Musical Potatoes and Painted Shoes.

Sometimes it's better to see the strings.  Sometimes it's better to have asteroids as potatoes and painted shoes.  If you're making a movie, and all the setting and non-human characters are created by computer, if the star of the film is sitting in front of a monitor someplace manipulating images, it's likely to pull down the film.  When I think of my favorite movies, Where the Wild Things Are, The Neverending Story, and the original Star Wars movies, most things were made of costumes, models, giant sets.  A minimal amounts of green screens.  Actors nowadays will never know how to interact with their settings, as they are all acting in front of a screen made to digitally manipulate images.  I mean, why shoot a film out at the ocean? Just create the scene, put sand on the ground, and get the right sound effect files from the studio  computer.  Jaws would (and is, have you seen the Syfy movies recently?) be so much easier to make.  No need for skinnydipping scenes and blood and the sound of actual orchestras.  Just create the sounds of the cellos on computer.  We don't need the flute players anymore.  They should go get a real job.

Of course, I'm being highly sarcastic.  Star Wars would be nothing without John Williams and his brilliance.  But maybe, just maybe, if Yoda were a puppet, and the city of Naboo had been made in some set in Brazil, maybe the new movies would have been better.  Heck, people might have actually enjoyed Jar Jar Binks, instead of finding ways of killing him.  The same thing goes with the music of any movie.  But usually movies have budgets big enough to have a big name composer create a score for it.  What happens when you are trying to make a video game, and it's the 1980's, and the technology isn't there for orchestral works, and your budget is slim?  Well,  you make your musical scores out of potatoes and painted shoes. Lets go for a musical adventure through some of the video games that I dearly loved as a child, not for the game itself, necessarily (although they were all great games), but for the music that artists do not get enough credit for, even after leaving tunes in people's heads for years.

There is no one who lived during the 1980's, and picked up the Nintendo controller, that can't instantly recall the theme for Super Mario Brothers.  But let's go back farther than that, to the days of the Commodore 64.  I must say, before I start this, that without the people that use Youtube as a place to store the history of mankind, from videos to TV to music to historical events, like Yeats' Graecian Urn, most of these pieces would be forgotten.  Let us hope that Youtube retains its function as a time capsule for future people to experience the amazing things that our generation has created.

Dig Dug  The melody track has basically two notes, with the other tracks going around it.  Dig Dug took the annoying siren noise of Pac-Man and turned it into something worth listening to.  And don't tell me that the modern day games are hard... they're nothing compared with the primitive AI of the Dragons that like nothing more than to breathe fire at you before you can blow them up.

        Another version, played on the piano.






Necromancer, by Synapse Software, was amazing, if you kept an open mind.  Grow trees to crush spiders, so the spiders won't grow and attack you while you fight the evil wizard.  It's the beginning song that makes the whole game, tho.







Or if you want to play the game, click here: C64s.com.

Star Soldier and Gyruss.  Nothing like space shooter games, where the space ships can bomb and blast everything in the air and on the planets below.  Actually, I loved Zaxxon from the C64 days, but when the Nintendo came out, these two were the best space games made, in my opinion.  Power ups, spaceships that are everywhere (think Galaga), but you've got to have the stimulating music to match the weaponry, something to activate my ADOS (Attention Deficit Oooh Shiny!).  These both do it well.....












And speaking of stimulating, you can't go wrong with the Intro Theme of Double Dragon. I was never any good at fighting games, but the music on this one was amazing!

 

And before I leave Nintendo World (which, honestly, I could go forever about Zelda and SMB...etc...), there is no video game company which was better at combining graphics, music, and, well, everything, than Capcom, especially the Mega Man series.  Mega Man 2 I would play just for the music.  I'll put the Bubble Man stage here, just because it fits so well with my next point about video game music. 

There's something about water levels and video game music. The 3/4 time of Super Mario Bros, level 2-2 is among the first actual "water" levels that I remember. When 16-bit music came out, composers used the water levels in games to let their ideas shine. The water levels were the soothing, ambient levels, where you could take the level, put the music on loop, and chill for an hour or two. Take Donkey Kong Country, for instance. I'm going to include a track on here now that is actually a remix from OCRemix which amplifies the original score. Just listen...

