Pedestrian View

My friend David recently reminded me that blogging matters.  He wrote, “Dude”¦write, or post some pictures or something”¦geez.”  This reminded me that, as a blogger, I have civic responsibilities.  People out there are depending on us to tell the truth, to write wrongs, to interpret the world, and to right songs.  We bloggers are no less important than the Helsinki Complaints Choir.

http://www.glumbert.com/media/helsinkichoir

A shout out to Hanna Erpestad for cluing me in about this choir’s great work.  I humbly blog on in their tradition.

I’ve got 70 essays to grade.  To make matters worse, it’s Saturday, and I promised my students I’d have them done by Tuesday.  If I’d done what I’d originally planned - graded 10 every day starting Tuesday - I’d have 30 left and time to spare tomorrow for the crossword, sudoku, and a leisurely walk with the dog.

Don’t get me wrong, I like reading student papers.  I’m interested in what they have to say.  I’m interested to find out if any of the things we’ve talked about in class have been put to good use.  For example, did they actually give any examples?  Did they write about things that matters to them? 

It’s grading them that’s the trouble.  I like the idea of coaching students to try things to improve their essays, but ultimately grading calls upon me to be judge and jury.  “Thou shalt serve six weeks in C Wing, upon which time I shall reconsider thy revision.”  No one believes they deserve to get sent to C Wing.  After all, that’s where murderers and sex offenders are housed.  I don’t blame them, but send them I must…

But wait!  My daughter’s birthday party is tonight, and the house needs cleaning.  Granted, my three daughters can handle the duties, but why shouldn’t I vacuum?  Better yet, why shouldn’t I reorganize the video collection? 

Ironically, avoiding grading has ended other procrastinations.  I’m registered to run the Half-Marathon in June, but I haven’t started training yet.  When I went to bed last night, my plan was to get up relatively early - say 7:00 a.m. - and grade five papers.  Well, I didn’t get up until 8:00 and then my daughter wanted to meet the track team down on the Lakewalk for a workout, and…you guessed it.  Sherry and I went down with her and I put in my first 30 minute workout.  We celebrated with Starbucks and a cranberry orange scone.  Yeah, us.

I also think about stuff as an avoidance mechanism.  For example, I have some ideas that I hope will someday make my fortune, and I sit and think about them.  My best idea is the lip balm phone.  The phone is the one item that everyone will continue to need for at least the next two years (after that, we’ll probably all be wirelessly hardwired).  With the success of the camera phone, why shouldn’t other combinations work?  Why not the Chapstick phone, or its competitor, the Blixtex phone?

Another of my ideas is Myday.  It’s a day that we’d insert between Tuesday and Wednesday.  It would have rules.  The first rule would be that it wouldn’t appear on any calendars (to make the yearly calendar come out right, we’d just subtract four or five days from each month).  The second rule would be that no one could schedule anything for that day - no appointments, no plans of any kind.  Every Myday morning would be a blank slate.  If we all observed it together, from Osama and Dubya all the way down to under the freeway overpass, I think it could work, and we’d all be better off for it.  I suppose there’s no money in it for me as the founder of Myday, but I can live with that.

Finally, there’s writing on this blog, the ultimate time waster.  I’d better publish this and start in on that first essay.

Theology isn’t normally on my reading list, but David Carlson recommended Marcus Borg to me after we’d discussed the role of creeds in mainline denominations one night (referenced by Borg in his discussion of the Council of Nicea).

To summarize, Meeting Jesus is subtitled “The Historical Jesus and the Heart of Contemporary Faith.”  If that doesn’t really help, let me try to illuminate.  Basically, Borg describes his journey discovering who Jesus was, and is, and what this might mean to a person of faith.  He writes of the early stages of his own discovery, when he began to realize that what he’d learned in Sunday school wasn’t very accurate, saying, “I found all of this very exciting, though it also seemed vaguely scandalous and something I shouldn’t tell my mother about.”  Exactly.  Sorry, mom.

Borg is an historian, and bascially he sets out to address common precepts that many Christians (and non-Christians) hold up as “true” and refuse/neglect to examine.  For example, the notion that the Bible is some kind of un-erring text - the Words of God, so to speak.  Nope, Borg argues  It’s a collection of texts compiled by the Council of Nicea some three hundred years after Christ.  This should not be news, but it’s surprising how ignorant Christians are of their own history (count me among the ignorant).  To listen to some, you’d think that the Bible was handed down by God (shrowded in clouds) to Billy Graham.  Did this council do a good job selecting texts that represent the message of Jesus?  Yes.  Did they also push a patriarchal agenda and bury the more feminine metaphors describing Jesus?  Yes.  Are there other texts of the early church worth reading that weren’t included?  Yes.  In short, to read the Bible and ignore the historical context is to misread the Bible.

