The Last Prayer

I don’t pray anymore.

I used to, though. From the time I was a little boy and was first taught about this God person entity being, I was taught the proper ways to address him. Er, Him. Head bowed, eyes closed. On your knees is good but not necessary. Out loud or to yourself, depending on the setting. Start with a nice greeting. “Dear...” followed by your title of choice. Lord. Heavenly Father. Or just plain old God. Give praise and thanks before you go asking for things so as not to seem like you’re mistaking God for Santa Claus. But definitely ask for things because everything comes from God, provided it’s His will. Just don’t go wasting God’s time asking for frivolous things, okay?

Among your entreaties don’t forget to ask for forgiveness for the sins you’ve committed. Even if you’ve been good, there’s something in there that needs forgiving, and the only one who can really forgive you in the saved-from-eternal-damnation sense is God Almighty.

Which brings us to salvation. How many hundreds of times must I have asked The Lord Above to save my soul? I was never 100% clear on the process. So I just ask Jesus to come into my heart? Like (gestures to chest) in here? Does he stay there or does he just clean me up and then go? And does this only cover sins committed to-date or am I covered for future sins as well? Do I have to keep doing this? I was never sure that I had done it right, so I repeated it, time and again. Salvation anxiety: it is real.

Once you’ve made it through all of your praises and givings of thanks and requests and your nine-thousand-four-hundred-and-seventy-third plea to be saved from burning in hell forever and ever and ever, bring it all to a close by stating in whose name you dare come before God (that would be Jesus’s), and then hang it up with a firm “Amen.”

I haven’t prayed in....a while. The short answer to the question of why I don’t pray anymore is that I don’t believe in God anymore. But even before I stopped believing, I had grown tired of that feeling that I was just talking to myself. I had grown so weary of never getting anything in the way of a response. A lot of people say that God and His answers to our prayers are all around us, even if we don’t recognize them, and that perhaps I should pray for eyes to see. A lot of people say that unanswered prayers are some of God’s greatest gifts. Well, I’m not a lot of people.

Some people want to define prayer a bit more loosely than the process I described above, which made sense. It’s just me and God, right? No need for all this ceremony. Some people want to talk about prayer like it’s meditation. Sitting still, quieting your mind, freeing your awareness to listen for God’s voice. But still, it all comes back to an attempt at communicating with an entity that is invisible, inaudible, odorless, flavorless, untouchable -- basically, a completely undetectable being whose entire presence is suspect.

“But God is all around us. God is in you and me and those kids and those old people and that tree and that dirt and that grass and that rock and that pitbull and, and....”

And what, Straw Man that I created and put words into the mouth of so I could get all huffy at it and it couldn’t respond? In what sense is God in those things? What reason do we have to believe that? And beyond that, if we’re busy trying to see God in everything, aren’t we sort of missing the thing itself in all its glory and wonder? Are those things only amazing and special and capable of taking our breaths away when we stop to really think about the fact of their existence if they’re somehow infused with this God of which you speak?

My answer is no.

Not praying has an interesting consequence, though. When confronted with a crappy situation about which I can do basically nothing, I’m left with little in the way of options. In the past, I could offer up a little prayer for the Lord above to intervene, somehow. It wasn’t much, but it was something. Now I don’t have that option. It would seem to do as much good as “sending good vibes” or whatever, a phrase I’ve been guilty of using, but which ultimately doesn’t do anything other than let the person on the other end know that I’m thinking about them and that I care. Which, I suppose, prayer does as well. If somebody says they’re praying for your situation, it’s just another way of saying that they care, and the fact that we believe differently in matters of God and religion becomes, in that moment anyway, tertiary.

So I don’t believe in God anymore and I don’t try to talk to him. Two connected facts of my person. I don’t remember what I said in my last prayer, but I sort of wish I could. It probably wasn’t anything special. But perhaps it should have gone something like this:

Dear God,

I don’t know why I’m doing this. I don’t even know...you’re not even listening, are you? You’re not even there to listen. I am literally talking to myself here, aren’t I? But I’m doing it anyway, so, I guess I’m saying this mostly for myself, and if by some chance you are there and you’re listening, then you’ll get the message too. Though that seems unlikely. I just want to say...look, I can’t do this anymore. I’m done. I feel like I’m fooling myself here, trying to talk to you, trying to listen, trying to discern your voice in everything. So, I’m not going to do this anymore, okay? If you’re there and you want to reach me for some reason, well, you’re God so you should know where to find me. Um, thanks, I guess.

