Since Blogger is Ghetto-fabulous...

...See here for some goodies.
Feed-back and propagation would be a delight.

djmase

Vulnerability.

Position:
The very utterance of the word elicits a desire to cover up vital organs, brace for impact, and protect oneself from certain impending affliction. The series of letters slices through the eardrum wearing a loathsome sneer, “I know your heart, I know your hurt, and I know exactly where to strike.” It wears a face; every person knows the face of vulnerability.
Yet, there remains a desire to redeem this fierce vermin of a term. Perhaps it is a theological disposition? After all, what has vulnerability done to desire such a bad rap; what culpability has he?

Consideration: (Second person intentional)
Has vulnerability left you holding a bucket full of holes?
Has vulnerability made promises it didn’t fulfill?
Has vulnerability whispered sweet, false nothings in your ear?
Has vulnerability harvested you then left you for dead?

Verdict:
Given the data, perhaps there is something in the nature of vulnerability that warrants skepticism. Perhaps it maintains a disposition that is slightly less than loveable and slightly more than horrible…one’s phenomenological response would suggest so. Erickson contends, “Credibility, once compromised, is not easily regained or preserved in other matters,” a position that is nigh impossible to refute.

The “But,” and there’s always a but:
Vulnerability is something like air. The commonality of its essence is pervasive, within both sacred and profane worldviews. In The Four Loves, Jack Lewis poignantly explained that there were two paths a being may take, the path of love (vulnerability) or the path that seeks to protect from loving anything in an effort to protect the heart; in the case of the latter the tale ends sadly, ironically. Some years later Emmylou Harris penned a song in which she states, “God knows how I love you, like a user needs a drug,” this sentiment follows the path of the typical user…down the rabbit hole, but once again provides a paradoxical insight into the psyche.
Yet, there is a theme strung through the profane. Although it hurts and the going is very difficult, there is a need, a want, a desire for this thing; this one dangerous, elusive thing. And the only extant bridge is named Vulnerability. (I do not know the Elvish word for “vulnerability” nor was the English to Elvish online dictionary of any assistance, yet if I did know it, this is where I would use it.)

So:
The human condition exists, in its unaided state, as one of brokenness with an innate desire for complete fulfillment (Here the position is theologically inform). Through this longing for restoration and ultimate communion one finds symptomatic tangential desires, such as said desire for vulnerability, permeating everyday life. Fear not, this urge, though frightening, is proper. It is an exhibition of how life was truly designed to be, yet due to the broken status of the world, vulnerability has yielded searing fruit resulting in a misconception of the entire entity. Vulnerability, at its root design level, seeks to be and provide fruitful relationships; storge, phileo, eros and agape.

Commission:
While the desire to protect oneself requires one, selfishly, to withdraw into their cave of protection, this place of “respite” will ultimately wield the most damage; sin is a brilliant paradox. Redemption of vulnerability exists as one verb of God’s overarching redemptive outworking.

Go.

Do.

The measure of a blog (post).

I've been told my posts are too long.

I am in complete agreement.

Yet, it is very unlikely that I will shift my writing style, specifically regarding length and the surplus of it---after all, if it is a story worth telling, it is worth telling thoroughly.

I’ve also been told that as terseness replaces loquaciousness, regularity should beset my current infrequency.

I am in complete agreement.

Yet, stories only come every so often, whereas research of a substantially more boring nature than my long stories maintains a position of primacy in my day to day.

I’ve this token to offer.

I am writing (hopefully) for fun again (hopefully).

---

Also, I have finished a year of Seminary only to realize the more I know, the more I don’t.

