I hate politics. I don't mean the Washington D.C. kind, although that variety is maddening if you take it at all seriously. (The trick is not to.) No, the politics to which I refer are the ones that hit home. The little squabbles between groups, and within groups. Person A doesn't like Person B, and so she tells Person C this. Now Person C just wants to be at Place D, which is anywhere that is not close to A or B's problems. I guess that it just gets me that I can have two friends who I thought were friends with each other, or who used to be friends with each other, and now I'm afraid to put these two people together. And why? There's never a really good reason. "Because he owes me some money." "Because I don't really like the way she talks."

"How often should I forgive? As many as seven times?"
"Not seven times, but, I tell you, as many as seventy times seven times."
I think of this line from Matthew often. The first time I noticed politcal manuvering outside of government, it was in my church. A couple of "church pillars", as it were, did not like a younger Minister that we had. So they just let it slip to a coulpe of their friends that they wouldn't support the church if she were still there the next year. Like, whoops.... So anyways, she got wind of it and was sort of silently forced to resign. And this was a person whom a lot of people, myself included, really liked and respected. To my mind, the church is the LAST place where you should find verbal knives in peoples backs. It's man fucking things up. Frank Herbert wrote in Dune, "The drowning man who climbs on your shoulders to save himself is understandable- except when you see it happen in the drawing room."

And it doesn't always have to involve figurative murder. If one person has the bad taste to play his friends like pawns, that is just as bad. I'm probably guilty of the same, occasionally. But I like to think that I don't have any enemies, and that I like most everybody. I just don't like being in the middle of it, is all.

"Ob-la-di Ob-la-da life goes on"

It's funny, he and I were talking about that song earlier in the evening. He thought that it wasn't the Beatles and I said that it was. Yes, life does go on. And all praises be to whatever God there is for that. I now have glimpsed my own mortality. Through the last 19 years, I have been reminded of death a few times, but this hits so much closer to home. Life is more frail than I can or care to convey, and life pushes on through more shit than seems physically possible.

He was in a car accident yesterday. A bad one, for the car. I went to the sight this evening and looked at it, and it was far worse than I had imagined. His car went over the curb and between a telephone pole and a large oak, scraping the pole as it passed. It went through a tree, not a large tree but a tree none the less, down a ten foot hill and skidded to a stop on it's side, just a few feet shy of a second large oak. The car was in tatters. After being towed yesterday, bits and pieces, especially of glass, were all over the grass and ivy when I went back. A headlight, cover for a side view mirror, hub cap, piece of bumper...

Last night is a blur of time and space. The wreck, probably around 1:30. He and David racing off towards the hospital. Coming back to pick me up minutes later. The ferverant praying in between. Cleaning him up at James'. Going to the hospital, finally. Calling the mothers, calling the cops, sitting beside him and waiting for the X-rays. And then the miracle. He is not dead. He should be, by all rights he should be. No broken bones, no major cuts, no blood loss. Only a small cut beside the eye, and a few minor scrapes.

One of the people who is most dear to me on this planet should be dead now. I am numb to implications of that scale. If I think too hard on it, I find myself close to tears at the chance of death and gift of life. The feelings of terror at loss and frailty with gain are overpowering.

God grant that this never happen again.

My favorite subject, the one I'm majoring in, and I can't figure it out for the life of me. Religion. This stuff baffles the shit out of me. I wish I could somehow believe. Just blindly know and not have any doubts that the answer I followed was right. I'm not even talking about proof, if there were proof there would be no cause for faith. I sometimes just wish that I could make myself to believe. As it stands, I am a Christian, but that hardly seems to matter all that much. I make internal switches from the world of science to the one of faith almost daily and sometimes in between. I can't believe that the Bible is truth just because it says that it is. And I can't believe that science is truth because there are some obvious, well, holes where there should be answers.

I've been reading Contact, by Carl Sagan. There's a lot of that in there about that sort of thing. Agruments between characters about the Jesus and Issac Newton. The problem is that the two use completely different languages. In science, "F=ma" is a valid point and a strong point. In religion, "thus spake the Lord" is equally unquestionable.

If relgion preches reconciliation, and science preches understanding, then are they both hypocritical for distrusting each other?

