tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27914087434098372212024-03-18T21:27:08.375-07:00The Rainmaker Confessions"If there were reason for these miseries, then into limits could I bind my woes."Elder Roxashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16923524321844669169noreply@blogger.comBlogger87125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2791408743409837221.post-32952043870906295152012-12-17T18:58:00.002-08:002012-12-24T01:00:43.727-08:00Five YearsAnd so it ends like it began...?<br />
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Five years, and the story comes to its close. A new chapter opens and creates futures just as difficult for me to recognize as the past. The blue and yellow has transformed into the red and black.<br />
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Five years...that's all we've got...<br />
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As surely as I felt it, that night staring at the sky while standing at a bus stop, something had started and, because it had a beginning, it would someday have an end. It would take time to get there, and in the process I would develop new lives to lead into this open world I had now exposed myself to. Five years ago, I didn't know how things would end...only that sometime during the winter of 2012, things would.<br />
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<img height="473" src="http://www.moseisleycinema.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fountain-tree.jpg" width="640" /><br />
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In 2007, I believed myself better able to understand the aftermath of that summer's intensity of meaning. Really, things had just begun. A contemplation of death, a distance between me and the one I loved most, and the belief I could trick myself into hope.<br />
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In the passing years, death has become much, much more than it was when I stood on the bridge that morning, staring at the water, looking for my fate, wondering if dying would be quick or slow after I jumped. That morning, I thought I could cheat death by believing someone out there was waiting for me. I had no ability to understand how death would make eternal the distance between me and him...he who I loved more than anyone, even myself. I was incapable of realizing my beliefs stood on precious little ground whether I wanted to trick myself or not.<br />
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And now, five years later, I am not sure what I can hope for anymore. The best friend I ever had is in cold ground, his name in ugly letters on stone. I found love, then lost it, then found it again...and denied it. All the fantasies I tried to carry past their point of relevance have finalized into obscure, ambiguous imagery. The ultimate reconciliation of God has been exposed as the ultimate beautiful lie I had avoided. I feel more alone---and cheated---than I'd ever have known I could feel.<br />
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<i>"...And all the nobody people, and all the somebody people ---</i><br />
<i>I never thought I'd need so many people."</i><br />
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I gave names to the seasons.<br />
<i><br /></i><b><span style="color: #6fa8dc;">COTTONFIRE</span><span style="color: #3d85c6;"> </span></b>- The summer of 2007, overture to what's coming...The blinding dawn of a new world which yet remains black and dark. Battle of heroes...Imaginary worlds to sustain me while I become disenchanted by everything around me, setting itself aflame. The ending to the most important friendship of my life.<br />
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<b><span style="color: #ffd966;">Across The Universe</span></b> - From autumn of 2007 until the winter of 2008. Escape from the house I grew up in, at last. The last thread snaps, the one between me and the church that was mine...and the people. I can't see you anymore, he said. Forced shadows. A girl. I'm done with being confused. The choice, then the boy. Did I know from the start? An incredible summer, my first kiss---then, the fiercest pain I've ever felt. "It's called heartbreak," he says, his telephone voice without emotion. And I'm alone again.<br />
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<span style="color: #6fa8dc;"><b>P O L A R I S</b> </span>- Two years, perhaps where a church mission might have been. From 2009 to 2010, the kind of friend I always felt like being, the tables reverse when my first best friend in years suddenly falls in love with me, then hides it to save our friendship...which ends anyway in catastrophe. But these are the circus years. God is dead. That one perfect boy scorns me, I don't whether to smash or fuck his pretty boy face. Then, London, where Satan stops at Bethnal Green. I feel connected, like I might never be alone again. Images recur of other places, places with knights and angels, and the end of the world. And a falling boy. I can never tell if it is me or someone else.<br />
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<b><span style="color: #ffd966;"> white noise.</span></b> - 2011, abismo bendito. Signals in crosshairs, deafening static the only sound that gives me any meaning anymore. Is there a name for this? Can this be named? Rumored abyss...but it is also the 'one year later' story, a hole through time. I make the terrible, terrible choice to abandon the man who loves me. I feel like I can hear everything all at once. Madness. Stateless. All reality constantly threatens to snap apart. <b><i>I</i></b> have snapped apart. Fragmented, trying to feel more whole when nothing feels broken, either. But there is a girl who lets me get as close to her as she dares to be close to me. We only trust each other during our final fantasies with the circus, and that lost boy, before we all try to grow up. A November morning communion. Then: betrayal, and the beginning of a curse. The last of twilight, and now a shadow falls.<br />
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Now, 2012. It's one cold, winter day. But to see him again for the first time in nearly five years gives me a strange sensation in an older part of my heart...it's a warm, good feeling. But how could I know it would be the last. There are last rites in bat country. Dark side...evil seems to win, every friendship goes fragile, then breaks. War of the worlds. I play with oblivion. Then...he falls. There is no immaculate collapse - just brutality and violence. The tragedy is so perfect, I don't know how I didn't see it coming - it was all there from the overture. But I didn't see it. Fear and regret, my constant companions now that the Black Parade is dead. Nightfall is clearing to reveal a blood red wasteland. I have lost almost everything, and I have almost nothing left to give. And it's over, all over.<br />
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But now bells begin to sound.Elder Roxashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16923524321844669169noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2791408743409837221.post-69913660092087718162012-08-05T00:15:00.000-07:002012-08-05T00:30:07.652-07:00Farewell, Elder Roxas<span style="background-color: black; color: white; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; white-space: pre-wrap;"><i>For nearly five years, I've been a member of an online community of Mormons who deal with same gender attractions. For the most part, this group consists of men (and some women) in their later years. Since I joined, and even before, there have not been many who are younger than twenty-five.</i></span><br />
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<span style="color: white; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; white-space: pre-wrap;"><i style="background-color: black;">As I've grown increasingly antagonistic towards the LDS church, its history, its policies, and its leadership, I've been the source of a few spats in this community. </i></span><br />
<span style="color: white; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; white-space: pre-wrap;"><i style="background-color: black;"><br /></i></span><br />
<i><span style="background-color: black; color: white; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">Two weeks ago, one young man named Paul (who had not posted in the three years he was a member) posted something brave, about reconciling his spiritual life with his choice to have homosexual relationships. Although he wrote he felt strong in his Mormonism, his strongest point was to reveal the community's guilt and shame as needless symptoms of demonizing our sexuality and our body, and he encouraged the group in general to overcome its habits. </span><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">The group collectively discredited and mocked him. For me, along with several other things this summer, this was the last straw. </span></span></i><br />
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<span style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><i><span style="background-color: black; color: white; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">What follows is my 'letter of resignation' from the group.</span></i></span><br />
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: black; color: white; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></b><br />
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: black; color: white; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This will come as a relief to a number of people who are members of [this group].</span><br /><span style="font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Although this is not the first time I say goodbye, it will be the last. </span><br /><span style="font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Some weeks ago, I woke up to something disturbing. </span><br /><span style="font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">My mother was standing in my kitchen. My roommate made odd faces about her. I rubbed away the sleep in my eyes. She was impatient to get me out of my apartment to tell me something. </span><br /><span style="font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Stubbornly, as I walked through the door, I thought, “This had better be quick, mother. Last night, my best friend left me a message...maybe we’ve finally started speaking again since he came back from his mission six months ago. And, the first thing I want to do today is call him back.”</span><br /><span style="font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">My mother was very bothered. More than usual. I’d thought this had something to do with my eviction notice, which had been sitting on the kitchen table.</span><br /><span style="font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">My mother cleared her throat, and told me last night my best friend had been in an accident up the canyon. I stared. “He’s dead, honey,” she said at last. </span><br /><span style="font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It was all over the news. Reporters had stolen his picture from his facebook. The earliest reports had hit the airwaves before the sheriff had even notified his next of kin. </span><br /><span style="font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">He was with a girl, exploring an old spillway pipe, built during a mudslide in 1983 which is still on record as the most catastrophic (and the most expensive) mudslide disaster in the history of this country. The pipe is only gated on one side -- the other drops off on the other side of the mountain as a rocky cliff, where one can still see the trauma from the old mudslide. The years self-destruct in the dirt; 1920s rooftops poke out of the grass, a 1950s truck is embedded into a river bank. Surrounding the area are shot up TVs and metal sheets, nearby is the shooting range for the county sheriffs. It cannot be properly called a ghost town, yet it is uniquely desolate. </span><br /><span style="font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">My friend had never been to this place before. But the girl had, and my friend was trained like every other young Mormon male to only desire an early marriage. This, evidently, is “one of those places” local teenagers and BYU zoobies go, thinking they are being dangerous, young, wild, and free. I will never forget there was no moon that night. So it was dark. No one’s sure what happened. He heard a noise, and whether he lost his balance or slipped, he fell off the cliff: headfirst, down nearly eighty feet. </span><br /><span style="font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Although he came to several times in the helicopter on the way to the hospital, it was, as the sheriff told me, obvious he would not survive. He was more or less given up for dead. But he was dead to me long before that night.</span><br /><span style="font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This boy was my best friend because he was the truest friend I’d ever had to help me deal with my same gender attractions. He took it more seriously than my bishop, my father, or my few other friends who knew about my struggles. He was passionate about me. He knew I could be happy, that I could eventually fall in love -- with a girl. His spiritual strength was unmatched...I’ve never met a single Mormon with a stronger heart than his. </span><br /><span style="font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">He was years younger than me, a Californian and new in my neighborhood, and while it took a few years for him to get along with anyone else his age in the ward, he and I were best friends immediately. But, it wasn’t long before we began to fight. He was frustrated I wasn’t trying hard enough, and I was just frustrated with myself. </span><br /><span style="font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The moment came, about five years ago, when I realized my friend would get everything I would never have. A mission calling, a temple marriage, beautiful children...all this would be his, because of his faithfulness. I wouldn’t ever have those things. I wanted him to be happy, even though I would never have those things. Because I loved him so much. </span><br /><span style="font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Eventually we were forced to put distance between us. His parents forbade him from associating with me because I was 19 and not on a mission. </span><br /><span style="font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Five years did a lot to me. I was abandoned by church leaders and ward members. Certain past members of [this group] were harsh with my weakening faith. And when I prayed, the heavens were silent. I was afraid of living and dying alone. So, I started my first romantic relationship -- with a guy, from a nearby town. It lasted a summer before ending in a terrible heartbreak, and a lot of things about my world began to change. I stopped going to church. I began to study other religions. <b style="font-size: medium; font-weight: normal; white-space: normal;"><span style="font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I played with tarot cards and ouija boards and studied atheism.</span></b> I experimented with drinking, drugs, sex, and rock music. I hung out with Communists, philosophers, Buddhists, journalists, the clinically insane, and city punks living in poverty. I met the devil in London. I got lost in the desert and nearly froze to death. I made and lost several friends. I met another guy...and fell in love for the first time with someone I wanted to spend the rest of my life with...but from doubts and fears I rejected him -- to my everlasting regret. And all the while my "best friend" was on the other side of town, preparing for his mission call.</span><br /><span style="font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This summer was a most unprecedented time, because I have never known such difficult times. An unfair dispute with my landlord threatened me with another season of homelessness. New government regulation of education has taken away my financial aid, and now two semesters away from finishing my degree, I have no choice but to abandon everything -- which, in turn, forced me to quit my job (because I was working for the school). I’ve watched all my friends turn on one another in betrayal and distrust. Others have broken relationships or defeated dreams. Recent events throughout the world have slowly broken my faith in humanity -- now that my faith in God is all but gone. </span><br /><span style="font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">College dropout. Homeless. Nearly starving (I spent a week or two eating out of a peanut butter jar). I'd never felt more lost, when my mother showed up in my kitchen that fateful morning. </span></span></b><br />
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: black; color: white; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></b><br />
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: black; color: white; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I’ve never known if my friend would accept me as I am now, with all my mistakes. And now, I’ll never know. This is the first time someone close to me has died. He died young, and he died violently, and only out of respect for the God he believed in do I not curse the heavens why on earth did it have to be him, why did it have to be now. This is not more than I can stand, but it is enough. It is all, all I can stand. And I am truly lost. </span><br /><span style="font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The distance of five years, death has made eternal. I cared about him more than I’ve ever cared about anyone...including my family, including myself. I’d have given my life up for him, and still would. Christ suggested this is perhaps the greatest love we can have. I am lucky to have found that love, and I am either blessed or cursed that love is not for a woman. I have all but given myself to the road to perdition. He could have had everything. I don’t know why God has spared me but taken him, whom I loved so. Now, he is dead. His broken body lies in an overcrowded cemetery. And I? I cannot put my love anywhere. There was so much of it, and that love is now as alone as me. And I have never felt so alone in my life.</span><br /><span style="font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I have never told members [here] to stop believing in the gospel. I have never encouraged others to leave the church. I have never encouraged others to break the law of chastity. I have never said a word of denial against God, Christ, Joseph Smith, the Book of Mormon, or the faith of the men and women on this list.</span><br /><span style="font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">All I ever wanted others to know is the fulness of joy that comes from a truly intimate relationship with someone of the same gender -- like the one I had with my best friend. </span><br /><span style="font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">But I cannot continue to be part of a community that continually treats me as if I am an enemy. If my spiritual beliefs and respectful solidarity is not enough -- if committed activity and strict adherence to authority and policy is what’s required -- then I truly have no place among the Mormons anymore.</span><br /><span style="font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Paul was not hated because he suggested it is not a sin in God’s eyes to kiss another man. Paul was hated because he was the first in years, six or seven at least, to suggest this community comes together over SGA because we all come together over our immense guilt, shame, and fear about SGA. We even give it an acronym, like it’s a disease. We talk about our so-called addictions to masturbation and pornography, counting the periods of abstinence as “victories.” We talk about what we’ve overcome, what temptations we’ve beaten. We focus on what causes us guilt, what makes us ashamed to even pray at night -- the sexual desires we repress, the erotic impulses we feel nearly consumed by, and we talk of these things as we talk of The Enemy. And yet, when one among us who barely (or, in Paul’s case, never) speaks up -- in expression of discovered happiness and spiritual peace in what he has found between him and his Heavenly Father, he is called false, implicated in some abstract corruption, denounced as an enticer to evil, and criticized as a rationalizer of sin. </span><br /><span style="font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">All I wanted was to share what I’ve learned with others...that I’ve learned, love is all we have in this life. That’s why Christ thought it was so important. Love can cross any limit, any distance. Love is all we have, no matter who we find it with. No matter the distance, I will always feel connected to my friend, a love beyond limits for that headstrong boy from California. I trusted him, felt safe in his home, in his room, in his arms. I loved the sound of his laughter, his dark eyes, his smile. His faith was nothing short of inspiring, and it matters not his faith was in Mormonism: he loved me, and told me so. I never told him I loved him back. I had friends like him who gave me everything, loved me so much...I had lovers who loved me so much more. I couldn’t trust any of them, or feel safe around them, because I’ve lost my faith in myself, my faith in my ability to connect with other men. </span><br /><span style="font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Now, I go in search of that faith. And God and Mormons, it seems, I must put behind me.</span></span></b><br />
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<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: black; color: white; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Most of my old emails between me and my friend are on this account. And I'm about to delete it. It seems there is no longer any use for it.<br />
</span><span style="font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So, goodbye.</span><span class="HOEnZb"><br /></span></span></b></div>
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<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: black; color: white; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">-- Elder Roxas</span></b></div>Elder Roxashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16923524321844669169noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2791408743409837221.post-35638757882623837782012-07-27T00:14:00.000-07:002012-12-24T01:01:16.485-08:00Racist?<i>From a recent online discussion, where an old best friend posted a picture of Morgan Freeman informing his interviewer that the way to solve problems of racism is, "Stop talking about it." After an involving argument with his cousin, the conversation was nearly put to rest when his cousin suggested I get over my harsh, racist experiences because everyone experiences inadequacy over skin color, including white people. (And she has a number of non-white friends, she says, so she also doesn't feel she is a racist person.) I got angry, and what follows is my angry reply. I post it here because, frankly, I'm sick of having to repeat myself whenever I hear this. So now it's here.</i><br />
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Perhaps you, as a white person, feel you've felt inadequacy over skin color. To be honest, I have no idea how it would be similar to mine, or my family's, or anyone else I know who isn't white -- and it is, at the least, arrogant of you to presume it's similar.<br />
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I've been kept from hanging out with neighborhood kids, held up in a Harmon's on false theft accusations when I was nine, prevented from dating a <u>ton</u> of white people (who specifically told me it's because I'm not white), limited in my academic field, certain kinds of marginalization and stereotyping in my middle/high school years and at church, called racial slurs and spat at, kept ignorant of my cultural history -- and in my darkest moments, each time those things happened a part of me desired to have white skin.<br />
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Have you ever been rejected by a lover because of your skin color? Has your heritage ever been completely obscured by the celebrations of another race? Have you ever had someone call you a dirty name, then spit at your feet, and tell you it's because of your skin color? Has a professor ever told you to specialize in studying the history of your skin color because everyone else in the department gets to study anything else? Have you ever spent lonely days or lonely nights staring at your skin, and wishing there was just a little bit more white, and not darkness? I'm talking about a very profound sense of alienation, social marginalization, and self-loathing. And every non-white friend I have knows what all of this is like. And you're telling me you've "in your own way" felt this desire, this wishing, and the endless guilt that follows? NO. You have not.<br />
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It is a slap in my face to say "...oh yes, us 'whites' feel it too." No alienation or inadequacy you think you've felt over having white skin could possibly compare or relate to the alienation and inadequacy over *not* having white skin in me, or my African American girl friend, or my Mexican/Chilean American girl friend, or my guy friends from Pakistan and Afghanistan, or my co-worker from the Dominican Republic, or...A white person trying to argue that everyone feels the hatred and inadequacy of racism is mocking, and it's offensive. I'm sure you didn't intend to be offensive -- but that's very offensive. And it is precisely the ignorance in that attitude I'm identifying as racist.<br />
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Of course "hatred and intolerance of another race extends past 'whites.'" But you have entirely missed my point if you think that's it, and we should all just move on. Racism is not a universal behavior, like there is no banality of evil; the song from 'South Park' about how "everybody's a little bit racist" is a bunch of hogwash that only perpetuates the same broken ideology contemporary racism embraces.<br />
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For racism to continue, in fact, it needs white people to publicly say things like, "I've dealt with racism even as a white person; we all have to deal with racism, so let's all be equal." Racism doesn't work like that, and every day it's more and more unfortunate less and less people with white skin fail to understand this.<br />
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I'm not the only one to deal with this issue, but until everyone (especially white people) realizes that I and others like me shouldn't have to be the only ones who think critically and authentically about racism, then it will always be a problem for<i> you</i> and me and everyone else. And the kind of thinking you've demonstrated is proof no matter how informed you believe you are about racism, and no matter how many friends you have of diverse ethnicities, you still don't get it.Elder Roxashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16923524321844669169noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2791408743409837221.post-57411271471387235412012-07-07T23:58:00.000-07:002012-08-05T00:16:38.739-07:00A Better Devil<i><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">From a recent correspondence with my cousin, over recent LDS church actions in Provo.</span></i><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Hey, my young cousin. I think much has already been said for you to think about. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Let me answer some of your questions directly -- beginning with your question about why I am playing devil's advocate, when the devil is (as you put it) "inherently evil" and, therefore, what makes me better than those leading the church whom I accuse of evil. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"> A lot of Mormons I know often indulge in an image of apparent self-victimhood, and I think it's pathetic. If members were actually challenged with legitimate criticisms, frank evaluations, and provocative questions, perhaps the church might have more to offer the world. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">As it is, members often dismiss agression as if it is only agression -- and not the obvious symptom of an organization and culture deeply threatened by the maladjusted, anywhere it's found, and so by nature of its very structure creates its own fundamental discontent and opposition. The primitive Christianity, the social/cultural naivete, and the willful psychological ignorance of most Mormons in this state have led me to believe the church, despite rapid global expansion, doesn't deserve to survive another century the way it is now.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I openly accost the church precisely because there are those who, like you, like the church (and with good intentions) but choose to not distinguish its abusive management and corporate organization from the radical potential of its own spirituality, philosophy, and history (since acknowledging complexities might betray or undermine the nature of good intentions) -- thus, my opinions are not something they care to hear. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I am not playing devil's advocate. The devil, throughout Western religions and the arts (literature, music, even comic books, etc.), is a character heavily invested in certain traditions, archetypes, history, and meaning. Mormonism, however, has an entirely unsophisticated understanding of Satan by comparison. He's simply a bogeyman, and a scapegoat, and it seems his only real use is to be feared as "inherently evil," the real source behind every human failing, weakness, or temptation. In the view of any mainstream Christian, that's weak at best. No other Mormon I've known besides myself is at all suspicious of how often we tend to blame something on Satan. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"> The devil is the ultimate con man, the trickiest of them all, as well as a rebel forces leader. He's considered a freak, a monster, and the first outcast in the world. Why else, upon his birth in the novel, does Frankenstein's monster love Milton's Lucifer? There is an instant understanding from the monster, who is himself unnamed.