Amen

Oh Yes, Mistakes Got Made

Earlier this week during my internet travels, I ran across a rather entertaining article about a 1995 Newsweek article wherein the author editorialized on the many reasons why the internet was doomed to go the way of Betamax. In a nutshell, his case boiled down to a belief that the state of the internet at that time was about as good as it was ever going to get, and its state, as you may recall, was not so great.

Obviously, things have improved, and pretty much everything in the article turned out to be wrong. Even the author himself, an astronomer and writer by the name of Clifford Stoll, has commented on how very incorrect his predictions were.

I feel for this guy, I really do. I seriously doubt he was the only one back then who was too preoccupied with the internet’s wackness to stop and think about its potential dopeness. He just happened to be one of the ones ballsy enough to put his thoughts into print. And then the internet got all big and amazing and his thoughts went from print to digital and got spread all over the very medium that he predicted would have been long gone by now. I don’t know Clifford Stoll personally, but I’m going to guess that this article presents one of the most inaccurate declarations of his lifetime. And there it is one the internet for the whole world to see and pass on. Shit, I put it on Facebook myself, along with who-knows-how-many other people. But hey, if you’re going to go playing Nostradamus, it probably helps to have a taste for crow, huh?

Stoll’s blunder may be more public than most, but he’s hardly alone in having made big mistakes. So in that spirit, I thought I would share some of the things that I myself have been wrong about, right here on the internet. And I’m limiting this to mistakes that occurred in my adult life because everybody’s stupid when they’re a kid. 

Mickey's Fine Malt Liquor is good drinkin'!
Holy hornet balls, could I ever put that shit back. I fucking loved it. I drank it from the widemouth grenade bottles and I drank it from the 40 ounce bottles and I loved every drop. Now? I’d have to say it qualifies as swill. Plus it’s made by Miller, a brewer I'd rather not support any longer. Please note, however, that this admission of error with regards to the quality of Mickey’s is not a statement of regret with regards to my tattoo of the Mickey’s hornet on my calf. I’m still pretty good with that.  

Vaccines are scary and bad!
When we were pregnant with our first kid, we started running across all these articles about the link between vaccines and autism. Mercury in a needle! Being injected into our precious baby! I’ll admit it, we got ourselves good and freaked out. But then we learned a bit more and realized just how ridiculous the whole facts vs. nonfacts controversy surrounding vaccines really is.  

My 1st marriage will last forever!
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHA!!!!! HAHAHAHAHAA!!! HAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHA!!!!! Whew! All right then, moving on. 

I want to become a counselor and help people!
When I enrolled in a master’s program with the goal in mind of becoming a licensed professional counselor, I really thought I had found what I wanted to be when I grew up. I learned a lot, but after a few semesters, I figured out that mental health was not the profession for me. 

I will never be an atheist!
And yet here I sit, an unbeliever. 

I will never put a LOLCat on my blog!
Doh! Actually, I think I've probably already messed this one up.

Blogging is dumb!
This isn’t really too far off from Mr. Stoll’s statement about the internet as a whole. I remember when I first started to run across people’s online journals, many of which were anonymous. I perused a few here and there and found it to be the whiniest bullshit I had ever read. I got it in my head that a bunch of people just writing about whatever the fuck they want to and putting it on the internet was a stupid idea. Then not too too long after that, my friend Tim created the individual blogs on the Loaded Gun Theory site, and lo and behold, I became a blogger.   

So there's just a few of my mistakes for y'all to chew on. I wracked my brain trying to think of some more, but these are honestly the only halfway-interesting ones I could come up with, and that's stretching the definition of "interesting." For those mistakes that I'm unable to recall at the moment, hopefully I at least learned a lesson from them.