Chapter Two: Fear & Gripping Grendel. (In part, 3)

-When an aircraft is stalling, flying too slow to create a low-pressure zone above the wing, two things are required immediately in order to avoid a fatal crash. The pilot must apply full power and push the stick forward, directing the nose of the aircraft at the ground. Now, this sound moronic, “We are ‘crashing’ by stalling, and you want to add power and fly straight at the ground?” “Yes, that is exactly what I want to do; it is our only way to survive. We need to gain speed in order for the wing to respond as it is designed to. Once we speed up, we will pull up and pull out, theoretically.” An awkward conversation one hopes to never find them self in, yet does on a daily basis in choices that are a bit lower stakes.
-I was not willing to obey to my doctor’s orders, not fearful of the stall-warning, willfully disobedient to the instructor’s directions to add power and nose over. My life was stalling out, with all my efforts I was trying to nurse it along, but I was unwilling to take the measures necessary to recover from an impending doom. I was too afraid to nose over at full throttle, “What if I can’t pull up in time? I will die!” I knew the stall-warning would not lie, buzzing and blinking away on the dashboard, but I also knew I did not have to obey it; after all, “I was the master of my own destiny. I was in control.” I had proven that over and over.
-There was a pendulum in my spirit that cyclically swung through anger, sadness, peace and questions; rinse and repeat. There was one underlying, pervasive monster in the early season of grief, Fear. Fear is a living, breathing, personal Grendel.
-“The joyless creature…The fiend’s temper was aroused; from his eyes came an unlovely light, like a hellish flame…The horrible monster intended to tear the life from the body of every one of them before day came. He hoped for his fill of feasting.” –Beowulf, Chapter 13.
-My fear was paralyzing. It is nearly humorous, in a sick British humor sort of way; the fearful paralytic is really in a tight spot for he is a self-defeating person, bent on doing nothing detrimental, therefore doing nothing at all. The fear grows so great that all of his life grinds to a halt. I saw it in minor ways within myself; the fear of make bad decisions on very basic levels, “Should I go home now or later?” to which I could rationalize myself is circles with justifiable reasons to do both or neither.
-The rationalizing created a bigger tear in the fabric of ability; after all, rationalizing had in part landed me in this jam in the first place. The powers, my powers, of rationalization allowed and facilitated me in compromising much of my supposed ‘belief system’ with ‘perfectly legitimate’ reasons for nearly everything. What could not be rationalized away was out right disobeyed resulting in the aforementioned stall-warning condition.
-As with any insatiable monster, fear was not satisfied to devour only the appetizers, it wanted the meal, he “Hoped for his fill of feasting.” Fear had a taste for my ability to create and write as well as my ability to engage in normal human relationships, particularly with women. The “What if I mess-up?” monster is far more dangerous than any multi-armed, well-fanged and smelly creature under one’s bed.
-My journal provides another telling and substantially humiliating truth about a person subscribing to this fear. It was a long time in the making, many quite hours of reading and thinking before I lifted a pen. “I am so afraid of having nothing profound to say. That I will read this in years to come and feel foolish about myself…at least feeling foolish is something, to ignore the present will erase it as I go forward. So, what will I have then? Nothing because pride kept me from it now.” To learn from the lessons granted us is one of the brilliantly defining elements mankind possesses over beast; that and the eternal soul. At this point I believe Grendel started to realize that my grip was strong. I hadn’t need of a blade to take his arm off.
-“Now the ghoul found that never in the world, anywhere on earth, had he met a man with a mightier handgrip. He became afraid in his heart, but he could not get away any the sooner. He was eager to be off; he wanted to flee to his hiding place and seek out the company of devils,” -Beowulf
-It must have proved a terrific blow to the façade, and the man behind the curtain with the PA who we are to “Pay no attention!” Realizing that my pride was blinding me started to allow some amount of melt, I began the slow process of trading my inky blackness, for the whisper of a brownish-burgundy smudge.
-Fear, or the Devil as I see it, has no interest in letting one’s mind out of itself. Freedom is the enemy of fear, for all freedom is bound in fear if allowed, and the Devil is the enemy of Freedom therefore by the transitive property of 9th grade geometry, the Devil is Fear incarnate. Hey, look at that, a formula! A mind inside of itself is the safest place for disintegration; living death to take place.
-Fear had explained to me, “Look, what ability have you in sorting through any of this? You put your best foot forward, so to speak, and look at the shape of things! Just give up, give in, and enjoy the read for the sake of it, that is the best we can offer you!” While bogged down in the trenches of Grendel, I found only one place where I was safe, or reasonably safe; or so I thought.

And now for something totally different...a backpack for your waist.

