In the meantime, perhaps you will write more. This is an effort worthy of far more attention than you have given it, distracted as you have been by the pleasantries of, well, just being distracted. Those pleasantries aren’t going anywhere. You should remind yourself of this now and then, and get back to the business of doing what it is that makes you who you are. Do it often, do it fervently, do it for as long as you can. Just in case one day it won’t be yours any more to do. Just in case it dries up. Get yours while the getting’s good, so to speak.

On the second day of a quiet house, the second of two days spent in the sweatpants you wear when you are sick (and almost never else), these are the thoughts that spin around inside your head. They haven’t taken quite yet — you haven’t spent any of this unexpected free time composing your thoughts, or even collecting them, really, except for this modest effort, right here, right this second — but they will, if you remember what you’re supposed to be doing, and more to the point, why you’re supposed to be doing it.

P.S. You’re kind of an asshole for writing this and then going right back to said distractions.

Thinking about rearranging the living area, if only because the neighbor’s television activity reflects in my turned-off TV screen and distracts me from writing, etc. Giving serious thought to moving everything I need into the living room, just so I don’t have to keep going up and down the stairs. This place is bigger than I will need, starting in 3…2…1…

Walked out of the theatre tonight. Drag Me to Hell. Haven’t done that in years. It ended up setting the tone for the rest of the night, which has been unpleasant and the complete opposite of the very nice day I had. I can’t blame the movie for that one. It’s very clearly my fault.

In the frivolous book I’m reading (The Accidental Time Machine) the protagonist inadvertently makes a machine that lets him jump exponentially farther forward in time each time he uses it. First he jumps a couple of days into the future. Then fifteen years, and his old girlfriend comes onto him, so he jumps again, 177 years into the future. The book has been moderately interesting up to this point, see, but when he lands in the future this time he asks somebody what year it is. Seventy, they answer. Seventy since what? he asks. Seventy years since Jesus came back, they say. At which point the book just got… boring. He jumps again, farther into the future, but I’m already done caring about this guy and his journey.

I’d hate to be a protagonist of anybody’s casual reading material. With days like this, who would hang in there with me for more than a few pages?

At a Saturday evening backyard wedding reception at which Felicia and I were only acquainted with the bride and groom, we were seated at a table of strangers that included: a touchscreen product design engineer and a video game package designer (married to each other), and a pastor and his wife. At one point in the evening the touchscreen engineer’s mother wandered by. She looked at each of us in turn, then settled her gaze on me and said, You must be the pastor. Which made Felicia (and the pastor) laugh out loud. The mother then touched her middle-aged son on the shoulder and explained that her son was raised as a devout Presbyterian, but that he had chosen his own path since then. To which the son responded by making devil horns with his fingers and hissing. Best wedding reception table I’ve ever been seated at.

The aforementioned Robert Charles Wilson seems to have a problem — or had a problem earlier in his writing career — with worthy endings. Spin, one of his more recent books, was fantastic. But if I’d read any of his other work first, I doubt I’d have made my way to Spin at all. I’ve just finished Blind Lake, and, like The Chronoliths, it constructed a steady intensity until the final dozen pages, and then deflated with a tiny farting sound.

Purged my Netflix queue today. Every last item, vanquished. Increased my plan 400%. Lined up all of the series I’ve been missing or haven’t seen before — the final season of The Wire, a little Californication, Mad Men, Generation Kill, etc. I anticipate having a lot more time on my hands pretty soon. Time for a little cultural catch-up.

Ten years ago American Beauty introduced me to Sam Mendes and Alan Ball, two unlikely successes at the year’s awards shows. I’ve since followed both of their careers with interest, but it appears that Mendes is holding that interest more steadily than Ball. I can’t seem to muster up any interest in Towelhead or True Blood. Mendes almost bored me with Jarhead but has recovered nicely. I suspect Away We Go is far less quirky and Juno-esque than the trailer suggests it is, and the prospect of Mendes producing an Aaron Sorkin script — even if it is a musical about a theatre group — is promising as well. Not to mention Road to Perdition, which creeps a little closer to my top five list each time I watch it.