</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">To me, the devil is less a god of evil and more a variation on the trickster figure, because there is both light and dark in him. Satan is a fallen angel with a bone to pick, but the devil is someone who challenges everything you think is true and forces you to grow stronger by taking up those challenges. That's why, to me, the last truly great devil Mormons had was Joseph Smith himself. He's not someone you want to completely trust, but it's not that he's simply to be feared, either. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"> No matter how many times the LDS church leadership does something incredibly stupid, like this new MTC building, I keep waiting for them to do something that will make me lose my mind at last and become a big problem for them; Mormons will rue the day I finally break, so it's probably a good thing I've been such a [slightly] polite pushover this long when they've spent this long pushing almost all of my buttons. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Simply put: the Mormons need a better devil than the one they claim to believe in, and I'm willing to put on those horns because that role must be played -- and, if I do say so, I qualify pretty well for the job. I don't intend to play the devil's advocate. Not at all. I intend to play devil, himself. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Your next question makes sense, cousin -- asking if I'm any better? Well, I'm not in this game to compete against other moral positions. I leave that to any self-proclaimed heroes, martyrs, or fools. If you've come this far, but you have not taken on the ambiguities and complexities of something or someone you love, you will only have a narrow understanding of them, entirely limited to what you've invented. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"> It's difficult for anyone to hear horrible things about something or someone they love, and particularly if it's spiritual in nature. But faith without questions is dead. Simple as that. A static testimony is a bunch of white noise over a pulpit, a D.O.A. sentiment.
The early church leaders believed in the utmost rigor in one's testimony, constantly keeping it dynamically alive with persistent study, questioning, searching. Last I knew, I've read the Book of Mormon four or five more times than any of my friends who all served missions instead of me. Testimonies need to be challenged to survive (which -- it turns out -- is what a good devil is around to help accomplish, if you consider Jewish rabbinical literature, for instance.) </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Mormons cannot often take it when someone appears to be making their lives harder by criticizing the church, and there's at least one good reason why: they deserve better than the church is giving them and, knowing that, leadership has nearly the entire membership tranquilized, arresting nearly any spiritual development that doesn't happen on their terms. Last time that happened in this country, a young farmer boy from upstate New York decided to go see God about it and fight to make his faith his own -- and just look what happened to him. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Another reason: there are few to no good adversaries of Mormons. I'm looking into that. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Finally, my cousin, you asked if I have the right, in all fairness, to make people's lives harder.
As nicely as I can, you are woefully unprepared to demand what's fair. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">You have always, compared to my lot in this world, enjoyed a certain amount of privilege (and while it's not entirely your fault you're in the dark as to why, there are things you can do to educate yourself). A happy marriage, family, getting paid somewhat fairly, being a return missionary -- all of these things, this culture and society will practically hand to you. It's all yours for the asking. But because of my choices, I've been fixed like a moth on a board to my proper place as "a bad apple." Something went wrong on my way out the factory. I will never have any of the blessings you have. My chosen [homo]sexual behavoirs and chosen cultural identity as a queer faggot, as well as my mulatto ethnicity, will always marginalize me to degrees you, unfortunately, aren't immediately aware of. Some choices have even been completely taken from me. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">It may be tough to hear others hate on the only real organization and people you've ever loved but the church and its members have, throughout most of its history, continually made harder the lives of men and women like me, and most certainly in ways that make <i>totally</i> infantile any provocations Mormons feel they've "suffered" from people who oppose or criticize them. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I love women, I love the cultures of peoples who aren't white or from the U.S. I do not stop talking to someone because they have sex, do drugs, or read Marx. I don't discriminate between so-called "lifestyles" -- those are what the rich have, and I hate the rich. I love any number of things about being truly alive in this world, for as the scripture says, we are that we might have joy. And Mormonism has since its inception attacked women, non-white peoples, sexual deviants, non-nuclear families, knoweldge and wisdom, history, and any number of things that are far more profound than talking smack about a church. And one of these days, Mormons will finally lose all my good graces. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">You don't like questioning something you love, or wondering if it's a horrible thing, but I've been questioning everything about who or what I love my entire life, and it has bore a hole in me through which I will fall for forever. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I gave the church my life, and nearly completely my love, and the church has done almost nothing but make my life harder -- and it'll continue to get harder as I get older, because it will always be part of me. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I tried to make a choice to be happy and follow what's in my heart; because of that, I will be punished. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">You have the faith that what's in your heart is aligned with what God wants: turns out, God wants his kingdom fully of white/white-faced, politically conservative and heteronormative males, and I'm none of those things. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">There is no family I will live with forever. I have no glories or blessings to claim, and my inheritance is dust on a wind, compared to yours. I am an eternal orphan, just a kid from yesterday. And so are many others I know who've been in very real pain because of the LDS church. Almost everyone I love most, Mormons cast aside and marginalize. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">You ask if I have the right to make people's lives harder: we'd beg of you, what gives you the guts to even ask.</span>Elder Roxashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16923524321844669169noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2791408743409837221.post-30663509295406908662011-12-02T00:45:00.000-08:002012-12-17T19:22:16.424-08:00white noise.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Soundtrack from "2011 One Year Later." Twelve months in songs. Until I'm better able to explain just what the hell happened this time. A few of these will have to do.<br />
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This was the season of my abyss. Abismo bendito. Year of the white noise.<br />
<br />
1. "Nerve Jamming" by Bass Drum of Death<br />
2. "Gimme Danger" by Iggy & The Stooges<br />
3. "Derezzed [Remix]" by Daft Punk, as performed by The Glitch Mob<br />
4. "Desarraigo" by Omar Rodriguez-Lopez, featuring Ximena Sarinana<br />
5. "Lamha" by Bilal Khan<br />
6. "Kings of the Wild Frontier" by Adam & The Ants<br />
7. "It's A New Day" by James Brown<br />
8. "En El Rio" by Vetusta Morla<br />
9. "Pa Pa Power" by Dead Man's Bones<br />
10. "Evil" by Grinderman<br />
11. "Lotus Flower" by Radiohead<br />
12. "Race Mixing" by Teenage Jesus & The Jerks<br />
13. "Run The World (Girls)" by Beyonce<br />
14. "Me Van A Matar" by Julieta Venegas<br />
15. "Lost Highway" by Hank Williams<br />
16. "Encantamieno Inutil" by Cafe Tacvba<br />
17. "Not About Love" by Fiona Apple<br />
18. "The Sniper At The Gates of Dawn" by The Black Angels<br />
19. "Orange Claw Hammer [Live]" by Captain Beefheart and Frank Zappa<br />
20. "When Your Wishes Come True" by Utada Hikaru<br />
21. "The Immediate Stages of The Erotic" by Mars<br />
22. "Lucha de gigantes" by Love of Lesbian, featuring Zahara<br />
23. "Let Me Go" by 3 Doors Down<br />
24. "Be Here Now [Live At The BBC]" by Ray LaMontagne<br />
25. "The Kids From Yesterday" by My Chemical Romance<br />
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<br />Elder Roxashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16923524321844669169noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2791408743409837221.post-33808870466058160502011-01-08T01:00:00.000-08:002012-08-05T01:00:33.320-07:00Echo<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Overture to the noise. Receive and transmit.Elder Roxashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16923524321844669169noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2791408743409837221.post-27773257945344954882010-12-30T05:05:00.001-08:002011-04-07T00:54:29.182-07:002010: Year That God Was Dead<span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-style: italic;">There's a.<br /></span></span></span></span></span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-style: italic;">There's a. There's a.</span></span></span></span></span><br /><br />All children grow up...except one.<div><br />"Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce." So said Marx in 1852.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic; color: rgb(204, 255, 255);">"At 12:01 AM, exactly one year ago, I remember I was standing on the edge of Arthur's Court - the neighborhood I grew up in. All the three story houses glowed with Christmas lights brightening up their grand backyards and driveways to accommodate boats and suburbans..."</span><br /><br />In the very last moments of December 2008, I stood at the edge of my neighborhood facing a vastness more alien and assuming than I'd ever known, sensing somehow I'd later wish it was a year I could have skipped. Here, in the last moments of 2010, I indeed find myself wondering, but more about 2010.<br /><br />And yet, both because of my choices and because of things outside my ability to choose, 2009 and 2010 will go down as an interwoven single thread of two strands, as if they are together one year. One terrifying, exciting, incredibly wasted year.<br /><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-style: italic;"><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-style: italic;">There's a. </span></span></span></span></span><br /><br />Well, maybe not a completely wasted year. In the spring of 2008, I saw the ocean for the first time, the Atlantic Ocean. It was like an encounter with a god, or a black hole, or some cosmically and epically unknowable <span style="font-style: italic;">thing</span>, and in May 2010 I flew over it to England. I learned a lot about myself while I lived in London for six weeks I never could have learned otherwise, and yet I'd never have pictured myself really traveling to and all over England...<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic; color: rgb(204, 255, 255);">"Small wonder that when a gay guy comes along weeks later claiming to have visions and revelations from God about my life, I don't believe him."</span><br /><br />Oh. Wait. Because last year, I met somebody who did see me traveling to and all over England. And I didn't really take him seriously because that was prefaced with the phrase, "God revealed you to me..." I do have to wonder if I might have taken that young, black, and respectful guy more seriously if it was with a crystal ball. Or maybe the <span style="font-style: italic;">I Ching</span>. Or...oh, fuck, what's the difference, right?<br /><br />Because it's December (and, in the story of my life, it's apparently one of "those" Decembers), and it's the last moments of 2010, and spiritually, emotionally, mentally, and physically, I couldn't be farther away from where I was in the last moments of 2009. Which is to say: I feel I'm almost exactly where I was just as 2009 was moments away from beginning. Which is to say: I don't find myself necessarily wishing there was time to skip time, but that time in fact did skip, and I'm wondering where the fucking hell the past two years of my life went - other than, not to put too fine or metaphorical a point on it, straight to fucking hell.<br /><br />What does hell look like, anyway? Well, I can tell you what it feels like: there's something, like a blink. Something goes out, then it returns, but slightly different, and it's difficult to see the difference until -<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic; color: rgb(204, 255, 255);">"Even now I try to remember the last three months and everything only comes in snatches. The checks bounced, the record player skipped. There was a power outage so brief you wouldn't have noticed except for that slight delay on all the clocks around the house. Absolutely nothing happened, and everything that did happen occurred all at once.</span><span style="color: rgb(204, 255, 255);">"</span><br /><br />See, the thing is, when I start to look back, things really do start to repeat themselves. The first time it's pathetic and empty, and ultimately kinda sad, lost and nothing can be atoned for. The second time, though, it's all forced and hammy, theatrical and outrageous, and ultimately like the most banal comedy you can imagine.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic; color: rgb(204, 255, 255);">"A mysterious alien thing too tiny to see has come from nowhere, invaded my throat and wrapped my body in so much continual pain that I'm prevented from even whispering."</span><br /><br />I had such strange resolve when I found that the virus was back again, in my throat. I was weirdly resigned to enduring last year's pain again, even if it had to be for weeks again. And so the only thing that truly disturbed me was not that the sickness might have returned, but that it was over in less than a few hours of its discovery just by a slight brushing away. Like that, I was cured, it was over. That's also what happened last year...but it took much, much longer than a few hours for it to happen.<br /><span style="font-style: italic; color: rgb(204, 255, 255);"><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-style: italic;"><br /><span style="font-style: italic; color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="font-style: italic;">There's a. There's a. There's a.</span></span></span></span></span><span style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> </span><span style="font-style: italic; color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-style: italic;">There's a. There's a. There's a. </span></span></span></span></span><span style="font-style: italic; color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-style: italic;">There's a. Th -</span></span></span></span></span><br /><br />There's a kind of feedback loop, and just when you start to detect there's something wrong in the way you've been keeping time, reality quickly rearranges itself. You aren't in control. Of anything.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic; color: rgb(204, 255, 255);">"Go to hell, Everything. You have confused the mother living fuck out of me."</span><br /><br />That sounds a little like the way my little brother described <span style="font-style: italic;">Inception</span> to me a few days ago, when he was telling me it was the movie that got him to think the most this year. I've heard similar from many others, and I wish I could say <span style="font-style: italic;">Inception</span> was just as mind-challenging to me. But the funny thing is something far more pretentious challenged me more: the Joaquin Phoenix film <span style="font-style: italic;">I'm Still Here</span>. I think it's a film that will haunt me for a bit longer. Along with other films this year like it, such as <span style="font-style: italic;">Black Swan</span>, it's gotten me thinking about a lot of things I don't like thinking about.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic; color: rgb(204, 255, 255);">"I suppose things don't seem all too different since the spring. I still write out my musings in the company of strangers who drag their American Spirits and their Marlboros, bitching about professors and bosses. I still improvise fragments of a blues tune in the shower when the roommates are out. I have a Pendelton whiskey in the freezer and a gradually emptying box of Lucky Strikes on my table. I check my mailbox even when I haven't ordered any cartel from Amazon to stick my fix. I measure out my indifference with myself and my life in Facebook sessions and regular size scalding cups of sweetened Americano.</span><span style="font-style: italic; color: rgb(204, 255, 255);"> These all are symptoms of my summer waste. The buzzing, the static. I spent more time in love with all the distractions and decorations my Visa could afford my boredom.</span><span style="color: rgb(204, 255, 255);">"</span><br /><br />In the blogosphere and elsewhere, I've heard the 00s called "The Decade of Broken Dreams." I can't help but wonder if we haven't gotten over it yet. As Americans, anyway. But maybe it doesn't matter, because I obviously can't. Obama's in office, and...and what? Wasn't that election time filled with, as Zizek notes, such Kantian enthusiasm for the future? It was infectious. I think everybody had that enthusiasm, and not just for the election - for our own individual futures. A week ago, I was with a friend who made an accidental turn down an old street; apologizing, he said, "Sorry, I guess it was 2008." I replied in joking, "Well, hooray - Obama just got elected." We laughed then, but I later wondered if there's ever anyone else who sometimes catches themselves wishing it was autumn 2008, and you're counting down to November 5th. Because I do.<br /><br />Zizek certainly has much to say about that, but to me, it goes beyond just a failure of revolutionary tendencies, and I mean on a personal level. If anything, that was this year for me, and what makes films like <span style="font-style: italic;">Black Swan</span> and <span style="font-style: italic;">I'm Still Here </span>so haunting to me: I'm asking myself what happens after the party ends, after the world ends, and after God is dead. Who's excited and hopeful then? If you find there's no God, does it necessarily follow you find there's no Satan, either?<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic; color: rgb(204, 255, 255);">"I could see the beginning of things, and I could see myself in the middle of some eternally marching time machine, with a million plans and every possible kind of lie. And I saw how it could end, everything - the big capital End of everything."