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I can just be walking along and break into a chuckle for no reason that is apparent to the casual observer. Usually when I do this it is because something I saw or overheard reminded me of one of Kevin Kling’s stories.

For instance, after I heard Kevin talk on NPR about his recovery from a motorcycle accident, I will never again encounter a cocktail weenie without a little chuckle. And not for the reason you might guess.

Any long term listener to NPR will probably have heard one of Kevin Kling’s commentaries or stories. I bought both of his CDs, one of which almost killed our entire family. Heidi was driving us to San Antonio and laughed so hard while listening to Kevin describe his harrowing experience marching behind the Clydesdales in a Labor Day parade that I had to grab the steering wheel for a few moments. He does some of the best spoken word stuff around.

So, if you have a little time and bandwidth to spare, his fan page has a more or less thorough archive of his online recordings. His irreverent yet loving skew on American life in general and Minnesota in particular will make good Labor Day Weekend listening. Enjoy.

I’m starting over. Three chapters into Thomas Merton’s “Seeds of Contemplation,” I realized that this book cannot be read like a normal book. So I’m going back to read and contemplate more deliberatively and reflectively. The words and thoughts are too rich to be consumed quickly. In the spirit of sainteros, whose blog has been an inspiration to me, I’m doing Merton lectio style.

“In all created things we, who do not yet perfectly love God, can find something that reflects the fulfillment of heaven and something that reflects the anguish of hell.” (p17)

Any fulfillment we find in created things belongs to God. It is the disorder of our souls which imposes undue desires and expectations on created objects or people — i.e. they will make us “happy” or make others admire us — which creates the anguish. To be “holy” is not to turn away from created things, but to turn away from the undue desire that our imperfect souls place upon them.

Perhaps this is what it means to be “in the world but not of the world?” Perhaps these undue desires we attach to the things and people in our lives is the “baggage” that everyone talks about needing to unload? Are these the “issues” we refer to when we say we have “issues?” Ooh, I am almost afraid to take this idea to prayer because I don’t want to have to think about removing the “baggage” I attach to everything in my life.

But I must eventually:

“Instead of worshipping God through his creation we are always trying to worship ourselves by means of his creatures. But to worship ourselves is to worship nothing. And the worship of nothing is hell.”

Gracies has got to be the coolest alternative culture collective I’ve ever seen. Check out the variety of happenings and grassroots inspiration going on there.

I came to Gracies via a cobweb site I found while trolling for Yerba Mate sources — the Cafetistas. They (used to?) get beverages donated by organic, sustainable, fair trade companies and then show up at events and give the drinks away for free. The idea was to subvert the corporate domination of certain beverage markets. Sounds like a really cool concept, huh? Problem is, their site hasn’t been updated since 2000. So who knows when the Cafetistas last struck.

With a Starbucks sprouting up on every suburban corner, wouldn’t it be a cool exercise in culture jamming to revive the concept?

I was browsing Red Rock Eater Digest (link’s on my sidebar) when I came across this link. It’s a page of MP3 downloads from a jazz musician named Steve Coleman. He is the brains behind a concept called m-base which, from what I can tell, is a methodology for composing improvisation, if that’s not too much of an oxymoron.

Well, I don’t know much about it, but what I do know is that his music page has hours of free downloadable jazz MP3’s. What I’ve explored so far is some very respectable bebop and hard-bop. Worth a listen if you’re into jazz. Any piece of music called “The Tao of Mad Phat” should be downloaded for the name alone.

I went to school with this guy. Vato de Futuro Wayne Pethrick has a cool home page. He’s one of the sharper crayons in the box over in the UHCL Futures program and I still have occasion to work with him on projects now and then. It was just today I discovered his web site which is deserving of some link love.

Seeing as how I skipped lunch, industriously working at my desk, I was looking for a snack while out running errands on my way home. I passed this place in a strip shopping center intriguingly named “Bubble Island.” It appeared to be a food establishment, but what kind?

Apparently they serve Vietnamese (Taiwanese? Chinese?) Tapioca drinks. Their menu has the unfathomable depth that only combinatorics can provide — about forty different drink flavors with many possible add-ins. Apparently the most common add-in is Tapioca — these black chewy pearl-sized balls which taste, I dunno, kind of like walnuts or something, but gummy. To my gringo American palate, it tasted good, but very strange.

