Tagged: creative writing
Children Grown Older
“What are you doing, A-? Just get in your seat!” I begged my toddler daughter as she almost finally got into her car seat.
“I’m looking at the pictures,” she replied, un-phased by my pleading tone.
“The what? Oh. Those are instructions for people who can’t read,” I retorted, no less annoyed. Instructions for people who can’t read, I repeated to myself.
That’s about right. We have plastic seats for children. The poor and illiterate didn’t invent them, and wouldn’t think to use them if it wasn’t for the wealthy and literate. So what do the literate do? Write instructions on the seat, as if that solves any problem.
****
I would’ve thought this experience was a one-off. Wouldn’t you? This “providing help in an utterly un-useful manner”.
Then we were at the local mega-playground today. And there is a sign with English, Spanish, and Braille. But the Braille is not textured—ie, not Braille.
In English, our native tongue, then, “It gets worse. It always gets worse.”
I Present the Latest Sham Holiday: Mother’s Day
Christmas, especially in its commercial sense, is at least pure and focused. Mother’s Day, on the other hand, has become a sham entirely. Worse than Kwanza. Worse than Juneteenth. Worse than whatever the heck Easter is supposed to be.
At church today a very old “Dr.” lady gave the sermon. She talked about how hard the job of “mother” is. That is to say, she talked about how hard the job of “mother” used to be.
If you send your kids to daycare so you can go to work to pay for daycare, is that noble?
If you are so tired from this unnecessary job that you feed your kids processed food, junk food, and fast food on the regular, is that noble?
If you spend any leftover income from your job on TJ Maxx and Ross for yourself instead of, I don’t know, saving for future expenses, is that noble?
This poor old lady, dignified and noble as she was, was so out of touch that she described my mom, who finished up 20 years ago. But today’s “modern” moms? They look and sound nothing like my mom.
It’s disturbing. And it’s another example available for use when instructing children to not be slaves to the sound of words but to consider concrete context too.
Having a baby doesn’t making you a mother anymore than being female makes you a woman.
Funny thing is, I, one of the last men raised by a mother (and father), didn’t get my mom anything on this holiday. But I did buy some over-complimentary cards (from me and the kids) and pointless gifts for my wife. What a sham.
There is nothing outside the man which can defile him if it goes into him; but the things which proceed out of the man are what defile the man.
One One-Liner Heard Inside Mardel’s and Why Seminary Costs Money—and Should
Here in Colorado Springs, the “Sierra” store is in the same spot as a “Mardel Christian and Education” store. I needed Mother’s Day gear, so after perusing Sierra to price compare “Expert Voice” “deals”, I took the kids across the lot to Mardel. (Sierra seems to be winning on every level, if curious.)
While perusing the Bibles (specifically interested to learn the LSB has made it to retailers yet), I passed by a couple of ladies (the types which strike everyone as just as permanently affixed to the spot as the bookshelves behind them) who were putting on a show of “enjoying” some restful repose inside a great store.
I made eye-contact with the elder and listener as I heard the other one say, “I am done reading theology. I tried for a while but, honestly, just give me Jesus.”
It’s a fairly trite and common assertion among under-achieving wives and over-achieving baptist ministers, so I cannot say for sure whether she was the echo chamber or in earnest. But it called to mind a conversation I had with my mom the other day about church.
Sunday School was the topic, or the setting of the topic. The real topic was the morons who lob terribly uninformed opinions about terribly vague and uninteresting parts of scripture at all comers.
I told my mom, “Remember when Charlie Sheen was in all that drama and his show fell apart? At one point he said, ‘You don’t pay prostitutes for sex, you pay them to leave.’”
“Oh, yeah. I remember. Ugh.”
“Well, with that nature of flip-sided perspective in mind, as I get farther and farther from my time at Seminary, I believe that is how the money part works. If churches aren’t doing it for ya, you finally decide to pay money to try to find meaning in silence. The nicest way of putting this perspective being that seminary students want to be around other people as serious as themselves (calling or no), but the truth (and cynical perspective) is that seminary students want to be around people who are able to keep their mouth shut when they don’t know what they are talking about. And the money has something to do with segregating those two groups.”
The White Devil
Now the serpent was more crafty than any beast of the field which Yahweh God had made…And the serpent said to the woman, “You surely will not die! For God knows that in the day you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
“Come on!” he smiled mischievously, “Come on, just tell me. It’s not like we don’t know the nickname. I just want to know it in your language.”
“Oh, no,” the brown mohammedan said, head-shaking, embarrassed and uncomfortable. “It is not right.”
“Seriously, just tell me. How much have we shared with each other so far? I only want to know it to make people laugh. It’s not like I mean any harm to anyone. It would make me betam yetek’eburu if I could whip out that phrase when appropriate. Ehbakahin? Please?”
