Is this what wisdom smells like?

• In certain cultures, hunger is personified as a wolf. When you get just a little bit hungry, then eat, it is like you ate the little baby wolf. How could you do it. If you get moderately hungry, you then kill the hunger by eating the adolescent wolf, a better adversary. But if you get really really hungry, then the wolf grows stronger. Too strong. Now the wolf is invincible no matter what you eat to kill it. Then you have no choice but to call upon the deity known as the Crazy Hunger, who alone is capable of dispatching this terrible wolf-beast. You set up a massive feast, I mean we're talkin' a competitive eating type of setup here, just neverending let's say hot dogs and apple pies, and you get down on your knees, and you shake your fists and call out to the heavens, 'Crazy Hunger, EAT THIS WOLF!"
  
• I noticed I waste a lot of time worrying about things that actually turn out to be just the problems I was worrying about. Like, e.g., waking up thinking about how later on I will have to pay some bills and find something to eat and figure out what to teach some kid on the piano. But this is such a stupid thing to worry about, because whether or not I worry, I'm still gonna pay those bills, find something to eat, and figure out what to teach some kid on the piano. So I was thinking what are better things to worry about. Of course the saints among us can probably worry about something unrelated to themselves, like global warming or hunger or that sort of thing. I tried that and it doesn't do the trick. Don't get me wrong, I care about those things, but I can't get myself to wake up too early worrying about them. I need some self-interest in there. So my new plan is instead of worrying about the inevitable and inescapable knots and obstacles of the everyday, I will start worrying about what to do in unlikely situations. Like for instance, say you were falling from a blown-up airplane towards the sea from not all that huge a distance. I figure if you are able to streamline your body into a perfect dive, you might not break all your bones and die when you hit. Or how about if you hear a nuclear explosion but it is a good ways off and you have like ten seconds to get somewhere safe from the shockwave, where are you gonna go? Or say someone wants to mug you, what sort of things are you gonna do to make them think you're too crazy to fuck with? Or what if someone decides to interview you about something you did, what are you gonna say to not sound like an idiot? What if you are driving across a bridge and there is an earthquake and you have to decide in like two seconds whether to try to slam on the brakes or accelerate enough to jump the newly formed gap in the middle of the bridge? These are the sorts of unlikely but possible scenarios that I want to waste my worrying energy on from here on out.
  
• Every single time I ever get annoyed with someone, and I mean EVERY single time, I then realize it is really something about myself I see in the someone. This goes for cats too.
  
• I taught a kid to play the drums. I am a dude who taught a kid to play the drums. If I didn't teach him, well, probably someone else would have. But still.
  
• Little kids like Buster Keaton because people falling is still the funniest thing.
  
• It turns out it is really easy to make delicious mustard at home with nothing but mustard seeds and water, and probably you want some vinegar or white wine too.
  
• It ain't no Hubble deep field, but when you look in ordinary binoculars, you are fucking looking back in time. I mean, not much, just a tiny little infinitesimal micro-nano-mini-second, but still.
  
• Our understanding of the things and relationships in our world can be favorably compared to the Hubble deep field. For one thing, we only see shit if we look really close at a spot. For another, things look 2D unless we use our brains and more evidence (like, say, the red shift caused by the electromagnetic radiation doppler effect from galaxies receding from us at varying rates) to figure out how they fit together in 3 d's. There's always gonna be more to understand the closer you look, and you're still gonna be wrong from the perspective of the dude in the future who gets a better look.
  
• You should google up some info on the Hubble deep field, I decided it is kind of ridiculous to link to general information like that in a blog post.
  
• If you're naturally curious, the internet makes you smarter.
  
• The most normal person you know is completely fucking weird as HELL.
  
• Keep your eyes on CERN, they are gonna discover some shit that will blow all our minds, even though it is just the shit that everything is made out of. Which fact itself blows my mind.
  
• I guess not all of these count as wisdom.
  
• I guess potentially none of these count as wisdom.
  
• Just because you're older doesn't mean you're wiser.
  
• It's not up to you whether what you say is wise anyhow.
  
• Just because you put things in topical bullet points doesn't mean they follow any sort of organizational pattern beyond the visual.
  
• Good bye.

