Accidental Historian

The Max Power Way

The byword for the Evangelical world is control.  For all the talk of free will that goes on, especially as a justification for the doctrine of Hell, absolutely no one in the Evangelical world is an independent actor working under their own volition.  This simple fact must be understood by any external observer who wishes to make any sort of sense of the various pronouncements that come from Evangelical thought leaders.  It’s also why that it makes perfect sense to an Evangelical to make a completely nonsensical statement like, “True freedom is slavery to Christ.”  That’s a paraphrase of a popular Bible verse and a prime example of Evangelical doublethink.  Freedom and slavery do not belong together in a positive correlation.  It’s simply logically impossible outside of a construction like, “I’m free to own and enslave as many people as I want.”

In Evangelical world, however, there is no choice between freedom and slavery.  There is only a choice between enslavement to Jesus and enslavement to evil, worldly things and/or Satan hisownself.  It kind of depends on who you’re talking to and where they fall on the fundamentalist-charismatic spectrum.  Jesus and whatever the not-Jesus of preference happen to be are equal and opposite binary forces.  There’s a whiff of the ol’ Manicheanism to the whole thing, but it’s tweaked because if you’re a true follower of Jesus then no matter what happens Jesus will hold on and the Devil can’t win but Jesus is powerless unless the person in question chooses to accept Jesus.  As such, the only space in which free will exists is in this freedom to choose sides.

This, ultimately, is why Jesus is the one-size-fits-all answer to any and every problem in the world.  Problems are caused by enslavement to worldly things.  The solution, then, is to choose enslavement to Jesus.  Do you have a drug addiction?  You need Jesus.  He’ll fix you up good.  Are you poverty-stricken?  You need Jesus.  He’ll provide for all your needs.  Are you a pregnant teenager?  You need Jesus.  He’ll provide for your baby.  Are you gay?  You need Jesus.  He’ll degayify you.

That Jesus/not-Jesus dichotomy is the root of all the confusing and obviously impossible except in a very narrow, specialized case Evangelical strawmen that the Evangelical apologists like to beat around.  A sexually active, unmarried woman isn’t a rational actor making her own decisions.  She’s a slut who’s enslaved to her own carnal desires.  A gay man isn’t a rational actor making his own decisions.  He’s a Devil-besotten sinner who’s been smitten by worldly desire for the all-powerful cock.

The only solution to this form of worldly slavery is to choose enslavement to Jesus.  Jesus enslavement is different from worldly enslavement because Jesus loves you and the world doesn’t.  We know this because the Bible says so (John 3:16, bitches!).  Everyone knows this on some level.  The Bible, after all, says that the heavens themselves declare the glory of god and it’s blatantly obvious that the heavens specifically declare the glory of the god of the Bible and go on to declare the awesomeness of enslaving yourself to Jesus because, well, because Evangelical Christians are far better at non sequiturs than they are at putting together logical proofs.  Geometry is a worldly thing that’s of the Devil, after all.[1]  And if you don’t believe me, there is a part of the Jewish Bible that gives the measurements of a circular item in the Temple and indicates by the way it gives the measure that pi is exactly 3.

I genuinely don’t understand why any of this is considered compelling argument.  I mean, I’m being intentionally snarky about it, but this is Evangelism 101 right here.  It’s logical fallacy after logical fallacy parading as profound consideration of the nature of the universe.  This only works with people who have already bought the idea that the Bible is a foundationally explanatory document.  It’s why the byword for Evangelical Christianity is control.

There are gatekeepers to the Evangelical culture.  Generally these gatekeepers are the pastors.  Their privileged position rests on the notion that they have access to knowledge that other people simply don’t.  That position is privileged and reliant upon the notion that the only valid source of knowledge is something that they have a privileged access to.

I mean, of course, the Bible.  If you didn’t realize that already then, um, I’m not quite sure why you’re here, honestly.

I was in an interesting position during my last few years in the church.  I was planning on going into ministry.  I was a smart guy who obviously knew his shit.  I combined these two things into access to and collaboration with the pastors of the various groups I was a part of.  This wasn’t necessarily a rarefied thing like saying that you’re buddies with Michael Jordan, but for most people the pastor was on a level above and the guy with all the answers.  So while I didn’t occupy a unique position, I occupied an interesting position and approached it with my usually inquisitive style.

I knew a bunch of pastors.  I knew of two who were genuinely willing to respond to questions with the words, “I don’t know.”  Of those, one would basically say, “I don’t know, but the answer is somewhere in the Bible.  You should read it more and possibly find a mentor to help you study.”  I found that frustrating, to say the least.

Still, those two pastors were the ones I was most interested in emulating, because I found a willingness to admit not knowing all the answers refreshing.  I also found that willingness a key part of any process of inquisition.  My main problem was that I kept running up against the realization that a lot of Evangelical pastors didn’t seem to find inquisitiveness a useful quality.

I can still vividly remember sitting in the church I attended for a while out at Western and listening to the pastor rail against the Emergent Church movement.  For him the likes of Rob Bell and Brian McLaren were enemies to be defeated.  For me Rob Bell was a wonderful Christian thinker and Brian McLaren was…well, he was kind of out there and certainly a bit unorthodox but I wasn’t going to call him a non-Christian and certainly wasn’t about to call him an enemy.  Mostly, though, I realized that this pastor, in calling Rob Bell a non-Christian and an enemy was calling another pastor I respected the hell out of a non-Christian and an enemy and, by extension, was calling me a non-Christian and an enemy.

That Sunday was one of the first in my long line of breaks with Christianity.  It wasn’t the first and it wasn’t the most important.  But looking back on it I realize something.

Christianity was a long, exhausting slog for me.  It had no payoff and no payout that I was ever able to discern.  As a bright, inquisitive person all of my questions were met with, “Read your Bible more.”  As a person who was self-critical to the point of pathology all of my self-doubts were reinforced with constant messages that I wasn’t good enough and I was too prone to give in to my sinful human nature.  I indulged in surprisingly few worldly things but was always told that they were too much and I was being too sinful.

I knew a lot of people in the Evangelical world who were massively broken in one way or another.  For me it was my self-doubt.  For others it was a striving to work off some real or imagined past debt.  For still others it was a genuine mental health problem.  And, trust me, I knew a few people who were totally fucked up in the head.

The Evangelical world I inhabited had no shits to give about me or anyone else.  That’s the dirty little secret about the whole thing.  That’s why this post over at Fred’s place about something that happened in Kansas City and which is associated in a weird way with the International House of Prayer is both horrifying and believable.  It’s also why this article about the source of the growing backlash against Wal-Mart is fascinating.

Those of us who had something to prove, something to escape, or something to validate were the best workers.  The church or the parachurch organizations that surrounded it chewed us up and spit us out.  If something went wrong or we burned out it wasn’t because there was something wrong with the system but because there was something wrong with us.  We could be pushed.  We could be directed.  We could be controlled.

My first real glimpse behind the curtain was that pastor who was angry at the Emergent Church movement.  I realized at some point that he wasn’t mad so much as he was scared.  He was scared of Rob Bell and Brian McLaren and the people who read Brian McLaren’s videos and watched Rob Bell’s videos because Bell and McLaren encouraged people to think about things in a different way than that pastor wanted them to think.  That was unconscionable.  That was intolerable.

It’s also why Young Earth Creationists seek to discredit Charles Darwin when debating scientists.  They are literally incapable of understanding that they could prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that Charles Darwin did, in fact, molest collies but that his personal predilections towards canine canoodling have zero impact on the scientific validity of his observations and conclusions.  They don’t understand that science has moved beyond Charles Darwin and that scientists would tell you that some of Charles Darwin’s conclusions were, in fact, wrong but it doesn’t matter because the overall umbrella idea of evolution through the process of natural selection is still the best explanation for the genetic variations and similarities of the various occupants of this planet we call Earth.

That’s because in the world of Evangelicalism you don’t follow an idea, you follow a person.  Even though the general, overall theory is that there’s this book called the Bible and this religion called Christianity and the people who follow those things assent to the notion that both things exist and have existed for the better part of two millennia it doesn’t matter.  The true arbiter of validity is the interpreter of the Bible and Christianity.  That arbiter is the pastor.  That pastor’s position is fragile at best.

I saw a few pastors fired during my time in Christianity.  It’s interesting, too, because my understanding of why that happened came from a wholly secular source.  I had a boss in high school who was friends with an AM drive-time DJ on one of the Chicago FM music stations.  I did not listen to that show, but instead I listened to a different, nationally syndicated (or soon to be nationally syndicated, I forget) DJ on a different station who had much higher ratings.  This was the ‘90s, kids.  Things like that mattered.

Anyway, one day my boss’s DJ buddy called in and asked to talk to him.  The main phone had recently broken, so we had a temporary replacement that didn’t have a hold button.  The phone, therefore, was deposited on the counter while someone went back to fetch the bossman.  I was there with another one of my coworkers who also listened to the same AM drive-time show I listened to.  We proceeded to discuss our preferred show and why it was awesome because that’s what high school kids do.

My boss came in, picked up the phone, talked to his DJ buddy for a moment, then looked at me with a bit of a grin on his face and said, “He wants to talk to you.”  He then handed me the phone.

I was treated to a string of profanity as the DJ bitched me out.  This horrified me, because I truly thought I had done something wrong.  I was also 16 years old and the sort of kid who literally did nothing to rock any boat I could avoid rocking.  That kind of matters.  See, 31 year-old me would have calmly listened to that string of profanities and then said something to the effect of, “Seriously, dude?  You’re so insecure that you can’t even handle overhearing someone talking about a different radio show in your presence?  Should I extrapolate this into a guess about the size of your penis?”

I did nothing of the sort.  I stood there, rooted in place, unsure of what to do and partially convinced I was about to lose my job because I’d insulted my boss’s friend.  My boss took the phone back, had his conversation, hung up the phone, and told me something that’s worth remembering.  He told me that guys like the DJ in question are insecure because people in that position could be out of that position and forgotten tomorrow.  The DJ was, in short, more existentially terrified of me and what my conversation implied about him than I ever needed to be about him.

I saw a lot of pastors lose their jobs in my time in the Evangelical world.  I realized at some point that being a pastor in an Evangelical church included a certain level of existential terror that they could preach an unpopular sermon on Sunday and be out on their asses on Monday.  That’s why control mattered (and matters, I suppose) so much.  That’s why the Evangelical world is split between the right way and the wrong way and the wrong way is simply not acceptable.  It’s simply not possible to exercise the control necessary to keep a congregation if the congregation is encouraged to think and study and draw conclusions for itself.

That’s why Evangelicals are encouraged to think of themselves as free through enslavement.  It’s why they’re encouraged to think of leaving as a different, more intolerable form of bondage.  It’s why I, as someone who was once respected as a worker and a true man of god, scared a bunch of people when I left.  If I could decide it’s not worth it and then simply wander off to live my life than anyone could.

Simply existing and not acknowledging the Bible as the end-all-be-all source of knowledge is a challenge to Christianity.  That, in turn, is why people like Pat Robertson have decided to declare that I have declared war against Christmas.  I’ve done no such thing, but the simple act of me existing and being who I am is a declaration of war in Pat Robertson’s world.

He is, in short, a tiny man who has to feel big by swearing at a 16 year-old kid for the simple crime of overhearing that kid talk about someone who isn’t him.  It’s impossible to not feel sorry for Pat Robertson because of this.  It’s also impossible to not feel a bit of schadenfreude at the realization that my reaction would cause even more spittle-flecked fulminating from a tiny, pathetic man who has decided to get in a dick measuring contest with someone who has no shits to give about the relative size of their genitalia because it really doesn’t matter, anyway.

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[1]I, for one, am enslaved to writing out the digits to the right of the decimal points in irrational numbers.  It’s why I eat so much pi, especially around the holidays.

Thank you, thank you.  I’ll be here all week.  Don’t forget to tip your servers.