The book, however, is more about Jesus, the person as the Bible portrays him, who Borg subdivides into the Pre-Easter Jesus and Post-Easter Jesus (which seem self-explanatory, but the terms are not what some might expect).

The Pre-Easter Jesus is the historical Jesus.  Of him, Borg argues that he probably wasn’t eschatological (increased my vocabulary); in other words, he didn’t see himself as divine and never would have talked about himself in those terms.  Instead, Borg argues, he was a radical “spirit person” who worked at every level to subvert the dominant religious culture of purity by preaching and living a culture of compassion (ie. hanging out with “unclean” people, healing on the Sabbath).  The implication is that most Christian circles continue to be cultures of purity - arbiters of who’s in and who’s out - and do not hold up compassion - love - as the highest virtue, nor live that idea. 

The Post-Easter Jesus is the Jesus as experienced daily by the early church during the first century after his resurrection.  This Jesus finds his way into the Gospels, doing things and saying things right alongside the Pre-Easter Jesus.  For example, statements like, “I am the light of the world” or “I am the way, the truth, and the life” are reflections of how the early church saw Jesus.  The Sermon on the Mount (”Blessed are the poor…”) is a condensed version of what the early church saw his principle message to be.  Borg argues that it’s unlikely that a real Jesus would have actually said these things.  He also argues that because he may not have actually said these things doesn’t make them false.  They are still the central message of Jesus that the Gospel writers wanted to get across.  The Gospel writers, particularly John, didn’t see themselves writing history.

Borg’s bottom line isn’t that the Bible is a bunch of lies.  He argues instead that it’s a rich, complex text, like any text.  It’s a product of it’s times and must be read as such.

There’s a lot more to dig in to in this book.  He puts together a lot of random pieces that had formerly been making clanging sounds in my head.  Primarily, Borg’s reading of the Gospels and Jesus puts what’s damaging about a lot of Christianity in sharp relief, and builds a framework for modern people of faith on which to rethink their lives. 

Good stuff, that Borg. 

“Kipple drives out nonkipple.”? –J.R. Isadore in Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep

I was recently admiring baby Juniper along with Susan and Theresa at LSC. Juniper’s mom, Amy Jo, had her along on a baby-goes-to-work day. We were marveling over the nine month Nipper’s ability to stand up with coffee table support, put things in her mouth, peek-a-boo, and smile. Amy Jo bragged about Juniper’s newest development. She can empty an entire bookshelf without finding the right book. She is clearly gifted.

Susan, with a 34 month old in day care, followed with information from Bernie, her daycare provider, about how astute her son is at taking out and scattering stuff — dumping toy bins and whatnot. Lego bin — dump. Play-doh supplies — dump. The assumption was that we were witnessing a developmental progression here. These youngsters are one small developmental step away from the next big thing — in this case, putting things away.

I couldn’t help myself. “The putting-away stage is a lot farther off than you think. My seventeen-year-old takes out lots of things. If she’s put any of them away, it’s news to me.”? At that point, Susan remarked that I should blog this, so here we are. Thanks, Susan.

Here’s Kylie’s desk. It actually looks pretty good here. I think I captured this Fuji moment about two days after a major anti-Kipple campaign.

See how quickly and silently it creeps. Honestly, my desk looks very similar. As Philip K. Dick said, “˜Kipple drives out non-Kipple.”? That’s a natural law. I think, however, that humans accelerate the phenomenon simply by being present. Let’s look at some more examples.

Maia’s drawers, as one can see, are literally bursting with kipple. I believe that she tries mightily to keep these drawers closed, but it just cannot be done. The natural blockbuster force of kipple is just too strong.

Not to be left out, this is Maritha’s beading table and bed. Sometimes she just has to give up and play chopsticks on the keyboard. Music tends to soothe the wild kipple spirit.

I’m not criticizing these girls. They are busy with lives full of creativity and excitement. I know for certain that fighting against kipple is a losing battle because I lost that battle long ago.

Our own kitchen table illustrates this nicely. My point here is that human development pretty much reaches its zenith when Juniper starts pulling Mercer Mayer off the shelves. Remember that just a week ago she was sucking on the pages, so it would seem that she’s gathering momentum for real progress. Don’t be fooled.

Late at night, one can feel the dark, silent forces of kipple gathering to clutter our lives. It only makes sense that human involvement exponentially exacerbates kipple, resulting in human tragedies like Hurricane Katrina, or the Lego I stepped on while en route to the bathroom late one February night in 1997.

Of course, it’s natural to succumb to the illusion that we can fight against it. If you come to my house — assuming you call ahead — you might notice that nothing looks like the images above. We will probably look relaxed and happy, but don’t let that fool you. We’ve just waged a heroic battle against our old foe, and while we appear to have won, our victory is fleeting.

Maybe Neil Young said it best in back in 1980. “Your buildings, if they rise again would do much better on the ocean floor. They’ll never feel the way they did before. They did before.”? –”Lost in Space,” Hawks and Doves.