I was a highwayman

Willie Nelson says:
I was a highwayman
Along the coach roads I did ride
With sword and pistol by my side
Many a young maid lost her baubles to my trade
Many a soldier shed his lifeblood on my blade
The bastards hung me in the spring of twenty-five
But I am still alive.

then Kris Kristofferson says:
I was a sailor
I was born upon the tide
And with the sea I did abide.
I sailed a schooner round the Horn to Mexico
I went aloft and furled the mainsail in a blow
And when the yards broke off they said that I got killed
But I am living still.

after which Waylon Jennings says:
I was a dam builder
across the river deep and wide
where steel and water did collide
A place called Boulder on the wild Colorado
I slipped and fell into the wet concrete below
They buried me in that great tomb that knows no sound
But I am still around..I'll always be around..and around and around and
around and around

and finally Johnny Cash concludes:
I fly a starship
across the Universe divide
and when I reach the other side
I'll find a place to rest my spirit if I can
Perhaps I may become a highwayman again
Or I may simply be a single drop of rain
But I will remain
And I'll be back again, and again and again and again and again..


In this song Willie Nelson is a dude who robs ladies and kills soldiers. A bad ass. An outlaw. But eventually he gets caught, and hanged. But see, then his spirit returns, a bit later in History. Now he is Kris Kristofferson, who is by far the most likely sailor of the bunch. Now who can say how glorious it is to make a boat go around some land (I mean, what the fuck, are you gonna go through the land?), I guess in this chapter it's just he's kind of an idiot and he fucked some kind of thing up with the sails or jibs or whatever, I dunno, go ask some blue-blood yacht dude. Anyhow, you'd think this spirit was gone by now, since it got hanged and also drowned. But nope. It comes back, a bit further into History, this time in the person of Waylon Jennings, who got a hand from FDR what with the WPC building a gigantic dam. Here things might be said to get a little metaphorical. The place is called Boulder but it's getting filled with concrete. The Colorado was wild but they are taming it. Steel and water did collide, but at what cost? At the cost of one Waylon Jennings. Granted, he was clumsy and he was the guy who didn't do the smart thing and be extra careful while walking around on top of a giant not-yet-solidified dam. So anyhow now the spirit got hanged, drowned, and encased in what was at the time the largest man-made monument named after a vacuum in History. This brings us, dear reader, not to the present, because the present can't really mean anything to itself, now can it, so instead it brings us instead to the Future, in the person of Johnny Cash, starship pilot. He is flying the entire distance of the universe, not just lurkin' around outside a town, or going around some land in a boat in the water, or spanning the distance between two sides of an enormous gorge. As we well know the universe is finite and who knows what is on the other side. There are those who say it is the same, only backwards, only you can't even tell it's backwards, since you, too, are backwards. There are those who say it is just sort of boring. Nobody knows for sure. Johnny Cash doesn't even know for sure, but he has whittled down the possibilities to two: either he will become a highwayman again, thus starting the cycle anew, or, alternatively, and I'd like to put in my vote for more likely, he may become a single drop of rain. Here is where I like to imagine that every drop of rain used to be a highwayman, an inept sailor, a clumsy dambuilder, or an astronaut. One of those four. Nothing else. I myself, when I reach the other side, may turn into a single grain of sand. I think that is the fate of the musician, the logger, the banker, and the flight attendant. Whereas it has been demonstrated that piano tuners, butchers, systems analysts, and tinkerers shall return a single breath of air. We will all try to find a place to rest our spirits if we can, but chances are we will be back again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, only each time one step lower in a major scale, until we get almost back to the tonic again, at which point I suppose you should just restart the song because not even Johnny Cash could hit that bottom one if he tried.

Tiny Fractal Tuba: Science Fact or Science Fiction?

Hey, look, I'm not one of those dudes who's all into fractals as a Thing. I mean, you're not gonna see me hangin' around in like a fractal shirt and you're not gonna hear me talkin' about how if we could understand fractals we could like solve hunger and racism and probably travel to distant reaches of space besides.

Figure 12: I'm not this guy

But check it out: have you heard about fractal antennas*? It is so cool. They can make antennas with a ton of surface area but still tiny, because all the surface area is from all the little tiny details instead of in broad lines, you know? Shit, there's probably one in your cell phone! Believe it.

Figure 12: Believe it

Well anyhow I was thinking: why can't we use this technology to make a tiny tuba? It could have a pretty small tube, diameter-wise, but one that is just outrageously long, but you know, long from being all bent around into outlandish, somewhat psychedelic shapes that are produced from the same kind of self-similarity iteration type processes as those t-shirt patterns.

