The Dirtbagging of America, Part 1

I don't know what to call the subject I want to rant about, so I'm going to make up my own term for it. One of the more unfortunate divides we have in society is due to this self declaration of being "regular folks". It seems to be a catch all term for simple people who wish life was even simpler and that there weren't complex challenges in society. Anyway, they seem to be locked in mortal combat with the Elite.

Who are some of the champions of the regular folks?

Larry the Cable Guy
Toby Keith
Sean Hannity
Dale Earnhardt Jr.
Dale Earnhardt Sr.

I could go on with lots of other examples, but I don't need to be more of an elitist douchebag about the whole thing myself. Chris Matthews got him self into a little bit of trouble about this during the 2008 campaign, because he was touching a nerve in America. The first thing you might notice about many (most?) regular folks is that they are...white.

to be continued....

Saying Goodbye

Inspired by someone
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My Dad and Mom had both wished to be cremated. My plan had been to call the funeral home the moment my plane landed, arrange to pick up Dad's remains, and then to call the cemetery to arrange to have somebody meet me there. However, with government offices closed, there was a delay in getting the death certificate, which in turn meant a delay in the funeral home starting the cremation process. When I called them, they told me I would need to wait until the day after Christmas.

When I was picking up my rental car, it was sinking in that I was there to take my Dad to his resting place. I started crying. The agent, flummoxed, asked what was the matter. I told him, and he was very nice and even upgraded me four wheel drive SUV. I got a hotel room right near the airport, and hunkered down for the night. Seattle was not equipped for major, extended snowfall. There just aren't enough snow plows. Plus, they don't use salt on the streets because it's environmentally unfriendly. The main roads were good, but side roads could be awful, and most parking lots might as well have been tar pits. Drive in and you're stuck. Luckily, I managed to navigate my rented vehicle safely into a spot at the hotel.

Christmas day I took on the sad task of cleaning out Dad's room at the assisted living place. All those mementos and memories of a life. I had brought an empty suitcase, and I filled it up with photos, a box of letters, and other things. I found his old high school yearbooks, with pictures of him in his teens. I kept them all, of course. Most touching was a class project he had done when he was about 10. It was an old notebook, and on each page he had pressed in a plant or flower he had picked. He signed each page and gave the date and location. I packed that very carefully.

Once again, I found myself crying, sobbing, weeping.

Somebody there said, "What are you doing moving on Christmas?"

"I wanted to be busy today," I replied.

The next day, I went to the funeral home to get his remains. Even though it was a snowy, slushy mess, I wanted to do this with proper respect. I had bought a new black suit for the occasion. My shoes made things treacherous, but I was determined.

The guy in the funeral home came out in blue jeans and a work shirt. He saw me, and got a little embarrassed about how he was dressed, but I told him not to give it a second thought.

When he brought out my Dad's remains, I broke down and cried again.

I pulled myself together and set out on the long drive. The cemetery was way up in Port Angeles, about 125 miles away, up on the coast of the Strait of Juan de Fuca. On the drive up there, we went right past my Dad's old home where he had lived for 15 years. We went past his old favorite spots, places where he and I had spent wonderful times together. I talked to him all the way.

When we got to about three miles away from the cemetery, I started crying again. It was painful to realize that this last journey was ending. The finality of it seeped in deep down to my bones. I had to pull over, and sat crying by the side of the road. Finally, I got it together, and continued on to the cemetery. It's a beautiful place. My mom had specified, "I want a place with a beautiful view". This was the perfect place.

When I arrived, there was somebody waiting for me at the chapel. Nobody else from the family was there, and there was no service, but I said my eulogy anyway. I talked about how, when I was 12, I had found their love letters. I had opened one from Dad to Mom. The first words I had read were "It's you that I love. You! You! You!"

I said how much I missed him, but that if any thing could make me feel just a little better, it was that they were together again.

I told him that I loved him. I thanked him for being such a good father. I talked about how he believed in the goodness of the world, and of people. "The world is not a perfect place. There are disappointments, but you never stopped believing, and you always looked for the good in people. You taught me that. Thank you for that gift."

Then it was time to close and seal the urn, and to put it behind the glass with my Mom's urn.

I said a final goodbye, and drove slowly away. Buoyed ever so slightly by the fact that Dad was still with me.

Nola

Another blogger has got me thinking about the Big Easy this week (naturally). Of the many things to love about N.O. (chicory coffee, beignets, being on your second hurricane at 10 in the morning), music is certainly near the top of the list. Doctor, Professor, take it away....

