a simple view of evil

I've quoted from Douglas Rushkoff on this blog before -- and I guess I'm doing it again tonight. I was just browing some blogs and this paragraph caught my eye.

In the absolutist, polar world view, evil quite clearly exists. All enemies are a single thing. Now, the enemy is flying planes into us, so we've got to go there and get them. Think of it more like a father protecting his house. One day, a robber breaks in and hurts one of the kids. Dad buys a shotgun, and you better not be caught riding your bike across his lawn.

you can read the whole post here.

It's this idea that evil exists as a force which is whole, coherent, continuous that I've been opposing for years to my friends who embrace Fantasy Literature as a genre. I read my share of Dragonlance Chronicles and dipped several toes in the fanasy streams (on the sly of course) when I was a kid...but ultimately that:

Choose your destiny! way of thinking lacked an ability to translate to the reality that I lived in. Because the evil that I participated in -- was so much more boring! So dull! So petty!

But for many people the Evil Empires and Axes of Evil are so much easier to use to understand the world. Because it's so much easier to like ourselves when evil is so clearly recognizably the *other.*

Paper Route

Have I told you that I grew up in a Baptist Church?

Maybe you didn't fully understand what that meant, though. We were at that church every Sunday from sun-up until after lunch time. We returned for Evening Services by 4 or 5 in the afternoon. On Tuesday nights we returned for something called "visitation" (so interesting a sociological phenomenon that I'll save it for another blog). On Wednesday night, we went to Awana, a curious amalgam of the Boy Scout / Military meets memorizing relevant fragments of scripture. Thursday night was family night. At church. (Seriously.) I don't remember details, but I remember that it had to do with committee meetings and a potluck dinner and freetime for kids. Friday or Saturday was a youth activity, and Sunday we would rinse, repeat & begin the re-cycle...

Oops I forgot to mention that we also went to *school* at the church. Secular humanism threatened the integrity of public schools, what with Madelyn Murray O'Hair and the Scopes Monkey Trial and all.

And the cumulative outcome of all this church? I had no idea what kind of world lived outside of the trips back and forth to church. There were plenty of people in this small world. My dad was the best preacher in town and the crowds packed in around him. So it wasn't like I felt like I didn't know enough people -- I was just pretty darn curious about everybody else. I poured over the newspaper. I watched my two hours of tv per week with so much vigor that i couldn't hear anything else. I snuck books like Star Wars and Goonies and Gremlins from friends since we didn't believe in going to the movies.

It is the responsibility of writers to listen to gossip and pass it on. It is the way all storytellers learn about life. (Grace Paley)

So when I finally became a paperboy at the age of twelve, I began my habitual and ongoing addiction to voyeurism. I had memorized the first and last names of all of the neighbors for two streets over throughout my collection cycles. I pieced together bits and parts of who they were. What scandals might lurk behind their doors. Alcohol? Cigarettes? Divorce? What made them a part of the World which I was so vigorously fleeing.

I eventually became convinced that the DeLongs at the end of the street were either intentionally avoiding my collection visits or they were living lives of crime. What else could account for their tightly closed door? Their perpetual "absence"? Crime.

If I stood in the entyway of a home as I waited for them to write the check, i would memorize everything. How many children in the pictures on the wall? Any of them have grandchildren yet? Did they collect figurines? Still have leftover hanging macrame? Then I would rehearse all of the details from each house like a creed as I loped up their sidewalks onto their porches, folding and stuffing the Muskegon Chronicle into their boxes.

I think ultimately I wanted to know:

were they like us? or were we truly as different as we purported to be?

Sometimes now when I am at a party or in a crowd or in any other minglable space, I feel myself diffusing. My curiousity braided with empathy turns me into the broadest of chameleons. In those moments I feel the euphoria of disappearing completely. I become the crowd. I don't exist except in the common will and the collective intention. I float as the us above the heads of every one individual. I want to deliver the newspaper into every single hand in the room and as they write their check for this month, stare into their eyes or their world until I can crack the code and Be Them.

control+shift+enter

do you ever feel like just being on the next page...skimming, or not even bothering with this next paragraph...which, inevitably, obviously, is going to be tire-ingly like this one.

