If 2010 were a character in a book, this would be his dramatic monologue at the close of this chapter of life.

“Always hope on people.  It is so easy to slip into other people’s ways of thinking about people.  What is hard is to believe in them.  But this is truly what people want: to be believed in; and depended upon.  One of the greatest feelings in the whole world is for someone you respect to suddenly rely on you.  Not because they were forced to, but because they actually do trust you; they think you can do it.  And so depend on people; know that them finding their way in the world, and being a person who succeeds because they are believed in, is far more important than whatever little task you gave to them.  

Do not shatter their confidence if they fail; be a person of faith in others.  Why have faith in others?  Because so very often having faith in others is what makes people great.  If everyone doubted them, they would wither away with the wind; but if along comes someone who says ‘I believe in you’, they will rise and conquer.  Thus, to not have faith is to make your lack of faith valid; they will not succeed, because you do not believe they will succeed. 

More important than believing in people is the opposite possibility: writing people off.  The worst and gravest thing you can do to another person is to assume the worst possible about their motivations, their thoughts, their intentions.  Do not make people monsters in your mind.  To do so is one of the most disgusting acts the human psyche is capable of.  A minimum amount of faith in other people is necessary; you owe it to others to not destroy their image, with no possibility of return.  Always allow resuscitation; always allow return.  Make room for people to surprise you; be ready for the better to emerge.  As has been said, to have such a minimum faith will often bring about the return on that faith.  Who will change into the better if no room has been given to them to do so?

We are becoming; as such, we commit so many faults.  But we are on our way.  And so do not only believe in my yesterday and today; believe in my tomorrow.  What was and is of a person speaks to our thoughts; but who knows how much it may be drowned out by the loudness of what they do tomorrow?  Who knows the glorious winged creatures we are bound to turn into? 

A creature on its way, but yet still one that constantly veers off the path, needs grace.  Without grace, he may as well settle in the ditch he fell into.  I need your hope just as much as mine to continue.  And in that way, we depend on one another.  But if you do not have faith in me, this does not mean I should be angry at you; for being angry at you would mean I don’t have faith in you.  And if I don’t have faith in you, I sabotage our lives just as much.  But my not closing you out allows your hope to get started; I have given you room to move forward.  And then I depend on your hope to move forward as well.  We are all connected; always hope on people. 

You destroy a man in real life when you destroy him in your mind.  We want others to believe in us; so believe in others.  Never write people off, never burn them alive.  Keep the world beautiful by not polluting others in your thoughts.  It is a wonderful thing to be relied on, to be trusted, to be believed in; the faith of another bursts into life like the first star of night.  Get up tomorrow a person of grace; always hope on others.  In so doing you will create an amazing world.”

2010 sat in his chair, his face alight with the lambent glow of the fire.  He saw some faces there, flickering for moments that only he could see.  Can we love from afar?  Perhaps not as truly.  But we can do in our minds what would guide our words if we were near them; we can keep our faith.

My child, get up, get up off the ground.  Don’t you know that you are loved?  I do not mean to refer to things you cannot see, but until I do you will not see them.  Many winters ago, you shivered, you shivered as you do now, but you believed.  What has changed my child?  Did I forsake you then?  Do you not know that I walk as you walk?  When you are sad, I am there, and I am sad, I feel all that you feel.  But I wish to lift your eyes up, for I love you.  If pain were nothing, you would not need it, and I would take it from you without hesitation.  But I love you, and because of that, I suffer with you, the suffering that I know we must endure.  I know the world is large, and it is unfair for you to burden it all.  Yet it all seems on you; but you must know, there is no part of it I would not lift with you.  I lift with you, I ache with you, I cry out to the heavens with you; ‘My God, My God’.  Don’t you know you are loved?  The world has been lifted up; I have lifted it.  All the pains, the hurts, the dead ends, the rage, the hate, the desperation, the displacement – all has been lifted up.  I love you.  And love means reaching to the lowest of lows for the beloved; Beloved, don’t you see I love you?  To love is to be with, and so I reach out for you; to what could I reach to love without pain?  What distance could I travel to be with you if not for suffering?  How could I say ‘This is how much I love you’; ‘My God, My God’.  Get up off the ground; for I got up, and I am with you.  Don’t you know that you are loved?  You are loved more than you could ever begin to feel; the pain, the trenchant agony, all will be swallowed up, enveloped and then squeezed out of existence by my presence, taken over by my might, defeated by you, my Beloved, as you get up, get up off the ground.  You are loved and it is I who love you.  If I were to appear though, I would lose you; I came to teach you to get up, get up off the ground, but my presence would destroy all the purposes of my teaching.  Teaching is only love if it sets the learner free.   And I want you to be free, Beloved, so that you will be able to see me.  I am here; reach out for me, find me, for I am here.  If you would not be free, you would not be at all; and so I fell to appear before you as a flash, a glimmer, to hope to catch your eyes.  The glimmer was slight, but there none the less; short enough to keep you free, long enough to let you know that I am with you.  And for you to see how far I would fall for you.  Don’t you know that you are loved?  Get up, get up off the ground, and lift your eyes, child: for it is I, I who fell to be with you. 

