Pactum Serva

2012-01-12T19:35:00.001-08:00

Starting on Christmas day, little Gwenny decided that she would never again wear anything other than a dress.

New Blog

2011-12-21T21:54:00.001-08:00

The new blog is up and running here: De Leporibus et Ranis

This time I'm trying out co-blogging with my cousin, so hopefully that will mean a more active blog, and perhaps an interesting Orthodox/Catholic dynamic.

Endings: Blog Finally

2011-11-17T19:02:00.001-08:00

Perhaps it outs one as a geek to say that Battlestar Galactica is the greatest television series of all time, but that does not mean it isn't true. This is not because it is merely great science fiction or because it is "dark and edgy", Caprica had this going for it, yet was entirely uninteresting. Battlestar Galactica is great for the reason that The Brothers Karamazov is great. Both are about life, death, love, sex, betrayal, unrequited love, despair, hope, madness, and faith and doubt - the very visceral ingredients of the human experience.

Some time ago I wrote that my main issue with Marxism was that I found no beauty in it. Eventually I thought this was a rather poor reason for rejecting it and I found I liked the theory and math of Capital, especially as interpreted by Harvey, so I thought I'd take it for a spin. It was something more scientific and rational to grab hold of while doubts about everything swirled around me.

Recently a formerly popular blogger publicly aired his abandonment of Christ for the philosophy of some obscure Marxist, to little response. I am not so much criticizing him as I lament for him. A good friend of mine once told me she believes that any good author, at some level, is writing about faith and doubt, their grappling with the Almighty. I suppose some lose that struggle between faith and doubt.

One would think that death knocking at the door would be the most difficult thing about cancer, but it isn't. What may have been the most difficult was the day I shit my pants and spent a long time weeping on my wife's shoulder, sobbing and soaking her shirt with my tears - that was when I knew life would never be the same, no matter how long I make it. Life has been hard. To be sure, there are many for whom life has been harder, but either way, life became much harder for me than I ever imagined possible. People have told me that this blog pre-leukemia is radically different than after. Though I fought against it and denied it to myself, I was angry - very angry - not at God, per se, but just angry and unhappy in general. I took that anger out on some people who did not deserve my ire, or at least did not deserve it in proportion to that received, and if it was you, dear reader, I am deeply sorry. It was something I had to work through, and I think I am now through it, at least for the most part. I am enjoying life again - difficult circumstances and all.

So, recently I changed my mind on the subject of beauty. It is THE reason. What is it to live a full life? Fullness is in the visceral, the bad and the good, and that is what makes for beauty on this side of death. Faith and doubt, Christ, is all part of that. It's not in some theory of perpetual revolution of the masses, which will never take place, and never really has without the leadership of radical petit bourgeois or, in the case of Paris, the artisans. It's not all bad, a lot of it is right, but it is lacking.

So what to do with this blog? My wife forbade my closing of it. Too many things have changed too fast, she says, and she wants at least these bytes of pixilated memory to remain. I understand where she is coming from. Nevertheless, subject matter has changed too many times. Val, my strength and refuge through the dark times, has given me permission to turn this into a family blog, and so that is what it shall become - pictures of the kids and all that. Over time the other content will go "missing", and some already has.

That does not mean that I intend to stop writing, far from it. I am presently putting together a new site. This time with Wordpress, as I hear that is where all the cool kids have gone. Once I have a little content, I will supply a link for anyone who finds it of interest.

Feast

2011-11-16T10:17:00.001-08:00

Pärt

2011-11-15T20:35:00.000-08:00

Donate

2011-10-17T21:43:00.001-07:00

2011-10-13T16:34:00.000-07:00

First Bad Bass - Mantime

2011-10-08T21:09:00.000-07:00

The Jack Johnson cover was playing on the radio during our drive to the lake this morning. It really was quite perfect. The man who did the movie soundtrack for my son's favorite children's character covering one of my favorite bands from high school. Sure the song is really about heroin addiction, but it sounds all aquatic.

Chubby Cheeks

2011-10-08T18:36:00.001-07:00

Conley has been putting on the poundage, now that the feeding tube is in place. The doctors have tested him for everything under the sun, and they all came back negative. It looks like the failure to thrive was probably due to GERD and a bad latch, but we will likely never know for sure. Thank you all for your prayers and concern.

Prayers Could Be Used

2011-09-13T11:29:00.000-07:00

Dear readers,

The last couple months we have been struggling with our little boy's weight, or lack there of. At three months and a mere 8 pounds, yesterday he was admitted to the hospital.

Needless to say, this blog is on hold.

Prayers for Conley would be greatly appreciated.

2011-08-31T20:45:00.000-07:00

Children of Postmodernism

2011-08-25T18:23:00.001-07:00

"[S]o we are all, and will forever be, children of postmodernism."
-Postmodernism is dead

Some years ago, the author of a now defunct blog wrote a short post about what he believed to be a Postmodernist movement among Orthodox bloggers, naming this blog along side other blogs, such as Owen White's old blog. At the time, since the piece was written in praise, I did not know what to make of it, as I fancied myself to be a Traditionalist. Well, beyond fancied; I suppose I was a Traditionalist in one of its weird and varied forms which owes its existence to Modernism/Postmodernism. To, once again, bring up the favorite resident Traditionalist as an example, one can look at Fr. Josiah Trenham's style of Traditionalism, which leads him to believe in all sorts of ridiculous anti-scientific ideas and philosophical/ethical anachronisms, but leaves him the room to dedicate homilies to preaching Neo-Liberalism. His Traditionalism is about as traditional as anal sex friendly Theology of the Body. Traditionalism, in many of its incarnations, especially within western Orthodoxy - owing to much of its theological traditions drawing so heavily from Modern and Postmodern philosophy - is nothing more than one of the varied Postmodern schools of thought.

The article above is not particularly good, as most attempts at defining Postmodernism are exercises in lumping arrays of movements, ideas, and philosophical and artistic schools together as one singular force and, often, boogieman. The only realm of Postmodernism with which I have any sort of working knowledge would be certain corners of Literature, where I suppose the author is right in such points as the mixing of high and low culture, though he seems to completely miss the common theme of alienation in the milieu of late Capitalism - a disease it can sometimes document with frightening clarity, but for which it has no cure.

One area in which I do agree with the article is that such developments within Western thinking influence all of us in inescapable ways. One can look at someone like Zizek, who, I hear, sees himself as working against Postmodernism, but whose work - with "high culture" Hegelian/Marxist/Lacanian cultural critiques making use of "low culture" "dirty" jokes, examples drawn from pop culture and porn, slang and vulgar language, and so forth - is nothing other than a "Postmodern" aesthetic. Which is little different than David Foster Wallace mining the depths of the unabridged OED and weaving together intricate stories with philosophical themes, while throwing in slang, obscenity and unflattering descriptions of disproportioned genitalia.

I once was complimented for throwing in a "fuck or a shit, for the common man" into my writing. At the same time, possibly even from this same person, I occasionally get requests to dumb the blog down some, or provide some sort of appendix. The vulgarities that find their way into my writing are really just part of the overall aesthetic, just as my playing around with various "narratives", streams of thought and so on.

The author of the article is wrong in his asinine theory that "Authenticity" has replaced "Postmodernism". Like Traditionalism, the search for authenticity is a form, maybe reaction to, and definitely part of, Postmodernism. That was perhaps the most Postmodern part of my blog, and blogs like the Ochlophobist - the authenticity seeking. The search for some sort of "authentic" way of life, which, despite arguments otherwise, was only a more thought out version of petit-bourgeois kids sitting on the curb, drinking malt liquor out of paper bags, or a crunchy-con's $20/bottle artisanal beer. (And isn't the obsession with the artisan just a rebirth of Arts and Crafts with narratives and petty moralisms?)

One of my favorite Postmodern novels is The Broom of the System. Despite the author's high acclaim, this novel always seems to get mixed reviews. Often the reason why people dislike it is the same reason I like it, that is, the manner in which it is a critique of the bourgeois narrative fetish - much of which concerns a woman who is, more or less, taken by the idea that she is her narrative, and since she feels she has no narrative, does not exist, with the joke being that, as a character in a novel, she is in fact her narrative and she does not exist. In the typical Postmodern way, madness and hilarity ensues. And, isn't that really what authenticity is all about? Finding an unbranded late capital-free "real" narrative about oneself? But then it is all made in relation to capital and is always co-opted by capital, and never anything other than a marketplace consumer decision, whether of idea, religion or product. Hipster drinks PBR to be authentic, big capital buys and markets PBR. My grandpa drank PBR, not because he was more authentic or untouched by capital. PBR has always been a product of capital. He chose the product because it was cheap, and was deemed cool/socially acceptable by his proletarian peers.

Is Postmodernism over? Probably. The last hurrah was likely the 90's. If Postmodernism is dead, it was not "Authenticity", but the internet that killed it.

Corporate Nation States?

2011-08-23T19:52:00.001-07:00

Libertarian paradise?

Some experts have scoffed at the legal and logistical practicalities of seasteading. Margaret Crawford, an expert on urban planning and a professor of architecture at Berkeley, calls it "a silly idea without any urban-planning implications whatsoever." Other observers have mocked it outright, such as Slate's Jacob Weisberg, who deemed it perhaps "the most elaborate effort ever devised by a group of computer nerds to get invited to an orgy." Despite the naysayers, Thiel appears firmly committed to the idea; he has so far funneled $1.25 million to the Seasteading Institute.

"When you start a company, true freedom is at the beginning of things," he says and slides the thought over to the topic of nations. "The United States Constitution had things you could do at the beginning that you couldn't do later. (Like slavery?) So the question is, can you go back to the beginning of things? How do you start over?"

Read more.

I sure would like to live on an oil rig constructed without a building code and governed by a corporation.

Minor League

2011-08-20T21:55:00.001-07:00

2011-08-12T11:37:00.000-07:00

Because it is Friday.

More Recession Music

2011-08-12T11:35:00.000-07:00

Finding My Heart at the Bottom of a Glass at the Bar Down the Road

2011-08-09T17:47:00.001-07:00

Yesterday we returned to our old home, to sell off the remaining livestock and pick up what remained of Mr. Angry, the murderous ram, all neatly wrapped in plastic and white butcher's paper. It was the first time my wife had seen the house empty and lifeless. She wept and likened it to viewing the body of a deceased loved one.

It was a good night for my dear sister to watch the kids, while we walked down to the neighborhood bar and talked over my bourbon and her girly drink - though she told me she is beginning to take a liking to the bourbon, as she stole sips from my glass. They serve their drinks cheap and stiff, which I appreciated greatly.

We discussed the whole ordeal of the last couple years of our lives, and how she felt that our little place and the dream of the farm were the last of what remained from before the leukemia. We held on long and hard, but we sacrificed too much. Both of us feel happiness in our new place, spending more time with the kids and each other, and looking forward to enjoying the things we love and had sacrificed for the farm. But our soft hearts still feel the sting.