But the NEXT page. That one will either be BLANK -- endless possibility.

OR -- full of excitement, drama, passion, fate!

if only....

Notes from the front burner

This is what I've been working on for the last hour -- a conference proposal that culminated in these words:

I develop a theoretical notion of “spectacular ambivalence” to describe the performative means by which my students and I move from the intransigence of unmatched expectations to the improvisational coordination of dialogue.

am i nerd or what?

watching the kids

Lynn's out of town for three days. It's been fun and crazy and made me admire endlessly again my friends who are devoting their lives to single parenting.

I had at least three people who said stuff like: "Babysitting the kids?"

And I sort of look at them and think -- okay, I don't want to assume that that comment comes from the place it sounds like it comes from -- but when Lynn's with them -- do you ask her if she's babysitting?

So I have been "watching" the kids -- but I don't mean that in terms of parenting. I mean it in terms of learning.

On Sunday afternoon they played, delightfully both together and without inviting me that they were taking a long (long, long) trip. They were "dad" and "mom" and packed a suitcase full of books and a few toys, lugged it upstairs, back down again, and made a train snaking around the dining room that included every antique wooden chair in this house (which is a lot).

Last night was "observation night" for Addison's swimming lessons, so instead of ellipticalling with a row of other suburban gerbils-on-wheels, I sat in a badly lit hallway watching a surveillance camera representation of Addison's swimming lesson with a group of 20 other thirtysomething yuppies.

And it was funny, becuase people didn't talk to each other very much. The most oft repeated comment was: I can't figure out which one is her / him. And it was true. There were just a slew of three year old bodies bobbing in that little pool and they do look astonishing alike when rendered on a mediocre resolution tv set from the distance of 15 feet in the corner of the natatorium.

So I was sitting there for forty minutes watching the pixels which were my little curly-haired progeny, and feeling genuine delight when he was the first to duck (partway) under water and when he eagerly kicked his way to the end of the pool and back, and even as he started up a splashing game with some of his newfound friends. But the truth is: forty minutes is a long time for a swim lesson. And I'm sure Addison even found some of the waiting around tiresome. And there's a reason why Reality Programming Television is not, you know, rooted in any kind of reality.

So it was official: "Observation Night" was boring. And delightful, mind you, but the delights were so occasional, as to render the overall experience....(I'm just being honest here, not heartless) boring.

And I could have struck up a conversation with the crewcut Dad in the Hollister shorts or the nursing mom in the chair on the other side of me, but instead I chose to just sit and watch.

I could make this a pool of peace after all.

And then I was struck that these ridiculously small pixels on the screen were calling to me in about a remarkable zenlike opportunity. I could:

Watch...my son.

I could, if I chose to, pour all of my energy into this activity. Considering him, enjoying him, wondering over him.

I think that parents expect that they'll spend time just watching their babies, but I, at least, assumed that once the babies turned into humans that I'd mostly interact with them or help them or engage them...but much less watch them. I do watch my kids through the observation windows at their school, on the playground, even in the living room or as they color, but...I decide now...it has not been for long enough. I need to watch them for longer than I would sit and watch a television sitcom or read a chapter of a book. Longer than it takes to do the dishes or play hide and seek grade four papers or catch up on my email.

I am suddenly struck by the fact that this is a decadent opportunity for growth, renewal and insight. It is an entire path in my life that I had not anticipated at all.

I can WATCH my children.

So last night as I stumbled up to bed, I took more than my habitual time to sit in their dark bedrooms until the nuances of their sleeping faces could burn into my retinas and sear my heart with that feeling of reckless affection so full that my whole body itches.

I have always loved this time: watching them sleep. But now I have a new subplot in the programming of my everday life.

Just watch.

curious about the triple triple?

vidlit. go.

Jesus has come again. And he's the internet.

(i hear you asking yourself: how much of this heresy am i going to listen to before i stop reading this blog...?!)

i'm just *so* all about storytelling boundaries finding new possibilities. This website is sort of the high culture equivalent of pop up video.