new dawn

Christmas break just started, I'm in bed awake late at night as usual and I thought I'd write a bit.

I'm rereading some of my thoughts from earlier-- sometimes I know how to articulate what I think. That's encouraging. My English professor commented to me that some of the best writing can come late at night because we might be closer to the unconscious... I think he might be right.

Anyway- I'm full of that rejuvenated feeling you get when you scrape through a semester of hard work and emerge on the other side, relatively unharmed. I'd like to get a fresh start this next semester and see if I can't finally learn from my mistakes and excesses.

I want to meet people.
I want to create a new me- no, I want to perfect the old me.
I want to write more.
I want to start exercising, build some muscle.

It dawned on me recently that I am not my body, my representation. I am Ryan, and I exist within that form. The form is mine to change as I will. Putting everything in perspective has filled me with a new optimism.

I feel capable, but also restless again. If I can get some things done over break that I've been meaning to do I think the restlessness will go away. When you're on the road to self-fulfillment, you don't get the restless feeling as much.

My mind is surprisingly empty right now, close to a sleepy nirvana state. This is good for meditation but not writing. I'll say a few more things and get some much needed rest.

The advanced fiction writing class I'll be taking this semester has me excited because I can feel myself taking the steps I need to fashion myself into something great, to harness my talents. I will write, even when it's difficult and when I don't enjoy it because I know that's what I can do, what I'm able to do. I want to load syllables into the cannon and fire them out, build worlds with words, brick by brick. Although I haven't read much of his work, I stand in awe of writers like Cormac McCarthy.

That is a man who looks at the english lexicon, and truly selects words to place on a page. He isn't writing as much as he is building something. His style is uniquely his own, his vocabulary has a spirit and an ethos, it evokes an entire internal universe unparalleled by other writers I've come across. The feeling as a reader that you get when you know the writer is twisting the material within his hands is a good one to have. I want to be the giver of that feeling rather than the receiver. The same feeling came across me when I downloaded Raekwon's new album, and compared the written lyrics to his delivery.

No words were off limits. The writing actually came alive in the delivery- images flashed before my eyes and created something that was much more than what he had started with. I look forward to doing this in the future.

new year

As always I've been neglecting this, but I started trying to write the other day and was interrupted when Jeff came back... so I guess now is as good a time as any.

I told Kayley to start writing as an outlet (theres a name that hasn't even been mentioned in this yet), and seeing how quickly she took it and with what dedication, it's made me want to push myself a little more to start being a better "writer." Not in terms of quality necessarily, just with more frequency.

I've only got about four minutes before the movie screening starts which I'm bound to fall asleep in so I'll have to come back to this later tonight at the library. Just had to get something down on paper for the new school year.

recirculation, hopeful re-ignition

Just finished writing an essay related to Greek American influence and sent it to my grandparents. I was pretty pleased with it because it was semi-focused as opposed to a huge broad attack on every facet of Grecian influence, which would have been impossible to write about. I feel a little guilty hearing people call it "brilliant" or even "good" because most of the stuff isn't very original, pretty much pop-media philosophy lifted directly from the tail end of Media 101, but oh well. Anyway-

Gram's comments made me consider logging a few more entries into this, since she talked more about disciplining a natural talent to hone it into something really great.
Actually thinking about it now there's probably nobody better to take advice from on something like that than her, her talent at painting seems so organic now that I take it for granted. But I've heard countless times that her talent is a result of prodigious, diligent practice and years of lessons on top of the natural "spark". Her advice made me just now feel a semblance of the perennial 'spark' that I just mentioned so I figured I better seize the moment.

I think part of the reason I hate writing in this so much is that my stream of consciousness sounds so much better without a stenographer. Looking back on what I've got so far is like an ironed out perversion of my thoughts, a really selective organization of a handful of things that darted in and out of my mind. But reading it back feels slow and cumbersome. Maybe I just can't write with enough fluidity or focus yet to capture them before they change. I guess as I write - literally now- I can feel my mental voice become more and more aligned with the one here. So it's close enough I guess, except that I can edit my internal monologue, a pro and a con.

Just to reiterate, tonight's talk with my grandparents has touched a small part of the spark I've been looking for a lot in my life lately. So it's like I'm a trout being re-released into the stream of writing so to speak, hence the title. I'm finding that I like my blog posts more and more in terms of titles as I read them back. I usually just pick a word or two to sum up the feeling of the moment I'm writing in and usually my writing below conforms to meet my original premise. It might be kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy but its great to see it come together after.