It would make such a low sound, but yet it would fit in the palm of your hand. (If your spine isn't tingling right now, either you don't care about the inconvenient size of the commercially available tubas of the day, or you maybe have some sort of neural problem you maybe should get checked out). I'm serious. This could change everything.

Scientists! Metallurgists! Help me! Now we make our millions! This is the dream that John Phillip Sousa never even knew he had!

Figure 12: Every Single Music Video in the History of the Genre was Leading Up to This Moment, But Still, Imagine it With Four Tiny Fractal Tubas

*I dare you to tell me I should say antennae. I fuckin' DARE you.

HOLY FUCKING SHIT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

WE HAVE A MOTHERFUCKING BLACK PRESIDENT!!!!!!!!!!!!!


*in the style of this.

Post number 211, in which I go from Point A to Point B

Point A: Anton Chekhov's The Student.

* * *

I was driving down to Lee's Summit on I-70 and I came to my favorite part of the trip where this huge valley just opens up out of nowhere. Whenever I drive into that hollow, I look to the crest of the next hill and think to myself, "that is where I am gonna be in about a minute," and then I try to remember to notice when I get there. Usually I forget. Like when you are pumping gas and you say to yourself, "make sure you pay attention as you screw the gas cap on, because otherwise you won't be able to remember if you did it or not." But this time I remembered, and it was cool.

* * *

My grandpa told me something a friend of his had said about music. This friend said that musical sounds are only there for an instant, then they're gone. If they were random and unconnected, you'd not remember them, and not be able to predict them, and it wouldn't be music as you know it. But if each tiny instant has some connection to the one before and the one after, we can entrain ourselves to this string of instants and share in a way of experiencing time. My grandpa then defined music as a way of connecting sound and silence in time.

* * *

My uncle was talking about the pilgrims and how they believed in predetermination as far as who was getting into heaven. But their version of fate had this weird twist where earthly behavior, though it could not have any bearing on one's future after death, could reliably be taken as a reflection of that future. So if you go to church and live a pious life, it must be because you are one of those chosen few to begin with.

* * *

My grandpa told me about how amazed he is that the earth is in just the right place to sustain life. Not too hot, not too cold, enough water, and a good atmosphere. I told him I agreed, sort of, but also that the very basis of our conversation was the life that earth makes possible. The odds seem low, that is, but who could talk about those odds but us lucky few who are on a planet in which atoms can combine into people and not just rocks?

* * *

Point B: Italo Calvino's Cosmicomics.

We're coming through. How do you do.

Equation #12

+

+

=

I Hate Al & Dan; I Love the Future

I was watching the Cardinals game today and I just reached a point where I couldn't take it anymore. During an exciting game, Al and Dan (the FSN midwest announcers for the Cards) were just blabbering on about their T-shirts and their cats and shit. I hate them! I hate listening to them! It's all blabbering until something vaguely bad happens, then it's Dan bitching like a fifth-grade jilted boyfriend. Then it's Al saying something vaguely almost goofy and Dan acting like it was the weirdest thing ever, and totally sucking Al's cock over it for the next ten minutes. Fuck those guys. I mean, I'm sure they're nice people and I don't hate them as people, they are just fucking awful announcers. At the beginning of each game I pray to the gods that this thing will happen more where the audio feed gets fucked up and you only hear the sounds of the game without any announcers. Gods, please make this happen more than once in a blue moon. It is the most glorious. It is the most high. It is the most exalted. Baal, Crom, Jesus, Mormon, come to my aid. Make this happen.

The future has allowed me, through mlbtv, to understand how truly bad our announcers are. I have watched games from all over the league, and I'd say ours and the Diamondbacks' TV announcers are the very bottom of the barrel.

(Who's the best, you ask? Vin Scully. Joe Morgan and Jon Miller. Joe Buck even, and Tim McCarver. The dudes who do the WGN cubs games, I don't know their names.)