</span><br /><br />That's what happens - you meet the Devil. And meet him I did, in London. Trouble is, he didn't take "Leave me alone, holy fuck" when I ran into him - he followed me across that gigantic ocean. Back here to Happy Valley, Utah/America, where young people were committing suicide.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-style: italic;">There's a........</span></span></span></span></span><br /><br />Ah, right. Suicide stories. Those too. <span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="color: rgb(204, 255, 255);">"If there is a God, and He is loving - more to the point, a 'perfect' God, and His command is a 'natural' one, then how did it make any sense that a 'homosexual' even exists? I felt like an anomaly, some hiccup in the Great Eternal Plan, and marriage was a holy recreation of Beckett's frightening endgame. And it felt sickening to literally be a freak of 'nature' every minute of every day. The ultimate concern was not whether or not I could 'overcome' the attractions, but whether or not I could live happily with myself and my choice long afterwards. And, as ever in the Church, we are talking about forever here."</span><br /><br /></span>So here I am now, going on four years later. And not a lot to show for it, it seems. Kinda like I wasted years of my life away. <span style="font-style: italic;"><br /><br /></span>It's just suspicious, and not just the missing, god-shaped hole in my memories. It's the synchronicity. It makes you paranoid, uncomfortable. And it's everywhere. No pun intended - if the Devil doesn't get me first, Nothing will. Nothing maybe already did. Do I even remember anymore?<span style="font-style: italic;"> </span>Time has already broken down and in the future, be it twenty minutes from now, twenty hours, or twenty days, this entire entry has already become meaningless.<span style="font-style: italic;"><br /><br /><span style="color: rgb(204, 255, 255);">"But then something happened in the Neverland."</span><br /><br /></span>Right. There was that.<br /><br />Everywhere and nowhere. Everything at once. And then nothing. Last December. I think I like to pretend it was terribly important, and I think I do that because it's easier than learning the real lesson of What Happened, which is the question I asked just before the apocalypse hit my retinas: "What's the difference between all these stories I keep telling myself?"<span style="font-style: italic;"> </span>And now I live in a world of the aftermath. Religion doesn't prepare you for this. And neither does atheism. Medicine, science, art - nothing prepares you for what happens next.<span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-style: italic;"><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></span></span><span style="font-style: italic;"><span><span><span><span><span style="color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">There's a bridge.</span></span></span></span></span></span><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-style: italic;"><br /><br /></span></span></span></span></span>Ah...well<span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-style: italic;">. </span></span></span></span></span>That much I have figured out, I guess.<br /><br />There's a bridge. It's black, and cagey. And I'm at the end.<br /><br />That's what the future looks like. It looks like goodbye. Like a few tears, then the punchline. Maybe birth, maybe death. Like history repeats itself - first as tragedy, then as farce.<br /><br />All children, except one, grow up. "To die," he once said, "would be an awfully big adventure!" I hope so, Peter. I hope so.</div>Elder Roxashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16923524321844669169noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2791408743409837221.post-34583297430106212022010-06-05T17:21:00.000-07:002011-04-05T18:42:14.669-07:00Satan Stops At Bethan Green [England Season]<div style="background-color: transparent; "><span id="internal-source-marker_0.17114986153319478" style="background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; "><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: normal; "><i><span style="background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">"You know I've seen a lot of what the world can do</span><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">And it's breaking my heart in two..."</span></i></span></span></span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; "><span id="internal-source-marker_0.17114986153319478" style="background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: normal; "><span style="background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; "><br /></span></span></span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; "><span id="internal-source-marker_0.17114986153319478" style="background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: normal; "><span style="background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">My father takes my mother's hand. I think she's crying. We don't know it yet - and by the time my parents do, I'll have crossed the dateline and time-traveled into tomorrow - but all this rain coming down is going to become a snow storm. The airport murmurs. Say it, Cat.</span></span></span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre-wrap; "><br /></span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre-wrap; "><i><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: normal; "><span style="background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">"But if you want to leave, take good care</span><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">Hope you make a lot of nice friends out there</span><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">But just remember there's a lot of bad and beware -</span><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">Ooo, baby, baby, it’s a wild world..."</span></span></span></i></span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre-wrap; "><i><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: normal; "><span style="background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; "><br /></span></span></span></i></span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre-wrap; "><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: normal; "><span style="background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">Leave synchronicity to 4 AM car radio, right?</span></span></span></span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><i><br /></i></span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; "><span class="Apple-style-span"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.17114986153319478" style="background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">When I was a child, my mother tells me, I was a smiling, laughing child. But he is not someone I can remember. Now, my latest stories have ancient charms, and my older stories are in newer drag. And where are these families? Ah...there is so much hostility in me. And the devil needs a new name. Why not a “yes” and a remembering? Must I forget? What can I love? What will I find to love? Such questions at 30,000 feet, tracing a line to a star. </span><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: transparent;"><span style="font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; background-color: transparent; "></span></span><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">A map. The changing clocks. The concrete offering stability. The sky a window above a window, light finding such ways down, down, to the elaborate wandering here. In corners the rascal beards, reptilian noises...</span></span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-style-span"><br /></span></span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; "><b><span class="Apple-style-span" ><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: transparent; "><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; "></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap; ">MIXTAPE TRACKLIST: </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">“GLOUSTER ROAD”</span></span></b></div><div style="background-color: transparent; "><b><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: transparent;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; "></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap; "><br /></span><span class="Apple-style-span"><span style="font-size: 11pt; background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">1. <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uao73FefA4">“Devil” by Stereophonics</a></span><br /><span style="font-size: 11pt; background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">2. <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TnxB9iZ_-g">“Deadwood [Live In Belfast]” by Matthew & The Atlas</a></span><br /><span style="font-size: 11pt; background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">3. <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8m55NDHvPY">“Zero [Live On Letterman]” by Yeah Yeah Yeahs</a></span><br /><span style="font-size: 11pt; background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">4. <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJzCYSdrHMI">“There’s No Other Way” by Blur</a></span><br /><span style="font-size: 11pt; background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">5. <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65N_1eSkKWg">“London, London” by Cibelle feat. Devendra Banhart</a></span><br /><span style="font-size: 11pt; background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">6. <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mahLKy6M3NI">“Gary” by Stages of Dan</a></span><br /><span style="font-size: 11pt; background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">7. <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_aGDgvtFls&feature=related">“The Boyfriend Song” by The Momeraths</a></span><br /><span style="font-size: 11pt; background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">8. <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-5ON-OfTqg&feature=related">“No Way” by Pearl Jam</a></span><br /><span style="font-size: 11pt; background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">9. <a href="http://www.myspace.com/thomastantrum">“The Last Kiss” by Thomas Tantrum</a></span><br /><span style="font-size: 11pt; background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">10. <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JkEwk7wZVV8">“Last Day of Magic” by The Kills</a></span><br /><span style="font-size: 11pt; background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">11. <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-B8OAj9F7hI">“Zorbing [Live On Jools Holland]” by Stornoway</a></span><br /><span style="font-size: 11pt; background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">12. <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZDlq3Im6tE">“So Here We Are (Four Tet Remix)” - by Bloc Party</a></span><br /><span style="font-size: 11pt; background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">13. <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVp7C5vzMgw">“England [Live At The Brooklyn Academy of Music]” by The National</a></span></span></span></b><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: transparent; "><span style="font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; background-color: transparent; "></span></span><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255); "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small; "><span style="background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">*EXTENDED "DEVIL'S CUT": </span><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">1. “Devil” by Stereophonics</span><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">2. “Memory Of A Free Festival, Pt. I (Old Brompton Edit)” by David Bowie</span><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">3. “Zero” by Yeah Yeah Yeahs</span><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">4. <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFyrjvW7Bno">“Woah, Billy!” by Lucky Soul</a></span><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">5. “Mother’s Best Child” by Stages of Dan</span><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">6. “London, London” by Caetano Veloso</span><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">7. “There’s No Other Way” by Blur</span><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">8. “Within The Rose” by Matthew & The Atlas</span><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">9. “I Can Change (Stereogamous Remix - Short Edit)” by LCD Soundsystem</span><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">/ INTERMISSION</span></span></span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255); "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small; "><span style="background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">10. “Wide Eyes [HibOO d'Live Version]” by Local Natives</span><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">11. “A Single Cup of Tea (Bedroom Demo Version)” by The Momeraths</span><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">12. “No Way” by Pearl Jam</span><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">13. “That’s The Way” by Led Zeppelin</span><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">14. “Last Day of Magic (London’s Listening Edit)” by The Kills</span><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">15. “Zorbing” by Stornoway</span><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">16. Exit Mix: Bowie’s “Memory Of A Free Festival, Pt. II” + “So Here We Are (Four Tet Remix - Camden Edit)” by Bloc Party</span><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; ">17. “England” by The National </span></span><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: transparent; font-size: small; "><span style="font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; background-color: transparent; "></span></span><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; "><span class="Apple-style-span">*features more local London music stretching from Camden Town to Islington, like Nate Maingard, Lucky Soul, and Yan Yates, but also random bits from Belle & Sebastian and The New Pornographers (even a weirded out Snow Patrol) that also made an impression on me during the "Satan Stops At Bethnal Green" story. Also includes a live version of my theme from 2010, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmefFcRJbXE">"Wide Eyes" by Local Natives</a>. </span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre-wrap; ">This is the mixtape I edited and created myself and burned to a CD given to me by the Atherton Lin boys.</span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre-wrap; "><br /></span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><iframe title="YouTube video player" width="640" height="390" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/Y4YO2v_xiYk" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe></span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><iframe title="YouTube video player" width="640" height="390" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/JVp7C5vzMgw" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe></span></div>Elder Roxashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16923524321844669169noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2791408743409837221.post-8921812894580740612009-12-31T06:02:00.000-08:002009-12-31T06:43:08.776-08:00Futures 2010<span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-style: italic;"></span></span><a href="http://therainmakerconfessions.blogspot.com/2008/12/futures-2009-polaris.html">Written</a> on Wednesday, December 31st, 2008. What I believed I would say in December 2009:<span style="font-style: italic;"><br /><br /><small>"...If love came, I wasn't fooled again. I didn't go searching for it; it only came to me, and in whatever form I took. What was most important was the love I could find in revisiting old friendships...and with any hope, one in particular has ideally and finally arrived at the place I've always wanted it to be. With any further hope (and likely a lot of luck had something to do with it, too) there was at last a place I reached with my father, and most importantly with my mother.</small></span><small> <span style="font-style: italic;">I have come to be comfortable with where I stand about God. My choice to either stay or leave the LDS church was not coercion or performance. I made my choice based on what I want most and what I need most. I didn't come to some kind of all-encompassing, self-righteous enlightenment. I only reached a point where the questions were no longer so pressing, or so urgent. I'm satisfied with what I found, even if I still haven't found what I'm looking for."</span></small><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:100%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:13px;"><i><br /></i></span></span></div><div><small><span></span></small><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:100%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:13px;"><i>-----------------------------------------------------<br /></i></span></span><div><span style="font-style: italic;"><br /><span style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-style: italic;"></span></span></span><span style="font-weight: bold;">Friday, December 31st, 2010:</span></div><div><span>What. A year. </span></div><div><span><br /></span></div><div><span>I'm so close to finishing my major. I might need to take a few classes in the spring, but after that, it's basically in the bag. Math class was both easier and harder than I thought it'd be. My graduation present to me is a vacation. Ticket to anywhere, Japan maybe. "I never really gave up on / Breaking out of this two-star town." I can almost taste it.</span></div><div><span style="font-weight: bold;"><br /></span></div><div>I finally got eating right. Raw foods - what a novel concept. If I'd known it would've felt this good, I might've started earlier than this year. Investing in a vegetable juicer instead of buying chicken strips at the cafeteria...what an idea. It was a rocky start, and I probably still have a bit to go before I can give up fish - to be gay is to love sushi, after all. But once I got over the cheese hamburger crave, it was surprisingly easy to get used to. </div><div><br /></div><div>Finally, a screenplay. With luck, a couple. With more luck, a film. Whoda thought. I think that all the stories I've kept inside since I was young are gonna finally get the chance to be shared, now that I'm getting my ass off the proverbial couch. Speaking of which...it's so nice to have gone a solid year with no TV.</div><div><br /></div><div>Got in touch with my feminine side and woke up all those sleeping princesses I grew up loving and even dressing up. "Lady Matilda"...Don't know where to go with it, but dressing in drag is not nearly the scary, vain and bizarre thing I always thought it was. It was actually a lot of fun. I don't know if I'll ever tell my mother, though. </div><div><span></span><span style="font-style: italic;"><span><span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal; "><b><br /></b></span><span style="font-style: italic;"></span></span><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-style: italic;"></span></span></span>Love came, as it usually seems to, in the summertime. But this time was different because, this time, I <i>refused</i> to settle. What growth came of that relationship matters only in that I learned more about myself and whether or not I'll ever find "The One" - any futures for that relationship are either already determined, and were from the start, or they've have already twilighted away and it was just another sunny experiment. And that's okay.