Val cut me off after two cigs, but allowed me another bourbon. We laughed at overhearing a kid trying too hard and obviously to get laid. Val told me my previous "Home" blog post was a lie; I will always be too much a redneck to claim to be urban. We agreed to make a better effort at keeping up on the redneck activities we had allowed to fall by the wayside, such as demolition derby at the speedway - Brenden has loved demolition derby ever since he watched my longtime friend compete at the county fair. We even have a Youtube playlist for him that is mostly made up of train and car crashes.

I have been struggling with the direction to take this blog, which I felt needed a shift, along with my major life shift, or perhaps ending it altogether. I have been unhappy with most of these attempts, which may have, at some level, been born of me wishing to no longer want what I once wanted. I think I may quit torturing you readers with music I listened to during dark days in college, but very rarely listen to anymore, and then only out of a misguided sense of nostalgia.

As I wrote before, this blog is a place where I work through my thoughts, and often these lines of thought will be abortive. When I turn on Pandora, I do not have a rap, electronic, downtempo or IDM station, but instead have a list chock full of folk, alt country, old country, outlaw country, alt rock and so on. Yes, I have been lying to you for the past few months. I post up LCD Sound System and then go listen to John Prine from an old boom box in the garage window, while finding a good spot of prominence to put up my grandpa's rusty old PBR trashcan, plan out my garden and stealth chicken run, and surf Craigslist for a project car. I may hate pop-country, but I'll be damned if I don't like Mark Knopfler. So, while I now live in a place where I could easily live without a car, let alone a truck, and while my beat up truck may have been towed away and I now mow my lawn weekly, I will try to return to posting from my country heart, for in the country is where my heart still resides.

We stumbled home, laughing and talking as we haven't in a while. I will be happy wherever I end up, so long as Val is there. We may have failed up in the world, but our hearts still lay outside city limits, whatever that may come to mean.

Yeah

2011-08-08T21:22:00.000-07:00

Home

2011-08-05T20:03:00.000-07:00

Pactum Serva has officially gone urban.

I Need Some Air

2011-07-25T14:19:00.000-07:00

One of those few albums worth owning on vinyl.

Mea Culpa

2011-07-20T19:15:00.001-07:00

Today I cleared out my email account for the first time in years, and in the process discovered unread blog-related messages going back over a year and a half. So, if you email me, and I don't get back, try again or comment on the blog, telling me to check for it. It is nothing personal, I am just a lazy blog host who ignores unfamiliar addresses.

Crap

2011-07-19T13:22:00.001-07:00

Just when I was getting excited about moving to a house just over a block from a Borders, I get this news: Borders Bites the Dust

Of course, it did not happen before putting the independent bookstore down the street out of business.

More on Hanna Coulter

2011-07-18T22:10:00.001-07:00

In response to Owen's comment here.

I think about Hannah Coulter might be the novel where Berry lays out his argument most clearly, at least among his fictional writings. Reading that novel left me feeling that Berry's vision is both simultaneously beautiful and a pipe dream that can only be appropriated in any meaningful way by a very few. He's a good preacher, I'm just not a believer anymore.

I think the major problem with Berry's thinking is that, as far as I can see, he thinks that the problems he perceives can be solved by a cultural shift. That if we, as a society, "decide" it is important to revert back to the family farm, we can have our Port Williams, stop topsoil loss, and so on. What he seems to miss is how capitalism shifts and creates social values. We cannot just decide to de-industrialize agriculture, when capital is so invested in it, and relies upon it for decreasing the cost of social reproduction. The Slow Foodies, to whom he now has become demigod, are mostly bobos and crunchy-cons who like their local hormone-free grass-fed artisan cheese, and can't comprehend why the rest of society won't (can't) pay $60/lb for illegal unpasteurized Chevre to go with their organic gluten-free rice chips and sustainably produced Napa wine - whatever pairs, I'm a beer man.

Then you get people like Salatin trying to convince people that they can become Berry's dream, if they just do it, work hard, follow their proven plan and so on. The standard bullshit. He, and people like Orthodoxy's own "Granny Miller", hold themselves up as examples, though they are obvious specimens of the upper petite bourgeois using their family wealth, learning and position to get where they are. Salatin, for example, inherited his farm and was supported by his parents, after quitting his white collar job, until he could turn a profit. None of those of his interns who have not inherited a farm have been successful. The lucky ones end up working for Salatin's now sprawling family farm, more or less as sharecroppers.

What put a big damper on Hanna Coulter for me, was how contrived the ending was. Berry insists that he doesn't romanticize, but I have yet to read a sequel that recounts what happens after federal tobacco subsidies are cut, 90% of the farms switch to Foster Farms chicken production, and the reformed grandson decides to cook meth to make ends meet. Neither does he, when waxing poetically about Andean farmers, give a perspective of what it is like to scrape a living off of eating potatoes and guinea pigs, only to loose all your teeth and die of a preventable disease before you hit 40.

Anyhow, I still agree with him (somewhat) on the issue of needing to de-industrialize agriculture. I do not think it is desirable to try and make small organic farms the norm (I wonder to what extent organic/sustainable agriculture is feasible only because of the "herd immunity" provided by surrounding conventional farms, whose antibiotics, GMOs and pesticides prevent the usual plagues), but I think it is necessary to preserve topsoil, reduce reliance upon petroleum, etc. Here, I think, he has some good ideas.

I still read his books because I've wanted to own a farm since I was a kid. I find it escapist. Some kids want to be in the army or be a fireman, I wanted something more random - to own a sheep farm. Oh well, most kids don't get to be firemen either.

Carlin

2011-07-18T09:24:00.000-07:00

The George Carlin Clip Every American Needs To See

One of my cousins posted this up on Facebook today.

Goodbye Farm

2011-07-16T11:24:00.000-07:00

Moving is for real when the last box of books is packed.

Our last chance at a sale fell through this week. Now we get to go through the common experience of the decade - short sale or foreclosure. We are not special, no reason why we should not go through it like everyone else.

Wittgenstein. Wallace.

2011-07-08T11:04:00.001-07:00

Ludwig Wittgenstein is known above all for his groundbreaking work as a modern philosopher. But he was also an enthusiastic amateur photographer whose pictures -- from a "composite" family image to a jaunty shot of a friend posing as if he were in a gangster film -- are intriguing and revelatory.

Sixty years after the Austrian thinker's death, the Wittgenstein Archives (located at Cambridge University, where the philosopher studied and taught) have gathered some of Wittgenstein's own artistic efforts, along with other related photographs, for an exhibition.

more

Whenever I read about Wittgenstein my thoughts drift to the Great Ohio Desert. It is too bad that David Foster Wallace's life was so short.

Relocation. Eminent domain. A desert respects no man. Fits with the whole concept.

2011-06-30T08:24:00.000-07:00

Going Nuclear

2011-06-27T13:07:00.001-07:00

FORT CALHOUN, Neb. -- A temporary berm designed to hold back floods at the nuclear power plant in Fort Calhoun, Neb., failed Sunday. A piece of equipment punctured the aqua dam at about 1:30 a.m.
more

Yeah, that looks safe... So much for "green" solutions.

A while back there was some interviewee on Fresh Air arguing for pie-in-the-sky "green" solutions for our water supply, mostly consisting of triple, or more, plumbing water systems and houses - potable, grey, irrigation, ect. I was left wondering how that idiot got national air play. The guy actually thought that constructing extra pipelines, booster stations, storage, ect, would save energy because we would not be treating water we are not drinking (never mind that he never addressed the issue of how to fit that many water lines in a standard residential street). The only semi-reasonable argument was for irrigation, though, recycling water for irrigation has been going on for decades, and only saves on depleting aquifers - ie, it is energy inefficient, but preserving aquifers is more important than reducing green house emissions.

Just about all of these "green" solutions at some point down the line are more devastating to the environment than business as usual, but they create new markets for capital and make the bourgeoisie feel good about themselves, and I suppose that is the real point.

Sunday, Mountains, Trees, Lake

2011-06-26T21:55:00.000-07:00

Lodi

2011-06-23T10:57:00.000-07:00

Not a bad folk cover of a central valley lament by my favorite faux-southern rock band.

Objectivists For Weed

2011-06-23T09:43:00.000-07:00

Ron Paul, Barney Frank Introduce Bill to End Pot Prohibition - Politics - The Atlantic Wire

Even silly old Randian ideologues can get things right occasionally... Generally for the wrong reasons.

La Dynamite

2011-06-18T11:17:00.001-07:00

Perhaps we should attack only the deputies who make laws against us, the judges who apply those laws, the police who arrest us? I do not agree. These men are only instruments. They do not act in their own name. Their functions were instituted by the bourgeoisie for its own defence. They are no more guilty than the rest of you. Those good bourgeois who hold no office but who reap their dividends and live idly on the profits of the workers’ toil, they also must take their share in the reprisals. And not only they, but all those who are satisfied with the existing order, who applaud the acts of the government and so become its accomplices, those clerks earning three or five hundred francs a month who hate the people even more violently than the rich, that stupid and pretentious mass of folk who always choose the strongest side -in other words, the daily clientele of Terminus and the other great cafés.

That is why I struck at random and did not choose my victims! The bourgeoisie must be brought to understand that those who have suffered are tired at last of their sufferings; they are showing their teeth and they will strike all the more brutally if you are brutal with them. They have no respect for human life, because the bourgeoisie themselves have shown they have no care for it. It is not for the assassins who were responsible for the bloody week and for Fourmies to regard others as assassins.

We will not spare the women and children of the bourgeois, for the women and children of those we love have not been spared. Must we not count among the innocent victims those children who die slowly of anaemia in the slums because bread is scarce in their houses; those women who grow pale in your workshops, working to earn forty sous a day and fortunate when poverty does not force them into prostitution; those old men whom you have made production machines all their lives and whom you cast on to the waste heap or into the workhouse when their strength has worn away?

At least have the courage of your crimes, gentlemen of the bourgeoisie, and grant that our reprisals are completely legitimate.

Of course, I am under no illusions. I know my deeds will not yet be understood by the masses who are unprepared for them. Even among the workers, for whom I have fought, there will be many, misled by your newspapers, who will regard me as their enemy. But that does not matter. I am not concerned with anyone’s judgment. Nor am I ignorant of the fact that there are individuals claiming to be anarchists who hasten to disclaim any solidarity with the propagandists of the deed. They seek to establish a subtle distinction between the theoreticians and the terrorists. Too cowardly to risk their own lives, they deny those who act. But the influence they pretend to wield over the revolutionary movement is nil. Today the field is open to action, without weakness or retreat.

Alexander Herzen, the Russian revolutionary, once said: ’Of two things one must be chosen: to condemn and march forward, or to pardon and turn back half way.’ We intend neither to pardon nor to turn back, and we shall always march forward until the revolution, which is the goal of our efforts, finally arrives to crown our work with the creation of a free world.

In that pitiless war which we have declared on the bourgeoisie, we ask for no pity. We give death, and we know how to endure it. So it is with indifference that I await your verdict. I know that my head is not the last you will cut off; yet others will fall, for the starving are beginning to know the way to your great cafés and restaurants, to the Terminus and Foyot. You will add other names to the bloody list of our dead.

