"Game face"

The pedal got away from me on multiple occasions. I'd find myself search for it on the ground and not finding it within reach. That's one of the funnier things, the funnier little things of the day. I don't want to go back to Kingwood, but I have actual reasons to. It's nice to live a life full of reasons and needs and appointments. It's in between we find our joy and when that joy is found within these things, then that too is something worthy of tremendous celebration.

"It's incredibly complicated"

Who gets there first? Woman or man? Girl becomes woman and boy becomes man but in which order? What's most common, what's usual? It's, of course, it's not the same for each and every soul but I'm just wondering, generally, from a bird's eye view, who gets there first more often than not?

Dear Diary, I was offered the opportunity to serve God and serve others doing something I love, actually love, and I try to conceive of the level of blessing showered down upon my small and unworthy, dinky little head. And I think to myself what a wonderful world....or God. Godworld...money.

I want to write like him:

"I was... thinking of this thing from...this thing that just happened...with the DEFICIT!"

Year 2 - Day 4: Spaghetti at Ashlee's along with my very first bus ride (I think they wrote a children's book about it) to campus. That separation between campus and home feels really quite nice. There is a strong divide, like that thing you hear about, that you're not supposed to do anything in your bedroom but sleep because it makes it more difficult to sleep when you try? It's like that. Oh bus stop, bus brakes, how sweet thy sound. It's the sound of not having to use your car, not having to WORRY about it even just for a portion of the day. These sidewalks feel good to walk on now. These classroom aromas just smell a little bit better. Why? I don't live here anymore. I live somewhere else. Heh heh, so much joy to be found in the pleasures of off-campus housing. So far so good. Not so much for me with the negativity now.

"There's the door"

Day 3 in the apartment of magic and wonder: I can't seem to escape this mystic cloud, this aura around that shouts to people "I want to move furniture! Let me move your furniture!" And as such the things I joked about this summer aren't quite as funny when the release punchline never quite gets here if you know what I'm talking about. This is a place, I have a place now. My car is not a football field away and I don't know who's gonna walk through my door in the next eight months. Who's it gonna be and what are they gonna do in my life, what are they gonna play? Why don't I make more things? I guess I have to chalk it up to laziness. There's an inherent thrill that takes me over when I see the results, the work of something out of nothing. There needs to be more. There's not enough, not nearly enough. I can do better. It can get bigger than this. I'll tell you what, ideas infect my mind with a certain yeasty quality. It only takes a little yeast to make the whole dough rise to epic proportions, so goes with the inkling of a thought in my imagination. All it takes a little bit of this, a little bit of that, and I'm just out to sea, I'm off the earth. For example (and this is the most current example of many, many examples) you know how easy it would be to serenade my last thing? I could just take the first letter off many a song character and I'd have it, not to mention that heart-wrenching ode to cunnilingus (of course I'd change the lyric for her). Yeah, this year will be SOMETHING

"Madras research project"

I never had a soft infested summer. I never had one of those. I dreamed of one, I imagined hundreds, and I could, if you would allow, paint a Vistavision frame for you of what I would've done, in gorgeous Technicolor I'd let you know the dream. But it wasn't in the cards. And from what I understand about the world, the part of life where such a summer could take place is gone now. It's lost. I'm trying to remember where time went, where I thought good places to put my time would be, and good portion of the ones I do remember don't seem like very good places to put time at all now. The rest, I don't know where they went. I don't know where the time went. So, you know, that was a mistake, one of those grave sins of idleness. I'm with Mr. Finn. We can all be something bigger. We can all be something bigger. There is no sin in smallness. The sin is in the people who remain small when they don't have to. That's wickedness. And the scene now is the scene near the end of Schindler's List where Schindler, outside the getaway car, breaks down in front of all the men and women he saved from the concentration camps saying over. He starts to take inventory of all his earthly possessions and looks at them in terms of Jews he could've saved with the money it took to buy them. I have no idea, no idea what my equivalent is in the drawn out analogy, and that's exactly the problem. It strikes me now how much that scene is truly Aaron Sorkin.

