Battered Old Bird Saturday, May 14, 2005

Oh, the house we saw on Friday was horrible. ("The House Beautiful is The Play Lousy."--Dorothy Parker.) Plenty of room, but dingy, horribly carpeted and laid out strangely. The feral twentysomethings who seemed to be in charge of the place didn't sweeten the deal. Big ugly dog on the porch: His barking made Wrong Turn Jr. squeeze Mama's hand tigher. Pass.

Meanwhile, one door down was a place we didn't bother to look at--and gazing over the backyard fence we kicked ourselves. Gorgeous lawn, lovely sunken pool, plenty of room...ay yay yay. In thirty years, when the robots come, we'll all look back and laugh.

@ 10:45:00 PM, ,

The Purple Sage Revisited

Received my high school's alumni magazine, with a lovely obit for Father Duffy (who I talked about a while ago). All of a sudden I remembered a detail from one of his freshman religion classes: He used to collect ads, headlines, cartoons, anything he could weave into a lesson; like a bird making a nest of strings and straws. One of his favorites was an ad for Life magazine: "Life: Consider the alternative."

I brought in one cartoon for him, which he seemed to like a lot. God (voice in cloud) is watching an artist painting something hubristic, can't remember what. Word balloon: "I admire his spunk." Lightning zaps the artist. "But nobody steals my act." He recognized the artist and the layout, and asked if I had gotten the page from Omni. I said yes. Close enough: One Guccione magazine is the same as another, right?

A signpost, and I didn't even know it. Ay yay yay, to be thirteen again.

@ 10:22:00 PM, ,

Jedi Are Just All Right With Me

Friday: Work exploded. Today: Watched the dust settle. Lazed at home with the family, went for a nice long walk, cooked dinner, gave church half my attention, then watched three hours (!) of the Clone Wars cartoon while Wrong Turn Jr. pounded and wailed at the gates of dreamland. I started watching the cartoon when it first aired: Tuning in for three minutes' worth of story every night is a little, how you say, labor-intensive. All scrunched together, it was fun and breezy and I won't remember two things about it in the morning.

It reminded me of watching a bunch of kids play softball. They pound dirt out of their cleats, they throw the ball around the infield after an out, they have little rituals in the batter's box--they do everything the major leaguers do except play ball properly. The cartoon is full of nifty little battle scenes that show off the Jedi and the clones and all that, and it's a lot more fun than the last two movies...but it doesn't have anything to do with Star Wars. A friend of mine once said that the reason we all fell in love with the first movie is that scene where Luke watches the sunset and the music swells: You learn everything you need to know about the character in three seconds and you're on his side forever. Likewise Obi-Wan rolling his eyes; Han smirking and shooting first. None of that in the Clone Wars: lots of posturing, no heart.

Whatever. I could complain about Star Wars for the rest of my life. And there's so much more bitching left undone!

@ 10:00:00 PM, ,

I Know All at Once Who I Am Thursday, May 12, 2005

A long day, editing from beginning to end. The cats were kind enough to start scratching at the door for breakfast at 4 a.m. I manage to sleep through Wrong Turn Jr. wailing and whimpering through the night; but the scratching and patting will skeeve me out of dreamland in no time flat.

Tomorrow, more of the same, plus we look at a house. It's been on the market a full eleven days without ending up under contract. Well, did you evah. My best guess: They moved the headstones but not the bodies.

Oh yeah, God, politics, sci-fi, movies suck, etc.

More later.

@ 11:02:00 PM, ,

Cheese for the Cheese God

Old-time religion yesterday. We loaded up and headed down South Central Jersey way to attend the confirmation of Wrong Turn Niece. Mrs. WTJ was her sponsor. Wrong Turn Jr. obliged by wailing the second the kids walked down the aisle and not stopping until returned to mother's loving arms an hour and a half later. In the meantime, we strolled the garden, watched cute little duckies and (almost) got cleaned up and changed in the trunk of the car before deciding the back seat would be a safer bet, given the area's rogue child-welfare services.

Aaron on religion: I am definitely not saying the God of Abraham is the only route. For this point, I call on the services of the newly minted pope, who spelled out a compelling argument (for Catholics, anyhow) in a book published just last year. His general point, as I took it, was: The church recognizes the kernel of inspired truth in all religions; but the church picks up where they leave off. In the case of Buddhism, for instance, the church recognizes the insights about the material and the spiritual, and sees them, in their way, as paths to holiness. But Jesus, in the church's view, solves the "problem" of Buddhism by redeeming the material world. The world is something to manage as a spiritual test--not to view as an illusion. (This probably mangles Ratzinger's point and Buddhist philosophy as well, but you get the idea.)

