t care that much. But it’s refreshing to see a highschool kid wearing the punk jacket with metal studs that he’ll swear he never owned when he turns 40.
So, the weekend was pretty amazing. If you’ve called and I’ve been absent, it was because I was taking in New England air, coastline, and chowder, or because it was I got back and have been bombed by the massive amount of work waiting for me. In the words of Good Will Hunting, I had to see about a girl.
Be warm, be filled, and I’m off to figure out what Dante’s doing with his description of Paradise. You think that Hell was crazy? Wait until you try to decipher what’s going on with the celestial hierarchy. I’ll just say that Thomas Aquinas loooooves to talk and doesn’t talk with any kind of brevity.
The news just broke. Their first album was sheer genius.
Justin, we hate to see you go, but go towards a healthier life.
I often feel halfway guilty about not posting about what I’m really thinking about, but then I think: who really wants to read a paper about a specific reading of a theological figure that most people haven’t heard of? But in truth, this is what my mind has been turning to the last three weeks, even in my sleep.
So, here’s a test. If people actually read this and like it, you’ll get more. If not, the struggle continues.
So, free to my reading public: do your worst.
I got your political process right here. Just think: if Kinky wins for governor, and then we get the presidency straightened out, at the very least, we’d be able to laugh for, eh, four years or so.
Please, Baby Jesus. I don’t ask for much. Just a healthy does of funny.
I just finished watching Shindler’s List for the first time in five years. More thoughts on that tommorrow.
But just as I’m ready to drown myself in self-misery over the wretched state of the world and the utterly delapidated state of the church’s mind, a strong dose of irony keeps me laughing into the night.
File the latter story under “My Agent is Saving My Self-Absorbed Ass”.
Bullet points. Break it down.
**
It’s been a long few days for those associated with Truett Seminary. The last remaining original faculty member died this past week, and the funeral was this afternoon. Ruth Anne Foster was one of the most gracious and amazing women I knew, and this afternoon was really a difficult time for all involved. We knew it was coming, but just the same, when a saint is translated to glory, it doesn’t make it any easier. But thank God for a life well-lived, and a legacy that burns in a multitude of hearts. She and Dr. Chip Conyers, who died in 2003, are the ones I look to in terms of how I want to nuance my life as an academic: fully grounded in the reality that life has a telos beyond what we write or publish. I mean, most of what I write will be chaff on a threshing floor ten minutes after I write it, anyway.
I’m staring down the barrell of three projects that have to get done in the next nine days. Two in-class presentations, and my first major paper. Wash, rinse, repeat.
I about had a heart attack this afternoon when I came downstairs to find my roommate’s truck gone, and the door standing wide open. Turns out a plumber was around, fixing yet another leak in our decrepit, yet beloved, house. Needless to say, in June, I’ll be finding a new residence–one sans wood rot.
Nine days, and I’m on a plane for Boston, and a much-needed weekend break from school. I’ll come back to hopefully find myself amply motivated to kick my own ass for the remainder of the semester.
LOST Premiere tommorrow night.
I love my family and and am missing them pretty terribly at the moment.
And it’s baseball playoff season. Praise be to God–I can breathe easy again. Go Tigers.