The mooslims are different in this respect. They are Old Testament in their belief in the power of utterances. The man wouldn’t budge.
“Oh well. Here comes another,” he said to himself. “Hey!” Pointing back down the hall towards the man he just left, the same smile still on his face, he said, “Abdi there won’t tell me how to say White Devil. How about you? I need it for purely social reasons. Please?”
Stonewalled again, and this time by a Christian no less.
That was six years ago.
Today, he knows the real meaning of White Devil. He had always assumed it had to do with brown people being more “spiritual” on the whole and white people being less “spiritual” on the whole. There also was the ever present, at least in recent centuries, technological advantages inherent to the (renowned as white) West that surely must have bedazzled outsiders into believing them to be derived from the dark arts.
Wrong on both points.
His own culture lauds literacy and learning. The greatest shame is an unexpected and unavoidable public display of illiteracy. If one can’t read, they hide that fact from everyone—and if it happens that they come to a moment when they decide to learn, upon taking that step, the choirs of the West rejoice more joyfully than the heavenly hosts when a new believer is baptized. Who, then, wouldn’t want to learn how to read?
But that is the White Devil describing itself, the White Devil marveling at its reflection in precious stones. As described by illiterate cultures, the ones who are lauded today for having “oral histories”, the White Devil is the absolutely ignorant and unfounded fear of what these cultures do not yet understand.
The truly ignorant are not the West’s unwanted newborns put outside to die by exposure like our own illiterate, no. He now sees that the truly ignorant are Adam and Eve, shortly after getting the boot from the garden. They know something is different. They know there is another power. They know they don’t have the power. And like Adam and Eve, they conclude those that do possess the power must be the enemy, the adversary, ha-satan. Or, plainly, the White Devil. And the only idea that populates the uninhabited landscape of their brain is to tell their children the story of the crafty serpent.
Name Change Coming Soon
I’ve been thinking it’s time to more accurately entitle this blog of mine. So a name change (just superficial—website will stay the same) from Captain’s Log to something else is coming soon.
The point of this post is to say, “Don’t be alarmed. It is still me. I just feel like I need to admit that I’m hijacking the mood when I drop the lure of being an interesting pilot/Captain who can also write well and has a unique perspective, but, really, I am just a blogger who blogs fearlessly—which means writes well.”
More to follow.
Two Random, Intriguing Thoughts on Friday
I realized this morning while sitting at the hotel breakfast that all the wonky Dr. Seuss characters (the Zeds, Noothgrushs, Tweetle-Beetles etx.) are actually not wonky but exact replications—in 2D—of people.
Secondly, and more importantly if you’re on a quest for meaning like me, I realized an important fact. Those of us with “guardian” personalities—I’m talking military, police, first responders etc—are frustrated and angered as a rule, almost necessarily so, because we see (from our perches as “guardians”) folks wasting our efforts. As in, “In post-armageddon dystopias, where rule-of-law is only foreign scribbles on the pages of unread books, you’d be able to dye your hair blue, but you choose to do that while I’m on shift? And in response to having to eat oatmeal instead of a smoothie for breakfast as a kid? Ahh. What am I even doing here?!”
Today’s My Birthday
My mother-in-law is currently living with us. Five days in. Hasn’t been terrible. I have chosen the strategy of pointing out every time I do something that husbands/men/fathers typically don’t do. (She doesn’t speak English, so my wife has to translate. It’s fun.)
Just now I started to wash my favorite La Creuset pan, their 11×13 attempt. I told my wife to tell her mom that on my birthday I still do the dishes. My wife responded that she had already told her mom that this was my favorite dish and that’s why she used it to make breakfast.
I said, “Ha. Probably shouldn’t tell her the real truth. The truth that I trust no one with my stuff. The truth that I have been hurt before, and so I wash my own dishes.”
I have been hurt before, and so I wash my own dishes.
Sounds like a pretty great opening line to a novel, if you ask me.
I’m Twelve. And I Believe Exile is Worse than Death.
My wife responds to my news, with barefaced contempt, “Because he’s black?”
“No. I didn’t say he brought the gun to school because ‘he’s black’. He did it because he’s stupid,” I clarified. “The reason I said he is black is because your son thinks all things black are right and cool, which itself is stupid, but the main point is I want to know what your son, A-, has told you about it. Because it is important that he agrees with me that this kid did something truly stupid.”
“He told me it was stupid.”
“Really?” I wondered, in blunt disbelief.
****
“Hey. How come you didn’t tell me about W- bringing the gun to school?” I asked A- nonchalantly as we drove home from school ball.
“I don’t know.”
“Well, what do you think?”
“I don’t understand why he would be expelled for bringing it.”
“Did you mention it to your mom?”
“On Monday I told her about it, but I thought it was a toy gun then.”
“Did you ever use the word ‘stupid’?”
