meditations on a sleepless morn, part II

continued from part I, wherein andrew compares not sleeping to digestion 

rinse lather repeat.

this is the magic formula i find myself chanting at daybreak. i'm saying the words earnestly, as if they mean something, as if there is a power to their rhythm. i speak them into my pillow, mouthing the words with silent urgency, believing hopelessly that when said in succession, they possess certain hitherto unknown sleep-inducing properties.

rinse lather repeat, i say, rinse lather repeat.

these words are my deathbed confession. no, they are my whispered communique in that first scene where friends and family cup their hands to my mouth and lean in to drink the honeycomb words of a dying old man, but from our sticky seats in the cineplex, we can see that there is more to those empty puffs than epilogue and benediction. we can see the beads of sweat on the old man's brow, the sudden dilation of the eye. and we know that a clue has been lost, that the dying man intends to convey some truth to break the spell of a tragedy that is now sure to continue. we know that people may die and that the protagonist will require at least an hour to sort things out and save the world. 

don't you think one of us should have pity and tell the protagonist? we could slip into that secret room with the film canisters and projectors and spare him the agony of lost love ones, lost time, and lost sleep. the old man says, rinse lather repeat, we'd tell him, rinse lather repeat.

but god is in the theater. perhaps he wrote the script. and so i'm praying that he knows the words, that he can take my cosmetic cosmology, my nonsense phraseology, and spin the story just right. he can transform my desperate compunction to say these words into a sort of worship. and then, in his great mercy, he can bring down the curtain and i can get some sleep.

rinse lather repeat, and make it soon, lord jesus.

to be continued . . .

on christmas lists, god, and the seahawks

some people hate christmas lists. they hate to write them and they hate to receive them. these people see the christmas list as a failure of knowledge and intimacy. they rightly point out that the purpose of gift-giving isn't to fulfill some need but to provide one another with meaningful tokens of our love and thanks and friendship.

i'm not one of these people. i suppose i'm a christmas list moderate.

i don't eagerly keep a list all year of the things i'd like for christmas and then postmark that list for the north pole on the fourth friday of november. and honestly, i never really know what to put on said list. but if my mom calls me up and asks what i want for christmas, i'll certainly oblige.

and as a giver, i really do want to light upon the perfect gift, the gift that would never find its way onto a christmas list. i want to give that very thing that will communicate a special bond between us, that will say, this is a gift uniquely from me to you, and it is awesome. because you are awesome. and i am awesome. and yes, we, together, are awesome.

but finding that special gift is hard. it's not something you can force. it comes to you like a poem, a word or phrase nestled in the rubble of otherwise useless dreams. and you may not know this, but most of us are bad poets. we mistake cutesy rhythm and rhyme or archaic verbiage for inspiration. we can't feel the imagery or themes outside the cage of our own skull.

and so, barring the miracle of the true muse or the true poet, the giver who undertakes a listless christmas may be giving just that, a listless christmas.

instead, i like to think of the christmas list as a tool. if you tell me you like bawdy limericks about snails or that red wheelbarrow poem by william carlos williams, i might still write a bad poem, but at least i'll know where to start. at least i won't be groping around in an infinite wasteland of content, imagery, and form.

so why the post-christmas post on christmas lists? well, mostly i wanted to write about my new kindle. but i got sidetracked by memory and discovery.

this year i mostly received gifts that were on my list, and perhaps some part of me, the christmas list antipath, i suspect, felt cheated by the absence of new poetry.

yet there were little surprises--the fingerless gloves were black, not wool; the e-reader was a kindle, not a nook. and both did the trick; both delighted me in the end--the fingerless gloves perfectly allowed me to adjust my temp when running the polar bear 5K on new year's day, and the kindle has pleasantly surprised me with how much i enjoy reading (and browsing) using its interface.

but above all, there was the unsuspected awesomeness of sharing in those gifts with the givers, in reading to my parents from my kindle as we trekked south to eugene, in accompanying my dad to a chilly wild-card playoff game at qwest stadium and high-fiving him ecstatically (while wearing those gloves) when marshawn lynch clicked it into beast mode, breaking eight tackles and stiff-arming his way to a sixty-seven yard run.

because, after all, what's more awesome than a crazy game that makes nfl and underdog history? what's more awesome than sixty thousand people losing their voices in praise of one thing? this is how i imagine heaven--a gift and an unbridled sense of exultation and joy. and no list could have scripted that.

atheism, sharing, and god

ok, i live and breath editing, so you'll have to pardon another ancillary mention of my work at the other journal (TOJ).

in my editing class, we've been getting the inside scoop on the publishing biz; this means chatting with acquisition editors and writing book proposals.

now several months ago, i thought it might be interesting to approach my boss's boss, the director of mental health at the seattle VA, about a book on his amazing discovery of prazosin, the nightmare-relieving pill for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). murray's a funny guy, a great storyteller, and an important figure in the research community, so i figured that a book that walked a tightrope between biography, history, and timely political commentary could be entertaining from his perspective.

but then the miracle of calvin college happened. at the festival of faith and writing, an editor for one of the big christian publishers approached TOJ about the prospect of transforming our atheism issue into a book. the editor encouraged us to submit a book proposal and then he bounded back to his world of signed books.

as it happened, my assignment for a book proposal was due the next week, so i jettisoned the poor iraqi PTSD veterans--in fact, were i to properly edit this post, they'd have been wiped from the annals of the 17 point scale because i have nothing more to say about the dormant book idea; i suppose that it's relevant to the chronology but not to the story--and attempted to pull together a coherent thesis for the a TOJ atheism book.

here's what i determined: recent publications that write on atheism from a christian perspective tend to lapse into polemics. they exist solely as a response to richard dawkins, christopher hitchens, and company. in contrast, the content in the current issue of TOJ uses atheism as a starting point for more important discussions about what it means to be christians. how should a life of faith differ from a life without faith? what atheistic ideas challenge christians to live life better and more like christ? i was a bit surprised to find such a foundation, but i think it might work.

still, just now as i was relaxing on my couch and listening to my highest rated playlist, i couldn't help but get a little apologetical. and when i say "a little apologetical," i'm referring to the branch of apologetics that relies chiefly on easily disproved observations.

i was listening to "a friend i had" by aaron sprinkle, and i thought, gosh, this seems like such a perfect song. it was more a gut reaction than the result of a close analysis of the melodic complexity or the lyrical juxtapositions, but i was overpowered by a strong sense that everything was just right. so right, in fact, that i needed to tell someone. i needed to get the message out to as many people as possible. i needed to share.

i think that this silent urge to share beauty is everywhere in the world. it's in the thousand blogs that celebrate a quote or lyric in every post. it's in my atheism book proposal.

and what's not in my atheism book proposal is this simple proof: perhaps that beauty is truth and perhaps that truth--perhaps all truth--somehow leads to god and perhaps our innate need to share that truth is in some way reflected in the international movement known as the church.

after exchanging book proposals with an editing partner in my class, she remarked, andrew, you need to use more confident language. enough with the "may," "could", and "perhaps"--write with some authority.

ok, then.

you can poke holes in my theory or decry organized religion or dismiss church or laugh at ritual but isn't it true that there's something distinctly human about sharing beauty, and isn't that to some degree the purpose of church?

yes, it is so.

photograph: andrew david. "the shining." central park, nyc, ny.