Word Shepherd

Calling it Righteous, Calling it Just

David Mahaffey — Tue, 01 May 2012 13:00:58 +0000

I voted last Monday in an effort to stop my home state from writing discrimination into its constitution in the name of God. The proposed amendment seeks to outlaw any form of legal domestic union except for the marriage of one man to one woman, which would as a side effect complicate the lives of all unmarried people, from single parents trying to care for their children to any victim of domestic violence. The list of Amendment One’s incidental effects is long and tragic, but to dwell on those is to ignore its far more painful deliberate aim: to make bigotry the law of the land. Many in my own family and others in the more conservative regions of North Carolina object to that characterization, but however many selectively chosen Bible verses they quote, and whatever they may feel in their hearts about gay marriage, the fact remains that if Amendment One passes it will threaten an already vulnerable minority that is as deserving of protection and support as any other. As election day draws nearer, I’ve seen one example after another of families who would be harmed by the passage of Amendment One. I have seen no evidence that harm would befall anyone if the amendment fails.

The argument over Amendment One stirs in me a very old guilt. When I left North Carolina, briefly, to attend graduate school in Massachusetts, my friends in Boston could not understand why I would ever consider returning to the South. It is hard to explain. I am steeped in the strangeness of this place, our obstinate cleaving to tradition, our unflinching rictus that has countenanced so many kinds of brokenness we had to make up even darker stories just so we’d know something could be worse than we are. But I was born and raised in the thick of fundamentalism, in a poor, isolated town full of people suspicious of anything not just like them. What peace I carried from there was hard won, culled from the few whispered strains of conscientiousness I could hear in the din when I sat still for long enough. I know places like that don’t change unless thoughtful and compassionate people work for it, but I cannot go back there. There are still a few people adrift in that town, and I have abandoned them. The best I can do is throw out a lifeline from the safety of my bubble, but that is no substitute for a kind, constant presence.

It was with markedly less guilt that I walked away from my hometown church. When I was a kid, I could never figure out what I’d done to make the preacher so angry, and making an introvert pray out loud in Sunday school is not the surest way to lead him to righteousness. I found the brimstone warnings terrifying in their vehemence and infuriating in their absolute certainty,. A few years ago at a funeral, the sermon included an explicit rejection of other people’s belief in reincarnation. I wondered how the fundamentalists would feel about a Hindu rejection of Jesus, and marveled, not for the first time, at how little capacity for empathy the church seemed to have. With its long history of oppression, it is no surprise to me that the Southern Baptists are just about the only denomination in North Carolina whose leadership has not voiced any opposition to Amendment One, though I do know a few members who have already voted against it.

photo: h.koppdelaney

But faith is resilient. I spent a few angry, faithless years purging any semblance of church from my system, but eventually I understood that no institution can speak for an individual, and that everyone’s articles of faith are unique. I still resent forms of evangelism that attempt to foist doctrine and dogma on me. I still chafe at injustice disguised as devotion. If you talk with me about what you believe instead of what your church insists, I will listen. Fair warning: I am more likely to quote Kurt Vonnegut than Jesus, and I am prone to discussing Moses and minotaurs in the same breath. I trust the rational verve of science, but not that all things are empirical. However much I believe in the impossibility of certainty, I believe just as strongly that there’s something beyond what our rational brains tell us, and I don’t mean “something” as in “a quantifiable force that our scientific instruments will one day be able to detect.” This is one of many differences between facts and truth, neither of which seems to have much to do with the rule of law.

I am lucky. As a straight white man, no church has the power to take away my civic rights. My particular faith doesn’t compel me to impose my beliefs on anyone else, and I am keenly aware that marriage is both a sacrament and a secular institution. It is already the law of the land that gay people can’t get married. The sacrament is “protected,” to whatever extent you believe it to have been endangered. What is already at risk, and what Amendment One further undermines, is the ability of the government and other organizations to protect all citizens from discrimination. Whatever you believe about marriage, I have a hard time understanding how anyone wants to take away vital community and legal protections from anyone else, calling it righteous, calling it just. Marilynne Robinson suggests that “human dignity is the one truth against which all other claimants to truth must be measured.” Those wielding Bible quotes in defense of bigotry, take note: I do not fight fair. This is my return volley.