"I'm not scared, I'm out of here"

I need a vacation. Not this summertime-in-atlanta-away-from-athens crap, but a real trip to a place that I don't live. I need to go to Europe. Megan got back from Europe today. Some people have all the luck, I tell you what. Any volenteers for next summer... anyone. I think that, if I could get the money for it, I would love to spend two weeks in Europe next summer. Take one or two people with me, stay in Youth Hostals and with friends of friends. Get a Euro-Rail Pass, if there is any such thing, and just go. Spend a couple of days on the North Sea, or in Hamburg, and then steadily work down through Munich, Vienna, Prauge, and end up in Rome or Athens for a ride home on Value-Jet.

The last time I went I didn't do things right. I went alone, lived with BerTiny, but hung our alone. I was too young to enjoy going out late, just barely old enough to have and appreiciate my freedom at all. It was fun to explore Vienna, see the museums, the palaces and the gardens, and to climb Schneeberg. Next time, though, I want to get a small group and really plan out what we're going to do. I don't mean every minute of every day, but certainly not just "Oh Yeah, let's, ummmmm, I don't care..."

Some of the art has to be in picking the group. You need people who'll get along and have somewhat common interests and tolerances. It would be ackward to go with someone who wants to sit down all day and someone who wants to hike up the Alps together. Say.... Ryan, Judith, and Caroline. Maybe Sean, Ashling, and Bria. Matt, Lauren and Avery. Ahhh..... Endless Possibilities... Now to find the money....

"Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike, they've all gone to look for America."

Damn! What I wouldn't give to be able to write. Not like this crap. Prose is not the problem, I'm good at it, I think. I have absolutley no problem in putting my thoughts down in an organized fashion. No, when I say write I mean poetry, more specifically, music. Go and listen to the Beatles album of your choise, Abbey Road, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band, Let it Be... whatever. John Lennon and Paul McCartney did more drugs than any ten people ever should, and they still somehow managed to write some of the best lyrics ever. To my mind, that just isn't fair. Not that life is.... but, you know... And drugs aren't necessisarly the answer. Try reading the lyrics to America or Sounds of Silence by Paul Simon. I could never be that subtle, implicit and beautiful about something so meaningful.

I guess that I'm too explicit, because it frightens me that I might spill my emotions and someone could glance over without seeing it. That and I dislike trivialzing my thoughts by putting them into cliches. If I could spin an elabrote metaphor or conjure an original similie for my feelings, that would be one thing, but saying that I feel like every rose has it's thorn straight up lables me as shallow and uncreative; two things that I am afraid to be. What would really enrapture is to be able to write a song or even a line in song, and have people who hear it say, "YES! That's how I feel, I just was never able to say it that way." There are way to many lines that I could feel that way about.

To begin, I shall start at the beginning. How's that for deep. Look, the reason that I'm starting this whole buisness, other than it being a really cool way for to get into my head, is that there is too much negativity in journals such as these. He doesn't love me... I hate myself.... Nobody understands me... Crap! The fact of the matter is that no one is ever going to have everything go their way, but brooding is not the way to help things. I don't understand myself, and in fact, one of my favorite pass times these days is to sit quietly or walk Sox and just mumble to myself, trying to figure me out. It's fun what I'll learn, or at least think I'll learn. But one thing that I do know, is that I am happier than most of my friends, just because I don't let things get to me.

Since this is a public journal, and there is a fair chance that people out there don't know me, I am going to explain a few things about me. I have cause for depression and despair in my life. My father died three years ago. The year after that my uncle and then my mother's mother this summer. Both gone. I can remember both of my Grandfather's and remember both of them passing away. Guess what, though. It makes me who I am. I suppose that it gives me depth and perspective. The point is that, yes, it blows goats, but I am still a happy person. Maybe I'm good at lying to myself, you say? Perhaps, but I would rather give it that misnomer than live in perpetual melancholoy.

Oh, I have my good days and my bad days. I am often nostolgic and get bored easily. I will lose patience with people and, more often, mentalities, and I can bitch and moan. But I really perfer not to. The only passable arguments for writing depression and self-pity are that (A) the act of writing ones thoughts is a sort of symbolic banishment from the mind, giving way to peace (which I can certainly understand) and (B) that songs, essays, poems and other such things about pain are far more interesting and entertaining than those about joy. My only answer to B is that if such is the case, than my faith in the Human Spirit is for naught. Songs of Laughter should be better than those of tears, and I can only wish it were so.
Scratch that; I can only believe that it is so.

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