I Feel Pretty

I have some bad news: the Dove people do not think you're beautiful. They don't think you are ugly, either. In fact (psssht, don't tell anyone), they don't give a rat's flatulence for you one way or another.

Oh, sure, the little Dove "Campaign for Real Beauty" plays a sharp (weaselly) game. That video most of us have seen on youtube sure seems to be mocking the beauty industry by pointing out all the photomanipulation and such that goes into fashion and marketing, and who doesn't want to be told that "beauty" as it has been marketed to us is a myth we can just give up on?

There are a couple of problems with this - first and foremost being the ulterior motives of the Dove corporation itself. Since that whole thing started, it is possible that they've helped a lot of little girls feel better about themselves with their "self-esteem workshops" - but it's absolutely positive that they've made a lot of money."Hmmm... which soap should I buy", we wonder, as a tiny little voice in the back of our heads pipes in and says, "buy Dove! They think we're beautiful no matter what." And have they let up on their photomanipulation in any of their other ads? Have they started using real women? No, of course not.

I read a news article online where the author seemed shocked to discover that Dove had doctored the pictures of the "real" women in its "Real Beauty" campaign. This sort of shock is, I think, just posturing, because we all know that the big multinational soap corporation doesn't give a hoot at an owl convention if we like ourselves or not. In fact, they know that the best way to ensure that we'll buy their product is to convince us that we are not beautiful, and that no one will like us until we buy their product.

So why all the posturing? Why are they pretending to care about us? Why do we (at first) pretend to believe them? And why are we pretending to be shocked when the mythology falls apart?

My guess is that we're all aware that our cultural conceptions of beauty are sad, stupid, silly, ugly game. We're caught in the maze of it and we don't know how to get out, because there is one thing we absolutely must have: LOVE. In our hearts, we know it's a sham, but we are afraid that no one else knows its a sham and if we stop playing the game, we'll just end up being losers. And nobody loves a loser - we learned that in kindergarten.

The Dove people want to believe that they're not evil. We want to scapegoat the evil corporations (or all the stupid people who believed them), but the truth of the matter is that we all believed them at some point, and we could all just stop. Seriously. Quit. We don't need the makeup. We don't need the clothes or the toys or any of the other garbage. We are beautiful, just by dint of being human, and we most definitely don't need some corporation to tell us so. We can love ourselves. We can see our own beauty, without an ad campaign.

Even if we did this thing, it would be a long while before we stopped finding certain types of facial features and bodies more pleasant to look at; but I've got some more bad news: all that stuff we're buying to try to mimic those pleasantries isn't working anyways. Nobody is fooled. Not even us.

So admit it. They don't love us (those faceless corporations), and other people don't love us any more when we become their slaves. We're just going to have to figure out how to love ourselves. And I have a sneaking suspicion that the answer to this puzzle is not to be found inside the doors of a shopping mall.

Anatomy of An Effup: Part Twenty-Five (The Ending)

This is the part where I don't tidy things up and make them all make sense; because I am neither a mathematician nor a messiah, here to save your soul or explain its molecular structure.

I am an artist.

I believe we all are born artists, and that the mathematicians and wannabe Messiah's of the world educate it out of us. Although I seem to have been able to somehow bypass the art-killing humps of adolescence and education and remain an artist "on paper", it took a major, tragic effup to force me to open my eyes to creation not just when making art, but as an everyday human being as well. So when I find myself befuddled as I try to think of how to sew this whole story up neatly so that all the loose ends are either trimmed off or hemmed up, my artist's soul tells me to give up.

Instead, I will give you an art lesson, and perhaps as you learn to make your mark with pigment on a two-dimensional surface, you will learn as well to see the way an artist sees, and how to live as an artist tries always to remind us to live. 

The truth about visual art is that it's not about having a magical power or really good fingertip coordination. It is about seeing. That's it. The rest is just practice. It has been said that there are none so blind as those who will not see, and the difficulty most people have in making visual art is that they miss out on that whole "visual" part. They don't see because they won't see. It is amazing to me how little anyone really sees the world around them - how much energy and effort we all expend to box the world, objectifying and categorizing and symbolizing everything that comes before our eyes.

We do this, I think, because we are very, very small and the world is very, very big. Confronted daily, as we are, with the vast unknowable mystery of everything, we begin to shut down. It's too much to cope with - too much to handle. Fear grips us, and so we do violence to the world in hope that it will then make sense. "She's just a welfare queen", we say, or "that's just a wombat", or "televangelists are the Great Satan", or "white people suck". I understand this, I do. In a sense, it is an inevitable aspect of our natural selves. We are made this way. This is how we are.

It is not, however, how our spirits yearn to be.

So close your eyes for a minute to the cold calculations of cultural blindsight, and open them instead to art. There are four things you must learn to see if you are going to make visual art. Eventually you may want to venture into the vast worlds of your imagination, but what we are going to focus on first is the world that you can see with your eyes, because that is the raw material with which you will be composing the imaginations of your soul. And we're going to draw people, because that's what I'm into. So without further ado...

"The Four 'Cs' of Seeing: Learning to See Contours, Contrast, Color, and Connections".

The first thing you must learn to see is contours. For the un-initiated, this just means the edges of things. This is where I start all my students, because it is the beginning.

Here is what I want you to do. Go into a room where there is another human being and ask them to hold still. Grab a pencil and paper. Open your eyes. Try to look at that person. I am sorry to tell you that you will fail. You cannot see them - not really - and so therefore you cannot draw them. Ever. Your eyes are a very limited and limiting tool for the comprehension of the world, and will only allow you to gain an impression of what that person appears to be from your perspective, your unique vantage point in space and time.