Hume Apparel from Hume Lake on Vimeo.

http://humeapparel.com/

Chapter Two: Fear & Gripping Grendel. (In part, 2)

-The loss of control yields fear. Ironically, one never had control; one never had control of anything! The control to take a breath, or to keep the atmosphere balanced, or to ignore gravity require a skill set that humans simply do not possess. One little cog in the human condition has ‘total lack of control’ inscribed on it, part number 3-5498-726. Yet, just as the little boy on the bike, people delude ourselves into thinking, “I have it in my pocket!” or “I’ve got the world on a string,” like uncle Frank, only to realize gravity effects them just as much as the next fellow. So, the loss of control is not exactly the fact of the matter or the concern at hans; it is the loss of perceived control, the counted loss of something that never existed. Generally, losing something that one never really had is not such a difficult reality. Yet, the natural man’s mind is so bent that perceived control has convinced the mind that it is actually real control. The weight of resulting loss feels equally real. Perhaps the human machine has deposits of grease and grime; perhaps some of the inscriptions are covered and cannot be easily viewed?
-The natural laws are etched into the human heart. They can nearly be proven, though no need for this exists, by the appearance, usually largely by surprise, of the moral compass. It is the woman who takes no issue with a set of hot topic items such as abortion or gay marriage, but then gets particularly irate over marital infidelity. It is the fellow who takes no issue with infidelity while brooding towards rage relative to an acquitted child molester. It is said child molester angry with the government of stealing votes at the ballot boxes. The circle of injustice has looped on quietly for thousands of years, and the bar by which it is secretly measured remains the intrinsic inscriptions upon the human heart.
-The inscription of the law is not an inoculation though, the law is solely a prescription for health, yet like every patient, the gift of choosing a their own path is in the mankind’s hands. One chooses daily to follow the diagnosis or ignore the requirements. Each chosen day of willful disobedience will yield calluses. Substantial callusing is required to fully mask the inscriptions but even the slightest extra layer is enough to cause blurred vision.
-If one is astute of their surroundings, the more they seem to ‘put together’ relative to the world around them, the less they seemed to control or even understand, for they realize through failure that they really have nothing! The rock star found overdosed the in his bath-tub at the Four-Seasons Paris, the actress who jumps off the tower or the dictator who shoots his mistress and himself in the head deep beneath Berlin in a dank little bunker; they almost had the World in their pocket, or so they fooled the World into thinking. The World is too big for a pocket; it is too big for three or four pockets. Princess Leia once said, "The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers." she pretty much nailed it.

Chapter Two: Fear & Gripping Grendel. (In part.)