<br /><br /></div><div>So many of the things I've always wanted to happen for me...actually did happen this year. Finally saw U2, finally went to the Festival of Colors, finally learned a song on a twelve-string guitar, <u>finally</u> finished <i>East of Eden</i>. (And I'll be damned if I didn't whittle down at least a couple of pages of the rest of my reading list.) And I can say all of that in Spanish and Japanese. But this year had so many challenges. It was difficult to make choices about my past, even though I've been anticipating it for so long. I don't know what can be said about those I've known the longest in the Mormon Church. I'm sure that I've offended some, and I know that in one particular case, I may never be able to see or talk to him again. </div><div><br /></div><div>But at least I've done everything within my power to let those who care and were concerned that this was the only way. I couldn't figure out my spirituality by investigating Hinduism, Judaism, Islam, etc. without also giving scientology, astrology, magick and all manner of paganism a fair chance as well. (At least I can finally read someone's cards.) But none of that would have meant much if I hadn't also, with equal measure and all the full furvor of my teenage years with Talmage, Nibly and C.S. Lewis at the bedside, studied out atheism. I've been exposed to it for the past few years, but at no other time in my life did I really read and reason with it as this year. And what a learning experience.</div><div><br /></div><div>I know I'm all over the map. (My poor mother.) But this is the way it had to be. And the reasons are rooted in the mere existence of my creative voice - a voice I'm still trying to find and control: my identity is constantly shifting. I'm here one day, then the next day I'm completely gone. I don't know who I am, and I never have. It may be another while, maybe even years, before I can know. But I might never discover who I am or where I came from, and this has always been my struggle. I was called "Paradox Kid" in junior high. But this year, I finally broke through the shapelessness of myself by coming to an understanding with how my memory works to influence my personality, and how I can create something out of that ocean always inside me. Hard work, but I can confidently say I got somewhere.</div><div><br /></div><div>And there's still so much more work to be done. More places to go and things to do and people to see. I have to continue to find how my voice works, and what I can do. So bring it on, 2011. Matthew A. Jonassaint never knew so little, or looked so good.<span style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></div></div>Elder Roxashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16923524321844669169noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2791408743409837221.post-21364873446414483052009-12-27T18:43:00.000-08:002010-09-16T21:44:12.852-07:002009: Year That God Forgot Me<b><i>New Years Day 2010...</i></b><br /><br />At 12:01 AM, exactly one year ago, I remember I was standing on the edge of Arthur's Court - the neighborhood I grew up in. All the three story houses glowed with Christmas lights brightening up their grand backyards and driveways to accommodate boats and suburbans. The city mayor lives two houses away, and just behind us an orthodontist who owns two German shepherds and was the first in our neighborhood to have a plasma screen TV. A bit to the left is a director at NuSkin and a few doors down from there is the owner of a Zion's National Bank. His wife owns a classy dance studio in the basement. If you go further down the street, you'll find a Marine family, a BYU professor family, and a chiropractor family. A fenced up majestic world, carved from pristine whiteness and heft of landscape, winding lovely in righteous twirls, made of houses and covered with ice.<br /><br />A year ago, I stood standing at the edge and mused to myself aloud that I'd be standing here again in 2010 wishing that 2009 had never happened. Just a feeling. Likely brought on by a decade's worth of college cynicism and all-around broken national faith in the future. I guessed that I'd look back on 2009 wondering if it was a year I could have skipped.<br /><br />At the time, there was little sign of what 2009 would bring. Admittedly, I was still angry and scared at what my breakup with my first boyfriend might mean, with all its deconstructions and devaluing of everything I was raised to believe I was not capable of ever having, or feeling. My only job was to act out what was assigned to me. There was an agenda to follow, after all. But then along came a redhead in a pickup truck, who could play the cello and give you such a kiss, and he denied me - my friendship or my past with him - for a better but dying man, ex-Army and hiding in the mountains. And all those hand-me-down ideas about everything had to change.<br /><br />So 2009 didn't look like a recovery period or a time to resort priorities. It looked like a Nothing. But I hoped things would turn up. I sensed change coming. And as I was accustomed to, I believed this change would come about from some temple castle glowing in mountainous dark night, or a promise at the end of "that" small blue book, or a lonely faithful moment on my knees at my bedside. Or maybe Erik would come back and make everything right again. Or maybe nothing would happen at all. But I couldn't have guessed it would actually be a long, timeless and spaceless chain of the weirdest and worst times of my life.<br /><br />I never knew I'd find myself little more than a month later on the floor of a bar, convulsing after that "one more" menthol American Spirit. Propelling curses and reckless shame at a ruined castle keep, a snowing sky and invisible God. Racing down the highway in too much black pain to think about anything except the week-old memory of a friend coming home from the streets of New York, with his honor folded neatly for everyday wear. Even after swearing then to abandon the bottle, months later I'd be back on the floor, vomiting, shivering, shirtless. In a personal place without emotion, without beauty, and without time. And cradled on that damn floor by people who really shouldn't care about me.<br /><br />A penthouse apartment, an abandoned field outside of town. Secrets, and even more secrets. A dark blue hotel room, a Wisconsin bathroom. She takes a long drag on her cigarette, looks at me, and says with a cackling laugh, "You look a bit overwhelmed!" As the banker turns me away, I mutter, "I guess I won't get that ticket to New Orleans." There are sounds of vomiting from my bathroom and now he's begging me to see his boyfriend, but he can't stop laughing so much. She's telling me in a rowdy campus hallway that prostitution is now the only way she'll make it through school. There's a sickly old voice with gray whiskers around the mouth and jeans stiffened by dirt, telling me to get out of the car and keep quiet, so as to not wake neighbors. "Matthew," she says, her voice glassy and strained, "Brother Pratt's been arrested. For raping a girl." I hear furious yells through the walls and the Guinness to get me off the floor and the hell out the door. The surging crowd lifts the girl above swaying heads to latex glove hands, and the medics carry her away strapped to a board as mud splashes and the band plays on.<br /><br />The train rushes by and I feel walls around me tremble. A mysterious alien thing too tiny to see has come from nowhere, invaded my throat and wrapped my body in so much continual pain that I'm prevented from even whispering. He puts his hand on the cool steel of his gun as he reassures me he knows the gospel of Christ as taught by Joseph Smith is true, but can't say the same about the Mormons. There's a firetruck outside flashing all my living room in blacks and reds with a pulse. She only lets herself look at the Kansas City photo for one moment before gently closing the drawer, and no one ever sees it again. "You're such a good cuddler," says boy with a body he stole away from Greek gods, and I taste his salty-sweet tongue on my side of the bed. I'm sinking into a chair and feeling the uncountable elephants in the room when the boy in the bandana has finally had it up to here with curiosity and yells at my face with a weird smile, "DUDE, are you FUCKING HIGH YET?" The midnight sky is scarred for one blinking moment as a ball of fire strings to a hot white light and falls down, down to the western horizon. She can't look at me, only at the ceiling, and she says, "A lot of people are about to die."<br /><br />I still don't know how I got a straight divorced man to make out with me in the lobby of a Hilton. I've been dragging so much secrecy, guilt, loneliness and anger inside of me that finally when on Halloween I watched a David Bowie get handcuffed and led away, after both of us had been turned away from a house of God to hands of the law, something inside me finally snapped. Cave paintings, comic books or stained glass windows? Birthday parties, pride parades, church sermons and elections...or masks, makeup, theatrics and temptations...what's the difference. Small wonder that when a gay guy comes along weeks later claiming to have visions and revelations from God about my life, I don't believe him.<br /><br />Go to hell, Everything. You have confused the mother living fuck out of me.<br /><br />But then something happened in Neverland. About a week ago, after days of not eating or sleeping, I finally collapsed on my bed...but I actually went somewhere. I could see the beginning of things, and I could see myself in the middle of some eternally marching time machine, with a million plans and every possible kind of lie. And I saw how it could end, everything - the big capital End of everything.<br /><br />I can't explain it. And I can't talk about it, not yet, anyway. But I'm wondering if this year is closing on more than just a decade of my life. I wonder if it's closing on an entire era of existence, an entire way of life.<br /><br />A boy lives in the house at the very very limit of Arthur's Court, where the large fence meets the city streets. He moved from Riverside, California when a great friend of mine had to move away. Riverside moved into his old house. We became very close, and maybe too fast. He was someone I loved more than my own life. But this world tells us that love can very rarely be nonsexual if it's with someone we're not related to. And this world tells us that if it is a feeling towards someone the same gender as you, it's either love, sexually, or it's lunatic crime and sin. So with religious fervor, I pulled that old sleight of hand, and I fell in love with a beautiful, strong, handsome and virtuous <span style="font-style: italic;">idea</span> of him, of who he could be for me. But Riverside didn't have enough strength to keep up with my little magic trick. In a few days now, he'll leave on his LDS mission to jungles below the equator. And without knowing it, he'll take a lot of my old and dying intangibilities with him. A door is closing.<br /><br />When I was a sophomore in high school, the stage technicians and actors used to call me Moses, because I was in charge of opening and closing the giant red curtain, and in order to do it I had to use a wooden two by four on this old machine. I remember watching, memorizing every blinking instant of the final moments in each scene, and how every time it never plays out quite the same way. It's the same words, the same clothes and the same boys and girls on a very wide and black stage, and out in the outside blackness is an ogling audience. The moments are composed of musical notes and chapping paint and makeup powders, always the same because of practice, always different because of time.<br /><br />And just before time and audience can pin it all down into some singled finality, I shut the curtain on everything, and the illusion can be preserved for me alone, behind the curtain, where everyone is frozen for that exact second before the abrupt rushing around to the next performing instant for the darkness. So I memorize the moment for tomorrow. And then it ends.Elder Roxashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16923524321844669169noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2791408743409837221.post-59722005372475881182009-10-18T02:26:00.000-07:002009-10-18T02:38:22.510-07:00Wanted: The IKEA CoupleThe PERFECT couple. They wear their relationship like war paint everywhere they go. Smiles are teethy and wide and just LOVELY. He keeps his hair gelled. She wears big crystal globe earrings and dresses in whites, pinks, and blues. Go as Jim and Pam from <span style="font-style: italic;">The Office</span> for Halloween and give out copies of <span style="font-style: italic;">The Color Code</span> for Christmas. Everybody, from corrupt politicians to the weekly weed hackers, is JUST SO NICE. Milk and sugar each other with theatrical politeness and traveling show affection everywhere they go. Speak in quiet secretive tones around each other and speak up, sometimes too loudly, when around others or in public - especially if they find something FUNNY. Everything is FUNNY. Love sharing food and feeding each other. Preface sentences with what he or she "said the other day" because it was just so SMART and WONDERFUL. "The world would be a better place if everyone was as HAPPY as we are," they advertise when they hold hands and walk in the middle of hallway, or kiss and giggle loudly afterward while in the library. They make the air claustrophobic with their billboard romance. They seek to be observed and objectified. PERFECT.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;">I too wish to be PERFECT. Let's have a threesome. Let's explore positions. It'll be GREAT.</span>Elder Roxashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16923524321844669169noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2791408743409837221.post-34284841302695041742009-10-14T01:11:00.000-07:002009-10-18T02:38:40.658-07:00Wanted: The Sk8tr BoiHas a fake gold watch. Wears name brand shoes without socks and a black baseball hat. His tan makes him comfortable and he is empowered by his smart haircut. He always looks impatient in class and fiddles with his pen; prone to doodling black and white geometrical shapes on paper or desk. His longboard is stickered in loud slogans and menacing symbols. His jeans are tight enough to wear <i style="">him</i> and his white Hanes sell his ass crack. Addresses females by attending to their gender ("Babe, baby, girl, little girl") and attributes status to males ("Brother, bro, dude, man, boss"). Doesn't like to cause a fuss, won't speak up unless watching an athletic event or bragging about last night's sexual exploits. Usually seen doing pathetic tricks outside the library or bumming a cigarette in the parking lot.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"> <span style="font-style: italic;">I need someone quiet and complicit to work for me. Do my homework for me, man. Bro, work my job for me. Dude, buy my groceries and weed my yard. Be my bitch, Sk8tr Boi.</span></span>Elder Roxashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16923524321844669169noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2791408743409837221.post-30413953388066703042009-10-06T15:40:00.000-07:002009-10-06T15:43:17.012-07:00About "Polaris"<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhezrfv8hB7oMDQsafoiUSjnpAKAKCSiq3HHhK2PaM26N-4UF7rVObCfDsOGWbV1AwzzLJfeIiCaoPa8NjlDN-bso-BYWPDdFqSGAWQdPb_7mUjGcVMBzoikmy9C-Bx71T3rVLwM6zD-D-u/s1600-h/Photo+54.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 324px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhezrfv8hB7oMDQsafoiUSjnpAKAKCSiq3HHhK2PaM26N-4UF7rVObCfDsOGWbV1AwzzLJfeIiCaoPa8NjlDN-bso-BYWPDdFqSGAWQdPb_7mUjGcVMBzoikmy9C-Bx71T3rVLwM6zD-D-u/s400/Photo+54.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5389620832140957058" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br />It's been a major pain, basically. But I finally have <a href="http://elderroxas.wordpress.com/">a new blog</a> on WordPress, and you're welcome to check it out.<br /><br />It'll probably get a different title at some point. Ideally, it'll be the place where I can blab about movies and put politicking rants, as well as randomness about my life in general. This blog will continue to be the vent for my creative shamblings and offerings and whatnot.<br /><br />That's all.Elder Roxashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16923524321844669169noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2791408743409837221.post-2790056692296095052009-10-05T18:35:00.001-07:002009-10-18T02:41:23.452-07:00Wanted: The Straight Guy Closet CaseA ruthless Trekkie. High attraction to nonwhite girls - even and especially if they have blue or green skin, use a golden staff, can fire a plasma blaster accurately and read your mind. Suffers from the unrequited love of pale and malnourished anime girls with pink hair, loosened ties, tiny skirts and whopping tits - but dislikes talking about actually "doing it" with women. His wrists and hands are the only muscles that receive exercise (due to rapid joystick movements late at night in front of the computer); he may look normal and fit when facing him, but when viewed from the side his surprise rotund belly makes him look like a Who. Typically quiet but will laugh loudly (if nervously) when the right <i style="">Star Wars</i> reference is made. Indecisive. Needs to roll a twenty-sided dice to choose what to eat, what to wear, and what to do with his meager paycheck. Walks like a dinosaur and has a sauce stain on his shirt. Often red in the face but not from yelling or exercise. Owns wooden samurai swords. Rarely leaves his house or apartment except for a Beto's run or to pick up the newest game on the Top Ten list. He wears his socks too high.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;">I'm looking for a model for my photoshoot. I will use incredible lighting and color. Photoshop will clear your blemishes and whiten your teeth. The photos will be posted in sororities and on the "women for men" section of Craigslist. Pay negotiable.</span>Elder Roxashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16923524321844669169noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2791408743409837221.post-80200578277507056152009-10-01T18:09:00.000-07:002009-10-05T18:31:26.239-07:00"Sediment Strikes The Atlantic"You, restless,<br />revealing delicate<br />dregs of stomach hairs - you stretch, and<br />my nervous<br />eyes steal a view.<br />Your morning<br />stubble doesn't give a damn.<br />Be dissident in my house. We can share<br />my bed.<br /><br />Aeolian winds now, excitedly<br />static, touching tongues as they busy<br />past to carve crests and peaks<br />of mountains,<br />snowy, feeling guilty<br />of their own terrible beauty.<br />Glaciers grace<br />slow and - one day plume<br />mists of sand into<br />oceans, into sedimental memory.<br /><br />When your lips are still<br />dampened with our pungent beers,<br />resume your stories. We<br />observe the parking from a<br />safe distance.<br />You are<br />pointing your anger at newspaper<br />headlines again.