-Émile Henry

If Tsar Nicholas Did Not Exist, It Would Be Necessary To Invent Him

2011-06-17T12:15:00.001-07:00

If we make concession and change the canons in order to attract people we would be doing the same as the Pharisees who traveled the sea and land to make one proselyte and when they won him they made him “twice a son of Gehenna” as themselves. In other words we would destroy those people.
-Elder Avvakum the Barefoot

I was sent this quote yesterday. I like the turn around. "To become more lenient concerning the arbitrary and contradictory rules accumulated over two millennia, under vastly different circumstances than those endured in late modernity, would be akin to the Pharisees."

Where many saints and elders are concerned, I have been increasingly taking a Voltairianesque stance. Par exemple, I can understand why some old Russian grandmother may need a St. Tsar, but am under no illusion that he was a good man.

What Were They Thinking?

2011-06-15T09:36:00.001-07:00

LLS - Light the Night

Obviously they do not google their choices.

I find it amusing how, whether religious or secular, it is necessary for organizations to give out prizes, heaps of praise and tell heart warming stories in order to get the bourgeoisie to part with some of that surplus value. Though, for some reason, it does not bother me as much when it is in a secular venue.

So, if any of you readers are owners of capital, donate at the top right link you stingy bastards. It will make you feel warm and fuzzy inside.

Stupid

2011-06-12T13:46:00.000-07:00

Most romantic ideals work better in theory than practice.

On the upside, they will all be in high school together some day, and according to the new life-expectancy report, the little one should be 28 before I bite the dust. It is nice when stupid ideas work out for the best.

Three

2011-06-06T11:50:00.001-07:00

Conley James

2011-06-04T19:57:00.000-07:00

Differences

2011-06-04T13:21:00.001-07:00

Recently my wife and I went to go listen to Elder Pavlos speak at a local university. We expected a lecture format, but instead were surprised with a question/answer session. What I found most interesting about the entire experience was the profound difference in perspectives between the monk and the attendees.

A typical question was, more or less, "How do we keep from being pharisees in this evil culture of ours, since we fast, pray and so forth." Continually the monk was asked to speak of our evil culture, the Islamic threat or the economic troubles of the petite-bourgeoisie, and he repeatedly refused to take the bait. A typical answer to the typical question was, "it is easy, do not judge." He went on at length explaining that we cannot judge people for their sins because we do not know the struggles they went through leading up to that sin. In the end, the only sin he attributed to our culture is that of despair.

I found it amusing that after he repeatedly spoke of his fondness for the local Muslims, he was asked about how to deal with "the growing Islamification of America" (what a joke that line is), then after dodging that question, went on to talk about how his love for the local Muslims was a major influence on him becoming a monk at St. Catherine's.

One of the final questions was quite sad, when a mother asked about how to keep children Orthodox, knowing, as I do, the paternalistic methods of family life present in that household. The elder went on to talk about showing them Christ's love, and to not be too hard on them, remembering our own exploits as youth. He reinforced over and over to never ever kick ones child out of the house. The most heartbreaking part of that was knowing this was this mother's husband's preferred method of dealing with rebellious teens, both his own and the children of those who heed his spiritual advice. I remember how broken she was when he sent their second born across the country to live with a bishop.

For the most part, the elder seemed very European and very different, in the best ways. In an unfinished post I am working on, I have the thesis that the major fault of American conservative/traditionalist religion/politic is lack of compassion, and the contrast Elder Pavlos provided only served to confirm my suspicions. My wife and I left the event wondering if Orthodoxy in America were even the same religion. It seems more likely that here it is just the Republican Party with smells and bells.

2011-06-03T08:55:00.001-07:00

Some day I am going to miss having little ones around.

Rabbit

2011-05-23T17:27:00.000-07:00

Oil!

2011-05-23T12:10:00.001-07:00

"This permit represents a significant milestone for us and for the offshore oil and gas industry, and is an important step towards safely developing deepwater energy supplies offshore," said Michael Bromwich, director of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement.

Deep-Water Oil Drilling to Resume in the Gulf

Superficially, atomic power would seem to preclude the use of coal and oil. However, quite apart from the energy gained by their combustion they remain, and always will remain, the basic raw material for all organic chemistry. Plastics, dyes, pharmaceuticals, solvents. Industry could not exist without them, even in an atomic age.
-Isaac Asimov, Youth

With oil and gas prices remaining high, one has to wonder whether the "Drill, baby, drill" rhetoric will make a return this election cycle. The Deepwater Horizon disaster should be a lesson as to why we will never again have $1.50/gallon gas. The real horror of the Deepwater Horizon is not the ecological disaster, as bad as it was, or that we are yet again issuing permits for new Deepwater Horizons without any significant engineering breakthroughs. The real horror is that corporations are now driven to the deep waters in order to maintain current petroleum output.

Think that the war in Libya is about democracy? Think again.

This is not a supply and demand problem, this is a labor theory of value problem. We are not going to run out of oil in the foreseeable future, but the labor needed to produce it will continue to radically increase, and price will skyrocket accordingly.

Jauchzet Gott in allen Landen

2011-05-22T13:25:00.000-07:00

One of my favorites. Unfortunately the best I could find on Youtube.

Reason Via Nostalgia

2011-05-20T18:58:00.001-07:00

Years ago, Rod "Muzhik" Dreher wrote a blog post about the human need for connection to place, bitching about not having his own and that he could not return to where he came from, since that place had changed, ad nauseum. One overly simplistic (and false) Orthodox talking point is that everything in Orthodoxy is about unchanging Tradition - Liturgy never changes, doctrine never changes, Orthodoxy never changes. Fr. Josiah Trenham, among others, take this to the extreme - preaching that homosexuality causes violence because some 5th century saint said so, and arguing along Fideist lines that the hopelessly out of date ideas in his unpublished book should be accepted on the merit of their coming from "the Fathers".

In Discerning the Mystery, Louth argues that the Tradition of the Church is the culture of the Church. If we were to take this conclusion of his seriously, would it not mean that the Tradition of the Church changes? A culture may maintain it's essence, but it is always dynamic, changing with those who organically constitute it. Rod's town changed because all places are in constant flux, the problem for him is that he and the place diverged because he was outside of it, enculturing in new places. He and the place would have changed by the mere fact of him not being in it. Fr. Josiah is wrong because Orthodoxy's Tradition is not (cannot be) an idiosyncratic reconstitution of Chrysostom's culture.

Lately I have been thinking a lot about motivations. More specifically, my motivations for converting to Orthodoxy. It seems to me that the reasons we tell ourselves, justifying significant life choices, are not the true reasons. My self-delusional reason was that I had intellectually convinced myself of it, I had read my way into it, or what have you. Of course that cannot be the true reason, since I spent a good two years trying to read my way into it. I would not try to if I had not already wanted to be convinced of it.

When I was 17, I capitulated to my parents' newfound faith in Evangelicalism, of the mega-church variety. This, for me, was a severe break from my prior enculturation in the old family parish. Eventually this lead to "spiritual turmoil", an existential crisis, or what ever you want to call it. Perhaps it was a crisis in my perception of self. What most modern spiritual butterflies will never know is the groundedness that emanates from being born into religion; from believing in something because that is what one does. I remember once, as a teenager, conversing with a friend on the subject of why Lutheranism was the correct Christian sect. We concluded that it was by virtue of being between the extremes of Catholicism and other Protestants, which, amusingly, was the argument made by many Orthodox less than a century ago. (Now it is that Protestantism and Catholicism are almost the same and Orthodoxy is radically different - almost a different religion - never mind that beside a Pope, liturgics and one Latin word, on the ground, Orthodoxy and Catholicism are very much the same. I used to talk religion with my Catholic cousin for hours without disagreement, despite wanting to disagree. No wonder so many Arabs just go to whichever church is closest.) Life was simple, so answers were simple.

Whilst this crisis was escalating in my life, I decided to try going back to my old church, become Lutheran again. On the day I attended church with my grandparents, I was shocked by the CCM band and the increased role of women, though I really should not have been. The LCMS had changed without me. It had become Rod's hometown, and I, Muzhik.

Over time I became more skeptical of sola scriptura, and eventually began excepting more traditional Christian doctrine. I came to, falsely, think of myself as a Traditionalist. I am not a Traditionalist, and never truly was. I am a Nostalgicist. St. Ignatius Brianchaninov once wrote that nostalgia is natural to the Christian, and so, perhaps, I am a natural Christian.

I think that I was looking for that home which disappears once one has been gone for too long. But I am done with all of that now. My time came and went, what is gone cannot be replaced. What I want now is that place for my children, and if Orthodoxy can provide it, then so be it.

La Femme Parallel

2011-05-19T08:18:00.000-07:00

Food Desert

2011-05-18T08:05:00.001-07:00

The Food Desert Map of the United States - National - The Atlantic Wire

The exemplary figures of evil today are not ordinary consumers who pollute the environment and live in a violent world of disintegrating social links, but those who, while fully engaged in creating conditions for such universal devastation and pollution, buy their way out of their own activity, living in gated communities, eating organic food, taking holidays in wildlife preserves, and so on.
-Zizek, Violence

Jesus Wept

2011-05-14T11:37:00.000-07:00

I think religion makes God cry.
- Uncle Rick

After reading a Trenhamite Facebook thread.

Some Thievery For the Weekend

2011-05-13T22:39:00.000-07:00

I missed out on some great albums during my phase of taking the writings of the fabulously bearded monk too seriously. It figures that these guys released an album featuring Marcos on the cover during that time.

I have some posts in the works, but with the house on the market and doctor appointments 3 to 4 times a week, do not expect much of significance for the next month or so.

Seasons Pass, Beauty Fades

2011-05-09T22:01:00.001-07:00

The rabbits are sold.

The two sheep we are not butchering should be gone tomorrow. Mr. Angry, the murderous ram, will have his life taken with what may be the last shot I ever fire in my own backyard.

The chickens we are not taking have been sold.

The garden is wasting away, untended.

Our yard dog's hip went out, and had to be put down - et tu, brute?

The farm is fading quickly.

2011-05-05T21:02:00.000-07:00

Are All Crunchy-Cons Girlie Men?

2011-05-02T20:44:00.000-07:00

Sure their chosen political label sounds like a gay ass name for one of those knockoff cereal brands I grew up on, but did you really think they were this lame? Well... yes, but still...

http://www.ocanews.org/news/ForcesBehindJonah5.1.11.html

http://panheresy.blogspot.com/2011/04/rod-dreher-is-behind-ocatruth.html

http://www.ocatruth.com/?p=830

2011-05-01T20:20:00.000-07:00

2011-05-01T18:51:00.000-07:00

This is family. This is America.

Soundtrack:
5. Crosby, Stills, Nash
4. Emmylou Harris
3. Iris DeMent
2. John Prine
1. Complete and utter silence

Goodbye Land That I Love

2011-04-28T20:28:00.000-07:00

In the mornings I like to sit out front, drinking my coffee and taking in the crisp morning air, while the lady across the street gardens and sings old Protestant hymns in what sounds like Korean. Around the neighborhood the roosters make their morning calls, echoing up and down the block. Now distant, now close, now distant again.

