That's a load of...

• Simplicity: In lifestyle, in philosophy…really in every part of my life, I need to simplify. I need to consume less. Use less. Require less.
• Discipline: What I’d like to see is a lot more growth in my ability to control myself.
• Physical Health: Not everyone needs to be superhuman. Same goes for me. But I could take my health a little more seriously.
• Creativity/Imagination: I wrote a post last weekish about how this part of me has suffered greatly in adulthood. I’d like to nurse it back to health.
• Faith: My atheist friends would disagree, however faith is central to who I am, and I want it to be strong. Strong like bull.
• Knowledge: I’ve gone a bit soft in the head. I need to sharpen old knowledge and set about to learning more.

What’s missing? Comment away…

Those chucks are awesome.

Well, since this blog is really just a personal deal, my pitch is also personal, and I’ve recently updated it. On my About page, it reads like this:

This site’s about my attempt(s) to be not bad, but good.

Can’t get much more succinct than that. Granted, every pro-blogger would advise against such a pitch, as it doesn’t really fill a need of anyone else. Good thing I have no intention of becoming a pro-blogger.

So if you’re ever wondering what this site is about, there you have it. It’s about me, trying to be not bad, but good.

Day One: Done.

However, I wanted to take a moment and share something from the fringes of my personal life. An old friend and his brother have been through an ordeal to which my words couldn’t possibly pay proper respect. I’ll leave it to you, my readers, to read their story for yourselves. It’s a story of sacrifice and love that I can’t wrap my head around.

In all of my joking and writing over the coming weeks. In my busy-ness and commentary about nothing, this story…this is something that matters. Nobility that I can’t even touch.

My heart and prayers are with you, Arnold family. And Ryan, you have my eternal respect. I’m in awe.

Chad & Ryan’s Story

If I'm breaking some sort of law...I'll take this down.

Along with another million or so people.

There’s this section of the blog that he’s been doing for a couple of years called “31 Days to Build a Better Blog“, and I’ve decided to do it. And blog about it. Just like my hero, Darren Rowse. See how that works?

If you’re new here, you should know that I have no aspirations of being “A-List”, but I certainly want to be better. This blog will never be in the top 10 visited in the world, but if I made the top 1,000, that’d be pretty cool. Maybe this is the first step in that direction.

Each day, I’m going to do the task assigned, and then I’m going to write about that task. Unless, of course, the task is to write a post. Then I’ll probably just do the one. I am pretty lazy, after all.

So sit back and enjoy my attempt to move from the E-List, to the D-List of bloggers!

Anarchy bad. Conformity good.

I’m ashamed.

Actually I’m not. And I’ve got other stuff like that. Stuff that everybody else seems to just lurve, meanwhile, I don’t get it. So, as part of my quest to become gooder, I’m going to catharsisize here and share them with you. In no particular order of dislike:

• Dave Matthews Band: Yep, this is actually redundant.
• Yoga: I really, really want to like this. Cause it looks so cool to be all bendy like that.
• House: The TV Show. I suppose I understand, cause Hugh Laurie is pretty much a genius. Everyone else is great. That kid from Dead Poets Society…awesome. Yeah, but has anyone else ever noticed that every single episode is…the same? Like, exactly the same. Not in the typical CSI sort of way. More like the writers are pulling a fast one on us. “Heh, heh. They’ll never know we use the exact same plot in every episode, but just change out the names of diseases and stuff!”

  Person is sick with some obscure mystery disease. House suspects he knows what it is, but cares more about being right than about people. Kid from Dead Poets Society tries to be his conscience. Boss lady yells at House chief of police style. House’s staff holds him in disdain, and doesn’t believe him despite the fact that he’s always right. Oh no, the person’s going to die! No, wait a minute…oh…yep. House was right. Again.