Bingorilla

John Williams Ruins Everything

At some point in your life, you’ve been some place where one or more persons sang or hummed or otherwise recreated the theme to “Sanford and Son.” If you try to tell me that this has never happened to you, I won’t believe you. You’re a liar. Shut up. No, YOU shut up.

I remember one such occasion in my own life when I was hanging out with my friends Lucas and Tim. Somebody, I don’t remember who, started singing the theme to “Sanford and Son.” Now that I think about it, I think it was me. I like singing the theme to “Sanford and Son.” There’s a relaxing quality to it. My friends, Lucas and Tim, told me that John Williams had written the theme to “Sanford and Son.” This is the John Williams who wrote the theme to “Star Wars.” Oh wait, you know what? We might have been singing the theme to “Star Wars” when this happened. Whatever theme it was, Lucas and Tim told me that John Williams of “Star Wars” theme fame had also written the theme to “Sanford and Son” and because I am sometimes gullible, I believed them. “Really? Really?” I asked. And not in a skeptical tone, but a really excited one. I was so happy to hear that John Williams, the guy who had written duuuuun DUUUUUN dun dun dun DUUUUUUUUN dun, dun dun dun DUUUUUUUUN dun DUN DUN DUN DUUUUUUN had also written bowm bowm bownowm. bowm bowm bownowm bowmown bowm.

So you can imagine how upset I was when I saw the smiles on Lucas and Tim’s faces that told me that they were just pulling my stupid leg. I wasn’t upset that I had been tricked. I was upset that this vision they had set before me was not reality. I really wanted John Williams to have written the theme song to “Sanford and Son.” Wouldn't that be a wonderful world to live in?

Goddammit, John Williams. You ruin everything.

Enter The Ninja

The other day, I needed to talk to my friend about this dream I had about him, this dream in which he was wrongly accused of murder because the dead person’s DNA was all over the couch in his living room, and nobody, neither the cops nor the courts would listen to him or his wife when they told them that they just bought this couch off of craigslist, that they didn’t even know the victim, and because their pleas did nothing but disappear into a bureaucratic vortex of deaf ears, my friend’s wife put on her P.I. hat and took it upon herself to solve the case. Yes, she had a hat. Then the dream went cinematic on me, cutting suddenly to my friend and I, months later after his ordeal, standing at a meat counter in a brightly-lit grocery store, and everything is quiet save the sound of his voice. “They hurt me, Travis” he tells me. “They hurt me bad.” And it’s only then as he’s looking me in the face that I realize his eyes have dimmed just a bit. I have no response for him, nothing worthwhile to say. I wanted to cry for my friend.

I was off-kilter for a good half hour after waking, sorting out the details of the dream from reality, assuring myself that my friend had not, in actuality, been accused of murder, had not been subjected to good cop/bad cop questioning or the violence of incarceration. I had an overwhelming need to tell him about this dream in which he figured so prominently, and finally did when I saw his name pop up in my IM list. We started talking about what a great story it would be, the kind of thing you might put on a stage in front of people for them to enjoy. We’ve been talking about it via email, IM, and text since then.  And as so often happens when people come together to tease the details of a story out of the ether, a ninja has appeared among the cast of characters.

This is not over.

A Bad Morning's Tweets

What's Wrong With Your Mind?

I realized a while back that the music loaded on my iPhonamapod was lacking something: good ugly brutal drill-seargent-mean workout music. Sure, I had plenty of uptempo jams in there, some of them plenty aggressive, even. But I had no individual albums loaded up that could drive me all the way through from warm-up to that final agonizing “DON’T YOU FUCKING GIVE UP YOU FUCKING PUSSY!” set and on into the cool-down. So this past weekend while I was making some adjustments to my carrying-around music, I remedied this situation by uploading one of the most perfect workout albums ever recorded, Pantera’s 1992 Texas metal masterpiece, Vulgar Display of Power.

Except for the last song because it’s a piece of shit.

