God's Country

It should firstly and plainly be said that I move in all those most respectable circles which all other atheist do as well.

I got up early this morning so that I could go out while the sun was still rising. It’s very often that I’m still awake when the birds begin to chirp but not so common that I’m actually awake and moving about outside with them as they do. I took a bike ride around the neighborhood and ended up down at the corner store. Everything looked fresh and clear in the morning-wet air. A crystalline blue sky filled full with misty cloud-whispers covering a heavy and damp dew humid air. It’s so clear out though. The sun is up but not out yet, not yet high enough to shine over the thicker clouds that coat the Midwest horizon in faux white cap mountain peaks.

Traffic is only a low rumble still and the loudest noise around me is the hydraulics of a truck cab and the hum of it’s refrigerated load. “Rolling Rock” it says in big beautiful letters above a panoramic blue-green rocky mountain scene I’ve never been to. I’d like to go out west, to the real west that lies past this old thought Midwest. I don’t especially like the idea of the West Coast, but I’d very much like to see the Pacific Ocean and those mountain ranges. The idea of the ocean doesn’t particularly impress me because of its size and grandeur, the great lakes ruined that for me at a young age. Never again will any body of water be anything more than a lake to me; I’ve peered out across lakes and seen nothing but more lake on the other side. And, I’ve done it from both Chicago and West Michigan looking back across at myself. I’d like to see the Pacific Ocean because of the name I imagine. I’d like to see a peaceful sea and imagine the orient on its other side. Worlds divided I guess. I’ve seen the Atlantic Ocean already and when I did I had all the salt that’s ever been a part of it stuffed right up my nose and down my throat. When I swam in it I was still so young that I had trouble opening my eyes underwater and it sure didn’t help me any. It was nice though, like going to a grandparent's house; someplace you know your family came from, seeing where your father slept and shared a closet for a room with his brother, seeing that vague place where your mother’s mother’s mother sailed over and on. In all the pictures I’ve seen of the west the mountain line in the background is what strikes me the most. Frontier land doesn’t stretch out forever in every direction; it’s cut up by ridges and pitfalls as far as I can see. Seeing pictures of those blue and white mountains is deceiving when you’re a child; there isn’t any way to tell where they end and because of that every town you see can give off the impression that it’s in a cradle of American bounty, set up and protected in a basin of God’s country’s very own best rocks. Where I grew up things looked to be in a basin themselves, surrounded on all sides by old industry. Steel mills, salt hills, burning blue-flamed oil towers; after a while it starts to look like the rest of the land, like it too was thrust up from the soil and rocks when the earth was still young and eons cooling. It’s hard to say if it’s any older than the rest of this place, especially when it was all already here by the time I showed up.

I rode my bike back home and left it in the garage on its kickstand. Looking at the red-lined clouds is like looking at the delicate red blood veins in a milky white eye. Everything just looks so clean and clear before that. The sky is infectious and all the air in my world is the same muted pale blue it’s been all morning and I start to wonder, “Is this God’s country?” Walking back inside I notice one last thing: those same road side gnats I picked off my shirt last night after running are stuck all up and down my arms now in the red blond downy hair. I pick them each out, one by one flicking them back in the direction of the road before I walk back inside and begin taking off my shoes in the front room of my parent's house. Oh happy new day.

caleb

And as I am Peering down Springs Blouse...

Why will I continue to search for meaning in a seemingly meaningless universe? Why must I reject those beautiful bouts of chaos? They hit me like pleasant strokes, bubbles in the brain-at the park last summer they floated through that cramped air and sun streaked sky.

Sitting in the tub I am four and my mother’s blowing bubbles over my head and they stick to the white tile walls and the water is getting cold and the bath is full of mountains of white that keep popping and a hair floats by and I get scared. When the water is too chilly for me to take and the heater in the basement is already dead from exhaustion mother fills a pot on the stove. Pouring it over my toes I know she loves me.

But then it was summer again and for some odd reason music sounded better then it ever had before. Something in the air had changed and what more than that, Spring had crept out from 45 degrees of rain into a stuffy car and suddenly its 63˚ at the city airport. And that damn it all to hell April 6, 2006 or was it 2005 or 1994-0r-2 had pumped me full of thoughts of perfect folds of red summer blouses and divine bosoms with perfect playful cleavage as a girl asks me to turn in her paper for her because she can’t be bothered by the niceness of the day to leave her seat and I’m peering past her name in the upper corner and seeing her smile and the shrug of her shoulders on the same depth of field while her breasts pull daisy stalks into that V you see when two leaves or petals or legs or parts of summer met.