My Life's an Open Book and it Starts On Chapter Nine

I slapped up a quick post based on a Pat Robertson video on Monday.  I said that I wanted to write up a big, damn post about why Christmas is better now than it was when I was a Christian.  That, of course, is kind of a hard thing to do since part of the “when I was a Christian” time was also the “when I was eight” time, and Christmas is always awesome when you’re eight.  So I have to limit the idea to basically the last couple years I called myself a Christian.  And that’s a-ok.

Go back to that Pat Robertson video.  It’s short:



The thing that immediately strikes me about that video – and if you can watch it I’m guessing you’ll see the same thing – is that Pat seems tired, resigned, even.  He’s all, “Here comes the War on Christmas again.  Hoo-ray,” and he’s dragging himself back to the fight with a bunch of tired, boilerplate anti-atheist crapola.  I actually feel sorry for him on some level here, at least on a limited level.  But that’s because I still remember what my last few Christmases as a self-identified Christian were like.

They were, in a word, exhausting.  I know exactly why they were exhausting: because I was constantly worried that I wasn’t doing Christmas right.  This is a very specific idea in Evangelicalism.  There is a right way to do everything and there is a wrong way.  The right way is the straight and narrow path, defined by a vast collection of (sometimes unlisted) rules.  The wrong way is any other way.  Deviation from that wrong way is bad mojo.

For those who don’t know what life is like in the Evangelical world let me tell you: everyone deviates from the right way.  It’s a constant existential crisis.

I realized this in one of those lovely moments of convergence that happen if you pay attention to the world in the way that I pay attention to the world: on Election Day.

2012 was, for me, exhausting.  On a personal level I went through a whole lot of shit, most of which was good in the long-run but kinda crappy in the short run.  On a global awareness level, though, I spent most of 2012 obsessing over the random minutiae of our endless political nightmare.  I could not help myself.  By October I was listening to Green Day’s American Idiot and Local H’s Hallelujah! I’m a Bum at least once a day.  I voted two weeks early in the hope that it would allow me to just let go, but I couldn’t.  I was obsessed with something that was completely outside of my control and it ate away at my every waking hour.

It was weird, too.  I didn’t see any good outcome to the election.  There was simply the catastrophic ending and then varying degrees of less catastrophic.  Honestly, I am not a huge fan of Barack Obama.  I think he’s been really good on some things and horrifying on others.  The thing he mostly had going for him was that the idea of President Mitt Romney was horrifying on every level.  I also basically assumed that the Senate would remain with a narrow Democratic majority and the House would remain with a Republican majority, so our best case scenario would be a repeat of the last four years.  Joy.

That’s the backdrop.  The important moment that I’m trying to get to happened on Election Day.

I woke up on Election Day feeling better than I had in quite some time.  It wasn’t that I felt good about the outcome of the election so much as that I felt good about the fact that it was finally about to be over.  One way or another everything would be finished and the awful waiting would be over.  Rather than continuing my Green Day and Local H marathon I got on the train that morning and turned on some Harry Connick, Jr.[1]

That was how I found myself on Randolph Street in Chicago at lunchtime listening to “Reason to Believe,” a bouncy, happy little ditty.  I was in front of the Thompson Center at Randolph between La Salle and Clark.  CNN was setting up a gigantic camera rig on the corner of Randolph and Clark and for a moment I was totally confused.  Then it occurred to me that, oh, they were probably doing something about the election.  I kept walking.

A couple blocks later I hit State Street and looked south.  The Christmas decorations were already out in front of the old Marshall Field’s store that’s now a Macy’s.[2]  I went out to Michigan Avenue, walked down to Washington, and then headed back toward the office, a route which would take me past the Daley Plaza, where they’d started setting up the kriskindlmarket, a German-style temporary town square Christmas market that opens at Thanksgiving.

All of this matters because one of the lyrics in “Reason to Believe” is “I feel just like a kid on Christmas Eve/You may not know my reason/But I’ve got reason to believe.”  I suddenly remembered exactly what it felt like to be a kid on Christmas Eve.  It’s this moment of great anticipation and happiness.

When I was a kid I used to set up my own Christmas tree in my room.  My sister and I both had these little mini aluminum trees with our own sets of ornaments.  We’d put the trees up on our dressers and put the ornaments on.  At some point my parents got me some strings of multi-colored lights, which was really cool since the big tree always only had white lights.  I’d put a string around the tree and another one around the bookcase and then I’d tape a string to the wall or the ceiling or something and for the month of December the only light I’d have in my room came from my string of Christmas lights.

On Christmas Eve we’d go to the candlelight service at church.  Then we’d go home and one of my parents would read “’Twas the Night Before Christmas” and we’d go to bed with an empty tree in the living room but I wouldn’t sleep for a long time.  What kid can sleep on Christmas Eve, after all?  Sometimes I’d peek out the door and see my parents putting the presents under the tree and try to guess which presents were mine and what they were.

In the morning the stockings would be full and hung on the stair railings, as we didn’t have a fireplace.  My parents would let my sister and I empty our stockings while we waited (forever) for grandma to show up so the big show could begin.  Nowadays, of course, that all seems so…childish.  But I can remember what it feels like to be a kid on Christmas and I can remember what if feels like to be a kid on Christmas Eve and that matters.

That’s not all I remember.  I grew up in the suburbs with two parents who mostly worked in the city.  At some point over the Christmas break my mother would get my sister and I on the train and we’d ride downtown, usually on the upper deck of the Metra trains because that had the better view.  Then we’d meet my dad and we’d spend the night at the Palmer House[3].  The next day we’d go the Marshall Field’s and line up for lunch under the tree in the Walnut Room and to get Mistletoe Bears and look at the windows on State Street.  Then we’d go over the Carson’s and see their windows.

Over the years, of course, things changed.  We stopped doing the Palmer House thing.  For a few years I didn’t go into the city at all at Christmas because I was at college and my break time was me working because I needed every dollar I could earn.  Last year I was working in the Loop and I went to meet my parents for lunch in the Walnut Room then went back to the office.  On Christmas Eve we got let out of the office at noon, so I hopped the Red Line and went up and had lunch at the Goose Island brewpub, then headed back to the Loop and got Gluwein and strudel at the kriskindlmarket before meeting my family for dinner and going to the CSO's Christmas Eve performance.

Things change is what I’m saying.  That’s life.

I started my own tradition in 2008.  On the first weekend in December I pulled out my hand-me-down artificial tree and my collection of ornaments, some of which were hand-me-downs from my sister and brother-in-law (who gave them to me along with the tree), some of which were even older hand-me-downs from other relatives, some of which were gifts I’d received over the years, and some of which were the very same ornaments I’d hung on that little tree I’d put on my dresser all those years ago.  I put on Harry Connick, Jr.’s When My Heart Finds Christmas and a Santa hat and I decorated my tree with a truly disturbing number of lights I’d just bought at the Menard’s (450 lights for a 6.5’ tree.  Blinding) and a truly gaudy light-up plastic star I’d found for $8 at Walgreen’s when I realized I had no tree topper whatsoever.

Why Harry Connick, Jr., you ask?  Funny question, that.  One year at Christmas during junior high I wanted nothing more than a CD player.  My parents, in their typical way, gave me CDs.  I think I got three or four but the two I can remember for whatever reason were the Aladdin Soundtrack and Harry Connick, Jr.’s When My Heart Finds Christmas.  I have absolutely no idea why they chose those particular CDs.  I really don’t.  But I remember being confused and a bit disappointed at the whole having CDs but not having a CD player thing.  They told me that I could listen to them downstairs on the big sound system.  Then, finally, once all the little presents were open, we got to the big presents, which was the tradition.  My big present that year was an RCA boombox with a dual tape deck and a CD player.  It was the best thing ever.

A few months later I’d buy Soundgarden’s Superunknown and play it on that boombox.  That marked the beginning of my love of rock and all that came from that.  I can also tell you exactly where my copy of Harry Connick, Jr.’s When My Heart Finds Christmas is right now.  Even though I'm honest when I tell you I have no idea what possessed my parents to buy that particular album for me when I was 13.  I can tell you, though, that at 31 I listen to that album every Christmas when I’m setting up my tree.

My Christmas tree still has a bunch of random hand-me-downs.  It also has a bunch of ornaments I’ve been accumulating over the years.  There’s my White Sox 2005 World Series ornament.  There’s the goofy Texas ornaments my family got me before I moved to Texas (in 2009, the year without a Christmas tree, since I was packing to move in December).  There’s the goofy bottlebrush gorilla I got last year that graces the donation icon on the right-hand sidebar of this blog.  There’s the really cool signpost ornament I got in New Orleans a couple months before I moved back from Dallas.[4]  There’s a relatively expensive Chicago ornament my sister got me at the kriskindlmarket before I went to Texas that cause me no small amount of anxiety when I couldn’t find it in 2010.  There’s also a little wooden Noah’s Ark that I have been hanging on Christmas trees for as long as I’ve known what Christmas tree are.

I’m sitting in my living room right now, lit only by the screen of my laptop and the lights on my tree and wrapped around the banister because I never got over my love of Christmas lights.  When I look at my tree I can see the Texas flag, the Marshall Field’s clock, the New Orleans ornament, the gorilla, the Kriskindlmarket ornament, and the wooden Noah’s Ark.  All of those ornaments are reminders of who I am, where I’ve been, and what Christmas has been over the years.  All of those ornaments are reminders of why I love Christmas.

I didn’t love Christmas my last few years as a Christian.  That’s why I feel bad for Pat Robertson when I see that clip from the start of this post.  I was constantly worried that I wasn’t celebrating Christmas properly, that I wasn’t being appropriately reverent.  It was a continual existential crisis that I can feel from Pat Robertson in that little sigh at the end of the resigned, “It’s Christmas all over again.”

That’s what fundamentalism is all about, after all.  It’s the meaning behind these continuing culture wars.  Pat Robertson only sees two ways of doing things: the right way and the wrong way.  At one point I only saw two ways of doing things: the right way and the wrong way.  Pat Robertson sees, as I once did, the wrong way as an explicit repudiation and negation of the right way and, therefore, as a declaration of war.

Pat Robertson is wrong, just as I was once wrong.  There is no War on Christmas.  There are no angry Grinches coming to steal the holiday.  The only eyes that can possibly see that war are eyes that only see a binary world with a circumscribed right and nearly infinite wrong.

I love Christmas way more now than I did a few years ago.  I love it so much that I broke with my new tradition this year to set up my tree a week early and go out to buy garlands and lights to wrap around my new (and, might I add, newly refinished) banister.  I was so excited I went and bought Daisy a Christmas stocking to hang on my new fireplace even though she’s a dog and has no idea what’s going on.  In Pat Robertson’s world, however, I’m at war with Christmas, I hate Christmas, and I’m miserable.

I find that odd.  I’m not the one sighing after saying, “It’s Christmas all over again,” after all.  I only see one miserable person when I watch that video and the person I see is Pat Robertson.

This is much bigger than Christmas, too.  As an Evangelical I was obsessed with doing things right.  I gradually became aware of the fact that the “right” thing was usually an extremely narrow interpretation of reality.  Now that I’ve separated myself from that world I’ve realized that anything and everything that’s not “right” has now been interpreted as being at war against those who are “right.”

This, ultimately, is why Evangelicals[5] see gay marriage, sex outside of marriage, abortion, and any number of other things as being “anti-Christian.”  They simply cannot fathom a world where there is a spectrum of beliefs and lifestyles, all of which are equally valid.  To them there is the right way and the wrong way and the right way and the wrong way are engaged in an eternal, zero-sum struggle.

I find that funny, honestly.  I also find it depressing.  I say this as someone who has come to appreciate Christmas a little more every year for the last five years.  I say this as someone who has come to appreciate Christmas a little more every year precisely because I’ve spent the last five years celebrating it the wrong way.  It’s funny how that works.

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[1]I like to think my love of Harry Connick, Jr. is well documented.  If you don’t like it, you can suck it.

