I’ve been wanting to post this for quite a while now, but never got around to finishing it.  Now that I have Jon’s honest account of his attempts to foster community and the frustrations he encounters as the perfect pass (but not a Hail Mary, mind you ), I’ll try to catch it, not bobble it, and run with it like a man with his hair on fire.  If nothing else, I hope we’ll end up understanding each other a bit better, with a brick or two removed.  It seems to me that despite a few common vacations we don’t really know each other well and perhaps that’s partially because we are on different ends of a number of personality spectra.

I loved Steve Taylor’s songs from the very first.  Here, finally, was a man who wrote edgy, provocative, insightful lyrics with a Bible-informed worldview – something I had long thought an oxymoron.  He’s the one who put the difficulty of belief into words in his song “Harder to Believe than not to.”  I still listen to his music occasionally, as I did the other week on a night drive home out of Zürich, when I was much encouraged to have someone ask me “Are you a principled man” instead of singing of Jesus the Friendly Monarch while I drove along one of the more dubious streets of the city. A long time ago, Steve Taylor wrote a song that stuck with me for quite a while:

Life’s too short for small talk
So don’t be talking trivia now
Excess baggage fills this plane
There’s more than we should ever allow

There’s engines stalling and good men falling
But I ain’t crawling away

I just wanna know
Am I pulling people closer?
I just wanna be pulling them to you
I just wanna stay angry at the evil
I just wanna be hungry for the true

Folks play follow the leader
But who’s the leader gonna obey?
Will his head get big when the toes get tapping?
I just wanna know are they catching what I say?

I’m a little too young to introspect
And I surely haven’t paid all my dues
But there’s bear traps lying in those woods
Most of them already been used

I just wanna know
Am I pulling people closer?
I just wanna be pulling them to you
I just wanna stay angry at the evil
I just wanna be hungry for the true

Search me, Father, and know my heart
Try me and know my mind
And if there be any wicked way in me
Pull me to the rock that is higher than I

I just wanna know
Am I pulling people closer?
I just wanna be pulling them to you
I just wanna stay angry at the evil
I just wanna be hungry for the true

(Lyrics from Sock Heaven, where you can also find some comments on the song.)

The line that stuck with me most was the aphorism in the first line.  Short, crisp, and right up the alley of this teen that preferred heading to the family car with a book instead of chewing the fat at after-church coffee time.  Small talk was for the birds.  Real Men got to the point, spoke trenchant, concise, necessary truth and insight.

Looking back I see that I only got it half right in several ways (which I suppose exponentially diminishes how right I got it).  For one, I might have skipped the small talk, but I also skipped the soul-baring heart-to-heart that was this mainstay of Christian lore but never part of my life.  Not talking at all is not a useful substitute for small talk.  For another, skipping the small talk and going straight to the marrow isn’t for everyone either.

I think my first conscious hint of that came a while back, when someone I’d met for the first time at a church I was visiting went from introductions straight to asking me what God was doing in my life.  I later realized that I didn’t want to answer that question, that I felt violated by it, but I lacked the presence of mind to stop and realize that.  Instead, I groped for an answer.  It’s not a question I often hear, and perhaps that and my lack of awareness of what God is in fact doing daily in my life was part of why I had a hard time saying anything vaguely coherent.

I could turn it the other way and say that asking a Christian what God is doing in his life is like asking a fish what water is doing in his life.  It takes a very alert and aware person to understand what sustains him how.  However, that’s dodging what I do think can be a legitimate question.

I say can be because not just anyone can get away with asking it.  What God is doing in my life – once I get around to grasping what it is – is likely to be very personal, due to his nature as a personal God.  He may be showing me something through failure at work, or through a hard time in marriage, or through the temptations I battle or give in to, and none of the above is something I’d share with someone who just happens to have attended the same church service I did.  I don’t think there’s a single person with whom I’d share all of the above – either because it’s not appropriate to share (for instance, some temptations I find wise to keep from Janet) or because I do not trust a person in that area.  (Guys, be honest here: how many of you would even admit failure at work to yourself?)