This is very important, so I want you to remember it: when you look at someone you are not seeing them - you are only seeing an impression of what they seem to be from your perspective. At the beginning when you are focusing on contours, all you are doing is looking at imaginary lines between an object and the stuff that you see around it. These are called positive and negative spaces, respectively, and they are also not really there. You are not drawing reality, you are just drawing reality as it presents itself to you. A kick in the pie-hole, I know, but you're going to have to deal with it. Your eyes can see a lot, but they cannot see the capital "T" Truth.

So relax. Your main task is not to capture and control that person onto a page, but rather to communicate what your are seeing with only the power of suggestion. Try to see these imaginary edges of the larger masses of the person, and then try to mark them down. But remember: you are not capturing reality as it is - you are creating a new reality of your very own. Why? Because it's fun! Because you are human! Because there is joy there! Because love is all about creating new things, and what could be better than to swim around in love?

The best way to get better at this is to practice. So as you walk around, try to see the world as you're actually seeing it, with humble eyes that acknowledge their own limitation. I believe with all my heart and a little bit of my spleen that if you do, you'll be flabbergasted at the intricate visual splendors that will unfold before you.

Why is this important? Because the alternative is objectification, which quickly becomes a lust for power, which is the same as hatred. If you draw this way, you'll be thoughtlessly putting down symbols and never really trying to see things. An eye will become an oval with two concentric circles. You will miss out on the mystery. Not only will it make you a terrible artist, it will wreck your life and all the lives you touch. Let me illustrate with the story of the erotic dancer and her four-testicle dog.

At the end of my first year as a planting foreman, I had been bumped from nine employees up to fourteen. It was optional post-season work, and Ben was the only one of the fourteen who was from my original crew. I was stressed and fatigued out of my mind, which may be why I didn't jump immediately on the objectification bandwagon on the day I drove back into the campground where we were staying and a tired-looking brunette came up to me and said, "Hey, you wanna see my four-testicle dog?"

This was at a time in my life when it would normally have made me a little uncomfortable to hear a woman (any woman) say the word "testicle"; but like I said, I was too beat to bother. "Would I?" I enthusiastically replied, "who wouldn't?!?" So she called over this big, shaggy hound of indeterminate lineage, leaned over him from behind, grabbed his front two legs, and picked his front end up off the ground. Sure enough - four testicles. It may have been the fatigue, but I just raved. I called the crew over and made them look at it. It's not so often you get to see a bona-fide-four-testes-fido.

Her name, it turned out, was Deb. Deb the dancer. The erotic dancer. This, also, did not bother me. Instead, I was intrigued. She told me that she was waiting at the campsite for some friends, but that she was staying over at a motel and was on a tour of small towns in Northern British Columbia, working as a stripper and an erotic dancer and trying to put together some cash. This was really out of the ordinary for a guy like me, a little missionary jungle boy who'd never seen an in-the-flesh erotic dancer before - let alone one with a four-testicle dog. Somehow, though, I didn't try to put her in a box. I didn't objectify her as some "damned harlot of Babylon", nor did I picture her as an object of hidden lust, about whom I could fantasize later after publicly decrying her lifestyle. Instead, I was entranced. This was a world I knew nothing about, and I was seized by curiosity. I asked her question after question. Who was she? Where was she from? What was it like, traveling from town to town doing what she did? How did people treat her?

I think she sensed that I really wanted to know and wasn't just digging for dirt, because she proceeded to tell me all about her life. She told me of her strained relationship with her father, with whom she'd bounced from town to town growing up as a military brat. He was in Florida and she was saving up to go see him, to try to work things out. She told me how the ladies of the towns treated her with contempt, crossing to the other side of the street and angrily glaring at her in the grocery stores. She told me how the men from the clubs often followed her around after work, making her nervous.

I felt privileged that she was letting me into her world a bit, but just as we were starting to really talk, one of the guys from my throw-together crew who had been hanging around listening butted in. He was your basic Bible School Boy, nineteen years old and absolutely convinced that he had the truth cornered and was just milliseconds away from wrestling it to the floor in a hammerlock. He started to barrage this lonely, sad woman with really invasive comments. He wanted to know, he said, if she was aware of how badly her lifestyle was reflecting on her. The contempt in his voice was palpable, and I watched as Deb the Dancer visibly shrunk into herself, made an excuse, and walked away.

I will admit that objectification is a sometimes useful pragmatic coping mechanism for a world of paralyzing complexity.  Imagine entering a large room full of chairs. Each chair is a wonderment of edges and shapes that constantly shift as I move. Each is a wonderment of light and shadow, with unique properties and made of an unfathomable conglomeration of particles held together by an incomprehensible array of forces. The shape and materials that make the chair what it is as a physical object have countless sociopolitical implications: from strip-mining to environmentally destructive smelting practices to the over-use of toxic, non-biodegradable plastics. In each chair there are cultural and psychological associations of rest, loneliness, isolation or death that we might tie to the experience of its "chairness", but if I had to stop and suss out my relationship to and experience of each chair I would never sit down and hear the lecture that would give me the information to get my degree to qualify me for the job that would eventually pay for my coronary bypass surgery. I have to objectify some things in some ways, I suppose, in order to survive in this whacked-out world.

Nonetheless, it is this same objectification that kills our ability to draw, because it tricks us into thinking that we have already got what we're drawing figured out, so we can stop looking. It also kills our ability to love when we do it to other people. So stop. Close your eyes, take a deep breath, open them, and try to humbly see the edges as they actually are. You will fail, but in the process you'll make art that communicates who you are, and that is worth doing.

The second thing I want you to learn to see is contrast. The Renaissance Italians who really kick-started western art called this chiaroscuro, which is just a nicer-sounding way of saying, "light and dark". While they did not invent the contrast between light and dark, they were the first to nail it down as an artistic concept and to make it a main area of focus in the creation of visual art.

