deviant

I finally got around to setting up an account on Deviant Art.

So, now you have something to buy that impossible-to-buy-for person for Christmas. You can get a print of one of my paintings for super cheap, or you can buy greeting cards, mouse pads, puzzles, mugs and more.

I forked over for a premium account so they'd let me slash their pre-set prices on all the various prints in half. That's right, HALF! So somebody who's always wanted a bit of my work should go buy a piece, so I can justify my astronomical thirty-dollar investment.

Click HERE for the funshow.

Anatomy of an Effup: Part Seventeen

When Ariana was two years old, her twenty-two year old father went on a business trip to Texas and never came back. Her mother eventually left Ariana and her older brother Zeke in the care of her in-laws and went to look for him. When at last she found him, he was married to another woman.

 For a while, they lived there in the small town of Roseburg, Oregon, wrapped up in the sympathetic fold of her flock of west coast relatives. Her mother's parents were there, too, so Ariana's mother, her brother and she moved into an airstream trailer on their property and did what they could to get by. Ariana learned from an early age to be strong for her mother, and to look out for herself. There were clothes to be folded and goats to be milked, and no time to spend crying over spilt dreams.

In time, her mother struck back up a correspondence with an old boyfriend from high school, a divorcee with two sons who lived in a house he had built up from the foundations out in North Carolina, about five minute's drive from where my parents now live. Letters became more frequent... then phone calls... until at last they decided to get married. Ariana was four.

It was not easy - moving across the country and trying to meld into another family. Suddenly, she was one little girl with three rough and tumble brothers - two older, one younger. Their home, like many in the area, was situated on an acreage, so she and her brothers became children of the woods. They spent their days tromping about in the creek, catching crawdads and dodging cottonmouths. She grew tough and independent, so it was only natural that as years went by and the time came for her to grow up and become a woman, she got heavily involved in sports. She cut her hair short and played hard, setting a school swimming record and becoming a team leader in volleyball and soccer. She took kickboxing and learned to hit harder than most guys.

She worked hard, too, during those transitional years. From the age of eleven she shoveled horse poop ("shit", she insisted) for a little extra cash and a chance to learn equestrian vaulting, which is basically an extremely demanding combination of dance and gymnastics on the back of a moving horse. She also got a job working alongside her mother as a veterinary technician at the local animal hospital. She asked for little from anyone, and indeed would not have gotten much. Her parents were always very careful with money and tended to funnel it towards other things, like her father's boat.

For eleven years, Ariana's step-father labored to craft by hand a beautiful thirty-five foot sailing ship. He built a mill, then took advantage of the "fortuitous" Hurricane Hugo to mill his own wood. He then built a large workshop, and with great ingenuity and a whole lot of time and effort began to put the thing together. He went to a gun range and collected piles and piles of spent ammunition, which he melted down and molded into the keel for ballast. He scraped and shaved and gradually the thing took shape: from the smooth, artful lines of it's hull to the finely polished, hand-crafted cedar interior, complete with diesel engine, bunks, cupboards and gyro-scoping galley stove - the works.

It seemed to Ariana that when he wasn't off building and maintaining airplanes her new daddy was always at work on the boat, and although this meant that he never once attended a single one of her games, she was not a complainer. She was, rather, a thing of beauty - a joyous, vivacious young sprite in her own right. She loved to explore the world around her, to play with animals, and to dream of great things. She wanted to live in Canada, adopt a child, and eat swordfish on the beach in Mexico. At every job she ever worked she was loved, and the owners of the barn where she shoveled adopted her as their own, having her over for meals and driving her to vaulting competitions. She, in turn, was a giver - and so she gave relentlessly.

It wasn't easy, though, and inside that tough exterior she held a lot of pain. The tensions of a blended family were exacerbated by a pair of strong-willed older brothers. They drank hard and got in trouble. One barely lived at home at all, and the other was kicked out before completing high school. Grandparents showed favoritism to their biological grandchildren, sometimes blatantly. Her parents argued, and her mother, an intensely private person, would sometimes confide to Ariana about their quarrels. Still, she did not complain. She gave everyone credit - perhaps more than their due - and worked harder to take care of herself.

After high school, she too moved immediately out of the home. She rented a house with one of her brothers while working three jobs and attending a technical college an hour's drive away, studying to become a licensed veterinary technician. When her brother decided he was more interested in smoking weed than paying rent, she kept right on supporting him - digging into her savings and barely getting by. She was a giver, but it was starting to become more difficult. Years of ceaseless sport had worn down her joints, and she was starting to develop chronic pain in her back, wrists and ankles. She was an athlete - what was she to do?

