Gnosce Te Ipse

It is Friday, though while for me that means a weekend where I will still have to read, Emerson and Faust respectively, plus work on my pathetically behind online classes, it's still Friday. Sadly, my wife works every day this weekend and my son will be gone all day tomorrow for football. I get to hang around because I have to help emcee the annual stewardship dinner at my episcopal parish Sat. night. That last sounds like a line out of Garrison Keillor. I am a huge closet fan of Keillor's show and books, by the way. I get to either too infrequently, but Prairie Home Companion is as good as radio gets, especially on a cold weekend in the mountains as the oil lamps and woodstove window burn. It isn't cold yet, but it will be. The change is coming even if it's a little behind at the moment. Oh yes, on that note, I'll be up at my mom's bringing down cedar rounds much of Saturday also. Free cedar is tough to pass up even at my age. Enough dribble. I have a...

I say that I'm a Christian skeptic, and I think that's a fair description. Human history is full of superstition, mistaken supernaturalism, little men running in the sugar cane at night...shhh, listen, I hear them scurrying in the dark! In a recent Skeptic column in Scientific American , Michael Shermer's monthly piece, I read how scientific knowledge, in one case fundamental descriptions of the chemical component to consciousness, does not mean one must abandon wonder for the self or the universe. Also, Shermer writes how viewing the faint Andromeda light moves him to tears; not because the bare smudge in his telescope has intrinsinc beauty, but because he knows the galaxy's astronomic age and distance from him, its viewer. Two things come to mind: one is that I agree because we have given some chemical neurotransmitters names, because we see they affect mood and accompany body events like orgasm or eating chocolate, does not mean our wonder should diminish. The f...

How long do I have? Minutes, really. Just a note to say I'm okay. The hell passes, without doubt it passes, and I'm handling what's left in its wake pretty well. S and I have connected at an even deeper level, and while nothing is perfect (this keeps puzzling puzzling puzzling me) what did Frost say, something like 'earth's the place for love, I don't know where it's likely to go better.' Only there's more. Frankly, I think God is changing me from the inside out. Why now? This I can't answer. It seems that the more I try to work in the church or grow spiritually as an individual, the more weak areas in my life go into spins, and then, amazingly, when I ask for help I get it. Does this negate my therapy, years in recovery? No. But even a skeptic like me, who doubts every internal impression, knows my mind's superstitious tendency to find connections where they don't exist...frankly, even I feel a certain awe. And right now, I'm...

Tonight my pain is once again great; it is the depressed pain, a feeling like none other, and the old echoes of the dark ocd. On a scale of 1 to 100 we're talking thirties maybe, but I rarely get this anymore. I can't even remember the last time. I did go to the gym tonight and lift; my old standby, excercise, always helps. Why the depression and anxiety, verging at moments on panic? I don't know fully. I do know it will be gone in a day or two; it will surely wax and wane and pass. Work is a huge part of it; I'm still dealing with last semester, with my new classes, with trying to build two effing online classes when I'm teaching am. lit. and honors and basic grammar for the first freaking time. It's very hard to build online classes and teach them at once. I tell people never to do it. And I get reviewed this semester and have to write a self-study, a reflection on my work. Me, I work hard. My college, my dept., well, communication failure, something,...

The drums roll to grog, and Billy not to know? -- Melville Today I turned 41. Wow. Ouch, kinda. 40 was tough, a true marker, but turning 41 reminds me that time doesn't stop, my body's march towards death, regardless of accident or disease, continues at its steady pace. How does being 41 feel different from being 31, or if I can remember, 21? In my case, 21 and 31 were special times with special struggles, so I'll stay at the general level: how in large terms is 41 different? Regarding apperance, my hair is grayer than ever, a bit thinner though I still have a pretty full head; oddly the rest of my body seems to get hairier with each year. And even that hair is getting gray, at least on my chest. Looking at my hands as I type I see some wrinkles, a dryness in the skin; I know from the morning mirror that around my eyes, the beginnings of creases which will only spread with the years. Still, I've held to a general level of fitness. I have more muscularity than mo...

Apparently my blog now gets spam. Besides a couple adds in the comment section below, I find enormous beauty in the other posts. Enormous. If I ever had doubts about being able to receive support via my blog, those are gone. The sincere and personal nature of the comments and insights is deeply moving. Mrs Fish, you rock. Steph and I are intense too. In some ways we, or at least I, was scared by our anger years ago, scared of actual confrontation, and S definitely is a woman who speaks her mind. I think one of the things that attracted me to her was that of all people, she was not in denial about what pissed her off. A couple years before I met her, maybe one year, she went through her closet and cut all the labels out of her clothes. They weren't swank labels, mind you, but she didn't want to be affected by icons of commerce. A girl who at 22 read Emerson (for real; I'm still getting around to most of him) Thoreau, Gary Snyder. I was impressed. But while I fou...

Those of you who pray, please pray; I'm off to Santa Cruz for another two days of sailing, the second weekend of my class, which is a good thing. But the tension between S and I has only grown, or simmered without resolution or closeness, and then blew up tonight. Over chores, mostly, making the bed. Yeah, critical shit. Actually, we have deeper issues; perhaps those are what's really up. I know we were both undernurtured as kids; I know we both have a lot of anger. I know I'm not the perfect person and neither is she. I know it would be great if life were one long vacation, plenty of money and people to clean my house and no work stress. But my experience is so far from that. I truthfully don't know how other people live, what their lives are like, but even apart from my ocd and depression, which really are in remission, healing, life is still often very hard. I don't know how people with more than one kid keep up with it, or with a baby. I'm beginnin...