I saw her as the day died -
a sprite, a dream, a flight of fancy sweet.
And she, she was held
in the prism of my eyes
when through the skies of lonely dusk
a beam had burned -
through the overcast
and past my tears.

They also serve who only stand and wait.

a new leaf

I'm thinking about a new direction for this site - abject commercialization. I've decided that as soon as possible I'll do this website up with frills like a store and a daily painting and a whole new look, and I'll design it to be a non-profit, profit-generating thingamabob.

See, there's this guy named Tyson Malo. He has a wife, too, and kids, but he's the one I knew at school. He was our dredlocked, counter-cutting edge class valedictorian, and after he graduated, instead of dinking around like most of us, getting jobs and being silly, he went to Bolivia with his family and started an orphanage. Just like that - no international organization, no fat board-of-directors bedecked in jewelry - just themselves and a desire to do something different, something right.

That's the sort of thing I can whole-heartedly endorse - the sort of brazen thing that I'm too much of a poultry to do myself.

So I'm thinking I'll get someone to do up this site, real businesslike. Maybe I'll talk them into doing it for a percentage of the take. Then I'll get my bum-end in gear and paint like a crazy fool and get prints made like a mad Hessian. I'll get my art students to donate their best work, and we'll sell it all and give ALL the profits to Tyson's dealio thingy.

Isn't that a fabulous idea? I knew you would. Well, then... lets!

liner forty-niner

I don't like stepping on lines, be they cracks in the sidewalk or whatever. It's neurotic, I know - my mum's back really isn't in any danger. Nonetheless, there it is. So I will step on no lines, and instead cross waaaaaaaaay over an ethical one by posting one of my fourteen year old student's drawings up here, just to show how amazing these kids are.

Having violated all kinds of proprietary and decency boundaries, I will continue on with an exploration of the meaning of my lineaphobia.

It may have started with the animated movie, "The Land Before Time", in which an itty-bitty little Pleisaur walks across a cracked desert singing the step-on-a-crack song, but I think it more likely might have been the four square.

When I was a wee lad there was a game we played called four square, where there was a large square chalked onto pavement that was divide into (oddly enough) four squares. The goal was to move from square one to square four by bouncing the ball into the squares ahead of you in such a way that it would bounce more than once before the other kids could touch, kick or elbow it into someone else's square. There weren't too many rules beyond that that I can remember, excepting maybe the one that said you couldn't bounce the ball on the chalk line.

If that happened, for some inexplicable reason we would all scream "LINER-FORTY-NINER!" and the kid who'd made this heinous error would move back to square one, or out, depending on if there was a line up.

You probably played the same game and are bored out of your gourd by my description. But I really do want to know why we screamed "LINER-FORTY-NINER" if you would be so kind as to un-dark or en-lighten me. It won't exonerate me of my copywritten sins, but it may make me smile, which, as John Piper might say, is the ultimate goal of everything.

Fred and Sally

Once upon a time a little girl named Sally had a pet wasp, whom she had raised from when he was just a squirmy little larvae. She loved him very much, and his name was Fred. Every day, Sally and Fred would play together, zipping down the hallways at school and attacking Sally's enemies, or just romping around in the meadows, killing butterflies. Fred and Sally loved to kill butterflies, who are weak and colorful and therefore deserve to die.

One night, Fred decided to go for a buzz. He creeped out of his hole in the wall and very quietly tippy-appendaged across the room and under the door without waking Sally. Then he flapped his fabulous little non-colored diaphanous wings and zoomed off towards the front of the house, intent on seeing the world.

So far, this has been a happy little, family friendly story. What I haven't told you, however, is that not everything was sweetness and light in Sally's household. Her father, who was (and probably still is) a plumber, had in the course of his job been stung several times by wasps, and took a very matter of fact view about the relative worth of a wasp. He thought that keeping a pet was unsanitary, dangerous, and downright weird.

Fred's foray into freedom was just the sort of thing Sally's father had been waiting for, so when he heard Fred coming (Fred was a BIG wasp) he rolled up his newspaper, stood up, and WHACKED Fred across the room. Fred was taken aback, sideways, and pretty much knackered. He fell to the floor with one wing missing, and was barely able to pull himself with his remaining three legs under a sofa. Sally's father took an exploratory swipe under the sofa, which cost Fred another leg and a bit more emotional stability.

Fred was in terrible pain. He was alone, and before he blacked out he thought, "if I can just hold on until Sally gets here, I'll be all right".

The next morning, Sally woke up and found that Fred was gone. She wandered downstairs, calling his name. Her father had already gone to work, but Fred heard her calling and managed to pull himself out from under the sofa. He began to drag himself towards the sound of her voice, trailing a thin track of slime out behind him.

