…can be really decadent if you add a little ground pork to the ground beef. Also, grilling is better then frying.
Obviously I’m not a vegan. But my beef intake these days is way, way down from what it was, simply because my body doesn’t do really heavy eating anymore. I used to hit the steak houses regularly. It think it’s been five years or more since I was last in one. But I still do the local rib joints here in Baltimore. This town has some fantastically good ones.
So I’m experimenting in the kitchen some today. Since I stopped going to the fast food joints (except for Subway and Quiznos), I’m missing the occasional hamburger out of my diet. I like a good burger. But I don’t trust the meat in fast food joints anymore, and if I want to keep somewhat trim I need to not eat fatty meats so often anyway. What I’m trying to do now is make my own burgers, from leaner, more wholesomely raised meats, and prepare it in smaller portions that more exactly fit my appetite. The burgers served at most restaurants are way too big for me.
But I’ve been reading that lean beef is actually not wonderful for making burgers. On a lark I bought some ground pork and made a burger out of about a quarter pork and three quarters lean beef. I kneaded it together with some ground pepper, garlic powder, a touch of Cayenne pepper, and a little fresh diced onion (again, from Whole Foods). Oh…and a pinch of finely ground beef bullion cube. I made a test patty, flat, because I want it cooked thoroughly in the middle, and about the size of the palm of my hand, which is about the right size for me. I eat small portions…always have. My diet problems come mostly from between meal junk snacking, which I won’t do anymore.
I’d bought a Delonghi electric grill some months back, and instead of firing up my trusty old Lodge cast iron griddle, I brought that out instead, because I hadn’t tried it with burgers yet. It’s an interesting design: the grill grate itself is the heating element, as opposed to a rack of iron sitting just over top the usual electric one. It does a great job of cooking and searing meat. The beef/pork burger I got off it was positively decadent.
The nice thing about meat is you can freeze it and it will keep for quite a long time. I’m going to make myself up as many burger pattys as I can out of the beef and pork I just bought, then put them in the freezer for later use. I’ll add the seasonings when I thaw them out for use. This is much better then the fast food burgers I’d been buying.
I’m out for a stroll with one of my cameras next. The weather is getting nice again here in Baltimore now. Then tonight I want to sit down in my art room, and try to get my drawing bug back.
Responding to legislation introduced in Congress last week seeking to discontinue the military’s "Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell" policy, Comedy Central’s fake pundit Stephen Colbert offered his own set of policy prescriptions to those who wish gays should be allowed to openly serve in the military.
"Folks, we are approaching a dangerous level of tolerance," Colbert mockingly proclaimed Wednesday night on his show. "That is why I am encouraging the Pentagon to adopt an even stricter policy, ‘Don’t Know, Don’t Think.’ Under the new policy, it will be against regulations for a soldier to even know what homosexuality is."
Makes a perfect fit with all their other domestic policies, doesn’t it?
The religious right is having another one of its puppet shows this weekend. This one is in San Francisco…which they insist was only chosen for the venue because of it’s abilty to host their event. Certainly not because they wanted to incite anti-gay passions in a city with a large gay population…
A two-day event called BattleCry starts Friday at AT&T Park, the downtown baseball stadium. Organizers say the gathering, which includes performances by Christian rock bands and inspirational speakers, is a way for young Christians to speak out against what they view as destructive cultural elements, including sex on television, obscene music and violent video games.
…
Tasha White, 18, attended the event last year and said it had opened her eyes to “a culture leading us into brokenness.”
“You look at Britney Spears, and what she did and that leads to divorce and rehab and drugs, and that’s a negative influence,” said Ms. White, who lives in nearby San Bruno and said she had had problems with under-age drinking herself. “And that’s not something I believe our generation should be looking forward to.”
Ms. White added that she did not think there was anything antigay about the event, though she believes gay people are “misguided.”
Mr. Luce echoed that sentiment, saying his group loves gay people, but does firmly believe their sexuality is sinful.
“We see homosexuality like a lot of other things that do harm to us, like lying, or cheating, or stealing,” he said, adding that he said he had seen studies suggesting that many gay people are depressed or unhappy. “And it’s not very loving to leave them in that state and not show them another way.”
It’s really touching how a movement that routinely lies through its teeth about homosexuals and what science reveals about sexual orientaion and family life teaches its puppets to say that homosexuality is as harmful as lying and cheating. And yes…these kids are being cynically used as puppets. Add to the long list of crimes against humanity perpetrated by the religious right, their willingness to take idealistic and passionate youth full of concern about the state of world and its people, cram their trusting heads full of tactical lies, and set them loose to destroy the very thing they’re so ardent to save. You could teach them to think for themselves, so they might find the answers this generation could not. But then they might question authority instead of "question homosexuality", and that would be a sin.
