Bored

I am bored, so very bored. My mind is flopping about like a fish on deck of a ship. The best I can look forward to is a grill.

When I’m bored, the future seems as endless as a bad dream, moment by moment laboriously lifted and dropped. I don’t dare look ahead, because there are yards and yards of moments strung end to end. I’m looking out at the parking lot. The light is lovely, winking off the cars. The chill of autumn is slowly wiggling in. But I can’t work up any enthusiasm for anything. Why do people drive here each day and park their cars and get out and go to work and actually feel alive? And everything is God here. God god god. We need more churches to let more people know about God We all have Bibles at our desks. I guarantee you I am the only one here who doubts so ferociously.

I am bored with the whole faith issue. I’m tired of thinking about it. I dread devotions here. I feel awkward. I feel false. I feel like contradicting everything. I feel like being late so I miss them. I feel like not being nice. I feel like sneering when someone says “God has it under control.” These people have faith and I’m the viper in their midst.

I am supposed to appreciate the here and no and not always wish to escape, but this nowness is so dull and I am so restless and cantankerous.

Black Psalm

When sorrow falls on your plate
with the clatter of dropped coins,
how do you ask a blessing on that meal?
How do you consume it,
how does it nourish and delight?
What do I taste and see –
sand and entrails.
Your will is like fog,
the shroud of accidents.
God, I do not trust you.
You give with one hand
and take with the other
and call it fallen creation.
You ask for blood
and speak love.
Your justice is ugly and unrighteous,
a knife at the neck of a small child
to test our loyalty.
Then you beam like the sun –
See, it’s all okay now –
it’s all mercy now.
See how I love you?
The enemy armies have been laid waste
and left to rot in the fields.
Now you can build your house on rock.

Why This Weekend Sucks

I never look forward to Memorial Day weekends. I always feel futile and ill at ease. It may be because my birthday always falls around that weekend. Dear Husband comes from a family that goes all out to celebrate birthdays. I remember one party when I was little, and no doubt presents when I was growing up. But, and it's kind of dreadful to admit because it sounds so emo, but I've never felt it was something to celebrate. I spent the better part of my life thinking that anyone glad to be here had to be nuts, and that my entrance was definitely not something I was happy about. It seemed so much like some sort of glitch, that a divine flunky read the charts wrong and I was really supposed to be back in the undifferentiated whatever that souls come from before they enter bodies.

Even now, when I can usually grab on to some perspective, and am medicated beyond belief, I feel more and more dark-minded as my birthday approaches, and I tense every time someone wishes me a happy birthday, as if I were taking something fraudulently. And I'm angry that I can't shake it, that I can't look on life as an amazing gift instead of my personal version of Kafka's Penal Colony. (Which, BTW, if you haven't read it you should really put in on your list. Criminals have their crimes written on their bodies with needles, and the director of the camp finally puts himself in the machine because the criminals all experience a revelation. And then they die. Yep, I love me some Kafka.)

I'm sitting at my desk at work. The office closed early, but I can't bring myself to leave. When I leave the apparatus of the weekend begins, all the cogs and wheels grind away, and I have to deal with sniping children, laundry, empty time, chaos, cooking, groceries, feeling lost, feeling futile. And I will be one year older, but no wiser.

God has Left the Building

“And I love the idea that the viewer goes through a similar process; because there's something so sexy about treasure, something so alluring and elusive about this fantasy of finding gold. And to some degree, you have to engage in what part of us lives in this fantasy, and what part of us is willing to see the other thing that's occurring; because we all want the fantasy. But there's always something more.” Quote from Darius Marder, directory of the documentary Loot.

The second sentence of this statement really struck me. This documentary is, I gather, about two men who, following war, buried treasures in different parts of the world, and in their old age they meet up with someone who leads them on a journey to recover it. I haven’t seen it yet, and I’m not sure I will like it, but from what I’ve read, the treasure hunt uncovers all sorts of things besides treasure.

What is a fantasy trying to tell us? The things I find alluring are not just about the object themselves. Obviously. I touched on that in my last post, how my fascination with this angel character reflects my own struggles with faith. Dear Husband might say I am rationalizing the fact that I think the actor is super attractive. But why do we latch onto celebrities in the first place? We all know it is more to do with our own desires than the actual person. The actor is beautiful, beautiful in a heart in the throat sort of way. But I’ve seen him all season without giving him a second thought. It wasn’t until Castiel became important that I found him alluring.

I develop short-run obsessions with characters, and in turn with the actors who play them. I obsess because they embody some issue or quality or need. Lie to Me and House: Dr. Lightman and Dr. House see through lies to the truth. They know when you're bullshitting. How desirable and painful at the same time. I wish someone would cut through my lies, and I tell myself plenty, and I tell others plenty. I would never in a million years have thought Tim Roth was attractive if he didn’t play this particular character. It’s all mirrors and glamour, in the old sense of the word glamour.

I’ve had these passionate interludes with fictional characters (and books themselves, too) for as long as I can remember. I’m sure others do, too. At times the experience of reading a really good book, the kind that stays with you through life, is a lot like infatuation. I have read books that made me breathless and tremble with excitement, oblivious to everyone at first, and then mad to tell everyone all about my beloved.

I think first of Brideshead Revisited, which may be indelibly ingrained in my psyche. I was in love with that book. With Sebastian and Oxford and the almost too rich, elegiac prose. There’s a line in the book about being in love with love, which is pretty much what I experienced. But then there is the theme of God drawing us in with an unseen hook and an unseen thread. There was a miniseries, and the actor who played Sebastian embodied the character so perfectly, that I was smitten with him as well.

Other fictional loves:

Sherlock Holmes: The allure of the unavailable.

Nabokov’s Real Life of Sebastian Knight: How much of the pursuit of someone else is a study of ourselves? What kinds of games can you play with reality and with words?

Raskolnikov: What do you do if you do the unforgivable? What is repentance?

Louis in the Ann Rice books: How do you live if you loath your very essence? What do you pin your hopes on?

Sydney Carton: Redemption.

Sometimes I am the character, sometimes the one who loves the character, and sometimes I just roam around among all the words.

So, recently, I’ve wanted to cut away the lies and pretense and admit that I am not ever going to fit where I seem to find myself. And then there is the questioning, the doubt, the sense that God is remote, the CEO of a corporation that churns along with its own rules that have so little to do with His true nature. Or at least I think or hope that is the case. I have never met Him, and I don’t think Castiel has either. In Supernatural, evil is real and present, but God is a cipher. Lucifer shows up, but God does not. Like Castiel, I’ve decided that I am not a good little soldier. If there is a side, I am definitely on the side of the messed up and burned out, the heretics and blasphemers, and the sovereign God, that construct of Calvinists, is in fact no god at all but a bunch of bureaucrats with their own agendas. As the angel Zacherias says in Supernatural, God has left the building.