Quiet Night Drive

How beautiful the moonlight-

It reveals the essence, the core of this world of night
Leaving all else, the ugly, the broken, the truth, behind.
Cold, stark, unfiltered silver, defining the bare earth
Its shades and hollows eternally graven in liquid light
Treetops rimed with celestial frost.

Head on my shoulder, her breath soft in my ear,
She whispers an off-key melody to match the ancient requiem of the stars above us
As we drift down this avenue of temporary bliss
To home.

Two Sides, One Coin

One of my all-time favorite fiction series is by an author called Tad Williams. It is called "Otherland", and while the plot is extremely complex, the basics are that a group of people are trapped in a place known as Otherland, which is in reality an immensely intricate virtual reality. There is a character in the book who goes by the name Hideki Kunohara. He is an enigma; a scholar, poet, and scientist all rolled into one. He has a quote which I've found to be both intriguing and enlightening. Kunohara states, "Always these dualisms- mechanists or spiritualists. Always choosing one side of the coin, instead of simply choosing the coin itself. Both have so strongly rejected the others side that they will regret it one day."

Now, in the book, he is discussing two opposing forces, one mechanist (attempting to achieve immortality through technology), the other spiritualist (trying through more traditional and religious methods to gain eternal life). These two organizations are at continual odds with each other throughout the series.

Yet if we remove the quote from it's context (I know, I know, some literary traditionalist is rolling in his grave right now) and we take it simply at face value, it lends itself to a wide variety of interpretations. Here's mine.

Dualism: two opposing forces, in this case "mechanist" (read: material) and "spiritualist", or immaterial. Two contrasting viewpoints, one focusing entirely on the present: humanity, technology, physicality, this present moment in time, our lives as a whole. The other, attempting the opposite; seeking the afterlife, completely immersed in the spiritual, ignoring or rejecting this world and all it has to offer. Each side choosing one side of the coin, rather than the coin itself.

I know people on both sides of the coin. I have friends who live entirely in the moment, never concerned with anything even remotely spiritual or ethereal. I also know people who seclude themselves, turn within and focus wholly on the spiritual, rejecting the world outside them. I present an alternative: to live within the world, yet not be of the world. Remain aware of this world, enjoy your life, yet at the same time, keeping the ultimate goal in mind. As Christians, we are not only told but encouraged to live this way. We should not fall entirely into one camp or the other. We are told to embrace the coin, if you will. I see this quote as a challenge, a challenge to keep our minds focused on the spiritual while at the same embracing our physical life here on Earth. If we fail to do this, as Kunohara says, we will regret it one day. The ultimate outcome of our lives should be to enjoy and spread Christ's love and gift of salvation to the world. If we live entirely in the moment, focused only the physical and material, we get sidetracked away from that goal. Likewise, if we maintain a wonderful relationship with God, yet completely ignore others, we are failing just as hard. We need a safe medium, a reconciliation of both sides of the coin.

Likes and Retweets

There is a saying: "Absence makes the heart grow fonder." Over the years, I've found that I prefer another saying, "Absence sharpens love, but presence strengthens it." Love, friendships, relationships in general are easier to establish and maintain when you are actually with the person in question. Seeing someone face to face, having a conversation, being able to see and interpret body language, all of these play key parts in strengthening a relationship. My generation has removed itself from this level of personal connection, instead choosing to rely upon a variety of other social media interactions.

Now, don't get me wrong, I love texting, Facebook, Skype, and Twitter as much as the next guy. But there is still something more... corporeal, solid, something more elemental about being about sit down across from someone and simply talk to them one on one. The advent of the internet and wireless, instantaneous communication has created a generation of youth desperately searching for fulfillment, for interaction. Yet our relationships, whether online or physical, tend to lean toward the impersonal. We have become a quantitative, rather than qualitative, culture. We can have a person's vital statistics at our very fingertips: age, gender, interests, dislikes, hobbies, friends, organizations they belong to, their taste in music, clothing, literature. We can view countless photos of them, see how they live their life, who they hang out with, what they do. We can read Facebook status updates and Tweets to get a feel for someone's emotional state. We can do all this... and yet never really know this person. They become a nonentity.

To put a different spin on this whole situation, let's take a look back at this beginning of this post. In it, I mentioned a need for contact in a relationship. I've had several relationships suffer (and die) because either I or the other person involved have simply not had contact for a long while. This same is true for our spiritual relationships. If we don't talk to God, if we don't communicate with Him, spend time with Him or in His Word, then we can't really get to know Him. And likewise, He suffers a disconnect from us as well. We need to constantly be with Him in order to foster a solid relationship. It's not simply tagging Him in a status update, or mentioning Him on Twitter, we need to sit down and have an active, engaging dialogue with Him. Otherwise, God to us becomes a nonentity. Worse yet, a nondeity. We forget about Him, and continue to live our lives, shallower and for the worse off because of it. The relationship suffers.