If you’ve followed the anti-gay agenda for very long, you’ve probably noticed a few dozen or so pat phrases that keep popping up, along with an assortment of words that don’t seem to mean the same thing in the twilight zone of the religious right that they do in the real world. As a public service, I thought I’d provide a few helpful definitions…
Homosexual: There is no such thing. Just people who keep having sex with persons of the same sex, no matter how much fear of God and acid disgust and self loathing we manage to cram into them.
Gay: A word that was full of cheerful carefree happiness until the homosexuals turned it into a code word for disgusting behavior.
Family: A word that was full of loving, nurturing, caring, security and warmth until we turned it into a code word for heterosexual supremacy.
Family Friendly: The civil way of saying "No Faggots Allowed".
Homophobe/Homophobia: Made up words, created by militant homosexual activists to stigmatize Christians who speak out against sin. Similar to how the word ‘xenophobe’ was invented by bleeding heart one-world liberals to stigmatize patriots who merely wish to keep their communities safe from foreigners and immigrants. Other invented words include Hydrophobic and Hydrophobia.
Ex-Gay: A person who is no longer one of those homosexuals that do not really exist.
Ex-Gay (II): A person who found freedom in the ten commandments of God, and the 1,287,094,873,922 1/2 commandments of the Southern Baptist Convention.
Ex-Gay (III): A person who did not question homophobia.
Ex-Gay (IV): A person graced by Christ after 50 years of prayer and repentance with blessed relief from the sexual temptations they had when they were a hot and bothered teenager.
SADD (Same Sex Attraction Disorder): Since there are no homosexuals, we needed a new word for people who keep having sex with persons of the same sex. And it had to be the opposite of ‘Gay’, since that’s how those people who aren’t homosexuals keep identifying themselves and we must disagree with everything they have to say about who and what they are.
Struggling with Homosexuality: A person with Same Sex Attraction Disorder who keeps insisting that there isn’t anything wrong with them.
Struggling with Homosexuality (II): A person with Same Sex Attraction Disorder who might be cured if only we can love them into hating themselves just a little more.
Struggling with Homosexuality (III): A person with Same Sex Attraction Disorder whose life is careening downward in a reckless spiral of sexual addiction, prostitution, crime and drugs. If only they had listened to us when we told them that homosexuals only lead lives of sexual addiction, prostitution, crime and drugs.
Brokenness: What makes abusing homosexuals justified. ie: if they’re already broken to begin with, then this can’t really be hurting them.
Sexual Sin/Addiction: Having sex and liking it.
Sexual Sin/Addiction (II): Having sex and not being ashamed of it.
Sexual Sin/Addiction (III): Having sex with the one you love and feeling blessed.
Transformed by Christ: Still paying money to their ex-gay ministry.
Found Freedom From Homosexuality: Now employed by their ex-gay ministry.
False Image: What a yellow wall constructs to convince itself that it’s yellow.
Misguided: You’re ignoring me.
Gender Confusion: You don’t fit into any of my gender stereotypes, so you must be confused.
Gender Confusion (II): Your attractiveness is challenging my heterosexuality, so you must be confused.
Gender Confusion (III): Your gender non-conformity is confusing me so I must beat the living crap out of you.
Homosexual Lifestyle: All our most disgusting and perverted sexual fantasies and disorders bundled together and tied with a little ribbon of love, placed on the backs of homosexuals. The cross we nail homosexuals to so they can die for our sins.
Homosexual Agenda: A homosexual who thinks they should be treated just like anyone else.
Militant Homosexual Agenda: A homosexual who expects to be treated just like anyone else.
Militant Homosexual: A homosexual who thinks there isn’t anything wrong with being a homosexual.
Militant Homosexual Activist: A homosexual acting like they think there isn’t anything wrong with being a homosexual.
Love The Sinner: Remember how Lenny in Of Mice And Men loved his puppy? We love you just as much.
So I’ve been busy this week at work, making sure that all the test center Linux workstations are ready for the switch to a new Daylight Savings Time schedule. I got home real late last night and pretty much just crawled into bed. And I wake up this morning at the usual time, and as I get out of bed I note that new high tech energy efficient furnace I bought two Decembers ago has kicked in…
I have a variety of ways I can schedule that thing to heat or cool the house. The controller on my wall, where the old Honeywell round thermostat used to hang, looks like an oversized iPod; white with a big LCD display and a set of controls tastefully arranged below it. No more just turn the dial to the temperature you want. I have it programmed to kick the heat back at night, and during the weekdays when I’m at work, and then start to bring the heat back up again just before I come home, and just before I wake up. I can tell it to heat the house as normal on weekends, and Friday, which is my telecommute day. I can program four time periods during the day, can set a different schedule for each day of the week, or for the whole week, weekdays or weekends. I can create a completely different "vacation" schedule, which kicks everything into low usage mode.
