on Truth

In my eye She sparkles as a constellation of contradiction. Eyes bright, laughter like water over polished stones, quick and ready smiles. Inside Her, the current I can hear most often is not laughter, but tears. She is both sorrow and joy and dances along the interminable line between them, hoping for reprieve.

I would like to tie this up, to give you a happy ending to sing to your children in their beds of innocence. That, it seems, is what a writer can and should do - bring stability and resolution to an insecure world of mystery.

But people are not rocks, and cannot be boxed. They are not two dimensional, or three. People defy dimensionality, as does She. This story, then, does not end. She dances still, a mirage barely existing on the fringe of my perceptions. I doubt Her even as I demand Her, crave Her.

What is there to desire except a dream - to crave, except a mystery? If desire is the recourse of the fearful, then why would anybody ever desire the easily attainable and drab reality of simple facts? Fear would always intercede at the key moment when desire can be fulfilled.

I will accept this. I will try to dance away from desire and accept mystery in the only state I can fully own - reverent awe. Where desire would stop Her dancing, I will set her free and dance my own steps, eyes wide open, trying desperately to time my music to hers.

buy more happiness

My landlord had an eccentric neighbor who used to ride around bareback on a large black stallion with a parrot on her left shoulder. That’s interesting.

Chris (my imaginary friend) and I had a conversation last night about traveling, and how he figured the best part is that you get to meet lots of interesting people. I reckoned that they are interesting because they’re different than you. If you were their neighbor, you’d probably just see them as boring old Vladimir next door, whose collection of exotic animals keeps breaking out and eating your potatoes.

It sounds good, doesn’t it? That the area around us is full of all these fascinating people and we just have to realize it. Still, I can’t help thinking that the folks in my town are a wee bit blasé – aside from the horse-riding parrot-lover, of course. I am on a hobby farm, but basically it’s just a vestigial hanger-on adrift in a tide of land “development”. Suburbia is all around. Rows on rows of identical houses (not homes) where people all eat the same nasty, homogenized, preservative-laced foods and go to the same dehumanizing jobs. They watch the same movies, listen to the same music, wear the same clothes, and actually buy the same magazines to tell them what to think about it all.

I pretend I’m not a part of it, but when it comes down to it, given the choice of two pairs of thrift-store jeans, I will buy the one I think looks “cooler”, which might or might not be those that fit most comfortably while providing shelter from the elements. And if you put me in a room with a TV and a movie rack full of pointless, entertaining drivel, I’ll watch it all.

I gotcha – I read what you’re going to say – “don’t be so extreme, Josh. It’s important to conform a bit to cultural standards so you can be part of all the important things that are going on. Besides, while most people might be like you say, when I choose what I’m going to wear and watch and eat, I’m different. I’m an individual in the midst of conformity.”

To which I reply, hmmm. If you happen to find yourself plunked down in the middle of a mental institution, doing the things everybody else is doing in order to fit in doesn’t make you cool or enlightened or an individual – it makes you a mental. Very few people in this loony bin of a world actually think there is something wrong with them. Our culture is sick, though, and if you look at yourself today and find that you are what the masses might call “well adjusted”, then something’s wrong.

My challenge is this: Don’t be conformed to the patterns of your world, but be transformed by the renewing of – not your wardrobe – but your mind.

high anxiety

I'm having another one of those weird sourceless anxiety-ridden moments. Why ever for? Probably someone just said something negative to me and I started to doubt myself.

I feel at these times a desire for immolation. Or spontaneous combustion. Or something. There's a line in a Radiohead song that says, "I wish, I wish for something to happen - to blow me sky high". That's a bit of what I'm saying. I hate how everything I do leaves me a tinge unsatisfied. Is it just that it's designed that way so I don't get satisfied and I shouldn't dwell on it? Probably.

Still, I hate how all my effort leaves me incomplete. I hate how the lust for money weasels its way into my interstitial tissues and makes me ungrateful for bounty... but I don't want to asceticize myself. In my heart I believe it won't work.

Grace, you say? Accept grace? Fine, then. I accept. Hum dee dum dum dum. Nah, not really working. No warm glow. I keep thinking that if I could just work harder and master my art and produce more and acheive recognition then somehow I'd be satiated. Then I tell myself, "no, Josh. That's not how it works. The only thing that can ever fully satisfy you is (barring the success of a Snickers) melting into God, and you can't have that until you're dead." Then I tell myself that I'm just saying that because I need a good excuse to avoid hard work and the metaphysical emptiness of soul that attends the striving after hollow status-markers is a pretty darn good one.

Then I pop back on up to the need for self-denial and I equate that with an acceptance of lifelong artistic anonymity and poverty and call it good, since I know that there are many better artists in poorer places who have even less chance of "making it" than I - so what right do I have to peer adulation?

