Graduation

It's like Mystery Science Theater 3,000 in the expansive basketball gym chock full of white foldout chairs, coffee, and tasty things. Jenny and I are in the back of the mostly-empty sitting-places with plates of eclairs and chocolate-covered strawberries, watching a grad on the jumbotron:

"I I can do it..." Jenny interjects for one grad who nervously hoists his gown-skirts over the last step. "I think I can, I think I can," as he tunnel-visions on President Libby, who is reaching out her hand and... "I got it!" he/Jenny exclaims as a flashbulb immortalizes the moment and his expression shifts to relief as Jenny graciously defers to me for the next voiceover.

If there was anyone sitting in front of us, we might, just might tip the scale from awesome to annoying--because only we could rock MST3k for at least four hours as hundreds of students traverse the stage and double-majors cross twice--but we are closer to the smorgasboard of muffins than our fellow viewers, allowing us to be awesome--yes, I'm going to stick with "awesome" as the adjective--together and yet still be respectful as we burst up from our seats at the right moments as the people we left as sophomores cross the stage in their chic, triumphant regalia. I'm usually not a fan of piping in a live event, would rather be there in the flesh, but with everyone packed onto uncomfortable bleachers at the Edmunds Center across the street, it's nice to give my coccyx and sweat glands a relief while energizing myself with double-chocolate muffins.

Jenny has been up here for a few days, and we talk about life and how we are going to take over the world (perhaps this is only figurative) and she whisks me down to graduation. It's great to see the sophomores graduate; it's the last class we were really, as a whole, close with. It's also the last class that remembers our techniques for hiding Bob the stuffed bobcat around the Wesley House, and somehow, right before the graduation party there when no one was around, he winds up moving from the piano to stand surreptitiously on the toilet tank of the girls' restroom...

After the graduation watch-party we join the throng of people coming out of the Edmunds Center, swarmed by families, congratulatory teachers, and so much praise that they deserve. Mima is there, Ali, Karen, and Rob, their whole families gathered round and taking pictures, people doffing gowns in the Florida heat. The Care Bears have never given this many hugs, and the positivity here could power a small city. At least basic electricity, not particle accelerators or anything.

Ryan is also here, I learn as he gets me round the back with a big bear hug. He's back from several days in New York City, followed by a camping trip, followed by what was supposed to be a road trip, but his friend got broken up with, so turned into doing housework at his friend's parents' house but it was still awesome! Now he's mowing the lawn at his mom's house for the first time in six months, fixing all sorts of things, and, to the shock of all involved, shaving most of his facial hair, allowing me to outdo him with my new beard.

We're still serving, just this time it's for our parents, and we're still building up to something, just mine is Bike & Build and Duke and his is EMT school. We're gonna blow raspberries and put our thumbs in our ear aside open hands--to look like affable moose--at culture which tells us to settle down and get a job; we're going to go where we need to go

Glee

I should have picked freakin' Phil Collins. It's not like any of us actually sound good, singing a cappella into a computer microphone, heard over computer speakers, but I should have gone with the sweet and sensible "True Colors" over the Rolling Stones song that was also on the list... but didn't realize that until day-of when I'd been practicing in front of Sasha for a while, her furry brow arching as I relate my story of interest and rejection, though ultimate assuagement. Meh, I'm only doing this for fun anyway.

I'm sitting like a putz in my neon yellow biking jersey in front of the webcam recording an audition tape for "Glee", FOX's latest hit show, half-musical, half-high school, but not a high school musical. "I've been singing since I was [make the size of a fetus with my hands]" I tell the camera, as to why I should be on "Glee", before I bust out my unaccompanied version of "You Can't Always Get What You Want" while sitting in my chair within the frame of the webcam. It's one of those songs that sounds better with a full band, Mick Jagger punctuating the phrases like someone is testing his rock-hard abs by punching him in the stomach. Come to think of it, I don't know if he has rock-hard abs or not, but it used to be in the performance of his songs he progressively took clothes off, both of which I cannot do (or probably shouldn't do for a high school show), while backed by Keith Richards' unstoppable guitar.

