Decades

Re-read The Gunslinger over the past couple of weeks.  Realized that I was 16 when I read it last time.  I will turn 33 tomorrow.  It’s been 17 years since I’ve read The Gunslinger.  17 years.  When experiences you consider close start taking on multiple decades you know you’ve gotten old.  17 years.  Has it been that long?  I know it has, but dang I don’t feel it.  Yesterday I was a teenager, today I’m a man of 33.  It gives a phantom perspective, a kind of strange feeling that time is so absolute in its ephemerality.  There is no moment of time in life that is not fleeting.  Yesterday my parents were young, they were young and having their own children, my sister and I.  Yesterday I was a kid running barefoot through hard clay, picking careful footfalls to avoid the sweetgums that towered over our backyard.  Today I am a husband and father, tomorrow I will be a grandfather. 

When history is studied its done event by event.  You take the spikes on the graph, the wars, the coups, the depressions.  Much of history is lost to boredom.  When momentous events occur people feel the need to commemorate.  The everyday is lost.  What you get is a kind of compression.  We look at events that seem very close together, they feel like relatives, even though they are separated by years, decades.  How often when you hear the history of the 20th century is World War I and World War II talked about within the space of a couple of breathes?  The span of half a century is easily a couple of weeks of a history class.  The decade we call the “roaring 20’s” gets maybe a couple of paragraphs.  A whole decade, a couple of paragraphs.  We don’t know what we’re living through right now, only our grandchildren will know.  They will ask us, “what was it like to live through the 90’s” and the confused expression we saw on our grandparents faces will be our own.  “It was like living through any other time, it was just living...”  

I guess what I’m getting at is I wonder where the spikes are on my graph?  To be honest I feel they have all occurred within the past five years.  I got married, had a son, graduated college.  That leaves 2 decades of what?  Maybe my spikes on the graph are coming later in life.  Maybe the next decades will be where a history of my life would focus, and my 20’s will be marked only like the roaring 20’s in a history book, short paragraph, they happened, and then they were gone.

Valentines Day 2011 - For Those Who Truly Love

I wanted to document the first time we've experienced a sick baby, really experienced it.  Valentines day, how poetic is that?  I didn't till after, till after we had gone through a couple of very sleepless nights, till after I had spent a couple of hours collecting medicine, and more than a few days just wishing that our little guy didn't have to experience pain.

Valentines day, the day of love.  If your making a movie you cast a couple of young, sexy, single people, you put them in a meet cute situation, you have them hate, loathe, then jump all over each other with sweaty, slobbery abandoned.  That is how hollywood shows a love story.  Here is my version.  A tired mother, running a fever herself, nurses a very sick child.  The child lets out small pathetic cries, they are pure cries, not unnecessary cries of aggravation, but true cries of hurt.  He fights breathing treatments, nasal suction, nasal drops, sleep, he fights for breath with tiny raspy gasps, he fights everything.  The mother will not leave his side, will not sleep, she will stay right there.  She will lavish concern and care over him, aching for his aches.  This is love, love more pure, love more selfless, a love that requires you give all you have, then give some more.

Happy Valentines Day, to all those who love selflessly, who love purely, who love like a mother loves a sick child.

Not so smart...

During one of my recent reads I ran across the idea that modern gadgetry serves the same function as witchcraft did centuries ago, namely it enslaves a population with ignorance and dependence.  It's an intriguing statement, because I believe it to be on the whole true.

I think we make the mistake in our society of looking on the people of yesterday as inferior, primitive, I believe people have always been people, and that those who came before us are fallible in the same way we are.  People are people, primitive and modern describe more or less the degree of pampering.  In some ways I believe those in ancient cultures to be far more advanced and intelligent than we are, and history has proven this out.  Example - the Egyptians built the pyramids, we have no idea how, the Vikings built houses in such a way where there was ventilation for the smoke without a hole in the roof, we have no idea how.

Here is something I've been thinking about a lot lately, cheap energy.  We've built our way of life on cheap energy.  We have the modern world completely addicted to technology.  If the cost of energy went up significantly, but not prohibitively how would life change?  This is something we should be thinking about, because our world, the world we know is based on CHEAP energy.  Say the lights in your house could stay on, but powering them cost $48 a day.  Energy is no longer cheap.  Powering up your cell phone costs $10 for every charge.  I'm not talking about rising costs that make you just want to "go green" but rising costs that make you question whether to even use the devices you use.  How would life change?  If you had to really think about turning on a light, or powering a computer, what would life be like?

I'm asking this because I'm not sure how our way of life would survive.  Modern homes are not built for the possibility of life without cheap electricity.  Big open designs are created for multiple lights and lots of heating and cooling.  Many homes don't have gas stoves, they have electric, they have electric everything.

Last week the temperatures went freezing in Texas and the power went out as a result.  If we had to survive a winter without electricity we would be okay here in the Houston, but what about those just six hours north?

I've wondered if our society will crumble under the weight of the faith we have placed in technology.  In 200 years what would they know of us if electricity went away?  The dependence we place on these devices around us, we don't know how to grow enough food to feed ourselves, and many of us don't know how to cook it without buttons if we did.


The thought of all of this is enough to drive a paranoid man such as myself crazy.  You can't worry to much about these types of things.  There was a message from Tom Nelson he talked about how Solomon could identify problems, but came to the conclusion there were no solutions.  The stimuli that govern our world are so fixed, reaping and sowing, I guess I just worry that we are sowing a harsh payday that will come, if not in my lifetime, in my son's or grandson's.

Understanding Parents

I remember feeling the raw aggravation of parents giving advice, trying to direct, push, and manipulate decisions growing up, and even after.  It was grating.  I understand a little more each day how hard its going to be to let go, to respect distance, to disengage.  Once you've gone through the process of fighting a kid on everyday things, wiping a nose, eating, not eating the dogs bone or food, going to bed, not chewing on a electrical cord, I'm sure its hard to ever see them as an adult, ever see them as capable.  I mean how can you?  Once you've wiped someones butt seeing them in another way might be impossible.

I've been frustrated at times at what I perceive as bad first impressions.  There are those who I was not kind to, a jackho around, a punk kid, and that is what I am to them now, not just then.  First impressions of your kid have to linger as well right?  You have to still see them as helpless, unable to make it if you don't intervene and we haven't even gotten to the "funstuff" we'll see around 13.

Lot to look forward to I guess...