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It must be the time of year that I have my blog identity crisis, because I’m not sure anymore of what I’m doing here.

I write here for the discipline of daily writing. I write here to share the ragged edges of myself with people who know me — give them the chance to laugh at me or react to me in ways they might not if we were face to face. I write here to give myself a sort of institutional memory of myself. I write here to hold unfinished ideas for further consideration.

But mostly I write here to make connections, to feel part of a community. With a handful of wonderful exceptions, I feel like I’m failing on this account. In the lunchroom of the blog world, I feel like one of those kids who sit at lunch alone or with a few people I know. Like an introverted kid who does not fit in. Too Christian for the regular bloggers. Too regular for the Christian bloggers. Too… something. Or not enough… something.

Question is, does it matter? I can’t say.

Would I write in Overflow, knowing that I’ll never get more than, say, 15 unique visitors a day and only hear from two or three of them a few times a week? Seems like I should. Seems like my site stats shouldn’t matter to me, but they do.

And that’s the real question. I don’t want to whine about my hit count or my lack of comments or whatever. That’s not the point.

The point is that I care at all. Is that a good thing? Is my writing here just an egoistic indulgence? Does it increase my unhealthy attachments to esteem in the eyes of others? Lord knows I spend enough time distracted by egoistic pursuits based on my need for approval without the use of the Internet. Is this blog just one more unhealthy grab for attention?

I am resolutely unwilling to do many of the things I see in other blogs that might help me to get a larger readership. But for some reason, I am unable to let go of the disappointment I feel when I check my stats. Something has to go.

I need to let go of the disappointment with my stats and need for approval, of course, and just be myself. But do I have to let go of Overflow to do it? Is ego-less blogging even possible?

Hell, I don’t know. Damn.

My department secretary emailed me to ask if I wanted to re-up for my Franklin Planner for next year.

My reply:

Lois,

Cody

I came in to work later than normal, so good parking spaces (read: spaces from which the walk to the door doesn’t cause you to sweat all over your fresh work clothes) are harder to come by. But, being a cautious optimist, I always make a drive-by of the good spots before I head out toward BFE to park my car.

What I saw when I rounded the corner filled me with indignance — a car had parked over the line between the *two best spaces* in that section of the lot! Imagine the nerve of this guy! I’ve seen arrogant jerks park their fancy cars that way to avoid getting dings in their precious overpriced automobiles, but this was some beater of a Toyota Tercel! I could only imagine what depths of assholery could persuade a person to park like that!

So once I pulled into my (much farther out) parking space, I whipped out a pad of sticky notes I use for general note leaving purposes and wrote the following:

“In the future, please try not
to take up the best two (2) spaces
left to park with your one (1) car.
Thanks.”

Brilliant. It was measured — a generally polite rebuke — with just enough sarcasm to make the person feel just bad enough to mollify my indignance.

And so I walked toward the door of my place of employment, note in hand, planning to make a stop by the offensively parked beater and give the driver a single-serve helping of homemade humble pie.

What I saw made me end up having to eat my own damn humble pie.

As I approached the car, I saw the back tire. Flat. Some poor slob was probably just lucky to get the car into a parking spot at all. I imagined some person pushing his car in the dark, alone, no spare, and no one to help him.

And I’ve been there before myself. I’ve made a driving career out of driving beaters. I know what it’s like being stranded with a car that’s crapped out on you. And I imagine that if I had pushed my car all the way from the street into a parking spot and noticed, after wiping the sweat from my eyes, that I had accidentally pushed my car over the line, I’d have said “Oh to hell with that.” (or something stronger) to the prospect of backing the thing up and parking it correctly.

Still would have been nice had he done that. But it was harder for me to be indignant about it. In fact, I felt very foolish at being indignant in the first place, standing there holding my little childish note. So much for being “spiritual.” So much for compassion. Some good all this meditation is doing me, huh? Well, it probably just means that I need to keep praying and prepare to eat more humble pie.

So now I’m at my desk, having a little coffee to wash down my pie. Otherwise, it’s been a good morning.

I love this book about Agnes Martin. So much so that I habitually check it out of the library. I don’t know why they don’t just let me keep it since I’m the only one who reads that copy, but I digress.

