Simple Lesson in Self Immolation

I was reminded the other day that I actually had a blog. That neglected pest of a thing that sits at the back door and stares at me whimpering with big sad eyes. I angrily rush past the door every day and wave it away, guilt ridden at it’s emaciated condition.

It’s not dead, won’t die, makes me feel guilty.

A colleague was lamenting to me today that there was not enough time to write or read. A condition I do not suffer as I’ve been teaching my area for quite some time now. I have an obligation to assist others and I am a little busy with that but holy cow does this damned thing bother me. I have no excuse.

What I wanted to share on this occasion was the opportunity I had to speak at a high school on the occasion of their Year Nine camp, late last year. I had been recommended by a chap I know who couldn’t fulfill his obligation as he was away doing work in Malaysia. With no trepidation the woman in charge – a deputy principle I think – checked what I was going to address on the topic of “Challenging Yourself”. I sent her the following:

Hi – (insert un-publishable name here) Just wanted to run some preliminary thoughts past you as to the talk to the Year Nines. I think the two nights might work well.

 In terms of working with Year Nines it's productive to engage them in some sort of conversation, getting their feedback about issues and then tying some of their ideas, beliefs, theories etc to broader areas of thought in Theology, Philosophy, Psychology (and other boring words). 

In terms of addressing the theme "Challenging Yourself" I'd like to start with social media and the increasing role things like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, blogs etc.. have in our lives and in our desire for community. 

Digging a little deeper it would be good to look at the students motivations and opinions about using these programs and then begin to draw how these tap into our deep seated desire for community (perhaps looking at how Neuroscience has found that we are hard wired for social activity) and how they work and also fail us at the same time. I won't be taking a ‘stranger danger’ approach to the new media, rather trying to explore the world these guys are engaging in. 

Very carefully without making too much noise about it I'd like to examine how these ways of approaching communication are very much self obsessive. They cause us to look very closely at a very superficial version of ourselves (I won't be coming across quite as blunt as this) and that when we begin to look at the very foundations of our Western Culture we find that the basis for successful living (which is what we ultimately want to achieve) is based upon being 'other' focused. (now whether I go to the following place all depends upon my engagement with the students) - But in alluding to the foundational principles of our culture I am addressing the Gospel - the event in which Jesus the Son of God enters and engages with humanity and invites us to participate with Himself, the Father and the Spirit - becoming involved in the eternal 'other' focused nature of God and therefore the foundation of life that resides in all of us as a deep seated and unrequited desire for community. This is the challenge we have. Superficiality/self-centredness  or eternal life. 

Failing that I can spend 2 evenings throwing M&Ms and Skittles at the kids. They usually dig that. 

in all seriousness it will start by looking like I may be a little like I'm not particularly going anywhere fast but we usually pick up speed as we go along. It is also unlikely that I'll get through all that material over the two nights - but I'll give it a red hot go.  

Needless to say – it was a disaster that haunts me still. They offered me a hefty sum of money to do this task – something I ultimately told them they could keep.

Before I did the talk I was speaking to a film maker friend of mine who was making a documentary on the very matter I was speaking on. We sought permission to film and were granted it, of course under the strict proviso that I was the one filmed and that none of the students would be identifiable. So, camera in hand, we arrived at the beachside camp.

It was a rather warm evening and the students were forced to sit on the floor. I already knew that I had one night to get through the material, but upon arrival I was informed that I had 45 minutes.

Then someone in charge got up and gave the most gormlessly threatening address to teenagers I think I had ever heard. It killed any spirit of fun or calm the night may have had present in it. It was pretty much a horse’s head in the bed.

And then I took the floor.

Thank you, scary lady.

The kids wouldn’t freakin’ say ‘boo’. My whole approach depended upon some sort of feedback from the students. I have never, not once in all the years I have addressed students (including students I used to speak to in the context of the street work I used to do) ever had a group refuse to address a single question I asked.

Thrown, I began to lighten the mood. I engaged the students, I joked with them and gradually the heaviness lifted. In this place I began to deliver what it was I wanted to raise with them – and they were engaged. Finally they began to respond and offer feedback to the questions I raised. It was awesome. After 50 minutes I called it to a halt. It was a success. I had held their attention and they were engaged. There was only one moment that was a little odd. It was at the mention of God. There was a shudder throughout the room. This was not a topic they wanted to hear about. I stopped – pointed out that I had grown up in an atheistic household and I understood how offensive and absurd the “Angry man in the clouds with a lever ready to plunge the naughty into the eternal fiery abyss” seemed to be. However there was more to say on this matter – and I left it there.

Upon finishing students came up to me and told me how amazing it was, how interesting it was, how much they loved it.

Brilliant, I thought.

And then the deputy principle came over.

“Well,” she said, “I’ve got to say that was all over the place. There is no way the students could follow what you were talking about and if you plan on making this something you do on a regular basis, you’d better fix it up.” I was stunned. I recovered and said, “I want you to keep in mind that you and your staff are not my target audience. My target is those kids, they’re on a camp and they need a little bit of entertainment along with something to think about. There is no point having a three part sermon that they’re going to switch off in half way through. These kids, have been God bashed – they don’t want a bar of another message about God.”

And that was that.

Staff filed out the door and went off to the next task.