Every two weeks some friends and I create new posts on the same topic. This week’s synchroblog posts — about resilience — are listed on our group blog, The Creative Collective. Please read them all.

The Compromise

David Mahaffey — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 13:00:59 +0000

photo: TheDeliciousLife

Demeter. One brother her consort, one her cradle robber. Thank the gods I was not born Greek. Sometimes a grieving mother’s only consolation is the reassuring chill of ice, her despair so emphatic the days darken early to hasten mourning’s end. Her neglectful tending of the harvest that first year imperiled even the gods, starving them of worshipers, their one necessary sustenance.

Zeus. His intentions, as ever, unclear: one part fraternal gift, one part proud father of the bride. It was an oversight not to consult the mother, but his was a well-practiced atonement. Only when his failed apology froze and crumbled in his hands did he resort to divine wisdom, the compromise struck promising the least agony in exchange for the least happiness.

Persephone. Betrothed to the underworld and seized by an inopportune pang for pomegranate. Whether tricked or complicit, she finds the flavor less bitter than some. She winters with her husband, as feared by the dead as she is longed for by the living, trying not to develop a taste for cursed souls.

Hades. What good is being a god when all it earns you is a longer portion of longing than the other side won? He could not say whether his kidnapped bride swallowed those seeds by choice or by guile, but for each season in turn his questions stretch down the lengthening days, his cold bed no more comfort than death.

Every two weeks some friends and I create new posts on the same topic. This week’s synchroblog posts — about spring — are listed on our group blog, The Creative Collective. Please read them all.

Madness

David Mahaffey — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 13:00:20 +0000

In North Carolina this time of year, there are only two colors, and they are both blue. Where I grew up, it was inescapable. In March at my high school, announcements included admonitions not to sneak in portable radios, a futile effort thwarted not by students but by teachers who knew what tournament time meant in the war for adolescent attention spans. The school also sent home letters to parents warning them against the all-too-likely prospect of their progeny skipping class to watch the games. This was no more effective during basketball season than it was during hunting season or on race day when NASCAR was in town, because serious fans of any sport who also happened to be parents involved their kids in their mania from birth. The first day of deer season inevitably meant I’d be one of the only male students in class, but come March, I’d be as swept up by basketball fever as anybody.

This tends to surprise people. The first time my partner came along for a visit to my parents’ house, she was astonished to observe a conversation with my dad in which I demonstrated not just a cursory knowledge of this year’s Carolina squad but a nuanced understanding of the men’s team, their history, and their prospects for the season. It’s a far cry from discussions of literature, or gadgets, or even cats, I grant you, but it’s just as ingrained. I tried to pass it off as merely an attempt to be conversant in the pop culture of the moment, but the truth is I was born this way. Or at least, my indoctrination since birth has been quite thorough.

photo: abbyladybug

know and have recited the “Carolina born, Carolina bred” rhyme. I’ve made the God-as-Tar-Heel-fan argument, citing the color of the sky as evidence. For an embarrassing number of years, I held onto a Coke can commemorating the 1993 championship team. I watched the seniors on that team play in my high school gym as part of an all-stars tour. I suffered through the lean Matt Doherty years, tuned in online while I lived in Boston for grad school, and watched the 2009 championship game with 20,000+ screaming fans at the Dean Dome. Just yesterday I caught my breath and my heart broke a little bit to think of Kendall Marshall, a kid in Carolina blue whose red-eyed press conference announced the cruelest of fates: his broken wrist might keep him from playing the last precious games of the year with his teammates. Sure, it’s a bummer for fans and a high-stakes concern if you have money or bragging rights riding on your bracket, but the young men and women who entertain the rest of us face the twin urgencies of an international, multi-billion-dollar media frenzy and the internal desire to keep playing a game that they love on a stage that celebrates it.

There is one aspect of my partisanship that many a Tar Heel fan finds lacking, and that is my vitriol for Duke. Right away, I’ve revealed a higher allegiance to grammar than to the Heels by spelling the rival’s team name properly (not “Dook” as the true believers would have it). I don’t think the refs blow every call in favor of Duke. I don’t think their coach looks like a rat. I don’t shout threats of bodily harm through the television at twentysomethings in royal blue.

