Dancing about you,
holding you,
dreaming about holding you,
holding you dear in all of my dreams,

the love that treats us badly
is the love that people swear by

but i swear by the last blood in the first
pomegranate
i've been granted a grace, when i was granted you

all the ancient visionaries in their stone canoes
never journeyed to a land near as fair as you


Dreaming on you you,
dreaming in you
dreaming as i float right on you

i hung my dreams upon you
after i vowed--
after all the sorrow sewed--
and weeping reapen--
that i would never hang a dream on
a limb, on a woman or a man
ever again

lying here beside you i will not deny to you-- lying here,
touching you-- i could almost bend, bow down low and worship you

i think i should

all the prophets never could--
and all the priestesses in their woods
burning incense to sex gods--
never guess the love in me this morning

Thanksgiving

I just really wanted to express gratitude. After a long time of what can only be described as waiting, my life is full of so much joy. Beginning this blog has led me to other people all around the world, some much closer to others. I want to give a shout out to my main ladies, London and Helen Hawarth at Superpsych.joeuser. I have been turned on to so many people with such skill and so many dreams: Andrew Barnett, Antonio Savoradin, Suw Charman, Jon Husband, the list grows bigger everyday. I just discovered the Coffee Sutras. I will try to make a link to as many of these sites as possible.

And by all means we must never forget my dear old friend Bree who began weblogging around the same time I did. Yay! London, she's a writing major at DePaul, and she's gonna start writing about her SEX LIFE !

Because this is a Thanksgiving I want to express gratitude for people who will never see this blog, but have sustained me: the parishioners at Saint James Episcopal Cathedral in South Bend, Indiana. After a very long time of feeling left out of and ambivalent to Christianity, I found a place and a people who cared about what I care for, the Holy Peaces who-- when they want to be-- can be the biggest, baddest, community of brothers and sisters this side of... well, this side: especially Anne Niemiec and Megan Bodnar, constant old friends. Let's see, who else, my old English prof Justin George Watson. I started out as a philosophy religion major, but the truth is this: what I learned in his English classes is really what formed my religion, my outlook on life more than anything any priest ever said. And: new to the crowd Aaron Mullins who has so much energy that his e-mails literally get up and do a tap dance on my keyboard !

And the clouds in the heavens, the Spirit that holds the earth together, our Father in heaven, our Mother below, every blessed saint and bodhisattva, all blessed beings, the earth that sustains us beneath our feet and glory that surrounds us, that we are born into and pass into it.

I would like to thank all the love around us.

Amen.

Mystery Meat

I heard about this case some time ago. But I forgot all about it until I was listening to the BBC around midnight. In Germany a man is on trial for cannabalism. Apparently he got on a chat room or something and told people that it was a childhood fantasy of his to eat a human being.

(Incidentally my childhood fantasy was to be a fireman.)

Anyway, someone obliged. The man gave him a ticket to come visit him. They had a congenial night at his house, and then the cannibal in making recorded himself stabbing the man to death and eating him.

The judge has decided the man is competent to stand trial.

His defence says that sense the "sacrifice" (?) was willing-- which sort of gives it a warm, cozy, Christian feel-- technically it was a mercy killing and not a murder.

Or maybe since the sacrifice was willing you could just call it a really, really, retro- Mass?

Wouldn't that pack the houses of worship on Sunday?

NOTES ON DEPRESSION

Okay, Andrew, Jon, everything you all said about depression had me going, "Oh, yeah, the good ole days!" Remember the time when I was cold all the time and couldn't feel? Then remember when sensation returned and all I wanted to do was cry because every sensation hurt? I was watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer-- yeah, I like it, so what? And after she's been brought back from the dead her life is awful and she wants to die again and... to make a long story short, her best friend tries to end the world. The earth opens up and swallows Buffy and her sister. They're in a cemetery when it happens. The show ends with them having to help each other crawl out of the grave. Buffy's got to do it all over again.

Who says that show isn't true to life !

I am doing what I hate: filling out an application. This time for graduate school. I hate it so much that I won't have any peace until it's done. Therefore I'm going it fairly quickly.