The important thing to remember is that if you want to give the illusion that the mini-world you are creating has the same sort of chunky, volumetric reality as our own (so your viewers will be able to project their imaginations into it), then you absolutely must include highlights, dark shadows, and a whole lot of gradations in between. Unlike a spray-painted stencil, the gradations of light and dark in the world of the eyes are both infinite and transient. They are always changing depending on time of day, location of the viewer, and the relative quality of the optical equipment being used. Those who like to name and control things in art call these gradations "values", and it is rather fitting, as the value we put on the various aspects of what we see reveals yet again the way we try to order, understand and control the world around us.

My last year of University the noted poet Luci Shaw came to a round-table discussion at a creative writing class I was taking. At the time my, writing was categorized more by fear than anything else, but my visual art was often raw and honest, exposing some very dark aspects of who I was and how I was living in the world - so much so that as I have mentioned before, it made certain people very uncomfortable. I asked her about this - the supposition that some of my work was too dark, and signified a problem with my soul.

She paused for a moment, as wise old poets often do, and replied with the same basic point I have been making here - that both light and shadow are necessary to depict and reveal the world as it really is to us. To know whether or not I had focused too much on the the dark, she said, one would have to look at a lifetime of my work. There are different seasons of life for all artists, she went on, but all good art will have elements of both light and dark worked into them. I found that to be both true and comforting - but not easy. So many questions still remained. What were light and dark, after all, and how was I to perceive them?

The answer, as you may expect, is that I still don't know. According to physicists, it's a very tricky question. Light is a particle and a wave, simultaneously. It moves at benchmark speed - so fast that if you go any faster, time moves backwards. It does weird things, too, like Einstein's "spooky action at a distance", and prompts all sorts of bizarre speculations in quantum mechanics. And, in perhaps the ultimate mystery, light in the form of solar radiation sustains life.

At a very basic, existential level, however, light is what, for those of us who are not visually impaired, reveals much of what we know about the world. As a sense, it is so culturally important to us that it has taken primacy even on the very basic level of language as a descriptor of the world as we believe it actually is. Though the universe we occupy has textures, smells, sounds, tastes and sensations that a brain with only eyeballs could never explore, we tend to think that what we see is what we get. Although this is patently absurd, it does teach us a lot about the way we experience our lives, and what we ought to do to begin to view the world more realistically and holistically.

The same is true of the dark. This is my confession: I am scared of the dark. Something about the dark always conjures up images of sharp teeth and creepy-crawlies. I almost can't go outside my house in semi-rural North Carolina at night without thinking of getting attacked by spiders, opossums, raccoons, the neighbor's cats, or even wolves - which aren't even native to the area any more. In cities, I envision knife-wielding crack addicts in every dark alley and doorway. I'm a mess.

The funny thing is, though, that I am afraid of something that doesn't exist. Dark is not a thing. It has no actual physical presence, but is instead an attribute or function of perception. Dark is a temporary and conditional obscuring of the revealing power of light. Something - whether it be the rotation or the earth or our own deep purple funk - blocks us from the illumination that would otherwise light up our life. This is the very nature of our reality, and denying it or wishing it were otherwise keeps us from working to change our perspective or the conditions that create it so that we can once again see.

It does not matter if dark is a tangible thing, it is an extremely complex and always-shifting part of our reality that we have to accept if we are going to be able to honestly explore the world of our own visual creations when we sit down to make art.

Light and dark are organic forces. Our perceptions of them constantly shift as we live and move. They are real to us, yes, but not like cubes of sugar that we can fidget with and feed to the monkeys. Most beginning artists are extremely timid about drawing in the dark, but denying the existence of the dark shows that we believe it to be an actual thing. This gives it a power it need not have as it feeds on our self-delusion and fear. It also blinds us to the fact that as scary as it can be, the darkness that we see in our art creates volume, in a sense bringing mass and form to our otherwise two-dimensional experiences.

So to grow as an artist and a person, stop living in denial and the fear that it engenders, and instead accept and explore the wondrous complexities of light and shadow that play across the world around you. Open your eyes and your soul will open as well.

Wow.

We're really zipping along all tickety-boo here. You've blown past the fear of the blank page, of contours and contrast, and will be painting your own Sistine Chapel before you know it. And speaking of the Sistine Chapel, let's move on to the third thing you are going to have to learn how to see - color.

This is your reward for all this work. This is where it gets really fun. If you've left the joy of coloring back in childhood, chances are this makes you nervous. You love color - we all do - but the thought of being in charge of the real-life gooshiness of some new medium scares the burnt umber out of you. My advice to you is once again to stop.

Breathe.

Anxiety is normal, but color is not the problem - it's being in charge that has you walking the knife's edge. You know what? Forget about it. New experiences are always a little overwhelming. When I was in high school I mostly just used colored pencils to copy pictures of supermodels for my friends. When I went to TWU they made me buy acrylic paint. For my first masterpiece, I chose to depict a shoe. I slaved over it for days and when it was all over, I cried. It was just that bad, and art had been the one thing that I was used to being really good at. If I wasn't an artist, what was I?

I painted over the nightmare shoe-canvas with purple and timidly started again - a purple pear and some purple apples on a few folds of some bright purple drapery. Very nice. My mother hung it behind a door. I kept working at it, though, and you know what? Color got fun again. Sooo much fun. I had a fair bit of raw talent, but fear and a whole lot of emotional baggage almost made me throw away the brushes forever. That would have been a tragedy because of one thing: Joy.

Color is the music of the visual universe, and contrary to the cold calculations of materialists everywhere, I think that although color does have its utilitarian purposes, it transcends those and exists for one main reason: Joy.