She started drinking and smoking up. A little, at first, and then more. She partied hard, and got involved with more boys than she liked to admit. I imagine that those were years spent searching for lost love, trying to find in a few fleeting moments the sense of perfect belonging and worth that perhaps had been missing from an absentee father, a distracted daddy, and brothers too caught up in their own problems to give her the support a family ought to provide. They weren't bad parents or brothers, she often said... they did the best with what they had.

It was that innate grace that prompted her to believe that she could change. She dropped out of school, worked harder still, quit drinking and began to plan for a move back to Oregon to stay with her Aunt and begin a new life with her father's family. She was making choices, being proactive - taking charge of her life. And then she met... Me.

My friend James once said, "I am not a great man. But if admitting that I am not a great man makes me one... well then, I guess I am."

Therein lies the painful and ridiculous paradox of this whole story: the more truth I tell about what a poop-burger I am, the more someone will come back to me and say, "man, Josh, I love your honesty. It's just so real and beautiful and you know what else? When I read your words they remind me of my own excremental actions, and I just feel like you've come out and said something about me that I always knew but just couldn't seem to say. What you've done is just so, so, so... great."

When people say that, I end up feeling like the magic is flowing - has flown, in fact, through my fingers and onto the page. As Goethe says, "Only the artist sees spirits. But after he has told of their appearing to him, everybody sees them."

In those moments I often start to get a little puffed up, until I remember that this is an EFFUP we're talking about here. It is a story with a definite ending, and in that ending, I am the loser. My wife walks away, and the story ends... that's losing, right?

Except, it isn't. Because life isn't made up of winners and losers, of great men and mice. Life is a story - a beautiful, endless story that doesn't (that can't) make sense. It is not about besting other people, it is about loving them. You win - you become a great man or woman - by subsuming all your fears, anxieties and desires into the bigger story - the story of love that we are all writing together with our imperfect, often ugly actions and words.

I set out at the start of this story to tell you the truth, but find that I have come to this point and now I do not know how to do it. I am afraid that the ugliness that is in me will wrest the story from my hands - that I will forget that this is a love story, not a weapon. I am also afraid that it is myself I will forget to love, that I will forget that we are all "Gods and Monsters", as the man says, and that despite my failures there is hope for me yet. 

I am tempted to avoid the sick, sad traipsing off to failure - to instead just type, "The End" and be done with it. The story has written itself, after all. You know how it ends and have seen me laying all the pipe, so what's the point in wasting all that energy blowing up the tanker?

Except...

Except it's not all ugliness and mayhem from here on out. There is beauty within the decay. It is like when, in that quintessential scene in the film "American Beauty", they watch a home video of a discarded plastic grocery bag dancing in the wind. Even in the detritus of a broken, failed society (more than three hundred and eighty billion plastic bags are discarded in the US every year) there is beauty. The ugliness of what I have done is there, yes. But if I cannot face it, I will miss out on the wistful song being played behind the dance of the plastic bag, and you will miss out on the lovely woman that is Ariana. It isn't a tragedy unless you, too, love what was lost.

So I will embrace this story and tell you about the pinky hug.

It's odd that of all the things that at the time seemed momentous, it is the pinky hug I keep coming back to. We were headed to Ariana's parents' house after dinner with some friends who, I was told later, had given me the nod. I was driving her Honda CRX, a sporty little red hatchback that she called her "cool-car", and somehow in the pull and thrust of that stick our pinkie fingers locked and the pheromone experiment began.

Ariana and I sparked and burst into flame. I was shaken and lost, unsure of anything. I was also the new guy in town, and although I still looked rather young (she thought I was maybe sixteen), I was instantly appealing to her. I was from Canada, and an artist. Not only that, but I also talked openly about my feelings and tried to treat her with respect. I clucked in sympathy when she told me of her losses, and tried to be honest about mine.

And she? She was this woman, strong and wild and crazy, her "cool-car" bursting with primal, canine energy from the two dogs she took with her everywhere - a welsh corgi and a German wire-haired pointer.

The first interaction I can remember with her was at a game of pick-up volleyball at some sand courts near where we both lived. As I recall, she was wearing a pair of short, shiny black athletic shorts with white stripes down the sides, and a light blue t-shirt that she had modified, in her way, by cutting a somewhat hap-hazard "V" in the neck at the front, and hacking off the sleeves. She was exactly the same height as I - five foot ten and a half inches - and had thick, shoulder-length brown hair. She had the cutest little buttony nose, some of the loveliest lips I had ever seen, and an athletic body with which she projected confidence, determination and purpose. I was immediately, acutely drawn to her for her beauty and her strength.

She threw sand at me and called me a name and so I, in turn, invited her to come see some of my paintings. That is, I suppose, what one does at pick-up volleyball games.