Garsh. If you read my regular entries here, you probably think I wander around all day beating myself in the forehead with a piece of plywood. The truth is, I don't. I spent forty-five minutes this morning shoveling chicken-poo laden shavings and I'm pretty well certain that not once in that entire time did I contemplate with anguish my tragic isolation in the universe. And I also danced around the kitchen in my boxers to some idiotic song I had stuck in my head. And they were polka-dotted.

With that mental image, then, I'll leave.

not getting any younger

A while back I was at table with some friends of mine, licking my plate of the remnants of a scrumptious homemade meal. Light, laughter and contented banter were the order of the evening. All of a once the Chinese foreign exchange student present, whom we shall call “K”, remarked to the lady of the house that some girl with whom he’d done something or other wasn’t old like her. Everyone got shocked and “oooohed” ominously and made little comments like, “watch it, buddy”. All in good fun, right?

“K” was ineffectively trying to back pedal and although I knew that when I stick my foot in the fray it generally ends up in my mouth I decided to come to his rescue. In a loud voice I interjected, “Well, you’ve got to understand that ‘K’ comes from a culture where age is venerated.” The laughter stopped and it was generally agreed upon that I’d made a good save and wasn’t that clever?

I was still bothered. It disturbed me to think that as good-natured as the whole thing was, the group was so lightning-quick to jump on “K” for his comment. We were a bunch of thinking, ostensibly-educated people who instinctively reacted in attack mode against a culturally uninformed person. What was he uninformed about? That here in Canada we view aging differently than the Chinese. We loathe it, fear it, distance ourselves from it (Lock them in homes! Quickly!), and spend a fortune on carcinogenic creams in an effort to stave off its effects. We do this, I think, because aging precedes death, which terrifies us.

Do we really believe that by all this we are somehow dodging the old death angel? What a joke! We can walk against the escalator if we want, but it will just speed up to compensate. In the end, the ride will be over and we will have spent a whole lot of it panting and looking backwards. The only one fooled will be us.

It’s time to learn something from the Chinese, young culture that they are: Aging is natural. Old people are a treasure, filled with stories that - were we to listen to them - might save us a war or two. Sure, they can be crotchety and shoot rock salt at us when we try to steal their apples – but that’s half the fun! My challenge to you is this – take care of your body but accept your age. Value the elderly and teach younger people to do the same or you know what? Someday they’ll lock you away – and you’ll deserve it!

collegiate barking

Let me tell you about my senior year at University, which should have been entitled "University : in which I Behave as an Ass - Poo and Everything".

This story has a lot to do with a lot of things, but mostly with girls who, through a long string of bad choices happened to occupy at the time in question a rather unmerited percentage of my brain space. "Oh, no", you charitably interject, "that's just normal, Josh. Boys are like that in college". Perhaps, but why would I want to be normal?

Anyway, the gist of it could probably be described by sharing with you one key, "oh-my-monkeybottom-i-wish-i-could-forget-it" moment. Let's go, then, to the lower cafeteria, bustling with people. I was one of them, along with my freind Dave Weins and the Resident Director in Charge of Keeping the Rules Unbroken. Up came a freshman female, a cute little number I recognised from "around". Introductions were dispensed with by the RD, and before my polite upbringing had a chance of kicking in I said - get this - "would you like to go to the Back Forty with me?" That's the Ass part. You see, the Back Forty Acres were the place where, rumor had it, college boys went to practice Linguistics.

I, being mostly terrified of girls, would probably have run screaming if she'd said yes. However, this was the year in which I'd turned over a new leaf, and fear wasn't about to keep me from acting like an idiot. No longer, I had decided, would I be that forgettable little goober who looks fifteen. Instead, I would flirt and chat and do things like open my mouth in public (from the top of a really tall tree) that would get me noticed. I decided, in short, to become "cool and popular".

Why did I do this? In a word, compensation. Even short mid-pubescent folks want to feel desireable. I was impatient to grow up and unsure if people would like the real me, so I created a caricature of myself and ended up throwing a way a lot of time I could have spent painting. Or playing chess. Or eating my own scabs. My poor use of time is not really the point, though. The point is that I didn't accept who I was as valuable and I thought I could shortcut to maturity by getting other, more femaler people to tell me I mattered.

On I struggled, chasing pretty faces without the gumption or the will to maintain an image of cool. I think I was perpetually aware of the silliness of what I was doing and when the crunch time came I'd back down, still maintaining the fantasy of a female ideal who would love me for who I was, unprovoked bouts of insanity and everything.

Don't feel sorry for me, though. I got what I deserved. The girl in the lower cafeteria put me in my place. The soccer team hottie laughed about three minutes and then hung up forever when she found out it was me walking across campus wearing that ridiculous Peruvian shoulder bag she deemed a "purse". The girl I charmed in the back of the theatre as we ignored the movie "Hannibal" together discovered I didn't want to be a missionary in Djabouti. And the girl I liked the most? She who, in another world, would have suited me best? She came up behind me as my two best freinds loudly mocked me for being a girl-obsessed freak. At that moment she, being of good sense and knowing whom she was, put it together with the reputation of patheticness I had undoubtedly earned and walked away.