Suffice to say, I bring the noise, but I don't think I bring the funk, and that's alright. I figure, why not? I'll be headed to Decatur, Texas on the July 1st call time, if I made it past the first round, with no possibility to get away, besides, I've got my future at Duke at least somewhat set for the next three years. The audition is overly big anyway, a gigantic public thing that they advertise on myspace and TV and imdb.com and all sorts of places, and performers are advocating for themselves, telling their friends and internet acquaintances to vote for them on this massive venture. I have other things to do. People have thousands of "Gold Stars"; I have three.

But it ain't about the Gold Stars, or being on the show. Too often in my life I have let opportunities slide by, oftentimes right in front of my face, that I do not claim because of fear; the well-meant, but often poorly-discerned reason of others; a culture where most of us suppress our individuality to be a part of the status quo; and a thousand other paralyses that prevent us from taking that step into courage that connects us so deeply to who God made us to be. So, the audition is an easy one to do--online instead of heading to New York or something--and very well within my power; I can't possibly make the call date, but who knows, if something happened, maybe we could work something out; maybe if I do this, I will feel more confident in future auditions... if, if, if... if I don't move on, I still get the experience, if I do nothing, I get absolutely nothing. The worst that they can tell me is no, right?

Besides, they need triple-threats, those who can sing, act, and dance, which probably doesn't make it my cup of tea. If only it were sing, act, and cycle, or sing, dance, and enjoy doing basic algebra or offer constructive criticism on the script, but nope, it's sing, act, and dance. I'm not despairing; actually, I'm thrilled. This year has been about taking steps out in faith, and trusting God for the courage to do so. Coffers are filling for Bike & Build because of so many incredible donors, housing is falling into place at Duke, Ryan and I survived Europe, and I hope to make this stepping out in faith, this slow strengthening of courage, a pattern in my life. Instead of reasoning how unlikely it was for me to get on the show, I reasoned, "I simply want to do this," so I told the reason-you-out-of-it world to put a sock in it, and bam! I auditioned. It's done. A part of my testimony. A fun, totally random story that I can lay claim to to surprise my kids in between my stories of dinosaurs and existential theologians and adventures after college.

Besides, even if I can't catch Idina Menzel when she performs a concert here in Jacksonville, I can always cycle by Metropolitan Park, where she's practicing during the heat of the day, the Jacksonville Symphony Orchestra all strings and fullness behind her. She's in jeans, and I feel for her, as does the family from Tampa that has come up for their twelve-or-so-years-old daughter's birthday just to see this. It's not like a concert--I mean, she starts "No Day but Today" from Rent and then stops to say, "Hey, can we do that in D-flat?"--but hey, it's Idina Menzel. I keep hoping someone will notice us through the chain link and say, "Hey, you guys are stalwart fans, why don't you come in out of the sun?" Who knows? It could happen. It doesn't, but it could.

The daughter knows everything about the star of Wicked, from her solo stuff to the duet she will sing with Lea Michelle on an upcoming episode of "Glee" and etceteras. It's like when I stopped by the Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian premiere in DC, thinking maybe something would happen, maybe something wouldn't, but setting out nonetheless, now able to say that I've seen Ben Stiller, Christine Taylor, Hank Azaria, Amy Adams, Ricky Gervais... everyone except Owen Wilson, and Robin Williams was especially cool after having open-heart surgery, when everyone else just walks up the red carpet, he slides from fan to fan, shaking hands and taking pictures, giving everyone a joke, including the Mexican woman I was standing with, who spoke no English, but with whom he posed for a picture nonetheless, with some sort of energy that, if it comes from himself, comes nonetheless from a deep inner joy.

Beaches

At the intersection of Atlantic and 1st, right down near the One Ocean Pavilion and a handful of other beach haunts, there is literally a Starbucks on either side of the road. Of course, this is along the Jacksonville pilgrimage route to the beach; Atlantic Boulevard used to be the only road running out here, which is why the founded-in-1939 historic Beach Road Chicken restaurant is on this road instead of the now-parallel-running Beach Blvd. This is how people used to get from the rivers and the center of commerce, over the Intracoastal Waterway, to the beach, and this is the way I have decided to ride today.