Down the street are empty fields, vast seas of green and gold. Some people think the summers are ugly, but I think little is more picturesque than a giant pepper tree amidst an ocean of golden rolling hills. I cannot count the times I have walked those paths with my dog, discovering abandoned buildings and ruins, startling rabbits and jackrabbits.

In the summer, when the work is done, we sit on the back porch drinking beer, smoking a pipe, and listening to music. All the while, relaxing to the sight and sounds of the livestock. On a good weekend the mariachi band down the street will be playing, and it is worth a listen. In the late summer and early fall our street sounds like a war zone, coming alive with the sounds of small arms and automatic weapons, as the police and sheriffs train.

Sometimes it is only once every month or so, other times it is multiple times a week, but entertainment is often to be had in the form of someone getting arrested. Next door is a group home. They are good boys, but sometimes they get violent. Three doors down is a drug dealer, but he is a vet who lost his legs in Vietnam, so you cannot really blame him too much. Last year, one of our neighbors had a big pile of crates full of game cocks, before he moved them on to wherever they were going. The people behind us kept a game dog for a few months, in the back corner, while its wounds healed. It was a sweet little pit, who cried for attention and loved my son to death. Most people these days do not realize that fighting dogs are wonderful with people.

I love the tomato sauce we make from our fresh tomatoes and the odd ends from our lamb. Nothing is better than lamb marinated in citrus, onion and garlic, roasted on the grill. There is a comfort that comes from working the soil and the smell of properly kept manure.

All of these things, and more, I will miss. Our ten year plan was unrealistic. We dropped the plan to three years, but that was still unrealistic. I cannot keep the yard up, I cannot keep work up, I cannot even spend the time I should with my kids. I have three to four good hours on an average day. After spending the last six months pushing to work 40 hour weeks, I have averaged closer to 32, and have been sick and getting infections constantly. I will never own a working farm.

My grandmother made us an offer that was beyond our wildest dreams, and so we are leaving the country for the city. We will be moving to the neighborhood where my father and mother grew up, and were I spent the earliest part of my youth, before moving to the country. There are priorities in life, and part of getting older seems to be watching doors close. So, with a tear in my eye, I realize the farm has to go because family is everything.

2011-04-26T10:10:00.000-07:00

2011-04-26T08:56:00.000-07:00

I have been listening to a lot of Old Crow Medicine Show and other bluegrass and folk lately. It seems to fit in well with the bittersweet emotions over the inevitable losing of our little "farm", and likely our associated dreams, which I will write more about later.

So it goes.

Kristos Anesti

2011-04-24T12:32:00.000-07:00

Here is a chill beat for all you sleep deprived parents out there.

Foutre Les Anglophiles

2011-04-21T18:01:00.000-07:00

In Orthodoxy it seems rather commonplace to be an Anglophile or Celtophile, but where is the love for the culture that brought us the Enlightenment, the more interesting sexual acts, Victor Hugo, Space Invader, and chèvre?

At times I am a bit of a Francophile. I like French agriculture, especially their sheep , dairy goats, poultry and intensive gardening. Despite some of my recent posts, the only non-experimental electronic music I still like is French. What is there not to love about 6 weeks vacation, the 7 hour work day and real universal health care? Above all, j'aime ma femme belle français, whose father was born in Maine but did not learn English until grade school. With the beautiful children she has born me and the respite she provides from this storm that is my life, I say foutre les Anglophiles.

Bonus song.

Paint Chip Marx Frowns Upon Gentrification

2011-04-20T19:26:00.000-07:00

There is an alley behind my office building where I often walk. Other than the parking garage on one side, everything dates back to the 20's. I like the ivy growing out of old planters and up the ragged walls, decorated with the old decaying artistry that even modern facades now lack. There are little wood carved nooks and posts, and steel grapes and vines adorning the old doors that remain. Much of it is lightly marked with graffiti and pocketknife carvings of generations of vandals. The pathway is of old brick worn smooth with age, littered with cigarette butts and occasionally beer soaked vomit.

The opposite wall is that of a 70's era concrete parking garage that was comforting in its ugliness, providing a sort of contrast with the beauty of the former. Recently the city made this building a target of its downtown gentrification project, spending years and countless dollars attempting to make it match the surrounding 1920's architecture, horribly failing in the process - unless one is half blind, squinting and driving by at 80 miles per hour. Most of this part of downtown is slowly giving into the bourgeoisification process, but this alley way resists. The wall gets tagged up so often that it already looks like patchwork from the paint-overs. The underpaid maintenance crew no longer bothers to do the job right. There is a big wad of gum, right a eye level, painted straight over. The paint is beginning to chip and peal, though it is only a few years old. The amusingly modified pattern of chipped paint pictured above is oddly reminiscent of Marx, in a Jesus on toast sort of way.

I think tomorrow I may add a caption: "Karl Marx Frowns Upon Gentrification"

Selling Out to Bourgeois Institutions

2011-04-18T14:04:00.000-07:00

Over the next seven months or so I will be promoting this thing. I might do some give aways and such, but probably not. If you are interested, my ugly mug will appear in the OC/IE "Honored Hero" section, as I volunteered to prance around for donations this year. I decided to become a part of this because the LLS fulfills functions that are sadly lacking in our government.

Rural Street Art

2011-04-14T13:27:00.000-07:00

I do not know why, but I love this stuff.

2011-04-13T19:56:00.000-07:00

For my long-suffering wife.

Grandpa, Chopin and the Hereafter

2011-04-06T19:25:00.000-07:00

The Farmer will heal the harvest by gathering the tares and thorns which have grown up along with the seed and taken all the power which should have nourished the roots. Because of these bastard plants the genuine seed has remained undeveloped and immature, smothered by the unnatural growth. So when all that is illegitimate and alien has been plucked out from the nourishing grain and is eliminated, after the fire has consumed whatever is contrary to nature, then the nature of these people also will flourish and will ripen into the fruit through this kind of treatment, receiving again after a long period of time the common form which was set upon us by God in the beginning.
-St Gregory of Nyssa, On the Soul and Resurrection

As I may have made it apparent with my previous altercations with DBH's brothers - from whom he apparently had bogarted the good genes, a la Twins - I have an intense dislike for limp-wristed conservative ecumenism. Nothing seems more infantile than the artificial delineation of who makes the cut and gets into heaven - which religions, which people within which religions, which people within which religions who are infinitely ignorant enough, ad nausem.

On the other hand, I have always liked St. Gregory's take on the afterlife - everyone is saved eventually. Most of the best people I have known in my life were or are Atheists and Agnostics, and I shudder at the thought that they might not end up in that place in the sky because of their irreligiosity. In fact, there is a whole irreligious wing to my family. My Irish Catholic Atheist Grandfather - the one playing the above songs, chosen due to his inability to play Chopin on camera - is a perfect example of this. He was an Atheist because he loved. He was the man who brought education and thinking to our family, though he never saw 12th grade. He never learned to read music, but could play Valse du petit chien because he learned by ear, and for a while earned a living that way. My dad once dreamed that he saw grandpa in heaven and took it as a sign, and I am inclined to agree with him, because I think God might like to hear Barcarolle Op 60 on an old worn piano - or maybe Gershwin, if someone has a camera.

Sexist Dualism

2011-04-01T14:38:00.000-07:00

Within the space of a day, I was sent this article, informed of sexist comments made by a priest and shown an incident on another person's Facebook, where a young girl was viciously derided for stating that she wanted to lose some weight for bikini season - how dare she think to wear such a thing.

One of my peculiarities is that I will not allow my daughter to own Barbie dolls, and will not buy them for my nieces. When asked why, I simply explain that the dolls are about teaching little girls to be sexual objects. You see, my daughter and my nieces are persons; they are not objects - especially not objects for the gratification of male desires.

My point here is to say that bourgeois modesty movements are the flipside of bourgeois clubbing slut-wear, both relying upon the same objectifying sexist premises. They are both obsessed with the idea that what a woman wears has everything to do with how men will perceive them sexually, and the worst of their proponents actually believe important societal consequences hinge upon what our daughters choose to wear. A woman is an object whose identity is defined by how she is perceived by men, and therefore is responsible for how herself as commodity is publicly displayed and the message that display sends to the consumer - i.e. men.

If one day, decades from now, my daughter decides to wear a string bikini out to the bar because that is the popular style and she is comfortable with it, I should learn to be okay with that. If she decides to wear the same because she wants men to desire her as a sexual object, then I have failed as a father. Similarly, if she did the same in a burka, whether I have raised my daughter right will hinge upon why she chose the clothing, and I will have equally failed if she dresses as such because of her desire to cover her identity as sexual object. (I will also know I have failed if any of my children ever step foot in a bourgeois night club or bourgeois brat's bat mitzvah.)

The best capitalist society can do is tweak how we sell our women. Here we are in the 21st century and the mystification of market mechanisms is all that separates us from the thinking that led primitives to trade their daughters for livestock.

I have no sympathy for those who would use "tradition" as justification for their abject sexism. Despite my jokes about sending my daughter to a monastery by puberty, I would rather her make some of those mistakes than be sucked into the modesty movement - as if what she wears will really have a bearing on that, and lets be honest here, most of the girls who fall for that ruse still end up making those same mistakes, but end up pregnant for it, because they are unprepared.

-After Note: Amusingly, as I prepared to send this off, Focus on the Family emailed me a similarly themed article. I look forward to the day I am swamped with articles on male beauty and identity as sexual object.

2011-03-27T18:39:00.000-07:00

Sometimes the days I feel the shittiest are the best.

2011-03-27T13:17:00.000-07:00

Inherent in this civilization of consumption and technology is the waste and destruction of the vulnerable earth. The mythic world we create in our photographs mirrors our world, where nature is domesticated and controlled. The scenes we depict however, display futile attempts to save or rejuvenate nature. We portray these attempts within our work by inventing machines and contraptions from junk and obsolete equipment. These contraptions are intended to help the character we portray to jump-start a dying planet. We patch holes in the sky, create rain machines, chase storms to create electricity, communicate with the earth to learn its needs. Within these scenes, we create less refined, less scientific, more ritualistic and poetic possibilities to work with nature rather than destroy it.
-Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison

I saw this exhibition years back, when a good friend of mine was going to art school in San Diego. I do not know what brought it to mind.

Always Remember To Respect And Honour Your Mother

2011-03-27T12:03:00.000-07:00

At times I think some of my comments on this blog can be misconstrued as criticisms of my mother, or her religion, when I am really just recounting memories. It would be an understatement to say that my mother is the source and fount from which my religion springs. For the larger part of my youth my mom was the only religious person of consequence in my life. It could quite rightly be said that I am a Christian because of her, and I am who I am because of her.

2011-03-25T20:27:00.000-07:00

His first two albums were by far the best, but you have to play the song that got him into the Guiness Book of World Records, and I suspect it takes the son of a hippy to appreciate whale songs in music.

