A Good Day

Lunch with the Wilson family. Shrek 2. A walk in the sun. The kind of afternoon that would send Richard sprinting home. A nice red wine on the deck with Ruthie--the weather is cool. A Beautiful Mind. Wouldn't you say...wouldn't you say that life is beautiful?

And Spend Your Lifetime Finding out Just Where That Is

I downloaded "Cathedrals" by Jump Little Children this afternoon and have already listened to it ten times in a row. Wow.

It Isn't Hard to Feel Me Glowing

It’s raining. It’s raining hard, straight down and I’m sitting here at my computer in the corner with all the windows and they’re open and I can hear the rain and smell it and it smells cool and clean and Miles Davis is playing and it's dark out and there’s thunder and I can’t imagine anything better. It’s so green outside.

My Week

All of my writing time this week is going toward getting ready for Sunday. I'll blog again when I can.

My Afternoon

Particularly good time at Friday's today. Hated to leave.

Thanks, J$

I spent three hours (literally) this morning catching up on emails, which isn't as much fun as it sounds like. Then Justin came over for a while and we went out on the deck and talked. Had he not come I probably would've spent the whole day inside. I have to meet some people at Friday's @ 3:00 and then I have a meeting tonight. Soon the entire spring will have come and gone while and I will have watched it out the window while writing Terribly Important emails regarding Matters of Consequence. God help me.

Only This Could've Kept Me From Blogging About Randy Johnson's Perfect Game

Tony Randall died today.

I Think I Have Blue-Brain

Something I’m noticing about my new job is that I have to think a lot while I’m doing it. That may sound odd, but the fact is that for years my job has required me to think only in brief, infrequent spurts. This made for lots of mental down time--while my body went about the physical business of RTV’ing things my mind was free to stew. If I stumbled onto a thought that seemed interesting enough to pursue or share with someone I’d stop, write it on a yellow Post-it Note, fold the note in half and put it in my pocket for later. I did most of my writing for Sundays like this-–I could cook on an idea for days, (sometimes weeks,) heap up a pile of Post-it Notes, and then sit down and, in one morning, regurgitate something coherent enough to fulfill my Sunday obligation--and most any blog entries that have been worth reading at least had their genesis during my time in the cage. This new setup may explain why I had so much trouble last month coming up with anything to say at church and why most of my recent bloggings have been so short. (Does size really matter?)

I’m not sure how all this will shake out. It may be that at some point I’ll have the new job down as thoroughly as I had the old one and I’ll once again be able to place my thoughts elsewhere while I work, but I doubt it-–the new gig is too needy people intensive. I’m eager for the new rhythm to emerge. I feel like there’s so much going on inside me lately that I just haven’t found the time to cultivate into something verbal.

Here's Another One

What's the greatest pair of songs ever to appear back to back on the same (non-greatest hits) album? At the moment I'm thinking of "Life is Sweet" & "Kind and Generous" from Natalie Merchant's Ophelia, though as soon as I write that I wonder about "Galileo" & "Ghost" from Indigo Girls' Rites of Passage. What say ye?

Meet Joe Black

Is not a great movie, strictly speaking, but I love it.

Finally

My deck is finally finished thanks to Jack Ray. Only took a year and a half for me to see that job through.

Greatest Pitcher of All Time?

Roger Clemens is 7-0.

Quality Time

Had a great time this afternoon with my very good friend Shawn. And it wasn't a Tuesday night and we weren't at The Comet and it wasn't at Friday's and it wasn't a Wednesday night. I love him and you would too.