I don’t really get the contentious nature of sports fandom, wherein another team’s demise is almost as satisfying as a favorite team’s success, but I accept that much of it the way I accept (by which I mean try to avoid) men who call me “bro.” There’s a book called To Hate Like This Is to Be Happy Forever about the intensity of the Carolina-Duke rivalry. I get nothing out of rubbing it in when someone else’s favorite team loses to mine (I tried it once because people seemed to really enjoy it). I realize that it’s all intended in good fun, but at the same time, I think there’s a not particularly fine line between some heated TV screaming and, say, killing a live ram because he’s the mascot of the team you hate.

So forgive me, if you will, if I lament Duke’s early exit from this year’s tournament because it means that two great teams won’t have a chance to play together again this year. And pardon my pleasure at NC State’s improbable success after a long, hapless drought. When I pick a color, I like to smudge the palette a little.

Every two weeks some friends and I create new posts on the same topic. This week’s synchroblog posts — about picking a color — are listed on our group blog, The Creative Collective. Please read them all.

The Day the Music Died

David Mahaffey — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 14:00:08 +0000

I used to have the most amazing CD collection. It included autographed copies, obscure bootlegs, mixes from people I loved, and an album of Edith Piaf covers sent to me by a French woman I’d never met. It also included about 200 discs of acoustic folk, blues, and enough Hot New Country to stage a line-dance marathon. Anyone who’s known me well will remember my CD case, from the kids on the school bus who borrowed the latest Shania Twain, to my college roommate who described Nanci Griffith as “hillbilly punk.” My collection was carefully sorted (alphabetically, though sometimes thematically) in an unwieldy zip-up case that must have weighed a good 10 pounds. I’d risk life and limb flipping through the case on the highway, familiar enough with the color and typography of each disc to find what I was looking for with one eye (mostly) on the road.

I can’t remember the last time I used a CD to play music. A couple years ago, I bought a vinyl LP because it contained an early release CD copy, which I popped into my laptop and copied onto my hard drive as mp3 files, which I transferred onto my phone so I could listen to the album while I walked my dog. The CD slot in my car stereo is blocked by a mount for my phone. I only buy a physical disc these days when there’s too much lag between the hard copy and the digital release.

Readers of a certain age will suspect Napster as the catalyst for this transition, but I actually survived college with my respect for intellectual property intact, at least when it comes to art created by those without the support of global corporations. No, I was forced to reconsider my CD habit the hard way: I lost all of my CDs. Every one. Gone.

Reconstructing the event, I think it was the cat’s fault. I was meeting my partner after work to kick off a road trip somewhere, and for some reason this involved bringing the cat. I pulled into the parking lot and started moving things from my truck to my partner’s car, including my ubiquitous CD case, taking extra care with the cat to make sure she didn’t make a run for it. Not far down the road I suggested we listen to some music, casting about for my CDs. It quickly became apparent that they were nowhere to be found in the car. No big deal: must’ve left them in the truck after all. We doubled back and conducted a thorough search of the truck, then, failing that, the car again. Even a slow crawl down the little two-lane road yielded no results, and I began to resign myself to a life without a soundtrack.

My partner’s apologies were profuse, and I was the picture of grace in accepting this new state of affairs, especially after she insisted on subsidizing the rebuilding of my music collection. But I could never quite shake the worry that something else might happen. As my new, more carefully curated collection grew, I took to spreading the discs across five or six small CD wallets, never traveling with the whole collection again. I bought my first mp3 player the next Christmas and began the endless task of ripping and tagging and sorting audio files instead of CDs, buying devices with increasingly large capacities to keep pace with my still-strong habit of music acquisition.

A few years ago I realized I’d been making more than half of my music purchases digitally and began to worry that something might happen to the files. I burned backup CDs, once again filling a bulky CD case with acoustic esoterica. I devised an elaborate file backup system so I’d always have at least two hard drives on hand and another online, three complete copies of my music collection. I am safe against everything except magnets and EMPs. Luddites and audiophiles alike may scoff at these methods, believing I have forsaken some delicate quality they hear in vinyl (which I do love) in favor of convenience and portability. It’s true enough, but then again, I don’t have to worry about the needle.

Every two weeks some friends and I create new posts on the same topic. This week’s synchroblog posts — about a record-scratch moment — are listed on our group blog, The Creative Collective. Please read them all.