I'm writing while I listen to music which I haven't been doing since Jake and I have been watching so much True Blood during the night hours. I think he likes spending the time with me a lot right now since he's grounded, plus it gives us something to share. We've always been really close but recently also completely different. So it's a good way to close the distance.

But its not just any music like usual, its Third Eye Blind's new cd Ursa Major. Third Eye Blind's debut has been so loved to death by me that it's better and easier to just think of it as a part of my personality rather than just an external collection of songs. I can't decide how I feel about this new one, its probably too early to pass judgment on it but I might as well anyway. I love a few of the songs but it's also really disappointing.

And it's strange to react with so much disgust to a band I love so much, because I feel like I'm turning the blade on myself. When Stephen Jenkins does the semi-rap delivery and misses the tone that he's nailed before, I feel like someone should just put him out of his misery. Or in 'Don't Believe a Word' when he drops the couplet talking about 'Brother, Brother' I want to avert my ears in shame. I really fill with a strong hate for some reason since it's such a low point in what could have otherwise been a great song. It hurts because I know he has it in him to create another CD like ones I love from my childhood but he continually fails to live up to the first. Blue grows on me more and more too, but nothing will ever match that watermark, I fear. That's part of the weird experience of loving something too much- fear of disappointment.

Either way, it's a rebirth for them as a band since the CD is at the top of the iTunes charts- they're getting a second life now which I guess I can only be happy and hopeful about. It sucks to see things you love and put stock in dissolve and disappear though. They still make fantastic songs that I love like "Second Born" or "Why Can't You Be" but by moving away from the album template they're losing focus. There's no point in fighting the tide though, the album is going to die (if its not dead already) and the only thing to do is hope someone masters the new mode well enough to capture as much meaning as the old one did. I'm filled with a nihilism since the attitude today is that nothing new can ever exist or be better than anything that already exists, but I guess I can hold out a futile hope. I'm deluding myself but I guess they call that faith.

I don't know what brings out the feeling of emptiness in people but maybe it is keeping a journal and constantly writing. It's like the existentialists talking about alienation and horror- when you keep staring at a blank page and you run out of ideas you just start disemboweling yourself and it all starts to unravel. You don't know what you want to do with your life, you're unhappy with the direction it's going but at the same time you feel powerless to change it- and at the same time you know its completely your responsibility that it's not changing.
Weird looking back on my writings from before too because occasionally the tone changes to one of bright inspiration, full of that lifespark I've mentioned several times here. Somebody said scars have the power of reminding us that the past was real, and that's exactly how I feel when I read them. They're scars of happiness and meaning that seems to currently be eluding me. And following a pattern in these posts, I'm scared that when I get to school again and start writing in this I won't be able to escape this restlessness. In short, I can't wait to get out of this fucking house and go to school, but in long, I don't want to go to school and find the same things I always find.

Maybe you can only find fulfillment in retrospect, maybe nostalgia is the antidote to the super saturated reality post-modernists talk about. When I look back on the past and I live through my joys and mistakes again, I find comfort but also a huge sadness. I wish that the feeling was something you could bottle and keep with you and gradually use up when you need it. Because when you hit the lows the highs are so distant and alien that it feels like they can't come again.

I only have memories of ease and carelessness, and I can't remember them that well. It's been something like 4 years. That's about all I've got tonight.

debunking God - a new theology

Now that entries have fallen to a rate of about one per month I guess each one has to be far more profound than the last. Since that's the case, tonight's discussion will be about God and the Bible and Christianity and all that good stuff.

Few things in this world are as divisive as Christianity and all the topics and issues falling under its blanket. Sure, Christianity is based on some principals that sound great: the 10 commandments generally make sense except for a few ones which are specific to the religion itself (ie, sabbath day holy, no Gods before me). On the other hand, once you delve into the Bible as a tenet of Christianity we enter a whole new realm of chaos where God is a walking contradiction. If God walked, that is.

So to start from the top, lets think of issues surrounding the Bible as a text. Obviously, there are lots of things happening in the Bible that simply can't happen in our world today, ruled by physics and other natural laws. So, the issue of interpretation rises to the surface immediately. Do we look at the Bible literally or do we look at it figuratively? Then comes the sub-issue: what if we look at it both ways? Which way do we choose for which passages?

Well lets start in Genesis. We open up the book and we get to the creation story. God makes the world and our tale is flowing linearly, when suddenly we rewind and there's a second creation story. Now, unless we want to open the door to all kinds of trans-dimensional, alternate reality, world-outside-of-time explanations for this, we need to pick a lens to read this through.

A literal reading is pretty much ruled out unless we open the door as I said before to all those crazy possibilities. So, I guess we're going figurative; this way we can accept both stories and boil them down to a small kernel of creativity that we can hold onto as we keep reading. Keep in mind though, we're officially starting to read the Bible off of the figurative foot, so to speak.