Better yet, F. Scott Fitzgerald. “So we beat on, boats against the current of kipple, borne back ceaselessly into the clutter.”? –Gatsby (last page).

The snowshoeing mentioned in my last entry was postponed by a day due to Monopoly. We’re approaching 48 hours now that our street hasn’t been plowed, so with no one going anywhere, we hunkered down over the familiar board last night. Actually, we couldn’t find our game, so we borrowed Abrahamson’s 1957 edition. Pretty sweet.

Our neighbor Lisa - also snowed in - came over for her first Monopoly game. At age 29, a Monoploy virgin. Her comment as she slowly worked her way toward bankruptcy was, “This is so much like real life!” Like real life, Kylie won mostly by making sure at every turn that I didn’t win. This stems from a long history of family games where I have shown no mercy to my children. The school of hard knocks teaches some painful lessons, some of which come back to bite the teacher.

I digress. I’m supposed to be writing about snowshoeing along Miller Creek.

This is what I was expecting - pristine stretches of drifted snow. I can no longer consider this “my woods,” though. At least one snowshoer and one back-country skiier beat me to it. You gotta be quick to snowshoe the virgin powder around here (second time with the v-word…what’s up with that?).
I started out with my trusty dog, Pepper, but the snow was too deep for the poor thing. She floundered for awhile, and then just sat there up to her chest and stared at me, so I turned around and brought her home.

As you can see, the other intruders kept mostly to the creek bottom.

The rabbits and the deer were also leaving a few tracks. The next photo shows where the deer have been following each other, plowing through. It must be tough for them in these conditions.

Mostly it was great to be out in the sun, the wind, and the dazzling white of the new snow. The only sounds were the wind, the soft shushing of my snowshoes, and the ambient sounds of the snowplows clearing the LSC parking lot.

Such is the urban wilderness. I left only my tracks, which by now have been joined by only a few others.

This is mostly for my Hawaiian readers.  Here’s the view from my living room looking east yesterday.

Winds were gusting over 60 mph from the east (from the lake) and snow was falling 1-3 inches/hour.  The wind leaves some places completely bare, and right next door a 5 foot drift. 

My neighbor had nearly a six footer in his driveway. 

Check it out:

George and I had a bit of a snowblower rodeo.  There’s nothing like getting out there with 8 1/2 horses of Briggs and Stratton and tossing some snow around.  The sad part is that this - and the storm we had last week - were the first of the season, which is essentially over.  We’ve had a nearly brown winter.  I suppose we’ll have two more.  How lucky can we get?

To back track, here’s looking north at the storm’s height:

It was a “snow event.”  Forget old fashioned terms like Blizzard or Show Storm.  No travel was advised, but Sherry had a hair appointment.  Naturally, we had to go, so we headed for Shear Katz in Fitgers by the lake.

While I was waiting, since everything was closed except Shear Katz (during blizzards, only the essentials:  grocery, liquor, and Shear Katz), I took the opportunity to go out on Gitchi Gummi at the height of the storm.  Two weeks ago during a cold snap, the thing to do was skate the lake, which my wife and children happily did without me one cold day.  Anyway, I headed out - the wind driven snow sandblasting me - onto Superior below Fitgers.  I thought it was a little slushy, then - perilously far from shore with absolutely no one knowing my whereabouts - I sank to my right knee.

It was time to return to the rocky shore quickly and not mention it to my wife.  Later at home, I confessed my stupidity to my family, only to be told that they’ve been warning against going onto the lake for a week now.  Who knew?

Back home, of course, the girls were home, warm and safe.  School was cancelled both Thursday and Friday.  Lucky us!

As I said earlier, I spent the whole morning with George running my snowblower, blowing out my driveway and another neighbor’s (they’re retired, but Marilyne still runs a mean blower).  No one’s going anywhere because the roads aren’t plowed yet.  As soon as a plow comes through, we’ll have to blow again because the plow will just fill up our driveway.

My teenage daughters, however, showed that they still have imagination.  They built show caves, and played cave monster.  Here’s Maia:

She’s the leader in snow event activities.  She strapped on snowpants and headed out first today.  Yesterday, she learned how to run the snowblower, too.  I thought she was having a great time (she did a great job), so I let her do the whole driveway.  Afterwards, it’s reported that she came in, stomping snow off, claiming, “I’m not doing that again.”

Later, she said, “Dad, when I ask to try something like that, I just want to go down and back once.”  I’m still learning a few parenting skills.

Maritha and Kylie are good soldiers, and once Maia led the way, they got into it.  Here they are:

In truth, they didn’t play snow monster, but their caves are pretty cool. 

If you’re in Hawaii right now, you’re probably thinking that you’ve got it pretty good, and I’m not saying you don’t, but I’m going out snowshoeing in awhile here. 

I’m thinking I’m going to catch some pretty good waves down by the creek.