For a while now there is so much crap in my life during the winter that I miss how beautiful winter is. I also miss how damn cold it is! I don't think until this winter, when my life is relatively tops, I've ever been so aware of how cold it is in January!

Or maybe this is just really one cold ass January.

Now go to

the animalrescuesite.com

and help out some animals !

POEMS

In homage to the fromage and cheddar eating, whisker wearing, all too daring little vermin who fill our house in winter.


1.
I am big
and you are small
I can't wait to kill you all

gas you, trap you, burn you,
stake you--
dirty critters, how I hate you !

God's creation lovely be
long as it stays outside
away from me.


2.
I love the trap
bloody and red
that tears away the mouse's head

I love the poisoned piece of cheese
that makes the little bastards wheeze

I love Phil the exterminator
because the mouse....

GOD HOW I HATE HER !!!

I found this on Andrew Barnett's site. He found it on Antonio Savordin's blog, so this is sort of a third degree theft. But it's the good kind.

From Andrew Barnett's blog:

I found this beautifully executed piece -- I forget the path that led me there -- on Antonio Savoradin's blog. It's about the nature of depression. I might comment on it in a few days, or work it into a longer piece I have brewing. But for now I just wanted to put it up here, before I forget.

To quote:

Depression, probably the most obvious condition leading to suicide, is a prison filled with repeat offenders, and the crime of melancholia has a startling recidivism rate. But it is not a prison in which rights are respected, nor is humane treatment the standard fare. Rather, the jailer is a fickle torturer who punishes his charges without mercy. The depressed person inhabits a cell with a tiny window and iron bars, is beaten, burned, electrocuted, and flayed by the guards, left shivering and in pain, while relatives and friends may visit, blind to both the unbearable wounds he suffers and to the bars which hold him. Bewildered, they cannot understand why he doesn't rise and walk through the empty doorway; they do not understand his pain; and they may inflict guilt or further torture by sneering at his condition or offering pointless advice ("What's the matter with you? Just leave!") which only exacerbates his suffering. Because they do not see the bars, the walls, the jailer, the prison grounds, they cannot take his pain seriously. It is an enigma to them. They can give him little, if any, comfort.

I found this on Andrew Barnett's site. He found it on Antonio Savordin's blog, so this is sort of a third degree theft. But it's the good kind.

From Andrew Barnett's blog:

I found this beautifully executed piece -- I forget the path that led me there -- on Antonio Savoradin's blog.http://savoradin.com/ It's about the nature of depression. I might comment on it in a few days, or work it into a longer piece I have brewing. But for now I just wanted to put it up here, before I forget.

To quote:

Depression, probably the most obvious condition leading to suicide, is a prison filled with repeat offenders, and the crime of melancholia has a startling recidivism rate. But it is not a prison in which rights are respected, nor is humane treatment the standard fare. Rather, the jailer is a fickle torturer who punishes his charges without mercy. The depressed person inhabits a cell with a tiny window and iron bars, is beaten, burned, electrocuted, and flayed by the guards, left shivering and in pain, while relatives and friends may visit, blind to both the unbearable wounds he suffers and to the bars which hold him. Bewildered, they cannot understand why he doesn't rise and walk through the empty doorway; they do not understand his pain; and they may inflict guilt or further torture by sneering at his condition or offering pointless advice ("What's the matter with you? Just leave!") which only exacerbates his suffering. Because they do not see the bars, the walls, the jailer, the prison grounds, they cannot take his pain seriously. It is an enigma to them. They can give him little, if any, comfort.

Anyone who gives you the party line about relationships between men being simpler than relations between women is giving you just that: a party line. Things are generally close to the surface with my female friends. When things are good their great and when it's on its on and we're all throwing furniture at each other and sending evil e-mails back and forth until we've gotten all the fight out of us. And then things are good again.

With my mail friends it has always been a bit different. Okay, a lot different, which explains why I don't have a best friend who's another guy. Here is the place to say this might be an American thing. I don't know how it goes in other countries. You can be friends with another guy who will not contact you for months at a time, or return you phone calls and after you've sort of gone on with your life hear that he regards you as "his best friend". You can watch all the Oprah you want, hoping to become an enlightened male only to learn that other males don't want an enlightened male for a friend. They do, but they don't. All your concern that was so attractive on one hand becomes threatening on the other. And God forbid he is actually concerned about you. Once one jackass I was friends with called me on the phone to complain that "I was in his head"-- whatever the hell that means! As if I had put myself in his head. Last year someone else who used to run up and hug me all the time (I got used to it after a while) wrote me a crazy letter screaming: DON'T LOVE ME !

