thoughts on this day

I usually buy a book of poetry of some sort when I travel. This trip has yielded six thus far, but four were from goodwill. I'm taking a gimme.

I finally finished "Tell We Have Faces". It was beautiful. I'm still soaking in it. The next day, I began my first attempt at Proust; "A Remembrance of Things Past: Swan's Way" to be specific. On a break, thumbing through my new poetry collection, I read "A Bookmark" by Tom Disch. He writes, "Four years ago, I started reading Proust. Although I'm past the halfway point, I still have seven hundred pages of reduced type left before I reach the end...Four years ago, by God! - and even then how I was looking forward to the day I would be able to forgive, at last, and to forget "Remembrance of Things Past." Hmm. This may be a sign.

I love traveling and long to do it more often. I love being able to schluff obligations and deadlines and... everything. Even if just for the afternoon...just for a week. We need breaks. Even from things we love. Should an independently wealthy investor want to fund my...how you say....life studies. I should keep a house in Nashville and another in Ireland. Or Scotland.... for many reasons. ...and because there's always the anticipation of the change, the chance that what is wrong is the result of where you are.

just like him

Thursday night before the Indigo Girls show at the Ryman, Derek and I waited out front talking a bit with Mary Gauthier about the Sufjan Stevens show we'd seen just a week or so before. She quickly and adamantly said she couldn't accept... or "get" Sufan's song "John Wayne Gacy, Jr." Suggesting Stevens just went too far. And I totally get that. In a moment of moxie, I said that while I can completely see the irreverence of it, it's the last stanza that makes the story worth the telling. Tonight I remember why. I read a little wikipedia on John Wayne Gacy and might just have nightmares about clowns tonight. They were not previously a phobia, but that may have just changed. Gacy did some heinous things to over 30 boys whom he later buried under his house or threw in the river when he ran out of room there.

Sufjan tells his story this way:

His father was a drinker
And his mother cried in bed
Folding John Wayne's T-shirts
When the swingset hit his head
The neighbors they adored him
For his humor and his conversation
Look underneath the house there
Find the few living things
Rotting fast in their sleep of the dead
Twenty-seven people, even more
They were boys with their cars, summer jobs
Oh my God

Are you one of them?

He dressed up like a clown for them
With his face paint white and red
And on his best behavior
In a dark room on the bed he kissed them all
He'd kill ten thousand people
With a sleight of his hand
Running far, running fast to the dead
He took of all their clothes for them
He put a cloth on their lips
Quiet hands, quiet kiss
On the mouth



And then there's the final stanza.....

And in my best behavior
I am really just like him
Look beneath the floorboards
For the secrets I have hid


I understand that it's hard to believe we are capable of such horrible things, but I think to be able to say "I would never be capable of anything like that", brings with it ideas of labeling certain people(s) "bad". This necessarily means that you must be "good" or have within you enough good to be able to control or overcome the bad. ...In my experience, my ability to control such...um...how you say... sucks.

All I know is, I have a hard, hard heart. I can so easily betray what I know to be true for irrational reactions in anger, fear or hurt. Cold is my warmest thought.

I love so poorly.
....and yet God is a God committed relentlessly loving his rebel children.


love,
jordan


"Love is something more stern and splendid than mere kindness." - c.s. lewis

Crash of 2006

Computer Crash + Deadline =










to be continued...