I ended up with a coconut milk drink with about two inches of the little black bubbles in the bottom. The cup itself was interesting. The lid was a thick cellophane that was heat-sealed onto the cup and then the straws — big enough in circumference to accommodate the tapioca — are pointed and you just pierce the cellophane with the straw and suck away.

The sensation of getting three or four little chewy balls with every sip of your drink takes some getting used to. But I could get used to it. I’ll definitely go back.

While I was sitting there sipping gummy bubbles and coconut milk, eating my peanut toast (the only food item they serve is toast. Yes, toast. Seven different flavors of toast.) I became worried that this place was too exotic to survive in the land of Taco Bell and the Olive Garden. I asked the guy behind the counter how business was and he said it was pretty good. It is steady during lunch and after work on weekdays, but on weekend nights the place is packed, the line stretching out the door.

Cool. Good for them. I’ve got to take Heidi and see what she thinks. A little local color is a good thing.

Wow, apparently Futurescan has been named a “blog of note” on the Blogger homepage. I guess I should update more often.

Indeed it is supposed to be a collaborative blog, but I have been the only “Vato de Futuro” to post lately.

I need to roust up the futurist posse so we can look good for our 15 minutes of fame. I’d settle for not looking lame.

On weekdays, especially now that school has started, I have a little window of time to spend with my kids. I get home at 5:00 and my kids go to bed at 8 or 9-ish. That leaves me three hours a night to spend with my children.

Somehow, with dinner to fix and clean up after, that time seems to just fly by. I find myself bathing an putting them to bed before I’ve even gotten a chance to do much with them. I can’t let that time go by mindlessly. Though I often do.

Last night Heidi gave me a nice gift. Mr. Freshpants wanted to go play immediately after dinner and Heidi told me she’d do the dishes (she cooked too, the dishes are usually my job) and I got to go spend some “floor time” in his room. We played with cars and made lots of vroom sounds.

Then I got to spend some time working with Girlzilla on her spelling homework and then she and I worked on a journal/blog page we are putting together for her. I showed her how to make an HTML link.

Nothing very grand, but that forty-five minutes or so with them made me realize that I need to block out some time for each of my kids every day. As regular as prayer. It is prayer of a fashion, isn’t it?

It’s a small window and it closes so easily. Especially when you’re not looking. Lord, help me to see.

I love it when two apparently unrelated realms of human endeavor intersect. I especially love it when I come across two delicious examples of it in the same day. Serendipitydo!

First the Internet Scout pointed me to a page of links that explores the use of artificial life algoritms to compose music. And then my own scanning took me to this treasure trove of resources about the intersection of science and art.

Warning: Don’t go to either of these unless you have some time to kill. They’re infectious.

I found another web ruin (last updated 1998) that stands as a cyber Mount Rushmore of sorts of the preeminent minds of our time. This Technoprophets page apparently was a class assignment at pre-9/11, pre dot-com bust Duke University. I’m sure all the students, starry-eyed with Internet dreams, are probably a bit sadder and wiser about tech these days. But this list, ancient as it is in Internet years, still holds up pretty well. You could get lost in there. Leave bread crumbs.

It’s hard to know when you’ve just experienced an artistic performance that is a classic for all times. Are time and perspective absolutely necessary to bestow superlatives of timelessness?

Did the peasants in the pit of the Globe Theatre have any inkling that the tale of star-crossed lovers they just saw would be hailed for hundreds of years as an example of the best artistic feats man could create? Did someone in the audience know better as the rest of them booed Stravinksy? I mean, Van Gogh died in obscurity. And many of the most celebrated artistic sensations of many an era have faded from human memory. So, how can I say whether something I just saw will be remembered for all time?

And what’s more, can Big Corporate Money produce anything approaching the pinnacle of artistic perfection? Can the crass power of ample funding and the brute force of cutting-edge technology produce sublime subtleties of human expression?

I have to admit I was skeptical about a road production of a Big Broadway Musical produced by Disney. But instead of coming away from The Lion King with a smile and humming one of the tunes, I came away from this performance pondering the above Big Questions of human artistic endeavor.