That's OK, though. I was who I was and I'm admitting it here. You also gotta know this - I didn't want to be. I wanted to be real, but fear of rejection (that omnipresent crippler) stapled my real mouth shut. It let me talk, but in someone else's words.

I like to think that I've grown up since then. Don't get me wrong - I still live in a fantasy world. I still pretend to be something I'm not. Still,I know myself better now and I work hard, even on this website, to let people see the real me. I married an incredible woman who loves my picadillos almost more than my perfections.

Every once in a while, though, I wish the path had not been so painful, or rocky. I wish I could traipse back through time and space, go to the lower cafeteria, and kick me an Ass.

the Proverbs of Josh

Oh, wow. You don't realize how internet-dependant you've become until you move to a place in podunkville where you shovel horse and chicken poo for the rent. Anya and I have been there a week and at last the mouse-pee smell has been eliminated from the stove. We even got five dead mice out from under a cubbard, so we're making real progress on killing off the olfactory circus that's been playing peanuckle in our snouts.

That, in case you didn't catch on, was my apology for utterly abandoning this site for so long (has it been two weeks!?). I swear I'll make up for it when I get my free month of internet started up in a couple of days. For now, having had my "fill of pee" has gotten me thinking about philosophy and so last night I sat down and wrote out a whole bunch of "Proverbs a la Josh". They don't necessarily follow a logical path and half of them may be hooey, but here goes:

*A porous encounter with truth is the only path to humility.

*Humility is the path to truth.

*Humility is not the equivalent of self-abasement. In fact, humility more closely resembles self-love.

*Pride is always fantastical, and therefore ridiculous. If not for its destructiveness, pride would be funny.

*Almost everything good is funny.

*Not everything we call funny is good.

*Omnicience is a prerequisite for true and complete love.

*Incomplete love is still good and worth pursuing.

*No one ever truly pursues that which he or she truly desires.

* Intelligence and pride are not symbiotically linked, neither are humility and stupidity.

*Everyone is stupid.

*Everyone is intelligent.

*The greatest aspiration of any human intelligence is to teeter on the furthermost reaches of its capacity saying "thanks". This state is mostly unattainable by most everyone but children.

*Childhood is a state of the soul, and has very little to do with age, except in most cases.

*Most everyone hates themself to some degree.

*Self-hatred is a form of pride.

*Pride most often disguises itself as self-love, which it is not.

*Self-love without humility is pride.

*Pride is unsustainable for more than a lifetime.

*The greatest danger at any time to any human soul is that it might abandon humble Reality for the cheap thrill of a prideful fantasy.

*If I am repeating myself, in various different word combinations, it is because that is all there is to life. Everyone repeats themself, over and over and over. The only question is whether they will be repeating the truth, or a lie. They rarely know the difference.

*Desire is selfish because it imagines that the self ought to have something it does not. The self is already complete, it only needs to accept completeness (ah, but in what does that completeness lie?).

*Desire is often mistaken as a catalyst for action. It is not. The catalyst for action is deficit. People do in order to fill. Desire is an ineffective way to change the world.

*If people were to truly live, they would do nothing. That is, they would do nothing "out of" themselves. They would do many things, but they would do them as a conduit of something greater than themselves.

*I have an 8"X10" on my wall of a dead rat in a skate shoe.

*Knowing may be half the battle, but nobody ever won half a battle.

*Selfishness is the shortest path to self-denigration.

*Fear is the primary emotional state of the comfortable. That is because comfort is a self-imposed illusion, which is scary.

*Philosophy without change is gibberish.

*Change without love is always destructive.

*Dogs are better than cats because they are more edible.

*Frustration is almost always a result of desire. Eliminate desire and you eliminate frustration. It is impossible to eliminate desire. Only the desire for God and the Truth and Love therein contained can ever result in any fulfillment because only that sort of desire is self-less, by which I mean it desires something truly other than itself.

*Selfishness is hatred. Self-less-ness is love.

*Very few people ever desire God. Generally they desire an image of themself that they project onto God.

*Here, then is the conclusion. Desire God, not yourself. If you do this, you will avoid interminable frustration. Desire and love God by eliminating selfishness form your life, one lie at a time. To love God is to love and fulfill yourself.

new things

I just drove a repoed car across America for a bank. That makes me part of the cruel machine, which confirms my hypocrital status. I'm getting a t-shirt made, I think. "Hypocrite", it'll say, in white letters across the chest. Since I'm doing this admittance, I suppose I'd better turn over a new leaf by starting to be less of a pointer of the finger. What's the motivation, if I'm aware I'm just going to turn around and muck things up myself?

So for the new year, that is resolution number one: start thinking of more positival slants on things.

And since we're in the business of upward directioning and the cliched world of broken self-campaign promises, I will now consider a few more.

Second, I will paint a whole lot more.

Third, I will be all businessey and such, for to make a go of it as a "professional".

Fourth, I'll stop making promises I've no intention of keeping.