true dat.

20090409

I noticed..

..that the best conversationalists are either great learners or great liars. Yet, the great liars are left with nothing to say when confronted by morality or the essence of.

And I am appreciative in having with me a company of learners.. close by or long away.

---

I realized that I sometimes intentionally-consciously clash with people who do things I don't agree with, not because I want to make things awkward, but because I believe what I believe because I believe it is true. And it is not the arrogance of giants but me asking the questions: 'Can you prove me wrong? If not, why do you believe otherwise?'

I just wrote a whole blog, but it was far too raw to put publicly, and shall be copied and saved for the paper archives.

However.. here's another excerpt:

[/begin]

..once upon a time, "people inherited religion." I inherited independence. Independence has taught me to find my own ways. And I think that it is far from the truth that I am alone. And it is far from the truth that secularism is rising and Christianity is falling, or that Christianity is rising and secularism is falling. Just as the middle-class is disappearing, so are the grays in our relationship and devotion to an ultimate reality (or lack of). Our grays are but a joke. I am tired of jokes. And so is the world. The world is polarizing.

And when the world has been divided, and the choice has been presented to all, along with the choice to choose, maybe that's when.

There has been a shift in the way we fight today.  Our battles today are not with sharp objects or explosives, but with what we believe.

And so how pathetic would I be, if I am one without a belief (God or not). If I am undecided. A mere weaponless civilian cast aside to be a victim of the effects of the things that shape and change the world.

And so I must question, what do I believe.

It takes a great deal of trust, choosing a side. Or it takes being mindlessly recruited. But inherited religion has become a thing of the past. Even those born into it have questioned it.

I like to ask questions, and I like to get the answers. I don't like letting go of my questions. And I can't.

I make it routine to loose my religion every once in a while. And so far, within seconds or within days, I find myself at the foot of the cross.

I am drawn to truth, and Truth has found me.

[/end]

For thirty years
I went in search
of God,
and when I opened
my eyes
at the end of this time,
I discovered
that it was really He
who sought me.

- Abu Al-Bistami, 804-874AD

I think I'm more comfortable with posting things I've written in the past.

why why zed.

20090404

[an excerpt from a journal entry i wrote a while back.]

...I can't find my history book again. I don't really care for it much. Though I really feel I should, because it is history. It feels gross to be engrossed with my own history all the time. The history of the people around me, the history of mankind, makes me feel more.. right. To not know history is like trying to finish a drawing without knowing what was drawn before you had started. I could get a few things here and there right, or I could completely bonehead the whole picture. Either way, I am not sure, and my hand is unsteady in its unease of its purpose. I do however, want to contribute to the big picture, and that starts with finding my history book.

Maybe.

I have been meaning to read the bible. I've said that to myself at least a buttload of times. I have mysteriously made my way into a youth group which I find on equal grounds of a high school classroom but with nicer people. But basically, someone teaches, and I've learned nothing.

I mean, I do learn I guess. Its all moral stuff, or howtodolife right stuff. I think I already know how to be moral, or howtodostuff right as far right as I know. But from what do I know right from? And how do I go further right?

I feel like I am writing about an obsession or disability I have with turning right.

Why am I learning the things I should do without knowing why I should do it? Should I do it? What if I didn't care about morality. What does this church group have to say for me? There is.. however.. constant reference to a certain book of history that I've been meaning to read.

(Buttload + 1.)

I guess they're assuming I know the history inside and out. How can one expect to live for something if they don't know the history? Not to hold judgment, but to know its progress, its growth. How can I live as a human not knowing human history.. I guess I should find my history book..

But this book, the bible, seems to contain a further history than my classroom history book.

Sure, reading about my country rebelling from another and killing each other is educational. But what about before all that?

This book, the bible, contains a un-understandable yet un-alien reason for my existence. It contains a morality that has freakishly preceded my acknowledgment. The authors have claims about the things that affect my being now, my being later and my being after-later. The book itself is a gamble between the possibility of the valid and the possibility of deceit, two polar opposites that the choice to believe and the choice to not has two very different outcomes in the end. Maybe that's why it interests me.

