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Wandering the savage garden...

Truth

Posted on January 30, 2016 Written by savage 2 Comments

There was a young man from south Georgia who thought that raccoons could be tamed.

He thought it was cute how their eyes were ringed, like masks, but had no idea how such masks might be considered to be effective.

So he tried to arm a raccoon with a staff – a two-foot piece of PVC pipe – but he never could figure out which raccoon he was trying to arm, or against what the raccoon would use the weapon.

Perhaps he thought raccoons were predatory, and needed a blunt weapon to be more effective. It’s hard to say.


A girl wanted to become a calligrapher, but she disliked liquid ink; she couldn’t write with pencil, either, so she found herself trying to draw with ball-point pens, with thick ink. It was not a pretty attempt. Her calligraphy mostly seemed to signify that her limitations prevented her aspirations, despite her desperation.

Her friends mostly thought she was a little nuts.


A dog howled at the planes overhead. It had no problem with the moon, or the stars; it found that it could frighten away clouds by shouting at them, especially if there was a strong wind. However, planes were its special enemies, and it would not countenance them; it yapped at them until they left his line of sight, which usually didn’t take very long. However, planes were stupid; they kept coming back, over and over again.

His owner mostly regretted buying a home that wasn’t too far from an airport.


Blue always wanted to be yellow; yellow thought white was a little proud of itself, so it would try to stain anything of white, perhaps by harmonizing poorly. It just wasn’t fair, yellow thought ,and it never once considered how blue might have felt, staring at yellow from afar, silently watching and waiting.

Yellow was a little bit afraid of red; sure, it was close by, but red always seemed so… passive compared to what it could be. Yellow was pretty sure red was going to snap some day, and the yellow would leak and fade. Then what would be left? Green?

How tragic.


The grass didn’t care about any of this. The grass only grew when the sun was overhead, when the days were warm, and slept when the sun went away and the cold came. The grass was content, and didn’t know that it was the color that earned yellow’s silent contempt, or that it might have served the calligrapher better than her poor writing utensils, or that the boy had no idea what raccoons actually were, or that he loved the raccoons despite his ignorance. The grass couldn’t even hear the dog, or the planes that terrified it so.

The grass just grew, and died, and grew, and died.

The grass was happier than the rest of them.


None of them knew what it all meant.

But someone did, and does.

BTW, this might have been the least edited, most accurate picture of “the process” for me that I’ve ever managed to create.

Filed Under: Lifestyle Tagged With: 500words, association

Sometimes persistence is measured by your belief

Posted on January 29, 2016 Written by savage Leave a Comment

As I’ve already written, I’m in a rut right now (originally wrote “trough,” and man does that sound pretentious). I’m struggling to do a lot of the things I’ve made a commitment to myself to do, including my daily writing.

I’m having to force myself to keep going, to cross over this valley I’m in.

The day before yesterday, for example, I didn’t shave; one of my commitments to myself was to shave every day. (I hate beards; I just also hate shaving.) That was the first day of the year on which I’d not shaved; even when I was on a business trip, I made sure to lug along my razor. But hey, let me just pick a regular old day of the week – no special circumstances, nothing really going on that’s unusual – and lapse then.

Yesterday, I got back on the wagon, so to speak; I’m clean-shaven again. Hopefully it was a one-day lapse and nothing more.

But then I was thinking about it: Why? Why is it a big deal to me? Why is something so trivial seeming to loom so large?

What if I have another day like that, like yesterday, where I struggle so much to write? Do I just shrug my shoulders and … not do it?

To me, I think it comes down to persistence and the reason for it.

I don’t think shaving is that big of a deal, really. It’s just a personal thing; it’s not even especially a hygiene thing. (I just dislike being scruffy.) Lapsing with shaving causes a focus on my ability to commit, not my willingness to shave my face. That’s what upset me about it (if “upset” is the right word) – it’s the failure of commitment, not the act itself. I don’t believe in the cult of the clean face.

Writing is a little different. With writing, I’m trying to form a habit and I’m trying to fulfill a commitment. I believe in what I’m trying to do here. A failure to write is, actually, a bigger failure than a failure to scrape off my nascent beard.

That’s not to say that the overall impact is necessarily greater – in the end, if I don’t write on a given day, all I’ve done is taken a day off. I’d be disappointed (just as I am with my shaving) but the world wouldn’t end.

But because I believe in the result I’m trying to create by writing, the shadow is larger.

Is that contradictory? “It matters, but it doesn’t really matter, even though it matters,” is what I feel like I’ve said. And I actually think it matters… even though it doesn’t really matter… but it kinda does matter, even so.

This is why, even though I’m trying to avoid editing myself, I have to edit myself; if I don’t, what I write tends to be a mess of contradictory gibberish that only I could read and understand and agree with. Be happy I’m not transcribing my actual word associations (yet)!