Getting out to the beach via Atlantic is a hard 18 miles of box stores and fighting with cars, even though every mile contains a few of the diamond-shaped yellow signs that show a happy bicycle on the street with the words "SHARE THE ROAD" beneath it. Today, this bicycle is feeling dichotomous: happy to be free and off to exciting places, annoyed as I pass another of these signs and a motorist honks at me in chastisement for taking up three feet on the rightmost of three lanes. Yarg.

Getting to the beach, though, is a sort of haven. Suddenly the environment shifts in a bunch of ways. Obviously the cars can't keep going East--there's an ocean in front of them--so they peel off down A1A to Ponte Vedra or Mayport and I hop two blocks deeper into the beachy pink and yellow color scheme to 1st Street, one block from the water, nestled among beach houses, with plenty of palm-tree roadblocks to stop cars and keep the street open for walkers and cyclists like me. After feeling I had to suck in my stomach to make room for these cars, here I can ride with no handlebars.

The beach also has a change in populous. After seeing relatively few young people in Jacksonville proper, young folks simply walk around at the beach. Couples walking and tanning at the same time (no one bothers to wear a shirt), a beefy terrier on a leach pulling his owner behind on a skateboard, etc. And everyone, everyone is in beach shape.

But back to Starbucks. Why one on either side of the road? Why one stand-alone, ostentatious drive-thru store looking across the divide to a little one in the mini strip-mall, the signs in the window and the words "Starbucks Coffee" overhead the only proclamations of its true purpose from its diminutive, cookie-cutter strip-mall frame?

I am feasting upon words; excuse me. Suffice to say, I've filmed in front of this stand-alone Starbucks before, spent hours here, and had no clue this other one was across the street. It reminded me of an African watering hole: all of these animals migrating across the Serenhgetti when the rains shift elsewhere, all stopping at the few watering holes available between points A and B. This leads not only to dangerous cross-sections of the animal kingdom--with lions and elephants and stuff drinking at the same bar--but also leads to a few packed tourist establishments along the way. I can't believe that the giant oases we see on Planet Earth are the only ones along the way, and can only picture the local lemurs, standing by their own lemur-sized Starbucks with teacups in their hands, looking out at the crowded commotion across the street and tsk-tsking as one of them squeaks; that is to say, as one of them says in the bemused language of their kind: "Tourists".

these animals migrate across the plain when the seasons change, because water dries up in one place and pours down in another. But in order to get there, they have to cross vast spaces, finding whatever water they can along the way, which leads for dangerous combinations of animals in one place. Lions and elephants and such crowd into one Starbucks, while you know the locals, the meerkats, or something, have this tiny waterhole all of their own that nobody seems to notice, and just laugh, in their meerkat way

Changes

So I've added some new features for my blog, and I need you to tell me how you like them. With blogger.com, one can add a "Monetize" feature that is supposed to show adds that relate to the posts at hand, and as many of the posts are rambling about ethics or completely random, I'm interested to see what comes up.

However:

This blog has never been about making money, and I don't know if enough folks read it to turn a profit, but I do ramble on about ethical things and books and dinosaurs and superheroes, etc.and I'm interested to see how these adds turn out. Please let me know if you think they are whack.

The Indwelling

There's a time for everything, right? Like, we who are introverts have to have our moments of being extroverted. We idealists or pessimists have valuable thoughts from our various positions, but, for simple quality of life, we need to spend a good bit of time being realists. In spite of all the relational work Ryan and I have done over the past six months, now is the time to bust my butt and get Bike & Build funded, and Duke after that, in addition to readying a new draft of the play. Somethings one can only do by oneself.

A day goes by, quiet in the gloomy house, with nowhere to go to separate work from leisure, Sasha and Hank bored and sleeping inside as I type on my Mac, the Florida summer oppressively hot outside.