The thing monitors the temperature outside as well as in, and builds an internal model of how the house maintains temperature, to use only the least amount of gas it needs. It’s burners can run at high heat or low, and the fan is variable speed. How much all of that is actually saving me is a good question, since right after I bought it, the price of natural gas heating here in Baltimore went through the roof (so to speak). But its good not to waste energy.
…and so here I am getting up for my day, and I note the furnace has kicked on. As I walk into the bathroom I can feel warm air gently flowing out of the vent. And a thought occurs to me. Does my furnace software need a Daylight Savings Time patch too? Because I’ve never had to set that clock once I got it installed. How the hell does this thing keep time? I guess I’ll find out…
I wonder if my car’s software needs patching too. Or that new digital camera I bought last year. This future I’m living in is not anything like the Jetsons told me it was going to be, back when I was nine…
(actually…his music for the film Koyaanisqatsi is a favorite. Buy the recent CD release, which includes the cue Organic, which the first release of the soundtrack unforgivably left out.)
On the March 6 edition of Fox News Live, while discussing Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s (D-NY) March 4 speech and her participation in a commemorative civil rights march in Selma, Alabama, host E.D. Hill accused Clinton of affecting a "Southern drawl" during her speech and asked pollster Scott Rasmussen: "[W]ould it happen elsewhere, if she was attending, say, a GLAAD [Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation] convention, would she speak with a lisp?"
You just know they all think gays have limp wrists and walk with a swish too. Why the hell did Harry Reid agree to have a democratic presidential candidates debate hosted by Fox News? He going to ask Focus On The Family to host the one after that?
John Ashcroft. You remember him…right? The man who scared the steaming crap out of everyone when President Junior made him Attorney General, because of his bedrock fundamentalist contempt for all that civil liberties and religious pluralism stuff? The man whose father, a traveling Pentecostal minister, anointed him with oil in the kitchen the day he took office? The religious zealot who asked nominees for judgeships if they were faithful to their spouses, and whether they drank? Who vetoed a bill while governor of Missouri to allow liquor sales on Sunday? The sanctimonious jackass who said, "I don’t particularly care if I do what’s right in the sight of men. The important thing is for me to do right in God’s sight. The verdict of history is inconsequential; the verdict of eternity is what counts." The self righteous prig who ordered a cover for the statue of the "Spirit of Justice" in the lobby of the Justice Department because one of her breasts was exposed?
Former Attorney General John Ashcroft, who sent a letter this week to his successor Alberto Gonzales blasting the proposed merger of Sirius Satellite Radio Inc. and XM Satellite Radio Holdings Inc., approached XM in the days after the merger was announced offering the firm his consulting services, a spokesman for XM said Saturday.
The spokesman said XM declined Mr. Ashcroft’s offer to work as a lobbyist for the company.
Mr. Ashcroft was subsequently hired by the National Association of Broadcasters, which is fiercely opposed to the merger. On its behalf he conducted a review of the effects on competition if the two satellite radio companies were allowed to merge.
See…all this time you thought what made Ashcroft dangerous was his moral fanaticism. But people become fanatics precisely because they have no personal sense of the moral and decent. Their inner lives are a vast unexamined wasteland where no personal sense of right and wrong ever had a chance of taking root. So as they walk through their lives, they come to embrace a kind of idolatry that’s all performance and ritual and ostentatious humility, dress themselves up as the idol’s champion and commissar, wage righteous war on behalf of it, so they can appear to themselves, to each other, and to the world, as all they are not within. Moral. Honorable. Decent. They wear their religiosity on their sleeve like that because not having a conscience, it’s the only place they have to put it.
Which is why fanatics are so dangerous. It’s not their moralizing. Fanaticism is the opposite of moralizing. They are incapable of moralizing. They have no brakes. They’ll do whatever that stone idol sitting silently in the middle of that vast inner wasteland tells them to.
The silence here. Yeah. For those of you wondering. I’m still feeling pretty much like the guy in White Room and I’m not up for talking about it because I know that, really, nobody wants to hear about someone else’s misery. Also, I just don’t want to know what’s going on in the rest of the world now, because I’m fucking tired of hearing about how republican’s can throw a party and invite every gutter crawling fag baiter in the world to it and their presidential hopefuls will come to that party and beg the gutter for support. So I’m not much provoked into saying something right now.