And then I am back at the park and that damn it all to hell April has set girls on every thought and emotion and sense I have. And there’s something in the air where I breath that causes something inside of me to feed and I can’t tear any bit of my over worked mind away from the breasts I see floating across the sky and over my bath and then I realize that they're bubbles I am remembering and I was four in that tub again.

And sometimes, we just have to be happy that summer and winter are so set in their ways. Spring and Fall, no matter what month, have a way of going either way, running a bit cold or feeling un-restfully warm as the wind blows. But, there is something about the middle of summer, something which is absolute, solidified by the heat of a July day which only summer has. Summer time is strong and sure, letting itself be known in every drop of sunlight into sweat, shouting out it’s presence like a boy with his ball in every long hour of the longest days. Summer burns a memory into your mind so surely that your brain peels. So definite that every blade of grass ever plucked up and rolled between your fingers, pulled at from the ground till it burst out singing dirt into the air as it gave to you is locked away in your mind. Summertime brings on emotions so dormant that even the bugs shoot off electric joy as they dance through the night, little thunderstorms so soft they could mock the lull a baby’s sleep. And, what’s more there is the memory of the first smear of that galvanizing green against the pavement where it is smeared into the heart and the soul of you the first time you see a fire fly die. Summer brings all the calmness of a nap, all the comfort of grass hugged feet, all the joy of nights so dark the sky is filled with lights that out shine cities and so warm that the day might not ever end and summer will just last forever.

And then I realize that it is April again and I’ve set out to get myself and there are a million pretty girls I’d love to kiss before I’ve lost my sense of Spring-supple breasts and supple heat that reaches inside of me and turns my chest up to the nth˚.

Starship Captain

Sometimes I think I should’ve been born in a different era.

People always say that, people always crave change. For some reason, they want something new, something different. The grass is always greener on the other side, and probably dozens of other old sayings that don’t come to mind right at the moment. Sometimes, though, it does seem that it really is greener over there, or maybe it is just greener in fiction. Yeah…

Maybe I would’ve been better off being born in a different reality, something that wasn’t so concrete, something more superfluous, somewhere more magical.

I started re-reading Dune about a week ago. I’m not sure quite what gave me the urge to do it, but I picked it up and started reading it. I think it was some sort of yearning to read an epic space opera... I can't really believe I just used that phrase, but I'm just going to go with it. I would read for a while and then start to feel guilty about doing it and begin to talk myself into reading something that I hadn’t read already. I have a huge stack of books that I want to read this summer, and I was “wasting” time rereading something I had read years ago. I always do this, make reading into some sort of chore and try to “accomplish” something by finishing a book that I don’t really want to. I should just read what the hell I want and stop reading what I don’t enjoy. But, anyhow… I stopped and considered reading something else several more times, but I never did pick anything else up, Dune was just too good.

And then I reached a point that made it all worthwhile, that made me realize just why I was still reading it and why I always listed it among my favorite books. As I was riding north along I-69 in Indiana, I reached some sort of nirvana.

I don’t think it was the words on the page, or even the place in the book that did it for me, but everything just came together in an instant. I realized just how great a book I was reading. It’s so good that I cannot even begin to explain it. I just felt like Paul, knowing that he was moving inexorably to a future he did not want, but being helpless to stop it. It was pure contentment, pure joy and a feeling of intense comfort and satisfaction, as if I was doing the perfect thing, at the perfect time, in the perfect place. I know there are countless people who wouldn’t enjoy reading Dune, many who probably would hate it, even… I know this, it’s not for everyone. I guess it’s plodding at times (but I never find it so), maybe a bit confusing, it’s long and dense, but I guess that’s part of what I love about it. Herbert created a world so rich and huge that it took my breath away even though nothing was new to me. At that one moment, the book was perfect, and the world was so right that I ached to be there myself. I wanted to be on that awful desert world. I wanted to be caught up in all the intrigue and violence of the Imperium. It is the reason I’ve sacrificed hundreds of hours to playing Imperialism, Civilization and Crusader Kings, just trying to reach that place where I feel that I am actually there, that I am actually the commander of armies, the diplomat plotting, the captain of that mammoth starship.

And, I guess it’s the same reason that I love Star Wars so much, the reason that I feel every insane, nostalgic feeling that I do. It’s all about that feeling that I can’t even explain correctly. Those things are more than movies to me, more than books, more than ideas, more than anything that I could ever put my hands on, or watch with my eyes. It is a world, a galaxy that is so ripe and wonderful that I cannot help but yearn to be there. It feels more like my home than this Earth ever will.

But, that’s when I know something is truly great. It simply transcends appreciation. I appreciate good books and movies, and I enjoy many of them, but a certain number of them strike a different chord. Some things I love, and they make me love them. It isn’t a passive experience, but they reach out, grab me by the collar and beat the living shit out of me until I realize their greatness. I feel every pang of sadness, every joyous moment and experience every wonderful adventure as if they were my own. The real world simply has never provided me with anything that real or that grand.