Saw Up today. Charming and wonderful. Pixar seems to be the only studio consistently showing me things I’ve never seen in movies before. And, dammit, making me all emotional and shit.

And then sometimes I just can’t take any more of it, and I spend a while with some lighter reading. I discovered a science fiction author in April by the name of Robert Charles Wilson. His novel Spin was wonderful, the story of the night the stars went out on our little planet. It has been a long time since I’ve found any contemporary science fiction that’s really excited me — usually I backtrack and reread Clarke or Bradbury — but this one prompted me to spend the past month reading Wilson’s other novels. I haven’t read the sequel to Spin just yet, but I’ve enjoyed The Chronoliths (although its ending fell a bit weakly to earth) and a collection of short stories. I’m reading Blind Lake now, the story of a highly-secured research community that’s been quarantined from the rest of the planet. Neither this book or The Chronoliths matches the intense character studies of Spin, but Wilson makes the most of his characters in what seems to be a very broad tale.

Back to the religious reading, however. Most recently I finished Bill Lobdell’s Losing My Religion, a fast read about the author’s experience working the religion beat for the L.A. Times, and how it ultimately led to the collapse of his belief system. There’s nothing truly revelatory here, but I enjoy reading about ordinary people and the moment they first poked holes in what they believed to be true. I relate very much to these sorts of stories.

Maybe two years back I read an article about the “new atheism” — I think it was in Wired — and began tracking down the books of the subjects mentioned in the piece. Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion, Sam Harris’s Letter to a Christian Nation. I can’t recall if Christopher Hitchens was mentioned in the story, but I can’t imagine he was left out, and his God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything was newly-released at the time. I bought Dawkins’s and Harris’s books, but I skipped Hitchens’s (all of these atheists and their s-ending surnames confound my apostrophical sensibilities) because at first glance it seemed to be the most openly corrosive. At the time I was beginning to read these books, I was looking for reason and open-mindedness. I attribute this to my fondness for Carl Sagan’s discussions about the existence of god, and his lifelong openness to the concept of a higher power, given proper evidence to support the idea.

I’ve only recently come around to finally reading Hitchens, and I have found him the most interesting of the three so-called new atheists. Harris is extremely readable and well-spoken, and I enjoyed his books. I’d rather listen to Dawkins speak than read his books, which can sometimes plod a bit. Hitchens, on the other hand, I have found to be extremely readable and well-read himself. God is Not Great makes a fair number of points that anyone who has seen Hitchens’s debates will probably recognize, but these points never get old because they are so useful in the argument for the non-existence of god. I’ve come across a few video series on YouTube in which Hitchens participates in a public and organized debate against some theist or another, and the outcome of these is never a victory for either side, but a clear sense that, of the two speakers, Hitchens has presented the more stable and reasoned case, and has refrained from reactionary speaking, or personal attacks. I find this sort of thing imminently watchable, and quite interesting. The theists who debate him inevitably bring to the table the same arguments, from one debate to the next, and Hitchens very calmly listens, though he has heard the arguments I am sure so often that he could probably sleep for five minutes and still respond accurately to the point, and follows up with courteous dismantlings of the concepts that have just been outlined.

The debate that I listened to today dealt briefly with the idea of agnosticism. The theist participant, Denish D’Souza, compared agnosticism to an uncast vote. The agnostic’s position, he argued, is the equivalent of not participating in the debate, and not affecting the outcome of the quarrel. I’m not sure I agree, but it was a comparison I hadn’t previously heard. I’m more familiar with the tired argument that agnostics are simply weak-spined atheists. The phrase ‘without the courage of their convictions’ is typically bandied about.

I find agnosticism to be a reasonable position, however. The concept of a world created and maintained by an all-seeing, all-powerful, all-etc. deity is not one that makes sense to me. (I can’t even say ‘any longer’, since as a child I’m not sure it ever made much sense to me. I recall being frightened of the consequences of unbelief, and that outweighed the importance of the questions.) Whether or not there is a god is not a testable hypothesis. Faith invalidates the need for proof. I’m not sure I’m capable, or that I ever was, of believing in something whose existence I cannot review evidence of. In particular I find the idea of a savior, and a system of belief designed to rescue one’s immortal soul from an eternity of torture, to be a concept of such dramatic weight that I cannot envision taking it so lightly as to just snap my fingers and believe.

