Today the Nashville experience really got a shot in the arm. The first interview of the day was with Eli, a guy I knew very little about. It
Category Archives: Introspection
Welcome to Nashville
So here I am, in Nashville. I
Sometimes
Some days I am so curious. There are things I want to do. Things I want to try. I have big dreams. Visions and dreams of what could happen, what might be. Sometimes I wish I didn’t dream so big. Sometimes I wish I could take a step closer to my dreams. Sometimes I wish I could be like everybody else. Sometimes I wish I could change the world. Sometimes I wish I wouldn’t say ‘I’ so much. Sometimes I wish someone would answer my call, that I wouldn’t be a prophet wandering alone in the desert. Sometimes I wish I had a dollar to spare. Sometimes I do. Sometimes I wish there were more hours in the day. Sometimes I wish there more hours in the day I could call my own. Sometimes I realize there’s not enough time and there’s too many dreams. Most of the time I don
Change
Change. Is it really the one constant in life? It’s kind of depressing that way. Theologically I realize there are other constants, but when you’re talking day to day life those theological constants don’t seem very tangible, which is a shame. It always happens when you’re getting comfortable, too. Just when you think you like things, they change on you. Perhaps it’s the cynic in me, but I blame everything on the cynic. It’s a rather cynical approach, don’t you think?
Sometimes I just wish things wouldn’t change so much. I’m not ready. I’m never ready.
Title
Why do I have so little understanding of the power available to me? Why does the life changing power change so little in my life? Am I that stubborn? That apathetic? That comfortable? Am I too interested in myself to care? What I know I need to do I don’t do, and what I know won’t help, I do. The question is do I really want to do what I need to do, or do I just know I need to do it? I like to blame it on a lot of things, too. It’s my culture. It’s my generation. It’s the way things are. Things are the way you make them, I say with defiance, and then go along with it anyway. What am I doing?
Nevinin and Shelley
Last night I had a dream about Shelley. Shelley was a girl in my fourth grade class who called me Nevinin. And Bullwinkle. And probably a number of other nicknames I can’t remember. I was blossoming into the epitome of a dork in fourth grade: glasses with thick plastic frames, braces, and a shot in basketball that hurt to watch. I wasn’t exactly Mr. Popular.
But at this point in my life I wasn’t concerned enough to care. That would come in fifth grade when I had simultaneous crushes on the skinny athletic girls that were actually an asset in dodge ball—the kind of girls that would rarely talk to a kid like me. But Shelley talked to a kid like me, if only to ridicule me. I could never quite tell if she liked me or if she like picking on me. I think she liked both. It was the kind of elementary chiding that at times was madly annoying, and at other times cute and familial. Some days I liked hearing her high pitched squeal, “Nevinin.” Other days I wanted to crawl in a hole.
Shelley had long black hair and freckles. She had a small mouth and nose that seemed pinched together. She had dark eyes and moody demeanor. I remember she smiled and laughed a lot, and if she wasn’t smiling you’d better stay away.
I remember seeing her through the darkened cafeteria in sixth grade at one of the many sixth grade dances. I saw her leaning against the brick wall during the slow song and I wanted to dance with her. My gut twisted in a knot worse than my wedding day as I navigated the swirling junior high pit of emotions. I couldn’t summon the courage and the opportunity slipped away. I remember at another sixth grade dance I asked Katie if she’d dance with me, and I felt the icy chill of embarrassment as we turned tight circles at arm’s length, the top of my head coming up to her eyes. I remember her shamed smile and the glances she exchanged with her friends. On Monday I’d be accused of liking her and would do all I could to deny it. Perhaps it was better I never had the courage to ask Shelley.
In tenth grade I sat behind Shelley in Mr. Palizzi’s American Literature class. We read “The Crucible” and Catcher in the Rye and Shelley cried out with a nostalgic “Nevinin!” I groaned and dropped my head. But the nostalgia didn’t last long. I listened to Shelley proudly proclaim how many days she’d been clean. She talked about visits to her counselor and had a collection of key chains celebrating her sobriety. One was for a week. One was for two weeks. One was for a month. Another for three months. The newest one for six months. My eyes were wide and I tried not to show it. She talked about sex and alcohol and her love affair with frogs. I was the quiet sophomore who started a Christian rock show on our high school’s radio station.
The next time I ran into Shelley I was sitting behind her in my Sociology class senior year. Our teacher was fresh out of college and we recognized the young blood. She was four years older than us and that didn’t earn her an ounce of respect. I felt bad for her. That and she had a name out of a Dr. Seuss book.
Sociology was fifth hour, and one day when my youth group girl friend didn’t have school—she was a cheerleader at a different high school, if only my friends knew I dated a cheerleader I would have been so much cooler—she baked a plate of pre-mixed cookie dough cookies and brought them to school for me. An office aid dropped off the package and I opened it quietly while our teacher with the Seussian name continued the lesson and yelled at one of the McCalls. The McCall twins were in my kindergarten class, and now they were in one of my classes senior year. How fitting. I was impressed they made it that far.
Shelley turned around in her seat and asked me what I got. I smiled and showed the plate of cookies, wrapped in yellow and blue colored saran wrap. Shelley lit up and cooed about how sweet that was. Shelley was now in an all black phase and didn’t seem to be proudly displaying her key chains of sobriety. She said something about not knowing I had a girlfriend. “Nevinin has a girlfriend!” she exclaimed, suddenly stifling her voice as she realized how loud she was. “Have you fucked her?” was the next question.