But the future, bless its little heart, has also allowed me to do this: I hooked up a little radio's headphone output into my computer, into Logic (an audio recording program), through about 10 seconds' worth of delay (the most I could get from a delay plug-in), then bussed through about half that delay over again to match FSN's unreasonably long broadcast delay, then through the living room stereo. This way I could mute out the TV and listen to our radio announcers, Mike Shannon (awesome) and John Rooney (fucking sucks hard, but at least better than Al & Dan), whose broadcast is in real time. Thank the gods for the future. Thank the gods for the one good announcer in this city. Thank the gods for computers. Also thank the gods for love, and for cute animals like platypusses and guinea pigs, and also thank the gods for the enduring miracle of the overtone series. That shit blows my mind. I'm sure I'm forgetting some stuff. The world is full of things to be thankful for. Thank you.

this is a city of crime

(don't step out of line)



It somehow warms my heart that there are little cultural tidbits like this that even now, even today, in the middle of the future, with wireless signals buzzing around our heads like golden flying moths, with text-to-landline technology threatening to make us laugh at even the saddest of phone messages, with flying cars just around the corner, with five hundred reaction videos to a single shock site, that the only internet representation of this horrible, horrible disfiguration of "rap" music by one-and-a-half respected American actors is a shitty VHS rip with catastrophically unsynched sound. Somewhere in my heart, nestled between fond memories of Honey Nut Cheerios at Grandma's house and hidden flames for older professors, between the aorta and the left ventricle, there is a closet Luddite jamming up my arteries. This is a city of crime. Don't step out of line.

The slow movement of Beethoven's fifth symphony

I guess I been meanin' to learn a little geometry.

I'm gonna go buy a compass and protractor and just go to town with Euclid's Elements. I feel like if you are a man, and you like geometry, you have to do that, at least once. You must do it alone. You can't take anything with you. Except your compass and protractor. And I suppose some paper, pencils, maybe some gatorade and beef jerky in case you get hungry. You have to just work through the whole thing in order, just work through it real slow and hand-draw out all the figures and proofs even when they seem obvious.

I don't know, I guess I just got excited reading about Reuleaux triangles and toruses and tetrahelixes and such, plus there is the matter of this beloved Achewood strip.

I will let you know how it goes. I will tell you how smart it makes me feel. I will tell you if it makes me lose weight and develop a healthy glow to the skin on my face and also my back.

What? No way.

This is incredible.

It reminds me of this:




P.S. I hate birds.

The Internets

I was thinking about these internets. They are getting huge. I mean huge. Doesn't it blow your mind? I don't want to sound like an old man or something, but holy shit everybody.



Yesterday, that person who comes by six days a week to put a bunch of trash in a little slot in my door brought us the yellow pages too. Yellow pages? Wow, remember that? That was a different time. Now, again, I know I'm starting to sound like an old man here, but let me explain. What has been blowing my mind about the internet has a lot to do with those yellow pages.

I'm sure I'm the millionth person to have this revelation, but the hugeness of the internets has changed how we find information. The search is what I'm talkin' about. Yellow pages? You know how long they'd have to be to cover every subject on the internet, even to list just the top few sites for any subject? You said it. Long as shit.

There are a few ready-built reactions to this. One can be amazed and stand in awe of this information superhighway, or one can decry the internet as some sort of lowest-common-denominator cesspool, which, after all, is probably built and maintained for the most part by people procrastinating doing something else. One can see it as a way forward for liberty and freedom, or one can see it as the beginnings of a Big Brother sort of thing. I figure whichever way you look at it, you gotta admit it is a giant world of culture, of cultural information and cultural traces, maybe cultural trash at times, maybe more the leftovers and refuse of culture, but culture nonetheless. And I for one am someone who takes culture seriously, wherever I find it. So when I think about how huge these internets are, and I realize that it's all culture on there, it tends to blow my mind.


It's vast and confusing and complicated out there in that "series of tubes." Too intricate for something like a yellow pages to be of much use. That's why searching has gotten better and better. But even just searching isn't quite enough in this huge, huge world. Searching can tend to be either too directed (do you really trust those top few ad-type hits on a given search?) or too neutral (i.e. unpredictable) with regards to quality or taste for lots of people. Enter all these "social bookmarking" kind of business, enter thousands of people writing blogs, etc. Now you can search the searchers, so to speak. Find ones you agree with, or disagree with, or sometimes agree with, but ones you can get to know and trust. Like a good music reviewer who you don't always agree with but who writes with enough personal opinion that you can get an idea how you would feel about the record from how they feel about it.


Hey, man, sure this is all trite. But I don't care, because these internets are huge, my friends, they are gigantic, and they blow my mind. I mean, they blow my mind without my having to notice anything about them other than what is plainly there, without looking too close or thinking too hard.

