Some Blog Notes

Everyone else has been active in the Blogosphere lately, but I'm actually pleased to be able to pass on some new information about family bloggers.

My Dad has started a new 10 part series over at his blog, White Tie and Tales, about what his platform would be if he were running for President. Its an interesting idea to think about blogging. You can read his take on the first of his ten subjects, Education, by clicking on the White Tie & Tales link on the side of this blog.

My Sister, in the meantime, over at Superstar in Training (now called Changes Daily - which is a complete misnomer) has announced that she has just launched two new blogs, Letters to Bono and Crime Survivor. I think I'll allow her to explain her reasoning much better by suggesting you go read the latest Superstar blog and then click the links over to Letters to Bono and Crime Survivor from there. (She also says some really nice things about me and AMFTB on there, which is another good reason to go check it out ;)

As for me... I'm just tooling along here waiting for whimsy to strike my fancy. Something will come to me to write, or it won't. Though right now my mind is struggling with the philosophical question about what it is to truly Have A Life, I haven't really developed anything worth writing about yet.

So, see you around...

Where Do I Get My Ideas...

Creation is a tricky thing. It is the willful act of trying to create something out of nothing. It can be frustrating, tiring, and extremely difficult. But when it happens, when creation perches itself on my brain, I can feel His spirit run through me like a bolt of happy lightning.

So, where do I get my ideas? This is the single most cliched question asked writers and I suspect there are as many answers as there are writers. I believe it was Charles Schulz that used to tell people that he had them delivered from an idea mill somewhere in the midwest. If only I had the address... ;)

My ideas always start visually, and that's probably where most of them should stay. I am a visual writer - I need to see what it is I'm describing, I need to imagine the scene completely before I can write it. So, its not too surprising that my ideas arrive in my brain as snippets of visions - like scenes from a movie not yet imagined. I will be minding my own business and I'll suddenly have this powerful vision of a dam exploding and a hero character leaping away on to a helicopter at the last second. Everything in my brain stops at once, like we can freeze frame that one scene and that one moment, and just examine it. Why did the dam explode? Who's the guy leaping from the top? Where'd the helicopter come from? Is this the end of the story, or the beginning? What kind of hero is this? What kind of villain do we have? I'll get this blank expression on my face for as long as it takes me to run down this vision's information. Viola. I've just started a story.

To fully understand me, it might help you to know that I get ideas like this about four or five times an hour. Most don't last in my brain more than the split second it took me to imagine them. Occassionally one will float in there for a few minutes, idly taking one question and answering it, to reveal more questions and answers. But most of the time, I get bored with the story in about 30 seconds to 5 minutes. About once a week, I'll get an idea that stays with me all day long. About once a month, I get an idea that stays with me for several days or a week. And about once a year, I get a keeper.

The process of creating a story is the same from the moment of inception until the moment of writing. Take a scene, break it down, ask the questions, find the answers, move on to the next scene. As the scenes pile up together, the story begins to take shape, and the questions and answers become more complicated. Often times, the scene that started the whole process won't even make it into the final story. The questions and answers are constantly changing throughout the process and some answers lead to tougher questions which lead to better answers which change entire sections of a story. Characters come and go, motivations change, scenery evolves, plot points are as liquid as the brain patterns that created them. But eventually, the story sits on a precipice and I just know I'm ready to write it.

For some stories, this process lasts only a week or so and I just charge right in with the writing. For others, such as the novel I'm writing, the process started years ago (1985 for my novel, for instance). In the last interview he ever gave, Philip K. Dick described it perfectly, "It's like those commercials that say we'll sell no wine before its time. Well, I won't start a novel before its time. It takes at least two years for a story to find its way to paper."

When you look at the final words of a story, just remember all the hard work and thinking that went in to putting those words there. Hundreds of thousands of possible permutations were likely considered for every possible aspect of a book. The physical creation of a thing isn't nearly as complicated as the thinking behind it. Just imagine how complicated was the thinking behind your own creation - what God must have thought about your contribution to the great story of existence. Doesn't it make you wonder? I know where I get my ideas... but where does He get His?

The More Things Change...