I do not by any stretch of the word consider myself to be a very intellectual person. I am reasonably intelligent, I think, but more importantly, I am deeply curious. There’s not much that I will take an interest in without exploring it to great depths. I do this with almost everything that catches my attention. The digression earlier in this post about the books of Robert Charles Wilson is a decent example. I’m incapable of enjoying just one book by an author; I have to locate and read them all. And so it is with matters of faith, which leads me to the question that’s been on my mind here lately.

Faith, as described by the Bible and other religious texts, has everything to do with believing, and nothing to do with seeing. It’s a conscious decision to trust in something that you can’t prove. For many people, this is not so difficult, and the faith that they hold sustains them during good times and not-so-good times. There are people who find it unnecessary to question their beliefs, and faith seems to be their reason for not doing so. There are few answers that could challenge what they already believe to be true.

But let’s suppose, for a moment, that there is a god. He’s a Biblical god, one who is responsible for the direct creation of humankind. He supplied us with free will, then died in order to pave the way for our salvation. He rewards us for believing in him. Over the years the direct evidence of his participation in our lives has waned. There are no clear-cut miracles anymore. Bushes don’t catch fire and boom with the voice of that god. Seas don’t part, suns don’t freeze overhead, and dead people aren’t resurrected. For a person with great faith, these things don’t present much of a challenge. Their faith does not stumble over these or other facts that suggest that there may not be a god. They are undeterred by the scientific method, by the observable expansion of our universe, by our planet’s fossil record of a very, very long past. (I am not trying to say that all people of faith shy away from science, of course.)

Here’s my question: assuming that there is indeed a god who created mankind, and that our eternal souls depend on our belief in him, how does that god account for the less-easily-convinced among us? That is, it’s easy to save the souls of people who have the capability for faith — well, perhaps ‘easy’ is the wrong word — but for people who do not have a predilection to believe in what they cannot discern or prove (and let’s not forget, we’re assuming that there is a god who created not only believers but unbelievers as well), what exactly has that god done in order to provide for their salvation?

If you assume that this god created all men, and that he is omniscient, then he is aware that some people will not easily believe he’s real. If that god is a kind and loving father, as often portrayed, and responsible for the eternal welfare of his children, then surely he has provided evidence of his existence, so that these particular curious and interested children of his might find their way to salvation?

But there seems to be no evidence that any god has done so. So far as I know, no irrefutable proof of the existence of god — any god who is an actual deity, and not one of the men throughout history who has masqueraded as a god — has surfaced. Which suggests that theories which we are capable of postulating based on tactile or observable or measurable evidence are of infinitely greater value than an untestable, unprovable god hypothesis. At least, I can say, they are of infinitely greater value to me. Our origin story, as science endeavors to tell it, is a far more complex and wonderful and interesting thing than is that of Genesis. Life on a planet as marvelous and rare as ours is made all the more exception for its finite nature. It is quite true that I would like to live for a few hundred years so that I might witness the next great progressions of our species, but even as a child the concept of a never-ending heaven concerned me. Life is all the more valuable for its limited duration.

And yet I know so little about so much. I’ll continue reading, and having long exchanges of email with my father, and watching men and women of great conviction debate their positions. There are still an awful lot of questions to be asked.

But I’ve got to finish reading some science fiction first.

So much for that. Here, I hand-code my hyperlinks. My embedded images? Got to drag them into Photoshop and crop the hell out of them and upload them before they’ll just work. Here I manually assemble my category listings. Here I forget to update the footer links, my Wordpress install is years out of date, my comments form is broken (it always shows zero comments, no matter what), and there’s no such thing as a Twitter feed.

Here’s home, I guess. I’ve missed this site, with its nicely designed undesign, and its gray, and more gray. So I guess I’m back, and maybe I’ll call off that other little blog fling I was engaged in. It looks like a couple of readers have been waiting out the doldrums here. I wish I had some finely-crafted posts to reward you with, but maybe that will come later. For now: howdy. I’m back. Disgruntled and cranky as ever.