You May Want to Skip This One

I’ve made it my practice to not just get on here and blog for no apparent reason. (Maybe that would be called “blahgging”). But here I sit with nothing in particular to say. Paul Simon said that “You Can Call Me Al” was largely a stream-of-consciousness exercise, which explains how he could get from “a man walks down the street” to “Mr. Beerbelly Beerbelly get these mutts away from me” in the space of one verse. I guess when you’re Paul Simon you can make everything work. I have some friends who are going to the Patty Griffin show tomorrow and they're as excited about that as I am about Simon & Garfunkel and Over The Rhine in July. (They're not together.) What is it about a live show that so much more fun than listening to the same songs on the record? Better not to try to nail it down--sometimes that's a good way to ruin something. Ruthie and I cleaned out my (large) box of cassette tapes from when I was a kid. That was good for some laughs. We only kept a dozen or so of them--the rest went into the trash can without any hesitation. Did I really listen to all that stuff? Some of them we threw out because I've replaced those tapes with CD's of the same album, but some of it was just bad. Not to mention any names. Jack will be here tomorrow morning to put the rail on our deck for us. The existing part of the deck went up a year and a half ago and we've been living with it like that (rail-less) ever since. It's been driving Ruthie crazy, but no one's come close to falling off, so I'm cool with it. This approach is pretty typical for me. Mmm...half-assed. The new job contiues to go well, though having spent a week at a different store I'm more aware now than ever how much help our desk needs. There's a dearth of professionalism at our store (in this particular department) that's more crippling than I knew. And what difference does it make? I have friend who's writing a novel. I think that's nifty. I've never been able to sit down and make a credible run at fiction. I get distracted by names and dialogue. That and the lack of story ideas. Why am I doing this? Because I don't have the balls to blog what's really on my mind this morning. Why not? There are like six people who read this thing and I'm likely to tell each of you individually, so why can't I just throw it out on what Shawn insists we call "The Net"? I'm tempted to delete the last line, because the truth is I intend to keep it to myself, (Oh how mysterious I am,) but I like the part about Shawn so it stays. Maybe I'm just doing this to avoid putting the dishes away and cleaning this room. Maybe I've set blogging back ten years. Is that possible? Maybe he ducked back down the alley with some roly-poly little bat-faced girl.

I warned you.

I Like My Life

Church Meat and PS2 with my people tonight. They were already here when I got home from work. Felt nice.

By the Way

I had another Jackie Robinson dream a couple weeks ago, only this time he was a briefcase.

bengregory1@juno.com & Lonesome Dove

Okay, I've obviously changed the template here--I got very tired of that green. Problem is, I'm so damn ignorant that now I can't figure out how to put anything in the sidebar. You know, all that riveting information like my e-mail address and the title of the book I'm reading currently. I think I've got the comment thing set up okay (try it) so if you're inclined to help a brother out, feel free.

This isn't as much fun as I had hoped it would be. I also hate that I've lost all of our previous comments--I've enjoyed the dialogue (yes, even The Great Easter Egg Debate of 2004). Nuts.

Yesterday

Had a wonderful day yesterday. By about eleven AM my house was well-populated with people I like. We had breakfast together, talked and ended up out on the front lawn under a beautiful sky reading from John's gospel together. I have to admit, it's getting better. A little better all the time.

After that Ruthie and I were off to the ballpark to watch the Reds. Who am I kidding, we were there to watch The Greatest Player of (at least) Our Generation. The Giants won't be back in town this year (barring some fluke playoff series) and we didn't want to miss what might have been our last chance to see him again. Our seats were about thirty feet behind third base, close to the field, and it was impressive just to watch him trot out to his position in left field. He didn't hit any out, but he did score twice, including the winning run in the 10th (having been intentionally walked leading off the inning). I've seen footage of oldtimers remembering what it was like to watch Babe Ruth and Gehrig and Jimmie Foxx seventy years ago and it makes me wish I'd been there, so I paid extra hard attention to Bonds yesterday--if I live long enough for people to want to hear what he was like I want to have something intelligent to say. There'll be enough video of him left for posterity (where there wasn't with The Babe) that it won't be the same, but someday I'm going to be able to tell people, "I saw Barry Bonds play." (Incidentally, the same beautiful day that was so pleasant earlier in my front yard and that made for such a great day at the ballpark included lots of sunshine and Ruthie and I are now officially sunburnt. It hurts.)