It takes trust to be vulnerable, trust that the other person will have my best interests in mind and be gentle with my soft spots.  That means I back off at the first whiff of a judgmental attitude or fixed expectations that won’t allow for my path with God and God’s way of working in me to be unique.  That whiff tells me that the surgeon won’t be gentle, and won’t read my medical history or check first if I have pre-existing conditions or am taking Aspirin.

And trust is what, in my opinion, ties back in to small talk.  Small talk is what builds a net of common understanding that allows me to know the other person means well, because he has so far.  Small talk, in my understanding, is the anesthesia of trust that allows the scalpel of truth to perform surgery without the patient writhing to break free and making a deadly mess of it all.

Of course, too much anesthesia kills the patient, too.  Small talk alone kills the soul, or, again in Steve Taylor’s words, “Surface skimmers choke on scum.”  I am glad there are people like Jon who see that keenly.  We need perceptive diagnosticians.

But along with that, most of us also desperately need skilful anesthesists.  Once a patient has emerged from surgery lacerated, bleeding, and in screaming pain, he will never again consent to an operation.  For instance, how would you react if someone forced an epidural on you because he was the self-appointed (or perhaps state-appointed) expert?  That should make us ask: How much damage have we inflicted because we diagnosed and operated on a patient without his consent and he couldn’t take it without the anesthetic?

So, at long last, I’m allowing myself to talk about college basketball, beauty pageants, Mac versus PC, and yes, the weather.

Just as long as that never becomes all I talk about.

You’ve read about how writing a good title for your post drives traffic, makes your blog post magnetic.  Here are three reasons not to write hypnotic titles.

1. The sure-fire titles have no character. 
Yes, good copy sells, but good copy gets copied and becomes trite and meaningless.  A flashy title can also obscure the contents of a post and make it more difficult to find.  If some day I want to find my poem “Spring Song,” what are the chances I’ll remember the title of the post containing it?  Therefore: write descriptive titles instead.

2. The sure-fire titles make you sound like a tout. 
And sounding like a tout is pretty much the definition of sucking like a flowbie, unless of course you are an unapologetic, shameless tout.  I suppose that does bring home the bacon and with the relative anonymity of the internet doesn’t embarrass your wife too much, but nevertheless, only write template titles if you have something you desperately want to sell.

3. The sure-fire titles make you sound like a sycophant.
True, I’m writing for you, and I try to make my post speak to you.  And true, my title is part of how my post speaks to you.  But at least half of why you read my posts is because I’m me, and not a spineless sycophant who tries to please everyone with his blog titles.  And that brings me back to reason #1: Write titles with character.

Thank you for reading this far, and I intend to stay away from template titles for the next few months.  It’ll be interesting to see if they do anything to my traffic, though.

One of the vestiges of my year at Virginia Tech is my membership in the Phi Kappa Phi honor society.  The society puts out a quarterly magazine that has recently always contained a poetry page and a poetry contest for the next issue.  I have decided to commit to participating, if only to force myself to write one poem per quarter.

One condition for eligibility is that the poem submitted be unpublished.  The Spring issue of the Phi Kappa Phi Forum is out, and provides the proof that my submission didn’t win.  The upside of that is that I get to publish the poem here, where I think it gets read by more people I care about than in the Forum.  Here’s the poem:

Spring Song

A silent world in frigid night
In rigid mortal torpor lies,
Awaiting beams of liquid light
To wash the dust from off her eyes.

My ear to the ground I can barely make out
The crocus and daffodil straining to shout.

The dawn restores the world to sight
And calls the morning chorus rise
To sing its fervor to the skies.

My ear to the ground I can just hear the feet
On creaky old stairs and on cracked bathroom tiles,
A pitter and patter that pools in the street
With bread-baking smells and cologne fruity-sweet.
I find, in the faces of people I meet,
The spring in the daylight means spring in their smiles.

The cold retreats,
Streams gush, ice cracks;
Green defeats
Browns and blacks.

My ear to the round of the swelling of life
I feel my joy grow with each kick in my wife:
I join with the daffodils, crocuses, birds,
And sing to new life a new song without words.

