Pulling Weeds

This blog entry was originally private. I'd decided to just write privately. I did one entry, which was a version of this one and then didn't do anything for ages.

As I sat down to write again my mind was flooded with issues.  There were dilemmas to be discussed about signing up with a friend of mine who has started a Labor campaign for the seat in Southern River against Peter Abetz ,who is a good guy!!!

There were my lamentations about doing something constructive. LIfe will be over and I won't have contributed anything apart from leaving children on the planet. And what  is the point of that if they don't have a life worth living. 

That said, I constantly struggle with the idea that we are totally caught up in the ideology of the age and I think that last comment is an example of that. This belief of consumption and contribution and self centredness. You might draw the conclusion that life is about making your presence felt, that the world was aware of you. Actually Alain De Botton tweeted recently words to the effect: 

"People who want to be famous generally had parents who took the media a bit too seriously."

But what if God is about the experience of existence. He exists and His existence is the experience of love in trinity. It sounds crazy at one level but I'm looking up through the smog, filth and haze of human experience where every weekend I look at the weeds and think - I should do something about that and then think, why bother, they'll only come back.

Old men weeding their lawns. Holy cow! That's what your life comes to. Weeding lawns. All the potential of human existence and you weed lawns. But then what does it amount to. 

So what is the alternative? Creating an impression of who you are in the minds of others. What are you embedding in the minds of others? An impression of you. So what? So what if they think you're x, y, or z? What the hell do they actually know about you. That's why I think it's all meaningless if there's no God.

At one level it makes sense there's a God. All this magnificence about us. I dont mind that it's all for Him. If the eternal mind of God has a place for me, great. It makes no sense to look at the universe and go, yep it's random. The brilliance of human existence is so complicated and magnificent that it makes sense that there's a God. 

I'm watching a doco about WWI and it strikes me as largely pointless. What a daunting, mindless, waste of life. Serbia wants to be free of Austria and so kills the Arch Duke kicking off what is in effect a series of dominoes. Crazy. It makes the arbitrariness and seeming meaningless of life very challenging.

And while I have never read it from beginning to end, I think Ecclesiastes is the wisest book in all the world. It sums up exactly what I think. This stuff of killing and weeding goes on endlessly and it means nothing. Therefore worship God. God is worth worshipping. The revelation reaches through like light into a dusty room and my soul rejoices. Praise God. I can live with that.

Hypocrisy in an age of surveillance

You know what killed this for me?

The stultifying discovery that students are reading my blog.  That terrible moment when one of them said out loud, “Hey! You have a blog.” My mind flashed through what was actually written in the thing. Should be okay. Should. But it reminded me I couldn’t relax.

 Imagine my delight when another student walked up to me and asked, “Your blog isn’t about anything. Why do you write it?”

IT DOESN’T SAY ANYTHING BECAUSE IF IT DID SAY ANYTHING IT COULDN’T BE SAID!!!!

The question was nevertheless a good one.

The reason it irritated me was because it was true.

A friend of mine recommended that I create a pseudonym and write under that but I found it overly complicated. Creating false emails, creating false names. At the end of the day either don’t bother writing or try to be careful coz’ the damn thing’s in print.

It is SO the age of surveillance.

The age of hypocrisy.

It is amazing though. Has there ever been a time when you wanted to be published and didn’t have to get a publisher? Then you would argue about what you could and couldn’t say. Then, carefully come to some agreement about what was possible to say. What you wanted to say. I believe a lot of thought went into it. Then it was published. Completed.

Not so much now.

Of course, who the hell is reading it?

It is SO the age of surveillance.

The age of hypocrisy.

The things they will lynch you for are the very things they themselves wish they could do but pride themselves on some perceived success in a given area. The travesty committed by all of us on a daily basis is breathtaking. Scorning someone for being X,Y,Z! Then failing to recognize that you are judging people for being less than you. That’s what folk are doing when they let rip about one another. They do THIS?! We pontificate about it because we don’t do X! “Therefore, I am better than them,” we assure ourselves. 

Tragically this has befallen Churchianity. I suppose it must have always been like this. I call it Churchianity because I don’t know if I have seen Christianity. Most of what we bring to the table is our particular background/denomination. Really, if we were Christians we would be absolutely cool with rubbing shoulders with Catholics, Greek Orthodox, Baptists, Lutherans, Uniting Church, Anglicans… you get the picture. But we’re quietly assured that we’ve got it right. We might say, “Hey, we’re not perfect.” But quietly we think: ‘Yeah, we’re not perfect, but they are MORE not perfect than us.’