Perhaps the best water level music comes from the Playstation, from Final Fantasy VIII, the Fisherman's Warf level. Also check out OCRemix artist Tepid's version of it, which I have put on loop in my car and listened to it while I drove: You'll have to click here to listen to it.

Final Fantasy has such wonderful themes, so I'll put 2 more here and then leave it at that.  What I'm trying to point out is that, while the Orchestral works of modern day games are beautiful and, in some cases, easy to make, the beauty that these composers made with just the most basic of electronic music technology is well worth listening, too.  Discover the songs from your favorite games, and then see if there's any great Remixes done on OCRemix.  Below is Relm's Theme from FFVI and then the final theme from Final Fantasy Legend from Game Boy. For the Game Boy theme, click on this link: This Link Here.

 

Death and Mass Production (A Book Review and Remembrance)

Book Review: The Fault in Our Stars by John Green

I must admit that when I saw this book in the stores, and picked it up, I realized it was the last thing I would want to read.  I mean, just another "kids dying with cancer story," depressing and melodramatic. My mind immediately leapt (the autocorrect doesn't have "leapt" as the past tense form of "leap.") to Death Be Not Proud, which most children have to read during high school at some point.  It's a matter of Pathos, I believe, to read these books where kids (or their pets) die, so that it says 1) "Quit Whining, it could be a whole lot worse. and 2) it prepares them for later traumatic experiences.  I swear I'm gonna rewrite Old Yeller , and make it actually have a happy ending.  Of course, you could always give it a sardonic twist, like authors are doing lately, and instead of a rabid fox biting the dog, you could have a mad werewolf biting the kid, so that the dog lives, but the boy dies.... anyhoo, I'm rambling now.  Back to the book.

But as I was saying, I didn't want to read another "Cancer" book.  My grandmother had just recently died of pancreatic cancer, and so why would I have to go through all that again in the pages of a book?  We want to escape reality, not live it over again.

Well, I was wrong.  Turns out that John Green actually realizes that, to twist a Bob Dylan line, "He busy dying goes through a lot of living." Because as I found out with my grandmother, dealing with death is best done as an affirmation, a recollection, of life.  There's no better way to surround the not-so-pleasant times of dealing with medical issues than to bring forth the humor that surrounds us daily.  My grandmother, as she was being prepared for her aneurysm surgery, was asked, "How do you feel?" She, in her wry humor, replied, "With my fingers."  It was the best thing she could have said.

So John Green picks up on this humorous thread and weaves it through the whole book.  He deals with the emotions of the teenage characters very honestly, with more depth than most Lifetime tearjerker movies.  Hazel, Augustus, and Isaac, (ironic that he's called Isaac, (eye-sic), since he's about to go blind) just roll their eyes at most of the attitudes of the adults in their lives.  They make fun of the "strong fighter kid who is always positive even while they lose his/her hair, limbs, etc....," even, when the time comes, they have to portray that image themselves.

Green picks up on the progression of cancer quite well, even talking about the "last good day" that seems to happen to terminally ill people.  I had one afternoon shortly before my grandmother died where she picked up her spirits and we sat there and laughed and she poked fun at me, before she went so far downhill we couldn't care for her at home.  He painted that scene so well in the book.  It was, to some extent, very cathartic for me.

That the title is based on a line from Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet (with all the foreshadowing that it implies), or that the book is filled with references to Eliot's "Prufrock" poem, or Frost's "Nothing Gold Can Stay,"  are added bonuses for those teachers who will inevitably put down the tired Gunther tome and teach this book to their 10th grade English students instead.
***

One part of the novel I found interesting, because it goes back to one of my other blog posts, was this fascination by Augustus about the Afterlife, be it a Christian based one or those suggested by any of the other religions, or nothing at all.  And it's fascinating because, if we are to believe that the philosophies of the 20th century and the secular material world have phased out the traditional Christian beliefs of Heaven and Hell, then this part of the book, and other references to the Afterlife (see Beetlejuice, or Paul Simon's song "The Afterlife,"  (go to my blog about the Afterlife for these examples.)
) is a desire to fill that void.  When reading this book and reflecting on it, I was pulled to  the band Death Cab for Cutie's song "I'll Follow You Into the Dark."