Listening to BT always makes me think of the desert... for as long as I listened to this music, it is a miracle I did not turn out a fag.

Adventures in Multi-Topic Stream-of-Thought: Facebook Prospects and WASP Phyletism

2011-03-25T16:44:00.001-07:00

Remember the days when you had to memorize phone numbers, and this song was on the radio all the freakin time?

I have been thinking about joining Facebook. Up to this point I have resisted the venture on the grounds that I take part in enough internet posturing on my blog. One of my sisters once quipped that I am a different person on the blog. True and not true. The Lotar persona is just the unmitigated coarse and sometimes angry portion of myself, who discusses uncomfortable topics, instead of searching for a way to change the conversation.

Soon after beginning Pactum Serva this became a place for me to work out ideas and, later, with the onset of leukemia, my chosen medium for catharsis - which Balthazar and the old Ochlophobist might advise against, but my wife encourages, and I trust her more. Generally, it has worked as a place for me to feel sorry for myself and vent my anger at the world - which was what I thought support groups were for, before I found out they are really just a place for the bourgeoisie to tell you to "buck up and thank God you benefit from third-world child slave labor." The unfortunate side effect being that for some unknown reason people seem to like to read my cathartic blather, I became somewhat known, and subsequently pissed off some people.

I never really understood why cultural critiques and saying that a certain priest was born with silver spoon in mouth, and links his politic too closely with his religion, was taken so seriously and grievously. Many of those same people post disparaging comments against everything not CrunchyCon/TeaParty/Libertarian/Orthodox-WASP-convert on Facebook and their blogs without a second thought. I think that part of it has to do with the fact that the real problem of racism and phyletism is not with the Greeks and Arabs, but with the self-aggrandizing WASP convert culture. They really seem to get angry and take it personally when you point out they are not the all-holy oppressed minority they imagine they have become, rather, they are quite the opposite.

I think the Church would be better off if ex-Episcopalians and ex-members of their derivative sects were banned from becoming clergy. Back when it was joyously announced that +Jonah would become the Great White Hope of the OCA, I shocked a few people by saying I did not like him, nor did I think he would do much good. My problem is that I first met him in a context including his 30+ minute Orthodox conversion story/testimony*. It was, of course, completely uninteresting and identical to everyone else's from his era. Everyone spoke Russian, they did not like WASPs, "The Mystical Theology…" was the only book published in English, yada yada yada. He was the poor oppressed WASP, who fought through adversity to become the head of his monastery. Later he went on to become the head of his jurisdiction, before the death spiral caused by his focusing on photo-ops at neo-con festivals over the real demands of his job. Maybe he will make a comeback - that would be like the most awesome narrative ever! We could make a movie about it, starring some ex-rocker convert who tells his old groupies to stop being whores.

The real problem now is that my wife is getting fed up with my messing with her Facebook page, or whatever-the-hell you call it, and my friends are tired of not being able to get a hold of me. Many months ago, I stepped backed into 1994 when the screen to my cell broke and now do not receive texts or remember to check my voicemail - which has enabled me to slip into the hermitish behavior to which I am so prone. So, I may give in. We shall see.

* Side note: I hate testimonies. My mom went through a phase where she would listen to them on tape in the car. The only two I can remember included a lady who got drunk all the time and a mob hitman. The one about the hitman was interesting until his existential crisis. They are all the same, and all equally boring. The only exceptions to the rule are exceptions because of what happened before the conversion.

2011-03-17T18:37:00.000-07:00

England has had statesmen in the past, as had Ireland. To-day both countries have but a weird collection of second-rate politicians who imagine that they are big men because they stand upon a big platform, and who fancy they show their greatness by haggling over petty items of expenditure whilst at the same time ordering the spendthrift use of human lives.

Whom the gods wish to destroy they first drive mad.

-James Connolly, Housing Problem

St. Patrick's Day

2011-03-16T20:52:00.000-07:00

I know it is Lent and all, but the Jameson is still coming out... maybe starting tonight.

Living Within Means - Ad Nauseum

2011-03-10T16:27:00.001-08:00

PLEASE WATCH THIS ONE MINUTE VIDEO ON THE SERIOUS FINANCIAL CRISIS IN OUR NATION AND THE FAILURE OF OUR LEADERSHIP TO FACE IT

This video is made by a college student. I have read numerous articles in The Economist, The National Review, etc. on the financial crisis in our nation (which is a moral crisis: an inability to live content within our income) over the last few years but this simple video tops them all.

-The Arena (video link is missing)

"[L]iving content within our income" is bourgeois speak for cutting services and jobs for the poor and working classes. So we can see here that the "moral crisis" in our nation is not the fighting of two imperialist wars while contemplating a third, it is not people dying of preventable diseases, it is not children going to bed hungry. No my friends, it is not profit-making by the incarceration of the poor and minority, it is not the assault on labor, nor is it the near devastation of an entire class by usurers. It is apparent that our problem is that we are too kind to the poor and working classes, and that we pay teachers, nurses and construction workers too much.

I am continually amazed by the inability of some to smell the bullshit. Our "financial crisis" is caused by perpetual war and not taxing the rich. We have a system of taxation that is regressive, thanks to St Ronald and his ideological heirs, while at the same time the elite, who have avoided taxation, have been doing everything possible to decrease wages and services. The hijacking of religion by Neo-Conservatism makes me wish I did not believe in any of it. I seriously want to vomit, and it is not just the chemo.

All of this just drives home how out of touch faux-traditionalism is with reality. The whole drill of 1950's Catholic petit-bourgeois culture - no contraception, man works, wife stays at home, sex through a hole in the sheet, and so on. How truly feasible is it for a person making $25-35k a year to live this way? I just do not buy the whole anti-contraception line anymore. The closest I now get is a cherry-picked condensation of Fr Seraphim Rose's and St John Chrysostom's thoughts on the issue - birth control is a sin in the hands of the bourgeoisie, as they try and plan their perfect little bourgeois lives of avarice.

If we want to take a queue from Chrysostom, it should come from places such as his homilies on almsgiving and his condemnations of the rich. Building a new church? St John Chrysostom says, "Make the rich pay for it." We should not worry too much about murdering the little people living in semen.

My thoughts on Culture War issues:

Birth Control? Go for it.

Homosexuality? These people are supposed to go their entire lives without having sex. They do not get to choose monasticism or not. You have to feel sorry for these people. Give them an effin' break.

Abortion? It is here to stay folks. Maybe we can turn it into a voting issue when an amendment is feasible. Even then, people get desperate and it happens.

Fornication? It happens, it has always happened, it always will happen. Some of the earliest canons of the Church had to do with kids screwing around. Most people cannot be indoctrinated into not following through with one of our strongest biological urges. It might not be a bad idea if your kid is taught about condoms - their non-girlfriend/boyfriend "friend" is a situational whore in waiting. Deal with it.

Now can we get back to rich people going to hell, and the possibility that making them less rich by taxing their asses might improve the odds of them threading the eye of the needle?

The Universe Conspires Against Me

2011-03-01T17:38:00.001-08:00

When life first shat upon me, mine eyes began to open to the things I previously did not wish to see. Now coincidences of events and of personalities are producing a continuation of this terrible process. It appears as though David Harvey's lectures and Tea Party politics have produced a concomitant elucidation of theories I wish not to be true.

Worry not. The political posts will soon end, and I will return to Anti-GTKTO - evil eye icons, communist Greeks, inconvenient facts of lives of Saints, and so forth.

Stealin'

2011-02-27T14:04:00.000-08:00

This morning it was announced that a pallet of marble had been stolen from the construction site of the new temple. Amongst the sighs and huffs of indignation, we were encouraged to pray for the poor soul of the man who would steal from the church.

While I generally dislike the idea of stealing from a church - I think stripping a foreclosed home or from a developer is a more moral option - I tend to think that like cursing or select sexual misdeeds, petty theft is a sin blown out of proportion by the bourgeois. To say that, as a sin, stealing a small pallet of marble pales in comparison to making a profit from the stock market would be an understatement indeed. At least the former thief broke a sweat with his effort.

With unemployment around 20% and people losing their homes, I say pray that the man gets a fair price for the pretty rock. The real shame is the men (one could not lift the pallet) could so easily and rightly discern that they would get more money by stealing from the church than by asking. And really, why should they respect a church they would not be welcome at, given that they are likely poor? Here they would be received with condescending smiles, while people laugh behind their backs and homilies are aimed at their inappropriately dressed children.

The Kids Dance to the "Union Song"

2011-02-22T21:30:00.000-08:00

Trying to make their Teamster Grandpa proud.

Gwenny Dances to Tea Party Song

2011-02-22T20:53:00.000-08:00

She dances a lot more when I don't have the camera. She will run across the house when she hears this song. She is off to a good start.

2011-02-22T20:42:00.000-08:00

My boy and a "baby bunny". I'll have to wait for nap time to slaughter these bad boys.

Koch Brothers Behind WI Governor Walker's Union Busting

2011-02-22T18:59:00.000-08:00

The Tea Party Recruitment Song

2011-02-19T12:45:00.000-08:00

2011-02-18T07:15:00.000-08:00

This guy is awesome.

Diane Rehm as a Vehicle of Neo-Liberal Propaganda

2011-02-16T16:37:00.001-08:00

World hunger and food stability can be solved by increasingly liberalized markets, free trade and removal of social welfare? The reason that Neo-Liberal policies have so far only contributed to the problem is that we have not yet gone all in? WTF?

Today's Nihilistic Absurdity

2011-02-05T12:18:00.000-08:00

But there is a second, and more revealing, kind of absurdist art, which unites to the mood of futility an element of the unknown, a kind of eerie expectancy, the feeling that in an absurd world, where, generally, "nothing ever happens," it is also true that "anything is possible." In this art, reality becomes a nightmare and the world becomes an alien planet wherein men wander not so much in hopelessness as in perplexity - of everything except the absence of God. This is the strange world of Kafka, of the plays of Ionesco and - less strikingly - of Beckett, of a few avant-garde films like "Last Year at Marienbad," of electronic and other "experimental" music, of surrealism in all the arts, and of the most recent painting an sculpture - and particularly that with a supposedly "religious" content - in which man is depicted as a subhuman or demonic creature emerging from some unknown depths.
-Fr. Seraphim Rose

I got into Experimental Electronic music back in my college days. I suppose it was a rather depressing and nihilistic time in my life, from which I would escape back home on the weekends. Fr. Seraphim pushed me a lot towards Ludism, which was easy given the Tolkien obsession of my youth, but lately I've been leaning the other way. Fr. Seraphim did often fall into blind reactionaryism, and drew his points too far.

At times, in moments of absurdity, I listen to the sounds of weeping machines with undercurrents of romantic nostalgia and alienation.