Okay...

So now we come to... let's call him Kip. Kip is an usher at church-- not the Anglican one, but the dysfunction Roman Catholic one I attend on Sundays. And Kip has been waving at me smiling and nodding for nearly two years. Only I've met Kip, so that's getting weird and I wonder, what is it about ME that attracts the strange folks.

Then: it turns out that Kip, who lives in my home town once lived four hours away in my best friend from college's home town. In fact, they went to high school together. In fact, he tried to date her. So one Sunday she comes to visit and all three of us are looking at each other like, "Er... this is strange."

And Kip has not gotten any less strange. For a while now he has been working up the nerve to talk to me. I haven't really wanted to be bother. I would say "Hello" he would stammer a lot. And it hits me that in America at least, there are so many rules set down that many times not only do guys not know how to speak to girls they'd like to get to know, but they often have a hard time meeting each other.

Imagine a man actually wanting to know another man!

Forbid!

"Planning to write is not writing. Outlining, researching, talking to people about what you're doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing. . . . Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way."

--E.L. Doctorow

This could not be truer. If you're calling yourself a writer, please sit down and write something. As long as you're talking about writing something someday, someday will never come.

I've been having a bunch of dreams and doing a lot of sculpting lately, and characters are coming to me. Today I need to sit down and write in my journal to understand the story better. Hopefully, then, when I get finished with the rough draft of the story I'm working on now, I'll be able to start this one.

It's not the starting part that the difficulty. That's actually a relief. It's the writing down in my journal and starting for weave all the ideas into an actual tale.


I've got to give credit for the Doctorow quote to the writer of the link above.

It is approaching blizzard weather today. I am really a little tired of winter by now. Shovel once, and an hour later it is time to shovel snow again. Not paying enough attention to outside weather I leave home in sneakers and it's a miracle that my feet aren't soaked through wading in the snow.

This afternoon I go mass at Saint Jame's Cathedral. It's always in the little chapel and the main church is closed up except for Sunday, but today I see a hearse and two black Cadillacs and remember something I heard about a funeral. So while Mass goes on in the little chapel, next door in the nave of the church the organ is booming.

The details? The funeral for a twenty-one year old. Steve, who was at the funeral tells me that the boy was sitting with his friends and they let him have a gun. His girlfriend had left him, he said, and so right there in their presence he shot himself. There is so much wrong with that story I don't know where to begin. Leave out the fact that at the funeral a girl who spoke introduced herself as his friend of fourteen years who had dated him for three. She said he was her rock and she didn't know what she'd do without him.

The year is new, and all of my friends are in their mid to early twenties, so I hear a lot about “dreams.” I get nearly the same reaction to hearing people talking about “dreams” that I get when hearing about, say, hagus.
The truth is that on the nature of having dreams I am rather agnostic. No, more than that. I simply don’t believe in their value. I’m tired of hearing about them. The time to dream is when one is asleep, and having dreams for your life is something that shouldn’t be indulged in too much after... well, I’d say twelve.
And I saying life is meaningless, that one shouldn’t have goals? Certainly not. What I am proposing is taking these things seriously. Oprah thinks dreaming and finding your passion is vital. I don’t agree. Say, I had a dream about writing,. I might say, “I want to be a published writer at age fill-in-the-blank and make so much money and live here and do that and this and....” And this dream has a way of remaining just that, a dream. And it’s also my privelege, centered around my desire.
A sense of mission operates in a far different manner: I have a gift for words, therefore I ought to put it to use and put it to use well, however I can. Part of this is publishing, but that’s only a part. Maybe wealth will come, maybe it won’t. Certainly I will have to sacrifice, having a gift also means having to give back. There, it’s a very cut and dry way to look at things, but it also seems to be the way to effectively accomplish them.
In this day and age we are very much centered upon what is owed us, and what we want and how we can acheive all the things we desire. In all too few venues is it forgotten that we owe a great deal to each other, that service is required of a human beings, and that to one who is given much, much is demanded.