Sherman, set the wayback machine...

Our scene: A dirty city street somewhere in Philistine a long time ago...

Bob: Hey, Phil, did you hear what the town crier just said?

Phil: No, Bob, I was too busy working. What is the latest breaking news?

Bob: Some Jewish terrorist went crazy with the jawbone of an ass and killed liked hundreds of Philistines.

Phil: What? That's crazy! Is he still loose?

Bob: No, he's dead. But still... it makes you think.

Phil: Yeah, what was he thinking? Do you suppose he was drunk on wine? Or perhaps caught up in some sort of lover's spat? And where did he get the jawbone of an ass so easily?

Bob: There's no knowing why he went bezerk. But he apparently obtained the jawbone legally.

Phil: There ought to be a law.

Bob: Actually, Phil, I think there are too many laws. I mean, think about it, if someone else had been carrying the jawbone of an ass, there might be a lot of Philistines still walking around alive today.

Phil: You know, Bob, you're right. I'm going down to the cornerstore and buying me a jawbone for protection. And then when people see me walking down the street with the jawbone, they'll keep their distance.

Bob: Just be careful, Phil. You wouldn't want to hurt anyone by accident with that.


This little slice of drama brought to you by the National Jawbone Of An Ass Association - just because I can.

I think I'd rather die

Apparently some people have not learned anything from the Bible - most notably the passion week descriptions of the Garden of Gethsemane. "Those who live by the sword, die by the sword."

I am not one of these liberal gun nuts who thinks we ought to abolish the 2nd Ammendment to the Constitution. In fact, I am all for the requirement of every household having a gun - like they do in Switzerland (where violent crimes are very low, perhaps because the criminals know that every household has an automatic weapon ;) However, I don't think I could ever own a gun, because I'm 99.99% certain that I would never want to use a gun on a fellow human being.

I'd make a terrible soldier. When confronted with a frightful situation where it was literally life and death, one of two things would happen - I wouldn't be able to pull the trigger, and therefor be killed, or I would pull the trigger, and therefore wish I was dead. I just couldn't handle the knowledge that I had ended someone else's life.

In the Navy I provided intelligence to an aircraft that did the dirty work for me. I still regret to this day the knowledge that some action on my part ended the lives of two or more young men - even if they were about to shoot a missile at our ships. This to me is not a win, this is a loss with an asteriks.

My point is that Jesus was very straightforward about this subject - do not give in to violence, no matter what the situation. It is something we have forgotten as a religious body, something that we have completely ignored many times. When it comes to death, the ends never justifies the means. What are we afraid will happen if we can not easily shoot or stab or kill our enemies?

I will never own a gun. Ever. And I'd wish you'd make the same decision.

Empathy, Tragedy, Senselessness

I think the Virginia Tech tragedy, as its now playing out, continues to prove that most Americans don't have a grasp on their emotionally distressed sides. Its far easier for us to look for a quick, simple answer, than to explore the idea of lapses in our mental health system or society. We want the pat, Hollywood answer - where the crazed killer is jilted by a girlfriend and goes on a rampage, or where he was crazy all along. See, he wrote violent stories - it was bound to happen sooner or later. Its far easier to look for a simple answer, but it leaves us with questions. How could we have not seen this coming since it was so obvious that he was crazy?

The answer is not simple, and it never will be. Each of us is capable of a Virginia Tech type tragedy and that's the scary fact. We are all awash in a sea of chemicals and neurosynapses that could simply freak out on us when we least expect it. A common stuffy head can cause undue pressure on certain portions of our brains causing us to see things or hear things that aren't there. Does this make us pick up a gun and kill 30 people? No. Of course not. But what I'm trying to say is, mental health is not always a constant and we should never take it for granted.

I knew a guy, Jerry, about four years ago. He was a roommate of a friend of mine. He was affable, loyal, and a good guy to know. We took him hiking with us. We hung out with him. My brother was even considering moving into an apartment with him. All of a sudden, Jerry disappeared. Nobody knew what had happened to him. We assumed that he'd probably gone home suddenly to visit his family until four days later, we got a call from his worried family that he hadn't been in touch with them. Though my friend filed a missing person's report, the paperwork was too slow. In the meantime, after an arrest and a referral to a mental health evaluator, Jerry was put back on the streets by the police department where, less than 24 hours later, he tried to beat a pregnant woman to death with a paint can.