So, in the church view, other religions get you moving in the right direction, but Jesus ultimately is the only one who can carry you across the goal lines. (Unless your great-grandparents had issues with Edward G. Robinson, which opens up a whole other can of locusts.) The fringier shores of Protestantism probably have a different take on this, but in the Catholic church, we love to see you smile.

As for not needing religion at all: I have a large idea I've been working on, but in present form it's too big and blunt to do any good. Let me refine. Pax till then.

@ 11:39:00 AM, ,

Like a Spirit in the Night Tuesday, May 10, 2005

Wrong Turn Jr.'s teeth are bursting through! Two little Gillettes, bottom gum center, ready to saw apart daddy's fingers and other objects of suckitude. Work is bursting through! Many, many late stories--and a certain thrill at being under the gun. Hmmm.

Tim and Aaron (with a hot-snark injection from BeK) have a fine debate going in the comments section below. To (hopefully) move the discussion a bit. some ideas. Note: I am starting to lose concentration here, so these will be sketchy. Do me a favor, and don't drive too big of a truck through the holes, OK?

Free Will: The point isn't that God makes us do right. (If so, he'd have a pretty crappy track record.) It's that God strengthens us to do right. We can call on that strength or (more often) ignore it. But it's always our choice.

Ethics and Atheism: I conceded at the start that most of the atheists I know are better people than I am. But I don't agree that those fine ethics come out of thin air. I would argue that atheism, as described and practiced in the comments, is a relatively recent historical development--and the underpinnings of its ethical system are rooted in that old bugaboo, the Judeo-Christian tradition. In other words, when the rationalists cast off religion and went casting for something else, they didn't "make it new"--they drew on what they had at hand. Even if we don't mention his name, God is in the DNA of our institutions, and hidden all through our societal memory. When it comes to ethics, he frames the debate.

I would further argue that all those fine ideas that are supposedly a priori--for instance, self-sacrifice for people outside your immediate family--are not instincts at all. Contra Rousseau, people aren't born generous and gentle. We have to be nudged toward sanity, a thousand prods a day from family and friends and faith. Wrong Turn Jr. reminds me of this constantly: He had to be taught to swallow, for instance, and that nighttime is for sleeping. So when it comes to abstract stuff like morals, I'm not going to rely on what he can pull out of the a priori zone.

There's more to say, especially about Aaron's key question. But I'm fading and it deserves closer attention than I can give.

For now, a Biddy Buddy:



Pax.

@ 9:26:00 PM, ,

Triangle Man Hates Particle Man Monday, May 09, 2005

Drove up to Queens yesterday to celebrate the many generations of Wrong Turn women. (Light traffic, by the way, but we paid for it, as we paid for everything, with axle-cracking potholes on the FDR Drive.) Mrs. WTJ got a few hours off as Wrong Turn Jr. made his way between grandma and auntie. Both of them are deeply in love with the little fellow. And who wouldn't be?



Here he is with a little Gamesters of Triskelion lighting around the eyes:



And here with loving auntie (also pictured at right):



Auntie's two daughters are also fascinated by their cousin. At one point, all of us were lined up on the living-room floor watching him sit up wobbily and chew on a blanket. Then we beavered through a couple bags of Chinese take-out while my older niece watched Nausicaa: Valley of the Winds.

We had a ghost, too: Granny WTJ, who faithful readers will recall left the world on New Year's Eve. Mama WTJ lived with Granny more or less all her life; this was their first Mother's Day apart. Granny's apartment, on the ground floor of Wrong Turn Manor, seems tiny and tomblike these days. Everything she owned--tchochkes, scapulars and a poster of George Clooney--wouldn't fill one closet in our place, but when she was alive the rooms always felt bursting. Her spirit made the place garnished and grand; the forty-year-old linoleum might as well have been marble.

Now it's a fixer-upper garden apartment with original appliances. Except the fridge, which is gone except for a rust stain on the floor. A sobering sight for your correspondent. "I will show you terror in a handful of dust."

Speaking of mortality and all that fun stuff, a good debate is brewing in the comments section of the previous post. I encourage everyone to check it out. I don't have much to add: I gave it my best shot, honestly. But I will just observe that both sides of the debate are essentially arguing from faith, and there might not be as much of a difference between them as they suppose.

@ 7:52:00 AM, ,