-“No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid.” Lewis opens A Grief Observed with this sentiment, if one finds them self reading A Grief Observed, meaning, if one seeks out the book because of a need for it, chances are this line will fillet them. I too found grief akin to fear, but I would go further than Lewis. I would say that the primary manifestation of grief is fear. I was afraid.
-It was three months before I wrote anything. My time was consumed with reading, crying, thinking, replaying, justifying, rationalizing and a plethora of other half wasteful, half insightful oddities. Sleep generally came early; I begged its arrival and would settle into uneasy dreams who seemed to have lost the ability to create new material. The mornings providing work and the bittersweet distractions that earning a paycheck creates. It was acidic to be at work, but basic to be busy, it was sweet to get home but bitter to be alone, it was an ugly state of being, all the while I willfully elected to fuel the demise, for a time. After all, there was a lot of neat stuff to see doubled over with my head buried in the ground.
-Sam and Simon were best of friends. Being small boys, their world was both large and small at the same moment. It was large in the sense that they both understood that beyond the smoke covered mountains there were many, many miles, kilometers, fathoms, or whatever one fancies for measuring given sections of land-mass to be discovered. Conversely, their world was small because they made it such. The concept of how small they were was not lost on either of them, particularly Sam, or Samuel. Taking a wild world and cramming it into one’s pocket is not an easy task as one can well imagine. It must be done one day at a time, one spoonful of dirt by one spoonful of dirt. And, Sam and Simon did in point of fact dig in the dirt with spoons. There was a clay ditch across the street where the two of them spent a good deal of time developing a dense maze of traffic tunnels in the sticky, red wall. It looked much like a giant ant farm to the causal viewer, a shot of red surface with spaghetti thrown at it, sinking into the surface just far enough for a matchbox truck to amble along the edge of the precipitous ledge. It was a beautiful, miniature version of the Stremnaya Road in Bolivia, “The Highway of Death.” Though they were not self-aware enough, neither of them, to realize what they were doing, they did go out and make war on the wide World everyday. Determined to make it palatable, manageable; controllable.
-At this juncture a parallel story requires telling. Sam and Simon were raised in a community where status was based on BMX racing. More specifically, status was based on winning BMX races. Armed with a continually growing resolution to win they set about expanding the control of their destinies by practicing religiously. Simon was older, bigger, faster, and he was in a different age group, which was lucky for Samuel. That did not dissuade Simon from poking fun at Sam regarding his choice of starting location on the ‘Hill.’ The real racers all started from the crest of the Hill at the ‘starting gate,’ where from one would gather the most speed, and frankly it is illegal to start from any place else. There was one caveat to said starting Hill, at the bottom of that seemingly immense Hill, was a seemingly massive jump. Gravity is not pocket-sized.
-Upon sufficient berating, Sam pushed his bike from the preferred, middle of the Hill starting point, to the top of the Hill. It is a historical fact; sweaty palms were born on this day. He narrowed his eyes down the Hill, Simon’s prodding, “Eyes on the prize, Newbie!” ringing in his ears. He had borrowed Simon’s helmet for the occasion and it gave him some false sense of courage in his quest to slay the Hill. There were grand visions of racing down the precipice, flying off the jump, and turning his head as he soared through the air in slow motion locking eyes with Simon as he mouthed, “What’s up now?” He imagined the voice of the announcer calling out the starting position verbiage; his small heart beat loudly in his little world. There was a moment when the announcer in Samuel’s mind summoned him and the other 6 invisible racers, “go!” Hurtling down the Hill was pure ecstasy. The speed, the whirling, the rush of certain victory at hand resounded emphatically; his World was indeed small enough to fit into his pocket.
-Somewhere between the split second realization of how large the bottom of the Hill jump was and a rough calculation of speed to weight ration Sam’s briefly pocket sized World began to grow, rapidly. He nearly had had it all the way into his pocket…but inflation was as inevitable as his trajectory. There was a moment, Simon could attest, Sam left his bike, he was traveling though the air, but not majestically. The travel was that of a baby bird on its maiden voyage hitting every branch on the way down; that is precisely what he did.
-Three hours and ten stitches in his chin later, he found himself jumping rope after a dinner at Simon’s parents’ house. “Man, I can feel this weight tugging my chin down every time I hop, it is so weird. It is as if the world is trying to drag me down into itself, it’s heavy…” he thought quietly.

Chapter One: Starting at 'The End.' (In part, 4)

(Cont.)

-Humans often find themselves searching for definition, that, “This is who I am,” a personalized Thesis Statement that will inform them of exactly who they are and what their major objective is for the next 60 or so years. A journal entry from four months after ‘day one’ paints this portrait, “I feel like I mostly only have questions. I am not thrilled with all questions. A few are okay, but answers go a long way.” There is an identity crisis here that is causing chaos in the mind. Questions abounded, answers have left a note on the shop door stating they’d be back at three, it is now half past four and there is no sign of them, the street is deserted, dark, damp and eerie.
-A cohesive recipe for success is a fool’s errand; yet this is not a reason to quit running the race. Hopefully, I had not set out on such a quest, to find the exact recipe, yet I was unsatisfied to merely quip, “Welp, that is that…what’s next?” Only quitters quit, age 26 was hardly the time to do so.
-Humans live in a world of perpetual paradox. If they eat food it will give them cancer, clog ateries, or make them obese, yet if they skip food for said safety reasons the results are equally and oppositely devastating. “Cars are killing the earth,” they hear, so public transport is used; only to deliver the rider to the office late, repeatedly, resulting in a loss of employment and the ensuing problems of being destitute.
-“Here is your cake, would you like to have it?”
-“Yes, please!”
-“Would you like to eat it?”
-“Yes, please!”
-“Well, do you want to have it or eat it? You can’t have both”
-“Oh…”
-The paradox list is endless, sit down and consider it objectively and honestly, nearly anything within life appears on it. Search for the paradoxical yang to the personal ying, generally speaking it is there, pretending not to see it will only delay the inevitable, ‘unplanning’ of “the wedding”.
-There are the ‘blessed fools’ in this universe that subscribe full-sail to the bliss of ignorance. They justify, “I needn’t know X, Y or Z” or “I needn’t accept X, Y, and Z” for a myriad of reasons. These fellows seem to find sleep at night, seem to find stomachs at ease, and pleasure in everything; I am not such a fellow. I was not blessed with the gift of “I don’t care.” “Care” is a bitter pill. It is actually a package deal, one can’t buy “care” in a white five-speed with a/c, but skip the leather seats because they get hot in the summer and are cold in the winter. “Care” is a hook, line and sink sort of business; it gets deep inside and when landed in the 16’ glittery, bass tracker on lake Wannawingo, “Care” rips your guts out leaving you a twitching little fish who swims for a little longer, tilted partially sideways. Why should the fisherman be concerned over one undersize bluegill, there are plenty of other fish in the lake, right?
-I had to ‘pop start’ us too often, my hand was no stranger to the emergency brake, I wouldn’t make excuses for her anymore, she was “over me,” her words failed and her behavior had made it transparent…my guts lay on the bottom of the bass tracker, thank goodness her hook was salvaged though. Imagine if she had lost that precious thing, they cost at least twenty or thirty cents a piece! The world was bobbing 45 degrees off true plane; my surety of control was suddenly and very lucidly a farce.