None of us had known that Jerry was bipolar until the incident occurred. The police that had arrested him and let him go did not know that he was violent or potentially dangerous, or they obviously would not have released him. Less than an hour before he'd committed the terrible crime, Jerry had been wandering the streets asking strangers to help him. Clearly out of his mind, most strangers walked away from him.

It was hard for me to grasp that a guy I knew had snapped like that - that I had spent time with him, hiked with him, and hung out with him. He had been a normal guy one day, and turned out to be a homicidal maniac the next. It was senseless, tragic, and I empathized with both the victim (both mother and child lived, thank God!) and the attacker. I'm sure that people who did not know him assumed that he was evil and looked for obvious explanations (he must have been on drugs, or he played too many video games, or he was a racist sociopath). But the "simple" fact of the matter was, he'd forgotten to take his meds and one thing had led to another in a terrible spiraling of events.

The media wants you to believe that this guy's writing was a clear indication that he was sick and depraved and was a serial killer waiting to happen. Don't you believe it. Don't you take the simple explanation. Writing is a form of therapy for the writer, sure - we've all written stories about harming people who have harmed us. I've killed off my ex-girlfriend hundreds of times with falling blimps, vicious attacks by wild animals, etc... But the fact is, writing is make believe. Its not real. Its a release - not much different than group therapy. A writer will write some pretty sick things, but that doesn't make him a killer waiting to happen - just ask Robert Bloch, who wrote, amongst other things, Psycho.

The real tragedy of Virginia Tech will occur if, once again, we look for and then swallow the simple explanation. Evil, drugs, insanity - these are all too simple to explain such terrible actions. Let us look, instead, to a more complex understanding of the events that happened that day and try to imagine what might have been going through that poor killer's head that could cause him to want to kill so many innocent people. For it is only in understanding that we will ever be able to prevent such actions from happening again.

Who owns my inner voice?

Somewhere along the line I got lost. It happened some time after high school and before I joined the Navy. My whole young life had been driving towards the point where I would take up the mantle as world's greatest entertainer/storyteller and then, in a moment, I found myself locked in a game of chicken with oncoming reality. I flinched and dove off the side of the rode and became lost.

It is certainly one of the backdrops that formed my naval experience - the search for myself. What had worked so wonderfully for me in my high school years now felt like dead weight. I had been writing steadily since my sophomore year and had written more than a thousand pages of material. But it lacked... well, anything that resembled a fine quality. It was sophomoric, juvenile, amateurish (though quite a bit of fun). As a writer, I knew that to write more serious stuff, I needed to find a more serious me - the me that was lying just beneath the surface.

Only, I wasn't there. I dug down futher. I embraced my serious side. I became as much fun as a drying block of concrete - still nothing. I tried going the other direction, figuring that maybe I had just feigned being boring to throw off the pursuit. But in nights of debauchery and drunken rowdiness, I still didn't find myself. I tried the still of the night, walking along abandoned docks at three in the morning, watching the sun rise over Pearl Harbor - but found only lonliness and doubt. I tried insanity for a while, but it didn't stick. I tried cookies, but they didn't lure me in. I could hear my inner voice mocking me, but I couldn't find it.

Finally, I tried the one thing that should probably never work - I stopped looking. And there I was. Inside, comfortable with my skin, safe and secure and ready to work again.

Occassionally, I still try to pin myself down. What exactly do I mean when I say I mean it? Do I really believe in Jesus, for instance, or is that some sort of conditioning of my youth? There are plenty of thoughts that seem to contradict the notion - where do those thoughts come from? In fact, where do the thoughts that would indict me in any court of the land come from?

I can't help thinking these thoughts. They're in my inner voice, but I don't know who speaks them. When I buy a plane ticket, I am just dying to say, "Please don't fly us into a building." When I hear about a school massacre I just want to say, "Only thirty people? You were using the wrong kind of weapon - you weren't really trying." To my inner voice, these are funny. They are mocking, joking, a whistling in the dark. I know my inner voice doesn't mean them, but it says them all the same.