Quantum physicists have postulated that the universe is a living, breathing (so to speak) entity down to its very smallest particulars, but I don't need their mathematics to feel the life that surges around me. Color is the aspect of the visual world that convinces me that this world is good, and despite the fact that my little corner of the Universe sometimes wallows in darkness, I am glad to be alive and experiencing it. This is a fruity, artsy, utterly subjective thing to say, but I will not apologize because I am tired, tired, tired of the way my cold calculations have robbed me for so long of the joy of life.

I could argue for this all day, but it is not what I want to do. Instead, I will tell you some stories, because I believe that in a sense that is all we ever do, anyways.

*I had a suite-mate my first year of University named Danier, a robust viking of a young man with long, straight, chestnut hair, a full beard and a deep, booming voice. He was tall and broad-shouldered, but leaned more towards old Irish Poetry and medieval music than acts of athletic prowess. For hours he would sit in our shared bathroom, practicing on the penny whistle he'd made. I loved his robust enthusiasm, but was pretty sure he was a little cracked in the head. For example, he would make us all refer to his girlfriend as "The Princess", and once told me he believed that each tree had its own individual spirit and that if you were still enough for long enough, you could hear it speaking.

What a fruit bat, right? I mean, each tree having its own unique spirit? Come on. That would mean that the thoughtless destruction of the world's forests was more than just piss-poor planning, it was an ongoing tragedy of incalculable proportions. I'd have to feel apologetic to my toothpick, for Pete's sake!

But you know, having spent ten summers witnessing the brutish and wasteful harvesting practices of the Canadian lumber industry (at the behest, primarily, of the American consumers, I might add), as well as taking part in the depressing uniform monostocking of those cut blocks with millions of, for the most part, lodgepole pine (which, due to absurd and financially-driven forest-fire-fighting practices are being decimated by the North American Pine beetle), I have come to the conclusion that there may be some merit to the idea that individual trees are important. Whether or not they have their own spirits is kind of beside the point - our current attitudes certainly aren't working.

I am aware, yes, of the irony (hypocrisy) in what I am saying. I, too, live in a house made in part of cheap Canadian two-by-fours, and am trying to get this story published on paper. I do not have to like it, though, or to assume that the way we currently pillage our environs is the only possible way to interact with a forest. Nor do I have to unthinkingly accept the mechanistic view of a perfectly understandable universe, robbed of wonder, beauty and life. It is just way more interesting to be alive if I can admit that there will always be more in heaven or earth than I could ever hope to capture in one philosophy.

*The Caquinte tribe of Peru tells of a huge, lizard-like creature that lives deep in the dark jungles, and of an un-contacted tribe that lives a hundred feet up on top of the forest canopy, moving from tree to tree with the use of long poles and vines.

*The summer my dad met my mom when they were both in Peru, my dad volunteered to go out into the jungle and help cut a new airstrip for a tribe. One day he heard someone yelling his name, so he dropped his axe and ran to the sound. When he got there, he found one of his crew members jumping in and out of what could probably be best described as a cartoon downpour. It was about ten feet in diameter, and moving slowly through the jungle on an otherwise mostly-cloudless day. They jumped in and out of it repeatedly, and then it was gone.

*I saw a white crow fly by, flanked by two black ones.

*One day while walking our black-lab mutt down a quiet side trail in a park in Langley, British Columbia, Ariana and I heard a tinkling sound from up above and looked left just in time to see something white and stick-like fall to the ground. We heard chattering, so we looked up to see another white object fly out from where a squirrel was perched on the mossy limb of a fir tree about thirty-five feet above us. Tinkle, tinkle, tinkle it went as it fell, bouncing off branches on the way down to land on the soft forest floor, eight feet away from us. The squirrel maintained its angry chatter as I stepped over and saw that what it had thrown was the sun-bleached thighbone of some mammalian creature. How did that squirrel get a seven-inch bone up the tree? And why did it throw it at us? Was it a threat - an expression of disgust at some unwanted trespassers? I don't know - or even care to know. I love the mystery.

*In the final weeks of my last year in Peru, my friend Benjamin and I walked the long, grassy airstrip down by the lake. This was the year that Benjamin learned of his mother's cancer, the illness that in a little over twelve months would claim her life. We walked as we had many times before, saying very little, and then sat on the sloped edge of the runway, staring off into the distance at one of those bizarre, localized storms that often happen in the amazon. Two monolithic pillars of angry gray clouds were billowing and piling up side-by-each, probably about a mile up into the atmosphere and at least a few hundred feet apart. The moon was brilliant that night, and glinted off the columns in shifting brushstrokes of silver as something brewed in the darkened center.

As we watched, lighting began to gurgle all up and down the insides of each of these pillars, illuminating them here and there with flashes of rich, glowing colors. There were swaths of green and gold, blue and crimson. There were pinks and oranges and yellows and all over little fingers of hot white fire danced and played, crackling and fizzling and sparking. Then long bolts began to flash intermittently across the space between the two clouds, searing bands that lit up the inner faces of those columns at intervals, to be echoed in the silences by the subtler hues being painted within.

Benjamin and I, who loved to talk and share and explain to each other the mysteries of the universe, were stunned and sat in wonder for this show, sharing nothing more than primal groans and shouts of wonder as it went on and on and on - for over an hour. We each wished, silently, that everyone else in the whole world could see this with us: our friends, families - Benjamin's mom. But it was the yearning joy at the impermanence of it all that burned this vision of the eye of God into my mind forever. This is the mystery and the music of color that plays on, largely ignored, as a perpetual soundtrack to our mostly blindered eyes.

The universe is alive, and color is the way joy writes itself all over its face.

You may think I am blowing fairy dust out my nose, but if you give it a whirl I know you will love it. Play, play, play. There are endless principles and rules to explain what color does and how it interacts with the eyes and psyches of human beings. Learn them if you want - they can help you get started - but never forget to play, to dance, to make love. Color brings joy to the darkest places. Remember all those darker values we were talking about earlier? Well, fill them up with color and soon you'll see the beauty even in the darkness. Color makes light and dark meaningful by filling them up with beauty.