This was not so much a musical as a ballet with words. Not so much a performance as a work of art. I found myself tuning out the music and the story (which I have seen in animated form with my children so many times I cannot count) and just watching the beautiful spectacle.

The genius of The Lion King was in its simplicity. The problem with big budget entertainment is that it is usually so ham-fisted and obvious it just hits you over the head. This performance was subtle, minimalistic, but intricate. Instead of having a big technical crew creating big effects from offstage, they moved the technical crew onstage and blended them into the performance. There was no usual “man behind the screen”. Instead he came out onto the stage and stole the show.

Disney spent its money well and created an artistic experience that defied categorization. Choreography was puppetry, the scenery was the chorus, lighting was a character, costumes were set design — all normal theater categories were turned upside down.

And so I came out of The Lion King Saturday in a happy muddle, not knowing what exactly I just saw and wondering if I had the proper perspective to place in it the hierarchy of human artistic experience. I guess it seems unlikely that The Lion King is a latter day La Traviata or MacBeth, but so much of the genius of The Lion King was unlikely. And so pleasantly unexpected.

Oh, and the music was pretty good too.

The last piece of TV flotsam I witnessed on my sick leave was a showing of the Rocky Horror Picture Show on American Movie Classics last night. It was weird watching that film without having a lighter and a squirt gun and a newspaper and rice and … you get the idea. I also, for the first time, got to actually watch the movie.

There were whole scenes I had never understood in the dozen or so times I’ve attended showings of this film. Partly because my attentions were split between the screen and the floor show and partly because the dialogue was obscured by the stuff people were screaming at the characters. So I finally got to sit down and actually watch my beloved Rocky Horror.

Man, that is one terrible film.

It’s like when I realized that most American beer tastes truly awful. I had already started drinking American beer because I thought it was cool and the only beer the people I thought were cool at the time could obtain was American beer. “It’s an acquired taste,” I’d say to myself as I choked the stuff down. Well apparently it is, cause I drink beer occasionally now, but not the same swill I started out drinking.

Hey, now that I think of it, that’s the way I started drinking coffee and Scotch as well. With all of these I got over the “yuck curve” by a sheep-like desire to be as cool as whoever I wanted to emulate at the time.

I was similarly sheep-like my first time at Rocky Horror. But there was no “yuck curve.” It was instant love. I wanted to be “in” on all the culture. I wanted to be a guy who knew when to throw rice and when to slap the seat and when to yell, “Kick it!.” I wanted to do the Time Warp. I wanted to be an “insider” so I could smugly tell all the “virgins” about what fun they were missing.

Such defines my adolescence. Trying to emulate the cool kids. I am not so sure I’m not still like that today. I’ve just fallen into what my parents would term a “good crowd”. When I got to college I sought out the scouting-related Service Fraternity like the good Eagle Scout I was. There I met my wife, who dragged me to Church, where I met a whole new set of people to emulate. I always seemed to end up surrounded by relatively good influences, reason #345 that my parents did good by me.

I don’t think I’m so alone in my “sheepness.” Jesus called us sheep for a reason, and not very complimentarily I might add. I think that’s why the Church has givien us the saints, a set of cool people to emulate. And I think that’s part of why we have so much ritual in the Church. Ritual defines community and gives us a culture to be “in” on. Everyone likes to be “in” on something.

There has been a lot written about the sociology of what makes RHPS such a cultural phenomenon. My theory is that Rocky Horror was like a secular proto-Church. It provided a an outlet for the secular practice of ritual and a community of people to be “in” with. How else could such an abysmal movie end up a cult classic?

But it did leave me with a great motto, something that, applied in a more constructive or spiritual setting, could be a rather nice mantra — “Don’t dream it, Be it.”

I’ve had a gut-wrenching two days. Not emotional trauma gut-wrenching but intestinal illness gut-wrenching. So apart from spending a lot of quality time with my loo and laying around willing time to move faster relative to my conscious perception of it, I watched a lot of TV. In fact I’ve watched more TV in the last twenty-four hours than I have in the past month.