As she got to know me, I offered her a vision of a man who would care for her, and love her the way she yearned to be loved. For my part, I saw her as a beautiful, sexy, vivacious escape from the confusion of a life with very little to moor it. Neither of us, however, was seeing all that clearly. The man she thought she saw was in many ways a mask I put up to hide the little boy I feared myself to be. I tried desperately to be honest with her, but always held certain aspects of myself in reserve. And she could never be anyone's escape. People are not toys, or tools for the avoidance of fear. They are people, and must be loved freely, openly, without condition.

I made it about me... me and my overblown sense of honor. So when on her week-long drive out to Oregon we racked up an Eight Hundred Dollar phone bill (frickety-splickety demon cell phone companies with their demon hidden roaming charges) I responded by paying for half of it and wedding myself to her in part out of what I saw as a duty. I loved her, I did - and every day we were apart my love grew stronger. But in that love I had allowed to ferment the tiniest bit of rot - a fungal obligation that would grow to infect my understanding of the whole relationship.

When three months later she decided to throw away her Oregon dreams and move back to North Carolina for the man she had come to love, I made her a book. I modge-podged the cover with a collage of pictures from National Geographic magazines and letters that spelled out: "for the love of Ariana". Inside, I had written that although I did not know what love was, I loved her anyways because... and went on to list reason after reason after reason. From time to time over the years, I would steal the book back and write a few more. I think I made it to two hundred and ten.

She, in turn, made me a book of her own - a beautiful work of art covered with a patchwork of blue cloth quilted over boards and bound with fishing line and hemp to heavy, blue, hand-cut pages. She shaped the letters of my name out of yellow fabric and sewed them onto the cover, and then she sewed for the book a fitted carrying bag of blue corduroy, closed with a large wooden button and a loop of hemp. Around the edges of the pages she wrote words of love in red pen, and in the back tucked a note of abandonment and a promise to be entirely mine.

It seems naive and idealistic, I know; but our books were true... both of them. In mine, however, was a seed of all the fear and self-loathing I'd dragged down from Canada and across the fertile plains to North Carolina.

I opened those blue pages and began to record there the poems I wrote for her. The very first is dated October, two thousand and one - one month after she moved to Oregon. It is not a masterpiece. It is no T.S. Eliot or Robert Frost or even Ogden Nash. It is a simple poem filled with bursting emotion and the little, intimate jokes of a young love. It is titled, simply, with her name:

Ariana

You were there,
with a smile excruciating to someplace around my duodenum,
and, like laudanum to my pain
in rain you puddle-stomped and romped,
a little kitten smitten by a ball of yarn.

I have been bitten
at the sight of wet overalls
your arms entwined in mine hoping for forever now
but knowing, in the end, an end will be.
It's sweet to see that we can be so real and feel so deep
the things we hope but cannot know.

We talk of fears and years gone by,
when you were not the person I was there for,
and we could care for other things.
In a bar, you sing out loud with a guy who sings out loud about
not being loved any more,
and the more you sing the more I knot inside,
wishing I could hide your pain.

Rain falls, washing and cleaning;
and I find meaning in the way you smile.

For, while I'm captive in your gaze,
I'm amazed that you can look so deep at me
and see
and still be here, so near.

I want to hold you,
ear on heart,
for days and days in the swelling place of being alive:

becoming free, becoming We.

---

When I wrote that line, "but knowing, in the end, an end will be" [emphasis added], I was no doubt attempting to be deep - to take into account the fragile, finite nature of our human lives and loves. There is nothing terribly wrong with that sentiment, but it certainly does not sound like the words of a person overcome with the passionate, driving elemental forces of young love and (in retrospect) seems eerily prescient.

In that lovely movie, "The Emperor's Club", Kevin Kline's character gets to the crux of the movie by saying that how we finish is determined by how we begin, adding later that "a man's character is his destiny". I have come to believe that grace is greater than destiny; but without it you will always get what you've paid for.

Ariana had only been back a few days when treeplanting Rob called me up to say he was looking for foremen for some crews and had already asked my brother, Jo-Ben. The possibility had been brought up in past years as I had started to excel in my planting ability and had demonstrated an understanding for the dynamics of the job, but back then it hadn't fit into my life plan and the prospect of leadership kind of terrified me. Still, it was a challenge and an opportunity, as well as a chance to continue to work with my brother, which I had grown to love doing. That, coupled with a growing unease with what felt to me to be hyper-accelerated relational momentum with Ariana, propelled me to say "yes".

Thus began three years of emotional tug-o-war for Ariana, as I retreated and came back again and again, never willing to fully commit in any direction. I wanted to. I tried to. But I found myself incapable.