For me, color connects to all the deeper, intangible yearnings of my glandular self - the things I want to know about but can't, so I just end up having to be satisfied with rolling around in joy. Color is a gift. Color is a feast of delights from the eyes to the soul. It is an orgasm without responsibility, an opportunity to find joy and meaning in the midst of ugliness. As an artist it is your job to show up, play, and smile. So do it.

And now that we're all having fun, let's learn how to see connections.

I started University full of turmoil and trauma, undisciplined personally but with an artist's eye and what many called an exceptional gift. There wasn't much of an art program at the school at that time - just two teachers in an old portable, actually - but those two little ladies were something else. Erica Grimm-Vance was a turbo-charged, short-haired woman whose works are displayed in no less diverse places than the Vatican collection and the movie "Catwoman" (she taught Halle Berry to paint for the role, but it was her work in the movie). Doris Hutton Auxier, who ended up teaching most of my art classes, was a likewise gifted and thoughtful artist.

These two women did not suddenly transform me into someone who could draw and paint exponentially better - the laws of labor weren't suddenly repealed on my behalf, but what did happen was that Erica and Doris quickly (and intentionally) went and wrecked drawing and painting for me, and then re-made it as something else... something much more interesting. "Why just copy something you see?", they asked, "when a camera could do it so much better?"

These ladies didn't give a lick if I was a fabulous xerox-monkey, they wanted me to make something new, something filtered through the only unique thing I had to offer the world: me. They wanted my art to say something.

This was heady news. I'd had very little technical art instruction and no theory whatsoever in my life in an Amazonian backwater, and it blew my mind that I could get involved in the myth-making, story-writing venture of my era. I could enter into an experience, filter it, and if I was lucky even transmit a little of the truth of it to someone else. What a rush!

I ping-ponged all over the place. I was the great white crusader who was going to fix the world through art. My work improved immensely by the attempt to infuse content with meaning. I quickly painted a series about apathy towards suffering, and started writing dramatic, cynical, self-righteous little world-fixing poems like this one:

The Ant 

I've listened for fifteen minutes about the rims on his car.
So far, I've nodded to his inane prattle and battled to remain couth.
But aloof, I brood in my balcony cage,
judging this stage vacant, and its actors, only that.

I spat on an ant once,
and watched it struggle through the bubbles and slime...
for life.
In time, at last, the struggle passed and the ant fell free.
I could see that death,
stripped of immanence,
had ceased to be within its head.

The dead, I'm told, don't live,
and instinct demands that life-pain whets only the sands
where we shore up our being.

But being is seeing,
and watching all this occur creates a whir and stir
in which it is impossible to hear talk of automobiles
and rims on wheels
without feeling very much like an ant -
covered in bubbles and slime,
writhing for the light.

My righteous indignation burbled up and I lashed out at all the power-mongering control-monkeys who were effing up the world, and all the mindless, consumptive sheep who were helping them do it. There were a few problems with this, not the least of which was my inherent laziness and unwillingness to actually do anything to change the things that bothered me.

I was tilting at windmills, a head chock-full of everybody else's problems and unwilling to admit, really, that the problem was also me - that my problem was entirely me. The issues I was pointing at were real, so the work I made still connected in some way to the truth. But until I could admit that I was as effed up as everyone else, I was unable to make the sorts of connections that might have freed me up to really love.

I will end this art lesson with this: open your eyes to the connections that only you can make. You are incredible - a uniquely placed compendium of influences that can uniquely love the world. Never let yourself believe that you have figured everything out. I, for one, was absolutely positive that I did the right thing by metaphorically killing Jennika from my life. The day that Ariana moved out, I called Aren up in Canada and poured out the whole story, ending with how I had dealt, finally, with Jennika. He did what good friends do and told me I was an idiot - that I had no right to punish her for my problems.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized he was right. I needed all the friends I could get, and how many people are there out there who could hear something like that and still want to be my friend? Two days after my conversation with Aren I called Jennika up and apologized. Not only did she graciously forgive me, but she has also been instrumental in helping me write this book. I don't know if I could have gotten through it without her encouragement and assurances that although it was awkward for her to read these things, she believed that they were true.

I was sure, but I was wrong... and that is fine by me. Love is bigger than my mistakes. Love allows me to be forgiven - to love Ariana now more than ever, and at long last to be able to enjoy Jennika as the wonderful friend that she is, without fear and fantasy getting in the way.

The End

*Final Note: I will be including my essay "How's it Gonna Be" as the epilogue to my Anatomy of an Effup, but this post is long enough as it is, so I'll just link it here.  To everyone who has faithfully read along with me, I cannot possibly thank you enough. When I started writing this it seemed an impossible task, so I chose to break it into smaller chores by posting weekly on the internet. It kept me accountable, and the affirmation you gave me encouraged me to believe it was worth doing.

As I continued to grow both as a writer and a person, I was able to stop needing that affirmation quite so much in order to keep writing, and to just be more grateful for it than anything else. Don't get me wrong - I'm still the same desperate, attention-grubbing person I once was - but the freedom that has come from writing this story has been unbelievable. Your gift to me... Merry Christmas.

It is my intention to immediately start work on a basic re-shaping revision. As soon as I have finished and had the opportunity to run it by a couple of fresh readers with English degrees, I will be sending it off to publishers. If you know a good publisher or editor, I would very much love to network that action. Thanks again,

Josh Barkey

man's man, manly man, manliest man about town.

I just knew there was a reason Mark Driscoll annoyed me. I mean, one that was shared by another human being with a brain. In this case, Juanito. Please read his latest post here and then go out out and kill living things (if you're a man) or hang up popcorn strings (if you're a woman). I mean, it's Christmas, after all.

