Weblog

Sure, I'm doing something with my life, but I really wish that I was doing something with my life. Repetition gnaws at my soul, but it's not stopping me from playing the same song over and over. Spontaneity is what my heart longs for, but, whenever she acted spontaneous, she seemed more of a girl and less of a woman. My mind keeps dreaming of life headed in another direction, but nothing that I'm doing or plan on doing is going to move me towards that other path. Right now, at this very moment, every ounce of my being — every single grain of who I am — wants to take nonsensical sentences and arrange them in such a meticulous grammatical fashion to keep you the reader in suspense, but the reality of the situation is that I'll end up going to sleep instead. It is 1:00 AM after all.

New computer.

It's sweet!

So, I'm wasting my life away here in Denver. As much as Denver is nice, it's not the corner of the world where the excitement happens. Well, come a week or two, that's going to change. The eyes and ears of the world will focus on what's happening here as journalists and reporters ascend en masse upon the Mile-High City.

The city of Denver has been preparing for over a month for the masses of people come to witness the coronation of the messiah and the masses of people come to scream and shout of the incarnation of the antichrist. Personally, I'm eager for the convention to happen.

Others that I know… well… you have to know a little bit of my background. I grew up in a fundamentalist Christian family, attended a fundamentalist Christian church and went to an überfundamentalist Christian high school. Let's just say that I'm well familiar with the fundamentalist train of thought — both its masterpieces in cognition and its epic failures. Point being, I hear things, and I've heard of some titanic-sized demonstration being planed by a few fundamentalist Christian groups.

I do not know why it's the way that things are, but, for some reason, the Republican Party is almost synonymous with Christianity in some fundamentalists' minds. I even remember a case where a church expelled some of its members because they voted for Kerry in the last election.¹

Mixing religion with politics is bad enough, but the real danger is mixing politics with religion. Okay, in the purest form of that statement, I don't believe that at all, but given the state of either the Republican of Democratic parties, proclaiming either one of these particular parties as the model for Christian thought (or just plain human thought for that matter) would be the epitome of psycholunacy. I can admire the Republican stance on certain issues, but the Democratic theme is… just better. Some of my closest friends, my favourite people and the best examples of Christian attitudes are Democrats. It's kind of hard not to say something when the idiot fundamentalists decide that they don't pass for Christians on political reasons.

I could go on, but I need to know when to stop typing.

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1. http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/Politics/story?id=742265

I had the pleasure of making a trip down to my home away from home. I made my way down to Arkansas. I was attending the wedding of some very dear friends of mine. It's absolutely fantastic to see friends get married.

Arkansas is a second home for me. I am very much saddened that I'm no longer around so many close friends. However, Arkansas also has very unpleasant things associated with it as well. I went to college there for four years, and, to be quite honest and straight up, it sucked. Don't get me wrong: I value the amazing friendships that I made as well as the wonderful relationships that I forged with some of my professors. However, there are those few people who I really don't like because they… well… ruined my life.

I'll summarise it for you: I'm bitter. How bitter? Let's just say that I had to edit out more than a few paragraphs here that went into depth explaining everything.¹ Just today, I got a survey in the e-mail asking me for my opinion on changing the name of the university. Under what category describes my relation with the university, I took the opportunity to clarify our relationship in a profanity-laced sentence that utilised no uncertain terms.

Anyway, to get back to the point, while I was at this wedding, I ran into a large amount of people who I knew very well while I lived in Arkansas. In particular was Pearl.² Pearl works at the university. She is a most absolute awesome person. I would always have to cross her path whenever I needed official tasks approved or so. Sometimes, I would assign myself the jobs that dealt with her just because it would take me through there.

Anyone who knows me knows that I have a habit of not wasting time. True to my character, I didn't waste any time after the wedding ceremony in getting to the reception. The problem was that when I got there, I was so early that there wasn't a single soul that I knew. I decided to take a nice little walk through the town before I returned to the reception. Pearl asked me why I was headed the wrong way. She pretty much kidnapped me and invited me to sit at her table. I ended up sitting with half of my coworkers from M-DAT as well which was an additional pleasant pleasure. As the night went on, we somehow got on the topic of JBU. I don't recall how we got on the topic, but I took advantage of the moment by spouting out my displeasure of the university. She could sense the bitterness, so she shared with me one of her experiences with bitterness. At that moment, we were just two people with a common problem.

I carry dollar coins around with me. Working in Downtown Denver, I find that they work well for handing out to the beggers and the homeless who inhabit the streets. I happened to have a few of these dollar coins with me. Pearl asked me to pray for her in her struggles with bitterness, and she said that she would pray for mine. I immediately took out two of the dollar coins that I had. I gave one to her, and I kept the other one. It serves as a token — a rosary of sorts — simply a mnemonic device. Right now, it sits on my desk at work. Every time that I see it, I remember to ask the Lord for his guidance in Pearl's situation. However, I'm also reminded of the plank in my own eye, and I ask the Lord for guidance in my own life. Somehow, I can't help but think that that might have been Pearl's idea in the first place.