Dude got punched

Understand, I was sixteen years old when this album came out, so I was at a point in my life when I was all about the blind screaming rage. As far as I was concerned, this album was the pinnacle of humanity’s creative endeavors. I don’t recall exactly what I was so very pissed off about all the time. The usual package of teenage boy woes with a crate of fat kid afflictions piled on top of it. But really and truly, the specific focus of one’s anger is of secondary importance when you’ve got power cords, double-kick drums, and demonic vocals providing the sonic backdrop for your angst. I had that shit on constant rotation.

So the other day I went to the gym, ready to give it a try. The gym I go to is in the bottom floor of the building next door to where I work. I go there because it’s free and because there’s hardly anyone there. I’ve often got the whole place to myself. As I walked over, I detected -- what is--? Is that apprehension? Nervousness? See, I had not actually listened to this collection of songs in ages. What would my beloved Vulgar Display sound like to me lo these many years later? Would the production sound shitty compared to the quality of recorded music now? Would it seem so silly as to be painful? Or, horror of horrors, would the music of my youth be too aggressive for these aged sound receptacles of mine? 

But as soon as “Mouth For War” came thundering in, all these worries went and fucked off somewhere. It was exactly what I had been looking for. I’m not going to go into the details of my exercise routine because then I’d have to punch myself in the face for being one of those people, but suffice it to say that by the time “Fucking Hostile!” rolled around, I was feeling, well, not exactly fucking hostile, but at least reasonably hostile. There was definitely some hostility emanating from my person, but in a positive sense. The blood was pumping, the music was aggro -- I was in a good place.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the door open and a person enter. I turned to see who it was and damn near dropped a weight on my foot. It took a long moment to register what I was seeing, but when the synapses finally got to firing, I realized that, yes, standing in front of me was none other than my old friend Jennifer. What was she doing in town? At my gym no less? What the hell was she smiling at? I pulled the buds out of my ears and stood there breathing heavy for a moment, trying to regain the ability to speak. Between gasps, I forced out the question.

“Jen?”

Something about her looked strange, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. She laughed and shook her head.

“I can’t believe you’re still listening to that shit.”

While it may not have been the absolute last thing I would’ve expected her to say, it wouldn’t have been among my top hundred guesses. I’d barely started to babble out a response -- “Whahuhwhowhat’reyouhuh?” -- when the door opened yet again and in walked another old friend, my oldest friend actually. I’ve known Chad damn near my entire life, since we were just little kids having sword fights with curtain rods and watching the skies over our suburban Houston homes for UFOs. He walked in and stood next to Jennifer. They didn’t look at each other, only at me, like they’d planned this little meeting. And just as I’d noted with Jen, he looked strange somehow. He laughed too.

“I can’t believe you, man.” he said.

“What?” There was clearly a joke here that I was on the outside of. “You can’t believe -- Pete?"

And then who else should walk in but none other than my freshman year crackhead roommate, Pete. And when I say crackhead, I don’t mean he busted his skull open while diving into the wrong end of the pool; I mean that he started off our freshman year at the University of Texas as a harmless pothead and was inhaling rock through a glass tube by the next summer. Until this very moment, that was the last I had seen or heard of him.

“Hey T-man, what’s happening?” He smiled and lit a cigarette. He always was the kind to ignore No Smoking signs, then act surprised when someone in authority pointed them out to him. Oh gosh, I’m so sorry!

And there they stood in a line, all facing me, watching me pant and sweat. An odd reunion in which I seemed to be the only person surprised at its happening. These three and I, the four of us, had never been all friends together. The three of them had maybe met each other at some point or another, but my relationships with each of them had been separate. So the way they’d all gathered here, completely unsurprised to see me or each other, it was highly suspicious. I had the strange feeling I was being intervened with.

And then it dawned on me, Pete’s scraggly hair, his acne-scarred cheeks, the inch and a half long cylinder of ash at the tip of his cigarette that would crumble under its own weight at any second and fall down on his hand -- he was exactly as he was the last time I saw him over fifteen years ago. And Chad with his wide eyes, long hair, and rail-thin body, Jennifer with her jet black hair pulled back with little butterfly clips and that scent of vanilla that followed her like so many admirers -- these weren’t the people they are now; these were the people they were then, back in the day, so to speak, back when the album I currently had blaring in my headphones was one of my mainstays. Pete’s cigarette ash looked close to teetering, but if he was worried about it, it didn’t show. “Seriously man, you still listening to this metal shit?”