We stopped by the Rock Bottom for a beer on the way home and then went home and smeared that green aloe gel stuff all over ourselves for a couple hours (which wasn't as much fun as it might sound like) until it was time for me to go to The Comet, which is always a good time.

Amen.

Best Baseball Name Ever?

There's a dude pitching for the Royals this year named Jimmy Gobble. Really.

Hmm

The guy on the radio just said that last night the president was, "visibly hoarse."

Let Me Clarify

"My stupid little life" was an allusion to American Beauty, one of my favorite movies.

Some of You Will Appreciate This

Yesterday at work a lady handed me a little pin and said, "Here--it's the Energizer Bunny. You can wear it on your apron."

Thanks Drew

"Most people want to wake up in the morning with a general at the foot of their bed saying 'Go do this.' The problem is there's somebody at the foot of the bed saying, 'Once upon a time.'"
--N.T. Wright

Sunday

Several of you have asked how my Sunday blabbering went and the answer is, it didn't go at all. I announced on Wednesday that I wasn't going to have anything and everybody was cool with it (which may tell me something). I've never before hit a wall like I did last week where I just absolutely could not come up with anything and the harder I tried the worse it got and the worse it got the angrier I got at living in a world where I was scheduled weeks in advance to have something worth saying on a given Sunday. So I didn't say anything. It was great. I should do more of that.

Sunday also happened to be our last as a part of the larger network we've been with for the past couple years. I've spent a lot of energy lately thinking about/working on a rather lengthy discussion of art and Abstract Expressionism and what this Next Step is going to look like to people and what it really is (like any of us know) but by the time that's finished and I'm happy with it the ratchet may have clicked again and What's Going on Now will be old news. So do with this what you will, but here's what's going on with us at the moment (as best as I can remember it). ;)

I had a serious meltdown (is there another kind?) back in the winter--I think it was Superbowl Sunday--sitting in my pew trying to reconcile what I believe with how I was spending my Sunday mornings. That day it hit me harder than it ever had before that I was trying to live in two different worlds (which you can call "having the best of both worlds" if you like it, but which to me felt hypocritical and dishonest). I wrote and fired off a long (for me,) profane (for someone else,) and heated e-mail to my friend Ken who has a long history of making things better. I think I told him I was tired of cringing. "There are a million churches in the world," I remember saying to him, "and that's fine, but there has to be a place for people like me--and we are legion." He suggested that maybe the time had come for Whatever Comes Next for our little group and so as of this past Sunday we are embarked.

There will be people who want to call it a church plant or a house church or an intentional community or some such, and while none of those labels are, strictly speaking, inaccurate, neither do any of them quite capture the nuances and subtleties of What's Going On. As best as I can tell (and I suppose I'm speaking mostly for myself) near heart of it is as an honest a pursuit of Truth as we're capable of (and Ken spoke downright eloquently on this subject Sunday) and a conviction that Jesus didn't come to start a religion. Not sure what it'll end up looking like (to anyone) and maybe that's part of the point. At any rate, now you're pretty well updated on my stupid little life.

Jorb Update

My new position at work is off to a great start. After a week of training at our Beechmont store I'm back at Home Sweet 3822 and it's good to be home. I finally know enough to be helpful rather than feeling like a pain in the ass asking how to do everything. (While I was away at the other store the lady with whom I swapped jobs called several times to ask me how to do stuff. She generally ended our conversations with apologies for having bugged me and I finally had to confess to her that she wasn't bothering me--not because I'm so naturally eager to help, but because it felt good to sound intelligent again after struggling all week to learn so much new stuff.) Even the new schedule is working out alright, though I'm going to have to do something about working so late on Tuesdays. Tuesday is the night my house fills up with people I like and I'm not happy about the fun they'll have without me.