An amazing song that goes so well with the book, especially the line, "fear is the heart of love," something the singer rejects.  There's so many ways to incorporate songs, poems, TV shows....etc... into this book, it really would be a great teaching tool, if a little controversial.
***

Since we're dealing with these subjects, I wanted to put here that a good friend I had in high school died this past week. Johnathan Ashley Nix passed away from a massive stroke.  I always loved his wry sense of humor, his unique way of looking at things, his refusal to let all the normal people of Heritage High to get to him all that much, even while I shrank inside myself from bullying.  It was perhaps this that kept me from really making friends with, well, anybody. He signed my yearbook, my senior year, with a long, rambling diatribe about anything, writing it upside-down and right to left.  It took me holding it up to a mirror to read the whole thing.  In the middle is his tune about "Mass Production," a Henry Ford-esque march anthem, much like you would hear in Brave New World.  I still remember the tune he used to sing it.  I only wish I could have been friends with him longer, from when we met in the 6th grade...  He took me to see a truly horrible version of Hamlet at an Atlanta Theatre for school credit (the professor was friends with someone there, I suspect), and so he brought over a ton of Fantasy books that he didn't want.  Among them was The Quest for the Faradawn by Richard Ford, a British author.  Truly a magnificent work, and one of the few I've read where most of the main characters were animals.  Anyway.... I'm just telling the few points in my life where his "thread" touched mine, and so hopefully it will be made fuller and more complete.  Outside of any afterlife or immortality that our souls go into, the memories that we have here are what keep Ashley living on here, inside our own hearts.  I scanned my yearbook page and have it below.

Skywriting and Trail Walking

There are few places in the world where you can truly experience freedom.  Away from technology,  other people, all the social restraints and mental hangups we all have about most everything.  No financial issues, no cars screaming to get gas, your eyes constantly on the arrow pointing dangerously close to "E," hoping that it'll get you home and back to a gas station by the time you get paid again.  There are very few places in this world where all that goes away, leaving us with our own two feet  and our minds.  One thing I know, there's nothing like the grocery store parking lot.

Back a couple decades ago, when Walmarts didn't dot the Conyers countryside, when there was a Richway, and a Big Star, and the building behind Arby's was actually a movie theater, there was a 16 year old boy just beginning work as a Bagger at Bruno's Finer Foods.  I was the fastest bagger there, and second fastest cashier.  But late at night, when the other baggers would rather be in the back pretending to put the fruits and herbs back in the refrigerator, I'd go get buggies out of the parking lot.  And there was total freedom away from most everything.  It was in the early nineties, so the only music available was that in my head.  And I sang those songs while gathering carts.  Only 5 at a time, for safety reasons (I think I was the only one to follow that, it was so "manly" to get 12 carts and push them all in at once).  My favorite song to sing out there was "Skywriter" by Art Garfunkel and Jimmy Webb.  Simply wonderful.  That was freedom.

 I'm reminded of this as I walk through the trails in Rockdale       County.  There are no people around, no financial pressures, just the ticking of time keeping pace with my walking staff.  So a week ago, I parked on the north side of the Rockdale River Trail (you can find it on Google Maps by looking up Daniels Bridge Rd, off Union Church Rd.) and walked to the clearing where the power lines stretched north to the power station.  I started south, trudging up the hill, higher and higher, until just before the top I looked over and saw Stone Mountain over the horizon to the north.  Don't think I've ever seen Stone Mountain from Rockdale.

Over the top of the hill, underneath the giant towers of flowing electricity, and continuing, there's a valley of green flora, weeds and insects.  Grasshoppers flying away from the trail, the cicadas rubbing their legs together in the hot Georgia summer.  To the right, a couple of houses are far off into the adjacent forest, and one has a rooster, so it crows, not knowing the time
of day.  This path would take me into a valley and up another hill to East Fairview Road, but I had already been that way.  This time, I turned east and climbed another steep hill to a grassy area.  On the left, a large granite outcrop grew out of the forest like some ancient ruins.  I climbed to the top of the rocks and looked around at the beauty of the trees, the grass, the sounds of life all around me.  Around the grass, dirt had been mounded together to make ramps for motorcycles, mopeds, and the like.  I wondered, as I listened to everything, why people on motorcycles would so freely roam this area, filling up the valleys with noise and not caring about everything that surrounds them.  I wondered how many people on foot had climbed those hills, reached the top on their own, and saw everything that Rockdale County had to offer.