At times I have a hard time reading the details. Two pages of small-text dedicated to a lineage and I don't know why I am reading it, the near genocide of the inhabitants of Earth except for a few, a man being raised from the dead, a fruit that bestows knowledge (how I wish I could have one of those for trigonometry). But it would be ignorant of me to merely hone into those things and only those things. That would be like getting stuck on our country being killers, and not acknowledging the context that they were fighting for certain freedoms.

No, the context of the bible is what causes me to quote "I've been meaning to read this book" a buttload of times.

And, despite my impressions from church group, it doesn't seem to ask that I merely pick from it to add to the nest of information and morality that I have built around me. No, it glows with purpose and history. A history that is not just a grounded landmark in the water that the boat of humanity has passed, but a something heavy that has fallen hard into the water, spreading on all sides ripples that travel to the ends of the Earth, going beyond where our little boat has traveled.

"Why?" asks the critic within my body. My life is fine. I have troubles, but I cope with and learn from them, and I become a better person. I kind of enjoy hopelessly searching for purpose, getting my hands into a multitude of things. So why bother reading this book that has culturally been advertised as one-minded and its own community has impressed in me its mere-moralness yet I feel there is something deeper inside of it and I somehow cling to this hope to feel real, to see the picture of humanity and help complete it?

Because, secretly, I am a romantic, in thinking and feeling.

And maybe someone left me a note with a story about them-self, portraying a character that is hard not to love and not to respect, a character irresistible in the portrayal of its existence, a character of characters, and at the end of the note it asks that I remember them, letting its romance seep into and shape the person I am, to the very end.

And if I were to ignore it, toss it aside and trash it, and in the end find myself empty and alone only to by a passing glance see the writer of the note and never again because I had ignored it.. I would, in the remainder of the consciousness of thought and feeling, burn in the regrets of negligence, lost, and failure.

And so, that is why I have been meaning to read the bible.

[end excerpt],

19/20ths.

The voices of the minor prophets have echoed down centuries to my own. Its beautiful, because I'd imagine them rushing from behind me and forward and beyond like a train. What precious cargo that train carries.

I realized how scary these times are. It would be hard to be a minor prophet in this day and age. Locusts back in the day would eat and destroy the very link that people believed was their relationship with God and people would panic and cry for God. Their grain and wine gone.. they had no where to turn to except God. Those dang bugs literally ate their life.

Today we have pesticide and flame thrower like contraptions to thwart these locusts. Brick walls and fly swatters. Cars that plow through like a tank gloriously eating thousands of bullets of rifles. Our life, wine and food supply are vast and well-protected.

I've not been having the greatest week. Living alone at home and being out of a recent relationship really takes a toll. Then there's always the little goblin problems that band together and join in the charge when the major problems appear. Little sneaky suckers.

Sitting around my family-sized dead-empty house only made clearer that I was alone. Gee, thanks. So after almost going crazy from sleeping too much and staring at white walls, I escaped in the middle of the night and ended up at Wal-Mart.

I looked around at stuff that I would normally buy. Food, books. And then stuff I would think about buying. Toys, games, electronics, sporting equipment (more specifically the knives and guns). And then when I finished, I realized that I had only covered 1/20th of the the whole store, and began to explore what the other 19/20ths that Wal-Mart held.

My eyes rustled through the organized pastey white branches of items, finding stuff like clocks with an aquarium inside and chairs that held iPods and refrigerators and your two kids.. while you sleep in it. And while I passed the set of multi colored camels that would go perfectly with my wood brown cabinet that has a compartment for both work and play, I wondered how many people actually buy these things. As a 3-D green gel ant farm stood before me, I wondered if I'd buy my kids any of this stuff. I thought never, and that no one buys these things.. or at least hoped. Every so often I'd pay attention to my surroundings, and the decent presence of people with carts and eyes that carefully scanned the seven in one grinder and juicer began convincing me that maybe Wal-Mart really does sell the other 19/20ths of their merchandise rather than only the 1/20th that I'm used to.