My guess from the comments in the Forum is that my poem was too one-sidedly upbeat to make it “very good.”  I can understand that from a technical perspective a duality and tension adds to the poem, and that bringing the duality out can put both aspects in stronger relief.  It also shows that the poet has thought about a topic and explores its depth.  That said, some things just are better pure and unadulterated – think maple syrup – and joy is one of those.  I’m quite happy with my poem, its metric interplay, and especially with its date.  I wrote it October 21st, 2009, just five days before I saw my first little pink plus.

So every time I don’t win, you’ll get another post here, and perhaps another stab at writing a sure-fire cheesy headline which is guaranteed to drive massive traffic to my blog.  If you want to help me win (or not win, depending), send me your thoughts on “Scare Tactics,” the topic for the Fall issue (I just submitted my poem for the Summer issue on “Recovery” on Saturday, so your help there is too late).

Oh, and note how I used the birds/words couplet here that I just made fun of (of which I just made fun?) in my last throwaway poem, Make It Rhyme.

Good enough is better than perfect.  After a few years of incubating the idea and a few weeks working on the designs I’m declaring the Bakamono shop opened.  Wearing a T-Shirt that proclaims you a fool has never been as easy, or as stylish.  Of course, you could also buy one as a present for anyone you don’t agree with but can’t tell that to outright.  Recommended recipients include politicians, warlords, Darwin Award winners, members of the Nobel Peace Prize Committee, your favorite infidels – the list goes on and on.

Here’s one of the designs:

There was a man, a wizened man,
Who lived as only poets can
Within a beat-up camper van.
And in that van he ran a school,
Presenting as a precious jewel
The poet’s magic golden rule:
“Make it rhyme, every time! every time!”
So all his students rhymed their words
And struggled with their birds and turds.
(And time sublime, and love above,
And worlds unfurled for you, my girl.)
But he said “Rhyme it till it hurts!”
For he was a poet
And he know it, he know it.

Every now and then, I have to have the opportunity to preach at Basel Christian Fellowship.  This Sunday, my topic was the importance of being reminded – if you have twenty-six minutes to spare, you can download the sermon from the BCF sermon page.  One of my points was that we have the entire world at our disposal to use as a set of reminders throughout our day.

How fitting that the same day I would read Luci Shaw‘s poem “Slide Photography: Climbing the Mount of Olives” from her collection “Polishing the Petoskey Stone” (see her poetry page for the book).  It makes the same point better and with greater beauty.  I’ll quote it here and hope she doesn’t mind the free publicity:

Slide Photography: Climbing the Mount of Olives

A grey wall fills the lens — old limestone
crowned with a branching weed
that blocks the sun (miraculous
that an herb so small can stop
the sun).
Hugging the barrier, close
as a disciple, the steep path
creeps up from Gethsemane. The click
and the click of the defining shutter
frames rectangles from which all sounds
will die, carried away
by air and time. Like the words
on this page, slides are silent.
It is the remembering mind that hears the
Arab children’s cries, crowds ancient alleys
with movement and the pungent smell
of sesame oil, calls back a vacant lot
rank with poppies as red as
spilled blood.
So how may we,
his distant pilgrims, know him real (whose
Garden presence still guards the gnarled,
secret olives)? Faith listens for his story
in the everyday neigh of a donkey,
an explosive obscenity, the threat of
armed soldiers, sweat on any dark skin,
the clink of coins, thorns pricking, metal
clanging on metal, a cloth tearing.

Thanks, Mom and Dad, for the book.

Ours.  Already very cooperative and photogenic.  Obviously, it picked our best genes.

February 14th I visited the muba because of the special science show called tunBasel where the Swiss Nanoscience Institute was showing our Nanosurf STM to interested youth.  (Now, they still have an older version and I think they should upgrade, but that’s another story for another day.)  There was a concurrent bicycle fair called the twoo which I was able to visit with the same pass, so I did and ended up trying out the Streetstrider.  It’s an interesting experience – imagine a wobbly elliptical machine that zips around at high speeds – and I don’t think I fully got the hang of it, but if they have a bike fair near you I’d recommend trying the Streetstrider.  It’s fun and quite a workout, but I doubt it’ll really take off here: the things a tad too wide to be practical, it’s hard to push, and I’d hate to be stuck in tram tracks with that thing, though I suppose if I was at least I wouldn’t fall.