I have renewed insight as to why I do not watch much TV. I just have to say now that the current vogue in TV advertising where they get a charmingly irritating character to interact wittily and oh-so-spontaneously with the public at large is getting to be way past its expiration date.

And the Clairol people simply MUST cease and desist with their whole “wank-vertising” campaign. You know the one, where the woman in the shower is enjoying her shampoo a bit too much, loudly, with gusto? I mean, there was a certain seventh-grade tittery amusement with the fact that the word “organic” is two letters different from the word “orgasmic.” If you stretched a bit you might get one double-entendre commerical off the concept. But this is just too much. Clairol is using this “wank-vertising” concept for its fruity shampoos now. Please stop now. It’s getting embarrassing.

But apparently wanking sells. Levi’s is picking up the “wank-vertising” torch with a new campaign that urges you to “Rub Yourself” in their jeans. (via Meg’s notsosoft)

But unless I get sick again, I probably won’t be seeing those commercials. Now there’s some motivation to stay healthy.

I am wearing, for the first time in years, my wedding band. I am so married it is ridiculous, but ever since my ring shrunk (ahem) to the point of cutting off my circulation, I have had it in a drawer. People would ask me why I didn’t wear my ring. And Heidi would chime in with a bemused, “Yes, Cody, why *don’t* you wear your ring?” I would always answer that it was cutting off my circulation and that I was not a “jewelry guy” anyway.

It was a few weeks ago that it occurred to me in prayer (or God told me, you pick) that, “Hey dummy, you can just have your ring resized.” And since there seems to be a several week lag between any idea of mine and observable action, I am now wearing my wedding ring three weeks and thirty dollars later.

And I am glad. I have felt a strong need to wear my wedding ring lately. Not to signal to the world that I’m “off limits” or anything territorial like that. For a guy my size, women do not make furtive hopeful glances at my left hand to see if I’m available. There’s absolutely no danger of that sort.

I need the ring on my finger as a symbol of my faith in action. I need to remind myself constantly that the core of my spiritual life lies in loving action — relationships — and not words and ideas. The slight pressure on my left ring finger is a reminder that I am working out my salvation through my marriage. Loving Christ by strengthening my love for my wife.

And so I pray that this slight pressure on my finger does not fade into the other sensations of my life. Just as I wish that my marriage stays rooted in action and does not become a fading sentiment.

This last weekend several hundred teenagers hanging out in a K-Mart parking lot were arrested by Houston Police for “criminal tresspass.” Just about everyone here thinks the arrests were ridiculous and the whole affair caused a big stink. Much debate has ensued about police abuses of power, but I haven’t seen anyone asking the deeper questions.

Like, what were four hundred teens doing hanging out in a K-Mart parking lot?

I’ve seen this phenomenon first hand in the parking lot of a shopping center by us. Heidi and I were leaving our customary date-ending browse at Barnes and Noble, our iced Chai Lattes in hand, and there they were. Hundreds of kids in the middle of the big lot, not parked at any particular store, standing in and around their cars talking. Hanging out, as teens like to do. I made a mental note to ask some teens I know from church about the phenomenon, but then promptly forgot about it until I saw the newspaper story about the arrests of a similar gathering of teens in a similar parking lot across town.

This parking lot hangout thing must be a trend. And now that I think of it, it makes sense. In car-happy Houston, the only wide open spaces available to most people are the parking lots and shopping centers have huge ones. Teens like to hang out in large numbers and there’s just not many places they can do that. They get locked out of most parks after dark and run out of malls and other commercial establishments by security guards if they accumulate in numbers larger than a dozen or so. There’s no viable public space for teens to gather and have their “scene” (or whatever they call it these days) without having to buy something, pay admission, or at least pretend to be shopping. Large groups of teens make adults nervous, so if they are not generating revenue for somebody somewhere, they are not accommodated.

But we need to accommodate them. They need a safer place to “see and be seen” than a mall parking lot. I always tell my brother the youth minister that his job is very important. He provides such space for teens to hang out and talk. Yeah, he also sets up events that give them something productive to do. Parents always like it when their teens have something productive to do. But David, and most other good youth ministers, know that kids just like to sit around and talk. I wish the rest of our society knew that. And were willing to make a safe public space for teens to be themselves.