Bitterness is great: it's a feeling that I've grown to love throughout my life. Once I've had just a small taste of it, all that I want is more. I cannot tell you how many times in my life that I've laid awake in bed pondering my spitefulness and gaining a perverse pleasure from it. Still — and this is possibly the greatest beauty that I have yet to discover — every time that hate gets set aside and the void gets replaced with love, there is experienced a much better feeling than bitterness could ever dream of holding a candle to — whether that came about through a whole bottle of Jack Daniel's or just a simple moment of unaided pure clarity.

True forgiveness will breed life, beauty and love. All that bitterness will breed is more bitterness.

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1. That might be an exaggeration. At the very least, I was thinking about writing more than a few paragraphs.
2. I've changed her name for the sake of this post.

I've lived here in Colorado for most of my life. Except for a four years in college in Arkansas and a short time in New York, I've known no other home but Colorado. When I was younger, we used to go up to the mountains frequently. We would hike, camp, fish and do all of that outdoorsy stuff that gives Colorado any significance. For some reason, the mountains of Colorado have always just had this sort of unique feeling — almost like a certain odour or aura — that only exists there. It can't really be described in words.

Some friends of mine got it in their head to make a trip up to the mountains with everyone. What was supposed to be everyone ended up only being three people — a number that didn't include myself. I pretty much figured that I wouldn't be able to get off of work in time to make it up to the mountains.

As luck would have it, the triple-digit heat here in Denver caused our work place to shut down all of the electrical equipment. This pretty much meant that we were free to go. That being the case, I decided to head up to the mountains.

I went home to pack. I then took the bus all the way up to Nederland, Colorado. Nederland holds a special place in my heart. My aunt used to live up there in a quaint, rustic cabin with a beautiful pond out in front. The whole town itself is just a beautiful place to see.

My original plan was to hike down the highway to the campground where my friends were at. A local hippie woman stopped and asked if I was trying to get a ride. I turned down the offer which I realise now that I shouldn't have done. I misjudged the distance to the campsite.What would have been a ten-minute drive down the highway turned into over an hour-long expedition. Eventually, I got picked up by a man named Spencer. Spencer was from Scotland. About ten years ago, he came to visit Colorado and fell in love with the place and moved to the other side of the pond. Regardless, what would have been another half hour of hiking turned into a four-minute drive.

I arrived at the campsite where we pretty much devoted the rest of the evening to good conversation and firemaking. Little did we know that the next day would be quite eventful.

Indeed, the next morning, we drove up through Nederland to the place that we were going hiking. However, the road was closed due to an accident, so we had to wait until the road opened up again. Since we were right there, I convinced everyone to take a little side trip into Ward.

Really, the only thing that the town of Ward is known for is for being a hippie town. Let me explain: Boulder, Colorado is known as being a liberal stronghold. People in Boulder think that people in Ward are completely out in left field. This town is a place for social misfits and outcasts that just don't fit in. The best way to describe Ward would be to call it a junkyard. Indeed, there were abandoned, rusting vehicles everywhere.

The others were worried that they were going to be attacked and killed in this creepy mountain town. I kept reassuring them that they're hippies, and hippies don't kill people; they love them and give them flowers. Apparently, there was confusion between rednecks and hippies. Rednecks listen to country/bluegrass music; hippies listen to Jimi Hendrix, DMB or Phish. Hippies are dumb because of drug abuse; rednecks are dumb because of inbreeding. The two groups are fundamentally different, and I couldn't understand why anyone would get the two confused.

After a bit of driving around Ward, we drove up and hit the trail. We took the Brainard Lake trail up to a lake that was apparently fed by a glacier. The scenery was enchanting. Again, it was that aura that just exists in the mountains of Colorado that makes it magical.

The whole way up the trail, we were cracking hippie jokes. Mostly, our source was the South Park episode where Cartman tries to kill all of the hippies in town that decide to start a hippie-jam-music festival. I must interject here that I really don't have a problem with hippies. In fact, I kind of like them. The others joked that I fit in too well up there. Indeed, I'm rather partial to the hippie crowd. The Lord knows that my taste in women is indeed the save-the-planet/cure-the-disease flower child. Combine that with the sweet, adorable church-girl stereotype, and I'm set.

We then started to make the trek back to our campsite, but we needed some supplies first. We stopped at a trailhead where the others had previously discovered a cache of chopped firewood. We “commandeered” the firewood. While there, we came across a bus that had been completely stripped. It reminded me of Into the Wild. I couldn't help but see the similiarity in that we were both two vagrants by choice going off into the wild country without the means to do it. We stopped in Nederland to pick up supplies. I got to the checkout counter and discovered that behind the counter was none other than the same Spencer that gave me the lift down the highway and thus helping my ordeal. It was an incredible coincidence.

We went back to our campsite and chilled. The campground was crowded as it was a summer weekend. We eventually let another family share our campsite. However, the campground ranger didn't take to kindly to that. Since all we were doing in the morning was packing and taking off, we decided to pack early. Despite the fact that temperatures in the city were reaching a hundred degrees, it got really cold up in the mountains. We decided to just skip the last night and spare the cold.

We made our way back to my old hometown of Broomfield, Colorado where I picked up my car and headed home after the best weekend that I'd had in a long time.