Having become thoroughly sick of Rome, I did not know how much Catholicism meant to me. I have studied many religions and practice three of them. There is truth in all things. Ever since my junior year in college when we studied Buddhism and Islam I wished that I could study my native religion afresh with new eyes. I wished that I could look at it as someone coming to it for the first time.
For me, this is what being an Anglican is like. It is the same Mass, but different. If one were asleep or inattentive he might mistake an Anglican service for a Roman Mass, but no devout member of either church could ever confuse the two.
Now we are in January, the time of new starts, the end of the Christmas season. I cannot believe how happy I am when I heft the weight of the Book of Common Prayer in my hands and begin the morning office. It is as if the gift I have received if Catholicism again after such a long isolation from it.

I have been thinking. All of us have an ax to grind. If we live in this world long enough, we’ve got an ax to grind. It’s all a matter of having the presence of mind not to waste out time grinding those axes. This means that from now on in my writing I will have to be very careful as to what I say on the Church of Rome, careful of how I portray Roman Catholics. Good storytelling should be like good coffee: strong, but with no room for bitterness.
It is a common flaw of people who leave one house, one tradition, one religion for another, to remain forever bitter at what they left, turning it into a monster while placing all hope and all salvation on the NEW church, the new philosophy, the new way. I will not be so foolish. All ways have their good things and their flaws. Let it suffice to say that I parted with Rome because she was an ill fit for me, and leave it at that. If I can rejoice in where I stand now, it follows that I must rejoice in the road that brought me here. If I had not been a devout Roman for twenty-one years, I could not be a devout Anglican this year, when I am twenty-six.

I almost didn't make it to the church. Firstly I wasn't sure if I felt like taking the bus downtown to Saint James'. Once I'd finally decided to go and I ended up on the wrong bus. Mass started at five past twelve. When I asked the woman across from me on the bus what time it was and she said it was twelve, we were a good ten minutes from downtown. When I'd finally gotten downtown I forgot the order of the streets and got off of the bus two blocks too early. I must have wanted badly to experience whatever I had experienced a few days before.

There were more people there today, a whole crowd in fact, and they were the power of the Anglican Mass. When mass was over, they gathered around me, demanded my name and then invited me to lunch. So, after twenty-one years in the Roman Catholic church, being largely discontent, after nearly three years at one parish where no one has ever invited me to anything, her I am at lunch getting to know these people. That's when I know I had stopped believing in Christianity. No, I don't mean what people THINK is Christianity. I don't mean the dogma and doctrine. I mean the actuality of Christianity, the Lord's Table where the Lord's love motivates people to be open and kind loving. I have experience little lovingkindness from Christians in a long time and had stopped believing in it. That's really what it means to stop believing in Christianity.

I do not understand how God works. Won't claim to. I was on top of the world (And it's been a long time since I've been there) as I took the cross town bus back to my house. But the bus switched its usual route and then it just sat and stopped. It sat there in front of the house of someone who-- while I can't blame him for my leaving the church-- was certainly a straw on my camelback. He stepped out of his car, looking forlorn, jiggled with the hood and then looked into the bus, and just before he saw me (or maybe he did see me). The bus pulled off.

What, Jesus, was the purpose of that? Me: happy at what I'd found, angry at the memory of crap I'd been through in the last few years, angry with the memory of him and the people I had been surrounded by. Switching from anger to pity to anger again. Gratitude to God for what he had shown me, and thinking of my old friend who was left fiddling with his car and his sour personality, the desire to show him what I had found.

It would be easier to hate someone or love someone, pity people or despise them. Believe or not believe. Be happy and not be angry at the same time. But it would also be... a fantasy.