<br /><br />Freckles<br />bronzed and<br />dirty scatter<br />into place<br />when you come<br />closer. Then are you - bright<br />spots of headlights dashing<br />electric along ebony<br />veins of highway or<br />careful butter spread on Monday<br />morning toast or<br />choirs of infant laughter dispelling<br />in nurseries or Time settling<br />everything.<br /><br />Me.<br />I asked<br />what histories you'd<br />spoken of to her<br />yesterday.<br />"He's so sad now,"<br />she said.Elder Roxashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16923524321844669169noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2791408743409837221.post-6577623114617626312009-09-16T16:27:00.001-07:002009-09-16T16:27:19.666-07:00Transmissions From B.S.S.S. (Broken Shooting Star Satellites) During The Suicidal Hurl Towards EarthDear Heath: I only know now that you aren't my muse. You aren't my Superman. Now I know that you aren't my god or even the source of my inspiration. You are an inspiration to me nonetheless, though. So why am I crying out to you?<br /><br />I'm crying out because you are nonetheless a mouthpiece for my muse. I do not travel by day, but under cover of the night. Therefore I must trust the guiding reflecting lights in the sky until I have prepared myself to face the more brilliant sun light. You're one of many pieces of a fragmented tale I am trying to remember. You are one of many things I copy and imitate in order to better learn how to birth and create. Until I can do it on my own. I won't, however, make the same mistake I usually do and mistake the model/example "thing" for the "thing-in-itself." Helpmeets are necessary supports until full flight is possible, right? Crutches are transitory instruments. There can be a virtue in a one-night-stand.<br /><br />So I will give you more of my attention. I've arranged things with Turvy already; I'll take my time back because I create Turvy to kill him, and I kill him to create him. I will stop trying to force my creativity out of my memories and find my altered state of conscience in the current moment and seek the inspiration there. Because I am there. Am me. Am Turvy. Am the Flash, Am Superman. Am that lightning bolt epiphany, am that death and that life. I am you, Heath.<br /><br />So I can't keep staking my hell in the past or my heaven in the future; all I have is now. All my life, I've been waiting - waiting on "that" moment, waiting for a Superman. Now, I'm gonna stop waiting. By this December, I want to have gotten farther away from the static and have found a few frequencies worth tuning into. In three months time, I'd like to be just a little more prepared and closer to the morning's light.<br /><br />But if not you, then who is my muse?<br /><br />I'm not sure right now, old friend. I guess we'll find out in just a moment.<br /><br />Now here I go screaming wildly as I unclench my fists, open my eyes and relax for the impact.Elder Roxashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16923524321844669169noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2791408743409837221.post-78229105966486738072009-09-16T16:25:00.000-07:002009-09-16T16:26:55.900-07:00To Turvy (the Elephant): A Speculation...If I could wind down the clocks just a bit right before this fall semester starts so that I could have a chance to speak with you, this might be what I would say.<br /><br />I suppose things don't seem all too different since the spring. I still write out my musings in the company of strangers who drag their American Spirits and their Marlboros, bitching about professors and bosses. I still improvise fragments of a blues tune in the shower when the roommates are out. I have a Pendelton whiskey in the freezer and a gradually emptying box of Lucky Strikes on my table. I check my mailbox even when I haven't ordered any cartel from Amazon to stick my fix. I measure out my indifference with myself and my life in Facebook sessions and regular size scalding cups of sweetened Americano.<br /><br />These all are symptoms of my summer waste. The buzzing, the static. I spent more time in love with all the distractions and decorations my Visa could afford my boredom. It was a serious affair but things haven't worked out. You have been weighed and measured, Turvy, and I love you very much. But I have to kill you now.<br /><br />It's the way. You know that by now. You are my time, and my time is a thread in Time when heard echoing down the hallway. My passage in this life lies between two doors to the dark, and I have sneaked a peek into both. I worry that I'm not there (where? There...), but I really am. I have been before. And I will be moments from now, too. I will be remembered. I will stain Time with myself, and you are going to help me. And for the very first time, I realize that I'll be remembered not because I fear being forgotten, but because I have the choice to be remembered - the choice to be alive. If only I can get my ass off this couch.<br /><br />So you will be electrocuted. All I do is say the magic word, like Billy Batson must when calling for Captain Marvel, and there will be shock and lightning to turn me into something new. But the lightning must strike you. The moment of epiphany belongs to me but you must suffer for it. Even die for it. You may be my own, and my creation, but all stars have their moments before they burn out.<br /><br />But in some places in this world where you've been, they do say that Shiva is your father. Others say you are the only son of our Father Abraham. You will be brought back to life during Death's immaculate dance. You will be saved by the hand of God at the very last second. I can only speculate that in some way or another, I will wake up tomorrow morning to find you in the room. I imagine that your face will be sad and that you will be smiling. And we will begin again, inseparable, until the very, very end.<br /><br />I suspect so. I suspect so.Elder Roxashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16923524321844669169noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2791408743409837221.post-72191811102081510252009-08-31T23:35:00.000-07:002009-09-16T16:25:37.731-07:00Static."All I know is that my mind is blown / When I'm with you...when I'm with you..."<br /><br />Summer 2009: the summer that time forgot. Even now I try to remember the last three months and everything only comes in snatches. The checks bounced, the record player skipped. There was a power outage so brief you wouldn't have noticed except for that slight delay on all the clocks around the house. Absolutely nothing happened, and everything that did happen occurred all at once.<br /><br />One way to describe it: "Static." is probably, in terms of consciousness expansion, a sequel of sorts to "Cottonfire" but it's a spiritual sequel to "Chain of Memories" (summer 2005) and a thematic sequel to "A Neverending Story" (summer 2006).<br /><br />When you soundtrack three months of your life with the antic bubble gum camp of The Flaming Lips and the religiously feverish and blasé melancholy of Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, you start to really play with notions of language and sound. Additionally, when you only read mythologies, creation stories from various religions and comic books and basically nothing else for a while, there's this weird sort of germination that occurs in your creativity.<br /><br />I can't explain. One moment I remember a boy barely out of high school suddenly leaning in to kiss me in the passenger's seat with all the moxie in the world, and the next thing I remember is spasming on a bathroom floor, vomiting and being carried by strong hands. Next I see a fight with my mother over the phone, and then things seem to rewind (or fast forward) to girls from high school coming up to me in church thanking me for something I didn't really mean to write. I go backwards and then my sister is calling me, nearly in tears, over my boyhood hero and then forwards again to my boss telling me, "I'm sorry but I have to let you go." I hear bombastic and ridiculous guitar and a beer-bitter voice surrounded by choirs. I see red and blue streak across a sky and a thunderbolt striking my mailbox. I'm drinking Corona at a wedding, then I'm standing in pouring rain watching men dancing in cages while a drag queen raises above my head in a firetruck ladder. I'm sinking deep into the chair in my living room, then suddenly dancing like I've suddenly discovered for the first time that I have legs, awkwardly tripping and jumping all over the apartment. A slightly mentally disturbed man with a pony tail leans in to kiss me outside my door while on the other side I'm bringing the young man's head closer to mine. I'm sitting on a curb smoking my last Lucky Strike and then I'm taking a shot of whiskey to toast to my unemployment.<br /><br />I just don't know what the hell happened.Elder Roxashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16923524321844669169noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2791408743409837221.post-16641343672192745282009-08-13T04:34:00.001-07:002009-08-19T10:37:33.962-07:00re: "COTTONFIRE" ...<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhE0YgaD-XEbFu2iiHcDJWD6w-x39ncH37RcaVECFfFCDTaTqoqs9hY-R4n3QOzKJeZb75R-8qVi66kXCRkhsYkY_Ljkhyb58LEUEaLLU7YvTxYY8Q792_xM6-UFiS4W37Psl2Zu2tJFPRc/s1600-h/ProvoRiverBridge.JPG"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 332px; height: 249px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhE0YgaD-XEbFu2iiHcDJWD6w-x39ncH37RcaVECFfFCDTaTqoqs9hY-R4n3QOzKJeZb75R-8qVi66kXCRkhsYkY_Ljkhyb58LEUEaLLU7YvTxYY8Q792_xM6-UFiS4W37Psl2Zu2tJFPRc/s320/ProvoRiverBridge.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5369409164016248498" border="0" /></a>It's important to realize that the phrase "existential crisis" doesn't really cover it. It's the closest term I have found to describe the experience; there was certainly a crisis and imminent, lethal peril was very real, as I was suicidal, and the resolution to the crisis can be described as an existential one. But ultimately I don't know that the term can accurately describe just what happened. But I'm here to state, for the first time, a coherent narrative of "Cottonfire," which (in my soundtracks and written entries) is the "title" attributed to my 2007 summer, from the first week of May to the last week of July.<br /><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />The name isn't meant to be necessarily cryptic. To begin with, often when I was in the car or walking around during those months, I would see little tuffs of cotton seeds floating aimlessly around all over the city. Later, the cotton would somehow become associated with the Tree of Life in Aronofsky's <span style="font-style: italic;">The F</span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjo5j4on1rmnCZ-TcWwcy45dj1XV9IXq4Xp99HBn6D-ZDE3yv3tFHbfoAjO_8cF9ys2wSk5r_Scl_T1U0i-3YR-E2cx-tzyZ6v0_SvaXKEXHzn5V1fBzl_qzmyX2obktPCxkphLGiHj1BGK/s1600-h/1566724.JPG"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 281px; height: 186px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjo5j4on1rmnCZ-TcWwcy45dj1XV9IXq4Xp99HBn6D-ZDE3yv3tFHbfoAjO_8cF9ys2wSk5r_Scl_T1U0i-3YR-E2cx-tzyZ6v0_SvaXKEXHzn5V1fBzl_qzmyX2obktPCxkphLGiHj1BGK/s320/1566724.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5369395935676125314" border="0" /></a><span style="font-style: italic;">ountain</span> - and I think it was more of a connection to Clint Mansell's score; I'd listen to that haunting piano and the strings and somehow it'd match up with the dance of the cotton seeds. Additionally, the name alludes to the 2007 <a href="http://www.ksl.com/?nid=148&sid=1450723">Milford Flat fire</a> (called the biggest recorded fire in Utah history) and the <a href="http://www.ksl.com/?nid=148&sid=1413405">PG fire</a> (curious to me because of its simple ignition - a lawnmower blade striking a rock). On the day the firespreads overlapped the most - the former near Saratoga Springs and the latter on the foothills below Squaw Peak - there were two giant pillars of fire and smoke as the sun set, one pillar in the east near my house (at the mouth of Provo Canyon) and the other in the far west across the lake.<br /><br />So the imagery has something of fragility to it, my awkward metaphor of life and death that describes, in one symbol, what happened to me two years ago when my life almost inexplicably changed - inexplicably precisely because I still can't figure out what started my own fires.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjW-e1iraA0SyiIZHRx-QSEubjOes0fX-wJ99ynva-kuEViUV5StihxTt5IXh6AN2qS5gatCAVqrT-AYgwD1bpM8QcO5fd0IY_2Xr6fadNXNzGfqS3ygpUp3NaFIAgBR7kclp_GN9komZtx/s1600-h/nietzsche.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 176px; height: 177px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjW-e1iraA0SyiIZHRx-QSEubjOes0fX-wJ99ynva-kuEViUV5StihxTt5IXh6AN2qS5gatCAVqrT-AYgwD1bpM8QcO5fd0IY_2Xr6fadNXNzGfqS3ygpUp3NaFIAgBR7kclp_GN9komZtx/s320/nietzsche.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5369394471607722274" border="0" /></a>It was definitely a countdown built from a few different factors. Most specifically, I was taking an Ethics and Values class from an adjunct professor named Ethan Sproat. At the time, I was (almost) completely devoted to serving a mission for the LDS church. The class wasn't necessarily forcing me to drastically change my religious views, but reading Nietzsche was a big mindtrip for my Peter Priesthood attitudes. My British Literature class may have added something as well because we were beginning to dip into heavy modernism and postmodernism, so I was spending some time with Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, T.S. Eliot and Salman Rushdie. In time, later that summer I read Dostoevsky's <span style="font-style: italic;">Notes From Underground</span> and <span style="font-style: italic;">The Trial</span> by Franz Kafka. So that was all forcing me to face some nihlistic (lack of a better word) conc<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgqMPNpfkiYfpVKMj2WMn7d63Qk4wPoTi9aFjgm74wo71wvCyf_m6PDNrqGmvfrh4ujAEvEwn9v1wstu2i9-0f_6cvhMwWW3saAVNbo6zHnY2wpu7cmUu7zRSdWZypflZMjDxfl1A1LDbAL/s1600-h/robert+plant.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer; width: 250px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgqMPNpfkiYfpVKMj2WMn7d63Qk4wPoTi9aFjgm74wo71wvCyf_m6PDNrqGmvfrh4ujAEvEwn9v1wstu2i9-0f_6cvhMwWW3saAVNbo6zHnY2wpu7cmUu7zRSdWZypflZMjDxfl1A1LDbAL/s320/robert+plant.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5369392779842345730" border="0" /></a>epts and concerns I'd spent most of my life being told I needn't worry about.<br /><br /></div> On another level, my music taste was radically changing (which may not sound relevant, but it was a huge deal). Up until that summer, I listening almost exclusively to Yellowcard, Hoobastank, Fall Out Boy, Dashboard Confessional, etc. But <span style="font-style: italic;">Spider-Man 3 </span>was coming out, and so was the film's soundtrack - this will sound weird, but every time a Spider-Man movie has come out, my music tastes have changed to each soundtrack (after the first, I stuck mainly to mainstream alternative, like Nickelback, Creed, Evanescence and Sum 41). But after the soundtrack came out, I started listening to Wolfmother, The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, The Killers, The Walkmen and Simon Dawes...and these "indie" rockers lead me to rock 'n roll roots; soon I was listening nearly every waking moment to Led Zeppelin, The Who, Fleetwood Mac, The Doors, Bob Dylan (it would take me until after I moved out to truly love him, though) and - eventually replacing Linkin Park as my favorite band - those Irish boys, U2. This 60's, 70's and 80's rock music somehow captured both the physical heat and the spiritual conflicted heat I was experiencing that summer. I watched the PG fire erupt on Squaw Peak as the sun set while listening to "Exit" from U2's seminal <span style="font-style: italic;">The Joshua Tree</span>; the song sounds like a scene from Capote and describes the quietly violent story of...well, you can find out yourself <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p15xxavWQ2E">here</a>.<br /><br />It's worth mentioning that I also spent most of the summer reading Homer's <span style="font-style: italic;">Iliad</span>. In addition to the recent acceptance of R-rated movies into my house, my summer felt rather violent due in part to reading about the Trojan War for three months - however, the important thing is how by the end of the epic, my beliefs about human nature and concepts of love, divinity and destiny were drastically changed due to reading about Prince Hecktor and Achilles. <span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-style: italic;"></span></span><br /><br />The escalation of problems in my family were a factor. Our family was struggling pretty badly financially and along with my sister I had to work the summer at Convergys, accompanied by my Kafka and Zeppelin, contributing most or all of my paycheck money to basic necessities like gas, food and even toilet paper. While I was privately nursing unsettling doubts and paranoia about the Church, my parents (my mother in particular) began taking a fairly negative position about early church history, particularly regarding Joseph Smith's little-known polygamous marriages and the Mountain Meadows Massacre. Soon almost each night our kitchen TV would be playing a fat red-haired man ranting anti-Mormon sentiments. I really through the whole thing that the Church was an uncrossable line for me, until one night my mom was watching the PBS documentary <span style="font-style: italic;">The Mormons</span> and I saw the following clip:<br /><br /><object height="344" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/yFGVz29OmOA&hl=en&fs=1&color1=0xe1600f&color2=0xfebd01"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/yFGVz29OmOA&hl=en&fs=1&color1=0xe1600f&color2=0xfebd01" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" height="344" width="425"></embed></object><br /><br />That statement (I promise not taken out of context), taken for granted at the time, would echo very deeply in my mind for weeks as I struggled with my ultimate personal battle: my same-gender attractions. Because desirous as I was to serve a mission and "overcome" the attractions, I would still lie awake in bed at night pulling my hair out over the complete horror of the implications: did God really want me to be alone? Even if I eventually found a girl to marry, could I love her? And could I give her what she needed? Tales abounded of men I knew who were unhappy, even with children. A story of a man who could not arouse himself around his wife, and in her frustration she gave him permission to have a homosexual hookup, just because she hoped it'd make him happy. A story of a man who couldn't let down a decades-old porn addiction. Men who prey around on Craigslist asking for BYU RM's to come over when the wife's not home and fuck in their garments. Men who never told their wives prior to the honeymoon that female sexuality wasn't a turn on. Men whose (ultimately mislead) notions of masculinity and femininity seemed troubling to my 19-year-old mind. I couldn't continue clingling to my boyhood perspectives like security blankets.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYwGHmzoHf8Hmt_d_C0lzcV_meTcDpJccGKTOZx7Sn8LzQbTviVhuVzsO_zZ8TnmWiI4GPxsH819zwAbEpjRUsya81uDPV4GpxemsBiLbVgR2YIGspCNYAVz0WWIAOJQvCj6sOLE8E-i0C/s1600-h/Joshua+Tree+Group.