“I may have said that I thought it was stupid that he was in so much trouble.”
“Okay,” I said. (I knew the boy would not react, ‘W- did something stupid.’ Check.) Then I took a father’s breath. “Here’s the thing. The most famous school shooting happened when I was a senior in high school. That’s over twenty years ago. And they have been happening regularly since then. For someone to bring any kind of gun to school at this point is absolutely, totally, and irredeemably stupid. Understand? Guns destroy. School, in theory, is about creation. The two will never mix. He was stupid. Or his decision was stupid. I don’t really know him.”
“Okay.”
****
“Well,” I answered my own 12 year old, H-, that night on FaceTime, “one of A-’s teammates brought, like, a bb gun to school. He’s probably gonna be expelled. So that’s causing some drama amongst the kids.”
“Expelled!!”
“Why is this shocking?”
“I can see suspended, but expelled? From the entire district?”
Drawing enough air to fill a sermon, “Guns kill people. Kids have been killing people in schools for twenty years now. What are we even debating, my daughter? So what if the kid has to go to another school. His parents maybe should be forced to move and try to live another way somewhere else. What they’re doing so far has failed. No person alive can suggest that ‘they didn’t know’ to NOT bring a weapon to school. How are we even talking about this, H-?”
“Okay, geez.”
“Tell me that your father thinks it is absolutely stupid to bring a gun to school and that it is absolutely fair to expel a kid who does.”
“You think-”
“-No, say, ‘my father’,”
Oh, the glare.
“My father thinks it is stupid to bring a gun to school and fair to expel anyone who does.”
“Good.”
****
Please, dear reader, lament with me. You already know how much I loathe public school. To hear that both my not-so-bright step-son and my I’d-like-to-believe-has-paid-attention-at-least-once-in-while daughter believe that expulsion or exile from the community is worse than being killed by a school shooter only feeds the fire.
Education is supposed to liberate, not indoctrinate. It’s supposed to turn the brain on, not off. Create, not conform.
Choose life, kids. Especially if it means alone.
People are stupid.
Good Writing Compels Writing
Earlier today, while on shift on this day of unflyable weather, I began trudging through the Gateway to the Great Books essay by Friedrich Schiller. I began it back on November 14th. He calls it, On Simple and Sentimental Poetry.
It is a far longer entry than all others in this volume, Volume 5, “Critical Essays.” And it is rather boring. His vocabulary is far broader than mine and he employs it from on high, without looking down, without slowing down. But I wanted to finish the article, so I reread the introduction, re-caged my gyros, and plodded on.
Finally, the relationship blossomed. Check out this criticism of a man (hitherto unknown to me), Klopstock.
His muse is chaste.
Wow. Stops you in your tracks, no?
Got me to smile and want to share the sentence with you all. Hope it was worth it.
Onward and upward.
The World Does Not Need More Children’s Books By Minority Authors
I saw a headline the other day about LatinX and other minority authors. It went on about how, while they are publishing some children’s books, there is still a great deficit and a need for more. Let me be clear: that’s simply not true. The world does not need more children’s books by minority authors.
I’ve mentioned on this blog before, more than once, that I attended an evangelical seminary for three years. It was a fairly robust graduate program, so far as I could tell—though I did not decide to obtain a master’s degree. Why not? Because I’m a man of action. And my professor and advisor could not answer the following question satisfactorily: “I’m a pilot. I wasn’t born a pilot; I had to learn how to fly. Likewise, I want to know what skill I will have by working so hard to get the degree. What skill, that I don’t already possess, will I have?”
He couldn’t answer it. I remember he tried; I remember he talked a lot in the space that naturally followed my question. But I also remember that he seemed to almost be speaking gibberish. There was some kind of mental block or other in that interaction.
Over a year later or so, I finally figured out “the academy”. So I emailed the advisor (I was no longer a student) and told him as much. In short, I said, “Higher education is all about writing the primer for the field. In this case, it’s the Bible. You all want to get on the translation committee of the best-selling Bible. In other fields it’s the History 101 text or the Biology 101 text that is taught at Harvard or wherever is most elite.”
My advisor replied, “So are you ready to come back and finish your degree?”
This is why I maintain and declare that the world does not need more children’s books written by minority authors. It just doesn’t. As always, minority authors have nothing to say. And if they did, they certainly wouldn’t need support from the majority. And if the majority, people like me and my old advisor, get them to quit writing, that means they certainly have nothing to say.
I haven’t gone back to finish my degree and I won’t. Like I said, I’m a man of action. I can already do everything those folks can do. But I do not care to write the primer for any field. Except maybe “Bravery”. Yeah. Maybe I’d like to write a book on Bravery.
Here’s my Bravery primer: If you really have something to write, then I wouldn’t be able to stop you no matter how hard I tried.
Captain’s Log 