now 
officially a contributing writer for the Burnside Writers Collective, run by Donald Miller and Jordan Green. You can read my On Fire for Jesus, or Ecoterrorism & Trader Joe's
And there will be more to come. I'll be doing an interview with actor Tony Hale for BWC.
Jordan and I were just interviewed for the Steve Brown radio show. The show was streamed live, will air on the radio this weekend. Or you can listen to our program by clicking HERE!
for many of the same reasons. It's hard to find a guy who's still got some part of his heart that's not gone cynical. And I love that about him.
because as a child, the Rose Parade reminded me that Christmas vacation was almost over. Or because I had siblings in marching band, and I hated standing on some rainy street corner just to catch my sister playing four bars on her clarinet, wearing a geeky red suit and Cossack hat. I just don't like 'em.Does your heart hold the magic of the holidays?What does it mean? "Warm memories, waiting to be discovered again? ... Believe in that magic?" Nothing. It's a circular, vapid, treacly, stinking pile of POOH!!!
Is it filled with warm memories, just waiting to be discovered again?!
Well now is the time to open your heart!
Believe in that magic! And remember those treasured moments.
Oh they're still there, deep within you; waiting to touch you once more
So come along! As the Magic of the Season leads the way!
Can you remember
How Christmas makes you feel?
That special magic in the air and all your dreams are real.
Can you remember:
The smell of gingerbread?
Candy canes and sugar plums dance inside your head.
(blah blah, something about reindeer)
The magic lives when we believe.
Remember the caring
A season worth sharing.
Believe in the magic in our lives
Just open up your heart,
And re-live the feeling.
Just remember the magic
Yes remember the magic … one more time.
Larry: For one day you get to forget your troubles, you get to remember what's important in life.He's right. Those are the things that are important. You can find the fun and joy and freindship at Disneyland. Or the consumerism at the beach.
Susan: Buying Mickey Gear?
Larry: No, the simple things ...
Susan: Like The New, Improved "Jack Sparrow-Pirates of the Carribean with Johnny Depp?"
Larry: No, things like friendship and joy and innocence.
Susan: Then why didn't we go to the beach?
Larry: Because the ocean is poluted.
only time we could be with my side. Finances are still an issue, so we decided to drive. Plus, Larry and I love road tripping. So does my brother James. But it's 1100 miles from West LA to Sedalia, Colorado, so the three of us were on the road by 5am in hopes to make it to Sedalia by midnight.
The sun is setting over the ancient barrier reef, the dust and the rocks turn colors, and the Rockies are looming in the east. I look out at the rock formations, the shades of red and green in the rocks and dust. I notice the way that the tectonic plates have shoved one over the other, millions of years ago, and I start to feel something I haven't felt in a while.
proper is only about two square blocks of old west style storefronts, a filling station, and a mini mart. They've only got two traffic lights, and those are only there to reinforce the trains ... make sure those cowboy ranchers don't drive their pickups around the crossing arms when the 10-car coal trains come through.Atheist Fundamentalists
From Investor's Business Daily, Posted 11/13/2006
Intolerance: Rock star Elton John's wish to "ban religion completely" may be dismissed as the hyperbole of a famous eccentric. But militant atheism has become more fashionable than ever. And it's targeting your children. The flashy singer of "Crocodile Rock" and "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road," who recently "married" his longtime male partner, told Britain's Observer Music Monthly that "religion promotes the hatred and spite against gays."
"Organized religion doesn't seem to work," he said. "It turns people into really hateful lemmings and it's not really compassionate." John concluded: "From my point of view, I would ban religion completely."
"Nobody would know my new album has been out since. My record label isn't doing anything to help. Fuck Universal. Please drop me. I'm 58 and I don't care anymore."I don't think the increasingly enraged Elton should judge others for being hateful.
On accusing Madonna of lip-synching: "I'm not afraid to speak my mind. I'm not going to mellow with age. I get more enraged about things as I get older."
Amazon's second-best-selling book at the time of this writing is an Oxford zoologist's venomous 400-page diatribe against "the vice of religion." In it, he insists that "even mild and moderate religion helps to provide the climate of faith in which extremism naturally flourishes." And he wants parents forbidden from raising children by their beliefs.If Sir Elton has anyone to fear, it's this psycho who advocates killing handicapped babies. Because they're substandard? That was Hitler's excuse for exterminating gays and Jews! Forget Hitler, evolutionary theory on animal homosexuality is that it's "nature's way of eliminating the weaker of the species." How terrifying is THAT?
"Our society," writes Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion, "has accepted the preposterous idea that it is normal and right to indoctrinate tiny children in the religion of their parents, and to slap religious labels on them — 'Catholic child,' 'Protestant child,' 'Jewish child,' 'Muslim child,' etc." Those "labels" are "always a form of child abuse," said Dawkins, who concludes: "Maybe some children need to be protected from indoctrination by their own parents."
... Dawkins has called on the United Nations to extend human rights to gorillas and orangutans. He extols Princeton's notorious "professor of bio-ethics" and animal-lib poster boy Peter Singer, who advocates the killing of handicapped newborn babies, as "the most eloquent advocate of the view that we should move to a 'post-species-ist' condition."