Life, the Universe, and Everything

David Mahaffey — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 14:00:47 +0000

This week I’m supposed to write about what moves me. I have resisted offering a specific example, though a trip through the archives reveals books and music and kitties that answer this question. And among unblogged topics, I could write about illustrated serendipity trees, or my dog’s recent terrifying trip to the vet, or Rick Santorum’s presidential campaign.

photo credit: Elfleda

If I were doing it right, though, everything would touch me in a meaningful way. I’d have no callouses on my soul because every deeply felt experience would scrub it raw anew. In singling out specific moments, I’d be trying to hide the fact that I don’t always live up to my own expectations, and I don’t want to disguise that fact today. I want to acknowledge that sometimes I am inarticulate. Sometimes I am a lazy activist who clicks the Facebook “Like” button for the cause but doesn’t march. Sometimes I get mad at my dog for needing to go outside again even though I know he’s sick. Sometimes I stay home and watch sitcoms instead of spending time with my friends, then complain about how I am only on the fringes of their lives. Sometimes I read blogs for an hour when I could be writing the short story I’ve promised to write.

I don’t need to cut myself slack. All I have is slack. When the universe grabs the other end and yanks hard enough to get my attention, it takes my breath away, and I am thankful for the love, the pain, the outrage, the weakness, the laughable unpredictability of life. And then I forget again, I allow myself to be lulled, a little less dazzled, even though I’ve slid way down before, been all the way numb before, and I know sure as I know anything I don’t want to go back to that. Not that I’m in any immediate danger of slumping into sustained complacency. Something comes along more often than not to ring my bell, like a copilot nudging me back to full consciousness if I start to nod off behind the wheel.

So what moves me? Everything, and not enough of it. I’m working on it.

Every two weeks some friends and I create new posts on the same topic. This week’s synchroblog posts — about what moves us — are listed on our group blog, The Creative Collective. Please read them all.

42 Reasons Why

David Mahaffey — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 14:00:49 +0000

DON’T PANIC
–Douglas Adams

I don’t remember exactly when I first read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, but I remember the first time someone made reference to it after I had. It was in some AOL chat room, back in the mid-90s when that was a thing, and someone called me a “hoopy frood” in the middle of a conversation about Star Trek. This, for the uninitiated, is high praise. The book, adapted from a radio show and later spun into plays, video games, and movies, is charming but not what I’d call a superlative novel. Its witticisms, exaggerated sense of the absurd, and completely brilliant notions linger long after the memory of the choppy structure and questionable plot holes fades. But it’s what readers have done with the book that matters. Being called a “hoopy frood” was like a secret handshake, a shibboleth that has never yet failed to signal the presence of a kindred spirit.

Geeks are good at this kind of thing. Maybe it’s because all the larger social groups shun us when we’re young, but we seem to reflexively build our own little worlds that keep us safe and, incidentally, keep out those who’ve spurned us. Dungeons & Dragons is probably the most iconic example: an entire universe we willfully inhabit in which the quietest introvert can be brave enough to embody a character (a rogue/thief, in my case) and trust friends to go adventuring through our imaginations. Maybe I didn’t know what was popular to wear or how to dance or why people laughed when I tried to join their pop-culture–fueled conversations, but I knew how to attempt a saving throw to avoid taking damage, and something about that D&D d20 (a twenty-sided die) meant that for once I wasn’t terrible at math. Not that role playing games helped with the social graces outside the confines of the adventure; we were mostly oblivious to the glazed-eye looks from our peers as we obsessed over some minutiae from the Monster Manual. We tend to alienate people not of our tribe whether we intend to or not. That’s why it’s so important to have a cadre of sigils that help us let each other know when we’re among our people.

The ones that have always resonated most strongly for me are from Hitchhiker’s. Don’t get me wrong: Star Trek’s optimism is contagious, and the bonds forged at a Dungeons & Dragons table are deep, but the quickest way to my geek heart is to talk to me about towels, Babel fish, and the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything. The recent movie does not count, but neither, to be fair, do the Star Wars films. Maybe it’s because the novel’s outlook is not sunny: Earth is destroyed very early on (spoilers!), taking with it the key to human enlightenment. Maybe it’s the use of bad poetry as an instrument of torture. Maybe it’s the depressed android. Or the spaceship that uses probability to travel to every point in the universe at once. It’s probably the puns, though.