A Real Celebrity

I guess I have a bit of a celebrity problem.

If you've followed my writing for a while, you know that my little problem has led me to take on jobs as an extra in film and television - where I met people like Lou Diamond Phillips, Allison Mack and Jennifer Garner - and that I tend to ogle the allure of fame with far more longing than I am proud to admit. I suppose that in a culture where a show entitled "American Idol" is accepted with nary the bat of an eye, I am not alone. This doesn't stop me from feeling shallow and pathetic, and so I cope with this feeling by making a joke of it - by over-emphasizing my attitude to the point of ludicrousness.

For example, when I flew to California to visit my brother and his family for Thanksgiving a few days ago I made a point of insisting that every luxury vehicle I saw with tinted windows contained a celebrity - whom I then proceeded to name based on the gender and racial profile of the actual driver. Fifty year old Asian woman? Ah, yes, well that would be Lucy Liu. Caucasian male with a handlebar mustache? Obviously Brad Pitt, getting in character for a new role.

This endlessly annoyed my brother, who kept insisting that Orange County (where he lives) is not actually in Los Angeles and does not have any celebrities (nuts, I know). So yesterday morning as I was driving my rental car back up to the LA airport I turned to my younger brother Jason and remarked, "wouldn't it be funny if I saw an actual celebrity at LAX and I could get them to let me take a picture with them? I could email it to Jo-Ben and just say - hey, brother: here's me with another one of those celebrities I've been seeing."

We dropped off the car, took the shuttle to the airport, and then my toddler son Mateo and I said goodbye to Jason as he went to check in at his airline and we went to ours. Tickets, baggage, shoes off, moving walkways, blah-blah-blah and then, just before we got to our gate who should I see zipping towards me going the other direction but Nick Vujicic.

I am ashamed to admit that I hardly noticed him at all, but that what caught my attention was this oddly-shaped foot he had. I had heard him call it in a video his "little chicken drumstick" and when it caught my eye I thought, "hey, there's that little chicken drumstick". Then I thought, "hey, it's that guy!"

All this took place in a few split seconds as he came around the corner in a motorized wheelchair, so just before he was right up on me I yelled, "Dude!... I saw your video online. It was great." He stopped and said hello in that sweet Aussie accent of his and I said, "yeah, man. I'm a high school art teacher and I showed it to all my classes."

At that point I felt a little awkward, so I started to turn away but he stopped me with a question: "did it encourage them?"

"Yeah", I said, "it really did. Thank you." Then as he said "great" I turned and walked away, thinking immediately that that wasn't what I had meant to say at all and wondering what it must be like to be accosted by strangers all the time.

Down at our gate, which shared a cul-de-sac with about five others, Mateo decided to run round and round in big, loopy circles as I followed behind, carrying all our bags. After a dozen rounds I looked up and who should be coming back our direction but this Nick guy. He and his friends(family?entourage?) parked themselves in some seats and had a sandwich, but after a while he disengaged and headed over to the window.

I saw a second chance, so I ambushed him. "Hey, man.", I said, "Sorry to ambush you there earlier."

"No worries, bud", he replied (I know... perfect, right?).

I asked him his name and then said, "I just didn't say before what I had really wanted to, which is that I watched your video right after my wife told me she was going to leave me".

He said something sympathetic, so I launched right into the story of how his video had touched and inspired me. As I talked about my pain I started to cry, and he gave me the sort of sympathy that made it worse. So there I was, standing in a crowded corner of the Los Angeles Airport, holding a two year-old (who for some reason was totally not squirming), a ukulele, a heavy backpack and a hand-bag of baby stuff. I was crying, thinking that all those people who had been watching my adorable son go all Ritalin were now wondering why I was walking up to the uniquely-shaped stranger and sniveling like I was the little kid with the carpet burn.

When I finished, he said, "Do you mind if I pray for you?".

Despite my qualms I will never say "no" to this question. Although growing up as a missionary kid has left me wary of gung-ho, obnoxious people who may mean well but spout off all the wrong things whenever they start to pray, I said an enthusiastic "Yes!" with absolutely no hesitation. The clip I'd seen on youtube was only about five minutes long and gave no real indication that he was a man of any sort of faith whatsoever. Nonetheless, when a man such as Nick Vujicic offers to pray for you, you just instinctively know that he is not going to hit you with a bunch of trite drivel that will make you grind your teeth and pray, yourself, for a meteor shower.

I cried. He prayed. The words were nothing different than I'd heard a hundred or a thousand times before but somehow they just seemed to stick. He prayed encouragement. He prayed wisdom for me as I struggled to raise my son. He prayed and a sense of rest and purpose seemed to hover over that moment. After his "amen" we talked a bit more. He was heading to Maryland to give a talk, then to Redding for some R&R. He was flying on my same connecting flight through Houston, so we spoke in passing a couple more times. Then he was gone.

Once again, this is not a story about how awesome I am. This is a story about how awesome I am not, but how despite all that, beautiful things just seem to happen all around me. I went to LAX hoping half-heartedly to see a celebrity, and ended up brushing up, briefly, against a great man. And even then - even after that - I still caught myself thinking, "yeah, but wouldn't it have been something to see a real celebrity?"

This morning when I told this story to one of my art classes, I pointed out that not only had I gotten from the incident a moment of great encouragement and a chance to meet a great man, but I had also been forced once again to face my own pettiness and out-of-whack priorities. "I mean, that airport was just full of wonderful, intriguing people, but all I could think about was that one of my high school youth leaders had peed in an LAX urinal next to Sean Connery - so it could happen to me, too."

Immediately, about three guys in the class said, "Whoa! Sean Connery!?! Now that is off the hook!" When I pointed out the irony of their response, they said, "yeah, but c'mon! Sean Connery!" And then they all traipsed off into their best impressions of the lishping shcottish actor.