No. 11 on Amazon is another atheist screed — "Letter to a Christian Nation" by Sam Harris. Harris' 2005 attack on religion, "The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason," got a prestigious award from the PEN literary association and still ranks No. 33 on Amazon. Harris is as eager as Dawkins to kidnap your kids and bring on the day when "the practice of raising our children to believe that they are Christian, Muslim or Jewish be widely recognized as the ludicrous obscenity that it is."YIKES! But before Christians get their panties in a bunch, these accusations come with foundations. There has been a lot of violence committed in the name of religion. But also in the name of Atheism (see Pol Pot, Stalin, Ghengis Kahn). A lot of the poeple who are hateful toward gays are just hateful people. Like Neo-Nazis. There are probably atheists who hate gays, but they don't stand with signs saying, "gays are going to hell." My friend Alicia's uncle was an abortion doctor. WAS. He was murdered, not by an atheist, but by a fundamentalist Christian psycho.
Religious Americans shouldn't be alone in fearing the popularity of these modern Mein Kampfs. Imagine the government forcibly preventing you from inculcating your children with your values and convictions, and substituting its own instead. Even when it's Darwin — instead of Hitler or Mohammed — being worshiped by the state, fascism is fascism.
No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.And to quote that dangerous subversive, Alexsandr Solzhenistyn:
Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.
The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart, and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. Even within hearts overwhlemed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained; and even in the best of all hearts, there remains a small corner of evil.
I ranted a while back about Christian Clichés.
Except I'm here on a Saturday, and there are kids. Lots of 'em. Kids who are screaming and squealing. Until the librarian comes over to tell them to please be quiet. Because librarians have the authority to do that: Tell someone to be quiet.IT IS FALL HERE NOW, MY FAVORITE OF THE FOUR seasons. We get all four here, and they come at us under the doors, in through the windows. One morning you wake and need blankets; you take the fan out of the window to see clouds that mist out by midmorning, only to reveal a naked blue coolness like God yawning.
September is perfect Oregon. The blocks line up like postcards and the rosebuds bloom into themselves like children at bedtime. And in Portland we are proud of our roses; year after year, we are proud of them. When they are done, we sit in the parks and read stories into the air, whispering the gardens to sleep. ...
I remember the sweet sensation of leaving, years ago, some ten now, leaving Texas for who knows where. I could not have known about this beautiful place, the Oregon I have come to love, this city of great people, this smell of coffee and these evergreens reaching up into a mist of sky, these sunsets spilling over the west hills to slide a red glow down the streets of my town.
And I could not have known then that if I had been born here, I would have left here, gone someplace south to deal with horses, to get on some open land where you can see tomorrow's storm brewing over a high desert. I could not have known then that everybody, every person, has to leave, has to change like seasons; they have to or they die. The seasons remind me that I must keep changing, and I want to change because it is God's way. All my life I have been changing. I changed from a baby to a child, from soft toys to play daggers. I changed into a teenager to drive a car, into a worker to spend some money. I will change into a husband to love a woman, into a father to love a child, change houses so we are near water, and again so we are near mountains, and again so we are near friends, keep changing with my wife, getting our love so it dies and gets born again and again, like a garden, fed by four seasons, a cycle of change. Everybody has to change, or they expire. Everybody has to leave, everybody has to leave their home and come back so they can love it again for all new reasons.
It's October, 2006: I'm on the plane to Nashville: AKA Music City, Smashville, NashVegas. It’s mercifully empty on this flight, and I have an entire row to myself. Across the aisle and back one row is a couple that looks pretty country. Fifties, Hillbilly hippies with turquoise jewelry. He’s got longish stringy hair and reading glasses. She’s got a Cocopeli bracelet and 30 extra pounds. They order Budweisers. It’s 10am.
I really do not like country music. Well, I like Johnny Cash and Willie and Waylon. But I really can't abide the slick stuff, like Shania Twain. She lives in Switerland for the love of Pete; how is she country? Or who's this Pouty Boy at the left? The Brad Pitt of Country? I wonder if this guy even wears a hat when he's alone. Maybe a bowler. 
I don't know if you saw the segment on 60 minutes about Darfur. The dictator of Sudan is Arabic, and he is conducting massive genocide of anyone who is not Arab. The Sudan military goes into ethnic-African villages in the south at night: kills the men, rapes the women, throws the bodies into the water supply so the village is uninhabitable. And then burns the entire village.
The Sudanese (arab) government bulldozes the refugee camps after chasing the people out in the middle of the night. (see what's left of the Al Geer refugee camp at left)
I love the change in seasons. But I grew up in Southern California, where those changes are very subtle. So I am attuned to the imperceptible shifts. My my favorite season is Autumn. Autumn here can mean little beyond the lone maple tree on a street meridian losing its leaves. The subtle change in light as the sun hangs lower light in the sky. The temperature dip. And that splendid melancholy.
It's Yom Kippur and I have some sins that need atoning for. I have some amends to make: to God, to others and to myself.