Gah, there I go talking about fiction again, but I just want to be a starship captain when I grow up, dammit.

Moriarty

When I was young, I had a Moriarty against whom my Holmes was pitted, as surely as I had found my Watson at that young age. I was matched against this fiend as early as I can remember. We were rivals of unimaginable import, no less so than Achilles and Hector or Batman and The Joker. Our battlefields were countless; the football field, the jungle gym, the backyard, the basement… We fought over the Super Nintendo controller, and we fought because we could. It was rivalry, it was sport, and it was a battle for the fate of everything that had ever mattered to me. And when one day he began to tear apart the snow fort that I poured my blood, sweat and tears into, it was a defense of honor and justice on a scale that would have made Superman proud. And we fought, beat and pummeled each other into the snow, fists flying, bodies tangled and snow rubbed into faces, a scene right out of Calvin and Hobbes, but what then felt more like The Battle of Hastings. I came out of it all victorious, and I stood there in my front yard, clad in all the regalia of winter, my cheeks flushed, my eyes bright and my heart thumping a triumphant opus. As the sun shone in that blue sky and the snow gleamed around me, I knew I had preserved my little kingdom in suburbia, I had held the city through the night.

It wasn’t just two boys solving their disagreement with fists, but something far greater than that, at least to me. Our conflicts always were more important than simple fights, because I never lived in the real world, not then, and not now. That lump of snow was my castle, and the pile of dirt in the backyard was the Hall of Justice. Roman Legions marched through my bedroom, and spaceships zoomed past as I stared up at those glowing neon stars on my ceiling. I always understood Richard the Lionheart better than Bill Clinton, and I probably still do. I never chose this rival, this nemesis, we were thrown together just like Arthur and Mordred. Since I can remember, I knew him, and we fought tooth and nail, and I gloried in the warfare. It was the stuff of legends and fairy tales to me. I despised him with every fiber of my being for my entire childhood, and then one day, all of a sudden, things changed… I was a freshman, and he was no longer there. I grew up, and moved on, but there was always that place in me that longed for that conflict, as assuredly as I needed comrades in arms.

It is important to have adversaries, to have someone to strive against, someone to push you and make you better. In conflict you strive to win, to fight your hardest against all odds because of that competitive fire burning inside of you. You do things that you never thought you could because of that need to be better, that need to win. In battle you become stronger, mind, body and spirit, even if it’s truly only mock combat. An enemy makes you learn and fight to succeed not with a helping hand, but with a kick in the teeth. Sometimes it’s the pain and hardships that turn you into a success, that make you strong. Sometimes it’s those bruises and black eyes that spur you on to be the best. Kennedy once said of the space program, “But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas? We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.”

Besides, when you’re a kid, weaving tales in your mind about defeating your rival is just fun. So now I’ve found a faux-archenemy, a new foe to clash with upon the battlefields of my imagination. If in doing so, I’m crossing the Rubicon from reality to the realm of fantasy, so what? Is it all that different anyhow? And it is in this vein that I struggle to keep the imagination flowing, the world from sinking into some sort of drab, cynical Hades. Because, what would be the point then? With no struggles, no adversity, where is the thrill of living? Who cares to live without that excitement, without that conflict, without that fun?

And so I write, because its better that way, half in the world of fiction, and half in this condition called reality. Like Alice, half through the looking glass, and half at home. Sometimes I wonder if fiction and reality are so different after all. I always find that people believe the myths more than they believe the truth, anyhow. I’m told the quack of a duck doesn’t echo. I really don’t know if it does, perhaps I should just go find a duck and a cave. Or I could just sit here and write about epic battles and great conflicts and then maybe go watch some Looney Toons and see a fight over whether it’s really Duck Season or Wabbit Season…

At dinner recently, I brought up the subject of archenemies, and how I wanted one. It got some good laughs, some hilarious stories and some jokes. For, who in their right mind wants an enemy, anyhow? While I cannot vouch for the state of my own sanity, because… well, that’s just a Catch-22, I can say that it is the idea of an enemy more than the reality of one. I miss the thought of having someone to pit my strength against, and in doing so, make myself better. I need something to fight, something to strive for, and some hardship to overcome. How else would I know that I have accomplished anything?

I realize the real world is filled with enough hardships, conflicts and roadblocks for me to struggle with, overcome and in doing so strengthen myself. But in the end, the problems of adulthood simply do not hold the same romance as those childish fights. So for now I’ll just look back at all those struggles of childhood, remember the glory and the happiness that they brought, and know that I will always have them. And in the end, isn’t that enough?