gas stations at night

are there other places or elements that shift their properties so substantially when day turns to night --

so as to change their fundamental character from the profane to the sacred?



we passed a lit-up gas station tonight on the way home from babysitting co-op. Jaelyn and Addison were both so tired from playing with everyone that they just lay against their car seats quietly. And suddenly I realized how GOOD gas stations, lit up like Vegas, are when its nightime.

I wrote a little song that starts out like this:

isn't it good to know that there are --
Gaaas Stations
Lookin all lit up night --
Ready to welcome you with open arms...

it gets better, but if I released it here -- how would I be guaranteed that you'd buy a copy from i-music when i get huge....

may the lights of a gas station shine bright in whatever night you find yourself...

Shhh...do you hear them? it's the robots...

i was getting out of my car tonight and the key was still in the ignition. (My keys are always in the ignition, btw, if anyone needs to run errands -- the Buick is your car...)

Bing, Bing, Bing,

the electronic chimes were sluggish sounding as if the battery were unwinding or fading or disintegrating in a slow lazy almost operatic way.

and suddenly I was AWARE.

Click.

This is wrong. This Bing Bing Binging.

This Buzz, Buzz Buzzing.

Dotted Lines on Highways.

Finished Microwaves.

Alarm Clocks.

Fire Alarms.

I understand -- the repetitive sound draws your attention and demands a behavioural change, but we're forgetting something. WE made this sound....

and now?

now this sound is remaking us.

We respond as if we had no choice...as if it is the only thing to do...

. . . . . . . . . . . . . .

I think i've told you that jaelyn and addison are huge fans of Yoshimi -- the cool concept album by the Flaming Lips?



Well the thing is -- in the story -- Yoshimi battles the pink robots -- evil robots, programmed to destroy us...

and so the other day when I was waiting through a customer phone service menu, Jaelyn asked me who was on the phone. I said: A robot.

Her eyes got huge.

Really?

I nodded.

REALLY? REALLY?

Mmm.Hmm.

MOMMMY!!!! Addison! Daddy's on the phone with a robot....!?!

I'm sure she felt like I would have felt if my parents told me they were getting ready for the Rapture later this afternoon...

. . . . . . . . . . . . . .

So we've been waiting for Arnold-as-terminator or the Matrix to arrive, and we've been blinded. BLINDED. They're here. They're here already.

Small repetitive noises.

the shape of the world(s)...

In the late summer of 1986, I quit my paper route in order to become a dishwasher and a busboy at Jerry's Roosevelt Roost, a family eating establishment at the corner of Roosevelt Road and Summit Road in Muskegon Michigan.

I could ride my bike to the restaurant, and did, until Michigan winter invited me to drive my rusty yellow Volkswagen Rabbit instead.

I worked in the dishroom only for a month. Kevin Dantuma and I were the only white people who worked in the back. We were both sixteen. On the other hand, no people of color worked in the front of the restaurat. Those waitress, hostess or salad bar attendant positions were apparently reserved for single moms, jaded divorcees and 25 year old white party girls who couldn't wait for closing time / bar-call. I didn't see the color lines until years later; then -- I loved working in the back with the easygoing, joking dishwashers and cooks. They teased me and we laughed together.

Kevin quit once basketball season began and I became a host and then a waiter in that year before I quit for the Spring Play.

I remember that when I became a host, suddenly I didn't see as much of Flora and Nancy and William in the back. Even when I would go back to chill with them, they would make fun of me in my linen Miami Vice Suitcoats and pink knit ties with blue oxford shirts. I better look out not to get dirty back there. Now that I was so fancy and everything.

After we quit, I occasionally saw Kevin at high school basketball games. We perceived his Western Michigan Christian Basketball team to be our biggest rivals. I'm sure they laughed at our Faith Christian Conquerers (complete with extra long cheerleading skirts and carefully trimmed fundamentalist versions of mullet haircuts -- the party in the back couldn't touch our collars...). They always beat us, but we came close several times. And it always felt like a Holy War. These folks, after all, believed in Evolution!

I was surprised to find out the summer after our sophomore year of college that Kevin and I were both working in the same Factory. The factory workers built Cam Shafts, but we just cleaned up their oil spills with kitty litter.