I wanted people to read this story. That’s made me think a lot about the life of the writer. Not necessarily or not very often famous and certainly not, as I once imagined, very often the turbulent, outrageous life of drinking and sex, drugs and manic depression. Before I had a taste of sadness and learned the damage true depression could do, I think, no, I knew that it would be romantic to be a drugged up, wined out writer courageously struggling against “the darkness of the world and in himself…” That’s really a great idea for a novel, but a horrible way to live and not a very practical way to write either.
The truth is mine is a very calm life. There is little external tumult. I’ve got to look for the events that occur in my day. But this is what storytellers do. We look, we observe. My days are sedate enough to more than amend for the upheavals, scandals and mistakes in the lives of these characters.
Since the story’s gone up on the web, I’ve had to describe it several times. I thought it would be a lot easier than it is, but the trouble is when writing I never really think about what the tale is about, I just write it.
The story’s about high school. Some people think high school was heaven. Others believe it was hell, I tend to place it somewhere near purgatory. Tina, Vaughan and Mackenzie are finding out who they are and refusing to be who others have made them out to be. Madeleine and Ashley are fighting who they have become. Ian Cane if finding love and friendship in strange places.
You could say it’s about love, especially self love and self acceptance. Mackenzie admits he is gay and has to learn how to begin living with that. This means Vaughan has to learn his best friend in the world is gay and learn how to live with that. Cedric Fitzgerald has been learning—fifteen years now—how to love a wife who has died, but not left him alone.
Primarily it’s a story about friendship. Cedric, Ida and Ralph who have been friends for forty years; Vaughan and Mackenzie, Tina and Madeleine, who have been friends since the womb. Luke, Roy and Ian, the new guys in the circle of friendship. This is a story about how friendship takes many forms, the best of which are unconventional. It takes place within the frame of one high school year in one town called JAMNIA, Ohio.

I went to the Anglican church in town today. Everything's different but familiar. It was the first mass I'd been to in... my life? Where I wasn't divided in two. Where I didn't have a section of my mind reserved for the hecklers or spend part of the time raising my eyebrow. Usually I only feel reverent in church on the holy days: Good Friday, Holy Thursday. And then a great deal of the time there is so much production with so little real ceremony I feel like I'm at a show I can't completely believe in.

Saint James is the diocesan cathedral, but there aren't very many Anglicans in this part of the state, so it is the size of a normal church. Inside of it, before and altar something precious was going on while outside the world went on with its usual business....

Later that day I had a daydream like a vision. I was in the dark interior of the cathedral, and the darkness seemed to be saying, "Wherever there is love... there am I. In a million different places in this city, in this world love exists. And it is strong.

Was thinking today how many people where gamefaces. How many people construct a world and play by its rules, or live in worlds made by someone else. We are all creators. We just have to be careful if we are imitators. We just have to be careful to create well, and truly.

TONIGHT

Tonight what I am getting past is the suggestion that there is nothing interesting about my life. I have lived in the Middle West all of my life, and been content, more than content here. But when you grow up anywhere between the west and east coasts of America that isn't a large city, you are told, and everyone around you tells you, that there is nothing here worth thinking about or talking about.

But here I am thinking about it and talking about it.

Would like to say that I have a publisher for this book it took me long enough to finish writing, but I haven't gotten the time yet this week to even get it ready to send to the publishers. Thought it would be a good idea to put it on line, that lots of people who would never see it if it were out in print would see it on the net and in blogs. This turning out to be sort of true. But putting it up on one blog and then another takes a lot of time. I am taking as much time putting this book up on the internet as I would if I were... no, that's not true. And it's a lot more fun putting it up here than printing it out, sending it to publishing house after publishing house hoping I'll be discovered. I'd rather be discovered while I'm waiting to be discovered.

People go on reality television to be seen. They go on American Idol or whatever Idol so that they can be seen. People do all sorts of things just to be seen.

Why does a writer write? To be heard? Possibly, but I think the best of us do it in order to hear.

James Gilliard, are you out there?

Is anyone out there?

Moloch, Moloch, loveless in Moloch.

P.S. A little Allen Ginsberg never hurt anyone.... well, except maybe Allen Ginsberg....

On Talk of the Nation the hour is devoted to finding happiness through employment. Americans, we are Puritans. We might as well still be wearing those black dresses and jackets with the cute tights and bonnets to boot.

No one ever has a special called "Finding happiness through unemployment." As a poet and a storyteller this would sum up my history since graduation from college. If you don't just haveto have money and everything you want write when you want to, finding fulfillment ceases to be a question. Having won a fulfilling life you start to ask questions like, "Where can I get enough money to buy a pack of cigarettes?" "Can I get a part time job that is extremely part time?"