Most of the beginning plays out in a very rhetoric-heavy, open-to-figurative-analysis type fashion. But then we get to a couple biggies where many Christians take their view and revert it to a literal reading.

This switch comes about basically only for human sexuality and the bevy of issues under that umbrella. That, and any attempt to break away from a binary morality, and a monotheistic theology.

At this point, I think it's time to make a hit-list of points and questions that serious Christians need to evaluate and come to terms with before they call themselves Christians:

1. The Bible was written by a group of men in a civilization that barely bears resemblance to our own. What does this say about the 'Word of God' contained within it? How much of what is written was subjectively shaped and changed, if it did in fact come from God?

2. Everyone thinks of God automatically as an old wise man sitting on a cloud. Those who resist this idea are just being playful usually- this is probably because old wise men are by and large the protagonists in the Bible. When in the Bible it says that God fashioned us in His own image, did that come from God or from a person who wanted to be like God while writing? Most people would agree that people are nothing like God, so how can we be in his image?

3. Is everything God creates perfect? If so, what does perfection mean here? If it means that it fits into a plan, we come to question 4...

4. Does God in fact have an ultimate plan? If God has a plan, how do we have any way of perceiving what his intentions are? Obviously, we can't because no human could ever understand God's intentions. So, what does this mean for the circular logic saying that we shouldn't do things because "God wouldn't want them." For example, there are two ways of looking at a transsexual moral issue in the Biblical concept which are both equally viable by the underlying logic at least. In terms of the transsexuality itself, let's just assume we're ignoring the sexual mores written into the Bible. So, the two ways are as follows:

-Everything God creates is perfect. As a corollary, He doesn't want us to change his creation. God would rule that transsexuals should stay in their bodies and deal with their challenges because that is God's plan for us.
-Everything God creates is perfect in the sense that it fits into an ultimate plan. However, we play a part in this plan- the things we do on Earth are part of God's plan. This involves overcoming obstacles and solving problems. God would want a person to be strong and brave enough to overcome the issue by having a sex change operation.

I could go on with the list, but the point is becoming clear I think. God's will can literally be used to justify anything from an abstract point of view. Most Christians would agree that God's will is ultimate and above everything else- this is essentially saying that a force of nature that we know nothing about is the most important thing in the world. How can we make good decisions based on that?

On the other hand, most people will also accept that emotions and spirituality do exist in the world, and we are more than a sum of chemical reactions. So, we need to come up with a realistic conception of God if we are expected to evolve.

Science can explain a lot, sure, but it operates within a fixed set of rules. These rules exist and are observable, but they aren't creatable. They came from somewhere, or they were always there. Rational people will agree that these are the two options. Obviously there's no way to logically jump to one of these decisions, so it takes a leap of faith at this point. Let's go with the idea that there is a creator, and let's define what it is.

Let's use some of God's qualities from the Bible to come up with a more realistic picture of what God is. So boiling it way down, God is:
-omniscient
-omnipotent
-loving, caring, accepting, etc.

Ignoring the parts where God acts like a human, lets focus on these qualities. Omniscience means that God knows everything. What does everything consist of? I'd say this means everything material, chronological, and spiritual or emotional. No person or singularity can do that, so we have to rule out an individual conception. Moving on.

Omnipotence means that he has an incredible amount of power, power to shape or change anything. Obviously as an extension of the first, that means God can manipulate any of the above qualities which he has knowledge of.

Finally, He's loving and caring and infinitely forgiving. So, we're beginning to get a picture here of consciousness, albeit a utopian-leaning one.

So lets put it all together. God is individual since he's conscious but he's collective because of his omnipresence. So he's simultaneously not an individual and an individual. Excluding the last quality on our list, we do know of some things which closely resemble the first two qualities: forces of nature. Gravity "knows" every event pertaining to it at any moment. It's everywhere, and it operates both individually and collectively. It also has an ultimate set of rules it follows, similar to our hypothesized God.

Spinning these together, God is both a force of nature and an individual. When we look at a single human body, we see some strong similarities. A human being is made of trillions of small interconnecting parts- these are individual. When we think about human beings we think of them as individual despite this - this is collective. All of our functions and behaviors are ostensibly governed by rules - this is a sort of mini-omniscience.

When we boil it down, it makes more sense to think of humanity as the God of the Bible rather than as a single man. If together we make up God, then we can indeed all be perfect no matter what we do, because the only rule involved with being a part of God is simply that we can't stop being a part of God. Like a single cell, an individual has no omniscience or power on its own. Together, humanity approachs a kind of omnipotence similar to that described in the Bible (remember, we started reading the Bible on the figurative foot, so stay with me).