"Absence sharpens love, but presence strengthens it." This rings true in all relationships, whether material or spiritual. A good relationship needs to be relational. It's simple and cliche, yet true. I'm trying to put these words to action in my own life, and I'd encourage you to do the same.

Grey Day

I love days such as these.

Where grey skies meet grey earth and
Clash, against a backdrop of autumn's last dying embers

Where the hollow groans of a wistful bagpipe
Echo softly throughout the world

Where light, diffused and cold,
Trickles through the ash-laden clouds, quietly,
Onto the hardened ground below.

It is a day for strong words and cold acts.
It is a cigarette day, a rusted steel day.
It is another day in this broken cycle of the machine we call our lives.

I love days such as these.

Space Goats

I've begun doing a little research on an interesting internet phenomenon known as "predictive linguistics", run by a group known as "Half Past Human". (Kudos to Jon for introducing me to this whole thing, by the way) What I learned about the project immensely intrigued me. Now, the concept of how this works is a little complicated, so bear with me.

Simply put, this technology searches the internet for specific kinds of words, usually posted on discussion blogs, forums, news sites, etc. Incredibly large amounts (we're talking terabytes of information, here) of these words are collected by programs known as "web bots", along with a snippet of their surrounding text. They are reduced to series of numbers and plotted on graphic charts as dots. These dots tend to cluster in specific areas around certain words.

Now, every word in every possible language has a meaning (barring some random, obscure, or relatively unknown dead language). In order to define meanings, one has to essentially boil a word down to its essence, what the word conveys. When broken down in such a way, we can cluster words together under common conveyances or meanings.

Okay, now that we've gotten past the "simple" parts, here comes the creepy stuff.

What the people running this project have discovered, is that for whatever reason (more detail later) certain groups of words or phrases repeat themselves in a kind of pattern over time, based on the change in the word's meaning. These patterns tend to develop around a specific event or occurrence, in the future. That's right. Using this web-searching and filtering technology, these researchers can isolate specific traumatic events in the future, based off of web chatter occurring previously to said catastrophes.

To break all of this down into a few sentences, here's a quote seen here, "It's like changes in language precede large emotional events. The larger the emotional impact of the event, the more advance notice the bots seem to give."

They use the example of a rock being dropped into a pond, creating ripples. If you approached where the rock was dropped, you would get stronger and stronger ripples the closer you came. These events tend to create "ripples" in web chatter before and (obviously) after the events occur.

Now the problem arises in that in this day and age, there is a LOT going on in the world. To continue the analogy, it's like pouring a dump truck full of gravel into a pond, then sorting through the ripples to find the biggest rocks. Not exactly an easy task.

The wonderful folks over at HPH have also separated the data into different categories, such as "terra" (ie, anything involving the earth, ground, life, biosphere, etc) "globalpop" (world population sans U.S.) "USofA" (specifically the United States) and a host of others, including "SpaceGoatFarts".

...yeah. Basically this category is for anything involving... well anything we don't understand. Things from space, the unpredictable, things we have never heard of or seen before, aliens, etc. ...and apparently, Space Goat Farts. As you can see, even the creators of this project treat it with a certain level of humor; they don't take everything they learn as the absolute word of God Himself. Yet, while their predictions are by no means completely accurate and all-encompassing, many of the timing and indicators given seem to align with real-world events fairly accurately. Here's a quote from Half Past Human's affiliates, Urban Survival:

"We have friends who have developed a groundbreaking predictive technology which we simply call "web bot" technology... The technology, which samples large portions of the public internet with an eye toward "sensing the future" based on subtle changes in language, seems to have given indications before-the-fact of a large number of major news events, including but not limited to our reports before the fact on things like:

• 9/11

• Sumatra/ Banda Aceh quakes

• New Orleans Katrina/Rita

• Cheney and his "accident"

• Degrading of Iraqi's and Iraqi youth rebellion against US

• Silver (prices) exploding, followed by Gold

• Pakistan earthquake

• Climate change (the life-changing event)

• The multiple extraordinary hurricanes (with another season coming like the last)

• The increasing unpopularity of the Bush Administration leading up to the inevitable meltdown

• Space Shuttle explosion

• The unfolding disaster in Iraq

• Commodity shortages with more coming this summer (2006)

• Emerging and ongoing, oil price increases

• Then there's the more recent China Quake warning 72-hours before events, and the forecast of a major economic crisis to arrive around October 7, 2008..."

