Orange Christmas

I noticed this year that it seems like a lot more people are stringing up orange lights for Halloween.

Not just on the porch with a few Jack O' Lanterns and some stretched-out cotton ball webs. But into the bushes and up near the roof.

It was a lot like Christmas tonight.

In more ways than just the lights.

First, there was the woman whose National Guard husband has been in Afghanistan since February and will be home around Christmastime. She simply can't wait. So much so that she's already put up her fully lighted, red-white-and-blue Christmas tree.

But that's not all that got me to thinking about Christmas.

As I walked around the neighborhood tonight, I noticed how so many people had their porch lights on and how so many people were walking around the neighborhood with their children and knocking on doors to accept gifts.

Granted, they were dressed in costumes, and there was a strong contingent of the half-dead oozing puss and blood.

Still, there they were. People opening their doors and giving and knowing each other.

I can't help but wonder why we use this day to open our doors and close our doors on the day that we should open them the most.

'Saying It's All Your Fault Is Just A Sympton Of Narcissism, Because If You Think It's All Your Fault, You Think You're All Powerful'

OK, this is a strange way to get into such a thick subject, but ...

I'm addicted to House, M.D..

Tonight Dr. House met a kid who got into a car crash and died for 97 seconds. It was the best 97 seconds of his life, so much so that he stuck a knife into an electrical socket to see if he could recreate it.

The Dr. House character typically struggles with the existence of God and in fact is written quite witty dialogue in the script to poke fun at God and those who are inclined to believe in God.

So, Dr. House decided to stick a knife in a socket, too. To see what it's all about.

He's an atheist, you'd think. But he regularly shows faint signs of seeking. Which is something.

The knife-in-the-socket-thing didn't do it for him.

Oh well, on to my point ...

I'd be the first to tell you that it's difficult to imagine an afterlife of ornately ordained castles with clouds for floors and streets paved with gold as you listen to praise music focused mainly singing about how we should spend all our time on our knees.

(No thanks, I guess. Unless the other option is ultimate oblivion. Somehow I hold out hope that I could smuggle in a few Rage Against The Machine CDs and launch a battle to change the culture of a heaven like that).

Here's the thing:

I'm not really caught up with that.

I realize that, either way, there's no way around what is known. What's known for sure is that my body will return to a physical state of being a self-unaware element of the fabric of the universe.

What happens when a life moves on? What happens in that transfer of energy? Is the sum total of humanity's capacity for awareness of the very workings of the universe just an intangible idea floating in the ether?

What I know -- and, well, I guess I could say I have faith in - is that there is no good explanation for why it's not possible that there is something more. There are explanations for why it might not be likely. Or whyight not be the sure thing that so many people believe it to be based on poorly formed theological arguments.

I think humans trip over their own guilt and embarrassment when we come these realizations -- that seem enlightening at the time -- that we're really not as important as we think we are.

Indeed, we cannot escape our humanity, such an awkward state of being for a living creature as aware as we are.

But who says we're not important? Because we're such a small part of everything?

The expanse of the universe no longer frightens me. Its magnitude is only relative to my perception of distance and time.

I just know that I'm a part of it.

This is certainly not a new concept.

But feeling it instead of thinking it is new to me.

I look beyond the tapestry of the sky and I see it and I feel it.

And I know this, and it comforts me:

We are all in this together.

Everybody. And everything.

'I Wasn't Looking At You, I Was Looking Through You'

The sky reveals more stars where I go to seek refuge.

There, the only light in the sky is if there's a high school football game up the road.

And from there, I gain a fuller understanding.

The smaller celestial bodies -- the ones that are dimmer, fainter, weaker.

It's rare that I ever see them.

But it's there that I do, and they compel me to see something I've never seen, if seeing is the way to describe it.

Their dimness. Their faintness. Their weakness. Outshined by the brighter orbs of energy.

I've been missing the point.

The sky isn't a dark tapestry painted with lighter and darker and bigger and smaller specks of light. It isn't a drawing or a painting or a schematic or a progression of notes.