Interested to save myself the library dance to get hold of the beloved book, I looked into buying it. The Amazon price new is $60, which seems fair. But this guy wants $240 for his copy. He says it is “pristine, shrink-wrapped,” but is that worth $180? I think not!

Slate magazine does a good job of characterizing the most popular arguments for and against the multiple universe hypothesis. That is why I love Slate, it excels at summarizing aggregated content — like the five daily newspapers or the top ten magazines or, as in this case, all the major players’ positions on a given issue.

Incidentally, it takes a dig at the use of Occam’s Razor in disproving the multiverse hypothesis. Good. I’ve never been a fan of Occam’s Razor. Occam’s Razor is based on a subjective judgement over which of two explanations for a phenomenon is simpler. All it does is transform one subjectively-based question into another subjective question — “Simple” is often in the eye of the beholder.

The next dates for Bad Art Night are set — September 17th and October 15th.

This time I am putting a bit more effort into publicity. Apparently one flyer, word of mouth, and my personal magnetism does not on its own draw many aspiring artists. This time I made flyers and posted them at the university, my parish, and The Arts Alliance of Clear Lake. The Arts Alliance folks sounded interested in the general concept, so we’ll see what comes of that. But at least they let me put out my flyers for now.

I am experiencing first hand the dearth of public spaces in suburbia. Our concept of the public commons is endagered to the point of extinction. Yeah, there are a few public spaces, but if you want to post a flyer where a good number of people might actually *see* it, you have to do so under the auspices of commercial or moneyed interests. Thus, what you’re promoting better not interfere with their agenda.

For instance, I couldn’t post these flyers at a Starbucks or another popular area coffee house because my events take place at a competing coffee establishment. Yet coffee houses in our area are one of the few places where my “target demographic” congregates.

I am so grateful for my neighborhood coffee house, Kenny J’s, because they have a free public meeting room — another rarity — and they are so open to hosting gatherings and posting flyers. They are the closest thing to public space around my area. But I still understand that they are a business and that there may come a day when their private interests and my endeavors may part ways. That’s why I try to buy lots of coffee there.

Fred recently posted a quote from Neil Postman which reminded me why I am willing to bother with organizing and promoting something as frivolous sounding as a Bad Art Night:

“What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture… In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us. … Huxley, not Orwell, was right.”

— Neil Postman, From the introduction to “Amusing Ourselves To Death”

So for the prospect of pulling people from in front of the TV for one night and getting them to entertain the idea of entertaining themselves with their own creativity, for the prospect of creating a public place for local culture, I am willing to battle the strip mall jungle searching for the elusive public spaces.

And I seem to remember that Texas Art Supply has a big public bulletin board…

When Heidi and I had our “Should Heidi take the part time ministry job?” summit, we tacitly agreed that we’d use some of her salary to get help with the heavy cleaning of the house on a regular basis. Today, with company coming this weekend, we are having a cleaning service come out and clean our house for the first time.

And so what do we do? Clean for three hours last night, that’s what. The house looks better than it has in weeks already. Can’t wait to see what it looks like after the cleaning folks get done.

Usually, we have to have a party to get the house this clean. But now we’ll have at least one other occasion a month to go around the house cleaning like mad people.

Funny how that works. I mean, we don’t want to have a highly paid professional cleaner come over and pick up our crap. We want them to do the kind of cleaning we never do ourselves, and maybe some we didn’t even know to do ourselves.

Since Heidi’s 19 hour a week job is turning out to be more like a 30 hour a week job, we have less time for cleaning than we originally thought. Good thing we thought to hire some help.

Is putting the leftover vegetables from dinner in one of those Tupperware containers and putting it in the fridge.

(Disclaimer: Bloviated musings about God are to follow. I have no qualifications to talk about God. And even if I did, using words to talk about God is like trying to do cross stitch with oven mitts on. But I persist in doing so, even if it is at least in part by request. So if you’ve no interest in my peculiar ideas, skip this post and you will have missed nothing.)

So I was unsuccessful in defusing the blog drama before it grew. But it did get a very thoughtful post out of Veronica. Something she wrote stuck with me:

“I am part of God, and I am. I am part of the Universe, and I am. But, I am.”

Yes we are part of God and the Universe. I see it as a “both” and not an “either/or” thing.

My recent correspondent, Ben, stated somewhere in my comments that he preferred to see things as they really are instead of how he wants them to be. I couldn’t agree more.