At the heart of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is my favorite creation myth ever, and I find I get along well with anyone else that it tickles. In this mythology, planet Earth is actually a large and impossibly complex computer, commissioned by pan-dimensional hyper-intelligent beings to calculate the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything. These clever beings had previously constructed a computer to tell them the answer to this question, which, after millions of years of calculations, gave them the answer: 42. Since The Answer is meaningless without knowing The Question, the first computer built the second (Earth), and five minutes before the 10-million-year calculation was completed, the Earth was destroyed to make way for a space highway.

The meaninglessness of The Answer pleases me, as does the futile attempt to learn what The Question is. In eliminating humanity’s great existential question, Douglas Adams reminds us how very small and precarious our position is, and I find myself along with the rest of humanity much in need of being put in our place with precisely this mix of derision and empathy. Every time I meet a fellow traveler, I am reminded how important this perspective can be.

Every two weeks some friends and I create new posts on the same topic. This week’s synchroblog posts — about books that changed our lives — are listed on our group blog, The Creative Collective. Please read them all.

Grist

David Mahaffey — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 14:00:16 +0000

Mr. Jenkins hurtled with all possible speed toward a mostly nondescript but increasingly insufferable little blue dot tucked away in a forgotten corner of the cosmos and wondered, not for the first time, why the one immutable Law of the Universe had been written the way that it had. That Mr. Jenkins had been present for and indeed a part of its writing did not lessen his confoundment. Nor did his frustration abate when he was asked to shuck off his several quantum states and wedge himself unceremoniously into a form recognizable to the citizens of the blue planet, with all its binary nature and its wheezing bellows and its fluids. The thing couldn’t even hear spacesong.

He was unaccustomed to hurrying. He was in charge of a cycle so complex, so replete with interdependent machinations, that he deigned to carry a pocket watch to keep track. Mr. Jenkins knew how much time should be left, given when the latest cycle had begun, and he knew that somehow a good deal less time actually remained. The harvest had fallen, unfathomably, behind schedule. If such a thing were possible he’d have suggested that his instruments had malfunctioned. But his pocket watch was the most carefully calibrated tool in existence. It never ran fast, never needed winding. If the watch slowed, time simply slowed momentarily to accommodate the watch. Nobody minded the occasional extra moment to savor or fritter away. Now the watch had ticked ahead, and had done so dangerously close to the midnight hour.

It had never done so before, though it was clear enough what would happen if a new day dawned prematurely. Without the proper fuel, morning could not come. Mr. Jenkins required every available instant for the harvest, the last speck wending its way back from Earth at exactly the moment the pocket watch shuddered across the meridian into the new cycle. There could be no margin for error. So Mr. Jenkins hastened toward his flock on the blue planet, his crippled human form deaf to cosmic sounds and blind to any but the brightest of blacks. No wonder they called space a void, if this was all they could detect.

This close to the end of a cycle, Mr. Jenkins was always weak. He had, in fact, intended to sleep his way through the exhausting and sometimes painful seconds on either cusp of the next cycle, but like any creature of long habit, he’d been roused by the slight shift in the pattern, its attendant foreboding. His partner, perhaps also restless, was not abed when Mr. Jenkins woke. There wasn’t time to search. He’d remembered to leave a note, just in case.

He had not, however, remembered to wear any pants. He was groggy and had done well, frankly, to remember to don the human body. He’d find something in stride with the local fashion once he arrived. It was hard, anyway, to achieve historical accuracy from this distance. Reconnaissance data traveled at relativistic speeds. Mr. Jenkins could do the same, though it meant burning through nearly all of his reserves.

Nearer to Earth Mr. Jenkins slowed his approach. He had, for one thing, to dodge all the clutter surrounding the planet. He’d also noticed a second moon in orbit and was pretty sure it wasn’t supposed to be there. The final burst of energy necessary to adjust course toward the ashen moon emptied him, and his human form crashed unceremoniously into what seemed from above to be a mountain range.

It was a mountain, but of chalk and dust instead of rock. Mr. Jenkins was forcibly reminded of the inefficiency of his breathing apparatus and excavated himself at once from beneath the mound of debris, gasping for air. He made note of the poor nasal design for later. It proved difficult to get his bearings on a moon that ought not to have existed at all, but he trudged forth, keeping the Earth in front of him and trying to remember not to stare into the sun if he happened upon it. He did not manage very many steps and was prepared to attribute this to another failing of the human design when he realized he was starving. He would require an early sample of the harvest.