[2]Chicagans hate that Marshall Field’s is now a Macy’s.  It’s a two-fer of a grand Chicago icon disappearing and being replaced by a New York (ptooey) icon.  I thought it was awful at first.  Now I’m pretty meh about the whole thing.  Field’s was owned by Target for a few years before the end, after all.  And I think Macy’s has done its best to maintain its own brand while respecting the history of Field’s.  They’ve kept a lot of the iconography of that venerable Chicago institution while haphazardly slapping their brand atop it.  That, when it gets right down to it, is about as truly American as you can get.  I mean, seriously, we have the Washington Redskins, the Cleveland Indians, the University of Illinois Illini.  Macy’s taking over Marshall Field’s and adding the Macy’s star to the iconic Marshall Field’s clock, putting Miracle on 34th Street-themed windows up on State Street, and selling Frango Mints in Macy’s bags is THE MOST AMERICAN FUCKING THING I CAN IMAGINE.  U-S-A!  U-S-A!

[3]Which, on the subject of Marshall Field’s and Macy’s, is now the Palmer House Hilton.  But no one seems to complain much about that.  Also, it has an astonishing lobby:




That lobby is also awesome because it’s on the second floor, so you come in from street level into a pretty normal looking arcade, then ride an escalator up and gradually the scope of this amazing room reveals itself.  To this day I’d rather stay in a century old boutique hotel than some ultra-modern resort because they remind me of the Palmer House even if nothing is quite like the Palmer House.

[4]Funny story on that one, too.  I found it in a little shop in the French Quarter and bought it as a souvenir.  The next morning I decided to go back and get them as presents for my parents and sister/bro-in-law from NOLA.  There was only one signpost.  But there was also an ornament with a Mississippi paddle wheeler that I want to say was the Delta Queen but probably wasn’t.  I thought, “Well, I guess I could get this.”  At some point shortly thereafter it occurred to me that my mother loves Mississippi River paddle wheelers in general and the Delta Queen in particular on a level that’s roughly equivalent to my love of Roger Clyne & the Peacemakers.  It was the most completely appropriate thing I could have gotten my mother and I bought it as a, “Eh, I guess this will do,” sort of afterthought.  The lesson, as always, is that my instincts are often way better than my actual brain.

[5]With exceptions, of course, Fred Clark being a shining example.  But it’s so hard to parse these things that I use “Evangelicals” in the “Evangelical voting bloc” sense because there’s only so much time I want to spend adjectivising this idea.

Angry Eyes, Part 4

The personal relationship with Jesus Christ that large swaths of Evangelicals want everyone to believe is the true version of Christianity is a deeply abusive relationship.  Their Jesus is emotionally and mental abusive.  For some, I suppose, he could also be physically abusive, but that was not my experience.  Still, emotional and mental abuse were the norm, so much so that in my last year or so of Evangelical Christianity I took to referring to god as “The Cosmic Jackass.”[1]

Making claims like that generally require a certain amount of support.  The classic situation of abuse is where one party holds another in thrall, usually through threats that may or may not get carried out.  Sometimes the threat is enough.  Sometimes the threat must be backed up by a demonstration.  This is most easily conceived of in the case of physical abuse, obviously, but I know of no one who would claim that mental or emotional abuse aren’t very real things.  So the question then becomes, “How does one identify this abuse when one party isn’t really there?”

For that the answer basically boils down to an abuse that is both created and enforced by cultural norms and group behavior.  God, it is said, doesn’t want you to read a book about science or watch a TV show that contains sex because that would be bad.  If you do something that would be bad, god will harm you in some way, generally by “withdrawing his protection.”[2]

I went to public schools in Illinois in the ‘80s and ‘90s and, as such, learned real history and real science.  I was largely insulated from the Evangelical obsession with teaching creationism and the revisionist American history of David Barton and his ilk.  As far as I knew, Biblical history lined up with secular history in all important aspects, but this was due to learning about the Bible in church with the implicit assumption that it was all accurate while I learned about history in school and the two tracks never really merged in any sort of meaningful way.  Science, for the most part, simply didn’t come up.  I gradually became aware of the fact that my secular education was fundamentally incompatible with my Biblical education, but no one told me that I had to pick one over the other.

My first true realization of the mental abuse inherent in Evangelical Christianity came about because of Amy.  We driving across the vast corn- and soybean fields of western Illinois discussing something or other when I casually mentioned something vaguely science-y that I took for granted, like the age of the universe or the Earth or whatever.  This was post-breakdown but pre-second breakdown, when I was still several months away from going back and volunteering with my old junior high youth group.  I was still planning on going to seminary at the time.

Amy didn’t like what I said and proceeded to argue in favor of what I now know is basic Answers in Genesis creationist bullshit.  She might have actually been the first person to mention Ken Ham to me, as I know she talked about him and I had no idea who he was.  I was completely and totally unprepared for that conversation, as the idea of entire lines of thought and human knowledge being completely closed off was foreign to me.  More than that, though, the absolute, shocking vehemence with which she shut down my simple statements of basic scientific fact surprised me.  I’d always regarded her as being smart and inquisitive,[3] so I’d naturally assumed she’d be interested.

I think that after that conversation she became progressively more scared of me.  She gradually withdrew from or just plain avoided any conversations where I held the intellectual high ground, as she became convinced that she couldn’t win against me in those arenas.  I didn’t realize that at the time.  Hell, I didn’t realize that until she flat-out told me, using words not so far off from the ones I typed two sentences ago.

A while after the car conversation we were hanging out at her apartment.  One of her roommates – who was not the most intellectually gifted person in the world – was there.  I, once again, dropped a casual reference to the universe’s age into the conversation.  Amy immediately told me to shut up because she didn’t want me confusing her roommate or have to start a difficult conversation.

I don’t recall her roommate even noticing.  I wonder now if she was just trying to protect herself.

It’s telling, though, that I had to go to an outside source, such as it is, for the mental abuse.  Intellectual honesty has always been deeply important to me and I have no fear of questioning my assumptions (sometimes too often, really).  That’s pretty much why I don’t do church anymore.

Well, that and the emotional abuse.  I mean, duh.

So, we covered way back in Part 1 of this here series that I have a notable lack of useful coping mechanisms.  I also have massive self-image issues, which was why doing the Fat Kid thing was just awesome.  I took that self-image stuff and channeled it all to an easily identifiable (and, sadly, really mundane) area.  Girls don’t like me?  Fat Kid.  I’m too afraid to talk to girls?  It’s not that, it’s that I know they won’t like me because I’m the Fat Kid.

Boom, right there.  It’s that second degree of self-justification that contains all the explanatory power.  That’s where Evangelical Christianity got all up in my business and fucked me over.

See, Evangelical Christianity has two messages.  The first is, “You totally fucking suck.”  The second is, “Only we can help you with that.”  The second message is rarely delivered as anything other than a promise.  As long as people keep buying the first message and the promise of the second, they’ll keep coming back for more.  And more.  And more.

I learned to be pathetic and helpless growing up Evangelical.  Every Sunday School or prayer meeting or Sunday sermon revolved around the idea that I wasn’t good enough and the only way I could become good enough was to accept Jesus.  If I still didn’t feel good, the message that I got was that I wasn’t accepting Jesus hard enough or the right way.  If I still didn’t feel good, the message I got was that I was still holding something back and I needed to give even more of myself.

I sublimated all of my hopes and dreams to the demented, abusive Jesus of Evangelical Christianity.  I then sat back and waited for Jesus to show up and make all of the sacrifices I made worthwhile.  When I finally realized that it was never, ever going to happen I left.  In leaving, though, I walked away from the cold comfort of the abusive relationship.

Sure, I could be intellectually free, but after some two decades of absorbing a message about how I wasn’t good enough and would never be good enough and could only be helped in that one place I had no coping skills whatsoever.  I only knew anger and waiting.  This was mostly because in the past my three mechanisms were prayer, waiting, and then getting really fucking mad because nothing was happening.

With prayer out the window, well, there we go.

I also got into the habit of incorporating alcohol as an integral part of the waiting.  At first it was basically a beer while watching TV or writing or whatever.  Then I developed a taste for single malt and bourbon.  Then I started to look for excuses to incorporate beer or bourbon as a part of pretty much everything I did.  After a while it was just kind of a thing.

Texas, for the record, did not help.  I was just beginning to adjust to the idea that I had a career-type thing and I was independent and I could think of myself as safe when the rug was pulled out from under me.  I negotiated a raise in the process of moving down, but the message that constantly whispered in the back of my head was, “You’re not in control.  You can’t make any long-term decisions.  You’re not safe here, there, or anywhere.”  I spent a year and a half mostly feeling hopeless.  Also, too, angry.  We can’t forget angry (although at least some of that anger was well-targeted).

So when I moved back from Texas and decided to buy a house, well, that was a massive amount of stress.  I endlessly re-hashed the decisions I’d made over the previous couple of years and thought of the ways god decisions I’d made after careful consideration then were going to completely screw me over now.  I cycled through worst-case scenario after worst-case scenario.  I filled spreadsheets with theoretical budgets and tweaked or re-did them based on new guesses that amounted to maybe $20/month.[4]  That’s, like, the diametric opposite of a coping mechanism.

I’d also decided to try a novel approach and not get angry about every unexpected thing that happened.  That left obsession and alcohol.  A week and a half ago I suddenly realized I wasn’t paying attention to what I was doing with the latter anymore.  I’d stopped caring about whether or not I was in control of myself or my situation.  That’s dangerous.

So the solution is to come up with an actual useful way of coping with the world and dealing with the unexpected now and unknowable future.  I can’t hide from any of it, after all.  And even if I wanted to hide, I don’t actually allow myself to do so, what with the being obsessive and whatnot.  So that’s a no-go.

It’s simple, really.  I know what I want.  I’ve always known what I want.  So I have to admit it to myself and then take necessary steps to get it done.  I can’t just deny everything and hope it happens anyway.

And, yeah, that’s kind of the thing.  I’ve still got a weird, jumbled collection of thoughts that loosely tie in, but the main thoughts are all out there.  And they’re probably confusing, since it’s a bunch of stuff that makes sense and follows nicely in my head and only in my head.

What’re ya gonna do?

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[1]One of the many, many ways I differed from the norm was in my lack of fear of swearing.  I learned all of the important cuss words in the fifth grade.  In high school I learned the Spanish equivalents, which is kinda funny, since I went to school in Glen Ellyn, IL, which is mostly known for being lily-white and affluent.  I’d make a joke here about learning Spanish cuss words from my friends, who learned them from their landscapers, but the truth was that I hung out with soccer players.  I believe Spanish cussing is the lingua franca of the soccer world.

Either way, I remember sitting in a church across the street from campus and talking to the pastor about my struggles with Christianity and constantly using the term “Cosmic Jackass God.”  He was, in most respects, a good man and pretty game to engage and talk about things that were not to be talked about.  So he actually did try to meet me where I was, which included at least one very halting mention of the blasphemy in which I was casually engaged.  While sitting in his church.  This, weirdly, is a good memory of that time.

[2]We see this one all the time from the TV blowhards like Pat Robertson.  They literally say, “Because America repealed DADT, god has withdrawn his protection from America.”  This is a completely meaningless phrase that nevertheless reverberates with a certain population segment.  Whether the idea is used cynically to rile up the faithful or the person saying it genuinely means it and has no idea that they sound like an idiot is a question I cannot answer.  I think it’s a case-by-case and speaker-by-speaker thing and anyone who claims that it’s all innocent or all coldly calculating is either naïve or hopelessly cynical.

[3]On a different thread, in 2000 I did what any good, Wheaton Evangelical did and voted for George W Bush.  In 2004 I voted for Obama in the Senate (I mean, c’mon, his opponent was Alan Keyes…), but as the 2008 Presidential elections were shaping up I was still in a basic conservative mindset and McCain hadn’t completely imploded, so I was planning on voting Republican.  Amy was firmly Team Obama pretty much from the get-go and argued long and hard against me.

Cross-sectional demographics is hard.  This is the lesson we’ve learned here.

[4]I don’t know how to put this lightly, but $20/month doesn’t mean much of anything to me.  I’m not rich, but the sudden realization that I’d forgotten to put the cost of a $60 quarterly parking pass at the train station should have resulted in a shrug rather than flurry of panicked Exceling.