• John Eldredge Books: For my Christian friends…sorry, I disagree. With, well, lots of stuff he says.
• Google Wave: It’s bad for several reasons. And I’m a nerd for having it on this list.
• The Twilight Books: Oh yes, I did in fact read the first one. My suspicions were correct. Stephenie Meyer is a terrible writer. Not as bad as I am, but still, terrible. Though I guess millions of people can’t be wrong.

I think “scorpino” sounds cooler.

On my runs, I’ve seen some crazy stuff. And here is a list of that stuff. For your personal enjoyment.

• A mule deer.
• A coyote who chased me for a ways.
• A bear.
• A momma bunny with about 300 baby bunnies…who decided being alive was more important that being a mommy when she scampered off faster than the babies could keep up.
• A woman in her 60′s. She was passing me.
• A beetle the size of my hand. Not exaggerating.
• A porcupine who “hid” from me by rolling into a rather large spikey ball.
• A group of kids smoking pot.
• A rattlesnake.
• A dog trying to bite me.
• And as of today, a scorpion.

Oh what wonders lie on the trail of…wonder…work…anyway, I see some cool stuff.

Well, I sort of worked out an analogy this weekend that might explain a bit where I’m at with the whole thing.

Oh, and if you’re a hard core pacifist, you may not relate very well to this analogy.

Imagine when you’re born, your creativity is born with you. An infant, but alive and uninhibited. As a child, just like you likely were, your creativity is somewhat wild, pretty original, and more than a little free.

Problem is, as you get older, inhibitions start to creep in. Imagine inhibitions are those creepy demons in the stripped shirts from the worst Christmas movie of all time, A Christmas Story. These guys crawl in, and grab your creativity. They hold it in this weird, restrained, contorted position. They don’t allow it to go out, experience the world, stretch it’s muscles, work out…nothing. Your creativity is stunted. It’s held back. As you grow up and mature, your creativity is not allowed to do the same. By the time you’re an adult, your creativity is either dead, or a vegetable.

Those creepy dudes come from everywhere. School. Your parents. Your friends. Society. Religion. All of these expectations turn into nasty inhibitions that sneak up and grab your creativity and torture it to death.

My creativity has done a decent job of keeping some of these inhibitions at bay. Not good enough of a job, though. My creativity is out of shape. Some parts of it are atrophied. It’s a little sickly. Functioning, but barely. Still bound up and held down by those striped shirt punks that should have been shot long ago by a Red Ryder carbine-action, two hundred shot Range Model air rifle with a compass in the stock and a thing which tells time.

So now, I need to fight. I need to allow my creativity to fight like an animal. To beat these inhibitions back. Kill them, if necessary. It needs to be violent. Mean. And it needs to push its boundaries. See how far it can run, how much it can lift.

For a while, I need to just…create. Even if it’s shocking. Even if it’s crap. If I need to write a story about a family of little people who cannibalize the citizens of a Michigan town, I need to do that. If I need to write an expose that criticizes the mating habits of raccoons, I need to do that. Doesn’t mean I’ll be creating stuff like this forever. I just gotta get my creativity back in healthy shape.

And it may take some messiness to do it. Those striped-shirt buggers gotta die.

America's Greatest Challenge

Actually, that’s not true. I’ve been madly in love with the mountain since then. My first ascent was with a group of friends, and I fell in love with every step of the 13 or so miles. We didn’t even know there was a race then. Not until we saw 80-year-old guys practically sprinting up the final 16 Golden Stairs.

I wanted that.

That first ascent got me to the Springs, and it inspired me to run that race 16 years later.

Now, you should know. I won’t be competitive. In fact, I’ll be a huffin’ and a puffin’ pretty much the entire way up and I’ll still finish somewhere toward the rear side of the middle of the pack. I’m not running this race to win. I’m running it because I love the mountain.

Yeah, yeah, all mush aside, I’m a month away from the adventure of my life. My run in (pun intended) with my first ultra was probably my biggest challenge to date, but my trip up the Pike to eclipse that. By far. A half marathon up a 14-thousand-food mountain. If I didn’t know that my finish time will be mediocre at best, I’d be pretty proud.