Treeplanting continued to provide a momentary escape. So I felt that I was over-committing with my body and soul to a relationship that at turns terrified me - so what? I was leaving in four months to go tree planting. Nothing need be set in stone - freedom was always just a short flight away.

The second summer I was away leading a treeplanting crew my sister Hannah came to North Carolina, and she and Ariana became bestest bosom buddies. My sister likes to talk (and talk, and talk, and talk) and in all her chatter Ariana picked up her enthusiasm for my alma mater, TWU. She decided she wanted to go there. I agreed to support her in that, and to move back to British Columbia. We took up residence in adjacent camper-trailers on Christopher John (of Stabilo)'s parent's property. She went to school and I continued to "work" half-halfheartedly at being an artist.

It could not go on indefinitely. Definition is the skeleton of identity, and something had to be defined, or everything would break. Changed loomed on the horizon, and I did not feel equal to the storm.

studentia

One of my more gifted students has been featured in print and online in "Charlotte Parent" magazine. I am giving you the link, so that you can look at it and know that inasmuch as he is cool and talented and worthy of your admiration, I am also these things by association.

Here it is. 

You may now love me, as well.

how's it gonna be?

It is midnight, and my son wakes up crying, drenched in sweat. He snuggles in close and through his tears I hear him say "eh-mo"; so I start singing the la-la-la's of "Elmo's Song". His cries taper off and he reaches up a tiny hand, strokes my face lightly, and in a soft voice says, "that, dadu... that". We are lying side by side on a hospital bed at Carolina Medical Center in Monroe, where he was admitted two nights ago with a high fever and difficulty breathing.

My wife had called and, unable to speak through her tears, passed the phone off to the closest nurse, who explained that he seemed to have pneumonia and that they would be admitting him into the hospital. As I drove down the highway towards the pediatric center the sun, which for two days had been blocked out by torrential rainstorms, poked through the evening sky, setting the already blazing leaves of fall afire. It seemed as though the top halves of all the trees are burning, and I was tempted to start making metaphors of death right there - but the glowing beauty of it all against the deep blue sky stopped me and I thought instead of rainbows, and hope.

I cry a fair bit on this drive, thinking about death and the fragility of my toddler son's life. But then I slap myself hard a few times, insisting that I "suck it up and be a man". My wife and son need me to be strong, I insist, so I say a little prayer for strength and drive on, tears drying.

When I get to the hospital she is indeed falling apart a bit, although Mateo is bouncing off the walls in Motrin-induced good spirits. I give her a hug and then try to anchor down my son, who soon crashes and spends the rest of our two days in the hospital alternating between being a pale, sickly-looking whimper-worm and a full-throated, screaming hellion. I can't blame him - every couple of hours someone comes into the room and pokes him with something, or makes him breathe wet air from a hissing, spitting tube, or jiggles one of the multiple tubes and wires connected to his body.

At long last, the tubes come off and the boy is freed. They say he may have asthma. I drive him home and put him down for a nap while my wife goes to a pharmacy to pick up his drugs. After two hours, he wakes up sweating and screaming, so I force-feed him some more Motrin and then take him out of the "grandmother apartment" where we live and into the house where his grandmother actually lives, so he can watch TV whilst I subject him to some more moist air from the home nebulizer they gave (sold) us at the hospital.

This does not make him happy, and sets off another three-hour session of crying, screaming and coughing, with occasional blips of calm. After dinner - which he does not eat - I begin force-feeding him the four syringes of antibiotics and steroids I am required to give him. At the final squirt of the final syringe he vomits, losing all the medicine and the cup of milk he has drunk all over himself, the couch, and me. My parents have by then dropped in to help, and so I snap at mom to cuddle him while I rinse some contact-cement puke off his clothes.

As I do this, I can't help thinking, "It's not supposed to be like this." It is a phrase I hate, not just because of the "correct", non-existent reality that it presumes, but also because it implies that I, in my infinite wisdom, know what that reality ought to be. It is a phrase my wife used to say when we argued and it infuriated me because, I reasoned (in that annoying way of husbands who are oblivious to what it would take to defuse a situation), it kept us from dealing with the situation as it actually was.

Nonetheless, I say it - repeat it, in fact, over and over in my head, as I pour more of the milky-white antibiotic from its container into the small plastic cap and then knock it over as I clumsily try to fill the syringe with one hand - my other arm wrapped across Mateo's chest. I start to cry, and when mom gives me a little sympathetic one-hand back rub I snap at her again, "Not helping, mom", I say, adding, "I know you're trying to help, mom... thanks, but it just doesn't help right now". I have long been mean to my mother, and it comes out worst when I am sleep-deprived and stressed. Maybe that's why my wife is not here, I think.