I haven’t seen Shelley since graduation, except for last night when she suddenly appeared in my dream. Recollection is an amazing thing.
Walking
That’s what they tell me. Walking is good for you. I do a lot of walking nowadays. It helps you think. It gives you time to think. It allows you to think. There’s something about walking that does that. Part of it is the fact that it takes longer to get anywhere than any other mode of transportation. And that’s just the idea. Driving is too quick. The only time driving is good for thinking is when you’re on a twelve hour road trip by yourself through Wisconsin. Otherwise you’re fighting traffic and focusing on staying on the road and what the other nut case drivers are doing. But when you’re walking it’s just putting one foot in front of the other and it really shouldn’t require that much of your attention.
So I walk. I walk to the bus stop every day. It gives me time to think, think about a lot of the things I like to think about. Somehow I’m better able to work through things when I can think them over while I’m moving my feet. Maybe it’s the change of atmosphere, maybe it’s the exercise that gets my blood flowing. It just does something that makes my brain work a little better, my imagination work a little harder. I imagine novelists walk several hours a day.
Wouldn’t it be great if everyone walked? If we stopped driving our cars and we just walked instead. People would think a lot more. Driving tends to deaden your senses. You listen to the radio, the atmosphere is controlled, you follow the lines on the road. Walking changes all that. People would see things, smell things, feel things, hear things, taste things. And they’d actually process that because they wouldn’t have anything else to do. Driving is kind of like the doldrums. Don’t get me wrong, I like driving. It’s just when that’s what you do every day to get anywhere it becomes more of a chore. Maybe I just don’t have the right car. But I don’t think so. Maybe we’d see a real enlightenment if people started walking. I bet that’s why there was an enlightenment in the first place–there weren’t any cars so people walked. Maybe I should think about that one a little more.
One more thing. Don’t watch a Quinton Tarentino film before going to bed.
Ideas
Big ideas. They like to deflate. They start small. Then snowball. Give me ten minutes of quiet and I’ll have a plan to rule the world. Give me another ten minutes and I’ll have the solar system, too. Give me five minutes of conversation and I’ll be taking over my cubicle and that’s about it. Ideas are funny that way. They work so well in my own little world, then you have to go and ruin it.
If you had a second chance, would you do it again?
The words echo back to me in an unending chorus. Eighteen months, do we have to do it again? I ask why and I ask why and I ask why and you shrug your shoulders and answer with silence. Damn the silence. They don’t teach that in Sunday School. They teach love your neighbors and your enemies, too, they teach about Jonah and the toppling wall. But they don’t say anything about death or pain or silence or unanswered questions. It’s been a drunken bus ride and I just want it to stop. I’ve gritted my teeth and smiled and tried to slosh my way through the messiness but it’s been dragging for so long. When will it end? Should it even end? Do we pick up the pieces and cut ourselves in the process, or do we just sweep them into the trash and wipe our hands? I don’t know which way to go, I don’t know what to ask for, and I don’t know what to say. And it’s probably a good thing because you’re not saying anything. Or I’m just not listening, which is probably the case. All I can do is ask for a little light in the darkness. This little light of mine, oh if you’d just let it shine. I’m so sick and tired of bad news on the telephone. I just can’t handle long distance calamity. Love doesn’t come through the phone lines because I can’t see that tender smile and I’m glad we never had a relationship like that. What are you talking about, you ask, and I sympathize. But sometimes you need to talk. I’m so tired of hanging up the phone and nearly crying out with the pain of a thousand wounds. The receiver clicks and the dial tone drones and it sucks the feeling from your soul. You feel hollow and empty and oh would you make up your mind? How am I supposed to tell you what to do?
And then there’s you. You sit so comfortably in your pew and it makes me sick. The pew’s so padded it’s dulled your senses and you don’t even realize there’s pain all around you. Why won’t you share that little light of yours, why don’t you let it shine?
I don’t have the answers. I don’t pretend to. But sometimes I wish I did. I wish I did.
If you had a second chance, would you do it again?
We could use a little light.
That’s what they all say. Conversations like brick walls. High and thick and fake. Nod your head and smile. You don’t have a clue what they’re talking about, and if you did you wouldn’t care.
Daydreaming through sermons like elementary children. Drawing pictures to keep from nodding off. Cancer cells expanding, but you’re too aloof. People hurting, people dying, people lying–people charging people buying, people accessorising. People laughing, people dancing, people singing. People shooting, people looting, people standing silent. People in love, people in lust, people in liquor. People judging, people blaming, people misbehaving. People distancing, people ignoring, people saying it’s not my problem.
Somewhere someone is walking alone down a long, dark corridor wondering when they’ll see the light. Someone should show them. Won’t someone, anyone show them? But we’re all too preoccupied, finding our own light, losing our own light, watching to see how others find the light. But we’re just students in a cafeteria, trying to fit other people’s notions of what’s right and what’s wrong, what’s love and what’s hate, what’s black and what’s white, what’s poor and what’s rich, what’s cool and what’s lame, what’s real and what’s fake, what’s true and what’s false, what’s good and what’s bad, what’s worth dying for and what’s worth living for.
And sometimes it just gets too late and the answers don’t come and you have to drift off to sleep, pulling the covers tighter and wishing you had the answers to a million questions and a million problems and a million lives broken from a world of pain.
We could all use a little light.