"Respectfully, no"

Smitten is the exact right word. That's all. I always spend the summer looking. There is a park at the very back of Kingwood Dr., East End Park. I had never seen nor heard of this park and it was like a revelation, like tasting strawberries for the first time. There was this thing, this grand, secret landscape a few blocks away from where I live and I had not the foggiest, not the foggiest clue. This could've been a garden for all summer long, this could've been a tender spot. It's places like these that make the difference. Things got a little mixed up this summer. I forgot a lot of things. For example, I forgot that it's okay to find more than three people wonderful at the same time. That's allowed and sometimes encouraged. It's good to create, it's good to take charge. Next time, if there is, I'm gonna try and reach for the whole thing and not just the crumbs. I don't want to accept less. I am finding less to be unacceptable, most likely because it is. It certainly is when standing right there, right next to more. I still want more. And we were in the field, and my guys were doing that thing sparked up in a long car ride months and months ago with an old friend, and now it was living before my lens. There were a few seconds there when I was gliding around, racing the rain, desperate to catch the boundless joy that can't live in a frame, when everyone was perfect. Everyone was beautiful. It's hard to say where the best parts of these days live after they're gone. In the middle of a field somewhere, there was a shining gift for the taking. I took it and I like to think everyone else did too.

"Those stories would make me like you"

It occurs to me now that I never regarded "Long Walk Home" as a actual song. I always just thought of in the most natural way in the world; it's what happens in the story. It takes me to the edge of the scene and compels me to ask one the best questions in the world: what's next? Too often I feel like I don't know what my life is but I know what it is. I can view the timeline of a life in terms of negative space. Well that's not so cute, that's not so funny. There's hundreds of people out there and there's a few more words than that. There's crazy opportunity around seven different corners that I haven't even turned. Imagine my shock when I actually DO. My friend jet-set his handsome self from Texas to Florida to watch a guy play a show. My work here is NOT done, not even close, but this is as great a start as any. Tonight I'm the father at the little league game and my champ just hit a double. I like wanting new things. I like wanting different things. I'm the last person you need to inform that we cannot, we may not, we should not afford all the things we wish and I will be the first to nod my head in agreement. At this point (certainly at THIS point), it doesn't make a difference to me. I'm near bewitched with the feeling, call it falling in love with falling in love. It is not the result, but the process by which those results are attempted. Chasing the chase, you may say. I feel, I don't know, perversely noble. I shouldn't and I'm not, but I'm gonna feel like that going to bed tonight because I got beat by, you know, God's odds and I am not bitter. I am discouraged and I am deterred, but I carry with me no shred of resentment. I look forward to dating my page August 18, 2008. At night I lay and stare at the ceiling, stare at the sheets, dreaming of something epic. And there is fire in the dream, and in the dream deferred the fire grows stronger, burns brighter from a God who would allow. And the fire carries me to the next day and the day after that, and the day after that, and the day after that.. My heart is full of faith and friends and family and....well, maybe you. We'll see what happens next.

Where It Happens

When I walk into an arena, and most recently a stadium, I am entering a ring match. In this corner, the body. In this corner, the spirit. Lights out, crowd up, game on. In this life, in this world there are too many days where we know the eventual outcome to the thing. Daily, flesh takes throne and is head of the winner's circle where our demons and better angels are concerned. So often this is the case, so often is the sad match when Spirit was never even in it, a stunning display of apathy. It's just what happens. The fights are never hard nor the battles epic, it's just the course of events in a day. Let's check the scoreboard and...yes, Flesh 28, Spirit 2. There is a sweet thing buried in my heart. It is the promise that there's a place I can go and see these two lifelong adversaries show each other what they're made of. There's a place to go where the two can show each other what they're made of, limping off the floor or walking strong. There's a place to go to see a proverbial hell of a fight and to see the good guy take it. I walk in, three hours later, I walk out. I know the fight, I know the score. Spirit wins.