She always seems to know how to calm Mateo down, and everything I am doing right now just upsets him more. As I give him the medicine a second time he struggles and cries, "Sleepy, Dadu. Sleep now. Bed." I assure him that we'll go to bed as soon as he gets all his medicine, and although he weekly says, "oh-kay", he keeps on crying.

We finish the last syringe and it stays down. At long last he quiets, nods, and begins to fall away. I put him to bed and go to apologize to mom (and, of course, to ask her to wash the puke-laundry for me. I'm not entirely a jerk, but my washing machine is broken).

Mateo sleeps nearly through the night, waking only a couple of times with a few short cries, but falling promptly away again. In the morning I hear him calling softly for milk, so I get him a sippy cup and then sit by him as he re-arranges his pillow, pulls a blanket over himself, and drinks the whole thing. His fever is gone and he is mostly happy. We make a Doctor's appointment and at nine-forty-five his mother shows up and we head back up the highway to Monroe. She is again her happy, smiling self, and I enjoy her company but cannot understand why she jokes with me and laughs when I start singing a silly song to calm Mateo. She has been gone less than two months, and the wound is still very raw and tender.

Our doctor is a black woman, an African. She is not a big woman, but fills the room with the force of her personality. She speaks loudly from only a few feet away in her somewhat thick accent, and seems to be unaware of the strength of her voice. It is a pleasant voice, though, so I am not offended by it. "Nobody in the house is smoking?", she demands, as if daring us to say otherwise. I say no and she leans in close with a friendly smile on her face, saying, "You would not lie to me, would you? Because I am watching you... I see."

Even though I have never smoked a cigarette in my life, I feel embarrassed and want to start confessing things.

My wife, feeling for me in my discomfort, interjects, "See, what happened is we're separated, and the place where I live my roommate smokes in the other room and..." the doctor doesn't even let her finish, "Whaat!", she asks, "Why you want to do something like that for? You are so young! You look like nice people - what is there so bad you cannot work through it for the good of the child!?!" As she says this she leans close to me again, and I once again feel the urge to confess. "I, um. I don't know." I say, avoiding her eyes and my wife's.

I want to tell this strange, powerful black woman that it is not my idea or my fault. That it kills me. That I would do anything to convince my wife to come back. But this is not entirely the truth. The truth is, all I can say for certain is that I do not understand what happened, and that every time I see my wife, I notice again how beautiful she is. I want to throw myself at her feet and beg her to come back to me, to change her mind. Again and again I think those ugly words: "it shouldn't be like this", and feel waves and waves of rage, sorrow, and confusion crashing against the walls of her determination.

I read something recently about strong black women, and how although they get a lot of flack for what is perceived as a domineering attitude, it is a way of operating that they have been forced into by a generation of black men who, for complicated reasons, have abdicated the place of leadership in the black community. This doctor reminds me of them and makes me think that perhaps this strength is not a forced response to an ugly reality, but a vestigial genetic heritage, handed down through generations from a wild past on a dangerous continent, where village women still carry the heaviest loads and form the backbone of deep, rooted communities.

I want to turn to this woman, to look her in the eyes and ask, "Why?"

Why does it seem so clear to her  - this woman so unaffected by our ugly, broken culture that she can speak her mind with love shining in her eyes - that we should just work it out for the good of our child? She is herself, in a sense, a child - unfettered by a culture that equates lies with maturity, and assumes that ugliness ought to be excused, apologized for, walked away from, or ignored. I want to ask her how she has done this, but she has already flown back into an explanation of Mateo's medical issues. She takes a final crack later, saying, "he is crying  because he thinks if he cries more it will force his parents to stay together. They know... they do" and then she calls a nurse to check his blood oxygen and is out the door and on to other patients.

I avoid eye contact with my wife as we leave the room. I am awkward and nervous, afraid of what she will say about this woman. I feel her memory as a beautiful, elemental force, and I do not wish to hear her maligned. We put Mateo in the car, and as I pull out of our parking spot my wife turns to me and says, "Apart from barely understanding what she was saying with that accent, I like that doctor. I think maybe we should stay with her. What do you think?" I mumble agreement as we pull into the street.

This world - this life - is a beautiful mystery. I do not understand even the smallest things. The sun shines hot in mid-November. Mateo whimpers and falls asleep in the back seat as my wife leans back to cradle his head with her hand, so he won't be jostled. I catch myself quietly singing a line from some song I don't really know, "I say a little prayer for you". I sing it over and over, so softly that I am almost humming. My wife laughs, folds some cloth to prop Mateo's head, and settles back into her seat, coughing.