Coming toward him across the dunes was a hooded figure bearing a shepherd’s crook. Mr. Jenkins, hoping he hadn’t been seen, ducked behind a rocky outcrop that looked very much like a stack of human spines. He fell upon the shepherd and partook of the man’s soul. The husk crumpled to the ground. Mr. Jenkins relieved it of the hooded cloak and crook, then left the moon he now knew to call Grist, a mound of bones and fire, in search of his lost flock.

Every two weeks some friends and I create new posts on the same topic. This week’s synchroblog posts — about speed — are listed on our group blog, The Creative Collective. Please read them all.

Borrowing Umbrellas

David Mahaffey — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 14:00:02 +0000

I used to write letters to myself on New Year’s Eve, to be opened a year and a day later. These exercises in introspection were frustrating, at best, full of halfhearted optimism that in the ensuing year I would somehow finally get my shit together and be the kind of person I wanted to be: stop playing so many video games; confess my love to my middle-school crush du jour; read fewer novels in math class; write more; have less stuff; be part of a community other than the tiny one I cultivated for myself. Every December would end in disappointment, knowing January would bring fresh testimony of my failure to be a decent human being. So one year I gave up in favor of drinking champagne and goofing off with good friends. It wasn’t a big deal. I was too exhausted for the annual retrospective and unwilling to unseal yet another autobiographical indictment. I released myself.

It is a trait common among my people — and I certainly share it — that no matter how much good we do, it never feels as though we’ve done enough. I am lucky at the moment to feel merely inadequate, merely lazy and hypocritical and complacent about my own contributions to the world, but I have known the crippling doubt, the desperate need to do more, that from time to time overburdens us all. We may be thoroughly inept at persuading ourselves that we’ve managed to eke out an existence that may not balance the scales but at least doesn’t tip them too far in the wrong direction, but we do a better job of persuading each other of this. I think we’re all pretty good at helping each other carry these failures; call it relentless kindness, radical forgiveness, grace, or simply the fatigue of knowing after endless search that there is nothing else to offer but ourselves.

In moments of self-judgment I crave those reassurances but at the same time I have an insatiable appetite for the judgment itself. It feels cleansing to acknowledge how far below my standards I fall. Having expectations doesn’t count unless I’m gritting my teeth and struggling to meet them. Who better to evaluate how I’m doing than the one who spends all the time inside my head? My people are well-meaning but not omniscient. I trust them because they refrain from platitudes and their sentiments are unvarnished, but what do they know about how fiercely or pathetically I have raged against the ills of the world? What does anyone else know about how well I’m living up to my potential? But then again, what do I?

photo credit: Chris Devers

Of course, once you introduce potential, the game is over. I am an incorrigible relativist, which means for me there is simultaneously always room for improvement and no hope of ever influencing the complex set of systems that govern our existence. Given either starting point, I can point the way to futility in alarmingly few moves. It doesn’t matter whether I’m meant to influence the system, guided by a divine hand or voices in my head or the flap of a mosquito’s wings in China. The system is the system either way, and we’re all standing under the same sky, eyeing the same dark cloud, and most of us never remember to bring an umbrella.

I’d say we should all give ourselves a break, but I know it doesn’t work that way. And sure, there’s something greater than the sum of our parts in the way people carry each other’s loads. Usually the only thing that keeps me from gorging on self-doubt is the energy it takes to huddle under a borrowed umbrella and patch the more egregious holes. The downpour drowns out all but the loudest truths. One of them is that the world is broken. Another is that it’s a gift to take care of each other. Next time it might be your turn to bring the umbrella.

Every two weeks some friends and I create new posts on the same topic. This week’s synchroblog posts — about hunger — are listed on our group blog, The Creative Collective. Please read them all.

Good Intentions

David Mahaffey — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 13:52:19 +0000

I am no fan of promises, wary as I am of breaking the big ones,
and leery, too, of invoking my resolve for slight reassurances.
So your options are either to wade through my stuttering caveats
or to pay strict attention to the resolve my actions might imply.
What you thereby extract is no less tenuous than any other faith.