Then I reached the gazebo overlooking the paved trail far below, next to the South River.  It reminded me of Stonehenge, some structure built long ago to watch over everything.  Turns out, it was an Eagle Scout project made by a neighbor of mine, Keith Asher, and his troop.  The gazebo had been pulled off it's original foundation by those same moped riders, but it was still very secure and well built.  I felt like I had made it to some end goal, standing atop some mountaintop, and it was good.

There are other trails I have followed where each dirt path had imprinted on it the hooves of horses (and honestly, I had to watch where I stepped).  Again, the trails were filled with sights that you just don't see going about your daily chores, a loan tree towering above the rest, plants I had never seen with soft, furry leaves, the cooler breezes going through the forest as the sun began to set.  And while I respect the people who traverse this area on their horses, I still think that these areas would be better enjoyed on foot.   There are similar trails at the Georgia International Horse Park, but according to the map, the trails are divided between bike paths and horse trails.  Would that we be able to walk any square inch of this Earth with our own two feet.  Just to walk, we should be able to go anywhere, but the fences and the signs and the obstacles that our laws put in place keep us in tight quarters.  Walking costs nothing except time, harms nothing, wears nothing out save the soles of our shoes.  It takes no maintenance, no oil changes, no cleaning of waste products.  It is marvelous and wonderful and if we could rid ourselves of the wheels and machines that walk for us, we would be in control of where we went.

A car can only go on streets, the width restricts us, the gas limits us.  But if we could walk to everywhere we needed, we would be totally free to explore and expand indefinitely.  There is nothing to keep our legs from traveling anywhere we wanted.  That is freedom.  You will not find true freedom cruising along the highways of America, although it certainly is tempting.  In my opinion, you will find the open freedom that I seek only on your own two feet, walking up hills and through valleys to places unknown.  May I never run out of trails to travel, nor miles to walk.

Movie Review: The Odd Life of Timothy Green

The reviews I read (that I agree with) said that you have to approach the movie without any cynicism whatsoever, which is extremely hard to do.  It also was obviously cut short, with many good moments left on the cutting room floor.  I keep wondering how it would have worked with a novel, written by someone who could pull it off.  The best part of the movie is the actors.  It could have been atrocious, but the actors pulled off a very barren script and made it worth watching.  The same cannot be said for, say, the latest Star Wars movies,  (and no, I'm not gonna pick on Jake Lloyd here).  C.J. Adams carries the whole movie on his shoulders, and does it with every inflection, every raise of the eyebrow.  He's the Haley Joel Osment of this decade.  Let's hope he doesn't mess it up like HJO did. Joel Edgerton and the other supporting cast did a likewise magnificent job.  Also, the music score was great.  I wish I would have listened to the soundtrack before I went to see the movie.  I did that with Where the Wild Things Are, and it was amazing!



Ahmet Zappa, who wrote the script, obviously is highly intelligent, using references to literature all throughout.  For instance, the story takes place around a pencil factory.  Henry David Thoreau worked at a pencil factory early on, who famously wrote in Walden about "marching to the beat of a different drum."  Timothy Green certainly does that.  He's also very much a naturalist, working with his girl friend (Odeya Rush) to make the leaf palace.  Also, the Pencil theme is famous because of an essay by Leonard Reed, (a prior blog goes into that) who goes into all the people who make a single pencil, all the individual jobs that go into constructing the eraser, the wood, the graphite. It is a magnificent essay of the free-market world, with each worker supporting the other.  And while the movie has a decidedly anti-capitalist tone, the idea that individuals, working together, can support and lift up each other, creating, as it were, a better mouse trap, is a wonderful message for today's world.

The main criticism I have is the framed effect they use with the Adoption Office.  I wonder how it would have changed to leave that part out.  It gives away the ending, right at the start.  You know what will happen all throughout, and it puts a sad tug the whole time (probably intended.)

Speaking of that sad tug, I walked out of the movie feeling much like I did when I saw Pay it Forward. I probably would have cried at some point, but I didn't have time to.  I had to go to work afterwards, and there just wasn't time.  And that got me to thinking, we just don't have the time to experience all the emotions that come with our lives.  We're too busy living at 45 when we should be at 33 and1/3.  Try playing a 33 record at 45 on a turntable.  The singers sound like chipmunks, and you lose so much of the emotional pull of the music involved.  Barry White would become very un-Barry Whitish, if you get my meaning.  Sometimes it's best to be like Thoreau, to watch the ants go back and forth.