Angry Eyes, Part 3

What are you afraid of?
What are you afraid of?
That alcohol is heavier than lead
And Hunter S Thompson is dead
She said, “You’ll never have enough
‘Til the day that you wake up
And everything is gone
Oh, everything is gone”
--Lucky Boys Confusion, “Leave on the Light”

Evangelical Christianity teaches you to hate, fear, and mistrust people.  There’s the big, obvious stuff that we all know.  The atheists and gays have an agenda and are not to be trusted.  The Muslims are all suicide bombers.  Liberals hate Jesus and America.  The poor are lazy, shiftless bums.  Evangelicals aren’t required to believe all of these things, but the various stereotypes are woven into the very fabric of life in a church.  They’re also not particularly interesting.

The place where that fear and distrust becomes interesting is within the walls of the church itself.  Life inside a church is like being in the cliquiest social club in the world.  People are constantly gossiping and jockeying for position and trying to be the person through whom all the power flows.  Evangelical Christianity is a place filled with idealists who only want to help make the world a better place.  It’s also filled with cynical, self-important assholes.  A lot of the latter are simply the hollowed-out shell of the former, tired of constantly having to learn and re-learn the simple lesson that the asshole almost always wins, even in the place that’s supposed to be Jesus’s home on Earth.  Jesus, as he is with so many other things, is powerless against the whispers of little old ladies at after-service socials.

Casual observers won’t necessarily know this.  I was far from a casual observer of life in church, however.  I was, as I’ve said, a Man of God, specifically of the type who was planning to become a pastor.  So I hung out with pastors.  I was a lay leader in multiple groups after graduating high school, so I hung out with other leader types.  I read books about doing effective ministry and building effective churches.

The thing that always came up was dealing with the difficult people in the church.  The difficult ones weren’t the disinterested or the disengaged.  The difficult ones were the people who sought to be the center of everything.  The difficult ones were the people who sought to have the power to be king makers and king breakers in their little worlds.  They had to be handled carefully and with kid gloves, as a pastor getting to close to one of them was holding a viper to his breast.

There were other, everyday problems to worry about, too.  Churches are hotbeds of gossip.  Simple self-preservation meant that it was a good idea to never, ever admit to any real difficulty in life.  There were the big, unavoidable things, like losing a job or something.  The community tended to rally around the people in that situation.  Woe to the man who was caught in adultery, to pick an easy example.  Depending on the church, though, the man caught with a bottle of whiskey might wish he’d been diddling the secretary.  There were other traps, too, though.

See, churches tell the people who attend that the church is a safe place.  People in the prayer meetings are encouraged to share their struggles.  Anyone who has been in a church for a long time knows that this is the exact last place to be honest, however.  There are acceptable struggles that everyone talks around and then gets a round of nods (the big code word here: “lust.”  If you haven’t been in a church you don’t know what I’m talking about.  If you’ve spent any time in a prayer group, though, you’re nodding along and you filled that word in long before I wrote it, although that’s context-sensitive).  As such, most prayer groups end up revolving around inane requests for help with upcoming tests or sick grandmothers or that one person that everybody has who they’ve been praying would receive Jesus but who just isn’t being receptive.[1]  Some uninitiated sap always walks in eventually and admits to having actual problems.  Everybody then talks about that person, usually when they’re not around.

Those acceptable and not-acceptable things are entirely group- and context-sensitive, though.  Moving from one group to another means it’s possible to screw up and admit to a taboo you didn’t know exists.  Things like smoking and drinking, for one, are fairly fungible.  Being divorced is potentially fraught with peril.[2]  Wayward children are also potentially difficult, as they can be an indication of the failure of their parents.

The trick to surviving and thriving in an Evangelical environment, then, is to never admit having trouble with anything except the acceptable things to have trouble with.  Mostly that means you have to admit from time to time that you have lust issues and you don’t read your Bible enough.  Otherwise you’re going to get called to the carpet.  So, as is my wont, it’s story time:

Story the First:  One of the girls I grew up with in my church was the daughter of one of the elders[3].  I knew him, mostly by sight.  One Sunday morning he was called up before the church, where he admitted before the entire congregation that he’d been having an affair and he’d be stepping down from his position as church leader guy.  I think I was in high school at the time.  I recall being horrified by the whole thing.  My problem was with the fact that it must have been awful for my friend to see her father humiliated in front of the entire church like that.

While I consider adultery pretty awful, I consider forcing a man to stand up in front of a church full of friends, acquaintances, and strangers off the street and admit to it[4] pretty fucking awful, too.  It’s the sign of a place that doesn’t give a shit about what the individual is going through, but only cares about making an example of someone who stepped out of line.  Who the fuck cares about the fallout for his wife or his children as they’re forced to very publicly come to terms with their father’s mistake?

Story the Second:  When I was coordinating outreach for the IV chapter at Western one of the other leaders didn’t like me very much.[5]  One of the other leaders got it into her head that Jesus wanted her to go off and do something else[6], which created a position that was filled by someone who was both unqualified and unstable and quickly lost her goddamn mind.  Some series of events that I don’t really remember anymore lead to me and one of the other leaders going to that first leader and asking her to talk to the person who was going bugnuts insane.

A couple weeks later at the weekly leaders’ meeting the head honcho, the leader who didn’t like me, and the other main leader blindsided the two of us with a whole thing about lovingly correcting our behavior for what we’d done.  I still remember sitting on the floor and shaking in rage.  I quit shortly thereafter.[7]

Story the Third:  When I was in junior high the head pastor of my church was ousted after an anonymous letter-writing campaign.  Someone in my mother’s Sunday School group had tried to get her involved.  She told them to shove it.  Later she told me the story and finished it off with, “If you’re going to say something, make sure it’s something you put your name to.”  I’ve always considered that the most valuable piece of instruction I received from either parent.

The lesson to be learned here?  Don’t trust people in churches.  It’s bad mojo.

Unfortunately I internalized that lesson quite well.  I already had self-esteem and self-doubt issues.  When I added those to my dawning realization that the people around me could be extremely petty and cruel assholes, even (especially?) the ones who were supposed to be the representatives of Jesus on Earth, I learned to internalize most of my own struggles.  It’s good to be wary that other people might have ulterior motives.  It’s much less useful to believe that everyone is a backstabbing asshole just waiting for a chance to take you down.

When I left the church I pretty much trusted no one.  Many of my so-called friends and theoretical support network disappeared overnight.  I had to be wary of all but a few because the people who popped in and out from time to time made their intentions obvious: they only cared to pull me back in.  I wasn’t about to be honest with them about anything, since they’d see anything I said through the prism of whether or not it could be used to reel me back in.

I’ve often tried to intellectualize the reasons I desperately tried to hang on to Amy during that stretch.  I’ve often tried to intellectualize the reasons I kept picking at the scab even after we stopped talking, which came after months of us making each other miserable and coming to completely and totally resent each other.  I tend to believe that it’s because I saw her as a symbol of something I was losing but not quite ready to give up.  I tend to say that she was a tangible thing to talk about when I needed some way to describe losing my religion.

I’m sufficiently removed from that to be able to say that’s probably a bullshit post hoc explanation.  I think I clung to her because I was desperately lonely and didn’t know where to look to fix that problem.  I think I was completely and totally emotionally and spiritually broken and hoping that she could somehow fix all of that.  She couldn’t and probably didn’t particularly want to, for which I cannot blame her.

Also, boobies.  It’s important to factor in the whole boobies thing.

Sometimes the answer isn’t this big thing that needs to be picked apart a bit at a time.  Sometimes it’s as simple as a guy who thought no one would ever actually care about him trying to hang on to one person who once had because he didn’t have anywhere else to go, lacked the coping mechanism to deal with it, and lacked the force of will to walk away and find something better.  Sometimes it’s just about trying to find a constant in a world that’s completely shifting.

When Amy was gone I curled up into the fetal position and hid from the world.  At that point I began transitioning from someone who drank from time to time to someone who pretty much always had alcohol around.  I crawled up inside my head, locked the door behind me, and endlessly picked over my memories while accompanied by alcohol.

Because that’s what writers do, right?  They drink and they write about their depression and despair.

I’m not an alcoholic.  I am, however, someone with a problem.  The problem is that I don’t much like myself and I don’t much trust, well, anybody.  Rather than spend these last four-plus years attempting to solve that problem I’ve been hiding from it and making excuses.

That’s an awful thing to realize.  The good news is that I realized it before I did anything irreversible.  The sad thing is that I know exactly what I have to do.  I’ve known exactly what I had to do for these last four-plus years.  The only thing that’s been stopping me is that I’ve been too afraid to try, too afraid to court failure.  I think this is one of those points where I have to actually try.

---------------------

[1]This is just one of those things.  Everybody has a non-Christian friend or relative or co-worker who just totally needs them some Jesus and who has totally needed them some Jesus since, like, 1987.  That person has been receiving weekly prayers since 1987 but wouldn’t know it, because the person who keeps bringing them up in prayer group doesn’t actually talk to friend/relative/co-worker about it.  Part of it is the passivity I brought up a couple posts ago.  Most of it is because almost no one actually wants to do what they’re supposed to do and actually trying to win people for Jesus.

I know that I sure as shit didn’t.  I was planning on being a pastor.  I was Outreach Coordinator for my InterVarsity chapter at Western.  That seems germane.

[2]Yes, even in 2012.

[3]Or deacons.  Or aldermen.  Whatever the hell the governing board of the church was called.

[4]Two or three times, no less, since I’m pretty sure they made him do it in every service.

[5]In the past I mostly attributed this to her being a backstabber who thought she needed to preserve her power against me.  I’ve since realized that she had a rather unique perspective on the whole thing where I was losing my mind and was afraid that I was in the process of fucking some shit up.  We didn’t like each other much and I haven’t wasted any time wondering what she’s up to since I left, but I’m willing to accept that maybe I brought more of it upon myself than I thought in the past.

[6]It was a stupid idea at face value and I accurately predicted that it would be a complete and abject failure.  The lesson here is that it’s pretty obvious when someone else is just making shit up and claiming it’s direct instruction from god.

[7]I have only two regrets about that.  The first is that I tried to pull the old “part as friends” routine.  The second is that I didn’t stand up, stick both middle fingers in the air, and walk out of the room.

Angry Eyes, Part 2

When you don’t fit in at church or bars
You bite your lip and you hide the scars
You pass the freeway out of town
For broken glass and comin’ down
--Sons of Bill, “Joey’s Arm”[1]

Evangelical Christianity is  system of ritualized obsession.  It rewards those who are the most ritualistically obsessed and actively encourages the not-obsessed-enough to become like those who are.[2]  Those who did it well historically were known as “The Saints.”  Those who do it well now are known as “A Man of God” or “A Woman of God.”

I was very good at playing the ritualistically obsessed game.  I was considered to be varying levels “A Man of God” from some time until high school until I left the church in which I grew up.  I wrapped my entire identity up in being considered a proper Man of God.  It gave me a sense of acceptance, respect, and gravitas that I otherwise would not have felt.  That need of validation and respect was what drove me to plan on attending Seminary and becoming a pastor.

Ultimately, though, I think it was what drove me to have almost nothing in the way of coping mechanisms.  In any other scenario my tendency towards obsession would have been regarded as a danger.  In the Evangelical community my obsession was directed towards Jesus and Jesus was all good, so it was regarded as being simply an aspect of my budding Man of God status.[3]

The problem is that obsession is the exact opposite of a coping mechanism.  In the Evangelical community if you’re having some sort of problem that you can’t overcome, the proper response is to pray about it.  There’s some parable Jesus tells about a persistent widow who gets what she wants by bugging an unjust judge every day, so the application is to bug god about the shit you’re dealing with every day.  It makes a certain amount of sense, I suppose.