You can’t cast characters in a movie that only live in my imagination.  Plus, admission to my imagination is free.

I really love other humans.  What they look like, the thoughts they carry, what’s going on in their lives.  Every person is so very much who they are.  It’s like they can’t help it.

The food and the service are not worth that much.  What you pay for is the conversation.

Connections are where life is made.  If you make yourself, but connect yourself to no one, you eventually find that you are nothing. 

Many people assume a person who leads a disciplined life has no contrary desires.  But the truth is that a person who leads a disciplined life does so because they have contrary desires.

A story properly consists in a set of events and their meaning.  Newspapers however report only events; poetry reports only meaning.

Philosophers are too stupid to understand ordinary folks.

A God would not be loving who was never angry.

I don’t understand when people don’t have blogs or journals.  Where do they put their thoughts about everything?

I live in search of life, and the words that express life, in that order.  I am way behind on the words part.  And the life part too.

“Anyway, so I’m going for an A in that class.  If I get a C, I might lose it, and, I don’t know, kill a fish or something.”  Brian shoved a hefty bite of lo mein into his mouth, driving home the casualness of his exaggeration.
“Yeah.  Dead fish.”  Amber nodded, her eyes abnormally wide.
Brian continued chomping heavily as he fiddled with a napkin, looking across the table with concern at Amber.
“You ok?”
“I’m fine,” Amber rejoined, shifting her weight and glancing at him, her eyes still wide.  “Totally fine. Yeah, I’m fine.”  She searched the table for grounding, her head still nodding.  “How are you?” she finally blurted out uncomfortably.
Brian peered at his friend, his marked chewing in its waning moments.
“You sure you’re fine?  You seem . . .” Brian trailed off, ‘freaked out’ being his first, and wisely vetoed choice of words.  “. . . you seem distracted.  What’s bugging you?”
The low hum of the Chinese restaurant filled their choppy conversation’s frequent lacunas.  Plates clinked together as they were picked up by customers at the buffet; stolid faced employees patrolled the restaurant like the ruling army of a small country.
“It’s just,” Amber accidentally suddenly began. 
Brian leaned in, shaking his head briefly to indicate his confusion.  Now she had to go on.
“I feel . . . naked.”
Brian tried with all his might to not look down at her clothes.  It would be weird if she noticed him do it.  She would know, he’s thinking of me and what nakedness is, he’s thinking it right now. Meanwhile, Amber’s eyes were frantically island-hopping from dish to dish on their table.
“What,” Brian gulped, “What do you mean?”
“Like us being here.  Everyone,” Amber cried, her voice tense and shaking, her hands now in front of her, gesticulating wildly.  “Like, we’re all eating.  That means we need food.  And like. . . people know that.  They know that as they look at you.”
Brian bit his lip.  He was shocked that the thought was not shocking.  “Yeah,” he said.  “So . . .”
“So that’s not ok!” Amber flooded into the air.  “Like, the fact that we’re talking means we need, you know, social interaction.”  Amber’s words tumbled into one another; her body was shaking rhythmically.  “That I don’t look like a mess means I need to feel pretty, that we’re breathing means we need oxygen, and needs, needs are so personal, it means I need them, and when people know that, that’s personal.  And we just admit it.  We come out and here and yell ‘I need food! I need friends! I need air!’ and that’s just, that’s just . . . pathetic.  We’re all just pathetic creatures.  Naked, pathetic creatures, gathering together and all just staring at each other being that way. Naked.  Completely, utterly naked.”
Brian now struggled to not imagine everyone in the restaurant naked.  He was slightly attracted to Amber; but elsewhere in the restaurant lay physical territory he was glad he had not charted.
“That’s true,” Brian agreed, nodding robotically. 
“Well, I don’t like it,” Amber went on.  “I don’t like being naked.  I don’t like people looking at me and thinking ‘Ha! She needs food. I know it.  Look at her scarf it down, look the way she pretends to not care.  But deep inside—aha!—deep inside she longs for it like a moon needs its planet, like a whimpering child needs its mommy—like a mad scientist who rushes to her secret laboratory now that she finally knows how to take over the world.”  Amber had grown sinister in her monologue as she displayed the other person’s thoughts, rubbing her hands together and breathing heavily.
“We, uh,” Brian stammered, “We can go if you want.”  He looked around nervously, wondering if they were being overheard.
Amber suddenly broke out of the evil character into a full cascade of tears.  The tears flowed freely, as in the moment a tub finally overflows on all sides.  Brian rushed to grab their coats off their chairs, but as he did so he worried that it would make Amber upset to realize she needed warmth.  As he contemplated what he should do, Amber got up and hurried off, away from the eyes of her omniscient onlookers.  Everyone now turned to Brian, who grinned sheepishly as he looked around.  He then remembered the thought of everyone naked, and immediately forced his head down as he rushed off in search of Amber.