Frank ferreting at 90

2011-02-04T10:54:00.000-08:00

Distributism, Wendell Berry, ect

2011-02-01T17:36:00.000-08:00

Recently Owen made a remark about the privileges Mr. Berry enjoys, which allow him to run his little farm. As I remember it, Berry did not inherit his farm, but that, I suppose, is neither here nor there. To operate a small farm (or large one for that matter) in the black requires a good deal of capital investment - whether inheriting the farm, or working a well paying job to purchase it. Additionally, the farmer must then either shrewdly market his product to the bourgeois, or find a secondary income stream - both is preferable. (This reminds me of Joel Saladin's self-help/farming manual, where he touts his own success, though he inherited his farm and was supported by his parents' white collar jobs while getting into the black. The infamous "Granny Miller", with her quaint Disneylandesque bourgeois playground farm - "let them eat cake" - also comes to mind.)

I do think that this is taken into account in Wendell Berry's philosophy - he knows it is not possible for the average person to earn a living farming. He does have a point in that current law artificially raises the cost of land and the costs of operation, and artificially suppresses profits. Nevertheless, from what I gather, his main solution is that of the Libertarian bent. That is, the idea that the problems of multinational corporate state-capitalism can be largely solved by forcing corporations to internalize all costs. I generally think this approach is crap. Capitalism, by its very nature, leads to a singularity - monopoly, accumulation of capital, and so on. We could take measures to momentarily reverse the trend towards this accumulation. We could break up Microsoft, GM, Monsanto and the factory farms, but they will return again. Those who out compete others will grow, eventually using their accumulated wealth to buy elections and legislation to become Monsanto again. Despite what he and the Slow Foodies think, education is not the answer to this problem. You cannot solve a fundamentally flawed utopianism with education (see Dostoevsky).

Similarly, I have been coming to believe that the Chesterbelloc canon is just a second rate Marxist analysis constrained by Papal Encyclicals. Mr. Belloc thought that some undefined taxation scheme could eventually lead to a nexus of perfect competition and freedom of enterprise enjoyed by the entire population. In some ways this led him to be an unwittingly evil Libertarian. He might have wrote about the working class being oppressed by the bourgeois, but then moments later rail against the idea of a minimum wage, writing such things as "The Mowing of a Field" to romanticize his positions. The wedding of this strain of thought to certain Neo-Liberal ideas in the modern Distributist "movement" (as if a few hundred people could be called a movement) led me to cease calling myself a Distributist a while ago. In fact, the moment happened after a couple of arguments I had with Mr. Médaille, where I accused his proposals for cost internalization of being regressive taxation.

Nevertheless, I like the idea of broad distribution of capital/means of production. Berry's ideas on agricultural organization and technology are the most sane and humane of the options I have been exposed to. I think this all needs to be done outside the framework of free-market Capitalism.

I do not know yet how I feel about Marxism in general. I have been enjoying reading Owen's philosophical shift, but I have not seen beauty in it yet, for lack of a better expression. I do find beauty in Tolkien, Berry and ChesterBelloc. Maybe that is not an entirely rational reason for not jumping on the boat, but I suppose I have a good bit of po-mo lodged in my brain. In any case, I will keep reading and see where it goes.

In the end, I think Arturo's "pissing into the wind" comment is apt (I may have just created an infinite link-back loop). I think that we are heading towards something sinister, and we cannot do anything about it. So, I will stick with the beautiful, and if I vote, I will usually vote Green over Peace and Freedom or CPUSA, and fantasize about agrarian utopias that never existed and never will.

Disconnect

2011-01-28T17:11:00.001-08:00

The fundamental disconnect between American bourgeois Christianity and Orthodoxy is as follows:

American bourgeois Christianity teaches that when one follows its tenets many rewards will come, mainly pertaining to achieving or maintaining the bourgeois lifestyle.

Orthodoxy teaches that when one follows its tenets a lot of bad shit will happen.

Postscript on the Dog-Headed Peoples of Libya

2011-01-28T16:22:00.001-08:00

(May they follow the example of their Tunisian and Egyptian neighbors and direct their cannibalism upon their American-supported oppressors.)

I think an important note to make is concerning the thinking behind GTKTO-Orthodoxy which brings about mental paralysis upon its confrontation with folk Orthodoxy. The first inclination is to appeal to academia, but then is university Orthodoxy more "True" than village Orthodoxy? The point of the post was not to say that doctors of theology in Thessaloniki believe in dog-headed peoples and write dissertations concerning the existence of the Cynocephali. I think it would be safe to say that no person of education has believed in such things in well over a millennia. There are arguments against depicting St. Christopher as dog-headed on both the grounds that he could not have been dog-headed, and on the grounds that, even if he were, in his glorified state he would be wholly human. Despite this, icons of St. Christopher Cynocephali exist all over the Orthodox world, and he is a part of village Orthodoxy. (There are still people in Transylvania painting his image on the walls of their homes, and similar cults of St. Christopher Cynocephali exist elsewhere.)

When looking at these matters, the "WASPy" inclination is to break out the books and point to some form of "official" teaching, which becomes problematic in that the lines between official and folk Orthodoxy are usually hazy or non-existent, particularly when it comes to the Cult of Saints, where iconography lends itself particularly well to folk religion, despite supposed rules here and there*. Combine this with the fact that the WASP must necessarily combat folk religion, which, in his psyche, boarders on paganism and witch-craft**, and is the only thing as equally deplorable as permissive sexual morality***. When one embraces the superiority of the university as "official" Orthodoxy to this degree, there engages a quandary that gives the person the choice between DBH-style Russian scholasticism and a sort of necessary intellectual schizophrenia concerning Hesychasm/Palamism. The difficulty here being Hesychasm is all the rage, Palamism has held up well in the realm of contemporary philosophy and scholasticism seems an intellectual dead end, but it was largely abandoned by academic Orthodoxy for centuries prior to the Paris school. On one hand village Orthodoxy was an authority, on the other academia is always the authority - Orthodoxy is about praxis, except where we do not like the praxis - we appeal to the academy for everything but the things we do not like.

Real Orthodoxy is more complicated than what we can look up in the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, and quickly becomes problematic when it is presented as tract-FMG-GTKTO-AFR-Orthodoxy. GTKTO-Orthodoxy suffers from Religion as Ideology.

*Bringing to mind the commonality of hushed conversations about Saint so and so having an icon of God the Father (or Holy Spirit, or western style, or pick your iconographic error), with the requisite "tsk tsk" / "he did not know better."

**I will agree that occasionally it does.

***Which, do to the particularities of WASP cultural norms, will lead him to write off the breastfeeding Virgin, or, in moments of self-conscious overcompensation, declare that he is not bothered by said icons - when it is obvious that if one is truly not bothered, one will not go out of his way to publicly volunteer that he is not.

Tangential to Anti-GTNTO - Anti-AOI

2011-01-26T11:43:00.001-08:00

[O]nly in Christ's name can we do the one thing that needs to be done in the world - lead it out of the dead end of contemporary godless fruitlessness and giftlessness. By the name of Christ, by the cross of Christ, the hammer-and-sickle can be given their authentic meaning; by the cross labor can be sanctified and blessed. "And" not only can but should stand between the words "Church" and "labor," "cross" and "hammer-and-sickle."

The difficulty here is not in the principle. Remove the violent, Bolshevik approach to the matter, and everything will be simple. In principle, the cross should be combined with labor...

The old coercion of the capitalist regime, which destroys the right to life and leaves one only with the right to labor, has recently begun to deprive people of that right as well. Forced crisis, forced unemployment, forced labor, joyless and with no inner justification - enough with all of that.

-Mother Maria Skobtsova, The Cross and the Hammer-and-Sickle

Stuff White People Dislike, Part 3 - The Raskol / Old Believers

2011-01-25T17:57:00.000-08:00

Get to Know the Original and its allies has provided you with neat little timeline tracts. You have heard the associated rhetoric: Orthodoxy never had a Reformation, Orthodox liturgical praxis is unchanging, Orthodoxy never had western-style religious persecution, ad nauseum.

We could get into a conversation about the Coptic question and the idea of pre-nationalist nationalism, perhaps including Syrian sectarianism, and debate the culpability of the Church in post-Constantinian State matters, and so forth. Using recent examples we could get into the issues of Old Calendarists (oddly reminiscent of Old Believers) and debate the possibilities of the modern phenomena of reverse westernization and neo-neo-Donatism. Instead, do to a timely conversation with an Old Believer last Sunday, we will focus on this group, which in moments of gross oversimplification and strained correlation, I refer to as the Mennonites of Orthodoxy.

So, in keeping with form - Get to Know the Original failed to inform you of the following:

Midway through the 17th century, the Russian Patriarch Nikon decided to correct Russian liturgical practice by realignment with Greek practice. In actuality, all he was doing was abandoning the Russian side of a few centuries of divergent liturgical development for the Greek, with mixed results as to the quality of the translations, and despite the Old Russian praxis being older in many cases.

Predictably, this caused an uproar amongst the laity and the lower clergy, which spawned a movement against the reforms. By 1667, the Russian Church had condemned these Old Believers, or Old Ritualists, in a Synodal council and repression commenced. This was the first, but not last, time the Old Believers came under religious persecution. During this time many were put to death. Some, such as the Archpriest Avvakum, who became an Old Believer Saint, were actually burnt at the stake, in good old "Western" fashion.

Despite a number of persecutions up through the Soviet-era, along with the corresponding martyrs, Old Believers exist to this very day, both in the priested and priestless varieties. In fact, they have a number of communities in the Pacific Northwest.

On Sunday, I stood on the grass outside the church while my daughter slowly and messily consumed her prosphera. During this time a man with a flowing beard awkwardly stood next to me, so, discerning his desire, I introduced myself. After briefly discussing the politically charged homily - most of which my son had saved me from, by whispering into my ear, "I need to go Potty Power, daddy" - he revealed to me that he was an Old Believer who had married into the religion, which he now takes very seriously. He lives in a community about 30 miles south of Portland, where he owns a farm, as apparently does everyone in his parish (priestless variety), but was in Riverside because his mother was near death. After he recovered from the shock that I knew what Old Believers were and the reason for the Schism (Raskol), and I recovered from my excitement at finally meeting one of their sect, we had an interesting conversation covering agriculture and liturgics.

Now that some of my book knowledge has been verified by an adherent, allow me to share a couple Old Believer particularities:

Correct

Old Believers cross themselves differently, aligning their thumb with their ring finger, which scholars believe to be the older fashion. A reason for their believing this change is important is that in Old Believer manner the index and middle fingers signify the two natures of Christ, and thus it is the two natures of Christ making the form of the cross, not the Trinity. Apparently there is currently a controversy amongst the Old Believers as to the orthodoxy of using icons of Christ where He is blessing in the newer manner. This is just the first of a vast array of liturgical differences; each of which they have a theological explanation for their superiority - some of which they are probably right about.

Slavonic cultural traditions are fused with religious traditions of the Old Believers. Men do not cut their beards, women do not cut their hair, and they attend liturgy in traditional attire that an Athonite would call above and beyond the call. (The man I spoke with was dressed in tee-shirt, jeans and an old ball cap, which lets you know the degree to which they respect our liturgy.) Additionally, most of them take traditional peasant careers, especially farming. For the Old Believer, unwesternized pre-Nikonian Slavicism is Orthodoxy, and they are willing to be martyred for this belief.