One of the big problems with the application, though, is the relentlessly navel-gazing nature of Evangelical Christianity.  It’s one thing to be persistent when you don’t have a job and are about to find yourself starving in the street.  It’s another thing entirely when you don’t have a girlfriend and totally think it’s god’s job to introduce you to that one, exactly perfect person.  Most Evangelicals, at least in the circles I moved, were affluent suburbanites, college kids, or affluent suburban college kids.  Guess how many of them were in danger of missing their next meal and starving to death?  Now guess how many of them were super worried about that big test next period, or their total inability to figure out god’s will for their love life, or whether they should go to Bethel, Calvin, Moody, or Wheaton for college.

This actually goes hand-in-hand with the passivity I talked about last post.  No one was supposed to make their own decision.  God was supposed to decide everything.  This is because every single decision made by every single affluent, navel gazing, self-absorbed suburbanite with whom I went to church supposedly reverberated into eternity itself.  Every person we met was supposed to either teach us something about walking with Jesus or be an opportunity to witness.  Every place we went was supposed to be a place that god wanted us to be.  Random coincidence, such as seeing an old friend in the grocery store and having a great conversation became a “divine appointment.”  Those divine appointments were obvious because a set of lost keys had caused an otherwise annoying ten minute delay in the day’s errands.

There are about five thousand things that I look back on now and think, “What the fuck was wrong with me for thinking like that?”  This is one of them.  I can’t excuse it because it’s insane.  I don’t want to excuse it because it’s fucking stupid.

It’s also rather insidious.  The thinking is so pervasive that even now, six years since the last time I darkened the door that taught me there’s no such thing as coincidence, I still do it.  I tend to quickly stop myself, but I really wish that I didn’t start doing it at all.

This obsession and passivity, then, manifested itself in a completely insane search for signs of god’s will.  It was really stupid crap like, “So I was praying for god to tell me where to go to school, then I turned the radio on and it was a song about Chicago so god totally wants me to go to Moody Bible Institute.”

The endless waiting on god also took away the freedom to want.  If I wanted something I had to make sure that it was what god wanted before I did anything.  While that was awesome as a catch-all excuse to avoid things that I didn’t want to do or was afraid to do, it was less useful in other situations.  The way I got around that most of the time, honestly, was to do whatever the fuck I thought was necessary and then figure god would sort it out later.  Unfortunately I did not do that nearly often enough to make a habit of it.  Nor did I do it with the things I was scared to actually do.  And, again, rather than being told that I was an idiot and I needed to make a goddamn decision and take a freaking chance, I was lauded as an example of a Man of God, waiting on god’s will for my life.

This is especially problematic when you consider the nature of seeking god’s will in the Evangelical world.  I’ve talked about this before, but one of the big exercises in which people engaged was the prayer to ask god to speak to them.  I forget when I first learned this, but it was a regular occurrence across most of my church experience starting sometime around high school.

Basically, what happened was you’d be in a prayer meeting or on a retreat or something and the leader would start a prayer.  At some point during the prayer the leader would tell everyone to ask god to speak to them.  Then there would be a time of silence, during which each person would, in theory, hear from god.  It was a quiet voice that came from inside their own head and told them private things, which were usually either warm fuzzies, but were sometimes commands to do something or other.

This is batshit insane.  I know this because I lived through it.  I know this because it nearly drove me batshit insane.  See, I was having one of those periods of wanting to do something but being scared to do it when I was out at college.  So I was doing the whole “seeking god’s will” thing, which ultimately resulted in a round of “try to get god to say something.”  God, unsurprisingly, “told” me to do something that I wanted to but of which I was afraid.

In and of itself this isn’t a problem.  If you were talking to a buddy and said, “Hey, I want to go skydiving, but I’m scared shitless,” your buddy would probably say, “Hey, try it anyway.”  That’s fine.  You could say, “Okay,” or, “No, I really don’t want to,” and then move on with your life.

When god tells you to do something it carries with it a certain level of pressure.  That combination of actions reverberating through eternity and actions demonstrating faith is a dangerous combination.  If god says, “Do this,” and you don’t, you’re demonstrating a lack of faith.  If god says, “Do this,” and you do it and you fail, that also probably means you didn’t have enough faith.  Ergo, there are three choices: don’t try, try and fail, or try and succeed.

In retrospect, the obvious solution to this particular Gordian Knot is to cut it in half and say, “Enough with the bullshit.”  When you’re worked up into a frothy lather of faith and you’ve pushed so much of your identity into the box called “Man of God” and you’ve based your entire life plan on succeeding as such an abject demonstration of lack of faith is a bad move.  This is a toxic combination, especially when the logical part of your mind is screaming, “This doesn’t make a damn bit of sense, you have to stop!”

Did I mention that one of the other awesome aspects of Evangelical faith is that it’s demonstrated by imperviousness to reason?  There’s a Bible verse or three that says something to the effect that the wisdom of man is folly to god and the wisdom of god is crazy talk to man.  There are all kinds of stories in the Bible and the collected Biblical fan fiction about the great saints of old that commend people who were crazy but somehow ended up in the right because their faith carried them through and god rewarded them for it.  So, what I’m saying is that the only real difference between my Evangelical community at the time and the snake handlers in Appalachia is that we looked at them and said, “No way, man, that’s totally crazy.”

So what followed was several months of me skating on the very edge of a mental breakdown.  It was great, let me tell you.  My faith almost completely fell apart.

Then I met Amy.  I don’t recall necessarily thinking that god had put Amy in my life to fix me.  I do recall thinking, “Holy shit!” and then deciding that the still open and festering wounds in my faith weren’t really that big a deal.  Because, y’know, boobies.[4]

The first three months were great.  Then I went back for my last semester at Western.  That stretch was rocky, to say the least, mostly because I was still in the, “Oh my god she’s the mostest[5] awesome person ever,” stage and she was in some sort of weird passive-aggressive not-quite-sure-what-to-do-with-me stage wherein she wanted me around but she also didn’t really want me around.

I went back to working with my old junior high youth group after I graduated.  One of the first things I did was to go on the winter retreat.  I drove up directly from work and got to Baraboo, WI on pretty much the coldest night I’d ever experienced.  I also found out when I got there that bus trouble had delayed the kids’ arrival, so I went to go take a nap.

One of the clearest memories of my life was sitting on the floor of the cabin listening to the Saw Doctors.  Specifically, I was listening to “World of Good,” which is basically a song about saying a sad goodbye and wishing the best to a dear, loved companion.  I realized that I’d be saying that to Amy eventually.  There was no god involved, no divine revelation.  There was just this moment where everything that had been happening over the past few months suddenly made sense and I realized that I had to admit to myself that Amy and I would never be what I wanted us to be and we’d eventually end up going our separate ways.

That weekend we had one of those big ol’ prayer services for which church retreats are so famous.  Eventually the leader took us in to the ritual time of asking god to speak.  So there I was, in a room full of seventh and eighth graders, doing a thing I’d been doing since I was their age, probably for the first time since I’d nearly lost my mind.

I don’t recall the exact “message” I got from “god” that night.  I do know what it was about, though.  I was told to stick it out with Amy, because if I had faith everything would work out.

I nearly had a panic attack that night.  I suspect that there’s a part of my psyche that has never fully recovered from the complete and total mind-shattering moment that I had when it happened.  I realized that night that Evangelical Christianity was a lie.  It was a terrifying, monstrous lie that we told to ourselves and each other to justify behaving in ways that were counterproductive and went completely against all of observable reality.  It was a lie that men in positions of leadership and power told to impressionable kids who were scared of the world and didn’t know enough to realize what is and isn’t possible, likely, or sane.

I’d like to say that I stopped it.  I’d like to say I stood up, told the guy to shut the fuck up, and told the kids that I’d once believed that it was possible to get god to speak on demand.  I’d like to say that I don’t fear that right now one of those impressionable junior highers from that night is starting down the same path that nearly broke me completely apart.  I can’t say that, though.  I can’t say that because I said nothing.  I was too busy trying to avoid having a panic attack.

There was also, I’m forced to admit, a small part of me that wanted to believe that it was still possible for god to speak, but that I was the one getting in the way.  There was another, tinier, part of me that wanted to believe that, hey, things could work with Amy.[6]

My faith didn’t die that night.  My ability to remain in the Evangelical world was irrevocably destroyed, however.  I stuck around as a leader through the end of the school year, then bolted.

It’s been six and a half years since that night in Wisconsin and six years since I went to a service at my old church.  It’s been more than four years since I talked to Amy and roughly that long since I went to a Sunday morning service at any church at all.  Yet I still carry that moment around with me.  Evangelical Christianity taught me to have faith in things that were impossible, then when reality crashed in around my ears I found out that I hadn’t learned a single skill to cope with the fallout.

I’m still haunted by the fact that somewhere out impressionable kids just like me are probably in the same exact place I once was.  It’s an awful, evil burden to place on the shoulders of a 13-year-old.  The worst part about it is that the people who are doing it think they’re doing the right thing.

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[1]For the record, “Joey’s Arm” contains what I would call “encapsulated despair,” which is something that the Sons of Bill do quite well.  One of these days I’m going to write a whole freaking post about Sons of Bill.  There’s an absolutely brilliant layer of storytelling underneath everything they do that exists on the same level as Mike Doughty and Paul Simon in that they can fit more atmosphere and narrative in four lines than most people can fit in to four hours.

Crap, I want to do that right now.

And, actually, now that I think about it, there are two broad categories of song-based storytelling: short form and long-form, for lack of a better term.  Long-form is the more common of the two, as it’s far, um, easier, for lack of a better term.  I mean “easier” both in terms of conception and execution than short-form, not in terms of, “Hah, well, anyone can write a song!”  Good storytelling is hard.  Putting good storytelling to music is even harder.  The trick with what I call “short-form” song-based storytelling is that it basically has to be a collection of vignettes within a larger narrative, all within the constraints of a five-minute song with a couple choruses and maybe a bridge.  I can think of exactly two artists that do that well: Paul Simon, Mike Doughty. Sons of Bill (specifically, I believe, the James songs, although I lack liner notes for the first two albums) hits it from time to time, like in the four lines that opened this post.  Check it:

She comes back to tell me she’s gone
As if I didn’t know that
As if I didn’t know my own bed
As if I’d never noticed
The way she brushed her hair from her forehead
--Paul Simon, “Graceland”

The best I ever did with my life
Said just three honest words to you
Three droplets in a pail of lies
Three gems among the alibis
--Mike Doughty, “Ways + Means”

Doughty has a competitive advantage in this category, as pretty much all of his songs are loosely-related collections of stories and/or words that sound good and seem to create a narrative.  The first verse of “Ways + Means” is my favorite, but Doughty is full of ‘em, like the two-line story in “27 Jennifers:”

I went to school with 27 Jennifers
16 Jenns, 10 Jennies, and then there was her
--Mike Doughty, “27 Jennifers”

Sons of Bill also have the ability to offer up a phenomenal two-line story:

Ain’t it funny how you pray for rain
Still waiting on the rust?
--Sons of Bill, “Virginia Calling”

“Virginia Calling” is actually a song built entirely on short-form stories.  It’s also a yearning for home and acceptance, making it the pessimistic counterpoint to Paul Simon’s “Graceland.”  It’s not despairing, however.  Simon’s hope is born from the belief that he’ll be accepted in Graceland, whereas the sadness in “Virginia Calling” comes from the realization that rain will eventually bring rust.  You get what you need, but it always comes with a cost.

Also, I should point out, this is all my subjective analysis of a thing.  Y’know, just in case you think I actually know anything…

[2]To an extent.  There are those who are obviously way out there in their obsession.  Those people are weird and kept at arms’ length by the rest of the congregation.  Figuring out the difference between the two is a fine distinction and a bit like asking a Supreme Court Justice to identify pornography.  Mostly, though, the difference between the properly obsessed and the improperly obsessed is in correct application of tribal ritual and Christianese.

Basically, if you want to be accepted, make sure you tell everyone that you wish you had the sort of faith and dedication to pray and study your Bible six hours a day and make sure every thought, action, and conversation is “god-centered.”  If you want to be treated as a weirdo, actually read your Bible and pray six hours a day and ceaselessly talk about Jesus with everyone you meet.  I hope that helps.