We need to get rid of our archaic images of God and start looking for God where it makes sense to look for him: everywhere and nowhere. The Bible is either trying to justify humanity as God as a collective delusion, or through it's search for supreme sovereignty it has unknowingly unearthed a more truthful representation of God. Many questions remained unanswered, but it can't hurt to take the discussion in a different direction.

exodus

I've been exiled to the lounge because Phil and Lauren are breaking up right now in our room, or at least I would assume as much. This is probably going to have profound effects on our social life although I'm not sure how right now. I'm not even sure they'll actually break up or if this is just a preemptive strike so to speak, because realistically break-up is inevitable in the long run. I give Lauren enough credit not to stick around if she feels unwanted.

In other news I've been feeling unmotivated and down lately, again. I don't know what it is that causes it, must be hormonal swings. I had an idea that had me feeling upbeat and excited for a few days that I would start an online media umbrella organization under which politics and entertainment and everything societal could be discussed online. I kept thinking about the party system and how deceptive it is, and that a real political alternative deserves to be voiced. Sort of a fine tuning of my rant about Rolling Stone getting lazy a few weeks ago. But lately the more I think about it it just seems futile. Hopefully by giving these thoughts words I'm not solidifying them or making them concrete.

I'm still optimistic about living in / being around Ann Arbor much more next year since it really feels like home. Bloomington feels very alien even though I was really excited to come here. I've gotten used to campus and all the different paths to take between classes, but it still lacks familiarity and I feel like a tourist.

stirrings

I need to take this in a new direction if I want to keep it alive since I don't think the details of my life have enough energy to keep a daily writing regimen fueled. Either that or I don't have the motivation to milk the juice out of my daily life to fuel it. Tonight is one of those weird nights where I'm seized by a bigger idea or wider purpose and I feel compelled to capture it.

I definitely can't sleep. That's partly because I slept until almost 2:00 pm today. Currently in Maine with my grandparents and it's been unusually uneventful considering how jam-packed with activities weeks with my grandparents usually are up here. Went to trivia at a bar with Andrew and got second place, small place with a hodge-podge of working class looking guys and upper class older folk. Regardless, I can't stop thinking about this idea.

Next year is going to mark my return to Ann Arbor regardless of my acceptance at the University of Michigan, although I'm still keeping my fingers crossed for that. I decided that I don't want to go to State because that would be a compromise. I never wanted to go to State in the first place, and I don't want to be a martyr just because I have a bad financial situation. So, if I work like a slave and go to WCC next year so be it, I will be in and around Ann Arbor most of the time.

Ann Arbor is a young town that is really alive with energy, political energy in a way that few towns are in America right now. In the 60s, San Fransisco was a cultural hub but I sense that Ann Arbor might be a new one for this generation. Everything is becoming more and more liberal, there's a store that sells hallucinogenic drugs (albeit legal ones), and streetside protests aren't a thing of the past. If ever there was a subcultural hippie renaissance, it would be in Ann Arbor.

In the context of this cultural frame of mind, I was listening to music and thinking about how important it was in the 60s, as well as how important it was to me. Jake and I's ex-step brother Eric broke his iPod and it was like his life had ended. Some might call that materialism, but they miss the point- Eric needs the music, not the device. I could completely relate. Then I began thinking about what music means today, in this generation.

In the 60s Rolling Stone was started, one of the most influential magazines ever. I have a subscription today, and when I started reading it I was mostly just fascinated by the language the writers employed, and the wide array of musical recommendations it presented. Recently I've began to read Rolling Stone with a more discerning eye, and I'm extremely disheartened by the direction that the magazine is going.

Rolling Stone still employs writers with an uncanny knack for language and twists of phrase, but Rolling Stone as an entity is a bloated, unfocused and often lazy beast. Few issues are examined or clearly presented for readers. Riding on the receding foam of the political wave the magazine created in it's heyday, its writers and editors hide behind a far-left position without doing any real deconstruction of information for its readers. And they've been fellating Barack Obama's administration with every page not dedicated to music.

On the surface, I'm optimistic about Obama, but Rolling Stone's complete acceptance of his word at face value is thoughtless, at best. The government decides to nationalize banks and pours billions upon billions of tax dollars into the economic machine. Following suit, Rolling Stone brings in an army of liberal economists who make incredibly incendiary claims: "Adam Smith's invisible hand is invisible simply because it isn't there."