RSA Animate - Crises of Capitalism

2011-01-21T20:01:00.000-08:00

Stuff White People Dislike, Part 2 - The Cynocephali

2011-01-20T18:11:00.000-08:00

"Whence have you come?" said Decius, "and what is your name?" "I am a Christian," said Christopher, "and Reprobus was my name before I believed, but Christopher has been my name since my baptism. My face tells that I am of the race of the Dogheads."

-The Passion of St. Christopher

Get to Know the Original neglected to inform you of the following:

During the later half of the ninth century, a monk from Brittany, by the name of Ratramnus, wrote an epistle concerning the Cynocephali, dealing with the subject of whether they were to be considered human and if they could be baptized. His conclusion being they could indeed be baptized, though their race should generally be classified as less than human, despite their being descendants of Adam.

You may ask yourself, "Who were these Cynocephali? And why were they being subjected to such overt racism?" Herodotus described the Cynocephali as men with the heads of dogs. They were believed to have lived at the edges of the known world, where they feasted on the flesh of men.

Tales of the Cynocephali have made it into Orthodox life by way of various Saints. There is St. Mercurius, who was accompanied into battle by two dog-headed men, who had murdered and consumed his grandfather prior to being confronted by an angel and converted to Christianity. In Cappadocia, there is an icon of St. Andrew of Cynocephali, about which I would very much like to learn more.

The ultimate dog-headed man story involves one of the Church's most venerated Saints, which many will recognize as pictured to the right. Many newly baptized choose him as their patron without knowing his full story.

An alternate depiction (left) of St. Christopher is that of St. Christopher Cynocephali. The Irish version of the Passion of St. Christopher introduces the Saint thusly:

There was a persecution of Christians in the time of the emperor Decius, and the holy man Christopher was taken and tortured like the others. Christopher was exceedingly wise, and had observed that the Lord assisted those of the heathen who believed just as much as he assisted Christians. Now this Christopher was one of the Dogheads, a race that had the heads of dogs and ate human flesh. He meditated much on God, but at that time he could speak only the language of the Dogheads...

To the right is a Romanian icon of St. Christopher the Dog-headed dating back to the 17th century. In Transylvania he is a popular part of the local folk Orthodoxy, where his image is often painted on the walls of homes, as he is believed to ward off evil spirits.

Of course we now live in a time and place were it is impossible for us to believe that dog-headed cannibals inhabit the dark corners of the remaining Libyan and Turkish forests. I believe that in many ways this is unfortunate, and so, at some level, sympathize with DBH's desire to believe in fairies since, if we cannot believe in the fey, we cannot believe in dog-headed men, dragons or men living in the bellies of fish.

Then again, does it matter if Saints such as Christopher, George and Jonah truly existed, or (if they did exist) whether their stories are completely factually correct? It seems a little silly to rewrite the lives of saints to fit into a scientifically plausible narrative, such as in the case of Saints Christopher and George, where St. Christopher is turned into either merely an ugly man or a barbarian, and St. George never slew a dragon to save a princess. (Even more laughable is trying to scientifically prove the possibility of something like St. Jonah living in the belly of a fish.) I tend to think that time is better spent dealing with the narrative as passed down to us - Cynocephali, dragon-slayings and all. Living in the modern world of genetic engineering, one has to wonder if the narratives and ancient treatise on saints and cannibals with the heads of dogs will be of more importance to our moral and spiritual understanding in post-Modernity than tales of an ugly Saint who may or may not have existed.

Stuff White People Dislike, Part 1 - Panagia Galaktotrophousa

2011-01-19T20:02:00.001-08:00

The Orthodoxy GTKTO will not tell you about. These ikons would never ever make it into the intro montage.

Websites, such as Orthodox Wiki, state that this icon is "rare", perhaps as a balm for their offended sensibilities. As I hear it, this icon is in fact common.

Hister Sighting

2011-01-16T11:22:00.000-08:00

I am such an idiot for liking this show. Whatever...

Sometimes my inner SWPL breaks through.

Merry Christmas!

2010-12-24T12:18:00.000-08:00

Call me uncultured, call me uncouth, but I am a big fan of Sir John Eliot Gardiner's interpretations of Bach.

2010-12-22T08:37:00.000-08:00

On Dobson, Zizek and Cheney Pelts

2010-12-21T15:52:00.001-08:00

At the dawn of my pubescence, my mother decided that the best way to discourage me from the evils of the world was to artfully apply a degree of Focus on the Family media saturation. Though I cannot recall any explicit conversations regarding the reasons for this approach, I do recall quite vividly the constancy of the radio shows and various propaganda tapes, which permeated our time in the car together. Despite my mom's undoubtedly good intentions, I found the propaganda for 1950's bourgeois values vaguely nauseating, if at times titillating in the degree of its sexual explicitness. If anything, I found this period of intended indoctrination created an intense desire within me to violently rebel against it. The paradox at hand was the degree to which my (then) agnostic father had, perhaps unintentionally, so deeply influenced me with Tolkien's thought. Therefore, I found the idea of fornicating deeply disturbing, for decidedly un-Dobsonian reasons. Additionally, drugging myself excessively interfered with my thought process, something I found undesirable.

So, finding myself in this sad situation, I decided on two "acceptable" ways in which to give Dr. Dobson the preverbal middle finger. The first was to acquire an acute case of sailor-mouth, and the second was to declare myself a communist - or, more accurately, to continue declaring myself a communist - I had first decided that I was a communist in the fifth grade, upon finding a copy of the Manifesto in one of my father's many boxes of books. It was perhaps obligatory that a young working-class Irish kid, who had a near hatred for his rich Regan-loving peers during his time at a private elementary school, with an agnostic one time union leader father, go through a phase of communism.

I never got deeply interested in politics, and so never read much other than the Communist Manifesto, various 70s era commune-themed science fiction novels and a small selection from various Irish Reds, most of which I can no longer recall. Were it not for Dobson, I most likely would have downgraded myself to a mere socialist a couple of years earlier than I did.

All of this is a long-winded way of saying that I have become intensely interested in the various discussions on Marxism that have been taking place on The Ochlophobist and Reditus. So much so that I recently listened to a two hour lecture by Zizek, and have decided to set aside the time to read some of his books. I think his criticisms of fundamentalism and the Left are right on.

Much like Dobson in my youth, the ridiculousness of the Neo-Cons who have involved themselves in these conversations has, at times, given me the urge to again declare myself a Communist out of mere spite.

To deflect the sort of accusations, well meaning and not, that I received with my post on Social Democracy, I must state that I am not a Communist. Neither am I a Social Democrat. I have a certain nostalgia for both, but I tend to agree with Belloc - despite his fanciful history of pre-Reformation England - in that the State should be necessarily at odds with big capital, and I remain skeptical that this could properly take place with communal or state ownership of "the means of production". (Though, given the choice, I would choose Socialism over Libertarianism or Neo-Conservatism.) Similarly, I do not share Owen's opinion that Hell was created for the bourgeois - though I find it hard to suppress a smile at the thought of hunting down and shooting bankers, CEOs, Wall Street executives and members of the Bush administration like the rabid curs that they are. (Who would not want a Cheney pelt for the garage?)

Morning Rain

2010-12-18T11:30:00.000-08:00

Diggery ready for work. He has not been too useful, other than killing mocking birds and digging out gophers, but he did help round up a run away sheep last week. I am certain this spring he will figure out the cottontails in the fields. I have been kicking the idea around of putting him on a coyote dog, and making an Irish Traveler-style Lurcher. Then we can go for the Jackrabbits.

I have a fondness for working dogs. You can tell from their look that they are useful, unlike that KC crap that is ruining the species. In the next couple years I would like to get a good terrier, to get the rats out of the corn and to go bushing for rabbits, opossum and coon. Should also help keep the feral cats out of the woodpile.

You can see the rabbit hutch in the corner. We will be getting our first batch of meat in a couple weeks.

The barn cats look for cover when the rain comes. This is about half of those that hang around here. A number of them are good mousers. Soon I am going to do some culling, but me wife is limiting my options to soft culling at the moment. It was easier when the coyotes did the job for me, but some escape artist yard dogs have kept the street coyote free for over a year. Which is good for the livestock, but has created a cottontail, ground squirrel and feral cat population explosion.

The stripped down bones is all that is left of the turkeys. The last one was mostly ground up. Val boiled the carcass for stock, and then it was thrown to the cats. The dogs only get raw bones. Val has got down my great grandmother's peasant-food recipe of noodles, stock and potatoes. To say I am a fan of peasant-food would be an understatement.

So far this year the rain has been spaced out well, and we are getting some good grass coming in. In a month or so I should not have to hay the ewes and lambs until June.

I am a believer in using recycled trash for my projects. A smallholder who does not reuse baling twine does not know what they are doing.
Mr. Angry gets locked up when breeding season is over. He has made it his life goal to mortally wound a human being. All that is saving him from a bullet between the eyes is that he puts some meat on my lambs. Once I have enough ewe-lambs out of him, he is either going to another farm or becoming sausage and mutton-burgers.

New Life

2010-12-17T17:22:00.001-08:00

After 5 ram lambs, Mr. Angry finally threw a ewe.

Anglo-Ameri-Ortho-Speak

2010-12-16T15:47:00.001-08:00

You have a hard heart that is puffed up with pride.
Shame on you.

I too grew up in Maryland during the time the Hart's did. My family also had hired help that just happened to be negro woman who was very dearly loved. I clearly understood the point of the Hart essay. I think you did too.
But instead of keeping still you choose to twist someone's fond memories to further your own selfish gains in a public forum.

What you have written is unloving and is the mark of an immature faith.
As an older Orthodox Christian woman I would encourage you to seek confession and consider what true metanoia is.
GM (Katherine Grossman)

---------------------------------------------

Dear Father,

My name is Katherine Grossman. I am a member of St. Elias Orthodox Church in New Castle, Pennsylvania and Father Gregory Long is my priest.

As an Orthodox Christian woman and a member of the Antiochian Archdiocese I feel it is my Christian duty to bring to your attention that a member of your parish maintains a personal blog that links by reference to St. Andrew’s Church.

I found some of the content, comments and “orthodoxy” from Mr. Neil Watson blog to be frankly quite shocking, and not representative of the traditional loving forbearance nor humility of the Holy Orthodox Church. I have tried not to form a negative opinion of St. Andrew’s Church and her members because of Mr. Watson.

I converted to Orthodoxy over 35 years ago. I well understand the challenges and spiritual growth cycle in newly Chrismated or Baptized Orthodox Christians. I have been told that many converts to Orthodoxy sin against the Church and act in ways, which bring shame upon Her due to over zealousness.

Unfortunately I have now seen it with my own eyes.

I beg you for the sake of the Antiochian Archdiocese and for the Orthodox Church as a whole, to please request that Mr. Watson not reference St. Andrew’s Church in his profile.