[3]This is not an attempt to say that I think for a moment that I’d be completely without obsessions were I not a former Evangelical.  I have any number of low- to high-level obsessions.  They just tend to balance each other out, as I focus on one or two things at a time, then get bored and move on.  In fact, I believe my other great obsession saved my brain when I was completely and totally falling apart in my faith in college.  My absolutely, ironclad determination to finish out my history requirements and get straight A’s forced me to spend a large amount of my time working on things that had fuck-all to do with Jesus and ministry and kept me grounded in a completely secular, task-oriented set of behaviors.  I had a 4.0 GPA the Fall semester and a 3.80 the Spring semester of a year where religion was literally destroying my psyche.  That Spring GPA would have been a 4.0, except that I had my least-favorite professor of all time and she gave me a B on, like, everything I did.

[4]Boobies.  The cause of and solution to all of life’s problems.

[5]Word autocorrected “mostest” to “moistest” there.  Just thought I’d point that out.  I cannot speak to the accuracy of that particular claim with any degree of authority, however.

[6]In point of fact, I did try to figure out how to stick around and make it work for the better part of a year after that.  Then I just kind of stuck around for a few more months out of a general lack of anything better to do.  I freely admit that god had nothing to do with that.  I was just a giant moron.  I was a persistent, determined moron, but I was a moron.

Also, I’d love to know why I haven’t figured out how to channel that more often.  Maybe it’s because I knew I was going to fail, anyway, but with other things I don’t know that yet.  Or something.  There’s a complete thought with a great deal of explanatory power in there somewhere.

Angry Eyes, Part 1

My daddy said “Boy you stare this old world down”
And it stared right back at me
And alone here in the darkness, is that the man I wanna be?

‘Cause this room is dark and empty as I lie awake at night
There’s just you and me and angry eyes
--Sons of Bill, “Angry Eyes”[1]

So there’s a story that must be told.  It’s a difficult story.  At least, it’s a difficult story for me.  But as best I can tell I have four basic coping mechanisms and only one of them is actually, well, good.  Welcome to my coping mechanism.

The story is messy, it’s self-absorbed, and its unifying theme, if it has one, is that there is nothing particularly unifying about it, beyond that of a guy trying to figure out how to make his way in the world and failing regularly in spite of his actual, apparent success.  It’s probably not fully honest.  Parts of it might not have even happened.  This is all about memory, all about unpacking those boxes at the back of my mind that contain those fragments of who I am and who I desperately don’t want to be.

This sounds pretty pretentious.  Sorry.  Dave Eggers would probably do it better than I just did.

In my mind I’ve always been the Fat Kid.  I was shocked a few years ago to run across some pictures of me in grade school and discover that I was a pretty normal looking kid.  I was bigger than most, but I wasn’t, y’know, fat.  I was also terribly uncoordinated and not particularly athletic, but I was also, what, 11?  I don’t think I figured out hand-eye coordination until about three years ago.

By the time I got out of junior high I was most definitely the Fat Kid.  I was the Fat Kid long before I graduated.  It kind of terrifies me to think about how quickly I must have ballooned.  I’d ask, but, quite frankly, I don’t want to know.  It’s hard to say for certain, since I have no recollection of my thought processes then, but I’m guessing that eating was my very first coping mechanism.  It also quickly became my first generalized excuse.

It works like this (or, y’know, I’d assume): I didn’t like myself, so I ate and got fat.  That way I had the convenient excuse of, “I’m a fatass, so no one likes me.”  It’s a strange place, that, like being in an abusive relationship with myself.  I didn’t want to stay there, but I didn’t want to leave, because if I did I might have to figure other stuff out.  That, as it turns out, is scary.

Junior high was also the first place where religion began to play a central role in my life.  This, for the record, is where the story starts to get hard to tell.   I feel I need to self-censor, exactly as I did in the post that kicked this whole line of thought off.  The wannabe evangelists are quick to pounce on the exact sort of stuff I’m about to say and use it as an attempt to wedge their crap in where it does not belong.

Still, it must be said that I hold the opinion that Evangelical Christianity pretty much fucked me over.  It wasn’t the only player.   I’m assuming it wasn’t the prime mover in whatever happened to make me what I was.  What it was, though, was a force that made healthy, proactive change impossible.  As such, it must be talked about.  I’ve always tried to avoid bringing it in as more than an incidental player when telling this aspect of my story, but it’s an undeniable negative force in my life.  My decision to leave Evangelical Christianity was a purely emotional attempt at self-preservation.  My decision to leave Christianity was an intellectual decision.  It’s best not to confuse the two.

See, for me the church was a refuge while I was dealing with life as a fucked-up teenager.  It was, for the most part, an undeniably good place.  There were good men and women in my junior high and high school youth groups who did their best to create the sort of place where a kid like me could hang out and feel safe.  That’s why I went back and spent four and a half years as a leader after I graduated from high school.  I wanted to create for some other kids what I, myself had found.

I got the habit of being the adult leader who knew where all the kids who didn’t want to be there would hang out.  I got in the habit of keeping track of the kids who didn’t want to be there to see if they were actually there, and then I want to find them if they weren’t.  There was a little room behind the main room where we did all our stuff where most of the kids went.  Other leaders would also head back and patrol.  A few also made themselves self-appointed leaders who watched the doors.

They, I think, just wanted to enforce discipline.  They’d keep the kids out of the back room.  I’d sit with them and talk about life.  I figured that was what they needed more than anything else.  Other leaders got into the habit of seeing me back there with the kids and leaving well enough alone.

It was my ministry.  I also recall being in constant fear that I wasn’t doing ministry right, since I wasn’t really making what I did about Jesus.  I wasn’t supposed to do ministry without Jesus, I thought.  I’d fail miserably.  I always, in fact, feared – and on some level assumed – failure precisely because I wasn’t constantly “bathing everything in prayer” as the lingo went.

That goes back to my own time in junior high.  I wasn’t one of the kids who didn’t want to be there.  On Tuesday nights the only place I wanted to be was at youth group.  It was, as I said, my safe space.  I did the retreats, the missions trips, the Thursday morning prayer meetings, everything.  A huge percentage of my memories belong in the old chapel across the street from the main church where we did everything.  An awful lot of those memories are good.

So, the question must be asked, why did I leave?  Why do I have nothing good to say about church now?

What it gets down to is as simple to say as it is complicated to conceive of or explain.  My church did less than nothing to prepare me for interaction with reality.  It did absolutely nothing to help me deal with the issues I actually needed to handle.

In the Evangelical community I grew up in, the answer to absolutely everything was Jesus.  If it wasn’t Jesus, it was the Bible.  Seriously.[2]  Every problem could be answered by praying more or reading your Bible more or praying and reading your Bible more.  Sometimes, too, you needed to fast, because there’s this one verse where the disciples are having trouble casting out a demon and Jesus shows up, does it, and then says, “Sometimes these things require fasting, too.”  You might think I’m pulling that out of my ass.  I am not.

Sometimes, though, Jesus is a lot less useful than a scrip and a drive down to the local pharmacy for a bottle of Xanax.  You would not know that to talk to a frighteningly large number of people in the Evangelical community.  The logic is straightforward if you’re well-versed in Evangelical thinking processes.  Jesus is supposed to solve all problems.  Therefore, if you have a problem, all you need is Jesus.  Also, some stories of Jesus casting out demons are obviously stories of Jesus healing mental illness, as such, Jesus totally has more power than Prozac, since, hey, Jesus.  It sounds weird, but a lot of things that made sense back in the day sound weird to me now.  Several things also make me question my sanity.

I once had a friend who was in desperate need of counseling.  She had three friends she regularly turned to when she needed something.  Two of us convinced her to go see a therapist, who then prescribed something or other for her.  The third friend told her that she shouldn’t take drugs, because Jesus should be enough and using “a crutch” was indicative of a lack of faith.  I told her that he wouldn’t say the same thing if she’d broken her leg and needed an actual crutch to walk around, so she probably shouldn’t listen to him.

I actually did have a doctor prescribe Prozac for me once.  I took, like, two of them and then stopped.  It wasn’t out of any sort of religious conviction that I can recall.  I just didn’t want to be on Prozac.  In retrospect, that might have been dumb.  It’s also academic at this point, since what happened, happened.  I just thought I’d toss that out there.

Leaving aside whether or not I needed to be medicated, my biggest problem was one that actually could be directly traced to Evangelical Christianity.  The community I was in encouraged passivity and, for lack of a better term, faking it.  I was exceptionally good at both.

The passivity thing is kind of hard to explain.  Basically, if you wanted something, you had to ask god for it and wait for god to open doors.  There were two broad categories of people who took this seriously.  The first category was made up of people who figured out how to get god to tell them what to do, anyway.  The second category was made up of people who tried desperately to get god to open doors that they, themselves, were afraid to open.

I was firmly in that second category.  The logic was that if god wanted me to do or have something, it would kind of happen, somehow, but if god didn’t want me to do or have something, it would never, ever happen.  There’s honestly no way of knowing whether or not I would have been so passive had I been in a different environment.  I suspect that I would have, given that it seems I could have found a way to not be in that category simply by being the other type of believer in that logic.

Thing is, though, that my passivity was considered a virtue by the people around me.  It was actively encouraged, but called something different: patience.  So when I spent five years flipping between taking classes at community college and working full time and generally being afraid of possibly making a massive mistake when I tried to step out into the larger world all I did was tell my friends that I was waiting on god’s will and, believe it or not, they praised me for my patience.  It was a great scam and a terrible, terrible lesson.

It was the Swiss Army Knife of excuses, too.  I was afraid of talking to girls (which, really, boiled down to me being afraid that no one would ever want to have sex with The Fat Kid), so the solution was to say I was waiting for god to show me The One.  If I wasn’t in the mood for that dodge, the other one was that I was valuing “god’s gift of singleness”[3].  It was bullshit and I’m sure that some people picked up on that.  For most people, though, it worked and it resulted in them thinking more highly of me.

It also meant that I never actually had to learn how to handle anything on my own.  I never had to try and fail.  I never had to try at all.  Success was incidental and I never had to internalize those lessons, either, since, y’know, Jesus.[4]

So, there we go.  I figure that covers about half of the reason I’m somewhat removed from being an actual, fully functional adult.  For my next trick, I’ll cover the two A’s: Anger and Alcohol.[5]

-

[1]For the record, I’d never actually looked at the lyrics to the song before and always heard that line as a really confusing instruction from his daddy that went, “Boy you stare this old world down it’ll stare right back at me.”  That doesn’t make a lick of sense.  Now it makes sense.  Also, I see it as an allusion to the old Nietzsche line about staring into the abyss.

I would not put that past Mr. James Wilson, honestly…

[2]There’s an old joke, told by people inside as a joke, about a kid in Sunday School who is asked to identify a furry brown creature with a bushy tail and penchant for acorns.  His answer is, “Well that sounds like a squirrel to me, but I know I’m supposed to say Jesus.”

That joke isn’t funny to me anymore.

[3]No.  Seriously, it’s a thing.

[4]Also, too, most of my successes were purely intellectual.  I learned that I could think good, basically.  This created a whole other set of problems, in that I’ve always tried to over-intellectualize and over-think, well, pretty much everything.

Basically, what I’m saying is that I’m 31 years old and single because I’ve never actually learned how to flirt.

[5]The two women I could say I dated both had names that started with A, now that I think about that particular construct.  One was a predator who took advantage of the fact that I was a giant mess.  The other was not necessarily a predator, but she helped mess me up good, too.  I was prone to cut her slack, then I was prone to get really angry with her for being a total bitch.  Of late I’ve had my own set of experiences that have convinced me that what we had was the Kobayashi Maru of relationship scenarios.  There are some things that have no good outcome.

Well, okay, the Kobayashi Maru scenario worked out just fine for the Romulans.  And James T. Kirk, but he cheated, and you can’t cheat in relationships.  Wait, you can cheat in relationships, but you can’t cheat in…

Aw, fuck it.  Forget I wrote that last paragraph.