Makes you shiver, eh? Kinda creepy. Now, by no means is this an exact science. Even the founders of the project advise people not to base decisions off of their technology. But still, the fact remains that many of their predictions have come true.

Now, how is this possible? Is there such a thing as a collective human consciousness, as some would suggest? Is it mere coincidence? Or something bigger than us? The evidence is controversial at best. Dean Radin (PhD, Senior Scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences) has conducted tests determining that human beings have the apparent capacity to see or sense a few seconds into the future (see pages 6-15). Interesting.

Oh, and by the way, apparently there's a large "tipping point" scheduled to occur on November 14th. That's this Sunday.

I leave the conclusion up to you, dear readers.

One Fist in Ten Thousand

I've been experimenting a lot musically lately, trying to broaden my horizons and sample a wide variety of sounds. Now, as a general rule, my tastes in music are widely varied. There are very few bands I genuinely dislike, and I'm always open to new genres or styles. I love music in all of its aspects (See The Trichotomy of Music for more). My music library has several days worth of listening in almost every genre imaginable. From Swedish techno to Southern rock, from Bach to the Beatles and beyond, I have a LOT of music. Yet there are a few select songs that always, without fail, get my head bobbing and my toes tapping. Here's a few:

"Supermassive Black Hole" -Muse
"Skin" -Breaking Benjamin
"The War" -Angels and Airwaves
"Holiday" -Green Day
"I Don't Care" -Apocalyptica
"Hey Jude" -The Beatles
"Sonne" -Rammstein
"Coming Undone" -KoRn
"Mr. Jones" -Counting Crows
"Bring Me To Life" -Evanescence
"Swing Life Away" -Rise Against
"Soldier" -Eminem
"Dota" -Basshunter
"Witchcraft" -Pendulum
"Blood Red Summer" -Coheed and Cambria
"Higher" -Creed
"Parallels" -As I Lay Dying
"Grace Like Rain" -Todd Agnew
"Last Resort" -Papa Roach


That's just a sampling, there are many, many more. Generally when I listen to an album from a band I like, I'll enjoy most of the songs except for one or two that just don't click with me for some reason. Without fail, every album I've ever heard has had one or two, sometimes even four or five songs that I just don't really connect with, except one: Ten Thousands Fists by a band called Disturbed.

I recently rediscovered my love for Disturbed after rifling through my CD collection and listening to this album in its entirety for the first time in a few years. Now, I've always been a huge fan of Disturbed, from about ninth grade onward. Their gritty yet smooth style, powerful vocals and complex, driving beats have eternally marked them as unique in mind. Their lyrics are strong and often emotional, compelling the listener to break free and empower themselves. The band is very outspoken against the government and the injustice and corruption inherent within, yet they support the US military with a passion that surprises even me.

I think I connected with Disturbed's music so well because I started listening to it at a really hard time in my life. Entering ninth grade with few friends and a shy personality was a tough experience for me, even though the school I attended was pretty small. I carpooled to and from school with several families in my area. The twenty minute ride to school and back gave me ample opportunity to relax and listen to music.

(Side note: now, at the time, my music tastes were heavily influenced by my brother Jon, who introduced me to such bands as Creed, Trapt, Breaking Benjamin, and Sevendust. As a result, I ended up listening to a lot of hard rock and metal, and still do to this day.)

Flash back to the carpooling for a second. I had bought Disturbed's (then) latest album Ten Thousand Fists during summer 2007 and was instantly enraptured by it. David Draiman's coarse vocals and caustic lyrics, combined with Dan Donegan's incredible guitar skills and Mike Wengren's syncopated, rhythmic drumming formed a perfect combination in my mind. Every day, without fail, when I saw the parking lot of my school approaching, I would switch to the song "Deify" by Disturbed and crank the volume as loud as possible, jamming out the whole way into school. It gave me the strength to face the day and imbued me with a sense of authority that I previously had felt I'd lacked. Disturbed was my life jacket in the turbulence of entering high school.

For that reason, to this day, I can listen to any track off that album and completely lose myself in the music. It's the type of thing that no matter where I am, whenever I hear a Disturbed song off that album, it instantly gets to me and I just want to let loose and start headbanging. I love it.

My Life As A Fish Hook

It's not every day a fish hook falls into your shoe.

Let me rewind a bit.