The other day I was reading a book by Richard Swinburne on the problem of evil, and he was talking about how the one universal human desire is for sloth, to rest, and the whole time I was reading the passage I kept nodding off.

That was a little bit like the time a few weeks ago I was reading a facebook status that said “I just went through deleting people off my friend’s list, and if you are reading this that means I find our friendship important and want it to grow” and while reading it I couldn’t help wondering who the person was.

I used to be such a good napper; the other day I napped and woke up four minutes before I had to work.  In my rush into work I left me keys in the ignition, which I figured out just as I was getting off my shift.  My little brother successfully scoured the house for a spare copy of my car key, and later Alex gave me a ride to pick up my car.  Upon opening the car, however, I realized I had not only left my keys in the ignition, but I had left the car on.

The jumper cables just reached my battery from Alex’s.  As we were trying to get my battery to work they told me to rev my engine.  Eventually my car just wouldn’t start; at that point I revealed to them that it had in fact run out of gas. 

Hours later after we had finally gotten my car to start Alex concluded, “What lesson have we learned today Phil?  Don’t be an idiot.”  

Of course, Alex then used the spare gas we had left to light the ground on fire.

I am reading a book by Johannes Climacus, a pseudonym of Kierkegaard’s.  It is very interesting, which is interesting because it is discussing faith as by nature being rooted in a person’s infinite interest.  Here is what Climacus says:

“In the interest of my problem it is more important to have it understood and remembered that even with the most stupendous learning and persistence in research, and even if all the brains of all the critics were concentrated in one, it would still be impossible to obtain anything more than an approximation and that an approximation is essentially incommensurable with an infinite personal interest in an eternal happiness.”

So Climacus posits, it makes no sense to think salvation consists in believing things about history or philosophy.  An eternal happiness must be rooted in an infinite personal passionate interest.  For the truth of history and philosophy are only ‘approximations’, and how can an infinite interest be attached to a conclusion that is only an approximation?   

It has been a good break.  I met a girl who only walks on her tippy-toes.  I am enjoying the cold.  It is good to have friends.

The stars know I’m a fraud

with shadows in my pockets.

I lied to myself in hopes that I would forget,

But creaks of light shine into my cell.

I can never build a perfect defense,

For the truth knows more than I know how to block.

My skin is a corpse; my disease seeps into the world.

I am a fraud.

I see myself as all; yet before all, I disappear.

Who knew I could be so little, after having been so big?

I wish to be wiped out, to see what true beauty is;

The world without me.

A world that goes on, and finds good, and has love.

And I am nowhere to be found; they are all happy.

I want to be needed.

But I enter, and swallow everything up.  I become all.

May I be empty, to let the good happen in the world.

I am a corrupting invasion, a pervasive flu, a deadly parasite.

Why have I come here?

What if I didn’t know I? What if I only saw others?

I wish for the all to replace me, for others’ goods to become my own.

I am a fraud. I swallow everything up, and spit it up ever worse.

I delight to know you, to find you in the skies.  Alive!

Be my all; empty me. Let me know life. There is so much to see.

My captious heart tries to sail away; but your storms forbid me.

Teach me, guide me, help me. May I be yours.

‘Bought with a price’

I want the life you have to give.

The world would go on; let others’ goods be your own.