It’s like having a BBQ on a burning ship.

Everyone stares at the sizzling steak while someone casually says, “I’m glad that fire’s contained.” Meanwhile the ship creaks as somewhere beams collapse in the crackling heat. We’re all looking at our particular fire we think is contained while hell breaks loose.

I suspect it’d be like this wherever you work or live. Where-ever we think we’ve got our particular fire contained you can rest assured that you shouldn’t rest assured.

Bleak.

Not really. What if it was…fact. What if the things we thought we were building weren’t really all that important. What if the things that were really important were the things we rush past each day. That, given our minds and how they need to be occupied, that we had constructed importance in the ‘jobs’ we had to do and didn’t take time to have the patience to look after what we’re supposed to be looking after. Our nearest and dearest.

BORING.

That’s why people fight. It’s interesting. We love gossip. We love drama. We love to watch the deck collapsing. Provided it’s the ship across the way from us. We all tut and shake our heads waving empty hands at the row boats on our ships muttering something about there not being time to do anything.

I’d like to thank Jo who has said twice to me now that I should blog. Apparently my quips entertain him and he has expressed that they should be written down in a blog. It reminded me I needed to write. I am also reminded that as someone who writes, part of the deal is that someone reads it. That someone else’s brain rolls the ideas about and appreciates it, considers it, hates it…whatever.

Super glasses man. We love him.

We're tired of having crap. Tired of the stuff building up around us. So at Christmas we decided rather than give a gift that was material we bought a goat! Just kidding now. I mean, that goat we got  had babies and now we have baby goats. Kids, if you will. That's entirely a lie. We decided we'd get a family zoo pass.

So this morning we decided to go off to the zoo.
There were a bunch of animals there.

Anyway here's the bit worth telling.

Taz stops to take out her sunglasses and drops them. POW. Out goes a lens.

I break into a Latino accent, "Man these glasses are BULLSHEET! Aint no way yo ever get them back in there."

She sighs because all the kids are there and I'm yelling stuff with an accent in the middle of the zoo. Or maybe she's sighing because she just got these glasses after I accidentally snapped the arm off her other glasses.  I figure, better to snap the arm off that rather than someone who matters.

All of a sudden there is this giant man standing right behind us. He is HUGE. He is blonde and really good looking and really well built. He says, "can I take a look at those?" And he gentle takes the glasses. Within seconds he has them fixed while he says, almost apologetically,"When you have glasses for fourteen years you know how to fix them." He begins to hurry away and then turns back to ask, "Do you need lens cleaner, 'cause I have some?" Taz laughs and says no. There's a moment and then I yell out "THANK YOU GLASSES FIXER MAN!!!" EXACTLY like when someone gets rescued in a Superman film.

My favourite quote, and has been for years is: "Things are always darkest just before they go pitch black." Thank you Sylvia Plath. That, by the way has nothing to do with the trip to the zoo.

Thinking about all this....

Every time I decide to shut up shop on this thing I reread it. I get such a kick out of it that I decide to leave it be. I mean, you (and by you I mean me - laugh out loud frickin' crazy right?!) realise that you're the only one reading this. Not sure why I take so much care with it. Well, use to.

Now I neglect it like I neglect those folks out the front of EVERYWHERE who collect money. Hate that. So many of them are back-packers who earn more per hour than goes in their pvc money collecting thing. Go figure. My friend thinks they' re a cover for organised crime and money laundering. le sigh.

Also the layout is rubbish. Looks terrible. Needs to be said. FIX IT!

Hey maybe this is my New Years resolution to just write crap into this thing and not get so anal about being careful about what I write. Although one does need to be careful. This year I'm going to put up more of MY photos. That's right I'm yelling that. Ah, the memories. btw the pictures are never random. The Swan Brewery is a significant place to me. Haunting for may reasons. Not the least of which is that there are many really old photos with it in the background and it kind of adds perspective about the passage of time. Also significant because on the site there used to be these beautiful round rocks that the Noongar believed were sacred. They were stolen. Because of the lack of evidence of this the people could never cite this as a sacred site and so the redevelopment rolled on. Oddly enough I read about the rocks and their theft in an issue of the Daily News dating back to the 1880s. Don't quote me but it was something like that. Hate to have to prove that.