In fact it was looking at things they really are that gave me a way of apprehending the concept of God. (Notice I didn’t say “knowing God.” Very big difference.) Looking at the way things are put together revealed a lot to me about my own nature, the nature of the universe, and the nature of God.

How’s *that* for a grandiose statement?

In my humble view of things, reality is made of relationships. Everything is made up of smaller stuff. The way that stuff is arranged is at least (and I suspect more) important than the stuff itself. Move one carbon atom in a glucose molecule and you have a cellulose molecule. One is digestible, one is definitely not. Same amount of “stuff”, different arrangement. The arrangement gives the molecule its “identity.”

Likewise, I see that relationships suffuse everything with identity, with observable properties. One could say that “qualities” of stuff come from the relationships that comprise them. Relationships as Quality.

Look at this from a hierarchy of function. The more complex the organization of a thing, the more “advanced” or “useful” or “interesting” we consider it to be. Alloys have more robust properties than simple metals. Our feet and hands — very versatile and subtle pieces of engineering that are probably directly responsible for our species’ dominance on this planet — are made up of tiny bones in a complex connection. Contrast that to the appendages of “lower species.”

Everywhere you look, connections are what lend richness to the world around us and make it so interesting and wonderful, IMO. The more subtle, dextrous, and numerous the connections that make up something, the “better” the thing is.

I see the same on an inter-organism level too. One bacteria doesn’t make someone sick, millions do. They work in packs. Social animal species seem more “advanced” than non-social species. And I have seen with my own eyes how people can come together and accomplish incredibly good things.

Yeah, people can come together and do incredibly bad things. Mob mentality and all that. Not all connections are good ones.

But image the vast collection of all of the “good” connections in the Universe. Totally incomprehensible in size and scope, but conceptually imagineable. Imagine every instance where, at any level from the sub-atomic to the macrocosmic, smaller individual things come together and give up some of their individuality and autonomy to make something bigger and better than themselves.

That is the stuff of spirit. I don’t believe matter and spirit are separate. Matter and spirit are embedded in each other. There is no “supernatural” and “natural” world to me. Only the world, which is fascinating enough for me, thank you very much.

So how do we get a “Being” from all this? I dunno exactly. Look at me and you. How the hell do you get a conscious being from this collection of cells we call our bodies? (Yeah I’m making the assumption that our consciousness is real. But like Veronica said, all I know is that “I am.”).

If you organize all matter from simplest and smallest to most complex, you start with inanimate matter. At some point there is a “leap” that goes from inanimate matter to “life.” No one can pinpoint what exactly makes something animate, but we can all tell a fake plant from a real one. Who can say exactly how we got from “protein soup” to “living cell?” We’re getting closer to the answer with biological science, but as with all good science, we are creating more questions than we answer.

There is a similar “leap” from regular life to consciousness. We’re even more clueless about what exactly makes a living thing conscious, but most of us have no problem seeing the differences between us and the monkeys in the zoo. (Okay, I said “most.”)

So I imagine another “leap.” Can’t say exactly what it is. I can contemplate a being like God about as well a rock can contemplate what it’s like to be “alive” or about as well as an insect can contemplate being “conscious.” But it is nice, for me at least, to imagine that mere conscious beings like humans are not the last teleological “leap.” Yeah, I choose to believe in the next level of Being. And I understand it is a choice.

I can imagine the vast collection of “Good” connections in the universe — from the ones that make one molecule behave differently from another to the ones that we “conscious” humans make when we form real “Love”, real “Community” — as God. I am in God, and God is in me. I particpate in God when I make good connections and nuture relationships, when I “make” things that are good. It gives me context and purpose and orients my life in a way that is productive and constructive. I am quite happy to be a smaller individual thing that comes together with others and gives up some of my individuality and autonomy to make something bigger and better than myself.

And so there you go, Ben. I’ll look back in twenty years on this bit of writing and laugh at myself and my ignorance. But that’s where I am for now.

What I get from all this God talk is that:

I am a little thing.
My nature is such that I need to connect to others.
There is something bigger and better than me that I can participate in.

And that’s enough for me.