Wait, I haven’t run this yet. And some of my previous distance efforts have proven that I can’t quite claim superhumanhood. Not sure if I’ll ever have that honor. I’m happy just to chase superhumans up and down mountains while I pretend to be even close to their level of awesome.

Okay, back to this race. I’ve been running, and I’m a bit injured. It appears, from my armchair, that the fracture from earlier this year has changed my gait, and it’s caused quite the case of tendonitis in my foot/feet. It sucks, but I’m good to go. One thing that’s not so good to go, is my weight, probably the original source of my running injuries.

I’ve been running a little on the heavy side for a while now. I’m not “overweight”, per se. Just heavy for a runner with my frame. That’s haunted my running hobby for a while, but running uphill for 4+ hours means every extra pound really counts. So in addition to logging a decent number of miles, many of them uphill and above 12,000 feet, I gotta lose me some weight.

Normally, I’m not in any way obsessed with pounds. The uphill makes them matter to me.

So I’m going to attempt to drop down considerable weight within healthy limits over the next month. Naturally, I’ll be eating quite a bit from the increased training miles, but I gotta make sure I’m burning more than I’m taking in.

This post has gotten quite a bit longer than I originally intended. My next few posts will be quite a bit briefer.

I promise.

I hope.

The reason for it is that I’m further refining what this blog is. I’ve got just around 1,000 (ish) monthly readers, and I haven’t really been tracking feed subs, so, yeah. I don’t know a lot about the fan base of this blog. That’s going to change, I hope.

Oh, yeah, the reason my picture is up there. This blog has always just kind of been a hobby. And though that’s not changing so much, part of that “hobby” is learning how to run a successful blog. And since this blog is the exact opposite of what pro blogs are supposed to be (a personal journal), I figure if I can make this audience grow, I could certainly make a blog that’s actually useful grow as well.

So what’s it about? It’s about me trying to be not bad, but good. That’s what it’s always been about, I suppose, but I’ve toyed with having multiple authors, multiple subjects, reviews, etc. I’ll still be covering many of the same topics, though from an even more personal perspective and hopefully, from a perspective that others can glean benefit from.

In August, I’m going to do ProBlogger’s 31 Days to Build a Better Blog. Hopefully that will tighten things up a bit. In the meantime, know that I plan on being a tad more vulnerable and open, a la Leo Babauta over at Zen Habits. Well, old school Zen Habits, anyway.

So you won’t get much of me telling you how you can be not bad, but good. You’ll just get a lot of me telling you how I’m trying to do that for myself. Body, mind, and spirit.

Amen.

Or something.

I was lost for 6 years, and now I'm found.

I don’t care. It’s your loss, and I don’t give a crap whether you like the show or hate me for liking it.

Oh, before I continue, herein you will find plenty o’ spoilers so if you haven’t watched the finale or are working your way through Season Four on Netflix, stop reading now.

Stop. I’m warning you. Read no further.

First, why LOST is awesome and you are not:

• LOST plays like a well-written novel. It pulls no punches. It’s not dummied down. It’s storytelling at its best; literature on the small screen. If you don’t get how rare that is, you are not awesome.
• The planets somehow aligned with LOST, with all involved parties being of extraordinary talent. Writers, directors, actors, best boys…everyone involved did a phenomenal job, so not only was LOST great storytelling, it was great TV.
• Like all great myths, LOST was multi-faceted, open to interpretation, and not wrapped up in a pretty bow. If you like to know all of the answers and have plot hand-fed to you, you will not enjoy LOST. You should go back to watching 24 and Dancing With The Stars.
• It took an incredible amount of hootspa to take the risks LOST’s producers took. Writing a show that’s nearly incomprehensible unless you’ve watched from the beginning? Gutsy.

I could go on and on. LOST was groundbreaking television from beginning to end. Yeah, there were definitely misses. It wasn’t “on” every single episode (or every single season…), but even when it was “off”, it was great. Being an artist, and one who chooses to communicate visually, I’m in awe of LOST and consider it to be one of the most significant advances in visual storytelling in decades. Yes, decades.