As a writer, I'm supposed to develop my own voice. But my own voice and I don't get along all that well. My own voice tries desperately to get me in trouble and as a result, my own voice is locked up inside and is not let loose. Sometimes I wonder, though, if that's wise. Sometimes I wonder if it wouldn't be better to say the things that I really want to say. It may not be the smartest thing I could do, but I wonder if it wouldn't be more real.

My inner voice is such a child and I feel reluctant to let it out because it might embarass me. But, maybe if I built it a safe little box for it to play in - something like a blog - it could get some air, meet some other people, maybe mellow out over time.

What I'd really like to do, of course, is send my inner voice off to charm school. But then I'd walk around confused all day as my inner voice spoke to me in a clipped and perfectly understandable British accent (since everything from England is cultured.) I am confused enough as it is.

Oh for the pleasure of dual personalities. I think I'd pick one that allowed my inner voice to speak - though I might then become the most reviled person in America.

I don't know where this blog is going today. Its rambling, but then so am I. Shut up now, inner voice! Its time to go back in the box.

Something More

The director gives the hand motion and the choir stands as one. We look out into the congregation. They stare back, expecting... what? Entertainment? Uplift? I don't know. Having been in the audience, my usual reaction to the choir anthem was to hope it went quickly. We wipe those thoughts out of our minds and give our attention to the choir director again, scanning only briefly our music to be sure we're on the right page. Done, and done. The piano starts tinkling away. The harp begins to pluck. Our lead Soprano steps forward and begins to sing a beautiful solo aria. Her words soar and sail around the clear acoustics of our new sanctuary. I am filled with her voice. Our que comes and we start in softly, backing her up - then more forcefully, as our voices blend and we stop singing the song and start feeling it. And then it happens. The words fade away. The dots on the page stop having any meaning. The song becomes something more, something that transcends the music as written, something that has life and soul, something that is pleasing to the Lord. The music becomes worship. And I can feel His pleasure bathing me in wonder and in awe that He should find such a pathetic thing as my voice pleasing to Him. It brings tears to my eyes every time.

Which isn't to say that I get this reaction from every piece of music I sing, nor from only classical music, nor from only church music. Any piece of music that transcends the boundaries of Earth, any piece of music that He finds pleasing, any piece of music that makes me forget that I'm singing - I can feel His hands lifting my spirit, elevating me. Otherwise, I might as well be singing in the shower.

I have had the reaction only a couple of times in the audience, so I imagine that for the most part, people just sit there and wait for it to be over, or garner there own limited pleasure from a pleasing performance (at least they weren't flat this time ;). I am getting older now and my voice is no spring chicken anymore. I no longer have the range I had even five years ago. But I don't think I could ever join the audience again knowing that even my crappy singing is pleasing, occassionally, to the Lord. I'd rather be active in worship than passive. I'd rather in meant something more than a tick mark on my heavenly attendance card.

In 2000, when I returned from Las Vegas, and before I started work at Yasutomo, I began an active campaign of weekly hikes to Norcal locations. One week, my friend Jay and I decided to hike a new trail in Big Basin Park. It was fairly long (something like 8 miles), but it had a waterfall at the half way point. I was convinced that this was something we could do.

We began the hike with a quick uphill struggle. I have never liked going uphill - even when I was in spectacular shape. Fighting gravity sucks. But this was fairly short, maybe a mile at the most, and then we were at the top of the ridge. The trail dove off the other side of the ridge and continued down to the waterfall.

We practically ran down the hill - it was a nice wide trail and not steep at all, the kind of path I used to love to run in cross country. It just kept going down and down and down. After about a mile and a half it leveled off and went relatively flat (though, deceptively, we were still descending) for another mile or two, until, viola! There was the waterfall. Not some pansy fairy waterfall either. This was one you could have stood under and taken a shower - even in the summer.