Chapter One: Starting at 'The End.' (In part, 3)

(Cont.)

-‘Truths’ in life are always, always harder to accept and learn to “live harmoniously” with than lies, at least at the outset of the revelation. By harmoniously I mean, let them sink in, let them become a reality, begin to see the merit in them instead of ‘just dealing with them.’ Lies are easy, at the outset, due to this very natural law. Truth and lies are inversely proportional; Truth is tough going in the beginning and easier as time passes, lies are easy going at the beginning and grow unbearable as seconds grow up in to minutes who in turn age into hours. The knee jerk human reaction is to put one’s fingers in their ears and say, “LA-LA-LA-LA-LA-LA!!!” this is not an effective way of dealing with problems in case there remains any confusion. Truth is Truth, acceptance and obedience to them is one option, the other option is pain and death; apologies to the post-modernist.
-A child standing in front of a bank of vending machines with one quarter is better suited to comprehend this complex of The Eros Dilemma than most learned scholars. It is very acute, and very difficult. It is a ‘simple to comprehend, but nearly impossible to make choice’ type of situation, “I can pick one of these treasures, or I can save my quarter because something better might come along when we get to K-Mart.?.?. I mean anyone of these ring pops would suffice, but what if K-Mart has super bouncy-balls? What if?” All that is left to do is accept the fact that there is one quarter, one crank of the chrome cross-handle, one opening of the plated trap door of goodness. But the human mind bends and bows for a way to have their cake and eat it too. When one has spent, ‘invested,’ a word I use gingerly, a great deal of time, emotion, money, dreams et al on an ideology, any ideology; romantic, bouncy-ball or otherwise, letting it wash down the stream of life, as a stick in the gutter of the street, is as difficult as swallowing a horse pill.
-Using the logic/intellect, balanced with approached objectivity, applied over a path of memories and history, juxtaposed with the a limited gift of discerment/prophesy, one, could begin to see as I had so often been told, “Yes, it is better, it really is…” even one so deluded as me at that time. Now, that nearly sounds like a formula; please do not malign my misguided thoughts as formulaic. Formulas have a place, they perform well in finding the distance a cannonball will fly if fired at a specific angle to the horizon, with a certain initial velocity, with such and such a wind condition, all within a vacuum, of course. Formulas perform well in vacuums, in the event that there remains any confusion, the earth is not a vacuum. ‘Theoretically’ is about the end of the use of ‘formula’ on this terrestrial ball; so check all formulas at the door, please. There is no exact formula to human life, there is only seeking, truly seeking, resulting in finding. What one does with the findings is a whole other story.
-Piecing together the history, the reasons or as many as I could find as to why we had failed was painful, it was truth so no less than pain was expected. The pain made it genuine, in as absolutely non-masochistic way as can be understood. Yet, the finding process challenges one’s self-worth, constantly. Allow one’s self to be defined by what other people think of them or more realistically the way that other people treat them, or even more realistically the way that other people mistreat them, which is the truest measure of value that one being holds for another, is wrong; plain and simple. If one subscribes to the theory of ‘what so and so thinks about me economics’ and chooses to establish their self-worth based upon another human’s, extremely dynamic opinion of them, prime conditions for heartache and sneaking, permeating untruths have been established. This deluded definition will, more than likely, lift the person just high enough so that when they fall, it does not simply smart; it shatters. It is a sad tale authored, mastered and propagated by a despondent, lonely monster, to yield more woe and destruction.