She tells me of her plans to get the rest of her things moved into her new place this evening. She is smiling, and I do not understand. I sing it again, and again she laughs and adds, "you know I'm going to have that stuck in my head all night." We drive as a family in silence down the road, between rows of gold and crimson oak trees, and I catch myself thinking, "this is how it should be".

Anatomy of an Effup: Part Sixteen

One very, very small part of the reason I did not attempt to put my awkward jungle "moves" on the actress formerly known as Nicole is that shortly after I got Jennika's "I'm engaged and it's not to you" email, I made an overly dramatic self-promise that that was it. I was done with girls for the foreseeable future. Maybe someday down the road I would meet some submissive little Nicaraguan girl who was accustomed to living in a patriarchy and would bake me empanadas and just adore me right down to my gringo toes, but for now I was done, I swore, with getting my knickers in a knot over these curvaceous little venetian blinders.

In the northern town of Chetwynd, British Columbia, I determined that no sashaying temptress was going to tie me down, or up in knots, or in any other way bind me with the cords of relational fidelity. I was going to drive my little car to my folk's place in North Carolina and then head off to Nicaragua a free man, and that was absolutely the bare bodkin of it. Little did I know the speed bump that awaited in Williams Lake - about six hours' drive south of Chetwynd.

Do you remember Catherine's best friend, who tried to use me as a wedge between Catherine and the bad-boy boyfriend she didn't approve of? Well, Allie happened to have a dentist father, a house on the lake, and a ski-boat/hot tub combo that was too seductive to pass up. Over the past few years my TWU tree-planting compatriots and I had stopped in at Allie's house a few different times, and although it's likely we had well-overstayed our welcome, I figured she wouldn't mind if I crashed a couch for an evening just this one more time.

After dinner on the deck, Allie suggested we head up to a party of sorts at her friend's house, up the hill. As much as I tend to feel awkward around groups of strangers, I did my guestly duty and when we got there found to my surprise that I was in one of my rarer moods, the sort where I feel pretty and witty and brash. I made myself at home, ate a lot of snacks, blatantly cheated at the party game (convincing all my teammates to do the same), and generally upped the "rollicking good time" quotient by a factor of me.

Back at Allie's, I turned to her and said something about being really tired, and she said, "Well, yeah. We could go to bed now. Or we could hang out a while in the hot tub."

Ring out, wild alarum bells.

"I really am feeling pretty bushed", I said. "I've got to drive all the way to Vancouver tomorrow. I think I probably ought to crash."

"Oh, come on", she argued, "You'll sleep better after a nice soak in the hot tub."

I caved. I mean, it would have been rude not to, right?

So there I was, sitting in this hot tub by the lake under the stars in the middle of the night with a cute girl whose parents had long since turned in. She started to guide the conversation to male-female connection, and relationships, and before I knew it she was asking me if, well, if things were different and Catherine was into me again, if I would still want to hook up with her. I knew exactly why she was asking me this, but despite my Promise I told her, in an offhand way, that I had learned that Catherine wasn't exactly my type.

At this point, you are undoubtedly thinking: "Are you NUTS! You're about to go to Nicaragua for God-knows how long, you're depressed about Jennika and some girl is offering you a momentary reprieve - after which you can just run off to Central America and never think about it again. It would be a weasel thing to do, yes, but why in the name of Bubba-Schtickey are you hopping into a hot tub with a hot girl who's obviously digging on you if you aren't going to jump right on that!?!"

Why, indeed.

That really is a wonderful question, and one I have gone back to in numerous lonely moments since. I put myself in that situation, but had zero intention of taking it where inertia was leading. Was I an idiot? Was I really some sort of bizarre throwback to an age of chivalry, a man who, with exceptional moral fortitude, will rise up and guard the lady's honor? Or was it just that I did not really think of myself as a man, and so instead chose the path of fear? Am I not attracted to women in the ordinary way?

Well: yes, yes, yes and no. I was definitely attracted to her - was grateful for the darkness, in fact - but as I sat in that hot tub pondering my next move, I wrote a little story in my head:

In this story I kissed Allie - just because I could. Then, perhaps, I kissed her a fair bit more. When I had first met Allie and Catherine and we had all ended up at a pizza place, I had overheard Allie describing to a couple of guys the "four levels of passion" that she figured happened during a good make-out session, with the final level involving some back-clawing and possibly biting - so chances were good that given that subconscious back-story things would have gotten hotter and heavier than I might have intended. At the end of that I still would have hopped in my car and moved down to Nicaragua. Then, after phone calls and emails (prompted more on my part by guilty obligation than desire), there would most likely have been an awkward, painful tapering off to nothing.