Filed Under: Lifestyle Tagged With: 500words, persistence

Sometimes you have to just keep going

Posted on January 28, 2016 Written by savage Leave a Comment

Writing today has been really difficult. I have a lot of new priorities for the year, because it’s important to me to be more effective in how I live my life, but this week has been just absolutely a massive challenge – I almost wrote “terrible” – for those priorities.

Sometimes it’s the circumstances; we have a problem with electrical load somewhere in our house, so one of our fuses keeps breaking. If it were just the fuse, it’d be no big deal; I can replace a fuse, I think. But to find a load problem is a different beast altogether, and that’s a time consuming and expensive process to fix.

I’ve also not been feeling very well; I’m congested and tired.

As a result, most of the things I’ve been doing regularly have been either a mighty struggle or a loss altogether.

The thing is: it’s my load to bear. I chose the struggle. I chose to try to be more effective and dedicated to the things I wanted to prioritize, so it’s mine to follow through.

At this point, I’m reminded of Nehemiah – building the wall around Jerusalem, with people around him trying to malign his character and disrupt his work. He kept on going, and going, like the Energizer bunny – what a terrible analogy, I’m sorry, Nehemiah! – but the result was that the wall was built. He actually finished.

The analogy breaks down a little, because for me, it’s not necessarily that I’m trying to accomplish a single task (although the 500 words challenge might qualify, I suppose). I’m not going to be able to push through for right now, and succeed – for me, success is that in a year, I’m still doing the things that I’m trying to do right now. (Again, the 500 word challenge doesn’t quite qualify – in thirty days, I will be able to say that I managed to write 500 words on – hopefully – all thirty of them, and if I can’t, well, I will be able to quantify my success rate.)

I’m just very tired. Today’s writing is boring to read, boring to write, boring to think about – I’ve been putting it off for quite some time, because I knew it would be difficult. I guess that’s part of why the challenge is structured the way it is: when the chips are down, when the going is tough, can you keep on writing?

And there’s the analogy to Nehemiah again. When people around you keep hammering at you, when things aren’t going your way, who are you? What happens to your effort? Can you dig deeply enough to keep going, to persist, without just typing the same word 500 times so you can take a shortcut to “success?”

I don’t know… but I’m going to try. I’m not willing to give up, especially not at this point in the challenge. I will find a way, if there is a way to be found within me. Five hundred words? You are nothing, words! I will remain myself, and keep on the best I can.

Filed Under: Lifestyle Tagged With: 500words, nehemiah, persistence

Listening to Music

Posted on January 27, 2016 Written by savage Leave a Comment

Yesterday I posted a reference to a song by Porcupine Tree, a band I’ve recently started enjoying. I listen to a lot of music from various genres, being a musician and a lover of music; for me it’s relaxing and edifying.

But one thing stands out: I don’t really limit what I listen to, outside of my tastes. There are forms of music that I don’t care for – I’m not much into hip-hop or rap, for example, and electronica has limited appeal for me, and some forms of speed metal are boring.. as is most Christian music.

The limits aren’t really on words, as it turns out; there are some songs I find distasteful because of their content, but for the most part, if it’s written well, it has a chance to resonate with me.

So I find that I probably won’t appreciate a song that shrieks how “God is so terrible, why didn’t I get my Barbie doll, where’s my Jaguar,” there’s nothing that says that I wouldn’t appreciate a song that shrieks how God is so terrible, how could He let something happen?

I can handle an expression of pain that results in a rejection of God – I can find the art in that. I don’t enjoy an expression of greed or arrogance. To me, that’s usually not art, that’s just foolishness.

So I find I can handle Rush easily: intellectual music, performed fantastically, even though the artists are atheists to the best that I can tell. They’ve largely rejected the notion of God, but they are rational about it – and the things they condemn in religion are many of the same things I condemn in religion.

I can handle Yes easily: excellent musicians, writing in purple prose (the music wins over everything), and their spiritual searchings are exactly that: searchings for meaning in spools of random color. As a band, Yes has trouble defining things objectively… but I can deal with that, even while (hopefully) holding objective reasonings myself.

I can handle Tool easily: excellent musicians, writing very angry content. Their rejections of God end up being Jeremiads, fierce considerings calling God to task for what the world is. I can understand (and even share) that sense of anger, even though my final conclusion is not to reject God.

I can handle AC/DC: simple musicians, perhaps, but the music is all Freudian id. I find much of their music laughable in content, but the force behind it is a pleasant association.

Led Zeppelin. Hendrix. Porcupine Tree. Matisyahu.

I guess the point behind all of this is that I don’t have a problem dipping my toes into non-Christian water – because it’s all part of the world in which I live, and to me it’s part of what makes the world what it is for me, a setting in which I can appreciate and glorify the Name of God, even though there are things in this world that attempt to demean the source.

Filed Under: Lifestyle Tagged With: 500words, music

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