 Look. It could have been a mess. You’re only getting my perspective. It was not the impression I got from the kids. A few days later I got a phone call from the guy who recommended me asking, “what happened??” Judging from his tone I’d say it would be the last time he’d be asking any favors of me. Again – I felt completely alienated, vilified and ripped off. I’d have been better to have said “no” at their request. Maybe the little group of kids that approached me were no representative of the whole, but it wasn’t the impression that I got. 

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.

So you want a Zebra Finch?

How do you say 'no' to your son about getting a Zebra Finch when your wife is in defence of the idea?

Here's a few tips.

First, talk about your own childhood and explain how you desperately wanted a Zebra Finch, but your parents said 'No'.

Second, think of an animal your wife hates and bring that into the conversation.

"Hey, I used to own a Ferret."
Daughter (Online with kid brother checking out Zebra Finch): What's a Ferret?
Me: Google it.
Daughter:(a moment later - awestruck): Wow! These are really cute.
Me: Yeah... they are.
Wife: No. They're not. They smell and they bite. They kill babies.
Me: Who needs babies anyway. You train them not to bite and you buy a female, they don't stink so much.
Wife: You're not having a Ferret.
Daughter: Can we pleeeeeeeeease have a Ferret.
ME: You know, they can, like some birds, mimic human speech.
Daughter: REALLY?!
Wife: Hang on...
Me: Yeah... the one I used to have, we trained it to say"I LOVE YOU" and it would look at you with these really cute shiny eyes and say it in a tiny voice. It would make me tear up.
Wife: Until it bit you.
Son: Yeah but can I have a Zebra Finch?
ME: Absolutely buddy. You get the Zebra Finch and your sister can have a Ferret, that would be fair.
Kids: YAAAAAAAAAYYYYYYY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Wife: We are not getting a Ferret!
Daughter: But Dad, do you want a Ferret?
ME: You bet I do but ...(make sure you pause for effect then look at wife) your mother doesn't want one. And if we can't have a Ferret then your brother can't have a Zebra Finch.
(Sadly look at both children).


And points go to me for not having to have a bloody bird in the house, though odds on we get a Zebra Finch and a Ferret. Ferret WILL eat the bird. Guaranteed.

When the muse attacks

It bothers me that most of the Philosophers throughout history were wealthy men with the means to pursue a life of Philosophy. It seems to defy the heart of the issue. I realise of course that everyone is capable of suffering and the wealthy will obviously encounter their fair share - I mean it's entirely subjective and humans being what they are, are fairly adaptive. So one person living in poverty is going to suffer in their experience. However the wealthy will also suffer - perhaps it's suffering loneliness, or boredom - or whatever. The point is in each person's experience the suffering while quantitatively different will qualitatively be similar. An injury is still an injury, a broken heart is still a broken heart.

I've picked a stupid dichotomy because all the research about happiness points out that everything between abject poverty and what we'd call substantially wealthy register similar levels of happiness. I have the typical imaginary ranter (she changes form - at the moment she's a hip athiest who is quite vocal and well educated - it's entirely likely she's my muse which would totally figure - that mysterious figure supposed to quietly inspire you is abusing me - holy cow she's doing it even now!

Muse: Oh, so you're writing a blog and that makes you an artist?
Me: What?! No, I'm just saying that you're supposed to inspire me and you're abusing me.
Muse: Yeah well you're the one make gross over generalisations about how the suffering of the wealthy are essentially the same as those in poverty...
Me: Here we go.
Muse:... because we all know that not having clean water and and basic shelter IS EXACTLY THE SAME AS SOMEONE TURNING UP TO THE BALL FOR THE GOVERNOR IN THE EXACT SAME DRESS AS YOU!!!!
Me: Yeah well it would be quite humiliating if you were a man.
Muse: Oh right make a joke out of it - why don't you throw in some sort of gay slur.
Me: That's an example cross dressing, doesn't mean you're gay so essentially you're the one whose being the biggot.
Muse: We're talking about the suffering of the poor and the down trodden being the same as the wealthy. You don't know what you're talking about and you're putting on weight.
Me: Ok, you know what you're out of control..
Muse: OUT OF CONTROL! YOU HAVEN'T SEEN ANYTHIN...... OUT OF CONTROL? ARE YOU RETARDED?
Me: Hey! Steady now that's kind of out of line.
Muse: SHUT.UP. And what is this? Why are you even writing this. Why? Who is reading this?
Me: No one has to it's just creative...
Muse: Then keep a fricken' journal genius. Spewing your junk trash thoughts all over the internet.
Me: While that's a tautology it's a relevant good point.
Muse: Right so can we stop this nonsense then and go back to that quiet despair you were quietly working on?
Me: Can we please keep to the point? I was raising the whole thing about Philosophers pondering stuff and living in the lap of luxury while they did so. I just don't think it's fair. What about normal people like me.
Muse: You can't use the term 'normal' with reference to your self.
Me: You know what I mean.
Muse: Yeah but you're still essentially privileged, compared to the rest of the world.
Me: That's just crippling Western guilt brow beating me.
Muse: No. It's me making a substantial point.
Me: I helped out someone by mowing their radically overgrown lawn yesterday and then I sat through a film with horrific hay fever - it was embarrassing - sounded like I was crying.
Muse: Don't chat to me, I'm not interested. Least you could go to a film. Spose it was 3D
Me: Yeah it was - it was $25 to see and it was obviously post converted. There wasn't any 2D screenings of it.
Muse: What film?
Me: Thor.
Muse: You know there's people with no clean water to drink in the world, don't you?
Me: Yes. I know. That's why you're in my head.

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