I recognized that this whole story would have been written at Allie's prompting - so it was likely to hurt her more than me. Although I'd been pretty shaken up back when I discovered how I had been manipulated, Allie had just been looking out for her friend. She didn't deserve to play nursemaid to my bruised ego.

So I kept my promise to myself and out of fear or good character or both I changed the subject and got out of the hot tub and went to bed on a big, soft, comfy couch of loneliness. The next morning as I helped with breakfast, I endured Allie's mother's thinly veiled insinuations ("oh, and he cooks, too") and then went out, jumped back into the trusty Jetta, and drove the remaining six hours to the lower mainland - where I did not attempt to have a go at Evangeline Lilly.

This was probably a wise choice.

Not, as you may think, because when someone is destined to become a television star they are therefore an unattainable, ethereal goddess, but because with the rucksack of abysmally low self-esteem I was lugging around it is unlikely I'd have done anything other than get myself all worked up over nothing. So I didn't.

I also did not call Jesse the girl, who lived on the Washington coast and would likely have welcomed a little post-educational walk down the beach. I shook off what I imagined to be the advances of the cute little friend of a friend in L.A. who tried to convince me to stick around for a few more weeks, and I back-burnered the attraction I had felt for a very long time for an old high school friend who lived in Tucson. I drove three thousand, three hundred and thirty seven miles without a hitch, all the way to Dallas, Texas. Then, as usually happens in this situation (going to Texas), things fell apart.

It started probably right when I crossed the border into Texas. I had set out at around four in the morning, planning to do the fifteen hours of driving time all in one day, so as to maintain my perfect record of only ever stopping at friend's houses and thereby never paying for camping or a hotel. It was one of the hotter days of the summer - I think about a hundred and fourteen degrees. My little un-airconditioned tin-can of a car quickly became an oven, and by Texas-Time my four-liter milk jug of frozen water was soon urine-warm and nearly unpalatable. I stopped regularly for freeze pops and ice cubes at service stations, but by the time I made it to Dallas I was hallucinating. Really, I'm not making this up. I was actually imagining myself floating about five feet above the car. I remember thinking how crazy it was that the guy down there was still able to steer and push the gas pedal without my help.

If you have ever been to Dallas, you know they have these insane interchanges that go this way and that way and yon. They suck you in and then spit you out in some direction you never intended to go, so even if my mind hadn't been operating like it was off on a really epic drug trip, it is likely that I might still have spent several hours going around and around in those dad-blamed things.

I think it was probably about an hour into my Dallas wanderings that the bearings on my car started to go. I wasn't sure at the time, of course, being mostly off in la-la land, so I pulled off to the side of some dark street, gave my tires a good kick, and then drove around some more. By this time it was one in the morning and I was starting to get a little worried. I hated to do it, but instead of waiting for my fellow early-morning commuters to turn into giant lizards as blood and microwaves rained down from the sky, I pulled into a gas station, dialed my cousin's number and begged him to come find me. As it turned out I was only about ten minutes from his apartment, but it was a terror-stricken ten minutes of waiting as angry clumps of teenagers loitered in the parking lot around me, obviously maneuvering for the best chance to kill me and steal all my valuables.

By some miracle, this did not happen. Instead, my cousin Neil came and rescued me. I followed him back, driving about an inch from his bumper, and woke up many hours later to discover that my wheel bearings were, in fact, expensively broken. And then I got a message to call Rob as soon as possible regarding our Nicaragua plans.

Months before, Rob had been up in Canada trying to undo the work of weasels on the board of the organization that had ostensibly sent him south. While he had been setting up the whole development deal, they had been busy not fulfilling their obligation to raise money to fund it, and the call from Rob was to sadly tell me that he had regrettably been unable, in the past three months, to make up the eighty-thousand dollar difference. So. No Nicaragua, and no direction to go but home.

Wherever that was.

another in-class doodleation - this time soft pastel

Tell Me a Story

ActorAustin asked me last night why I hadn't written yet about our little adventure at a club in Charlotte called Coyote Joe's, and said he was waiting in suspense to see what dry, witty bit of snark I learned about life via steel-guitar playin' Russians, giant singers with giant-er egos, and the oppressive, dystopic hat restrictions.

It wouldn't be that hard to come up with something, either, because the whole experience was so bizarre (from the standing, snarling grizzly bear in a glass box, to the senior citizens groping each other on the dance floor as the semi-country Rock band chanted "It's Getting Hot In Here, So Take Off All Your Clothes") that very nearly everything in the place had a story. But my heart just hasn't been in it.