That's an extremely powerful statement. Rather than explore the implications of it, the writers mention that the economist in question won a Nobel Prize and neatly wrap the subject up. The opinion is handed to the readers on a silver platter. This kind of political discourse is completely killing real ideas and discussions, and keeps herding mindless American citizens into their partisan pens. I, for one, would like to see some evidence to back up some of these claims.

Everyday I become more and more of a conspiracy theorist. Obama is young, charismatic, and intelligent. He's relatable and he's a shrewd politician, but he's still a politician. McCain and Obama are both in government, and both made sacrifices to get where they got. Obama got farther, so chances are he made even more.

People forget about Obama's complete lack of effort to crank back government phone-tapping legislation. More examples are out there but the point is this: Obama is no longer a man, he is part of a political machine. This machine has trappings and machinations that existed before Obama, which he has inherited. Obama now serves hundreds of men behind a curtain, and many of these men are wealthy.

The more I turn the thought over in my mind, the more the need for a real cultural watchdog seems to arise. Somebody with drive needs to take to the streets, find kids who are disillusioned and interested in music, culture, and the world that they stand to inherit one day. Start spreading the word to the people again, go back to old forms of true patriotism.

Young generations aren't supposed to file silently into the future, placidly accepting government growth and privacy invasion that would make George Orwell turn over in his grave. We should be resisting the PATRIOT Act with every bone in our bodies. We should be profoundly disturbed by the notion that the government thinks that implanting microchips in people's arms to keep track of them at all times is a good idea.

Images keep flashing through my mind of a few kids in a cheap car, blasting loud music through the intersections in Ann Arbor, throwing handfuls of purple fliers out the windows. Passersby stop with interest and read the leaflets being dropped. They announce that a new publication will be taking sharp interest in music and politics again, a serious look at the forces behind our world that are shaping it outside of our control.

Nothing has changed since the 1960s except that the youth is better equipped than ever to spread their points of view and implement change. What has changed is that we are numb and indifferent to the world, and that is something that has to change from within. All it takes is one spark to start a fire, and more and more I sense that this spark might be on the horizon. Since nobody else is taking the step forward, more and more I wonder if I should try to ignite something myself.

unnecessary mistruths

I've been neglecting this lately but tonight I do feel fairly compelled to write another entry. Tonight was a typical college drinking night, and on the walk home things got philosophical as they often do when alcohol is involved. Phil, Lauren, and I were all discussing the moral aspects of homosexuality. Phil stood behind the bible and I felt pretty divided.

It got me thinking about Gnosticism, and whose hands the world is truly in. The Bible has certain aspects in it that are poignant, but by and large my opinion is that the bible was a document written by a bunch of old, unsophisticated white men who were intolerant of most things accepted today as social norms. The bible (and Phil's argument) was that homosexuals were an aberrant mutation of the human standard, and that being attracted to members of the same sex was a complete choice. I disagree.

There is no choice involved in my attraction to women, and to suggest that people deviating from the norm do have a choice is ridiculous. Attraction and love isn't a choice, it's an emotion that overcomes people. Phil tried to claim that murder wasn't pre-disposed, murder was a choice the same as homosexuality was. This is incorrect. Serial killers have been found to have genetic and environmental similarities meaning that the choice is not entirely free.

This string of thought got me thinking about evil in the world, and the biggest, most fundamental question about morality I had even as a child. If God was in control of everthing, why did he create a system of morality at all? All the system does is evaluate which followers of his are worthy enough to join him in heaven, which seems ridiculous to me.

In a contrary viewpoint, I don't think God released his system of morality as a list of 10 doctrines set in stone. God is a reasonable, empathetic being which means that he understands people. I disbelieve that the concept of Satan has any power over the human race, since what could defy the will of God? If God wanted everyone to be in heaven with him, it would be so. I'm pretty sure God does want this, which has forced me to revise my religious thoughts.

I believe in a God or creator, but I won't limit him or her to a gender or simple role in a preestablished religions like Christianity or Islam. God is so much more than that. God is both existant everywhere and nowhere, since I think we are God's tools and appendages. We can easily find God in ourselves if we try.

I don't accept that a document riddled with loopholes, prejudice and hatred is an infallible, holy text. I do believe that myths and legends have emotional and moral weight, which means that most religions do have something to bring to the table. The fact of the matter is that nobody can know what lies after death, and pretending to have faith and be sure in a code of morality is absurd.

I believe the ideas that I've stated, that God exists both everywhere and nowhere as a singular creation, and that morality is a much more grey idea than any holy text states. I hope to educate people about this, but it's difficult to shake old systems of control. For a while, I thought the bible was a necessary evil to keep people in line, but now I realize that its completely unnecessary.