It'll Take More than Double Yellows to Get Your Ass Back Home

In my last post, which also doubled as the first post I've put up in a month, I included this line as an innoculation:

On some level I want to self-censor, because I know that someone, somewhere will read this and say, “Ah ha! He’s ripe for evangelizing back to Jesus!”  Fuck that.  I mean, seriously, fuck that.

The post went up at 8 AM.  At 9:05 AM I got a comment from some person who, to the best of my recollection, has never once commented on this blog, bearing a bunch of Jesus-related crap.

Anyway, "A voice in the wilderness," this one's for you.



That, by the way, does not accurately reflect my life.  Also, it's really too bad that I couldn't go with the thematically similar, but less apropos "This Losing Fight," since it includes the phrase, "And you could buy her reparation flowers/But you make nine dollars an hour/And the whole thing's just gonna wilt and die anyway."  For the record, when Sons of Bill blow up huge like N*SYNC I'm going to start a tribute band called Reparation Flowers.  That said, have some more Sons of Bill:




Oh, and this one's for you, too:



I don't gotta buy the cure from you.  I know you're only gonna sell me the disease.

The More Things Change...

So, I’m working on a few milestones, here.

I moved back to Chicago over the Fourth of July weekend last year.  Specifically, I moved back to my parents’ house, due to my brilliant plan to purchase a house of my own.  My plan was to do so quickly.  It is nearly Fourth of July and I am still living in my parents’ house.

This is not to say that I don’t actually own a house.  I have, in fact, owned a townhouse on the south side of Wheaton since April 20th.  It might be move-in ready after next weekend.  Turns out that buying a house is a giant pain in the ass.

I’ve learned that there are two basic events that no one who’s experienced or been adjacent to someone who has experienced them will tell you the real story until after you’re committed: buying a house and having major elective surgery.  Everyone says buying a house is awesome.  Then by your four hundredth trip to Home Depot to buy some random shit you didn’t know you’d need you’ll have heard the horror stories of some six hundred other people.

So, basically, if you’re wondering whether or not I’m alive, I am.  If you’re wondering whether or not I unceremoniously quit blogging, I have not.  I’m just really busy.  It doesn’t help that work managed to pick up to an insane degree at pretty much exactly the same time I signed the mortgage.  There are a whole bunch of writing-related things I want to get to, but just haven’t been able to sit down and, y’know, write.

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I was in Madison, Wisconsin on Wednesday and Thursday.  I’ve written about my vast love of Madison before, and this time I was there for the same exact reason: Roger Clyne & the Peacemakers at the High Noon Saloon.

This particular trip was cursed, however.  After I got done eating migas at Fuzzy’s Tacos on Thursday morning I just said, “Fuck it,” and got the hell out of town.  The Peacemakers were in Milwaukee the following night, but I decided not to go.

The Peacemakers were at the Cubby Bear, across from Wrigley Field, on Saturday.  I didn’t go.  I was too worn out from everything else, and my bro-and-law and I had been at my house installing a new bathroom exhaust fan at 6:30 on Saturday morning, so I was in bed by 11 pm that night.  A friend texted me right around the time the Peacemakers would have been going on to ask where I was and was shocked at my response.

I honestly didn’t feel like I’d missed out on anything.  By my count I’ve seen the Peacemakers as a full band a minimum of 16 times since 2008.  I’ve seen Roger and PH do an acoustic show together.  I’ve made some good friends and good memories out of the whole thing.  I got the bestest dog in the world, too, which is pretty freaking sweet.  I’ve traveled to some places I wouldn’t have otherwise gone and been introduced to some great non-RCPM bands because of the experience (Sons of Bill, the Alternate Routes, and American Aquarium are the three that come immediately to mind).  I wouldn’t trade any of that for the world.  I’m not saying that I’ll stop going to see RCPM in the future, nor will I stop wearing their t-shirts now (in fact, I’m wearing one as I write).  This was timing, as much as anything (as was last summer’s RCPM/Sons of Bill show at the HoB Chicago on the same exact night Soundgarden was at the UIC Pavilion.  SOUND.  GAR.  DEN).  The big thing, though, is this: in between shows I barely listen to the Peacemakers anymore.

But the novelty, it seems, has worn off.  That’s okay, it’s a thing.  But that’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately.

Last year, not long after I moved back, I went to see Local H at a venue out in the suburbs.  I didn’t enjoy myself much at all, as I got stuck in this weird feedback loop about how I suddenly couldn’t see meaning in going to concerts and what the fuck am I going to do if I find myself at 40, then 50, then 60 as one of those people who’s still trying to go see the same bands on the county fair circuit (or the nursing home circuit, maybe?).

It wasn’t really a question about music itself.  It was a question about meaning and mortality.  It was a question that I’m no closer to answering now than I was then.

All I know is that when I left religion, RCPM was one of the things I used to fill the gap.  I am incapable of doing things like that without reflecting on the meaning.  I guess my problem now is this: I know that there are some things that used to mean a lot to me that doesn’t mean as much anymore.  It will fade over time.  Again, that’s fine.  But my big question is this: what do I do next?

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Ultimately, I think, this is a question about religion.

Leaving Christianity still hurts.  It doesn’t hurt in the sense that I miss having religion in my life.  It hurts in the sense that I still remember realizing that I’d been lied to for all those years.  I still remember the lesson that people who called themselves my friends, people who claimed we were family would no longer talk to me.

On some level I’ll admit that brought a certain level of freedom.  It meant that I could choose to leave behind some people who I didn’t actually like but felt forced to consider friends because, y’know, Jesus and shit.  It meant that I could start being intellectually honest with myself and stop trying to cover my various doubts and concerns.  Still, leaving Christianity still hurts.

This is a tough thing to talk about.  On some level I want to self-censor, because I know that someone, somewhere will read this and say, “Ah ha! He’s ripe for evangelizing back to Jesus!”  Fuck that.  I mean, seriously, fuck that.

My lack of religion is not an emotional decision.  It’s an intellectual decision.  As such, my feelings on things have no real bearing on my decisions about them.  I just thought I’d make that point clear.

It’s difficult to figure out a way to talk about this, honestly.  It’s not that I’m uncomfortable doing so, but that I’m not sure words exist to make my point.  If they do I am completely without the ability to put them in the right order to make sense.  I suppose, though, that I’ll try.

Self-definition is kind of the central point.  I once defined myself as a Christian.  I defined myself as a certain kind of Christian.  Other people defined me as a certain kind of Christian, too.  Once I stopped defining myself as that kind of person a bunch of other people suddenly didn’t like me anymore.

I’ve never been particularly comfortable with myself, if I’m honest.  I’ve always been way too freaked out that people won’t like me, especially if I ever let them meet the real me.  So whenever I find it necessary to redefine myself, it freaks me the fuck out that people will walk away.

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Honestly, this has nothing to do with religion, either.  It has everything to do with the fact that I walked into my (still incomplete) kitchen at about 7:30 this evening and poured all my liquor down the drain in the sink (except a bottle of Roger Clyne’s Mexican Moonshine that really deserves a good home and a bunch of large format Two Brothers and Dogfish Head beer that, again, could use a good home).

I’m not an alcoholic.  I mean, when it gets right down to it there’s a big semantic argument to be had, here, but suffice it to say that I don’t think of myself as an alcoholic.  I also think of myself as someone who should stop consuming alcohol.

I’ve been fascinated with the stories people tell about being alcoholics over the past few years.  Some of it is because there are certain people I find fascinating who are also alcoholics (Craig Ferguson, for one) or because I know people who are alcoholics.  Some of it is, if I’m honest, because I’ve wanted to confirm for myself that, no, I’m not an alcoholic.

Quite frankly, I think I’m on the safe side of the line.  In all of the narratives I’ve come across there is a gradual progression that basically amounts to losing control.  For a long time the person in question is on top of the alcohol, then they’re not.  It’s also always a hindsight thing, too, and there’s always a moment where the person realizes, “Holy shit, what the fuck is happening?” or “Holy shit, what the fuck just happened?”

When I moved to Brookfield and found myself alone much of the time and trying to deal with the fallout of the Amy thing and the leaving Christianity thing I flirted with the edge of control.  When I moved to Texas there were several points where I flirted with the edge of control.  Right now I’m under a shitload of stress and, guess what? I’m flirting with the edge of control.  This tells me that I self-medicate with alcohol, which is a huge, blinking danger sign.  It also tells me that if I keep on this particular path, eventually I’ll hit a point where something is too much and I go over the edge.  If I’m honest, which I might as fucking well be right now, I’m worried that this time will be that time.

I’m playing Russian Roulette and I’ve already flipped three chambers, basically.

It’s that self-medication during times of stress bit that’s both my savior and the potentially destructive element.  When I’m not under a heavy stress load I’m completely aware of my limits and in control.  I can go weeks without drinking, or only having a beer or two a week because it seems like a good idea at the time.  So all I have to do is get through the stressful time and everything is okay.

That’s where the but comes in.  What if the stress time lasts too long?  What if that, “Holy shit, what just happened?” moment comes during the stress period and from there I cannot return?  The thing I’m suddenly realizing is that my normal state actually betrays me in my over-stressed state.  Because I’m in control and/or there’s nothing I need to worry too much about controlling in my normal state, I think I’m in control at all times, even when any outside observer would say that I’ve just stepped over a line.

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So here we get into the weirdness of self-definition.  I’ve defined myself as the beer snob and scotch drinker guy.  I go to concerts all the time, which generally revolve around, y’know, standing around in crowded rooms and drinking beer.  I’ve got friends with whom I hang while drinking and shit.  I’ve made “guy who drinks alcohol” a part of who I am, a part of how I think of myself, and a part of how other people think of me.

How do I deal with my (very real, I’m loathe to admit) social anxiety now?  I mean, I still want to go to concerts (and, on some level, I’m intrigued by the possibility that they’ll suddenly get cheaper).  I don’t want to go back to hanging out with teetotaling churchies.  I have no intention of starting up with Alcoholics Anonymous.

See, for me from a personal standpoint this is really not much different than losing weight.  I’ve been quite successful at doing that in the past, and all I’ve really had to do was stop thinking of dessert as a good idea.  I, for all intents and purposes, trained myself to ignore cake.  I can (and have, which is how I know I still have control) do the exact same thing with alcohol.  When you’re not eating cake, though, you just have to say, “I’m trying to lose weight,” and everyone will be, “Oh, good job, we’ve been meaning to tell you you’re fat.”

For some reason, I feel like doing the same thing with alcohol is a different thing entirely.  Losing weight is considered empowering, almost.  Not drinking feels like it’s admitting to some sort of weakness.

Actually, now that I think about it, I kinda-sorta blame Alcoholics Anonymous for that.  What’s the first thing you have to do for them?  Admit you’re powerless in the face of alcohol.

Well, fuck that.  I’ma stop drinking precisely because I still have control and alcohol is powerless in the face of me, what with the fact that it’s a non-sentient liquid.  And if people don’t like that, I’ll tell them to go eat cake.

Thanks, internet, I’m glad we had this talk.

Also, I’ll probably have to update how this whole thing is going, as this has kicked off a whole round of “Geds thinks about religion and lack of empowerment.”  The alcohol/powerlessness thing is basically motivated by shame.  It also occurs to me that I feel ashamed to admit to certain people that I don't want to drink alcohol anymore in the same exact way I feel ashamed to admit that I'm just not as in to RCPM as I used to be in the same exact way I felt ashamed about saying I didn't want to do religion anymore.

Think those things are interconnected?  Hopefully I'll have time to tease the thoughts out...in, like, two weeks.

I also want to write a post about Mavis Staples, because, holy shit, Mavis effing Staples.

On a somewhat related note, I also have many, many thoughts about Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter and, more than that, the annoyingly predictable conversation discussing said book always kicks off.

Oh, and I'm pretty sure I left a really fun sci-fi story on hold back in April.