What I have been wanting to write about is marriage: specifically, why I think it's freakin' awesome. I suppose this is odd, coming from a guy whose wife left him less than three months ago, but I have a bit of a bone to pick. One of the really bothersome things about the experience of being wife-dumped has been the way a number of my good friends - people whose opinions I generally respect - have just sort of shrugged their shoulders and said, "well, it's a bummer there's a kid in the equation, but I guess sometimes things just don't work out. Hope you find somebody else". I call Bull-Excrement and, shaking my fist, yearn to ascend the soapbox.

When I told ActorAustin this, he demanded that I write a narrative essay - which is to say, a story that hooks the reader into living the narrative with the characters and engaging the idea in a more holistic way, rather than just with that little bit of mind that handles reason and argument. He argued that it will last longer and be more effective than if I try to argue them into my point of view.

He's right, too. Last Wednesday I asked my third period class - the one I have just after chapel - what they thought of the speaker.  There were a whole lot of shrugs and one girl said, "he was all right, I guess."

"What did he talk about?", I asked.

This is typically a pretty chatty class, but no one volunteered an answer. With a little more prompting, one guy said, "Um, I think there was something about light". A few other students agreed - and remember that this response was coming about fifteen minutes after the guy had spoken his last word. Not exactly rousing, memorable oratory, I think you could say.

My third period class is primarily comprised of freshmen. Two weeks ago they all got out of fourth period to hear award-winning young-adult author Gary Schmidt speak over at the middle school. So I asked them what they had thought of his talk. Most of them chimed in with enthusiasm.

"I was expecting it to suck", said one typically un-involved boy, "I thought he'd talk all about how to write paragraphs or something, but it was really interesting."

"What was your favorite part?" I asked.

And at that point, the whole class jumped in, recounting parts and pieces of each of the three stories he had told over a forty-minute period. They had all been engaged. The funny thing was that although they remembered the stories distinctly, they didn't remember being taught anything. His main point had been clear, though, and when I brought it up, they all remembered and relived it. Because he had said it in a story, they had all easily absorbed what Schmidt was trying to teach them

"I guess that's the problem I have with these chapel speakers", I said. "They fail to tell good stories, so they never answer the question 'why should you trust me?' The only people who are going to get anything out of it are the people who already agree with them - and even they won't really remember anything. This is because in order to matter as a speaker to people who don't have an overwhelming pre-existing reason to trust you, you have to tell them a story."

"That was what was cool about Jesus.", I went on, "He didn't provide answers, he just sort of explored the questions with stories, so that as listeners we could place ourselves in those stories and, hopefully, buy into the truths they were meant to convey. Jesus loved people and took care of their practical needs, and therefore had probably earned enough credibility that they would have listened to some dry theological homily. Nonetheless, for the most part he did nothing but tell stories - and look at how long those stories have been remembered, and the number of people they have affected."

My class listened politely, as they usually do. I am, after all, just a teacher - telling them one more time and in one more way what to believe. Maybe some of the things I rant about will sink in, but what they will probably remember a lot more clearly is the stories I tell them - about my failed marriage, or the adventures I had in Peru, or the crazy things I did as a tree planter in Canada. The cumulative effect of those stories and the lessons I have learned from them is bound to have a greater impact on the way these young men and women (or "future slaves of corporate america", as I referred to them this morning) think and act.

ActorAustin listened politely as well as I recounted and re-ranted all this. Then he changed the subject to fear, and how I've been saying we do all sorts of destructive (and sometimes even good) things because of fear. Then I changed the subject and said that I would qualify that we do a lot less destructive things than we otherwise would because of the under-woven influence of love, and then we talked about Russians and movie-making and emotion-manipulating, and about two nights ago when we went to the crazy redneck bar with a couple of friends and sat awkwardly out of place, sanctimoniously laughing and watching the unfortunate implosion of our cultural heritage. ActorAustin and I are like that on the phone - we just blabber on about all sorts of things, weighing out ideas. We do this because we're friends, and are therefore in a story that we both find interesting enough to engage.

For my other friends - the ones I don't see any more who think it's cool to just end a marriage if it doesn't seem to be working out - perhaps I ought to just put the diatribing treatise on the back burner. Perhaps our stories have diverged too much, and they're unlikely to be swayed by any argument I make. In that case, I guess I ought to just keep on keeping on with my "Anatomy of an Effup".

Perhaps if I can share honestly the very humanness of the mistakes and failings that have brought me to this place of brokenness, they can walk with me through it and see as I do with the rose-tinted glasses of hope. If I have told a true enough story, it may be that they will experience through it a glimmer of the grace that I believe has the capacity to transcend the petty failures of all our lives and build of them a beautiful, restored mosaic of relationships.