I began thinking about things I could buy. Me, I'd like to think I'm a pretty simple guy. So things such as wallpaper with The Beatles painted all over it and extra large lava lamps don't tempt me too much. But when it came to books, food, games, electronics, etc.. I was a sucker. I thought about buying a hunting knife and going hiking specifically because I had a hunting knife to reach my destination and use it cut open my MRE and eat my preserved food. I thought about buying more speakers to wire up my place with house-wide music system. I thought about restocking my library (in which seriously 3/4ths of my books are missing and in hands that hopefully have put them to more use than something to stack or ancient dusty artifacts to be found later) with books about vampires and spies and love and Bill Clinton's biography. I thought about filling my refrigerator with eight different flavors of chicken.

Fortunately, I'm poor. I don't have the luxary of splurging my money on hunting knives and chicken. But is this what I was resorting to? Buying new things to satisfy my life? Or at least salivating over them at 12AM in Wal-Mart slowly writing the future biography on Alex Young who owned hunting knives, lots of books, stereo speakers and eight flavors of chicken?

When the walls of comfort and happiness have been consumed by depression, I run to Wal-Mart in search of material to rebuild those walls? On other days, I've sought out fun-friends (you know those friends) to keep my mind happy and ignorant. I contemplate playing video games to throw my self into a world where blowing things up is good and you get points for it or where your integrity in life is rated on a scale of lightside points or darkside points.

I began to realize that what I was doing was trying to escape. That I was basically getting drunk to get a temporary escape from life.. and later a hangover.

And while those locusts eat our lives and from inside to out, there are microwaves that look like a creation born from the Mac family and books about joggers that accidentally travel back into the medieval age to hide in, and thousands of more stuff in 19/20ths of Wal-Mart. A seemingly indestructable supply of wine of the riches.

If Joel was a jogger and accidentally traveled forward through time to our day and age, what would he say? He couldn't tell us our wine is consumed by locusts. Sorry buddy, but if you could count the stars in the sky, that's how far and wide and numerous the wine of the 21st century is.

I guess he could just simply say what he did say, "wake up, you drunkards, and weep!"

I did eventually wake up, earlier tonight, and wept for five hours. What a good weeping does for a man. How forceful it was, almost. I had no one within reach, knew no games would satisfy me, too tired to read, too active to sleep. I had nothing left but to let this body crumble and break down.

In the last two hours I lay on my roof, in the open. No longer hiding under the roof of my house, under my pillows, behind my computer screen, busy swallowing chicken or lost in a story about a girl who loved a guy named Alex, written by Alex. I lay in the open, no longer hiding behind man-made walls. I realized that there are times when God provides fortresses and trees for shelter, but sometimes not. These were one of those moments.

I embraced my world. I took in the heat. Shuddered in the cold. I hid no longer.

If Alex were a small little country, tonight it was ravaged by locusts coming from who knows where. Whether it was God, or it was cruel nature, it didn't matter. Something deep inside of me, knew I needed this.

I was a tree covered in grape vines in desperate need of Air.

Near the end of the night, I laid awake on my rooftop under a clear night sky. I closed my eyes and I prayed for Love to come down and rescue me. And when I opened my eyes, a small gastly figure hovered in the distance above me. My mind passed it off as a a single cloud in the sky, putting along. I reached out my hand in desperation, wanting to believe that maybe it was God, coming over me. As a reserved logical brainy asian man, this is not something you'll find me doing everyday. But the desperation was so much, I cared not for the people walking their dog in the distance at night staring at me wondering what I was doing.

Oh God, I hope that's you. I need you. Refresh this old soul.

A few seconds.

I pull my hand back to find the cloud gone. My eyes dart along the path that the cloud would have gone, and all around. Nothing.

As the clear night sky slumbers peacefully above me, I suddenly feel as if I could do the same.

A shooting star speeds by; Joel on a train with a white sign on the back..

The Lord dwells in Alex.




that's me, working hard in the office as usual. with a tie around my head.