Now, for the finale.

You’re still reading? Don’t say I didn’t warn you…

Okay, first, they weren’t all dead the whole time, folks. That was the point of Christian’s line “There is no ‘now’ here…” The sideways timeline was purgatory or Abraham’s bosom or whatever you want to call it. Yes, in the sideways timeline, they were all dead. But it doesn’t take place in linear time, so some of them died old men and women, some of them died over the course of the show, and some of them, like Jack, died in the finale.

Second, if you think LOST was about answers, you’re missing the whole point. It’s more about questions, but it’s not even just about that. LOST was about LIFE. Life and death and questions and history and time and future. And the afterlife. And mythology and redemption and relationships.

YES…relationships. THAT is what LOST was about and what I pulled from the finale. It’s a cliche but one of the most important cliches you can ever know: it’s not the end. It’s not even the journey. It’s who you’re on the journey with. Ask Chris McCandless, who’s self-penned epitaph is “Happiness is only real when shared.”

The Island is Earth. The Losties are us. The Others are religion. The Dharma Project is science. LOST is LIFE. Flocke/MIB is the evil in mankind. Jacob is the good in mankind. Jack was “born” when he opened his eye on the Island, and of course “died” when he closed his eye at the end.

LOST was one, giant metaphor for life.

The religious parallels…heavily Christian, I might add…were astounding in the finale, which left more questions than answers. Even though I don’t believe that any of the “answers” are absolute (because as with any great myth, the “answers” are really left to the interpretation of the viewer), here’s my take on a few of the more specific biggees:

• What was the Island?

  In the LOST mythology, I believe that the Island was simply a place where there was a high concentration of electromagnetic energy, which caused lots of phenomena, not the least of which is the collection and trapping of souls who have yet to move on to the afterlife.

• Who were Jacob/MIB/Protectors?

  The ancients discovered this island an untold number of millennia ago, and realized its potential to destroy life itself. So an order of sorts was formed, and passed down from generation to generation, protecting not the Island, but the rest of the world FROM the island, if that makes sense. Jacob was the current protector during the course of the series, but MIB, who could have been a protector, simply chose another way. We saw a very small part of the Island’s history, which involved the epic struggle between Jacob and MIB.

• Who were The Others?

  I kind of get into this above, but The Others were simply the more “spiritual” group of people who were obsessed with the Island. Over the course of LOST, we discover that some of them were loyal to Jacob, and others were misled to be loyal to MIB.

• Who was the Dharma Initiative?

  This was simply a group of scientists who wanted to learn from the Island, though their motives are fuzzy. It’s possible that the people who commissioned them wanted to harness the Island’s power, which in the mythology of LOST, would have been an evil act.

• When did everybody die?

  I covered this above a bit, but I’ll be clear that I do not think they all died in the plane crash, nor do I think they all died when Jughead detonated. A central theme to LOST is time travel, and I think we see a lot of that going on, as opposed to just alternate realities/dimensions.

• Do the LOST and Alias universes collide?

  HA! Didn’t expect that one, did you? Though I don’t think JJ Abrams or any of the others from Bad Robot have gone on record regarding this, as a fan, I choose to think that they do. I believe that it’s possible Rambaldi was an “Other” or otherwise associated with the Island. Perhaps he was one of the protectors. I don’t know, but in my world, the two mythologies are connected, as may be Fringe’s mythology, though I don’t really watch that show so I can’t really theorize about it.

Overall, LOST changed the way serialized storytelling can be done on TV. I’ve shared with some friends that I believe LOST is the new model. That serialized mythologies like LOST need to have an end date. Like a mini series that spans several years. It enables the writers to create a rich experience, with complete character and story arcs that you can’t get on a serial that has no end in sight.

I was pleased with the LOST finale. I was in love with the series. I have a difficult time believing that anything will compare to it for a long, long time.