In the end, I would put this movie in the same category with Pay it Forward, A.I., Where the Wild Things Are, (all underrated movies that are some of my most favorite) which are movies about kids, but definitely not for kids.  Disney's commercials  for the movie on their own channel are actually misleading in how "supernatural" CJ Adams character actually is. In fact, he's just a normal kid, with leaves growing out of his legs.

Olympic Blahs

Only a few hours left before the start of the NFL preseason starts, and our month long wait for anything football will end.  Being football fans, games, analysis, talking ESPN heads droning on and on about what Tim Tebow has done or how Darth Vaderish Bill Belicheck is, anything like that is better than what's on television currently.  Most shows on now serve only to lower the IQ of most Americans by several points each year.  But that's not what I want to talk about right now.

Currently, you turn on the TV and hit any NBC owned station and you'll find coverage of the 30th Summer Olympiad from London.  I love the Olympics; I really do.  The theme music is yet another work of brilliance by John Williams, and Brian Costas usually does a great job of covering the two-week competition. Watching all the sports, seeing the perfection of the human body, in form, in function (don't I sound like Hamlet?), with what skill they move and bend and perform, as if some orchestra shared with my ears a cacophony of sound exalting the human spirit.  To watch the Olympics is to witness human beings at their physical best.

But this time, I've been consistently bored with the broadcasting of the Games.  It's fantastic that America has performed so well, earned so many medals, but this time I'm just not excited about it.  And there are a ton of reasons why I think this Olympiad is among the most banal games ever broadcast.

When Football season begins again (soon, and very soon), I know for a fact that Touchdowns are worth 6 points (plus the PAT), and Field Goals are worth 3. In baseball, you run around the track and it's worth 1.  Simple scoring procedures.  Even Golf (when they don't decide to mess with it) is easy to follow.  So when I watch the Olympics, I want a simple scoring system that anyone can  understand.  It was like that in 1984, when Mary Lou Retton scored a 10 to win Gold for the Americans.  The diving competitions do it that way.  Jumps are worth a maximum of whatever score, 8.5, 9, 10...etc... and then deducts are done from there.  And while gymnastics is sort-of that way, it changes every single year.  If only the judges would hold up paper signs of their scores like they do in cartoons.  NBC tried to make it easier by using a color code for good, so-so, and bad scores, but it didn't help.

And while we're on the subject of judges.... let's get to know them.  I mean, we all know who Simon Cowell, Randy Jackson, Sharon Osborne are.  They need to introduce the judges for the Olympic sports.  Let us know why they are judging the competition, why they are qualified. Let's know the nationalities of them, and give a run down of how they score different things.  If not, they should just let computers scan the performances, find irregularities, and spit out a score.  The computers, like the current judges, would be omnipotent and invisible.  It's a human sport.  Let's make everyone human.

Speaking of humans... When we watch our favorite sports, football for instance, we have a clear cut reason for routing for certain teams.  I want the Oklahoma Sooners to win all their games. I love seeing Steve Spurrier lose (because he throws his hat off in disgust).  But why should I care who wins the Men's shotput? Or Women's 1000m relay?  The answer is, of course, the human interest story.  It's what made NBC's coverage of past Olympics so watchable.  We looked into the days and lives of the athletes from all over the world.  What was a common day like for the underdog Romanian gymnast? How did the Ugandan Marathon runner train for his sport, and was he running away from enemies in the country?  The athletes aren't just superbly toned bodies, they are human beings with human stories.  There was none of that this time.  We saw the USA girl gymnasts in modeling poses, and, outside of Gabby Douglas, we saw nothing about where the others come from.  Sports were broadcast with no switch-over, with no warning, and in prime-time, they filled the time slot with as many USA performances as possible, without worrying about who they were or who they were competing against. They might as well have been robots out there.

And let's face it, NBC had the ability to film years of human interest stories and show them on any number of channels.  The biggest mess up that NBC/Comcast did was to not use the NBC Sports Channel in the way that ESPN has.  While the Olympics were going on, the NBC Sports Channel had Poker on.  I never saw Olympic stuff on that channel.  They could have used that station to show recaps, human interest stories, analysis...etc... much like ESPN uses SportsCenter.  I could keep SportsCenter on all day.  I keep up with all the sports, at least in a glancing mode, all year round.  That way I can talk intelligently about baseball or basketball or hock...well, maybe not that, any time I need to.  The Olympics should have had the same thing.  An information source to keep everyone educated about what was going on.