The path continued... up the waterfall. We grinned and bore it. We had never yet found the perfect Escher trail (downhill both ways) and this didn't appear to be it either. Besides, the waterfall was tall enough. We'd climb up to the top and be back on the ridge and then after a short hike, we'd climb back down the first part of the trail and be back to the car. Or so I thought.

Apparently, we'd come quite a ways downhill. We climbed up the trail and reached the top of the waterfall and I was seriously spent. But I knew we only had a little more ways to go to the top of the ridgeline, so we continued forward... and forward... and forward... and forward...

In three hours, we still had not found the top of the ridge. A series of switchbacks and up and down valleys had meant that for more than three hours we had been climbing steadily uphill with no end seemingly in sight. I was literally pulling energy from the very last of my fat reserves and the sun was starting to set in the tree infested park.

Jay knew that I was done. And he knew that there was no way he could go to the car and get it and come back for me. If he left me, I was going to have to crash there in the dark park by myself until help could come. And what was help going to do? Nothing. They couldn't carry me. All they could do was help me walk. I was out of water, out of trail mix, out of strength, and out of patience. I was near tears. So Jay did the only thing he could do, he got behind me and pushed me up the hill.

Physically, he pushed, prodded, yelled, poked, and motivated my ass up that hill, and up the hill after that, and finally, up the last hill until we stood on top of that ridge and looked back down the seemingly innocent downhill trail that led to the waterfall. We didn't have time to ponder such philosophy though as it was nearly dark and we still had the last mile to hike.

I stumbled the rest of the way and made it to the car and when I finally got home that night, I slept like a dead man for about fourteen hours and I was sore for two weeks.

I was reminded of this on Sunday as I suddenly felt the holy spirit wash over me in the middle of singing. I've been feeling out of sorts lately - a natural let down from the exuberance of fishing and hiking in God's country and the return to civilization. I've been feeling drained, lethargic, spent, and distant from God. And then, all at once, during the mechanical process of singing, I felt His pleasure on me and I was uplifted. And then I remembered Jay. And I realized that I was receiving this gift as a form of reinforcement - that God was now behind me on the path, pushing me uphill again.

Its a long climb with moments of sheer beauty and many hours of sweat and monotony. Sometimes we just wish it would be over soon. And sometimes we get a glimpse of something more, something beyond that which can be seen or experienced without outside help, and we can feel His loving support of us and know that we are loved and will never be abandoned on the dark trail.

The Lord's Moving Company

The Lord moves in mysterious ways indeed... and gets us to move as well. For the first time in over ten years, I had a really strange thought last night - It's ridiculous to be as old as I am and still be living at home with my parents.

Now, to be fair, there are many reasons I've never had this thought. First of all, there is just no way I can afford to live in the San Francisco Bay Area. If I scraped together every spare nickel I had, I couldn't even afford rent. The friends that I have that do rent apartments (or parts of apartments) all live month to month just to pay the rent. They exist. They don't LIVE. And as for buying or owning a home? Forget about it. Without some serious infusion of cash into my life, that will never happen. So, that's the major reason I live at home with my parents - its economical to do so. If I had to leave, I would move out of state - a long ways out of state - the further from California, the better.

Second, my parents are getting older and they really need help around the house and in the backyard. When they're on vacation, I look after the house and the pets and what not. But even when they're home, I am there as a helper - a fall back position for errands, and construction work, and all sorts of other projects.

Third, I get along really well with my parents as we have a lot in common. This is one reason I have never felt strange or ashamed about living at home before. In terms of roommates, you couldn't ask for a better pair than my parents (and they keep to themselves).

That being said, this thought came to me last night out of the clear blue, and I knew it was more than just a thought. It was a suggestion. A hint. A, dare I say it, command. God was telling me that it was nearly time to move on - to move out.

The question is... where? As I pointed out, economically I can't afford to even live in my car. So, I'm not sure what He has in mind. But I will keep you posted.

The Secret Revealed

Read the Bible.

No charge. Just remember where you heard this startling advice first.

Okay, I'm back now. Fishing is safe for the rest of you once again. I have many amazing adventures to relate... someday... when I'm not so busy catching up with all the work I avoided while on vacation. But for now, its back to the coal mines...

Heigh ho!