So what does one do? Remember the regimen of prayer at Taizé, how three times a day kicks apathy in the butt at critical moments. Grow a maintained beard. Go to the library for some new CDs and blast Ben Folds, Bon Iver, and Tupac. Ride the bike hard, discovering new routes. And take pleasure in the fleeting moments with friends and in little odd moments during the day when joy breaks in, like watching a squirrel jump from tree to tree, when the dogs brighten up they see their pack leader in the morning, or when Tupac says, completely randomly, "Man, Fidel Castro is a straight guerilla pimp." Even though I don't quite know what that means, it still brings me the joy I get from random things, a joy that is awesome, unexpected, and ever-abundant in a world of diverse stimuli, a China Buffet of disparate experiences, every choice around you so rich, so full of life and delicious MSG.

On second thought, imagine this as a China Buffet in Albert Brooks' idealized heaven in Defending Your Life, a buffet with all of the taste and none of the fattening properties, where you could, if you wanted, eat MSG on everything or have bacon milkshakes. If you wanted.

Arrival

Sasha announces the kind postman with her usual loud barks as Hank, the old dog, sort of perks up his head, says "Pfft... I dun scared him for fifteen years, he ain't coming in here," and sure enough he doesn't, in fact, fit through the 3x8 mail slot and pose any danger to me, but Sasha makes a ruckus nonetheless.

He brings the mail as he always does, with headphones on and scruff that makes him look like a metalhead in anachronistically blue postperson shorts, but then he drifts back to the truck, to the only vehicle in America whose driver side is on the left, and he begins hefting something...

Despite the efficiently-packed box, the bike is remarkably put together. She kind of lights up the room, not only since she is the one clean thing in the room downstairs where Sasha sheds all day, but she is the first new touring bike I've ever had. While my other, twenty-or-thirty-year old ones have had personality and life experience, this one is new, needing someone else to put the pedals on for her, seeing the world for the first time. Maybe the baby bit is too romantic: if she's like anything, she's like a Mr. Potato Head, everything sort of obviously going here and there, but this bike connects to my heart like no Mr. Potato Head ever did. Even the one in Toy Story. Of course, she's not as special as Sasha, but Sasha--giant white German shepherd that she is--only scoffs when we suggest saddling her and riding dogback to the grocery store. They did it in Lord of the Rings, though, which is such an incredible film about stretching our capabilities, yet Sasha is still incredulous on this point, as I imagine our old German shepherds were that Halloween that mom suggested, and followed through, with dressing them up like clowns (including the face paint). They had been scuba divers the year before, complete with tanks. I deduce that it is exactly this disparity between canine species that led to Middle Earth never developing bicycles.

Manservant

This becomes my name as I scurry around the two-tiered deck that, a day ago, I finished painting. Tonight, I am opening wine bottles with one eye, letting the other linger at the oven over the creamy artichoke wantons and its neighboring hors d'ouvres. I've come to serve, and I am doing so in the most traditional sense of the word, topping off glasses and refilling plates at the farewell party for my dad's much-beloved coworker who has left his department with an awesome promotion. Turns out my parents have wanted to have dad's small team over for a while, but couldn't do so until they had someone to help clean the house. Ta-dah!

Yet, in all of the preparation for the evening, I find that I can so easily escape from the gloominess of the house and the never-ending demands of cleaning by hopping on my dad's bike and cycling off into abundant life. I think the challenge of being here is the overall sameness of it, especially when working in the house or novelizing my play, my latest endeavor to re-enliven a four year-old script that's still not done. Nothing really changes here, a sense of constancy that probably really helped me growing up: heading home from work, for example, and knowing that one won't bump into a protest and have to take a different route; or, in a daily sense, if one has a car, one can drive everywhere, be in control at all times, never have to deal with the random conversations while killing time at the bus stop.