I suppose we are all in this together - heck, this story gets most of its punch from the fact that Nick Vujicic is the sort of guy who has his own Wikipedia page and motivates a lot of people to stop crying for themselves and start living. In retrospect, Nick probably played an important role in my own motivation to stop sniveling and start taking responsibility for myself and my abilities by beginning to write the memoirs that I've been serializing on this blog as my "Anatomy of an Effup".

I told my class this morning that while I get really suspicious when people start telling me they know exactly how God is monkeying around with their business, I have to admit that this sort of fortuitous, karmatic event has me just about ready to claim that God is in the business of micro-managing. That may in fact be crazy. All I can say for certain is that I am extremely grateful for the unforeseen and undeserved opportunity to meet a man who, if not a real celebrity, is most definitely a really great man.

excuse me...

My sophomore year at University some phone company executive had the bright idea to give every student on campus a free, fifty dollar phone card. The catch was that you had to use it within the first week of school, and once you activated it you had only twenty-four hours to use the whole thing. I suppose they were thinking that it got their name in front of all of us and most people wouldn't use more than a few minutes, anyways.

Their marketing department didn't account for Six-Lower, a dorm full of ingenious troublemakers. We figured that we could use the interwebs to find the country codes for places all over the world. We also figured that a whole lot of students weren't bothering to collect the cards from their mailboxes, much less use them - so with a deft little twiggle of a kitchen knife we might or might not have relieved a few mailboxes of this extra bit of recycling.

Thus began a three-day marathon of prank calls to the friendly peoples of Scotland, Ireland, England, France, Australia, Belgium, New Zealand and Botswana.

Now, I can assure you that while calling a random local number and asking whomever picks up if their refrigerator is running is, in fact, lame - there is a whole lot of comedic gold to be mined by asking the same question of the good citizens of Sri Lanka. The accents, for one, add a lot of flavor to the joke, and it helps that it isn't really part of the cultural heritage over there to be told that you'd better hurry up and catch it.

It wasn't all just inane jokes, though. The Six-Lower prank call protocol dictated that a healthy percentage of your calls had to be purely social, so we spent many a good few minutes asking random strangers all sorts of intriguing questions about their lives and opinions - such as where to get a good cinnamon bun in Edinburgh, or whether it seemed wise for the Spice Girls to be wearing high heels and leather pants while dancing around on the uneven desert floor.

I don't know why I forgot that story completely until last week. I mean, it's a pretty funny story - the sort I tend to tell over and over until someone informs me that, yes, this is the tenth time I've repeated it to them. Perhaps it's because it has me violating federal regulations and stealing from mailboxes - perhaps I just don't want to think of myself in that way: breaking rules and bothering strangers.

If that's the case, then it could be that all the truth-telling I have been trying to do of late will be opening up vast new anecdotal comedic vistas.

Or maybe jail cells.

studentia

One of my more gifted students has been featured in print and online in "Charlotte Parent" magazine. I am giving you the link, so that you can look at it and know that inasmuch as he is cool and talented and worthy of your admiration, I am also these things by association.

Here it is. 

You may now love me, as well.

how's it gonna be?

It is midnight, and my son wakes up crying, drenched in sweat. He snuggles in close and through his tears I hear him say "eh-mo"; so I start singing the la-la-la's of "Elmo's Song". His cries taper off and he reaches up a tiny hand, strokes my face lightly, and in a soft voice says, "that, dadu... that". We are lying side by side on a hospital bed at Carolina Medical Center in Monroe, where he was admitted two nights ago with a high fever and difficulty breathing.

My wife had called and, unable to speak through her tears, passed the phone off to the closest nurse, who explained that he seemed to have pneumonia and that they would be admitting him into the hospital. As I drove down the highway towards the pediatric center the sun, which for two days had been blocked out by torrential rainstorms, poked through the evening sky, setting the already blazing leaves of fall afire. It seemed as though the top halves of all the trees are burning, and I was tempted to start making metaphors of death right there - but the glowing beauty of it all against the deep blue sky stopped me and I thought instead of rainbows, and hope.

I cry a fair bit on this drive, thinking about death and the fragility of my toddler son's life. But then I slap myself hard a few times, insisting that I "suck it up and be a man". My wife and son need me to be strong, I insist, so I say a little prayer for strength and drive on, tears drying.

When I get to the hospital she is indeed falling apart a bit, although Mateo is bouncing off the walls in Motrin-induced good spirits. I give her a hug and then try to anchor down my son, who soon crashes and spends the rest of our two days in the hospital alternating between being a pale, sickly-looking whimper-worm and a full-throated, screaming hellion. I can't blame him - every couple of hours someone comes into the room and pokes him with something, or makes him breathe wet air from a hissing, spitting tube, or jiggles one of the multiple tubes and wires connected to his body.

At long last, the tubes come off and the boy is freed. They say he may have asthma. I drive him home and put him down for a nap while my wife goes to a pharmacy to pick up his drugs. After two hours, he wakes up sweating and screaming, so I force-feed him some more Motrin and then take him out of the "grandmother apartment" where we live and into the house where his grandmother actually lives, so he can watch TV whilst I subject him to some more moist air from the home nebulizer they gave (sold) us at the hospital.

This does not make him happy, and sets off another three-hour session of crying, screaming and coughing, with occasional blips of calm. After dinner - which he does not eat - I begin force-feeding him the four syringes of antibiotics and steroids I am required to give him. At the final squirt of the final syringe he vomits, losing all the medicine and the cup of milk he has drunk all over himself, the couch, and me. My parents have by then dropped in to help, and so I snap at mom to cuddle him while I rinse some contact-cement puke off his clothes.