In Christ,

Katherine Grossman

Grove City, Pennsylvania

-------------------------------------------

Initially I pleasantly toyed with the idea of addressing the various iterations and possibilities of the undefined content of my blog which relegates it to the category of "shocking", its relation to class, race relations and playground authoritarianism, and the important, yet never obvious, consubstantial spiritual implications, with a brief aside on the unfortunate consequences to the Holy Archdiocese of Met. Philip and the reputation of the good peoples of St. Andrew's (with special regard to the negros, as the dear lady lovingly refers to them). Sadly, prior engagements have prevented such Kierkegaardian musings, which most certainly would have surpassed Fear and Trembling in its depth and scope in the examination of the very essence of what is 'good'. Unfortunately and regretfully in its stead, despite my deficiencies in the field of philology (which the good Dr Tolkien would have inevitably noted, had he chanced upon this essay in print), I shall briefly comment on the above linguistic patterns, namely, that which we shall henceforth refer to as Anglo-Ameri-Ortho-Speak (AAOS). That is, the propensity of a certain segment within the greater realm of American Orthodoxy to pattern perceived pious tonalities upon myopic readings of the Athonite parable tradition and the homiletics of fourth century Saints, which may provide the most astute with a framework in which appearances may be properly cultivated and preserved, to their greater detriment.

Though it is true that I have never met the (in)famous Magical Negro, and consequently cannot be certain I have met anyone I should dare classify as "holy" in the sense of experiencing the uncreated light. (Oh, dear. It seems as though, against my better judgment, my Neo-Palamite leanings have been revealed.) Fate, I fear, did not bless my family with the proper economic and social prominence to afford the borderline necessity of colored help, which is a supposition of the dignified man. Once, however, I encountered a nun who spoke to me by my Christian name, despite having never met me, though admittedly, she was not African-American and therefore, by association with a lack of an appropriate amplitude of skin pigmentation, not Magical. The fact of this renders said miracle suspect, leaving me to speculate on the near certain possibilities of coincidental mistaken identity or demonic possession on a Dostoevskian scale. Fortunately, I do in fact know that the few people whom, despite their atrocious lack of appropriate pigmentation, I would (verifying my duly noted immaturity, I am sure) consider to be of high spiritual standing and whom I have the good fortune of being intimately acquainted (excuse the poor choice of words - please preserve a sense of propriety for the dear lady's sensibilities by avoiding unnecessary foul and equally imprudent humour) would, in fact, not be caught physically inanimate and decomposing whilst communicating in such an affected manner (AAOS), which, I may point out, communicates a sense of spiritual superiority concomitant with ill-veiled false humility.

Good day, my lady. Now be off with you.

In perpetuity,
Mr. Neal R Watson, Esq.

Memories of Riverside Before the Fall. Or, Am I the Only One Who Misses Mosh Pits?

2010-12-15T16:31:00.001-08:00

(Warning: This post exceeds my usual four letter word limit)

Recently my wife was hit by another of her near constant sushi cravings (this baby is in grave danger of being SWPLish), so we dropped the children off with the in-laws and I took her to one of my old haunts - a little hole in the wall named Joe's, where you can get a roll for $3.50 and similarly priced booze. At the sight of the cheap artificial plum wine, Val was left wishing she was past her first trimester.

This was where my friends and I first experienced this cuisine. At the time not realizing Japanese etiquette, we went for the all you can eat special and proceeded to order the entire menu. About half way through our guts were splitting, and we had to bribe the manager in order to leave without paying for the unfinished rolls. One of the chefs had a thing for the elder of my two sisters, and would often send her unsolicited specialty rolls. Back then they attempted to present themselves as one of those upscale places, but they have since better realized their clientele, blasting ska, punk and 90s alt rock, with predictably matching décor and a door man fluent in English.

A few years back, one of my friends threw an alternate high school reunion party and most of the old crew showed up. I introduced Val to people I had only seen a handful of times since everyone dispersed about five or six years ago. Ever since there has been a bit of a running joke about my old friend Chris, who but for the encroaching baldness, has not changed at all since high school. My good friend and old roommate wondered at the working class chip on Chris' shoulder, which remains though he is now an engineer. As he said this, I noticed that he too was much the same person, though he worked in the same field - I never once saw him don a pair of slacks when he had his $70k/year office job. I think for some reason we all have that same chip on our shoulders, though we should now be petite-bourgeoisie. (I guess the saying, "You can take the girl out of the trailer, but you can't take the trailer out of the girl" is broadly applicable across class and gender lines.)

There were a few years when Chris and I hung out near constantly. His dad drove trucks, my dad loaded trucks. I listened to Ska, he listened to Punk, but we crossed a lot in the middle. We frequently hung out in the neighborhood of Joe's, since there was an independent record store, a Hot Topic, a Dickies Outlet and Save a Bug, which was important because we both drove 70's VW Bugs. To this day certain Ska albums bring to mind the smell of the grease and oil that would cover me as I made my weekly repairs on the thing. He and I "got" each other. He was the sort of guy who used the words "fuck" and "fuckin'" for nouns/pronouns/adjectives/verbs/filler/ect. He did not go to church unless he was feeling particularly fearful of hell, such as the time he went to the altar call at one of those crusades. I was trying semi-successfully to follow the new-found principles of my parents' Evangelicalism, so he would try to keep me away from drink, tobacco, pot and easy girls - all of which he liked very much.

Whenever I would stop by Chris' house to go to a show or whatever, his mom would nearly beg us to take off the thick chains we wore around our necks, for fear of providing a hand hold to our would be assailants. She would make us confirm that we would have each others' backs in case of the fight she was always certain we would get into. I was eventually able to ease her fears once I showed her how they could be easily removed and wrapped around a fist as a weapon - not that such a thing was at all practical.

I remember going to The Barn before the university shut it down, getting bruises from a fist or an occasional post when the mosh pit got out of hand. Out front one could get a decent nic hit from just breathing the billows of cigarette smoke that passed for air. I missed the final show, but I hear they tore up the place. They later tried to turn the Fox Theater into a replacement venue. The Skeletones played a couple of times, but it never took off, and then the Supreme Court lost its mind and the city eminent domained the place in their quest for the bourgeoisification of downtown. Not long after that they successfully closed down the pawn shops and banished the homeless.

Each year downtown would be closed for the Orange Blossom Festival, and the whole lot of us would go to listen to the bands, ogle scantly clad women and get funky tans in our wife-beaters. Every year, the previously mentioned local Ska/Metal band would play, though only once did they play that infamous song about the joys of cunnilingus. They were somewhat universally enjoyed by everyone under fifty. While in the crowd, I once had a man my father's age offer me a hit off his joint. At times there would be two or three mosh pits, which were so harsh I would rarely partake.

Eventually the city started to crack down on the revelry. First they banned mosh pits and hired security to enforce it. Then they banned the good music, which ended my involvement in the event. Eventually they got tired of the drunken fights. Deciding that the event could not be reformed to meet their new vision for the city ("Riverside Renaissance" bullshit) they ended it altogether.

Occasionally we would get tired of the pool hall and my friends would talk me into going to a party. Usually they were at this house back in the hills, thrown by this guy with a creepy dad who was always there, thinking he could fit in with the young folk. Though once we went to a Halloween party up in Mocking Bird Canyon, thrown by some spoilt aristocratic college student whose parents where off on vacation. Things got crazy pretty quickly, and for fear of his parents, the guy called the cops on his own party. After we made it past the police, we were blessed with the amusing sight of some drunks who somehow got their car up an embankment and safely through a half dozen pepper trees, while facing the wrong direction.

Yesterday my wife and I took the kids around downtown to see the lights and the animatronics around the Mission Inn. I look around and I see The Fox Theater is a performing arts center. There is a specialty candy shop and a place that sells designer cupcakes. For a few years now they have set up a temporary ice-skating rink during Advent, and now they have caged reindeer. The "Reggae" shop around the corner is still there - somehow the dispensaries have not put it out of business - and so is Le Sex Shoppe. Down the other direction remains the used bookstore, whose owner stole books from my father at a yard sale, and which obviously has a secondary revenue stream, given that I am almost always the only costumer ever in the damn place, and I never buy anything due to familial loyalty. Still, on the whole, the town is becoming unrecognizable. My children will never know it as I did.

Grit

2010-12-14T16:43:00.001-08:00

I am feeling particularly self-destructive today. When I was in cross country there was a mind game I would play, where I would tell myself once I reached some arbitrary landmark, I could slow down. Once I met this goal, I would find the grit within myself to set a new marker, repeating the game continuously until I reached the finish line. The secret of the game being to never set my sights too far.

Today is a struggle between grit and depression, a psychological game of reaching my next marker - the 25th of December - the day my sick/personal/vacation leave resets. I feel as though I will not make it.

My wife and I set up a goal a month or so back. A real finish line. The plan is to get licensed and receive a raise. Then the money will be used to buy and pay off a quarter-section in the northern end of the state, between two of the nation's foremost experts on my disease, and where churches and monasteries abound. I will go on permanent disability, and we will raise some sheep and cattle - enough to pay for the land, but few enough to not be a great burden - the Feds can pick up the rest. Perhaps then my children can know me as something other than the Dr. Jekyll who leaves for work, only to return as the Mr. Hyde who takes up residence on the couch each evening.

Is the plan escapist? Of course. Escapist plans are never what they are cracked up to be, but I expect living on a bit of land in the country will be preferable to Section 8 housing in Riverside. That is the alternative, because I sure as hell am not working the next ten years to pay off a house in the burbs. It is either this or throwing in the towel.

We gave ourselves ten years, but days like today make me wonder if that is possible. Can I possibly keep this up for another ten years? Can I get myself licensed and make myself valuable with this dysfunctional mind, in the constant fog of chemo? I do not know. When I think of it that way I feel like giving up and letting the tide of destruction wash over me.

Keep the goals close. Eleven more days and I can call in sick. No. Forget that. Two more hours and I can go home.

Break is over.

DBH and the Magical Negro

2010-12-07T15:42:00.001-08:00

After taking offense to an abbot's opinion that holiness is not possible outside the Orthodox Church, DBH takes the opportunity to inform the world of what Orthodoxy 'truly' teaches through his latest article. In his sage manner, The Eastern Orthodox Theologian weaves the Mammy/Magical Negro narrative of his late family servant as proof positive that holiness does indeed exist beyond the bounds of the Church - simultaneously proving that it is indeed possible to be unintentionally offensive whilst airing grievances against another unintentional offense.

After reading the article, I was left with a variety of questions. Such as: How can someone who purports to be an intellectual have such a knee jerk reaction to a vague answer to a vague question? Does DBH pray to his Mammy, or is he conflating virtue with holiness, and perhaps not disagreeing too greatly with the offending abbot? Would the Hart family have allowed a real aunt to die in a dilapidated nursing home? If not, would that make them more or less virtuous? Has DBH lost his wit and thesaurus, or has he taken to writing from his iPhone between classes? Would Spike Lee bitch-slap him after reading this self-conscious yet unintentionally racist anecdote?

After spinning tales of Magical Negros and fairies, The Eastern Orthodox Theologian nearly has me on the edge of my seat waiting for the tales he has in store for us. Dragons? La Chupacabra? Lazy Mexican day laborers? Only time will tell.