I’m mostly just occupying myself with a couple of photo projects down in the art room lately, including a photo album of shots from the Woodward days. An old friend of mine complained the other day that he couldn’t get to the albums I’d posted on Classmates.Com without paying their fee and I thought, well hell, I’ll post them here then…and of course then I got to thinking about how I might like to do it a little differently then I could there…and so on.
So I’m editing a photo layout in Apple’s Aperture, which still has it’s flaws, but they’re more of an irritant now with version 1.5.2 then a hindrance…except when it comes to the medium format stuff anyway. Otherwise Aperture is a fantastic photographer’s tool and I love it. But prowling over all those images from back then is leaving me more then a tad bummed out.
I bought the big film scanner, the Coolscan 9000, so I could start on a project I’d been planning for a while now, to scan in everything I ever took, and get it all cataloged and searchable and workable in the computer. I actually have a system I’ve been using since the Woodward days, but it makes use of numbered contact sheets and I haven’t had a darkroom where I could process contact sheets in years, so it’s been getting badly out of date. So I’ve been working the Big Scan project from both ends, that is, from the beginning of the old system forward, and from today, and all the rolls I haven’t made contact sheets for, backwards. It’ll take years to complete the scan (and Terabytes).
So I’ve been at it now for a couple months and I already have a bunch of stuff scanned in from the Woodward days and I keep pouring over it like I’d just like to go back and do it all over again and I know I can’t and I know it wouldn’t be good even if I could, but there it is. And I think the reason is that I was happy back then, in a way I don’t think I’ll ever be again. Which is probably a bizzare thing to say about being a gay teenager in 1971, when you really think about it. For all that 60s Peace, Love and Understanding stuff going on back then, the environment for gay people was not wonderful. Not at all.
I have a stack of underground comix from the period, and never mind the drugs, there’s a ton of free love and sex going on in them. But without exception, whenever they touched on homosexuality, and the breathtakingly liberating thing about those comics back then, after years under the thumb of the Comics Code Authority, was that there were no taboo subjects, gay people were portrayed in all the typically crude and demeaning stereotypes of the times. Well…except for Howard Cruse’ Barefootz stuff, which was like an oasis in the middle of a landscape of crude, jackass ignorance. Not a lot of free thinking there when it came to gays. As a gay teenager, I mostly just glossed over that when I read it. Below the surface it was making me angry, but I thought eventually people would wise up. Some did. Most have not. No…the Free Love 60s/70s were not a great time to be Gay in America. Not at all.
And yet, I had this completely naive faith, after I came out to myself one December evening, that I could find my soulmate, that I Would find my soulmate, and we would have our life together. And it kept not happening. And it kept not happening. And it kept not happening. And now I’m 53 and it still hasn’t happened, and I suppose I’m prowling over all those photographs from back then, as a way of holding on to that faith, or at least trying to keep it alive. Because if I loose that faith that it Will happen, I really don’t have anything left.
I have the best job in the world now. I have a nice little house. I can buy the cameras I couldn’t afford when I was a kid. I have an art room now. A little back yard. Everything I once assumed, assumed mind you, that would be out of my reach all my life. I grew up in a fairly low budget family environment, and I’m living a pretty good life now. And it all seems like props on a stage, and the story has no point. It just rambles on and on, but it’s going nowhere. There is no meaning. Not without that love of my life.
So I’m editing these various photo layouts of that time in my life when I could easily believe that love would happen to me somehow, someway. That I’d find that love of my life and we’d build our life together. And if I can see anything at all I can see how much time has really passed since then. And it hasn’t happened. And I’m working with these photo layouts in Aperture, and there he is, here and there among the images, the guy who opened my eyes to what it was all about. And elsewhere in that vast library of negatives and slides I have, mostly still unscanned for now, are the others…I could name them all but I won’t…that I circled around, and tried to start a fire with, and a few of them I dated for a while, and a few of them I could only circle around, but they all told me in one way or another ‘no’, and I grieved, and I moved on. I’ll see them all again as I work my way though this project. And here I am prowling over all this visual history of my life, and I’m still as solitary now as I was when I first came out to myself, when, unlike a lot of my peers, I was swept up not in a chaos of self loathing and fear and disgust but of awe and joy and amazement that there was such a thing as love in this world, and that it could possibly be so sweet. And I just knew that I’d find the love of my life someday. I just knew it. And I haven’t.
And I know, reading back over what I’ve just written, that there are people in this world who would be just delighted to know this. The haters want us to be lonely and miserable in this life because…well…they hate us. And we need to hate ourselves as much as they hate us. We need to hurt, simply for existing. Our wounds are the butter on their daily bread. I can not begin to describe the anger and outrage I feel toward these monsters in words, though I’ve tried over the past few years to do it with a few political cartoons. But anger is a brittle bedrock to build a life on. And it can easily turn into hate. You need love.