Namaste

For the first time in about a year and a half, I went to yoga class. It was great, and I don't know why it took me so long to get back. Yoga and I got off to a pretty rocky start though, and it's kind of a funny story.

I first got into yoga about 10 years ago when I walked into a gym to sign up for a tai chi class there. The owner of the school asked me why I was interested in tai chi. I told him that I had seen people practicing it, and I loved the graceful and controlled movements. "You do understand that tai chi is a martial art, a fighting style, don't you?", he asked. "Do want to learn how to fight?" Umm, I guess I didn't know as much about this stuff as I thought. I talked to him a little more, and he told me that what I really was looking for was yoga. "Yoga?", I asked incredulously. I had always thought of yoga as so...passive, with lots of sitting around, meditating, and chanting. He went on to explain that like the martial arts, there were many schools and forms of yoga. Some were more based on meditation and non-movement, while others were more athletic. At this particular school they offered classes in a style called Iyengar, named after it's founder B.K.S. Iyengar. "If you take it seriously, it's the hardest thing you can study at this school", he said. I decided to give it a go and signed up for a ten class cycle.

A couple of nights later, I was back at the school for my first class, which was %100 female. The instructor was no-nonsense and her class was very organized, and I left each one invigorated though a bit humbled. With each class, the instructor made things tougher and tougher, and really pushed us to improve the quality of our work. Most of the time however, I thought she was particularly hard on me, calling me out by name if I was a little off, or criticizing me when I couldn't hold a pose in balance long enough. We had been steadily working up to doing a handstand, and when the night finally came to do this, many in the class popped right up with no effort. "OK", I thought, "I can do this, just focus!". I tried and I tried, and though I got close, I could not muster the derring-do to pull off my handstand. My heart sank as the teacher approached. "C'mon, you can do this. You should already be up there, let's GO!", she commanded. I tried again, but no. She seemed to grow a bit more flustered and stepped over to me. "Kick your feet out and up!", she barked. This was getting a little embarassing now. OK, I thought, I'm giving it my all this time, and with that thought I kicked my legs out hard, and WHAM!! caught the teacher flush in the face with my bare foot. I saw her glasses fly into the air in one direction while she went down in the other.

The class was stunned. "Oh my GOD!" I screamed. Her nose was bleeding a little, and someone ran to get ice. Her glasses weren't broken, but certainly were a little bent up. I apologized again and again, but she hardly said a word. After a few minutes of the ice, we concluded that her nose wasn't broken, but class was definitely over for that night.

I have to admit that despite having pre-paid for a few more classes, I never went back there. I did stick with yoga though, and eventually got a little better.

Serendipity

I'm paying the price today for staying up late to watch one of my favorite movies, Serendipity. If you haven't seen it, or have dismissed it as a cheesey lightweight, let me tell you a little about why this film speaks to me.

Is finding true love really about anything other than fate and destiny? I don't think so. In the beginning of the movie, Jonathan and Sara meet for a short while but spend the next seven years thinking about each other and looking for "signs" that they belong together. Along the way, they find other partners that bring them to the brink of marriage before fate and something interior to them intervenes. One of the important messages of the film is that you can try with all your might to love back someone who loves you (romantically), but meeting your soulmate is one of the most powerful things that will ever happen to you in your lifetime.

I think Kate Beckinsale is gorgeous. I almost miss some of the dialog in the scenes she's in because of how distractingly pretty she is. OK, she's not the greatest actress, but her lightweightedness is sort of an asset in this film either by accident or good casting.

John Cusack. Guys want to be his bud. Women just want to take him home and make him feel better. He's sexy, smart, real, and sensitive without even trying. Just look into those sad eyes.

Though I've seen it a number of times, each time I watch I usually find myself worrying that something might go wrong this time, that fate will pass them by and they will miss the chance to find each other and true love.

The soundtrack is terrific too BTW.

SPOILER: Here's the final climactic scene where they meet again, at the place where it all began.

Live from the Beast of the Belly

We had a major ice storm today. It was one of those times when the temperature was just right, and everything outdoors looked as if it had been dipped in a sugar glaze. So pretty, I wish I had thought to take a pic.

I've been baking cookies off and on all night tonight. The kitchen is a disaster area, but I'm streaming Celtic Christmas music, there's an open bottle, and I'm in total bliss. My roomie fell asleep on the floor watching Jurassic Park II, so I know she must be tired (she loves that movie). She's been on a tough temp assignment gig for the past few weeks and has some long days.