As I do this, I can't help thinking, "It's not supposed to be like this." It is a phrase I hate, not just because of the "correct", non-existent reality that it presumes, but also because it implies that I, in my infinite wisdom, know what that reality ought to be. It is a phrase my wife used to say when we argued and it infuriated me because, I reasoned (in that annoying way of husbands who are oblivious to what it would take to defuse a situation), it kept us from dealing with the situation as it actually was.

Nonetheless, I say it - repeat it, in fact, over and over in my head, as I pour more of the milky-white antibiotic from its container into the small plastic cap and then knock it over as I clumsily try to fill the syringe with one hand - my other arm wrapped across Mateo's chest. I start to cry, and when mom gives me a little sympathetic one-hand back rub I snap at her again, "Not helping, mom", I say, adding, "I know you're trying to help, mom... thanks, but it just doesn't help right now". I have long been mean to my mother, and it comes out worst when I am sleep-deprived and stressed. Maybe that's why my wife is not here, I think.

She always seems to know how to calm Mateo down, and everything I am doing right now just upsets him more. As I give him the medicine a second time he struggles and cries, "Sleepy, Dadu. Sleep now. Bed." I assure him that we'll go to bed as soon as he gets all his medicine, and although he weekly says, "oh-kay", he keeps on crying.

We finish the last syringe and it stays down. At long last he quiets, nods, and begins to fall away. I put him to bed and go to apologize to mom (and, of course, to ask her to wash the puke-laundry for me. I'm not entirely a jerk, but my washing machine is broken).

Mateo sleeps nearly through the night, waking only a couple of times with a few short cries, but falling promptly away again. In the morning I hear him calling softly for milk, so I get him a sippy cup and then sit by him as he re-arranges his pillow, pulls a blanket over himself, and drinks the whole thing. His fever is gone and he is mostly happy. We make a Doctor's appointment and at nine-forty-five his mother shows up and we head back up the highway to Monroe. She is again her happy, smiling self, and I enjoy her company but cannot understand why she jokes with me and laughs when I start singing a silly song to calm Mateo. She has been gone less than two months, and the wound is still very raw and tender.

Our doctor is a black woman, an African. She is not a big woman, but fills the room with the force of her personality. She speaks loudly from only a few feet away in her somewhat thick accent, and seems to be unaware of the strength of her voice. It is a pleasant voice, though, so I am not offended by it. "Nobody in the house is smoking?", she demands, as if daring us to say otherwise. I say no and she leans in close with a friendly smile on her face, saying, "You would not lie to me, would you? Because I am watching you... I see."

Even though I have never smoked a cigarette in my life, I feel embarrassed and want to start confessing things.

My wife, feeling for me in my discomfort, interjects, "See, what happened is we're separated, and the place where I live my roommate smokes in the other room and..." the doctor doesn't even let her finish, "Whaat!", she asks, "Why you want to do something like that for? You are so young! You look like nice people - what is there so bad you cannot work through it for the good of the child!?!" As she says this she leans close to me again, and I once again feel the urge to confess. "I, um. I don't know." I say, avoiding her eyes and my wife's.

I want to tell this strange, powerful black woman that it is not my idea or my fault. That it kills me. That I would do anything to convince my wife to come back. But this is not entirely the truth. The truth is, all I can say for certain is that I do not understand what happened, and that every time I see my wife, I notice again how beautiful she is. I want to throw myself at her feet and beg her to come back to me, to change her mind. Again and again I think those ugly words: "it shouldn't be like this", and feel waves and waves of rage, sorrow, and confusion crashing against the walls of her determination.

I read something recently about strong black women, and how although they get a lot of flack for what is perceived as a domineering attitude, it is a way of operating that they have been forced into by a generation of black men who, for complicated reasons, have abdicated the place of leadership in the black community. This doctor reminds me of them and makes me think that perhaps this strength is not a forced response to an ugly reality, but a vestigial genetic heritage, handed down through generations from a wild past on a dangerous continent, where village women still carry the heaviest loads and form the backbone of deep, rooted communities.

I want to turn to this woman, to look her in the eyes and ask, "Why?"

Why does it seem so clear to her  - this woman so unaffected by our ugly, broken culture that she can speak her mind with love shining in her eyes - that we should just work it out for the good of our child? She is herself, in a sense, a child - unfettered by a culture that equates lies with maturity, and assumes that ugliness ought to be excused, apologized for, walked away from, or ignored. I want to ask her how she has done this, but she has already flown back into an explanation of Mateo's medical issues. She takes a final crack later, saying, "he is crying  because he thinks if he cries more it will force his parents to stay together. They know... they do" and then she calls a nurse to check his blood oxygen and is out the door and on to other patients.

I avoid eye contact with my wife as we leave the room. I am awkward and nervous, afraid of what she will say about this woman. I feel her memory as a beautiful, elemental force, and I do not wish to hear her maligned. We put Mateo in the car, and as I pull out of our parking spot my wife turns to me and says, "Apart from barely understanding what she was saying with that accent, I like that doctor. I think maybe we should stay with her. What do you think?" I mumble agreement as we pull into the street.

This world - this life - is a beautiful mystery. I do not understand even the smallest things. The sun shines hot in mid-November. Mateo whimpers and falls asleep in the back seat as my wife leans back to cradle his head with her hand, so he won't be jostled. I catch myself quietly singing a line from some song I don't really know, "I say a little prayer for you". I sing it over and over, so softly that I am almost humming. My wife laughs, folds some cloth to prop Mateo's head, and settles back into her seat, coughing.

She tells me of her plans to get the rest of her things moved into her new place this evening. She is smiling, and I do not understand. I sing it again, and again she laughs and adds, "you know I'm going to have that stuck in my head all night." We drive as a family in silence down the road, between rows of gold and crimson oak trees, and I catch myself thinking, "this is how it should be".