At this point in my life, I don't want the constancy. I want a place to lay my head, and I want a task to perform, but I want to be held up by the Burmese monks going to protest in front of the White House, I'll even say I like seeing older, white people walking around with tea bags dangling from their hats, because that's poetic material one can sink one's teeth into. A crowded subway is simply oozing with characters for plays, several different people, on one stage, having one shared experience. Here I am left to my own devices, to think up these characters on my own, to have little outward stimuli except for the study of film and books. I feel much more actualized on a subway reading poetry, or with the wind whipping by me on my bike, than in the car, bumper-to-bumper, as the radio puts on another commercial.

Conversely, there's something to be said for the business partners laughing and cajoling over a bottle of wine and good steaks, lifted up above the wetland scene of our backyard on the white deck. In an era when we let culture isolate us more and more, when we turn to our TVs for interaction instead of our neighbors, this sort of shared experience is, in fact, countercultural. And in the middle of all of this is Sarah, these people's old coworker--and a twentysomething--smiling and laughing like a wedding day, as a bunch of people take time to sit with her and tell her what a blessing she's been to them.

Abundant Life

"[Jesus said] I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly."

John 10:10

On my dad's 30 year-old Fuji--my bike is in the mail--and thinking about abundant life. Moreover, I'm thinking of devouring the quick lines of the road under my own effort, the wheels quickly lapping up the distance between places through my powerful, wind-whipped sense of empowerment; how, at the moment, a sleeping bag and a book of poetry seem all that I need for life. Free. On the road. Like the person who has just been established as a kung fu master.

When I used to crisscross the Jacksonville bridges as an intern for the Film and Television Office, I remember stopping at a downtown red light and feeling as if infinity was found in a combination of those straight roads and that which was underneath my seat. It was a precipice, a Forrest Gump moment, right before he started running across the country, touching an ocean, and, because he could, running right back to the other coast.

Yet those days were on a mountain bike, which may feel abundant in the amount of things one can jump over, how the shocks take the abuse of constant leaping off curbs and going places that would make the Fuji cry tears of degreaser and lubricant. I have no regrets, but I wonder, in those days, if I ever felt the draw to live life more abundantly and shut it out because of my obligations to get to work on time or this or that. Did I want to ride off into the sunset? Why didn't I?


Training, I miss DC. Jacksonville doesn't have the hills, the grandiose architecture and numerous points of interest punctuating the ride, the convenient bike lanes in every direction, the roads through Rock Creek Park closed on weekends to cyclists and joggers. Conversely, the bus drivers here haven't almost killed me yet--which is a good thing, because one knocked me off my bike once in DC--and here people are much more likely to talk to you on the side of the road, cyclists waving a kind hand, and, if they're dismounted from their bike, they are usually jovial and up for a conversation.

So what is abundant life? You know, the precipice moment where you feel not only on top of the world, but as if you have your whole life in front of you?

Too often I cop out and make abundant life something to do with one's setting. Indeed, in some places, DC for instance, life is almost spoon-fed to you, the diversity obvious, the bike lanes safe and convenient, the people all walking to work at a distance one could reach out and touch them; yet that isn't yourself coming to the precipice, it is outward stimuli continually keeping you on your toes. When I came to DC, weighed down by the defeat of a terrible economy, being turned away by publishers, etc. I needed that stimuli, and so do most of us, I think, for a time, if only to get us out of our own heads and move us toward peace with our brothers and sisters of disparate backgrounds and upbringings.

But honestly I think abundant life, and all of the empowerment that comes with it, is a function of stewardship. Of tending a garden. Of getting exercise. Of pausing the movie and taking a friend's call, surprised by how difficult and purposeful that action. Moreover, this is a stewardship of our own selves, of what God has given us in the beginning and as we've grown: our passions, our interests, our relationships... Abundant life for me is busting my butt to write my play and seeing it finally performed. It's caring for a piece of machinery so that I can use it to cycle through the thick Florida air. It's--heck, why not--it's not dating for a while, then meeting someone interesting, and they say yes. And I can't even imagine what Andy and Tawny have to say about this, staring into the eyes of their sleeping child, she who looks like both of them, learning all she knows about love from the two people so gently rocking her back to sleep.