Maybe we can all aspire to certain unachievable goals, such as:
be relentlessly kind to ourselves (the hard part) and each other.
If the world really ends next year we won’t be put out for long.
And anyway the Mayan calendar hasn’t been as clear as it might’ve
regarding the potential for self-righteousness in the aftermath.

If that’s a little too “Thou Shalt,” let’s try something modest:
smile for the camera (especially if the lens cap is screwed on),
and I mean it, all the way through the flash and the fourth take,
really work those dimples, don’t hide those coffee-stained teeth,
offer up your unvarnished soul before they even try to steal it.

Every two weeks some friends and I create new posts on the same topic. This week’s synchroblog posts — about resolve — are listed on our group blog, The Creative Collective. Please read them all.

The Web of Us

David Mahaffey — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 13:51:53 +0000

In 1996 I received in the mail two cassette tapes from a man I’d never met. One was a copy of John Prine’s Prime Prine, the other was Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks. The tapes were sent to me by Tom, who lived in Nashville, TN, and frequented the same country music discussion boards I did online. I knew that Tom was in his 50s, married, and in love with music. Tom knew that I was a kid in high school, just beginning to get frustrated with catchy songs that didn’t say anything. I played “Sam Stone” and didn’t know what to do; you can’t tap your toe to that quiet, plaintive testimony to the lingering and devastating consequences of war. Neither did I have an explanation for my father when he asked why I was listening to a man on the radio say Jesus Christ died for nothing. But I could hop online and write an e-mail to my friend Tom about the music he’d sent me and in that way begin a conversation about music that I continue today with my best friends, my family, and the occasional musician. This makes it hard for me to accept ill-informed dismissals of “the internet” as nothing more than a distraction that prevents genuine human connection.

I taught myself how to build websites by making one that helped the fans of a particular songwriter find each other. On the site I read stories about dead fathers, newborn children, weddings, love, and divorce. We helped each other track down copies of out-of-print CDs. We met at concerts. This was before Google, before Facebook. It was hard to find each other. It felt like a revelation when we did. We cared, deeply, about something that from the outside looks pretty silly. Like all communities, ours was a safe space to be unabashedly ourselves.

Earlier this year at a Rock Band party, one of the only songs I really knew was “Tangled Up In Blue,” from that same Bob Dylan album. I wouldn’t have known the song if it weren’t for AOL chat rooms and Yahoo! message boards. I wouldn’t have been invited to that party if it weren’t for Google Chat, which over the previous year had provided me the split second I needed to compose my thoughts during conversations with the friend who would eventually invite me to play Rock Band with him. Both of us were, I think, slightly mistrustful of humans (most of all ourselves), and with schedules that did not accommodate regular face-to-face interaction, we used the tools at hand to flash the appropriate secret handshakes, tease out the shibboleths of our tribe, and build a foundation upon which we could launch plans for global domination, or at least become friends. It is unlikely that I would have croaked out the Dylan song I learned as a teenager had I not been both comfortable with and fond of the people in that room. It’s a fair bet that every person there had used online interactions to deepen their relationships with me, if not with each other.

I started blogging in 2003 or so, as a way to keep in touch with far-flung friends and family while I was in graduate school in Boston. I didn’t have time to write letters to everyone I wanted to, and I thought that blogging would be a way to reach those who cared to read as well as a pretty selfless means of procrastination. Now I am Facebook friends with my large extended family, old friends from high school and college, and a sizable number of people I’ve never met. Some call it a waste of time, and it certainly can be that if we want it to be. But I know who’s getting married, whose cancer is in remission. I know who’s had a terrible day and needs to be invited out for a beer. And I know who will celebrate my happiness, support me through my failures, and on occasion reach out from Nashville, Tennessee or Paris, France to be a part of my life.

There are, certainly, a few sketchy characters amid the seekers of wonder and the wandering dreamers. I am free to keep them at a distance or to engage them just as I am offline, and when I choose the easier path I feel just as guilty for doing so. But for every person sharing hate and spreading rumors, there’s one sharing beautiful artwork (or cute cat pictures) and spreading links to writing that moved them. I’d rather not dismiss any of the above.

Every two weeks some friends and I create new posts on the same topic. This week’s synchroblog posts — about community — are listed on our group blog, The Creative Collective. Please read them all.