What I need right now, is to believe that it will happen to me. No…I need it to actually happen. But if I stop believing that it will, then for sure it won’t. So I can’t loose that faith. I can’t. But I think I am.
Speaking today at the Conservative Political Action Conference, right-wing pundit Ann Coulter said: “I was going to have a few comments on the other Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, but it turns out you have to go into rehab if you use the word ‘faggot,’ so I — so kind of an impasse, can’t really talk about Edwards.” Audience members said “ohhh” and then cheered.
A 21-year-old man from Bayonne, New Jersey was followed off the PATH train in Hoboken and attacked by two men who had been harassing him on the train for, among other things, wearing pink pants.
Hobokenpath Police are calling the attack an anti-gay hate crime, according to the Jersey Journal:
"When the train pulled into the Hoboken station, the two men followed the Bayonne man off the train and up the stairs, then attacked him near a newsstand on the concourse in Hoboken Terminal, police said. The man required 12 stitches to close facial wounds, police said, adding that he also had a black eye and was temporarily blinded in one eye. Using video shot from security cameras, police were able to identify Hoboken High School student Andy Rivera, 19, of Marshall Drive. He was brought to the police station for questioning and arrested Tuesday at 2 p.m. on charges of bias intimidation and aggravated assault."
The other assailant is still at large, but a warrant has been issued for his arrest.
I’ll bet Couter’s audience would have cheered that beating too. Coulter, you’ll recall, is the well respected conservative pundit who said her only problem with Timothy McVeigh is he didn’t go to the New York Times building.
Former Gov. Mitt Romney (R-MA), prior to Coulter’s appearance: “I am happy to hear that after you hear from me, you will hear from Ann Coulter. That is a good thing. Oh yeah!”
Police in Detroit released a sketch Thursday of the man suspected of killing Andrew Anthos, a 72-year-old disabled gay man whose dream was to light the Michigan State Capitol dome red, white and blue for Independence Day.
Anthos died Feb. 23, 10 days after a fellow bus rider, spouting anti-gay slurs, paralyzed him with a blow from behind with a metal pipe. Police have since questioned several people aboard the bus, including the wheelchair-bound friend Anthos was helping through the snow when he was struck.
Coming up…another lecture from David Broder and the other Wise Old Men of Washington, about how liberals are so hateful, and just too damn angry…
In the white room, with black curtains, near the station,
Black roof country, no gold pavements, tired starlings,
Silver horses ran down moonbeams in your dark eyes.
Dawn light smiles on you leaving, my contentment.
I’ll wait in this place where the sun never shines;
Wait in this place where the shadows run from themselves.
You said no strings could secure you at the station.
Platform ticket, restless diesels, goodbye windows.
I walked into such a sad time at the station.
As I walked out, felt my own need just beginning.
I’ll wait in the queue when the trains come back;
Lie with you where the shadows run from themselves.
Another bit of 60s psychedelia that seems completely random and meaningless at first glance, and yet it isn’t. The song seems formless, winding, aimless, like the smoke off a joint. There is no rhyme to the verse, no obvious sense of narrative in the words. Time seems to shift randomly back and forth. Yet there is structure here, and a rigorous one. Each verse is comprised of three phrases of four syllables each. It is played, except for the chorus, with the beat on the last syllable of each phrase. And there is a story. A very painful one. But not, alas, a very uncommon one.
Silver horses ran down moonbeams in your dark eyes.
Dawn light smiles on you leaving, my contentment.
I’ll wait in this place where the sun never shines;
Wait in this place where the shadows run from themselves.
The following opening sentence, taken from a genuine newspaper story, is brought to you as a public service of the Society For Laughing In Robert Bork’s Face:
A jazz musician was injured Friday after jumping from a burning motor home driven by a one-time roller skating stripper from Lodi.
As long as there is Jazz there will always be an America…
I first heard Wichita Lineman when Glen Campbell recorded it back in 1968. Something about its aching wistfulness just grabbed me, even back then, well before I had any interest whatever in the dating and mating game. In 1968 I was in Junior High School (they call it Middle School nowadays…). I was 14 that summer, and already starting to get teased for my utter indifference to the opposite sex. But thanks to a really brutal sex ed class taught by our gym teachers, who loaded our little adolescent brains with a ton of horrific lies about homosexuals, I knew I couldn’t possibly be one of those. Girls just weren’t all that interesting, and the guys who big deal out of sex were morons. I was above all that crap.