The Language

There is a deep and blue mystery to the music of Thomas Newman. His melodies are something unsolved. I actually dreamed something from the song "Here I Am", a number from "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels", a musical not many people have heard or heard of at all. All non Joanna Gleason fanboys back off. She's mine. When one meets a person, there are expectations and the meeting, failing, and transcending of those expectations. There is a improvised dance and within the hasty steps the two dancers must act quickly and cling to the nearest thing, holding on for their lives so as not to disrupt the requisite melody. They must find and seize the commonalities and comfort zones or they shall be forced to fumble in darkness until they do so. This is the meeting. And after this meeting or several meetings akin to it have taken place, a language is formed. The vocabulary might be limited or expansive, the grammar confounding or absolute sense-making, but once established this is the tongue that the two must speak in upon each encounter. Some folks never see reason to broaden the scope of their language, keeping the familiar rhythm clicking for years and years without concern. Others can't wait to have enough knowledge of the new tongue to write a book about the other, or about the other and himself, or on himself as the other sees him. And then, of course, the dreaded and age-old conflict arises; the dueling wills. One contents oneself with being the underachieving student in this class of language. The other develops a restless heart for more. More words, more knowledge, more discovery. And so it is, and so it has been, and evermore shall be. My thing is that I want to speak it all. I want to know it and speak it and be able to zig zag through the life with an unparalleled fluency. I want to be able to dazzle my opposite with masterful command of what the language means and is and should be and can be and I want to do that with two languages in the same breath. I want that. I may not do those things, but I'd like to be able to get to the place where I am, at the least, able to.

"The Francis Scott Key key"

All the best stuff, the best books, the best portraits and movies, the best episodes of the best television shows, the best articles in the best magazines, they all aspire to the unequivocal wonder that is the sound of music. And so goes conversation, so goes relationship, so go the people, so goes life. Here's where the train goes off the tracks for me: signals. I am signal blind, signal deaf, signal dumb, and I am most certainly signal SMELL-BLIND. I see them where none exist and I don't when they're basically humping my leg. Yes, the reason I would never be a good baseball, all physical acumen aside, is the fact that when the third base coach would do that thing with his hands I wouldn't know if I was supposed to steal 2nd or tackle the pitcher. Yes, it's that bad. This is me, I'm sure we've met. What I want/wish/can't wait for; the thing. The thing I used to see weekly a few sanctuaries ago. The thing I saw dancing down the street in Westfield, in glory of wrinkled joy. The thing, the one that's gonna be burning coals underneath my feet, a wolf snapping at my heels. My knack for teetering right on the edge of great things has equally remarkable and disgusting consistency. I'll jump now, and I'll tell you why, Gidget. Beneath the precipice, life is waiting. This includes heart-wrenching failures, thousands of disappointments, and enough pies in the face to make a grown clown cry. I keep thinking about it, and I think it's time to pony up. Life is waiting.

Threading the needle

People get ready.....there's a train coming....you don't need no ticket....just thank the Lord. Something went terribly right and here I am, thinking that it's other people, not me, who should be experiencing such tremendous joy, such richness of life, such wonder of the minute and lovely. It should be other people who should be so easily conned into accepting life as it is, and having the privilege to know a week in which Bruce and Stephen Colbert are a breath away. There is a consistent feeling in each step, in each press of a button, that I'm not exploiting the fullness of life to the extent it deserves to be. I'm gonna build a house too. In my house the walls will be full of color and joyful noise. There will be doors and windows as a striking invitation to light and the world's beauty. Let it invade the home and let it shine so silently in the afternoon. Let it cast shadows on the scuffs and scrapes of the floor sustained while engaging in music, in each other, in our own feet. The bedroom's a palace and the kitchen's a garden. Let it be these things. In this house, let no darkness in save for the seed of betrayal forever ingrained in the crooked timbre of humanity and even then let those things be torn apart by the merciless fury of a love shared. We'll see.