"God willing and the creek don't rise"

I don't know if you've ever heard that old expression, but my grandparents and parents say it all the time. I recently took a journey down to Shannon County, MO, where my grandparents' families are from. When they were growing up, the saying was a lot more literal. When it rained hard, the creek rose, and they couldn't get to town. That seems pretty clear to me, but now I'm not so sure, given some sources I've found on the internets (such as this one) that take the "creek" part of the expression as referring to a native american tribe known for harassing west-bound travellers. Then from etymology to current usage, I don't quite agree with the definitions provided here, either. Now I'm no expert, but if I were, I might paraphrase the old saying with something like "barring any unforeseen obstacles" or something like that. For a remote, rural, and religious family in the Ozarks, God and the creek were two very real obstacles to be reckoned with.



There were other obstacles, too. My grandpa's family had a truck with disfunctional brakes. When they drove to town, they had to coast down some big ol' hills on some thin passageways through trees that we might hesitate to call roads today. So, God having willed it and the creeks having stayed at a ford-able level, they'd drive that way to town, but on the way back there was a hill that was too high and steep to coast down safely. So they had this tree they'd cut down, and they'd tie it on a long rope or chain to the truck at the bottom of the hill, then drive up and over, dragging the tree up as a counterweight to their descending truck.

Not all obstacles come in deity or natural-phenomenon form, either. Language is another barrier. I'm not talking words themselves, but specific usages. Take this dialog between a waitress and one of my great uncles on the occasion of his first-ever trip to a restaurant, for instance:

Uncle: (orders something)
Waitress: How do you like your eggs, hon'?
Uncle: Oh, I like them a lot. I eat 'em most every mornin'.
Waitress: No, I mean how you like your eggs cooked?
Uncle: Oh, now that's the best way to eat 'em, if you ask me.

Now, I know these stories seem implausible, but I have every reason to believe they're true. And I know it's trite, but it blows my mind to think about how much we take for granted today as compared with the world these stories tell of. Last night a violent storm tore down trees and knocked out power all over St. Louis. I wanted to find out about the damages, but there was no TV, no internet, no nothin'. I turned on my car radio and lots of the local stations were out as well. Hell, the Eads Bridge even closed for a while because some of a building fell on it. Now, that's not quite the same as the creek rising, but it's sort of close.

Hmm, that was supposed to tie things together and wrap 'em up a lot better than it did. Well, shit, as my grandma says, ain't that enough to gag a maggot? Well now that's a whole 'nother story for a whole 'nother time.

The execution of the last imperial family

I heard a great and disturbing story the other day. It's about the last Tsar, Nicholas, and his family. They were being held captive after the revolution, and then finally someone decided they ought to be killed. Knowing what was coming, Nicholas and the imperial family sewed a bunch of jewels and diamonds into the corsets of his daughters-- both to hide the riches and to protect the girls' lives. It ended up being a really bad idea, though. A group of men came into the chamber and started shooting the imperial family. Everyone fell down, but the daughters weren't dead. The gunmen kept shooting, but the daughters kept on not dying. They tried bayonets, but that didn't do the trick either. Finally they had to resort to shooting them in the head (I swear I'm not making this up-- read a first-hand account to get even more details. While you're at it, watch this movie too, and you'll realize that this wasn't so very long ago and that these are real people we're talking about. Plus it has some cool music).


What a great story. I mean, I can't imagine the pain the daughters must have been in. And I can't imagine how freaked out the executioners must have been when they couldn't seem to kill the daughters. And of course there's a lot one could say, if one felt like it, about the symbolism of those precious diamonds and jewels. And it's so cool the gunmen tried so hard to not have to ruin their victims' good looks, even though as it turns out they were gonna go dump the bodies down a well somewhere anyway (again, it's all here). I guess I'm just blown away because it's so much better than any story anyone could ever make up about the death of the last imperial family. It seems like someone should make a movie with this scene in it. Wait, maybe they already did. I'll have to check that one out and get back to you.

Ray Harryhausen

This Sunday, God willing and the creek don't rise, I'm going to see Jason and the Argonauts and another few short films on the big screen, followed (or is it preceded?) by a talk from Ray Harryhausen himself. For some reason I've seen Clash of the Titans about 50 times in my life, but I've never seen even a scene from Jason and the Argonauts. I only know two things about the movie. First, how cool the famous skeletons look:



Second, the score is by Bernard Herrmann, whose score for North by Northwest has got to be about the best movie music ever made (though he's more famous for Psycho and Citizen Kane). Yep, he's a national treasure.

So throw in some bad-ass skeletons, throw in a spectacular composer, and add to it Harryhausen himself (who seems to be a great talker, based on interviews like this one), and you can see why I'm so excited. Of course, it will most likely sell out and I won't be able to see it anyhow. Damnit. God might not be willing, and the creek may well rise this Sunday. Looks like I've got some ark-buildin' to get to...