We drove to and from work together at 5 a.m. and home at 5 p.m., both college boys trying to pay their own way through...

We laughed and told stories about our Manager -- Freney. His jaw and teeth had been rotted away with cancer, but he still always had a huge pouch of chaw in his lip. He spat wherever on the factory floor that he wanted to. He cursed and told lewd stories and laughed gruffly at himself and our awkward polite silences.

I could close my eyes right now and reconstruct exactly the flicker of the flourescent lights in that high wide warehouse of a factory room....the smell of the oil, the smooth purity of the concrete floors, the spartan aesthetic of pipes and metal and concrete, irrigating troughs between the machines that were so filthy with corrosion and oil and residue that they almost looked absurdly soft and welcoming -- like a toxic mudbath....

He and I were so tired in those days that we talked about the fact that we never even drove down to Pere Marquette anymore to cruise the strip with our friends...as the sun set over the vastness of Lake michigan. And we were astonished that work could so colonize our social lives. And such work! Kevin was quiet and kind and a preppy looking metalhead who continued to attend his Christian Reformed Church...

And I saw Kevin one more time six years later and then not since. But it feels funny to me how you can share a particular vision of the world with someone and then they fade from your life like the vision that you shared. Still there. Abiding. But like a ghost that only whispers a reminder about the shape of the world somewhere else...

sweater weather

i love these temperatures, this light, the edge of chill in each breath and the likelihood of wind.

i love the crunch of black walnuts below our tires when we drive in the driveway. I love the golden nostalgia that casts shadows everywhere from anytime after three in the afternoon until the crispness of the dark night comes again.

i love my raggedy wool sweaters and my hole-y jeans.

i feel flooded with a million memories in autumn, but half of them never happened to me. They are memories of my grandparents putting on coats and my teenager parents donning sweaters and all of them walking to cars or down the cabin road or through the Soo Locks Park holding hands. I'm lonely for Michigan and jealous for every little unimportant memory and anecdote that prefigured my life....

brewing about...

1. is there any special reason that you should wait until a teapot whistles before you use it for your tea, or is it just fine for you to pour it once you know it to be hot?

2. 24 hour theatre worked: we produced four performances of plays (some ambitious, some deep, some fun...) and produced about fifty zombies for the next several days. I've tripped (seriously) and fallen twice and that's when I'm not just sitting, staring and drooling....

3. LOVED the comments after my vocation post. I couldn't agree more with many of them, and appreciate deeply the affirmations...

4. I've been thinking about some comments that "anonymous" (ahh the rich complexity of discourse in the pomo age) left on my blog a few weeks ago. A's argument seemed to be, to me, that liberals want to look like they care. this in response to a post where i confessed that i *didn't* care as much as i wish i could about tragedies around the world. But i didn't say that i wished that i could *look like* i care -- i said I wished i could care. so i've been listening to political discourse with that grid recently and feel like this may be a trope of conservative discourse. That liberals hold their positions not because they believe in them, but because they want to look like they believe in them. It doesn't seem like a helpful claim to make in terms of democratic practice. But I don't want to say that mischarecterization is primarily a problem of the right wing. Disaparaging discourse seems to be MORE of what people know how to talk about than issues. And liberals just as much conservatives are to blame. how to change...?

5. i've also been continuing to think about the testimonial -- both as a genre of discourse and as *the* definitive sociological marker of evangelicalism. until the other day i was feeling bitter about the way that evangelicalism-as-a-culture makes everything into a "testimony" -- in many cases before anyone's had a chance to recover from pain or problems or tragedy or grief or flaws -- the comic frame of "testimony" turns the lemons into lemonade... But I also realized (partly thanks to Jay Case) that the testimony is a site of great empowerment for the individual without power. It is the embodiement of personal narrative as transformative resource. Those who put faith in the testimony -- ultimately put faith in the possibility of personal experience and narrative expression as vital hermeneutic...(despite, maybe, some of the difficult theoretical consequences that creates for more conservative theologians)

6. and i'm thinking all the time about how wonderful and difficult parenting is. Living in the fact that your child(ren) will. must.do. experience pain is....sometimes....unbearable.

7. finally, i'm feeling: (see the last post) tired. i'm going to bed...

peace~