Honestly, I thought the Olympics would be a welcome distraction from everything else that's on TV right now.  Nothing.  Nada. Zip.  Endless "reality" shows, sit-coms that are anything but funny, reruns of game shows, like Wheel of Fortune, where I can guess the puzzles cause I've seen them before, or, if the networks aren't exciting, we can always watch hours of political analysts shouting at one another ad nauseum. But this time, I think the rest of television actually brought down the games.  My expectations of the Olympics were lower because I have no expectations for anything else NBC or any other network shows.  It might have even started with the scandal about the USA uniforms for the Opening Ceremonies not being made in America. It was obvious that the television stations cared only about scandal and division than the unifying celebration the Olympics were supposed to be.  I gave up watching actual television a long time ago.  If it's not on Disney/Nick... I'm probably not going to watch it.  It's all just garbage.

I left out the whole argument about time zones and time-delay programming, because I don't think that really mattered that much.  Even editing was okay (as Golf is edited all the time and is enjoyable), it's what they showed and what they edited that was the problem, along with everything else above.  How social media affected the games, I'm not sure.  I have no problem knowing who won before watching it.  I have a problem not knowing who I'm watching.  It'll be up to those at NBC to know how to use Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Hulu...etc... to their best advantage.  They have 2 years to figure it all out.  Integration of the all medias, as well as a clear, concise way of letting people know the schedule, is imperative before they get to Russia and Rio. The Olympic Games are a global, international event.  I hope that given the global media, NBC can figure out how to make individual athletes matter as much as the medal count for entire nations.  It has nothing to do with USA vs. China.  It has everything to do with the ability of the athletes to perform at the ultimate level of human achievement.  That is what will inspire people to become the best they can be at whatever they're good at.  It gives people a goal to achieve, a common one, a goal that will unite, not divide people and nations. 

Weddings; Facebook; Crossing Threads (A Eulogy)

My brother got married this weekend. Lots of Pomp, lots of Circumstance, lots of great food. The caterers made this herb dip to put on crackers, cream cheese and all types of dill, parsley, probably rosemary... amazing stuff. As for the wedding itself... it's like finishing a hand-knitted sweater. You know, the ones that your mother put on you to play out in the snow, the one's that remind you of Christmas, fireplaces, good food, relatives. And there's a reason for that. It's in the threads itself. The metaphor is as old as weaving itself, from the ancient Greeks' Fates to modern day quantum physics, we could each count ourselves as an individual thread, created and tied to our parents, our loved ones, and then split off to join other threads in this grand sweater. Think of each point in time that we live and then join them together in the cosmos of space-time. It becomes a line of moments, beginning and ending in this great jumbled up mess of a universe.

The threads run parallel, at all angles, and intersect, all in different directions. For some, we hope that we never see that thread again, and in others, the thought of a thread being torn away is heartbreaking. There's nothing we can do about some of it, with chance, or the hand of God maneuvering the threads of our lives hither. It's the merging of those threads together to make a stronger fabric, that is what a marriage ceremony is all about. A bed sheet with a high thread count is much more sturdy than a cheaper one, where holes can easily appear with a careless use of scissors. It is best to have a high thread count in our lives, no matter what you might ask of me in person.

So the wedding is a celebration of the merging of two threads. May they never depart from one another. Weddings are a thread attractor, pulling, charging the ions of threads to come together and intersect. It's this point that most weddings are sorely missing together. We have such little time in today's life to travel, to communicate with our friends and family, and so when those chances arise, let us take advantage of them. The days before and after a wedding should be filled with the get-togethers of friends that have not seen each other in years, family chats on front porches or kitchens like in times past. Let us not join threads for an instant, only to go off in our own directions, alone. We should linger, remembering, bringing the experiences of our lives together. It's the only way we'll learn. Let's make a wedding a week long experience, a celebration of our lives to that point, a re-dedication to friendships, loved ones. Let's not put off that phone call, that letter, that drive to the next town to see an old friend. Let's make the fabric of our lives strong, so that can never be ripped asunder.
 ***