Well, you can just imagined what Sally did when she saw Fred.

Not only was it obvious that he'd sneaked out without permission, but there he was, lying on the floor with two legs, one wing and a trail of slime leading under the sofa. He was weak, and pathetic, so without a second's delay she picked up a book and squashed Fred flat, because everyone knows that tolerating weakness erodes the foundations of a good and just society.

The End.

the kid

Perpossibly one of the reasons why I have been a little undermotivated in the painting/writing department is that teaching is such a good fit for me that I tend to feel fulfilled enough after coming home that this burning compellation to go out and produce a masterpiece is doused to the point where mostly what I want to do is house stuff, like toodling around fixing something or playing with the kid.

Today, for instance, I started off class with a discussion of the following quote of the day, which ended up morphing into "Josh Rants about Stuff". Mother Theresa said that "No one has a right to a superfluity of wealth while others are dying of starvation and suffering from every kind of want". I mentioned how it was quite a timely issue, as during an election cycle one way politicians get elected is by flatteringly pandering to the pride and selfishness of their constituents by going on and on about their "rights", which to me is an amoral and un-Christian concept.

I then asked the class to imagine they're sitting down to a great feast, while next to the table a malnutritioned child is wailing and snotting. I suggested that we could all agree that a person who would thoughtlessly sit through that meal, thinking only about what could have been made a bit better and how good it all tastes would be really, really sick.

What then, I asked, if you moved the child to the other side of the room? I think we'd all agree that the person who'd cavalierly attack said meal would still be performing a fairly depraved action. What if the child was in the next room over, and although you couldn't see him or her, you could still hear the cries? How wrong would it be to go ahead without helping the child? Or what if the child was across the street in another house, but someone was calling you every hour with updates... "yep, still starving"... what then?

How far away does the child have to be for it to be someone else's problem?

I reminded them that we are some of the wealthiest people in the history of the world. Money is power and, as Spiderman's uncle would say, with great power comes great responsibility. We are responsible, so what will we do?

I talked of Jesus, and how we like to talk about who's in or out of our "Jesus Club" while ignoring the fact that the people who are really out are the one's who've ignored him in his suffering, as it is lived out by people on this earth. We are at a Christian school, I reminded them, and we are supposedly preparing to live out our lives as Christians. So what did Jesus say a Christian is? Someone who doesn't ignore the dying child.

Then I challenged them to move beyond wallowing in guilt and to think instead of the practical ways in which they can be Christians in the world. Mother Theresa didn't set out to fix Calcutta, she set out to love Jesus wherever she found him in those whom no one else wanted to love. That is why the world was changed. I reminded the students that it wasn't their job to fix the world, that that was something that was being done, gradually (OH MY FARFIGNOOGAN HOW GRADUALLY!) by God. It was their job to love the world by dying to themselves.

And then I handed out grades.

I love this stuff. I love pointing out to kids how I and they and we and them all tend to live selfish, petty little consumerist lives, claiming to know the truth but wallowing instead in lies. I love how even though I know they're getting the opposite message more often and more strongly than I could ever give it, that I am loving them the best way I know how by bringing to them what I believe to be the truth about what it means to be a follower of Christ. I love it and I believe that each little voice counts, and that maybe - just maybe - one or two people will take slightly different, slightly more loving paths than they might otherwise have done.

why I'm not voting in this election

1. I'm lazy.

2. I'm cynical. I think politicians are all weasels, and what's the point of voting if all you're voting on is which color fur will be one the rodent with beady eyes and pointed teeth who'll be signing off on the next perversity that will sustain "The American Way of Life" (read: mysoginistic, hedonistic, selfish, no-holds-barred Capitalist, piggist, deity-claiming-and-then-blaming, self-congratulating idiocracy).

3. I'm confused. I grew up in Peru, raised by one American and one Canadian. Most of my favorite authors are British. I really really dig Mexican food and I think I'd rather live in Spain than most other places. I know a little bit about a lot of places and have a hard time caring very much about any of them. I just moved back here after mostly being Canadian for the past ten years.

4. I'm a racist. I think the human race is comprised of foolish people who think no further than their own wallets. I'm pretty sure that in a democracy of such people, whomever gets chosen will be, morally speaking, pretty much diametrically out of whack with me and mine. So I refuse to participate.

5. I'm a realist. I'm fairly confident that democracy is just another way of pacifying the masses while those with power continue to wield it as they see fit and do what they must to keep it. I think nationalism is stupid and dumb and immoral.

6. I'm a coward. I have a sneaking suspicion that I'm living in one big sinking ship. It's what happens to empires, and I'm not really sure that when this one starts to list I want to be seen holding one of the oars.

7. I'm lazy.