Today I’m taking the day off - vacation! - to accompany my wife through her second surgery in as many months. Don’t worry, she’ll be fine. But it is still an occasion for prayer (or thoughtfulness, for you thoughtful people who do not pray. To-may-to, to-mah-to, I say)

Of course, I could say that for everything. Isn’t everything an occasion for prayer, for thoughtfulness?

I am also hoping to make this a Taking Time to Take Care of Stuff Weekend. I hope to use my time sitting in the waiting room making an impossibly-long prioritized “Shit Together” list and shoot to work the top half off this weekend, wife’s recovery permitting.

So I pray for health for my wife and productivity for myself. And a cooperative disposition for the children.

Super profundo on the early eve of your day. (Bonus points if you get that reference.) Have a nice weekend.

I was driving around at lunchtime running errands and listening to Radiohead and God spoke to me. She said:

“Let it go, Cody.

And, by the way, you’re out of milk so pick some up on the way home, okay?”

(Okay, so some people would call that my superego or an internal dialogue, not God. Whatever.)

Some long-time readers might remember my first Mate Joy Song to the tune of “Monday, Monday”.

This one popped into my head this morning as I was brewing a pot of the green gold…

Mate Joy Song II

(to the tune of That’s Amore, with apologies to Dean Martin and piano bar singers everywhere)

Pronunciation guide: Mate - Mah-tay

When the drink hits your throat and your mood starts to float
That’s a-Mate
When the world seems to shine and it’s way before nine
That’s a-Mate
You will sing ting-a-ling-a-ling, ting-a-ling-a-ling
When you’ve had your first cuppa
Hearts will play tippy-tippy-tay, tippy-tippy-tay
It’s a great waker-uppa!

When you drag in to work and you feel like a jerk
You need Mate
When you skip down the hall and your mind’s on the ball
You’ve had some
When your drink peps you up and you know you’re not
Drinking a Latte
Scuzza me, but you see, back in old Argentin’
That’s a-Mate!

Mr. Freshpants’ pants aren’t as fresh as we’d like them to be lately. He starts preschool next Monday, by which time he is supposed to be potty-trained. Mr. Freshpants has no interest in being potty-trained.

He also, to my dismay, has no interest in books. I ask him if he wants me to read him a book before bed and he says, “No, I want to go bed and go to sleep.” And if he’s not going to bed, he’s too busy playing to want to stop and read a book. He’s a very busy guy these days, seeing as how he is conducting all these experiments.

Experiments like, “If I slip out the back door and go play in the yard, how long will it take for Mom and Dad to notice?” (about 5 minutes on average) or “Will the dog like this little bit of food I have?” (yes, most likely) and “What will happen if I shake this open container of crackers up and down vigorously?” (crackers will fly everywhere and Dad will yell) There’s so much to investigate at age three and a half.

But what he does like is “doing the doggy.” It’s not what you think. Stop, you.

He likes this little software program for toddlers that has basically taught him how to point and click with the mouse on little toys and animals, which then do little stunts, dances and other non-sequitur actions in response to the clicks. His favorite is the doggy, which is why he calls it “doing the doggy.”

So we’ve found something he likes to explore that doesn’t involve making a mess. So the question is, what else is out there in the realm of toddler software? The program we have is kind of cheesy, but it’s cheap. I’d kind of like to avoid product placements and marketing pitches of any kind. But who out there knows what to get a child who’s starting to out grow “Toddler Head Start?”

One of the secretaries outside the row of hard-wall offices on the way to my cube has a religious calendar hanging where I can see it every day as I pass. In her calendar, Jesus is Black. He’s got a ‘fro and a mustache and this month he’s ascending to heaven.

I like the Black Jesus. He makes me smile. If we white folks can make Jesus white everywhere we worship, why can’t black people make Jesus black? He’s just as scmaltzy and kitschy as most other commercialized religious imagery. He’s just got this Samuel L. Jackson thing goin on.

He’s a lot more fun to look at than Armand Assante Jesus, which is what I’ve dubbed the standard picture of Jesus that is ubiquitous throughout our diocesan facilities. Yes, he looks like Armand Assante with a light, tastefully trimmed beard.

Actually, I’d like to see a picture of a Jewish Jesus. A sweaty and dirty Jesus. A Jesus who looks like he just walked 30 miles to press the flesh with and preach to a few thousand of his followers. I don’t imagine a pretty Caucasian, white-robed messiah.

So a black one will do just as nicely.