Great Caeser's Ghost

My Testimony

Religion. Here’s a topic guaranteed to piss off anyone. If you don’t believe me, take a minute to turn to the person on your right and say, “I’d like to talk to you about Jesus.” Believe me now?

I don’t consider myself to be a religious person. I go to church most Sundays, more for my family than myself. I believe in the organized church and all the good that can be done in a church community. Unfortunately, a lot of bad can also be done by church communities. It’s possible to convince a person to do almost anything if they can be made to believe they are doing it for religious reasons, and groups of people are more suggestable than individuals. It’s my opinion that religious faith is a delicate balance of hope, ignorance, and suppressed disbelief. As long as the latter makes up less than half of your faith triangle, you probably consider yourself a religious person. If a big enough piece of that pie is made up of ignorance, you could probably be incited to blow up yourself or your neighbor if the request was preceded with “God says”. If your triangle is made up only of hope and ignorance, you should probably let someone else hold your wallet.

As a child my religion was built solely on ignorance. I believed because I was told to. The same is true of a child’s belief in Santa Claus. As I matured, hope moved in. My hope was informed by my burgeoning fear of death. I hoped there was a heaven, and I hoped to go there if I died. As my experience grew, I began to find there were many religions that were different from my own, some even disagreed with the most fundamental things I believed in. Some have a hell and a devil to stand in contrast to their god and heaven, and some don’t. Some have a messiah and some don’t. Some don’t have a heaven at all, but instead believe in reincarnation. Some have no heaven and no reincarnation. Some religions once dominated the earth, and are now laughable and quaint. Some have many gods, and some just one. Some have demi-gods and some don’t. Which one is right?

Let’s check the evidence. Uh oh, there is no evidence. None at all. Well, there are a bunch of scientific studies showing that prayer has absolutely no impact on results. There are also a bunch of studies attempting and failing to prove the existence of the human soul. This is where disbelief was born, and immediately suppressed. As Christians, we are taught that the only unforgivable sin is to deny the Holy Spirit, and God knows what we’re thinking. So I had to work hard to suppress the doubt and the denial that would surely follow. Because if we doubt, and then deny we’ll go to Hell (assuming, of course that all the other stuff isn’t bullshit).

Once doubt met logic, the scales began to tip. As hope and ignorance fell away, the triangle of faith became a circle of reason. Now here I am with only my experience to trust and only myself to believe in. I have only myself to blame for my failures and no where existential to look for support in times of crisis. I am the master of my own destiny. And you know what? It’s pretty sweet. There is great relief in rising from the attitude of penitence. There is liberation in knowing the laws of man are sufficient, and that progress, both social and scientific, is a good thing. There is great motivation in knowing I have only one lifetime in which to accomplish and experience everything I desire to.

I am not writing this as a condemnation of anyone else’s faith. It is not an argument for atheism. This is just my testimony. As for who is right and who is wrong, only the dead have seen the ending.

Cruising Poetic

So we’ll go no more a-roving

So late into the night,

Though the heart still be as loving,

And the moon still be as bright.

-Lord Byron

Those lines makes me think of all those teenage nights spent driving around with my two best friends, Matt Petty and Lee Walsh. We never seemed to have a destination, but we were always going somewhere. It was freedom like I had not known before. We were the Lewis and Clark Expedition of the streets of Fort Worth.

There’s an episode of the Wonder Years right after Kevin gets his license. He and his friends go out wandering. At the end the narrator says, “We didn’t really accomplish anything that night. Nothing of any real importance, anyway. But through the high school years that lay ahead… there would be a thousand other nights, just like that one. Stupid, ridiculous… and glorious.” I love that line. It says it all.

It’s a rite of passage for young American men after getting a driver’s license. As long as there have been cars and roads to drive them on and cities to drive them through, boys have sought their freedom behind the wheel. Its more about the journey than the destination. Its about constant discovery and endless change and the element of chance. You can control the vehicle, but not always the conditions. Ahead lies risk and danger, joy and exhaltation. You can’t easily turn around so you only move forward, pushing forever away from the place of your birth and constantly toward the grave. If you’re fortunate you have close friends to share the wonder with you along the way.

Ah that’s just drunk talk, sweet beautiful drunk talk.

Alcohol… There are few things closer to my heart, and none closer to my liver. Come to think of it, there are few things closer to my heart than my liver. They say to write about what you know. Not sure who “they” are, but I’m certain I was drunk when I heard it. (The entire opening of this blog should be read as though spoken by Groucho Marx.)

I’d like to preface the remainder of this blog by saying:

I don’t have a problem.
I can quit any time.
I learned it from watching you, okay!

I can’t remember when I had my first taste of alcohol. My dad used to let me have a sip of beer if I brought him one from the fridge. (No need to alert Jeff Foxworthy. I know what I might be.) I’ve been drinking for the joy of it since High School, but I don’t think I came to a mature approach to drinking until my late twenties. Before then it was always about getting drunk, usually for social reasons. These days I’m more of an anti-social drinker, and only occasionally drunk.

My favorite drink is wine. I prefer a Chiraz or Cabernet. This is a great cheap way to get woozy, and one of the only ways I can get a buzz without getting full. As cocktails go, I like Jack and Coke or Pineapple Rum and Coke. I drink my Jack and Coke from a special cup used only for that purpose. The Rum and Coke I drink from a 44 ounce glass filled over halfway with rum. I also enjoy a sweet salty Margarita. That taste of tequila triggers a puke memory in most of us, right? Of course beer is universal. It goes with everything from Monday night football to Saturday night baseball. (Don’t let that sentence fool you into thinking I take Sundays off.) I hate it when I get to that first Budweiser commercial and there’s no beer in the house. I will pause a game and go buy beer if that happens.