I don’t need much; a place to sleep, friends to laugh with,

a fire to indulge in.  A sky at night, filled with your light,

and the feeling of your love. 

What an adventure your tough love would be.

Empty me out; shake me, rattle me out of my hypocrisy.

A fraud, a fraud, but one opening up in the marketplace.

It was me; I did it.  Let this be true.  I want to be in your home.

Let me know what it means again.

Several brain cells were gathered around a long table to discuss ideas.

“Alright, cell people, I hope everyone enjoyed their morning break, but we’re five hours to deadline here,” the gruff boss began.  “What do you got? I want to be impressed.  Hit me.”

“Ok how about this,” starts an enthusiastic cell halfway down the table.  “He’s in a plane, but he falls out, and he lands in a giant bowl of jello.  Then he starts a company selling jello.”

All the cells’ heads quickly turned to nervously await their boss’s reaction.

“No, it’s crap.  Besides, how does that fit in with his life?  He hasn’t seen any jello recently, and I don’t even know what such a dream would mean.”

“Well,” the brain cell began abashedly, “The jello is because it’s winter, and he’s missing desserts again.”  The cell gulped fantastically.

“Go on,” the boss said, his hands folded in front of him.

“And the factory is because he’s nervous about what job he’s going to have, and everyone keeps asking him what he’s going to do when he graduates.”

The boss leaned back in his enormous swivel chair and pondered.  After a few moments of incredible tension his  verdict arrived: “It’s crap.  What else we got?”

“Me!”

“Yes, you Josiah.”

“Ok, so he’s walking along the sidewalk, and he runs into someone he hasn’t seen in a long time.  I have his file here on an old friend named Mark Stron-”

“Crap crap crap.  Too plausible.  Who’s next?  You, Sylvester!”

“Don’t worry boss, I got us covered.  So he sets up a snowball fight on the statehouse lawn between opposing political parties, but then people start dying because the snowballs are poisonous.  He then wanders the city looking for a mattress to buy because he knows his survival depends on it.   While looking, though, he gets caught up in an underground ring of people who practice crying in front of one another.”

A silence hung in the air as the boss looked at the mobile of ideas.

“Oh,” Sylvester began again, “And his friend Jeremy is there.  But he thinks Jeremy is really crying, and not faking it.  But he never finds out for sure.”

“I like it!” the boss beamed.  “People, start working on it!  We need to have tryouts for people in the snowball fight, Frankie that’s you, go!  Cheryl, costume design, get out of here!  The rest of you, talk with one another, I want this storyboard to make absolutely no sense by the time we’re done with it.”

“How long do we have, boss?” someone asked amidst the boardroom of scurrying brain cells, causing a momentary pause.

“Look people, Philip’s sleep schedule is havoc, we all know that.  However, our best intelligence has reported to us that he’s going to get wired after watching a movie at around 10.  We put the most plausible bedtime at 3 AM.  That gives us nine hours, but look, I want this thing done by midnight if we can, got it!  Let’s go people! Move, move, move!”

The Committee to Plan Dreams had officially dispersed.

He wrote a book on how to be a successful author, but no one bought it.

Everyone who disagrees with doing philosophy disagrees for philosophical reasons.

The man had rushed to the book with vigor, but as he sat his head drooped over the text; it was a long, tedious work, and the answer he had so desperately thought it would provide was never on the next page.  

I am not living with a sufficient level of honesty; which is to say, I am not living at all.

Humans hate one another.  They see certain people, and they don’t care for the rules any longer; that person must die.  The narrowing of eyes, scoffing when heads are turned, leering and peering – what a disastrous mistake, that this person got let into reality.  It is a consuming hatred, one that burns within.  This is one of the things that humans can feel; we must take a note, and not forget it.   

Hearing about other people’s lives is like reading fiction; we consider the characters objectively, not like we would analyze ourselves. 

Life – such a narrow escape through the clutches of nature!  We are like a thief, bolting around each next corner as we are chased by the authorities.  What are a marvel and a miracle that we are alive.

The snow falls gently, no rush, we shall coat the earth eventually.  It is a very calming effect.  What have we ever worried about?  Ahhhh.  

Winter: the season of ”what a beautiful day inside it is today!”

What do I want to remember?  Such random things become the montage of our lives.  Why did I remember him saying that thing? 