Yet even then, something about songs of loneliness and longing spoke to me. Maybe it was because my family had just moved, again, and I’d had to leave another group of hard won friends behind. Maybe it was that best friend who said he’d write and he never did. Maybe it was seeing all the guys start turning their attention towards girls, and something deep down inside of me just knew, somehow, that I was going to have a much harder time of it then they would. Yet, I very seldom paid any attention to the lyrics of a song. My ear always treats the vocalizations as just another part of the music. Lyrics are just too literal for the place where I go, when the music sweeps me up. Railroading was the first context I’d heard the term ‘lineman’ used, and so for years I vaguely thought Wichita Lineman was about a train engineer, working a lonely branch line somewhere in Kansas. But it’s about a telephone lineman…
I am a lineman for the county and I drive the main road
Searchin’ in the sun for another overload
It’s a Jimmy Webb song. A lot of the popular radio songs I used to listen to once upon a time, have turned out to be Jimmy Webb songs. By the Time I Get to Phoenix. Wichita Lineman. Galveston. Brad DeLong said of MacArthur Park that one of its many great beauties is that "…the schmaltziness of the metaphors and similes is so extreme and unbelievable that they deconstruct the ideas of "schmaltz" and "kitsch." Nobody could use these metaphors with a straight face. Yet the narrator of the song somehow does." I’ll never listen to Galveston again the same way, after DeLong pointed out on his blog that it was about a solider in Vietnam, cleaning his gun for the next battle, knowing he would die before his love back home could see him again. Webb’s father was a Baptist minister and ex Marine. His mother died when he was still a teen. All of his most popular songs were all composed when he was between 19 and 21 years of age.
I hear you singin’ in the wire…
The song is about a lineman who randomly hears a person’s voice while he is working on the lines, perhaps while he was testing the lines with an earphone, but considering the lyrics it’s more likely he’s hearing induction of local radio station signals directly into the wires. The radio and TV stations on the great plains are allowed to use considerably more power then here on the coast, for obvious reasons. Sometimes, those long stretches of copper wires will actually serve to rectify a strong signal, making them sing…
…I can hear you through the whine
That wistful whining of the strings in the Glen Campbell version of this make a lot more logical sense when you know all this, and yet you don’t need to know it at all: the sound works perfectly as music. It evokes, at least for me, the emotion the lyrics speak to. I have traveled the great plains just about every year I could by car, and it’s even more lonesome there then the southwestern deserts ever get. The Big Empty is how I think of it, beautiful though it is. And far from the noise of the cities and the Interstates, it’s Quiet. So quiet sounds normally masked to you begin to come forward. You hear the wind gently rustling the tall grass. You hear grasshoppers jump from one blade to the next. Stand out there long enough, perfectly still, and you can start to hear your own heart beating.
And the Wichita Lineman is still on the line
Picture someone working those telephone lines alone in that gently rolling sea of tall grass. In 1968, long before cell phones and the internet and satellite TV, those long stretches of copper wire vaulting from one horizon to the next were all that kept the people of the plains in any sort of direct contact with the rest of the world. His job is important to his people. He is keeping them connected to each other. But what of him?
I know I need a small vacation but it don’t look like rain
And if it snows that stretch down south won’t ever stand the strain
Working high on the telephone poles in the middle of The Big Empty, you could easily imagine yourself the only person on earth. Yet the wires in your hands are alive with the high pitched confused noise of busy human chatter. The sound rises and falls as you work, like the quiet hiss of waves washing gently up on a shore, and then drawing back into the sea. The human race is having a conversation with itself. But its all jumbled together, out of phase, mixed with random harmonics and radio frequency heterodyning. All you hear is a gentle whine coming off the wires. But the human ear, like the human eye, tries to discern order within chaos. The lineman hears, or he thinks he hears, a voice…and it beguiles him.
And I need you more than want you, and I want you for all time
And the Wichita Lineman is still on the line
Perhaps the voice fades back quickly into the whine and he never hears it again. Perhaps it comes and goes. The song does not say. Perhaps the lineman hears it randomly from then on while he works out on the lines. A beautiful, beguiling voice, keeping him company while he gets on with his life out in The Big Empty.
…I believe this is a vital issue in the life of the church. The hope of wholeness and holiness of life is integral to the Gospel message. Jesus didn’t die on the cross to save us from throwing gum wrappers on the sidewalk or using the wrong fork to eat our tofu, he died to save our deepest selves from our darkest sins. And, because we are created with human bodies full of hormones and fallen psyches full of what my friend Bill Stafford calls "disordered affections," many of those deepest sins will involve our sexuality. We are not given new life and new power in Christ so we can do what we darn well please. We are not our own, we are bought with a price, says St. Paul. Therefore, he says, we are to glorify God with our bodies.
