Egregious Reader

I have no doubt that as we go forward trying to understand our country and make it better we are going to have to find new language, new maps, new models to understand. I have come across one that isn't perfect, but worth considering.  First, why do we need new models? No model explains everything, they are shorthand to allow collaboration and passing torches for giant projects like cultures and nations. The reason to change out your model is if another one comes along that explains more of the problems with the model ... the ways in which the model doesn't apply or work.  Ok, so our current model/large-scale narrative is that our society is not perfect, but it is built on equality and freedom. People come to America for this opportunity. Immanuel Wallerstein calls this universalism: jobs assigned/granted by merit school acceptance by merit marriage for love (not wealth or ethic group) equal vote equal before the law This is the "official gospel of modernity."  The op...

On white facebook (I say that in humility and to acknowledge that as a white person I inhabit mostly white spaces on facebook) I see a lot of arguments about looting and assumption that MLK would not like what is going on, even sometimes white people trying to shame the current situation using MLK as an example. To those people, I say -- Read some Martin Luther King. (I also like what Ezra Klein said that maybe the police and government leaders should read Dr. King too). The behavior they are talking about when they call for nonviolence is at most a small element of a much much larger crowd of nonviolent protesters and regular people who are mad as hell, sad as hell, tired as hell. If you want these protests to be organized then you should stop allowing people like the Minneanapolis police chief Bob Kroll to call groups like BLM a terrorist group. Wake up dummies, the biggest domestic terror groups are white supremacist! What I don't think our nostalgia brain(washing) with it...

I love John Coltraine's music, especially with a good book and a cup of coffee while my wife and two children are taking a Saturday afternoon nap and the weather is wonderful like it has been the last week or so and the sky is so blue that makes you happy. . . and all along inside my ears I hear the talking horn of John Coltraine and the wonderful jazz drumming of Elvin Jones and McCoy Tyner on piano and if you listen in you realize that all of it is grounded by some bass player allowing the music to sound wild and free, but still tied to rhythm, still grounded by something you could almost do by tapping your fingers, something you can understand with your mind. . . but the part that I love is the emotions that fill the other things (it doesn't have to just be the bass keeping everyone in the same musical language), these jazz musicians seem to take turns on who remains orthodox and dogmatic, usually the majority will remain fixed to the song itself, while in turn they try t...

At first I thought this book was almost a blog made book, as I know that Glennon has kept up a longstanding and beloved blog. But that's not right. The pacing and the structure in the book is excellent. Her prose writing style is poetic and chapters feel like prose poems. I love the titles and how the title is additive to the whole chapter. Glennon mixes personal narrative with mini sermons. She is a preacher and her message is powerful. This is her third memoir and who better to explore and explain (and explode) the way we live through story, than someone who literally makes her living writing her own story. Stories direct our lives toward happiness or rightness or safety. And as much as we would all like to step out into a blank room--a “non-construct”--to examine our story and make changes, this is not a luxury offered to flesh and blood human beings. We are always changing the tire while flying down the mountain taking a turn and narrowly avoiding a baby goat. Insert “sto...

BOOM! BOOM! Cannons and we all dig down further into the ground. foxes aren't made to be threatened by modern war mechanisms but we adapt Our leader never goes anywhere without the machine gun bullet sash too bad we don't have a machine gun The three idiots have half destroyed their country trying to blow us to smithereens lucky for me we stole all this paper from Kinkos the Tuesday before dad was caught killing Bunce ducks maybe one day this will be a record for martian foxes trying to puzzle out the lunar surface of what used to be a forest. *** I miss the sunsets and flowering trees I miss other foxes (Illustration from the cover of Roald Dahl's Fantastic Mr. Fox with Quentin Blake as illustrator)

What if you could take a sightseeing trip through your own past? Or what if your emotional landscape could turn into pixar animation and you could hop on the bus and take a tour. Perhaps for some this is available. I have trouble dropping down into my feelings and my memory is faulty for some reason. I can remember books and movies, but struggle with returning to my own personal experiences. Of course, there is no way to know what it's like to be in another person’s head .... so for all I know this is normal and people have higher articulation--agile in words and so penetrating the cloudy mists of time. But I are speaking well, amen? "I are a graduate." I can’t remember what movie had that joke.  I certainly feel anxiety as we all do right now. Corporate and collective anxiety for what the future will be and how much it will cost. The COVID deaths in the US are now at seventy five thousand.  I feel a lot of anger at the gutted leadership in our country. The revolv...

It is not uncommon for skinny nerdy timid boys (speaking of myself in the middle school to early high school days) to identify as outsiders. A variety of factors can lead one to outsider feelings ... or left-out-feelings. One finds these things are somewhat universal when one finally finds a way to talk to others ... but sometimes that skill is hard learned. And one can go on identifying in isolation or one's own outsiderness. In college, I started over, grew long hair, hung out with the cool kids who liked punk music (hardcore at the time) and even had my first girlfriend. Nonetheless, I felt alien among the particular kind of Christian liberal arts college I went to. Alien may not be right, it always felt like God didn't grant me the same number of limbs as my fellow students, or even that I was missing one or two of the five senses. Worse, because it was God who purposely withheld it from me. Practically it meant that even though I was finally successful in friendships, ...