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 254px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYwGHmzoHf8Hmt_d_C0lzcV_meTcDpJccGKTOZx7Sn8LzQbTviVhuVzsO_zZ8TnmWiI4GPxsH819zwAbEpjRUsya81uDPV4GpxemsBiLbVgR2YIGspCNYAVz0WWIAOJQvCj6sOLE8E-i0C/s400/Joshua+Tree+Group.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5371727931094645074" border="0" /></a><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><br /></span>The stories were everywhere, and none of them seemed to be what I wanted from the Church. The ultimate concern was not whether or not I could "overcome" the attractions, but whether or not I could live happily with myself and my choice long afterwards. And, as ever in the Church, we are talking about forever here.<br /><br />In the face of that unadulterated uncertainty, that paranoia and doubt of having joy in this life, I was hearing on my left hand that the LDS gospel, the leaders and members were untrustworthy and on the other hand I was being told that I could never question. The years h<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEggCLH0ul181vX_0brCGLag8Yg8WKfnBY2QhVA2mpXz-woXJTBwi_Ey9LqlCMaqYEirw0eTxNDPBzvDmWtCEYJlSUeOshsA48KvFEA2HUcnvBtwAAgFDKBREh8ftLlkU9PqaSMERLBjXQZE/s1600-h/n1035930279_30155706_7784.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer; width: 256px; height: 243px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEggCLH0ul181vX_0brCGLag8Yg8WKfnBY2QhVA2mpXz-woXJTBwi_Ey9LqlCMaqYEirw0eTxNDPBzvDmWtCEYJlSUeOshsA48KvFEA2HUcnvBtwAAgFDKBREh8ftLlkU9PqaSMERLBjXQZE/s320/n1035930279_30155706_7784.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5369429771999151122" border="0" /></a>ad taught me complicity; now, however, there was a strange shift and I was beginning to realize that I'd spent my life "settling" for what the Church was telling me. I became angry at the illogical <em>façade</em> of it all; reality seemed a joke. If I was "supposed" to end up with a woman, how did it make any sense that I couldn't be attracted to a woman? If there is a God, and He is loving - more to the point, a "perfect" God, and His command is a "natural" one, then how did it make any sense that a "homosexual" even exists? I felt like an anomaly, some hiccup in the Great Eternal Plan, and marriage was a holy recreation of Beckett's frightening endgame. And it felt sickening to literally be a freak of "nature" every minute of every day.<br /><br />Given everything I was hearing on all sides, nothing made sense and I didn't feel like anyone understood me. I couldn't go to my parents (for reasons obvious and listed above) and my closest friends were either ignoring me because of my increasing depression or on missions across the globe. The lonlieness broke me, the countdown terminated and the culmination of these several factors, discernible and indiscernible, finally mounted to a rebellious - and perhaps even more illogical - conclusion: obviously, if I couldn't fix myself, then I simply had to kill myself. And soon.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjaEDUB1KgC0r-A6J8IF4zY7X9B_Yt7Qtaw_Bpm7Z-kKUASvmPNtoyURpEo-qJWFGDsdFG17uaQEWkik_JiGHIxVfVlhFn4MFO_CDi4octUHWwEVKSzh1-hBf5RSrSDejecnevjkRp0KRb_/s1600-h/1626377.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 213px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjaEDUB1KgC0r-A6J8IF4zY7X9B_Yt7Qtaw_Bpm7Z-kKUASvmPNtoyURpEo-qJWFGDsdFG17uaQEWkik_JiGHIxVfVlhFn4MFO_CDi4octUHWwEVKSzh1-hBf5RSrSDejecnevjkRp0KRb_/s320/1626377.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5369447009029500434" border="0" /></a><br />It started slowly; I found a way to expose the blades on the cheap Bic razors we had in storage and I would sneak into the bathroom at night, turn on songs in reverse, and slowly draw. I only scratched at my wrists themselves, but soon there were very visible scars on my shoulders and legs. I rationalized that somehow I was bracing for the real pain, death itself.<br /><br />So there was some elaborate planning. It would be at the end of the summer and it would be the most unexpected thing in the world. I had the entire morning of the day planned out. Friends and family would wake up to find notes and emails. I researched several methods before settling on one. There woul<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjS-KJfatoUG3CVFAI_Qjvir2sI6c8732y5VlgpOLMWHcrfClmEZH-ErayjdmdDo-VjzZvYFgEBsBKeNUmRc4yB_N-zYKTHlqkBWdoHNAJ7Q1fzbM5etVcsSxyABt7OX0tut5GI7rzYNrZ9/s1600-h/DSC_8920.JPG"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 213px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjS-KJfatoUG3CVFAI_Qjvir2sI6c8732y5VlgpOLMWHcrfClmEZH-ErayjdmdDo-VjzZvYFgEBsBKeNUmRc4yB_N-zYKTHlqkBWdoHNAJ7Q1fzbM5etVcsSxyABt7OX0tut5GI7rzYNrZ9/s320/DSC_8920.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5369422216615525554" border="0" /></a>d be rope I could buy. And there was a bridge. The Provo River is sewn with a batch of footbridges all over and one of them would be my own end. I knew the knots. I would jump off the bridge and after my neck would snap, the rope's support would break away from the bridge and my body would fall into the river. I would wait until before sunrise to leave my house, head down to the river, and jump.<br /><br />There wasn't much "talking myself into it" but there was more over the actual act of the choice itself. My problem was that while I was constantly thinking about suicide and planning for it, I couldn't be said to have been suicidal. My problem was that as desperate as I was to end my life, every time I came to the actual deed, it was like suddenly entering a vacuum in a wide and neverending desert, or climbing up walls. There was nothing to stop me, and yet something very clearly was stopping me. I don't know how to explain it. Every bone in my body wanted me to end it and I had every capability and opportunity to end it. But some<span style="font-style: italic;">thing</span>, some<span style="font-style: italic;">how</span>, was in my way every single time. And this only infuriated me more - I felt even more incompetent that I couldn't control anything about my life, even how I would die. One more thing I somehow could only half-ass and never get right.<br /><br />There are three music albums that came out in early 2007 which would narrate the weird "death" journey/ritual I acted out throughout the three months. First there was <span style="font-style: italic;">Welcome The Night</span> by The Ataris, which detailed lead singer/songwriter Kristopher Roe's own existential crisis after his divorce (which I learned from his own mouth, after interviewing him with Lindsey at their St. Patrick's Day concert in SLC). This album conceptually narrated my own crisis and the album ended with an affirmation of the inevitability of death. Hence, the next album was Linkin Park's <span style="font-style: italic;">Minutes To Midnight</span> and opened with the result of this affirmation: defeat and the choice to commit suicide. The album follows the slow process of saying goodbye to friends, examining the reasons for the choice while building up for the act along the way, and the last song is the dying breath of a victim of violence.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh3BUmJ9EwlQeKkoB0e58lcAjwnfpxKLRT1RGbnnbBtzleyvRj9KMRx5HHHJxLPtVDSSzadrVC3n-_k3B8IMltWk2ket-zfZ9xxNZVTmcR7vQeEyaRiGuN3wJRz_bXS5mmXMugaWQ24MSrL/s1600-h/The+Black+Parade+vinyl.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 425px; height: 425px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh3BUmJ9EwlQeKkoB0e58lcAjwnfpxKLRT1RGbnnbBtzleyvRj9KMRx5HHHJxLPtVDSSzadrVC3n-_k3B8IMltWk2ket-zfZ9xxNZVTmcR7vQeEyaRiGuN3wJRz_bXS5mmXMugaWQ24MSrL/s400/The+Black+Parade+vinyl.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5369432834809434482" border="0" /></a><br />The third album was the most important: <span style="font-style: italic;">The Black Parade</span> by My Chemical Romance. The very first sound on the album is the decline of beeps on a heart moniter. As a concept album, a story is told about an unnamed character called The Patient who dies of some sort of heart complication (ope<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgzSqh4YFAS9BInLEjWqn10omvdqwmsDsR7jty7KvSBzWdBNCnte5LbgdCiTL5wQsavSgyE3Hp6t5K9UrSkOOVL8U0pCWCCfUr6IERuKaKpDuw-V8s_GL4FRwNVitDcgP4vTdC_ufQS6zR/s1600-h/skullparade.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 190px; height: 252px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgzSqh4YFAS9BInLEjWqn10omvdqwmsDsR7jty7KvSBzWdBNCnte5LbgdCiTL5wQsavSgyE3Hp6t5K9UrSkOOVL8U0pCWCCfUr6IERuKaKpDuw-V8s_GL4FRwNVitDcgP4vTdC_ufQS6zR/s320/skullparade.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5369431945393236642" border="0" /></a>nly interpreted as medical or related to the girl sitting at his side). Part of the mythic setting of the story is that death comes to you in the form of your most precious memory. The Patient's most precious memory is seeing the city parade with his father; hence, death comes for him in the form of a large goth parade that takes him on a Dickensian journey through time and space visiting various dying people in the form of memories - from a church revival, to a cancer boy, to the first World War, to a mental hospital, to a high school massacre, to a final confrontation with his father - all the while learning about life and death. The album ends ambiguously: by the final number, either The Patient has learned to accept his "life" in the hereafter, or at the moment he becomes at peace with death he suddenly wakes up in the hospital bed to find that the entire thing was a dream.<br /><br />What this "narrative" did for me (particularly <span style="font-style: italic;">The Black Parade</span>) in addition to all the philosophy was show me that while I didn't fear death, I actually wasn't necessarily afraid of dying, either. Ultimately, I was afraid of how I, as a person both spiritually and physically, would become irrevocably altered by the pain that would accompany the calamitous act. But one thing I took from U2 and <span style="font-style: italic;">The Fountain</span> was that pain is intricately connected with life: pain is a physical signal of growth, conducive to being alive - a physical reaction to life itself. I wasn't afraid of dying - I was afraid of really living. And in the face of life itself, the choices were <span style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">always</span> mine.<br /><br />When the appointed day came, the sunrise found me on the edge of the bridge. But that was, by itself, the only thing that had gone according to plan. It had begun to come apart when I sat down to write my "last letter" to my best friend serving a mission on the other side of the country. It wasn't until then that I remembered he had asked me one day in high school to never kill myself because it would be "tramautizing" and affect him for the rest of his life. I didn't want to believe that people would actually care about me being gone, but it wasn't until I'd sat down to write his letter that I realized that even if others did miss me, that wasn't the point. The point was that in this life, we make connections with others, and part of that connection is having faith. Pain is a part of every relationship, be it friendship, a romance, parental or otherwise, and I would have to accept that in order to accept myself and come into my own in this world.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj39LGE5tVWodPQcdSMHdp7gqm1_kHkwBny6WxgAUryxBPHJlYqF7nmsZ74E-bz53X_XCHMveJbGPwYQrNCPwevMP8IgWLbik3h-kYtVu-fTiRwVz5AzzrokVPkYOJjWsGFfsgw7EIGU9Yp/s1600-h/the-fountain-movie.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 225px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj39LGE5tVWodPQcdSMHdp7gqm1_kHkwBny6WxgAUryxBPHJlYqF7nmsZ74E-bz53X_XCHMveJbGPwYQrNCPwevMP8IgWLbik3h-kYtVu-fTiRwVz5AzzrokVPkYOJjWsGFfsgw7EIGU9Yp/s400/the-fountain-movie.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5369435499341252290" border="0" /></a><br />As the sun came up, it became increasingly clear that whatever was inside of me willing me to live, it was stronger than any mere evolutionary impluse lulling me to reproductive priorities with a girl, or any carnal lust for masculinity and male bodies. It was stronger and much more clear than any of the darkness I'd endured since high school and the recent bouts of doubt and paranoia. It was some sort of light inside that just wouldn't die, inadequate and trite as that description is. What it finally came down to would affect me for years afterwards.<br /><br />As I stared at the water, I began to work out images of myself in the future being with a wife and having a family. I could make myself in a nametag on a mission in the water. I strained my eyes for images and felt complete faith in a road that lay ahead of me. With that, I turned and walked off the bridge back on the sidewalk and headed home. I snuck back in my house, went to my room, and fell asleep.<br /><br />I would later talk about visions and dreams, and a little after that I would even believe myself. But did I actually see the future in Provo River? Of course not. But what I'd done was much more incredible. I had actually created that road I'd put faith in. I'd created my own potential future and then tried to act it out - created it literally out of thin air. The implications wouldn't hit me for a long time - not until I'd already fallen in love with a girl for the first (and perhaps only) time in my life. But I'd realized that it was possible to create my own destiny. That for the first time, my choices were not preset by old men sitting in a SLC building or by teachers, historians or even friends and family. For the first time, I felt like my life was truly mine. It was an incredible feeling that had me walking on air the entire way back to my house.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhiUZwvU4nMfP2biC3KKYpznX_UJYhSOXFU1fxjqTlqVCTwlB6ltqtBiIg1vCIhuk6EPyQFMX9skqAOs2A3WUoKPfoSGWh2lir4wOOoXUNCQ-sEao3IpBtP9wUD3tyv5OCde8fNuwhZCmH8/s1600-h/1627481.JPG"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 401px; height: 299px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhiUZwvU4nMfP2biC3KKYpznX_UJYhSOXFU1fxjqTlqVCTwlB6ltqtBiIg1vCIhuk6EPyQFMX9skqAOs2A3WUoKPfoSGWh2lir4wOOoXUNCQ-sEao3IpBtP9wUD3tyv5OCde8fNuwhZCmH8/s320/1627481.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5369396117153647794" border="0" /></a><br />Like Kris Roe and Allen Ginsberg wrote, this life is a passage between two doors, and perhaps we can't understand life while living it at the same time. But there are things to discover and other things must be earned. There are unspeakable horrors and there are breathtaking miracles. Nietzsche and Bono, <span style="font-style: italic;">vita femina</span> - life is a woman, and she moves in mysterious ways. But if heaven is so great, then why this postmodern obsession with living as long as possible, retaining youth? I'm in no rush to get there; if there's one thing I've cherished from the five times I've read the Book of Mormon, it's Nephi's statment that "Adam fell that men might be, and men are that they might have joy." No matter what path lies ahead in life, it will always be one I carve and pave for myself. My perspectives on life, death, the nature of reality and everything else have become drastically different because of these realizations. While it's taken me this long to finally sit down and write down a basic summary, I have to constantly remember what I learned about myself during my Cottonfire summer two years ago.Elder Roxashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16923524321844669169noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2791408743409837221.post-33216702025997987922009-07-17T04:51:00.000-07:002009-08-27T01:24:10.314-07:00Maybe Just Avoid District 9<div style="text-align: justify;">Is there anyone out there besides me who didn't particularly like <span style="font-style: italic;">District 9</span>?<br /><br />I know Joanne Kaufman over <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203863204574346442439617628.html">at <span style="font-style: italic;">Wall Street Journal</span></a> didn't. Neither did Kyle Smith <a href="http://www.nypost.com/seven/08142009/entertainment/movies/only_a_prawn_in_game_of_life_184428.htm">at <span style="font-style: italic;">New York Post</span></a> (and I love his "kill-or-be-krill" jest) or J.R. Jones <a href="http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/district-9/Film?oid=977681">at the <span style="font-style: italic;">Chicago Reader</span></a>. Heck, even <a href="http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090812/REVIEWS/908129987">Ebert </a>and I both have the same dislikes with the same movie for once. But for the most part, their critiques are brief and don't really give details. So here I go.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqW9s789etysoEfI4QC9dUC65UFdAr9du64ylOaL8IX5Mz6bUDsbJhAxJZTPhoEwBnFygJFNr4MBV9v0kZdM5Trldu8HNqwTVlA_SMnp-Hwm1oxOdSRoh2ZzJ60W1bY-8gAxbDqJyDcnC6/s1600-h/District600.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 180px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqW9s789etysoEfI4QC9dUC65UFdAr9du64ylOaL8IX5Mz6bUDsbJhAxJZTPhoEwBnFygJFNr4MBV9v0kZdM5Trldu8HNqwTVlA_SMnp-Hwm1oxOdSRoh2ZzJ60W1bY-8gAxbDqJyDcnC6/s320/District600.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5370935026000826722" border="0" /></a><br />Let's start with what should be appreciated. Because really, you've gotta hand it to an August blockbuster that grosses over $35 million in its first weekend when it's got unknowns for a cast, relatively simple set production, not based on a comic book, video game or novel and its only real name credit is a man at the helm with a name stamp somewhere in the last ten years of pop entertainment. One film tried to do that earlier last year: <span style="font-style: italic;">Cloverfield</span>. Like <span style="font-style: italic;">District 9</span>, it was plenty hyped with a cryptic trailer as well as extensive viral marketing in addition to billboard signs. It came out at an unconventional time for a big-budget movie, it had the potential to spurt out spin-off films or tie-ins, it was about aliens, and it was produced by J.J. Abrams from the hit shows <span style="font-style: italic;">Alias</span> and <span style="font-style: italic;">Lost</span>. And nobody seemed to care about <span style="font-style: italic;">Cloverfield</span>.<br /><br />But at least <span style="font-style: italic;">Cloverfield</span>'s story lost its pretentiousness quickly. <span style="font-style: italic;">Cloverfield</span> wanted to take the "alien blockbuster"/"disaster movie" genre* (see also: <span style="font-style: italic;">Independence Day</span>; see also: <span style="font-style: italic;">Armageddon</span>) and deconstruct it a bit; instead of big names starring as scientists or military personnel - usually men - who save their estranged families and the world, it told a street-level story of snobby teenagers who get trapped in the big mess of things, and all of them wind up dead by the end - including the guy who saves the girl, plus the girl. By itself, that's pretty predictable, but not usually in an alien blockbuster. <span style="font-style: italic;">Cloverfield</span> also broke conventional norms by being shot <span style="font-style: italic;">cinema vérité</span> style to give the film a more realistic look and feel. However much Abrams wanted to break from normal alien movie narratives, though, none of those methods employed ever got in the way of actually telling the story (unless, of course, you didn't like its predictability or you were one of those people who got vertigo in the theater from the HandiCam style and blew chunks).