…
In August of 21003, ECUSA’s General Convention created an uproar when it decided to endorse and bless the consecration to the office of bishop a man publically and proudly living a homo-erotic relationship. This unprecedented decision–made in the face of international pleas that it not take place–created an uproar in the whole Christian and, indeed, the entire mono-theistic world. The Anglican Communion, under the direction of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, created a commission to explore how the communion could and should respond to this provocative, unilateral action by one small branch of the Anglican Communion…
…
The Episcopal Church needs to be called to just the sort of repentance and humility it says it believes. Only that sort of clear, forthright repentance can lead to reconciliation…
Church ousts him after ‘inappropriate relationship’
An Orange Park priest and leading voice in the theologically conservative Anglican movement in America has been stripped of his clerical credentials after having "an inappropriate relationship" with an adult female church member, the parish’s top lay leader said Monday.
The Rev. SAMUEL C. PASCOE was removed Feb. 10 from his position as senior rector at Grace Church (Anglican) and lost his ministerial license as a result of the relationship, said David Nelson, senior warden of the former Episcopal congregation.
Pascoe, who is married with three sons, said he couldn’t comment on the situation and referred all questions to Nelson.
Pascoe, 56, for several years has been an outspoken critic of the Episcopal Church USA for what he and others see as the denomination’s increasingly progressive interpretation of Scripture and its growing acceptance of homosexuality.
When the denomination elected an openly gay priest as bishop of New Hampshire in 2003, Pascoe helped lead a movement that resulted in his and several other parishes quitting the denomination and its Jacksonville-based Episcopal Diocese of Florida. He sharply criticized Florida Bishop John Howard for refusing to quit the national church.
"He’s known nationally, for sure, and he’s probably the biggest player in Florida," said David Virtue of Virtueonline.org, an Internet-based Anglican news and commentary site with about 4 million readers.
Pascoe led his parish into the Anglican Mission in the Americas, then orchestrated a $4 million fundraising campaign to build new facilities after the congregation left Grace Episcopal property in 2006, Virtue said.
Virtue said the tragedy isn’t for the Anglican movement but for Pascoe and his family.
"He is a godly evangelical who struggled for the faith, led his parish out … and started all over again, and then suddenly this," Virtue said. "It defies all reason."
The Rev. Kurt Dunkle, a spokesman for Howard and the newly installed rector at Grace Episcopal Church, said the diocese has no comment.
Nor did the Rev. Neil Lebhar, a spokesman for the Anglican Alliance of North Florida and another leader of the region’s Anglican movement.
Nelson said the parish was informed of the relationship and Pascoe’s status during Ash Wednesday services last week and again in services Sunday.
"It’s a painful thing that has taken place," Nelson said. "And it’s difficult for Sam given the comments he has made" on issues of sexual morality.
Ah…just blame the homos. That’s the routine in that glass house you call a church isn’t it? It isn’t Sam’s fault, whatever he did that was…inappropriate. It’s ours…right? Because Gene Robinson became a bishop poor Sam just lost all his moral bearings and he couldn’t help himself. Blame Gene Robinson. Sam’s a righteous man of God so it can’t be his fault he’s a jackass. It has to be the gays fault. Blame us. That’s what you think we were put on this earth for after all, isn’t it?
They say that fundamentalism springs from fear of the unknown. They say it’s a retreat from reality into the comfort of dogma: a mental padded cell where no doubt ever disturbs the peaceful tranquility. It is a place they say, where there are no questions, no doubts, only comfortable certainties. A place where you don’t have to think for yourself, and most importantly, where you are not responsible, only forgiven.
I disagree. Fundamentalism I believe, springs not from fear of the unknown, but from fear of the people next door. Fear that they can cope with the world as it is, better then you can. Resentment of their courage in facing a world that you cannot. Envy that turns into hate. Fundamentalism doesn’t so much give you a place to hide from the world that the rest of us manage, somehow, to go on living in, as give you permission to put your thumb into our eyes.