Most nights I have a drink when I get home. Usually it’s just a glass of wine, but at the end of a difficult day it may be far more serious. I have no qualms about drinking alone. I don’t know where that social hang up came from, but “drinking” and “alone” go together quite nicely. Sometimes they like to invite “in the dark” and “in my underwear” to the party.

One night I got tired of getting up to refill my wine glass, so I brought the bottle back to the living room with me. Lisa saw me refilling from the couch and said, “You don’t have to use a glass on my account. You know you want to drink from the bottle.” I considered it, but decided that’s a line I don’t need to cross. Not yet, at least.

Bananas Foster or: How I Almost Married a Chubby Girl Because Her Hot Cousin Dumped Me

Thanks to Facebook, I have reconnected with a bunch of people with whom I have been out of touch for many years. When I look back at the past 20 years, I find there is not a single person I’ve been in touch with consistently. I suppose this is normal in the years after high school. So I will quickly fill in the gaps for all my new friends and reconnected friends and family:

1990 – 1993 Hot Tub Time Machine

In Hasbro’s “The Game of Life” you get to choose the path for college or career. Both paths lead to the same place, and ultimately come out pretty even, but the career path requires crap work and low pay at first. In my life I tried college briefly, but chose the career path. I worked lame jobs and hard jobs during those years and many of the years that followed.

Most of that period was spent hanging out with Matt and Lee, my two best friends from High School. Those were wasted years, but fun times.

1994 – 1998 The Empire Strikes Back

I was orphaned in my twenties. I lost my mom in ’94 and my dad in ’98, both to cancer. I lost both of my grandmothers in the same week in February of ’99. I lost my faith somewhere along that road. Then I found it, then I lost it again. That’s probably a story for another blog.

I’ve been married twice and almost married a few times more. I married my first wife a month before my mom died. I almost bolted from the church that day, but I looked out of the groom’s room and saw my dad rolling in my mom in a wheelchair. She had literally left her death bed to see my wedding. So I went through with it. Four years later, a month after my dad died, I threw out the first wife. If my first marriage was a book, it would be children’s book, the kind with big innocent cardboard pages, simple words, and almost no sex, like “Goodnight Moon”.

1999 – 2001 Doctor Strange Love or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

I highly recommend first marriages. It’s a great learning experience. For example, I learned you shouldn’t marry your prom date. I also learned that I love sampling wedding cake, but I hate weddings. So after my first marriage ended, I got engaged a few times, but always avoided setting a date. Between 1998 and 2002, I sampled a lot of cakes.

2002 – present Field of Dreams

I met my second wife, Lisa in 2002. Our marriage is a dream. Lisa is my best friend, and my one true love. I could write pages about Lisa, and I will, but not yet. We have a terrific son. He’s a smart and talented kid with a well developed sense of humor. It sometimes really pisses me off to see myself reflected so perfectly in another person.

I learned the value of hard work early on, and those lessons have served me well. I now have great job that I enjoy going to every day. What I do is also fodder for another blog post.

As I approach my middle years, I am satisfied with my life. I am married to a woman I love. I have a job I would do for free. We’re mostly healthy and mostly happy most of the time. My life is full of laughter, and when I see the bald guy with the grey chin whiskers in the mirror, I generally like him.

Now… we’re all caught up. I’d ask how you’ve been for the last twenty years, but I’d rather read it in your blog. So get to work everyone, and start sending me those links.

Thoughts From Anna

My cousin Anna has a great blog that she updates almost every weekday (http://annah40.blogspot.com/). I admire her dedication to maintaining it. Even more, I admire the thoughts she shares in her blog. It’s all very personal. The topics range from the mundane to the deep. She’s covered topics from her love of Easter hats to her waning spirituality. Early on she blogged about the death of her father. He was a huge influence in my life. I keep a picture of him on my shelf at home even all these years later. That blog entry hit me hard. It brought back so many feelings and memories, that it took fully a week for me to get back to normal.

Her blog has made me think about my smart-assy poorly maintained blog. I wonder if these are the thoughts we leave for posterity. When we die, will they somehow be maintained by ancestry.com or whatever archive we’re using when that time comes? Will our children, grandchildren or future decendants read our blogs to find out what we were like at this moment in our lives? Do I want my message to the future to be a list of things that make my ass sweat?

The short answer is yes. I do want my great great grandchildren to read about the things that make my ass sweat. I hope they get a chuckle out of it. But I also want to say more. I am going to try to do a better job of updating my blog. Five days a week is never going to happen, but a few times a month is a commitment I can probably keep. It may often still be things that make me laugh, but I won’t avoid covering other, more personal topics.

For the faithful five following my blog or those who browsed here from Facebook or Twitter, every entry may not be for you. Going forward, I may only link the funny ones to Facebook. For those in the distant future reading this, I hope your robot overlords don’t catch you slacking. If Ray Kurzweil is right, then I am probably one of your robot overlords, and I promise vengence on anyone caught screwing off. For my lovingly tolerant wife, this may be as close I am able to get to sharing my thoughts and feelings… so stay tuned.

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