The night is young, a crisp autumn's eve; and there he sits, quiet and still, on a lonely park bench. Staring up into the starless skies above, thinking idly to himself, to God, to no one, really. A small wooden rod lays at his feet. Intrigued, he picks up it, notices the nails stuck into the wood at either end. Curiouser and curiouser, he thinks to himself. He begins the short walk back to his home, swinging the stick by his side. Suddenly, the sensation of cold, slippery.... something... slides its way into his shoe. Violently he throws off the offending article of fashionable footwear and checks it for whatever produced this decidedly slug-like sensation. There! On the ground! A glint of light reflecting off the shape of a.... fish hook?

That's right. A fish hook fell into my shoe. Not even like a wussy, three-pronged baby one. No, this was a serious, not-to-be-screwed-with fish hook. I'm talking serious serious hookageness, here. This thing was fearsome. Now, for me, sharp metal objects materializing inside my comfy, well-worn DC's is not something that happens every day. So here's the deal (non-sappy story-like). I was sitting on a bench this evening, when I noticed a long wooden rod by my feet. It had nails sticking out of both ends. Naturally, being the adventurous type that I am, I decide to keep it as a walking stick for the hike back to my dorm. After the fish hook fell into my shoe, I took a closer look at the piece of wood. It was a homemade fishing rod, either from some kid or an entrepreneurial (albeit non-artistic) college student. Wrapped around the nail at one end was a bit of fishing wire, which somehow had snapped, loosing the fish hook which then fell into my shoe. Like I said, not something that happens every day.

Yet this odd occurrence struck a chord with me. My personal belief is that everything happens for a reason, that it's all part of God's plan for me and everyone else on this planet. I take incredible comfort in the concept of predestination. But... that's a story for another blog post. Anyways, I was wondering why something this random and weird would happen to me, maybe it was just unimportant, maybe God was having a laugh on my part, I don't know. Yet in the end, it gave me an idea for a blog post and a funny story, so I guess it had some meaning after all.

Here's what popped into my head as a walked slowly back to home sweet Sparrowk, idly caressing this large metal fish hook.

Let's look at this as an analogy. Say there is a man fishing in a pond with this homemade fishing rod. A simple piece of wood (with nails stuck in at either end), fishing wire, and a hook. He cocks it back, then with an expert flick of the wrist sends it skimming over the water to the exact spot where he wants it to sink.

Now let's pretend that fish hook is us, and the fisherman is God. He throws us into this stream, these waters of life. Once we hit, we immediately sink (this line doesn't have a bobber, it's pretty low-tech). That would be the effects of our inherent sin, dragging us deeper into the dimly-lit depths below. As we drift through the murky waters of this life, we get swayed back and forth by the currents running just under the surface. We are influenced by a variety of sources; friends, family, the media, our culture in general. We are tossed around, not knowing where to turn or where to go. Sometimes, we get caught on a log or a some reeds, anything from sex or drugs to simply making bad decisions. We get mired down, caught in this snare. It takes a little tugging and prodding from the fisherman to get us out. Sometimes it's painful, it is almost never easy. Yet gently, surely, He pulls us out of our entanglements and drags us back to shore. Now let's take this one step deeper. If we are the fish hook, then suppose the line is our life and our faith, and the rod in the hands of our fisher God is Jesus Christ. We are connected to Christ through our faith and actions in this life. God sent His son to be used as a tool to guide us and teach us and ultimately to die for us, saving us and keeping us on track in the waters of this life. We are able to connect with God directly through his son. God uses the rod to direct our life (and therefore us) in this world. Many times we get snatched away by the current, but He always has the ability to reel us back in. To continue the analogy, if we are a fish hook, then the rest of the world are the fish. They're worse off than we are in many ways. They don't have the benefit of the fisherman's direction; they simply wander up and down the stream aimlessly. Our job is to catch them. There is a reason that Jesus calls for his disciples to be "fishers of men". Our purpose in this life is to first, glorify our Lord in all we do, and second, bring others to Him. Now, this process is not always pretty. Many times it's hard, even painful. It's not easy to surrender control of your life to someone else. It's not easy to completely open yourself to anyone, even your Creator. I find it slightly ironic that we try to hide things from God, like He doesn't know us better than anyone else in existence. (But I digress). Many people will try to fight God, like a fish on a line. But slowly, surely, He reels them in, a bit at a time. And, sooner or later, through us, the fish is reunited with the fisher. Now, this is where the analogy kind of breaks down... seeing as a real-life fisherman would probably gut and then cook the fish. But you get my point.

I thought that was an interesting analogy, and especially so because the real-life homemade fishing rod that I found had nails stuck into it... just like a cross. Hmm. Maybe everything does happen for a reason.