Also, hopefully I’ll be able to provide a detailed breakdown on my thoughts about oil-based v. latex-based paints.  And my thoughts about Sherwin-Williams primer v. Kilz Premium v. Zinsser 1-2-3.  And my thoughts about Behr Premium v. Pittsburgh Paints Ultra v. Valspar.  And, hell, if you’re lucky I’ll show some pictures of power tools, as I have several and am borrowing many more.

Have I mentioned that homeownership pretty much sucks ass so far?

Every Day I'm Rising Up

I turned 31 on Monday.  I know, right?  I'm sure some of you are all, "Wow, that's fucking old."  Others are like, "Pffffft, young'in, come back and talk to me when you can grow hair on your nuts."

As such, I think 31 is a pretty damn good age.  And it was definitely time for a party.  Three years ago on my birthday I saw Local H at the Double Door in Chicago.  Two years ago I saw the Lost Immigrants at the Doublewide in Dallas (and met James Dunning, who turned out to be a cool dude).  Last year I got my offer letter to come back to Chicago from Dallas.  This year, well, this year I had a party game:



Yup.  Nothin' like taking the day off to sand down your stairs.  Anyway, it was a good birthday, all things considered, especially since I got an email from Barnes & Noble at 11:30 on Monday night that Blackout, the third Newsflesh book, was ready to be downloaded.  I hadn't been expecting to get it until June.

And so but anyway, now that I'm officially ensconced in my fourth decade on this planet, I feel it's time to pretend like I've developed some wisdom about life.  So here are my three big lessons on life:

1.  Every few years I realize how dumb I was a few years ago.  I fear the moment when that stops being true, because it means I've stopped growing and learning.

2.  I always have to be willing to get hurt and be disappointed.  I've spent the last few years focused solely on expectation management, i.e. if you don't expect too much you won't be let down when the roof inevitably falls in on you.  I've finally figured out that the only thing you get from that is misery compounding misery, because if you don't dedicate yourself to something and try you'll just end up wondering why you can't have nice things.

3.  If I'm waiting for someone or something to come along and complete me, I'll never be whole.  No one else can tell me who or what to be.  It doesn't matter if I'm looking for god or a significant other or that job that I think will be the best thing ever.  If I don't know who I am and can't give myself meaning, then I'll just be defining yourself by some external thing.

So, yeah.  It's pretty trite and obvious, I suppose.  But it took me thirty years to learn, so maybe it's not.  Life is really good right now and I've got some developing developments of a developmental nature that I think will probably actually cause my head to explode if they go the way I hope they do.  But even if they don't, well, I've learned enough to say that it won't be the end of the world and there's always something new and exciting around that next corner.

Anyway, here's some happy-making music:



And here's some Florence + the Machine, because, holy shit, Florence + the Machine:

Self-Discovery Sucks

You, you never realized
What I could do
Stars in your eyes
You made it true
While looking at the sky
You were searching for something better
When that better was right in front of you
-- Lost Immigrants, “Something Better”

Journeys of self-discovery suck.  You’ve basically got two options.  You can have a “journey” to discover something that you want to discover, anyway, at which point you’ve just wasted everyone’s time and are a dishonest fucknugget.  Or you can approach them honestly and discover a truth or four.  Those discoveries, however, will usually come at an inconvenient time and force some sort of response that requires effort and change.

They then tend to be really hard to explain, especially when you don’t actually want to.

I have learned, however, that when I don’t want to do something, like, really don’t want to do it, then it’s probably the most necessary thing in the world for me to do.  So I suppose I must try.  Perhaps with enough words I can muddy my self-discovery enough to safely ignore the various implications.

One of my unacknowledged reasons for keeping Her in a prominent place in my headspace was also one of my most self-serving.  I always claimed that it was all about reflecting on the religion left behind and whatnot.  It was far more useful to me to keep her around, however, because I needed a villain.  She made a fantastic villain.  I could explain away any number of my unsavory or self-defeating actions with a, “I did it in response to her and she’s kind of a bitch.”

I’m not going to say that she’s wasn’t kind of a bitch.  I have a great deal of independent confirmation that, yeah, I could say that she’s kind of a bitch and get away with it just fine.  Some people are just plain mean.  Some people are capable of going to default meanness when pushed hard enough or it suits their purposes.  It’s human nature.[1]

I tried very carefully to avoid one of the undercurrents of the whole “Her-as-bad-guy” aspect of my mental image of her.  There were an awful lot of things I did and said that reminded me of her.  I’m not talking about things like, “I told a joke and realized that it was a joke I said with her.”  I mean that there were (and are) aspects of my personality and/or treatment of others that remind me of aspects of her personality and/or treatment of others.  If she’s the “bad guy,” then, it stands to reason that there are actually two “bad guys” in this narrative and I’m one of them.  Or, worse, it stands to reason that there’s only really one “bad guy” and I am the sole proprietor of that particular role.

Like I said, journeys of self-discovery are a bitch.

She, for instance, tended to take a relatively dim view of humanity.  I liked to claim that I took an opposing viewpoint, but there are a lot of times when I say I don’t like people.  I eventually reached an uneasy compromise with the little voice in the back of my head that likes to point out the hypocrisy by replacing a standard, “I don’t like people,” with the compromise position, “I like people, I just don’t like being around them.”

I also rather uncharitably (which doesn’t mean I was wrong, it just means that I was uncharitable in my assessment, if that makes any sense[2]) accused her of pushing people away in order to facilitate an unnecessary abandonment complex, thereby justifying further withdrawal from people.  This, as it turns out, is pretty much my biggest flaw.  I do my level-headed best to convince people that I am an asshole and better left alone so that I’m primed to be left behind by people who decide I’m an asshole.[3]

I accused her of purposely sitting on the sidelines of life and thinking rather than doing, of complaining rather than changing.  As it turns out, that’s pretty much what I do all the fucking time.  Texas was a year and a half of bitching and making excuses for not changing my circumstances.  The year and a half before that was the same thing.  And I didn’t even have Texas as an excuse.  I just had a generalized, “My life sucks and I’m not happy.  Mwah!” going on.

So, basically, I’m an entitled brat.  I make sure that I’m alone and push people away to avoid having to deal with the possibility of them leaving.  And I project that shit on to an ex who may or may not be the things I accuse her of but who should have abso-fucking-lutely nothing to do with my life anymore.  That’s pretty awkward and self-defeating.

In this I can say that I absolutely agree with the central premise of the book Night of the Living Dead Christian.  What I am as a human being can be allegorized within the context of a monster story or two.  But that’s the origin of the monster story, anyway.  We invent gods and demons and monsters and angels as anthropomorphic beings that reflect and amplify a specific aspect of human nature or behavior.  It’s not like Matt Mikalatos was breaking new ground with his book.[4]

While we may agree on the diagnosis, I see no reason to agree on the cure.  I see no reason to include a third party in my self-assessment outside of the possibility of a friend to be honest with me or a counselor to do the same but for an hourly fee.[5]  If I’ve wronged someone I need to apologize to them and try to make amends.  Invoking a third party or apologizing to a third party[6] instead simply doesn’t do a damn thing.

Moreover, the big problem with the whole salvation thing is that it requires an admission, which can be either explicit or implicit, of powerlessness.[7]  For the majority of problems humans bring upon themselves, admitting powerlessness to stop doing it is the worst possible approach.[8]  Admitting that there’s a problem that must be dealt with and taking personal responsibility (within reason, of course.  There are some things that are beyond any given individual’s control) is the only way to approach something that needs to be fixed.

So what am I going to do about the lessons of my little journey of self-discovery?

I’ve been gradually realizing these things since moving back and attempting to take appropriate steps.  Not being a gratuitous asshole seems like a good first step.  Avoiding the easy attempts to fish for compliments was also a good resolution.  I’ve been actively trying to believe that people really do like and respect me, no matter how unwilling I am to buy that notion.

Mostly, though, it’s all about making active choices to do the nice and helpful thing and not the knee-jerk asshole thing and believe that if I’ve chosen the people I associate with correctly I will be repaid and won’t have to worry about the day they leave.  All of that starts with a realization and a choice.  I don’t always get it right, but I do get a lot of practice.  It ultimately comes down to an act of faith, but the faith I place is in myself and the people around me.  No Jesus is necessary.

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[1]It occurs to me, too, that while this particular post comes in place of a theoretical Part 4 to my review of Night of the Living Dead Christian, it also fits in perfectly as a mid-point to that particular series, in that this post can easily be seen as my rebuttal to the central thesis of the book.  Which, I suppose, makes sense, since it is actually very much thematically linked.  In fact, I think I’ll probably make that explicit somewhere in the body text.

[2]And if it does, please explain what I just said to me in the comments.

[3]I should point out, too, that variations of this work for compliment-fishing-expeditions.  As in, “I’m an asshole.”  “No, you’re a nice guy.”  “Well, thanks, but you’re apparently pretty non-observant.  See, right there, asshole.  Bam!”

Of course that sample exchange is actually second-level asshole-ness.  So there’s that.

[4]Sorry to be the bearer of bad news on that one.

[5]Or a blog audience.  Writing, after all, is my therapy.  It’s cheaper than the counseling option, too.

[6]Especially in the way a lot of Christians I knew (was, sometimes) did so, wherein they apologized to god for their transgressions without actually apologizing to the people they’d wronged.  At that point the act of apology is nothing more than selfishness.  And I’m not saying this is Christian doctrine or a specifically Christian dodge.  I’m pretty sure there are a few places where the Bible frowns on exactly that.  But there are a lot of things that the Bible says that people who claim to follow it ignore.

[7]While I’ve made a few uncharitable interpretations of Mikalatos’s conclusions in his book, I don’t think I’m going too far out on a limb by saying that his big conversion scene hinges on an admission of powerlessness.

[8]I find that focusing all my energy on the thing to be avoided forces me to think about that thing, which forces me to want it.  For instance, I was the fat kid and I always used that as an excuse.  A few years ago I said, “Fuck it, I’m tired of this.”  I proceeded to drop 110 pounds of the course of nine months, which was both insane and counterproductive.  I obsessively worked out and counted calories, all the while fantasizing about all the food I would be able to eat again once I got to my goal weight.  I never actually hit my goal weight, but decided, “Eh, this is good enough,” one day and proceeded to stop working out or paying attention to what I was eating.  I gained about forty or fifty pounds back, then stabilized when She was around.  After that ended I ate and drank a lot and added on another thirty or so, and ultimately ended up within 20 pounds of where I started.

I regarded food as an addiction and myself as being powerless against it.  So when I started to gain weight back I ignored the evidence out of shame and denied it was happening.  Eventually I denied myself right back to where I started.  Kinda.

Then in September of 2009 I said, “Fuck this, I have to fix it again.”  I proceeded to lose 110 pounds yet again, but this time between September of 2009 and April of 2011.  The first time around I was pissed if I didn’t see the numbers on the scale drop every day.  The second time around I was okay if I lost a pound or two over the course of a month because I’d decided that the entire purpose of my life wasn’t to be not-fat, but to be healthy and the only way to achieve healthiness was to get in shape but also enjoy the journey.  So if I wanted ribs I ate ribs.  If I wanted cake I ate cake.  And when I didn’t want ribs or cake I ate in a fairly regimented and predictable way that still included food I enjoyed but in moderation.

I’ve put a few pounds back on since moving back to Chicago.  My eating schedule totally broke down and, holy shit there’s a lot of places to eat in downtown Chicago.  I pretty much made it my unstated goal to eat at all of them in my first month working in the Loop.  And then I still stepped on the scale and forced myself to acknowledge that, yeah, that wasn’t working out too well for me in the body mass category.  So when I got tired of overeating and started to see some numbers that were going from, “Huh, I should work on that,” to, “Holy crap,” I was ready and able to get back to good habits.

Food no longer has control over me.  Gaining a few pounds no longer cause a negative loop of shame.  I no longer see myself as running away from my inner fat kid.  I instead see myself as someone who is a few pounds over his preferred weight and who, therefore, needs to remember to eat a few more goddamn salads and not quite so many muffins.

Admitting powerlessness to food didn’t work out nearly so well for me.