This is an all-encompassing space, functioning with laws within laws within laws.

From the largest scale expansion of the universe to the smallest elements of quantum physics, where an entire universe functions within an atom.

Countless potential dimensions.

But until now, I've not gotten past the third one.

This is living. This is accepting.

This, the ability to be aware of the space you fill and the space between you and everything else ... that's the recognition of our intimate role in the expanse.

We make constellations of our immediate celestial neighbors. Big and little serving utensils. Half-men-half-horse creatures. I've spent more time pointing out the faint stars that barely make out Orion's penis than looking beyond connecting the dots like a children's menu at Applebee's.

What of these barely visible dots of light?

These are the blemishes. The pieces of sand on the photograph.

Or ...

Now ...

The truth of the space between everything.

The living space.

And the understanding that we are as close as we choose to believe and as far as we are afraid to be.

'Look In Their Eyes, Ma, You'll See Me'

Fear the time when Manself will not suffer and die for a concept,
for this one quality is the foundation of Manself,
and this one quality is Man,
distinctive in the universe.

The home phone rang today in the middle of the day.

I put my book down and briskly made my way through the hall before the fourth ring, thinking that maybe my wife or someone else who knows I'm home right now because I have to work tonight just needs to ask me a question.

I soon as I put my finger down to answer the call, though, I knew that I would be answering the call of someone who doesn't know me but who wants something from me anyway.

I usually know this when people call me Christopher, which is my first name. This man didn't do that this time. It happened the other way.

He asked for my wife.

When I told him she wasn't here, he asked if I were here husband.

"Yes."

"Hi, I wanted to see if you'd be interested in joining the (was it the Committee? Association? Coalition?) To Stop Illegal Immigration."

And time quickly slowed down to sub-seconds within seconds.

It wasn't just the irony. It was the affirmation. The confluence of past and present and fiction and reality.

Here I am, on a quiet day before I have to go to work, reading the center core of "The Grapes of Wrath," doing what I should have done 15 years ago when I tried to bullshit my way through book reports.

You know, it's the one about scores of family being forced off their land by invisible banks and compelled to head west to magical California, where there's so much promise and opportunity because a handbill told you so.

Only to find so much hatred for the disheveled masses seeking refuge and just a small slice of the excess left behind.

Where people are dying in abstract ways, but mainly as a result of the phenomenon of people de-humanizing other people. Which is the same as death, if you think about it, because you cease to be a person if you can't fight your hunger and your pride to remain what makes you a person.

As all good art does -- or even just a sublime combination of a few words does -- you are able to think of what the essence of something is through a story told about it, the story you have molded into a prism through which you see a certain thing as it is.

That's why Jesus spoke in parables.

And it's why I love to hear the tales children spin on the affairs of matters.

But, to the man seeking to enlist soldiers into his association/committee/coaltion to battle illegal immigration, let's just say ...

"No, I'm not interested in that."

Peace, Motherf#$&a!

I've noticed that when people are into peace, and they use their cars to express how much they're into peace, they're usually really, really into peace.

It's rare that I ever see a car with just one or two bumper stickers.

You know, a modest-sized, flowered peace symbol centered just above the rear-window brake light? Or a simple "What Would Jesus Bomb?" sticker on the bumper of a Prius?

No, if you're into peace, and you're really into peace, nothing less than a Peacemobile will do.



I did see a minivan the other day with one simple sticker: "GOD is NOT a REPUBLICAN ... or a Democrat."

That helps me lend a person some measure of credibility, knowing that a conversation isn't going to devolve into an eyes-glazed-over treatise on how communism actually won but the media covered it up.

But if you really want to enforce the one-car-length rule of road safety with me, get me behind a car with a bunch of peace stickers on it. It's not a roadside conversation I want to have while we wait for the jackbooted, fascist agents of pain to scribble down an incident report.

And if you want me to screech over to the shoulder, put on my hazard lights and beg 911 to send an ambulance to extract me from my truck and spirit me home ... put me behind a Patriotmobile.