<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">District 9</span> has several similarities. The vague trailer teased audiences with the name "Peter Jackson" for months preceding its release and was greatly hyped with billboards and Web sites. It plays out documentary style, talking heads and all. I believe that it also tries to break away from conventional movie sci-fi structures.<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi9f5Y-n-BG5aAzPdOtwQwSLVOOvDdwYnuRMxecL7MJaFKLBpgQohcFlLZxZou4foDK5Jcdh8v1WEu_kQ0eaBKt8fSkeZz_fJ3k8J1tTW0IN_IUPcoSjLpf5tCcOvMi_uD_Bb83oOV1FlKy/s1600-h/425.2.district9.lc.071309.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 237px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi9f5Y-n-BG5aAzPdOtwQwSLVOOvDdwYnuRMxecL7MJaFKLBpgQohcFlLZxZou4foDK5Jcdh8v1WEu_kQ0eaBKt8fSkeZz_fJ3k8J1tTW0IN_IUPcoSjLpf5tCcOvMi_uD_Bb83oOV1FlKy/s320/425.2.district9.lc.071309.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5370934306567949442" border="0" /></a><br /><br />In some ways, it succeeds, because <span style="font-style: italic;">District 9</span> certainly raises a lot of interesting stuff. Take, for instance (spoilers ahoy), the allegorical nods to apartheid, the "final solution" to move them all to a giant concentration camp of tents, or the protagonist's progression from small tuna working for the Man and leading a basically uninteresting life to - contrary to how most of these alien movie heroes react - become progressively cruel and selfish as he inches closer to his objective, even to the point of becoming cowardly and turning tail running during the final battle. It certainly raises interesting questions about humanity as an identity, and the film does a great job of realistically portraying how the world might actually react to an alien immigration. There are some moments in the film that had me gripped to my seat, like when the scientists force the protagonist to kill an alien. The film even has a touching father-son story. I can get teary-eyed at few things, father-son stories being one of them - and mostly in weak/simple films like <span style="font-style: italic;">Signs</span> or <span style="font-style: italic;">The Lion King</span>.<br /><br />But from there, the film goes nowhere. And that makes me more frustrated with the film rather than hate it. As soon as the credits started rolling and I wanted to talk about these things, the longer I reflected on the film, the more it started to flake away and fall apart. And I don't mean story-wise. The story, when isolated and packaged for a <span style="font-style: italic;">Reader's Digest </span>version, is pretty straightforward. But the internal logic itself doesn't work; several parts of the story rely on seemingly arbitrary plot points or devices that are either entirely unexplained or rely on heavy interpretive analysis from the audience. I can definitely handle the latter (<span style="font-style: italic;">The Fountain</span> is my favorite movie, and I never see it the same way twice, so I'm not unfamiliar with films that demand a lot from the viewer). But the former aggravates me to no end, and it was my main complaint with <span style="font-style: italic;">Slumdog Millionaire</span> (and I'm the only one I know who disliked that film, other than Salman Rushdie).<br /><br />Like (again, spoilers) when the protagonist is wheeled into a room full of dead aliens (some in pieces, and a talking-head shot explains that no human has ever bonded to an alien and lived. This made me think that the room was full of failed metamorphosed human-aliens, and yet this was never explained. A friend later postulated that the room was actually full of aliens that had been kidnapped and subjected to testing. I'm open to that possibility, except the movie didn't provide much evidence to fully argue that, either. The movie had moments where you had to infer what was going on, which I'm usually fine with, except that too many times I had to say, "Well, <span style="font-style: italic;">maybe</span> this, <span style="font-style: italic;">maybe</span> that" instead of "The film gives A, B and C, so therefore <span style="font-style: italic;">this</span> is what happened." Too many "maybe's" and your "clever" story starts to look like a spaghetti sieve. And I wasn't surprised by any of the "twists," including the transformation from alien to human.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiTdGqAsD4BymzYiObAA92AAQiuMrC2hSRaxhlrG1Z4H4aLk3iZbOYgPXfbZ0ZKC1rlYMoYefgJc9qgxwb6LxEpeiWr0UpOH4AChdHY82V3DTQBNcTSwUsEmJ67cDGTh6keqOARPINSX3P0/s1600-h/large_WE8460813c.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 348px; height: 185px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiTdGqAsD4BymzYiObAA92AAQiuMrC2hSRaxhlrG1Z4H4aLk3iZbOYgPXfbZ0ZKC1rlYMoYefgJc9qgxwb6LxEpeiWr0UpOH4AChdHY82V3DTQBNcTSwUsEmJ67cDGTh6keqOARPINSX3P0/s320/large_WE8460813c.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5370934747708091858" border="0" /></a><br />And not being surprised by <span style="font-style: italic;">District 9</span> is funny because so things felt so random. You mean to tell me that the aliens are the only ones can operate their weapons, and the weapons are powerful enough to literally explode their enemies, and there are tons of these...and the aliens either don't use them to take over or they sell them for...cat food? (Um, cat food? Giant shrimp from another galaxy are in love with cat food? And calling them shrimp is about the only explanation for the ethnic slur "prawn," because the movie never tells me the how or why.) One friend pointed out that the film mentioned the aliens were likely low-level workers on the ship, which might be interesting enough to make sense, except that raises all sorts of questions like where are the other aliens who actually piloted or lived on the ship, and even then the film only raises that as a hypothesis. If the mothership was always operational, then why the hell do you need the fuel? (And the film never really tells you what the fuel is actually made from or why it takes twenty years to make.) Unless the "ship part" that fell is somehow part of the cockpit, since it can operate as one once it docks inside - <span style="font-style: italic;">but the film never tells me</span>. How did humans learn their language - and, more importantly, how did the aliens learn English - in twenty years without writing anything down (which is one place where that "Well, they're workers" theory starts to look even weaker)? How did the aliens get human-sounding names like Christopher? And if human-sounding, why so English when the film is set in South Africa?<br /><br />And speaking of the setting, when I stopped to think about it, Johannesburg felt more like a gimmick than a setting. It's interesting to see an alien movie taking place outside a big American city like New York for a change, and the allegorical reasons seemed appropriate to somewhere in Africa. But from there, it felt like that's the only reason to set it in Johannesburg, and trying to be so special is a bad reason to set any story. Change a few minor details and the story would've played out the same way in Russia, London or hell, New York. One thing I noted was the voodoo on alien bodies in the film which, again, is an interesting concept of how alien immigrants might impact local culture and/or religion, but from there the ball gets dropped because the voodoo felt like more of a reflection on South Africans being kooky witch doctors than anything, which starts to bother me when I think about using superstitious South Africans as a mere plot device. A friend suggested that Johannesburg was a good setting because Johannesburg has a very diverse culture and society where several immigrant groups are packed into shantytowns like sardines in a can, making it a giant melting pot where aliens could fit in. This is a good theory and it's definitely interesting...except the film doesn't do anything with it.<br /><br />The editing of the film itself bothered me, too. There are a few places where you can tell they got sloppy - there's even a place during the climax where one character was barking orders, then crouching down to snipe out a building, and when the scene cuts to an explosion, the next shot of the character has him back on the other side standing and barking orders instead of crouched where he was. And the oh-so-realistic documentary style was poorly handled and ended up feeling like another gimmick. The film couldn't decide if it was a documentary or a typical sci-fi thriller because the film actually told the story both ways; most of scenes were told in normal linear film fashion, which felt weird because it would switch back and forth between styles from start to end. It wasn't necessarily confusing, but it felt weird.<br /></div><br /><div style="text-align: justify;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEipkzQnna35TSEKKIEjfwpiHAyiV2_U4IYfb3hjuA5Ud2ngzcnSMeRsf-GahMDRRRXBqZx0SnwUt47oM3Mdv3yfasYOpanvZkj4yc_ykAAWSZtiPn5e0LFGQKLtjUkqZfawNqwwGnYXns3B/s1600-h/14district9_600.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 396px; height: 200px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEipkzQnna35TSEKKIEjfwpiHAyiV2_U4IYfb3hjuA5Ud2ngzcnSMeRsf-GahMDRRRXBqZx0SnwUt47oM3Mdv3yfasYOpanvZkj4yc_ykAAWSZtiPn5e0LFGQKLtjUkqZfawNqwwGnYXns3B/s320/14district9_600.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5370935446142532882" border="0" /></a><br />Maybe I'm just an oddball when it comes to sci-fi films; one other thing that significantly separates <span style="font-style: italic;">Cloverfield</span> from <span style="font-style: italic;">District 9</span> is that I'm the only person I know who really enjoyed <span style="font-style: italic;">Cloverfield</span>. But I'm really not that particular about having answers spoonfed to me and usually prefer to be kept guessing during a movie. I feel like I could keep going with pointing out the weak spots in District 9, and that's because it's like one of those house-trained dogs that begins to act stupider the longer you give it attention. Ultimately I can't entirely hate the film because I was definitely entertained and had a good time in the theater. With some better writing and direction (and cleaner editing), the film might've suffered less under the pressure of its constant effort to be "unique" and "special." And perhaps the sequel (and there may almost certainly be one or two of them) will be better developed or explain some of these holes to me. But I can only recommend a dollar-theater or DVD viewing of <span style="font-style: italic;">District 9</span>. I don't understand how it blew your mind, <a href="http://www.observer.com/2009/movies/district-9-blew-my-mind">Sara Vilkomerson</a>, or how the hell you could possibly find it "philosophically sophisticated," <span class="details"><a href="http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2009/08/12/entertainment/e082032D23.DTL">Christy Lemire</a>. To me, those are gimmicky buzz phrases indicating only what this movie <span style="font-style: italic;">maybe</span> could have have been.</span><br /></div><span class="details"><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">*I consider alien movies like <span style="font-style: italic;">Independence Day</span> to be part of the disaster film genre because when you look at the tyoical narrative structure of both films, they generally play out the same way whether the planet is threatened with asteroids, twisters, hurricanes, 2012, or space ships. Makes me think we should also throw in <span style="font-style: italic;">Transformers</span>.</span><br /></span>Elder Roxashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16923524321844669169noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2791408743409837221.post-30452604940029278202009-07-10T17:18:00.000-07:002009-07-12T16:36:55.433-07:00See Mike RunThis is Brother Pratt.<br /><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiL5BKJ-zaO0Gk43vkYcrszsVcn6bD0QRVrTl-Ax3ScSQJ3iqE39ff8ntrIpUNkyKVlqm9y-UWoEIm6Ue_xRFpxcC4lEhagXpNmUWQ7FcKh-bTE9YG5oKoRC2JRKdGGAnZKIhG7MQTIjxyG/s1600-h/1496416.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 306px; height: 231px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiL5BKJ-zaO0Gk43vkYcrszsVcn6bD0QRVrTl-Ax3ScSQJ3iqE39ff8ntrIpUNkyKVlqm9y-UWoEIm6Ue_xRFpxcC4lEhagXpNmUWQ7FcKh-bTE9YG5oKoRC2JRKdGGAnZKIhG7MQTIjxyG/s320/1496416.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5356993655843940962" border="0" /></a><br />This is Brother Pratt in the Utah County Jail (as seen in the<a href="http://www.deseretnews.com/article/705316062/LDS-seminary-principal-arrested.html"> <span style="font-style: italic;">Deseret News</span></a>).<br /><br />Michael Jay Pratt - just saying the name puts courage in the hearts of hundreds of Orem High Tigers who remember him as the great seminary teacher. He was not just an inspiration to us, he was the closest thing some of us had to an actual general authority. People described him in terms of actual salvation. "Brother Pratt changed my life" or "Brother Pratt saved my life." He was a hero in almost titanic description; his spirituality, tracing back to Parley P. Pratt, was believed to be penultimate perfection. A short guy with a big heart who had just the answer for your problems and the right shoulder to cry on when he didn't.<br /><br />And he has been arrested for sexual assault. A 16-year-old girl from his current teacher (and principal) position at Lone Peak's LDS seminary.<br /><br /><p style="border: 0pt none ; margin: 0pt; padding: 0pt; outline-color: -moz-use-text-color; outline-style: none; outline-width: 0pt;" id="kslvid7115675"></p><script type="text/javascript" src="http://pandora.bonnint.net/video/embed-p.php?id=7115675"></script><p style="border: 0pt none ; margin: 0pt; padding: 0pt; outline-color: -moz-use-text-color; outline-style: none; outline-width: 0pt; vertical-align: baseline; font-size: 0.75em; text-align: center; width: 424px;">Video Courtesy of <a href="http://www.ksl.com/">KSL.com</a></p><br />Brother Pratt - the man, the myth, the legend. It all sounds like gross exaggeration. Like me, and others, have blown things out of proportion. And that's precisely because that's what it is. A fiction. A man mythologized.<br /><br />Michael Pratt's life story kinda sounds like something that came out of a seminary movie. He had a troubled past as a teenager fiercely rebelling against the Church he was born into until, one day, he was dared to read the Book of Mormon. It changed him into a spiritual powerhouse causing him to go around spreading love for Christ long before he ever blew out the candles on his nineteenth birthday cake. His mission yielded endless stories for what would inevitably be his life's work: teaching in seminary and Sunday schools.<br /><br />He had a life on the go; he and his family would pack up and move whenever he came to a high school and stay for a few months before picking up again and going to a new school. But he left his mark all over the county. He could get the quiet kid to raise his hand and the talkative jocks to shut up. The door to his office was always open long after school got out for the day and, oftentimes, there was a line of people waiting to lighten their latest load on his shoulders, seeking his advice. His lessons kept you awake and energized; people could repeat the main points from his lessons by topic or memory...and, of course, everyone who took a class from him remembers his "Puddy Cave fieldtrip" lesson.<br /><br />Like I said - a man mythologized. And I'm certainly no different; Brother Pratt is the reason I almost became a seminary teacher. I was one of a few who could comfortably call him Michael - he had been a lodestar in my life since I was fifteen, being the only church-related figure I felt I could talk to about my struggles with my same-gender attractions in high school - and even years later when I became inactive and began dating my first boyfriend, he came to visit me at my apartment and took me to dinner. There are several stories - from funny anecdotes I even tell co-workers to a curious winter night miracle I still can't explain to this day - that describe my friendship with Mike, and my journals from high school feature him and his advice frequently. He was one of my closest friends, down to his current position as the second counselor of the singles ward I inactively belong to.<br /><br />What's interesting now is not just his arrest and this scandal that follows; it's the reactions from all my old high school friends. One friend said, "Bullshit. It's all bullshit - the girl was troubled and has destroyed his life." Another remarked, "I'm shocked. He was...well, everyone thought he was so perfect." Even my sister expects that sooner or later we may yet discover this all to be rumor. Some have already begun attributing "this tragedy" and "this dispicable man" to the subjugation of the devil. "All I can say is blame Satan," said one commenter on DesNews' website.<br /><br />Not many seem to want to examine this for what it is: a beloved church-related figure who is now alleged to be a felon. Instead, all wait in nearly breathless anticipation to see how innocent Brother Pratt will escape and get out of this one intact and precisely as everyone remembers him. The response is largely disbelief, but most of all denial and paranoia. "We'll find out the truth sooner or later - this has all been blown out of proportion."<br /><br />But proportions larger than life have surrounded and romanticized this short-of-stature man for years. We've put him in a light that, perhaps, doesn't truly exists. And now may be the right time for us - especially me - to admit it. It'll be better for any healing that needs to occur to keep the facts straight from the stories we tell...for such is the stuff that heroes are made of. In this important time, remember him not as that mythic hero-god...but as a human being. Like the rest of us. And in that way, maybe he can continue to inspire us. Brother Pratt can be both hero and felon.<br /><br />And I think I know how it will all end. This will undoubtedly stain Brother Pratt's reputation for years. But in time, this will be seen as one other spiritual trial Brother Pratt "bravely" passed through. It will become part of the stories he'll tell in devotionals (which I'm either sure of or hoping) he'll be asked to speak at. "You know, when I spent those hellish nights in jail," he'll start, and the room will quiet. And this will all become hushed controversial apocrypha, like most LDS Church scandals.<br /><br />But - "Do you think he <span style="font-style: italic;">really</span> did it?" people ask me. I answer: "If you love Michael, does it <span style="font-style: italic;">really </span>matter?" Loving doesn't ever mean seeing just the *good.* It means seeing the *person* in spite of the *bad.* And counting in the good. So let's allow God (and the laws of the land) to decide Brother Pratt's innocence or guilt. It need not concern us and is nobody's business but the families and people involved; the rest of us, let's follow C.S. Lewis and "get back to the business of loving." Which is precisely what, as Michael has taught us, Christ is all about.