Here, Mara Schiavocampo captures Peterson Toscano in a couple all-too-brief passages from his one man play, Doing Time In The Homo No-Mo Halfway House. She intercuts excerpts from Peterson’s play, and an interview with him, with an interview of John Smid inside his little ex-Episcopalian church, turned conversion therapy camp. There’s a moment in the video with that’s telling, and it comes when Peterson explains how he finally had to ask himself one day, what he was doing to himself, and John he insists that The Truth…The Truth…The Truth…has set him free…
The Truth…The Truth…The Truth… Jacob Bronowski in his magnificent book and BBC series on the history of science, The Ascent of Man, devoted an entire episode to the difference between truth and dogma, titled Knowledge or Certainty. He begins with the face of his friend, Stephan Borgrajewicz who, like himself, was born in Poland. And he asks us, how well, how precisely, can we describe this man’s face? He asks a painter to render it, and says…
We are aware the these pictures do not fix the face so much as explore it; that the artist is tracing the detail almost as if by touch; and that each line that is added strengthens picture but never makes it final. We accept that as the method of the artist. But what physics has now done is to show that that is the only method to knowledge. There is no absolute knowledge. And those who claim it, whether they are scientists or dogmatists, open the door to tragedy. All information is imperfect. We have to treat it with humility. That is the human condition; and that is what quantum physics says. I mean that literally.
This episode is the heart of the entire series. In it, Bronowski calmly and methodically rips to bits the view that science is only about dry facts and figures. It is a method of knowledge he insists…a very human one. We are not Gods, we do not have the perfect God’s eye view of reality. So we must approach what we know with humility, and question it, and test it, and verify it, because we do not have that perfect absolute knowledge of Gods. We can be right, we can be wrong, but when we do not test our knowledge against reality, when we set ourselves apart from that need to test our understandings and let nature speak its truths for itself, we open the door to the worst that is possible within us. And that worst has no bottom. Bronowski ends the episode on one of public television’s most powerful, most moving moments, and it ends as it began, with the face of Stephan Borgrajewicz, many years younger, taken when he was imprisoned in a concentration camp…
We have to cure ourselves of the itch for absolute knowledge and power. We have to close the distance between the push-button order and the human act. We have to touch people. The truth John, is that you won’t stop forcing gay teens through your program against their will, because it’s the ones that are comfortable with who they are that you need to force your cheapshit cowardly self loathings into the most. The truth John, is that you sold out every moment of pure and honest happiness you could ever have had, for the sake of pleasing a world that Still thinks you’re a pervert. The truth John, is that now you can’t bear to see a happy, well adjusted gay kid, because they remind you of everything you could have been, everything you could have had. The truth is the wall is yellow John. Take a look at it someday god damn you. An honestly lived life isn’t necessarily an easier one, but it’s…you know…Authentic and Real.
Scarborough Fair was a 45 day trading fair held in the seaside resort of Scarborough in medieval England. In its time it was internationally famous as a place to trade and do business with merchants from all over England, parts of Europe and Scandinavia. I’ve often imagined that the song that bears its name had its origins in some poor unrequited lover’s ballade. He was a bumpkin come to the fair from the sticks to make his fortune, or at least a little spending money he could take back home. But he lost his heart instead. You have to figure though, that any song humans have sung across the centuries is just ambiguous enough that anyone can imagine themselves in it.
As the years passed, it gradually became a duet sung by lovers who seemed separated by more then the distance between them…
Are you going to Scarborough Fair? Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme, Remember me to one who lives there, He once was a true love of mine.
For me, when I’m in a certain mood, nothing beats hearing Sergio Mendes & Brazil ’66 sing this chorus. It’s seductive and beautiful. But they only sing the chorus. There’s more to it, and when you uncover the additional verses of this old medieval song, what you discover is that it is a duet between two lovers who are asking each other to perform simple, yet clearly impossible tasks…
Ask him to find me an acre of land, Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme, Between the salt water and the sea-strand, For then he’ll be a true love of mine.
Ask him to plough it with a lamb’s horn, Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme, And sow it all over with one peppercorn, For then he’ll be a true love of mine.
Ask him to reap it with a sickle of leather, Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme, And gather it up with a rope made of heather, For then he’ll be a true love of mine.
Again, it’s all just ambiguous enough that you can see in it almost anything you want to. Maybe this was medieval England’s 50 Ways To Leave Your Lover. Maybe its a devoted couple having a good laugh together that while they aren’t the perfect lovers of the folk tales and ballades, they’re still happily in love all the same. Maybe its a couple who’ve let each other down, angrily hurling impossible demands at each other. Maybe the song is about how love makes us rise above ourselves, brings things out of us that we’d never have known were there, never have known we could do or become, until we met that one person we would do anything for.
Are you going to Scarborough Fair? Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme,
Perhaps once upon a time there were two people who might have loved, but time and circumstance just made it impossible. And now all they can do is wave at each other at a distance, smile a little, laugh a little, and ironically give each other these little absurd tasks to win each other, knowing full well it can never be.
Remember me to one who lives there, He once was a true love of mine.
The songs that speak to us about the human condition across the ages, tell just enough, and leave out just enough, that everyone can recognize themselves in them.
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