Fiction is very misleading because we see all the lines, and know that what happens next is already there, we just have to get to it.  But the future is very different from that, much blacker, much scarier; we live at the cusp of reality, always scything our way one stroke at a time into the darkness, from the created into the uncreated, filling out reality’s edges, finding how it is the story goes. 

You may think that it is inside who the man truly is.  But if he does not act it on the outside, what does it matter that it is inside?  How can the inside be what a man truly is?  However, if it would get lost, if action cannot say who we are, maybe we are just inside.  Maybe we are just created, as what we know ourselves to be, but we never get put on display. 

So are we secrets or not?

A secret is something only one person knows.  You can never tell another person a secret; the telling undoes its secrecy.

To be something only you can see, what a marvelous thing that would be.  Would that not be beautiful?  If you were God, would you give people lives?  Would it not feel wonderful to say to someone, “Here. Here you go, this is for you.  You.”  The speaking of ‘You’, that is the gift.

Marriage, that is the giving of something to someone from what already Is – your life.  But to make you at all is to make from what is Not into what Is. 

Are we made by our circumstances?  Some people may think we are determined, the world is set up already: there are buildings here, and a system in place, and that’s how you become who you are.  But what if there were lots of ways you could respond to your circumstances, to this system, to this place?  Maybe there were lots of roads, and you picked a specific one; we are quite underdetermined by our circumstances.

Seasons shine different sorts of spotlights on people, revealing their chameleonic glows; they are magical in the summer, that girl at the carnival that seems so special, the beauty of summer nights, how you never want it to end.  The winter spotlight makes people seem peculiarly alive; their opaque breath shows how they are a drastic invasion into the still and silent scenery of snow and icicles. 

I want to be alive.  I want to find the unexpected.  Children have such a greater capacity for life.  We shrink it down down down until we don’t know what to do.  We just think about it all the time, but in that way thinking is not a power.  Thinking becomes a magnetic force, one that will always hold you down to thinking about the you you will never be. 

We live in a fog, unless we act.  If you don’t see it through you will never see at all.

There are two extremes of people, those who are sickly and soberly logical, and those that die to be alive, who are full of passion and emotion.  I prefer the latter to the former.

What is a story?  How do people talk?  What is the unexpected?  Is it more internal, or more things that happen that we don’t control, and how characters respond to that?  Characters – what kind of humans are there? for those are the characters. 

This is all abstract.  You know the details of your life, I never will. 

We do wish for certain shapes of life, that people would say certain things, be certain ways, and we would get really happy, because then we could respond the way we always wanted to.  But this makes a good situation in reverse; you can try to say the things and be the way that will allow other people to break out into who they always wanted to be. 

It’s a very hard thing to draw the stories out of someone.  You have to say just the thing that will make them recall it; otherwise, they will not think of it, and then they won’t tell it to you.

The snow falls, how gentle, how inspiring; I couldn’t have painted this reality.  From the Not into the Is.  How interesting and difficult it is to be a human, and yet to watch this wintry world washes all this worry away.

And it kills your soul.

That, anyway, is what I read on the warning label of a jackhammer.  Problem is, if you bought a jackhammer, you’re not the sort of person who reads warning labels.  And that’s why no one knows that facebook kills your soul; we all migrate there, but migration implies a lack of thought.  Who knows why we’re going where we’re going?

You want to free a man?  Give him addictions that are good for his soul.  For we are all addicted.  But some of us become addicted to people, to God, to blue skies, to art, to the moments where we’re children again. 

But now it’s cold December
when all the dead are lonely
for no one visits tombs
when it’s frosty, dead, and snowy

I lost hearing in my right ear right after Thanksgiving, almost as if God were saying, “But did you forget about this?”

God has all sorts of ways of showing us that we’re idiots, but we miss most of them.  And that’s because we’re idiots. 

But he still loves us.

Somehow whenever I’m stopped at a red light, I always think the road I’m on is more important than the one that has a green light.  I convince myself that there are barely any cars over there, and that the traffic light has a flawed design. 

But that’s because I’m an idiot.  That something is an inconvenience to me is not immediate evidence that it is wrong.  It’s only evidence that I don’t like it.   

Speaking of inconveniences, now that it is winter I have to go without one of my favorite fruits, which I must admit is making me quite watermeloncholy. 

Snow has fallen; into the winter we go!  Time to go to battle against the sombre gray skies of a cold and withering world.   Don’t let your hope have a freezing temperature; and don’t sit on facebook all winter.  Find some people, do something.  Facebook is a disease, and relationships are the cure.