What ever happened to "patrons"?

Is there any way I could live as a kept man, and still keep my integrity?

Does integrity really pay the bills?

How much do I care about what pays the bills...?

Epiphany

Happy Epiphany. Mass was a surprise this morning, one might even say... well, and Epiphany. Saw lots of people I didn't plan on seeing. The music was especially good. I was especially happy. I sat next to a man whose breath could have been better, but whose voice was excellent and our pew blasted away "We Three Kings..."

So the sermon begins with the priest talking about how we doubt God, or doubt the goodness of God or... I don't know. All I know is that eight out of ten times whoever is doing the sermon starts it by talking about how difficult it is to believe which makes me wonder, if even the priests don't believe in thier religion, might there not be a problem?

I usually get up and leave the pew around the sermon. This Sunday is no exception. I hear about doubt and what has surprised me over the years is how all the other Catholics I grew up alongside of who were "better" than me or nicer than me or joined choir or campus ministry when I didn't want to always go on about how hard it is to believe....

Believe in what? I have never had a problem believing. for all my flaws I have always more or less expected God to be God even when I had no idea what that meant. Orthodox Christianity... I often doubt. The Catholic Church, I flat out ignore. God... Jesus.... I don't have trouble with them at all. Religions fight against each other, claim which is right and which is wrong. Tell you to believe in this or go to hell. The infant in the manger just offers himself as a gift and says, "Here I am." I have no trouble believing in him unless I stop believing in love.

Today on Epiphany, as we think of the wise ones and the three gifts I think of their gifts to me, what they are saying to me. Tonight I think of the first gift, the gift of gold. Gold is the gift of kingship? What is it telling me? That a king conducts himself with honor and dignity and that he can be relied upon, that there is royalty in everyone and everyone ought to be accorded that dignity. There are so many people out on the streets, at the grocery store or the mall who are amazed just when you treat them with the dignity they deserve... Just when you remember they are queens and kings... even when they themselves have forgotten it.

yechydda

So, I went to check out my own blog and looked up into the little advertisement sign over it. In small yellow letters I read: related articles: storytelling, agnosticism. Intrigued, I clicked the agnosticism button and scrolled down to look at a description of the articles related to my blog. How did I get lumped in agnosticism. I know that when I filed with Blogphiles I had twenty key words I was allowed to punch in. Maybe agnostic was one of the words I punched in, but I don’t think I meant it the way most people think it does.
Talking to people, surfing the web, reading through other blogs I can’t help but notice that the subject of God, (his, her, their) existence or the lack of it is very much in vogue and everyone has an opinion. Some people have very long, very sophisticated explanations to back up their opinion, and they’re usually more wrong than anyone else. Going through these agnostic files I found some people that said an agnostic was someone who said you can’t know for certain if there is a God or not. Others were much more militant including the Church of We Don’t Know And We Don’t Give a… well, you know where I’m headed with this.
When I say agnostic I don’t mean that we don’t know. I mean that we can’t even begin to guess. I grew up a devout Catholic and more about that later. The devotion would have been wonderful if we were taught to be devoted to truth, to love, to honesty, to God. We should have been taught to follow Jesus but instead we were handed a million ways to grovel in front of him and instructions on how many types of sin there were and how they determined our level of unworthiness. I talk about my own growing up, but whatever church you grew up in, or religion, or even if you grew up without religion, the story is more or less the same. We are taught one view and God has to fit inside of this. Woe to the people who don’t believe the same way. Woe to people who call God Krishna. Or him Her, or don’t call him at all, who believe in an inner light or a basic goodness or just are tired of religion.

Let me sign off with this, a description of a scene from a book called Becoming the Enchanter, by Lyn Webster Wilde. In a part of the book her teacher is trying to convey a truth to her by telling her a story. He says, “Close your eyes and listen. I am going to speak you ancient words… they will resonate in your mind at hidden levels, reminding you of what you already know… just listen and let your mind drift. Don’t try to concentrate…”

The best religion will never claim to be dogmatic and final. The ceremony and words are a collection of senses and songs, words and symbols that we can pass through into goodness and grace, two things very much worth believing in.