 How do you find a thread in this busy world? So many people going about their lives without knowing what's going on. I've heard that sites like Facebook and Twitter are simply a waste of time, keeping people apart even while promising more communication. And while it would better to talk to people face to face, sometimes when you only have a few minutes, checking up on people's lives online is easier. It's the magic of Facebook and Twitter. Facebook is declining because people just post silly pictures of cats and messages now, instead of using as an instrument of communication. And when a thread is cut, Facebook (especially with the new Timeline idea, which I love.) becomes a portrait of someone's life. A virtual biography that will last as long as the Internet (or at least Facebook) does. They become those crosses on the side of the road, a plaque next to a statue. May they stay there for many generations.
***

A customer came up to me in Lifeway a few weeks ago and bought some devotionals, and I instantly recognized her. Many years ago, when my stepdad drove an ice cream truck, I went with him from time to time. On one of the stops, a mother would come out with her young son and buy ice cream, and she and my stepdad would talk about life and such. It made riding in an un-airconditioned truck worth it, to bring happiness to those in the community. The son's name was Eli Simpson. And so Mrs. Simpson would come up with Eli to the grocery store where I worked and buy groceries. I went over to their house one day to invite them to a new year's eve celebration at our church, and when I went into the kitchen, I found that Mrs. Simpson had saved all of the Snapple Elements bottles and put colored water in them. I have those same bottles on the top of a bookshelf in my room. I always remember that we had the same collection going. At the celebration at the skating rink, Eli was skating and fell, hitting his head on the side of the rink. Made a nasty gash on his head, and he had to go to the hospital and get some stitches. Don't think I ever saw them again after that, as I went off to college and then to the bookstores...etc...

So, back to Lifeway, I asked her how Eli was doing. She told me that he had killed himself about a year before. Shocked, I didn't know what to say. She said she wished we could go back to those days of innocence next to the ice cream truck. It saddened me, to think that someone that young and full of life was suddenly gone. So I tried to find what happened, some record of it. There was no obit. in the Rockdale Citizen, only a record of mischief in a police blotter. I finally found a record of his death in the funeral homes records online. I did find his Myspace page, with little activity past about a year ago.

I don't know what happened to him. Why his thread was cut short. I don't know how he grew up or what his life was like past getting ice cream. What is on Myspace is normal teenage banter, so there's nothing to learn from. Further, there is no record on there of his passing. So, as a eulogy for him, I leave this blog post with metatags so that anyone that searches for his name will find it, and they can leave memories of his life. For parents out there, never let your child's "thread" get too far from your own, and hug them and let them know they are loved. I know that Mrs. Simpson loved her son very much, no matter what trouble he got into. All this for a thread that only crossed mine a couple of times, but it is worth it. Those are the memories that make up our lives, that make creation whole. Let us remember them.




I leave this with a linked song from Spotify, since I cannot find it on Youtube. It is Stan Rogers' song "Delivery Delayed," sung by Mary Travers of Peter, Paul, and Mary. It suggests that, even when we are born, our lives have many births, whether religious or otherwise. In this song, we grow up, grow apart, and only are "delivered" when we reach out for the love of our parents, only to find it had always been there. A very powerful song, and fitting for this Eulogy.

Wild Places

I don't pretend to be an environmentalist.  Someone recycling cans could probably fund college through what I throw away.  I'm not going to make excuses for this; I'm too lazy to make the effort.  I remember listening to Rush Limbaugh on his radio broadcasts, where, during the event that has been called "Earth Hour," where everyone is supposed to turn off their lights for an hour to preserve energy / pay homage to "The Earth" (as if our power is some sort of ritual lamb were supposed to slaughter), Rush tells people he's gonna turn on all his lights.  I agree with him... I'd go buy those flood lights that rotate in the sky and pay a huge electric bill that month.  I really wouldn't do that, but I don't agree with the idea in the first place.  In fact, the whole idea of Environmentalism is about as complex as you can get.  If you would ask me my top 10 books, easily among them would be Henry David Thoreau's Walden.  Simply give me a log cabin out in the woods someplace, next to a river (and if I ever win the lottery, I've got one picked out), and an ultra-fast line to the Internet, and I'm all set.  I'll sit and watch the ants gather food for their hills.  You see, there's a distinct difference in loving Nature, wanting to treasure and relish in the glorious things of this world, and being an Environmental Activist.