144 Ping Pong Balls

Ping pong balls are hard to find. Well, hard isn't the right word. But you'd think they might have some at Walgreen's, or the grocery store. Nope. Well, ok, then they must have one at Target, right? Especially that crazy Super-Target with guitars and olde-style popcorn kettles? Nope. Surely they must have them at one of those big strip-mall sporting goods stores, but do you want to take a 45-minute bus ride both ways just to buy some ping pong balls? The only other place is Wal-Mart, and you probably don't want to go there on account of their being all evil and everything.

These are the considerations which, about one week ago today, led me to do a bit of e-commerce. Lo and behold, the good ol' internets had tons of ping pong balls, and beyond that a star-ranking system for balls, super-balls that are supposedly indestructable, all manner of paddles, and my favorite, a robot that shoots ping pong balls of various spins and velocities (this one runs for $695).Well, I'm a bargain hunter. It just didn't seem worth it to pay for shipping and everything and only get 6 or 12 balls. And amounts a little higher than 12 started to get expensive. But then once you hit a gross, they come down. (Do you know how many a gross is? It's 144. It's one of those numbers that have a name, like 20 is called a score. You can read all about it here). I put down my $30 and forgot all about it.

Then, this morning, at approximately 8:58 a.m. on this sleep-in-Thursday, there was a sharp rapping at my door. All at once I remembered all those considerations enumerated above, and I bolted out of bed and signed for the lightest package I've ever received. It's mostly air. 144 white ping pong balls. (Hey, that has a good ring to it. How about in German: something like Hundert Vier und Vierzig Weiße Tischtennisbälle. Damn, that might make a good, catchy, 80s protest song like Neun und Neunzig Luftballons).

Now there's a lot you could do with 144 ping pong balls, and it's not all pong-related, let me tell you.
-This guy, for instance, played a merry prank on a co-worker.
-I was thinking about those huge tubs of plastic balls you used to jump in at fairs and carnivals.
-If there were a sudden flash flood in my basement and I couldn't escape, I'm pretty sure I'd survive for up to two hours by breathing the tiny bits of air trapped in each ball.

Well, I guess I'll go play some ping pong.

why our world is awesome

I can't believe Weekend at Bernie's really exists. Did someone really make that movie? Pinch me. Is this really happening? What? There's also Weekend at Bernie's II? Holy shit. I could die a happy man. And if I do, it is my sincere and abiding hope that my corpse will be involved in zany hi-jinks.

strange encounters with jesus

The other night I dozed off, and when I awoke Jesus was on my television, getting darker and brighter in waves. This naturally blew my mind. I'm not a religious person, but there for about ten seconds I was completely terrified and convinced. Then I realized it was a DVD glitch: I'd been watching the now-cult-classic The Big Lebowski before I fell asleep, and sometimes when my DVD player gets stuck it makes the frame it's on get darker and lighter. I wonder why. Anyhow, the image I saw was very dark and must have looked something like this:



Even though I'd figured out a rational explanation, I was still pretty excited. I mean, who cares how it happens, having a vision of Jesus is still a great thrill. So I busted wide-eyed into my roommate's bedroom and dragged him in there to see, but damned if the DVD didn't come unstuck just right at the moment he entered my room. He claims he believes me.

So that was pretty weird. Weird enough that I told the story a few times, even though I was afraid people would think I was turning into a Jesus-freak. I tend to tell stories that take way too long. I give way too many details and often forget to finish. Well this is just what happened last night, when I was at a Valentines Day party and trying to tell the story of my vision of Jesus. I made the mistake of mentioning the DVD glitch before I ever mentioned Jesus, and the conversation immediately turned into some sort of panel session on just why and in just what ways DVD's tend to get stuck (could it have been this?). This must have been about a twenty minute interlude, after which I suddenly remembered to tell the rest of my story. I got to the Jesus part, and was just telling how the DVD came unstuck right when my roommate entered, but at that very moment a gust of wind knocked down a little framed picture of Jesus that was sitting on the windowsill across the room.



This naturally blew my mind even more. It was really weird. Weird enough that I'm telling the story, even though I'm afraid people will think I'm turning into a Jesus-freak.





Whew, I gotta tell you, I'm really glad nothing Jesus-related happened this time around. That would have really, really, really blown my mind. Jesus Christ.