The Baby's at My Mom's

Rather, the toddler's at my mom's.

Ruthie's working a half day.

I'm here by myself. First time I can remember the hope of a handful of uninterrupted hours alone in, what...months maybe?

I love them both, but this is Good.

Let's see if I remember how to do this.

Thought I'd work through my little book a bit more. I finally filled the last page yesterday. It took over two years and the last thing on the last page is something someone said this week:

"Life is the story that you tell yourself about it." -- TG

I liked that for a stopping place.

Now back to where I left off in February. The e-mail addresses of a couple people I was supposed to keep in touch with. I'm horrible at keeping in touch. Just awful.

There's a list of stuff like conduit connectors and 90 degree elbows that could only mean that someone -- likely my father-in-law -- was working on our house and I'd run to the Depot for him. I'm as bad at doing stuff around the house as I am at keeping in touch.

Then the name of a song I heard on the jukebox at the Comet and liked -- Lee Morgan's "Slow Drag." That's good squishy.

A list of three things that I can't quite hang on a hook. Not sure why they're grouped here the way they are. I feel like maybe they had to do with things about our Approach to Life (i.e., what we do instead of "church",) that were bothersome to people we/I knew in the Before Times. Great Ben, what were they?

1. Sunday meetings
2. use of the word "Christian"
3. What happens when I die?

Places, I suppose, where our lack of Orthodoxy can be uncomfortable for some people. Oh, then there's a couple more:

Bible/divinity

Yep, I'm remembering this Conversation. It wasn't -- and isn't -- I don't think, that we're giving the wrong answers to these questions. It's that we're not asking them. Or at least not straining at them. Not tortured by them. (Someone said, "'I don't know' is good theology. Who was that, Buechner?) That seems to be a big part of Me -- who I am, how I am. This whole thing for tomorrow has pointed it out to me more clearly than ever. I allowed it to throw me -- just for a moment -- out of my actual Life and into a couple weeks of rereading and concentrating and dissecting and analyzing and...what's the word? Trying.

Good or bad, trying to figure out how to have a conversation just isn't me. Neither is bearing down and working at something like loving people. Seems destined to fail. To never rise above behavior (as opposed to identity). To create more pain than it assuages for everyone involved.

For my money the Buddhists seem to try too hard too. At least based on lots (but not all) of what I've read.

Phone rang and shot my train of thought.

A book recommendation: Wilde's De Profundis, which I'm pretty sure Michael recommended and which I still have not read. Looks like I was reading The Picture of Dorian Gray at the time because on the facing page I've written:

"We live in a age that reads too much to be wise and that thinks too much to be beautiful." -- pg. 133

and I'm pretty sure that's where that's from. Liked that line and it may have something to do with what I was trying to get at a couple paragraphs ago.

Another book recommendation: Christ the Eternal Tao which I also have yet to get to. Sounds about right to me though.

Scattered lists of things I intended to blog about and may or may not have ever gotten around to:

Pittsburgh
Josh & Jared
Larry B.

Dana
DATA
my job

Onward Ctn Soldiers

Glad I never got to that last one. Would've been ugly.

Then a line from a Jewel song, which I'm told she lifted from Ghandi or somebody and which in the Before Times I could have called my Life Verse, (if it had come from an approved text):

"No longer lend yourself to that which you wish to be free from."

I wasn't writing it down to remember it -- it's been too big a part of me for too long -- so I must've needed the reminder. Still do from time to time, but it's getting better.