I guess it goes back to political ideologies. It concerns how we want to govern our lives, how we see our contract with those who would govern over us.  Our relationship with our fellow man. At its core, Environmentalism is a genuine concern for our planet, with maintaining the beauty and wonder of the planet we live in.  While walking the trails at the SRCP (South Rockdale Community Park), along the South River, I've seen many empty beer cans, other pieces of trash, even a bag of Legos spilled out on the ground.  And at times, I've noticed the water itself has a green tinge that is probably caused by pollution upriver in Atlanta.  I am not saying that the SRCP and the South River are junky.... it is truly beautiful, as the pictures I've taken show.  It would take very little for volunteer groups to pick up what little trash is there.  It would take so little to recycle cans, to conserve water...etc...  We use a large bucket to collect the water that comes out of the compressor in our air conditioning system.  We could, if we had a garden, use it to water the plants and save on using water out of the hose.  It makes complete sense... except we don't have a garden to do that with.

The problem with Environmentalism lies in how you handle the problem.  Companies like Disney, who created a  "Friends for Change" program on TV, have used private funding to promote volunteer work from their clients.  Excellent job! Through individual efforts, so much can be done to promote conservation of our resources...etc...  However, it's when people decide that government regulation of large corporations and commercial regulations of such things as light bulbs, that I start to object.  At this point, the power is taken away from the individual and put in the hands of bureaucrats in the government.  It ceases to be about caring about the planet we live on and more about money, power, and status.  Environmentalists become identical to the private corporations they seek to drain power from.  And then I get turned off by the whole thing and start agreeing with the bombastic statements that Rush Limbaugh uses against the Environmental movement.

The Paradox comes into play here.  By that I mean the Libertarian paradox that states that limited government is ideal when the "ideal" is followed.  If every private corporation instituted measures to protect the environment, preserve resources...etc..., then no regulation would be necessary.  However, not every business is going to operate by what is right, as the desire for profit at the expense of those they are responsible to (including the customers, the Earth, their stockholders), will overcome the reasoning for self-regulation.  Thus the government is needed to assume such actions.  And it drives me nuts!  Because almost every issue runs up against the Paradox when "ideals" are brought to the table. I return to Thoreau at this point, reading his essay on Civil Disobedience, especially the last two paragraphs.  Well worth the look.

Now, jumping to my walks down the trails of the SRCP.  A song kept coming into my head, one by Peter, Paul, and Mary.  In 1982, they self-published a live concert album titled Such Is Love.  I originally found it in a used music store located by my grandmother's house in Oklahoma City. The cassette had never been opened, but what music it contained!  One of the tracks was "Wild Places."  It brings together the idea of protecting the Environment,

 

living along side the beautiful works that God made on this globe, and the idea that doing so is an act of devotion.  For the very fact that such beauty exists in this world, outside of our influence, is an argument that God created this aesthetically pleasing place for someone to enjoy.  Namely, us.  If we cannot take care of it, then it was a wasted effort on his part.  And since I know that this is a fallacy, since God is outside of time and error, then He expects us to enjoy the beauty He has given us.  And what better way than to walk down the trails of this land and witness the beauty of nature, as well as the monumental objects we have placed on this Earth.  I always get this feeling that we need to make God "proud" of us.  For He must have pride in those He loves (and by the fact that we were made in HIs image, we must have pride in the objects we create.)

The duplicate beauty of the trails I've walked is that it contains both God- and Man-made wonders.  Taking a scene from literature, Howard Roarke, in The Fountainhead stands on the hill outside of the architecture school and visualizes the magnificence he can create from simply the clay and rock around him.  A marvelous first scene of any book, in my opinion.  We create things on this Earth for our own convenience, and if we do this in a method which preserves the natural beauty of the world, or even enhances it, then we have used our talents in ways that God would approve.  We have created objects in our world that are good, just as He created this world.   So whenever I cross the hill and see towering before me the power lines that stretch to the far horizon, it is beautiful to me.  If only other people could see the aesthetics that I see.

On a related note, an article in Yahoo showed an design from Meridian 105 Architecture that would work perfectly with my idea of an apartment building that would conserve space and allow people to live in balance with Nature, with Commercial space below ground, and Educational and Religious structures in a vastly increased green space that would be created from the destruction of unneeded current buildings.  Check out more designs here!