Chapter One: Starting at 'The End.' (In part, 2)

(Cont.)

-Eventually, I couldn’t take the disappointment any longer. Perhaps disappointment is too large a word? I am wary of using words that that are too large for there utility, Jack Lewis taught me that. If I were to insert a better word, or a better string of words, it would look more like this, “The car usually worked, it usually ended up getting me to the destination, eventually, but there was a certitude in my mind that a better, more fluid solution existed, I had but to seek it, diligently.” I ceased to see the value in the lessons of, “Oh, so that is how a fuel pump works!” or “I bet this brown wire is supposed to be connected to that little bracket thing right there…” and desired a car that I could get in, turn the key, and drive to Hanny’s diner, day or night, no questions asked.
-Cars can be sold; wives cannot, at least not within my belief system. I selfishly, perhaps, wanted a car that loved me as much as I loved it; I think I felt same way about what I wanted in a wife.
-Yet, a valid counter argument could be made regarding this sentiment. After all, as aforesuggested I do subscribe to the ‘the two shall become one flesh’ school of thought. With that being said, I would love me, therefore I would love her, therefore she would love me. Maybe it is not such a selfish desire after all? It is not that I have said I wanted a car that loved me regardless of mistreatment; I said I wanted a car that would love me back. My shoulder just brushed against the thorny hedge of the ‘does unconditional love exist?’ question, I shall pass on the hedge cutting, after all I am wearing short sleeves. Maybe it is innate in the make-up of the human nature to seek this Eros, and all that it touches, be reciprocated? Maybe it is part of the natural law, perhaps?
-My “library” was actually the second bedroom of a two-bedroom condo that I bought for me and my former fiancé, Marie. I use the term ‘bought’ loosely as I would be paying for it for the next thirty years; it is strange how often one refers to a residence as “his house,” when in reality the bank owns it, and the bank is owned by the government and the government is owned by a group of Asian business men in Hong Kong.
-I entertained so few visitors in those days and procured so many books that a library seemed a better use for the space; a place of respite away from my normal world, the kitchen and living room, who were already deafeningly silent. The life of a celibate is one of ‘domestic silence.’ There is no sound of one puttering around in the adjacent room, no tapping of a foot on the floor, or laugh resulting from a Jane Austin quip. There were sounds mind you, but they an amalgam of sirens leaking through the vinyl double-hungs, drunk bar-goers struggling home still finishing their last call beverage, and the creaks of the old, abraded floor. But those sounds were not mine, Neil Diamond would agree with me, that song belonged to everyone. My song was now silent, it was sort of my own little version of Spinal Taps’, “It goes to eleven!” but conversely mine went to eleven; quiet.
-We had spent months planning an October wedding, and unplanned the same wedding a week before the nuptials during a less than delightful ‘conversation’ on a more than delightful Saturday. There was no single straw what broke the camel’s back, straw is manageable. Yet, there was a time when one plus a million equaled too much and better senses prevail. “Better senses” is again a poor choice of words; it is far too small and requires expounding, which is my intention.
-“It is better this way,” how many times had I heard that ‘encouragement?’ Too many to count; oddly enough I believed it, not out of bitterness mind you, from day one. Day one being the ‘unplanning’ Saturday or sometime slightly before that warm, otherwise sublime, afternoon. The idea of, “This {marriage to be} is a messed-up state of affairs which will only get worse, and walking down this path really should not be continued,” was not revolutionary to me, yet by the same token, it was an immensely difficult Truth to come to terms with.