<br /><br />Mike's mythology is too strong amongst too many people for him to pass away into bare naked factuality. This story could break Brother Pratt's heroic narrative among us old Tigers, as well as his other former students. We needn't completely let go of that inspirational myth surrounding him but we do need to break from any dependency on such hero fiction. We, all of us, have been writing the story from the very beginning. He never came to us claiming he was our hero. We did. ...<span style="font-weight: bold;">I</span> did. And I will always - <i><b>always</b></i> - love him dearly.<br /><br />And so it is with all our gods.Elder Roxashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16923524321844669169noreply@blogger.com18tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2791408743409837221.post-54591091035318325182009-07-02T03:24:00.000-07:002009-07-10T18:38:56.095-07:00Queer Film Spotlight: Shelter<span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-style: italic;">Shelter</span> (2007)</span> This movie was a pleasant surprise because I thought it'd be just a softporn like<span style="font-style: italic;"> Latter Days</span> but with "surfer dudes." It turned out to be a well thought out story about a young graffitti artist named Zach who's stuck in urban California dreaming of getting into art school while taking care of his sister, his father and his orphaned nephew, Cody. When Shaun, the gay older brother of his best friend comes into town, Zach starts to rethink his relationships and the direction he wants to take with his life.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFJpTKaaNCvFZ3LZlV2B0UZTDjiXahb1QDIGVOtT29PmUIlKsZm0gaCrcow4ip6dBRZPd3j7-QXTHURjzvZ5QViOJ85r9D90hAR4jG6PkJv-RLw1I2nklEE24Hq-xNi6AF7i7-rkOsK_W5/s1600-h/022108e.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 380px; height: 338px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFJpTKaaNCvFZ3LZlV2B0UZTDjiXahb1QDIGVOtT29PmUIlKsZm0gaCrcow4ip6dBRZPd3j7-QXTHURjzvZ5QViOJ85r9D90hAR4jG6PkJv-RLw1I2nklEE24Hq-xNi6AF7i7-rkOsK_W5/s400/022108e.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5334028180112726722" border="0" /></a><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Shelter</span>'s fault is its vageness about its own story. It lacks plotholes but it also lacks focus. It's not clear how his sister finds out about him and Shaun, or why Cody's father is gone. One scene makes it seem<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEie_kd8cnyEVKaUiHdXkboeNb-Zr6Eb9wjlDCc_1JL5oxANUYM1GLHo_lLcLzptr03ny8zTwBo2uyYR4wSqP9u6I2oZoHojq9mRHFHPZQ_WkNU9_uhqyiPvWIrok7mAVL9FSxfG3ksXToXS/s1600-h/shelter2.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 207px; height: 311px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEie_kd8cnyEVKaUiHdXkboeNb-Zr6Eb9wjlDCc_1JL5oxANUYM1GLHo_lLcLzptr03ny8zTwBo2uyYR4wSqP9u6I2oZoHojq9mRHFHPZQ_WkNU9_uhqyiPvWIrok7mAVL9FSxfG3ksXToXS/s400/shelter2.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5334028928489764418" border="0" /></a>s as if Zach and his sister (as well as his on-and-off girlfriend) all happen to work at the same place. At times, the film's ambiguity gives way to gimicky plot tricks, like the com radio. In addition to taking care of Cody, Zach and his sister presumably must care for their mentally disabled father as well, and yet we only see the father at the very beginning and forget that his character exists until he's mentioned, in passing, towards the end of the film. These might be minor flaws, but they undermine the film's believability.<br /><br />Zach often sleeps away from home, is socially disconnected, and is defensive over his artwork. He has to worry about being a father figure to Cody while maintaining so-called masculinity and applying to an out-of-state art school. I think these are good ways to underline Zach's feeling of restlessness, but unfortunately it was hard to buy all of these things when they happened because, due to Wright's acting, they went like lukewarm milk.<br /><br />This brings me to the film's biggest problem: the characters were all believable except the protagonist himself. The character could have been very interesting, but Trevor Wright plays him like a wooden puppet. His angsty fits would be understandable but his age is supposed to be 22. It's difficult to care about Zach when everything he does feels somehow lacking. Worst is Zach's "change of heart" which feels like a magic trick out of thin air because of how sudden and unexplained it is. By the end when Zach is trying to convince his sister about the future, it sounds more like he's trying to convince himself.<br /><br />Ultimately I think most of the problems I have with Zach were first impressions, and maybe the character will seem better handled on a second round. The film's protagonist might seem like the most underdeveloped part of the movie, which is unfortunate, but ultimately I'd recommend it to anyone. It's very enjoyable, tells a good story, and has a great soundtrack. Shaun's character was well-acted and so was his brother, Zach's best friend. Additionally, the kid who played Cody was good at being both sensitive to the tension between others as well as being innocent.Elder Roxashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16923524321844669169noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2791408743409837221.post-52081834367616274812009-07-01T02:24:00.000-07:002009-07-10T18:46:33.652-07:00Batman is dead.<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj6-H6r3zRDTJVdbMbRuBbOwURkgiEPcq6B7vpXc1dtqfFtVKcqszgcWAUf-gXTI6PsWkT-a1EtGSYt6V3N3D7VRRJO39WzlMUVLHEBy1onr1g8RXiolTz5gJ4jv0ox2v8Q5AiFknEaE0ss/s1600-h/finalcrisis3.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer; width: 78px; height: 333px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj6-H6r3zRDTJVdbMbRuBbOwURkgiEPcq6B7vpXc1dtqfFtVKcqszgcWAUf-gXTI6PsWkT-a1EtGSYt6V3N3D7VRRJO39WzlMUVLHEBy1onr1g8RXiolTz5gJ4jv0ox2v8Q5AiFknEaE0ss/s320/finalcrisis3.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5353422934427711746" border="0" /></a><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTKu7CaPwLt6ohzrRHXd8fOfyBsgbra8KJ0DzBegMZMA15GWSmEsHhf8get76CCYRV0zi3ivdQTy16_4v3Vl_H9IizKZDnJWbXK8M0EUpHOXqONo-TGkCog7x9FtWsiQ-Bfs4nlSEmJuRR/s1600-h/batmanrip.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 208px; height: 312px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTKu7CaPwLt6ohzrRHXd8fOfyBsgbra8KJ0DzBegMZMA15GWSmEsHhf8get76CCYRV0zi3ivdQTy16_4v3Vl_H9IizKZDnJWbXK8M0EUpHOXqONo-TGkCog7x9FtWsiQ-Bfs4nlSEmJuRR/s320/batmanrip.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5353429848050870690" border="0" /></a><br />It's raining blood and tiger cats are riding giant dogs. The fabric of reality is being torn asunder. Batman's got a gun; he must choose between his consistent morality and a once-in-a-lifetime exception. The President of the United States is an African American Superman. Sexual objectification of contemporary female superheroes is fought out between Supergirl (the blonde bombshell, like Marylin Monroe) and Mary Marvel (with a shaved head recalling Britney Spears). Green Lantern Hal Jordan stands trial for a crime he didn't commit. There are crop circles. There are angels and prophets, cannibals and vampires. There's a tiger with a checkered jacket adjusting his bowtie after clawing out someone's innards. Prometheus is bound to a wheelchair. Frankenstein quotes Milton. A Rubik's cube turns people to dust. Hell hounds chase a school bus. An avatar of death, armored in black, is on skis. 98% of the world's population raise their fists to the devil himself after he hacks the internet. A beautiful kiss and tragic self-sacrifice. The first boy on earth, the last boy on earth. Time runs backwards, then forwards. Red and black. Superman screams, winks and sings.<br /><br />I give you FINAL CRISIS by Grant Morrison, J.G. Jones and Doug Mahnke. And after spending the entire night up reading, enjoying every single minute with laughter and plenty of jaw-dropping moments alternating between shock and awe, I still have no idea what the hell just happened.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqdXnT8tQCUGz1QN30YUfy1-PSaqfV34-6BENgb9bhvDAol1slQVECvdTenUL8NtH-omB3gNwdpWhFthXVgtBmhqJAekYih5ZACKbdopD95hhaH7ANsVzujiXUmrFIOimABzgzXxXi4E53/s1600-h/final-crisis.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 214px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqdXnT8tQCUGz1QN30YUfy1-PSaqfV34-6BENgb9bhvDAol1slQVECvdTenUL8NtH-omB3gNwdpWhFthXVgtBmhqJAekYih5ZACKbdopD95hhaH7ANsVzujiXUmrFIOimABzgzXxXi4E53/s320/final-crisis.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5353430313702801074" border="0" /></a>Many people have raised the same point about this work - and a true point: this comic is terribly complex and confusing. The story begins as a murder mystery dressed with Greek myth at the curtains, but from there it explodes into wild chases and space odysseys that, by there very dream logic nature, belong in a comic book. Gritty realism and nihilistic philosophizing switches places with completely over-the-top action and complete baloney physics. Earth-shattering truths are delivered in between outlandish dialogue lines you sometimes want to read twice to believe. Deus ex machina abounds frequently. The comic remains completely po-faced about it all from start to finish.<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQ8xe1hOWkj1nwjDKIrbvbj5A3vjFC3SHBfJcK9PSz0WF91jADjawn7_iKJ3JjAZi-yOFaZldEx2YyeECZOz4DfVYJA1tamc8YrVOzOUjDsFV-x6E_k6v-uIMlXe7y1rvhJGHdD9GjUMMC/s1600-h/fianl+crisis+4.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer; width: 214px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQ8xe1hOWkj1nwjDKIrbvbj5A3vjFC3SHBfJcK9PSz0WF91jADjawn7_iKJ3JjAZi-yOFaZldEx2YyeECZOz4DfVYJA1tamc8YrVOzOUjDsFV-x6E_k6v-uIMlXe7y1rvhJGHdD9GjUMMC/s320/fianl+crisis+4.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5353430441986035314" border="0" /></a><br />And that is exactly why FINAL CRISIS is so brilliant. It manages to be, simultaneously, what comics *were* and what comics currently *are* - what they have become. For Morrison, superheroes have begun to be little more than moralizing or philosophizing social commentaries with only enough life to sustain a narrative structures that can support "realistic" plots. Stories that give you factual reality to believe in, rather than any merit of the story itself. It's all very formulaic. And it's all so very...boring. The very image of Superman holding Batman's burned and battered body expresses this: the imagery is bewildering and chilling at once, and makes us ask ourselves what comics once stood for, and the grim redundancy they've become. Have we kept the magic alive or did we kill it?<br /><br />I've been reading DC comics for less than a year. So I had to do my fair share of homework on characters and events. I knew Barry Allen gave his life to save the world in the first Crisis but I've had very little exposure to Darkseid. I was plenty familiar with the Guardians of the Universe but not the Monitors. I know who the Tattooed Man is but had no idea about Black Lightening. Did the story ever contradict itself, or even the artwork? At least a couple of times, yes. Did the story every become so muddled that I couldn't understand what was going on? Definitely.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzFnlQnz8fjIRGpNq3jfvnbAh5rIKphQ5i5FxxuZQEwNK2ndrRoVvUpTrFi_993SN0TE_EHpargx1laik2SA5cY45TYqVv9gKtQ8O8wg8q8nGV-MbjdILq783Be8d17sL9XbxfGcwZ97h9/s1600-h/final-crisis-hardcover.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 208px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzFnlQnz8fjIRGpNq3jfvnbAh5rIKphQ5i5FxxuZQEwNK2ndrRoVvUpTrFi_993SN0TE_EHpargx1laik2SA5cY45TYqVv9gKtQ8O8wg8q8nGV-MbjdILq783Be8d17sL9XbxfGcwZ97h9/s320/final-crisis-hardcover.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5353425260361416290" border="0" /></a><br />But again: that's EXACTLY why this works. Because you have to just believe in the story itself. Morrison has said in interviews that while background will enrich the story, EVERYTHING you need to read and enjoy FINAL CRISIS is right there in its own pages. The will to believe - the faith in the magic of stories (not storytelling, but stories themselves).Elder Roxashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16923524321844669169noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2791408743409837221.post-40405029257456242312009-06-26T00:18:00.000-07:002009-06-26T01:43:55.164-07:00"I've Waited Here For You, Everlong."The first thoughts I begin to believe in after Kristian leaves is that I will never hear from him again. But the first thoughts I have are unrelated to whether I will hear from him again or not; instead, I'm more concerned about why I can't find the shirt - the shirt I let him use after the dust settled and the heat had reached its limits in my small room. Is it this shirt? Is it <span style="font-style: italic;">this</span> shirt? Is it...this one...is it...And before long, my mind is beginning to wonder if he was ever here at all.<br /><br />Of course he was here. I smell my forearms, then I put the the bottom of my shirt in my face, and I slowly drag my tongue over the dimpled skin between my lips and my nose. Of course he was here; he was here because I can still smell him and taste him.<br /><br />And I can feel him, too...if the only thing I'm feeling by him is the emptiness and slightly unsettling ordinary-ness of my room. The floor is still a bookshelf for all the books - mostly poetry; all the Ginsberg, Whitman, Goethe, Eliot, Dante, Plath, Homer, everything that constantly reminds me that I have so much reading to do, but these Greeks and Beatniks also share the chaos of my floor with my Silver Age comics. The Flash and the Green Lantern shine their perfectly masculine smiles and costumed muscles up at me, along with a new Captain Marvel issue to my right and the nebulous heap of undershirts, underwear and other clothes scattered in a frenzy across the area to my left.<br /><br />They are all still, the books and the comics and the clothes, but the fan is spinning widly. Everything is so quietly the same. I can feel my stomach churning. It's something not digesting properly, maybe the Frosty from three hours ago, but more than that, it's all trying to wrap itself around a familiar fuzzy emptiness. I usually feel that indefinite vagueness in my stomach when I pass a couple kissing or think of Erik. It's the damn romantic in me that always hurts when he doesn't get what he wants most. I only feel it now because instead of enjoying this - enjoying even the <span style="font-style: italic;">aftermath </span>of it - I am trying to make it something serious.<br /><br />"I gotta be cool / Relax / Get hip, get off my tracks...Gotta be cool / Relax..." I have been trying to make this serious from the beginning. I have to remember that the only thing I have to light knowledge on this thing is Erik. But things were particularly clear with Erik simply because we both made it clear from the beginning what we wanted most is what we needed from each other. That's why the relationship clicked together quickly only to burn slowly out on itself. But Kristian and I are moving at lightspeed, and that's precisely because we <span style="font-style: italic;">don't</span> need each other. And the problem is that it's not "just a hook up" because at the same time we care about one another <span style="font-style: italic;">just</span> enough to make it matter. This thing with Kristian is moving so fast that the only thing I can do to slow it down is maybe knock it over the head.<br /><br />As I brush my teeth in the mirror, I try to remind myself that I have no reason to make things so serious with Kristian, just as I have no reason to expect anything from him. He knows this because I've told him. We've both admitted that neither of us want a relationship right now, and I know more and more everyday that a relationship with Kristian might not last long at all. We work well as friends but we could destroy each other in anything more. Even though we both refuse to "see" anyone else, I don't think he's as stuck on me as I wish he was. I know I'm just trying to save myself the pain again. I can't go through what happened with Erik. I knew from the moment we got together that Erik and I would never last the summer. But that was different. Because I do care about Kristian. But I fell in love with Erik.<br /><br />It's not serious, Matthew. And, for right now, it doesn't need to be. This is what I've told myself every time I see him. That's why, instead of making the same mistake I made with Erik and always worry about when the spell will be broken, I will savor every day I spend with Kristian and always assume that it could be the last. It's not a fatalistic mentality, and neither is it merely realistic. It's just how I remember not to put my fingers around the neck of this thing and choke it into being serious. So that it will live.<br /><br />My favorite thing will continue to be how his smell stays all over my hands and my shirt for minutes, occasionally even hours, after he leaves. I will continue to keep my hands off the steering wheel and let this thing drive as fast as it will. And I'll continue to believe. Not that I will never hear from Kristian again. But rather, believe that this - <span style="font-style: italic;">this</span>, this moment...really is worth my while.<br /><br />There's something slowly creeping down my forehead; I am still sweating.Elder Roxashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16923524321844669169noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2791408743409837221.post-79893576063741573382009-06-25T20:20:00.000-07:002009-06-26T01:26:19.545-07:00Notes From The Black Book"Fuck you, Chandler. I love ya, but I am sick of your shit. 'You're so dramatic, Matt' - this coming from a guy who boasts of doing every thing...most people never do by age sixty. He talks like he's never seen a human before. Fuck off!"<br /><br />"Maybe, for the rest of my life<br />I am damned to look for Erik<br />in every white truck I see go down the street."<br /><br />"'I was thinking about getting <span style="font-style: italic;">War and Peace</span>. I've never read that book.'<br />'Yeah, <span style="font-style: italic;">War and Peace.</span> Dostoevsky.'<br />'Yeah.'<br />'You should get this book.' He pulled something off the shelf, and I knew what it was before I saw it: a deluxe illustrated version of <span style="font-style: italic;">Angels and Demons.</span> 'It's the best book.'<br />'Really?'<br />'Yes. I've read it three times.'"<br /><br />[<span class="app docEditedBy" id="noticeDiv" style="padding-bottom: 2px; white-space: nowrap;">6/14</span>] "I spray the Glade all over the ceiling. An orange-mango-smelling mist destroys itself into smithereens across the patch of space above the living room floor. Lindsey might know as soon as she walks in, but it's meant to mask my most recent of sins in case I get a surprise from the cops' latest round of "Pop Goes the Weasel; 'all around the innocent apartments, the monkey chased the zoobies...' that they play every night at 3 AM. Is it ozone-friendly, empty of toxins and firesafe? Probably not. It is more like the blood of innocent lambs that I spray over my doors and doorways to let the Lord know I don't wish the angel of death to come by. Yes, angel of death, pass me by."<br /><br />"Him, in the yellow? That's my best friend, Najib. I would die for him. I'd give my life for him. I love him."Elder Roxashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16923524321844669169noreply@blogger.com0