Today has been traditional cookie day - pressed butter, chocolate chip, and oatmeal raisin. They've been turning out terrific; I'm really in the zone tonight and am in the middle of making the OMR's as I write actually. Enya is singing O Come O Come Emmanuel as dinosaurs roar in the background. Ahhhh.

Our Own Reasons for the Season

I love Christmas, always have, and I'll probably write a bit more about that. I've come to not really believe in the Judeo-Christian God, so it might seem odd to some that my home is graced with lights and a tree with many ornaments my family has collected through the years. But is Jesus really the reason for the season? Like most traditions, it's more complicated than that (see here for a good historical overview), but everyone works it out for themselves.

I've excerpted from Martin Willett's site, but he and I are pretty much on the same page when it comes to reconciling our personal beliefs with the holiday season.

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I was asked by a bloke at work whether I (as an atheist) celebrated Christmas. When I said I did he asked me whether there was anything hypocritical about that (actually he might have used shorter words). My response was that I don't see Christmas as being a Christian celebration, it is a secular festival built on a Christian adaptation of pagan traditions, there is little distinctively Christian about it and I feel no problems about joining in public and family celebrations of secular humanist values: peace, goodwill to all men is not a monopoly Christian sentiment. Actually they're not particularly good at it.

I am open minded about whether or not there ever was a man named Yehoshua ben Yosef, preacher and travelling miracle worker, self-proclaimed Son of Man, saviour of the Jews and only begotten son of Yahweh the Hebrew god. His existence or non-existence is not in any way an article of faith to me. Some atheist scholars are quite happy to consider him as a historical figure, albeit one about whom a lot of myths have been written. What is not in doubt, however, is that both the gospel accounts of the nativity of this figure are fabricated myths from start to finish. It stands to reason that if there was supposed to be a real messiah, son of God literally walking the Earth as an apparently normal man then he needs a story to account for his birth. An ordinary story would not do. It needs to be of a suitably mythic scale, full of symbolism, allegory and the fulfilment of Scriptural prophesies. That was what was needed, so that is exactly what was written.

Nothing in any of the gospels fixes the date of Jesus' birth. The early church simply did what it was very good at, stealing and neutralizing the traditions of other religions and cults. Christians celebrate the birth of Jesus as either December 25th, the birthdate and festival of the resurrecting God-man Indo-Iranian Mithras (originally Mithra, the name changes to Mithras for numerological reasons, just as Yehoshua is Joshua in the old testament and Jesus in the new, so the Greek name has numerological significance), or January 6th, the birthdate and festival of the resurrecting Egyptian God-man Osiris-Aion, born of the virgin Isis (the Black Madonna of so many “Christian” statues).

There were festivals and celebrations at the time of the winter solstice long before there was a Christian church, for a couple of centuries at least before Jesus may have lived. The early Roman Church simply commandeered all shrines and festivals to itself. Places where pagan goddesses gave oracles became shrines of the blessed virgin Mary. Temples to Mithra or Apollo became churches, worship and festivals continued as before only the names and a little of the theology changed. What happened in the Greek and Latin worlds also happened in the Celtic, Germanic and Nordic lands. Old gods had their myths and festivals stolen and dressed up as Christian festivals. Celtic heroes became rewritten as Christian Saints. For the most part the people as a whole didn't seem to mind too much. There were still bonfires, feasts, gift-giving and excuses to get drunk. The change from pagan to Christian simply meant business as usual, slightly fewer orgies but just as much tax and as many idle priests as ever. Many old traditions and superstitions lived on and were Christianized. The people were still as irrational and superstitious as ever.

The Christmas that we celebrate today is a mix of old pagan traditions such as evergreen decorations and feasting coupled with an often neglected Christian gloss and overlaid with more modern secular humanist and consumerist traditions.

I am not unduly worried by the myth of the Baby Jesus in the stable. He doesn't really kill the Xmas atmos that much. Christmas is mostly a time of hope for peace, harmony and friendship. Two thousand odd years ago nothing significant happened on December 25th, it was an ordinary day. That is no reason not celebrate the festival of hope for the future. We don't need a non-existent God to send a son to be killed as a blood sacrifice for us. We just need to understand our shared humanity. That is the true message of this season of hope. We could do it at any time, but December 25th is traditional. The festival is called Christmas, it contains the name of a mythic religious entity that I do not regard as a god, but then so do the words Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. No big deal. As an atheist I have no more problems with Christmas than I do with Wednesdays. (Thursdays, of course, are a totally different matter, I never could get the hang of Thursdays.)