“What?” I was totally thrown off. Were these really my friends from over a decade and a half ago standing before me in this gym? What were they doing here? Why these three? Were there more coming? Was one of my exes about to walk through that door?

“You’re what, 30-something now dude?” asked 17, 18, maybe 19 year old Chad. “You haven’t mellowed out yet?”

“What? No! I mean, yes, I have. I haven’t listened to this in years. I--what’s your problem? You come from the past to hassle me about my music?”

“Who is this again?” asked Jennifer.

“Fucking Pantera,” drawled Pete. “Y’all, I remember this fool used to play this shit all the time. And sometimes he’d strap on that guitar of his and fucking play along with it. He’d be all--” and then he proceeded to demonstrate for Chad and Jen what I looked like when I did my dorm room rock god routine. I don’t recall being quite so spastic, but I didn’t argue. I was faintly aware of a guitar solo emanating from my dislodged ear buds. I left it alone, leaving Dimebag Darrell, R.I.P., to do as he pleased.

“Okay Pete, first of all, fuck you dude. I couldn’t listen to classic rock for an entire year after living with you. A year! You made me not want to listen to Zeppelin! And The Doors still irritate me.”

“And you’re still wearing that?” asked Chad, pointing at the ratty old Tool tee-shirt I was sporting.

“Oh my god! You had that in college!” said Jennifer.

Holeyer than thou

“He had it in high school!” said Chad. “We both got that exact same shirt when we saw ‘em in concert senior year.”

“Trav, come on.” said Jen. “I had slightly higher hopes for you than this. Buy some clothes, would you?”

“I’m just wearing it to exercise!” I protested.

“It’s like you haven’t grown up at all.” she continued.

“Yes I have! Seriously, look at this thing. It’s covered in holes. I only wear it to work out or to mow the lawn or -- oh! I have a lawn! I have gardens! I have kids! A wife! Chickens! See? Grown-up stuff.”

“So are you still listening to Tool?” asked Chad.

“On occasion, yeah, and so are you, I might add. Current you, I mean. In fact, you just saw them in concert not long ago.”

“Really? They’re still around?”

“Yep. You went and put the pictures up on your Facebook.”

“What’s a face book?” he asked.

“A book with faces in it?” said Jennifer.

“Why would I put pictures of a concert in a face book?”

“Maybe they were pictures of faces?”

“That sounds stupid.”

“It is stupid.” I said.

“So hey man,” said Pete, “it looks like you ain’t done a whole lot with yourself since college, huh?”

“What?!” I laughed because this had all become so ludicrous. A crackhead was standing here telling me that I hadn’t done much with my life. Three inches of ash hung precariously off the end of his cigarette. “Dude, I’ve done plenty. Probably more than you have, wherever the fuck you are. For all I know you’re fucking dead.”

“Oh now that’s just mean.” said Jennifer.

“Naw, he may well be right.” said Pete. “I ain’t exactly been walking a righteous path.”

“Still, it’s not a nice thing to say.” she said, looking at me. “Be nice.”

“Yeah,” said Chad. “It’s not our fault you’re all old and still pissed off, listening to this shit.”

“I’m not old.” I said.

“They playing Metallica on classic rock radio yet?” he asked

“He was always so angry.” said Jen. “What were so angry about anyway?”

“I wasn’t--! Look, is there something you need from me? Something you need to tell me? Or did you just travel into the future to give me shit?”

“You’re being awfully defensive.” said Jennifer.

“No I’m not!”

My hostility, it was increasing.

“You fuckers are standing here giving me shit about my life just because you happened to catch me listening to Pantera for the first time in literally years when in fact I’ve...” and I started babbling, stammering, spilling out an incoherent bullet list of my life in no particular order, things I’d done, things that had happened to me, accomplishments, failures, the most random of memories, any and every thing I could think of to prove that my life hadn’t gone on pause all this time, that I’d been living, doing. And it wasn’t until I heard myself actually say, “I’m a different person now!” It was only then, as I stood there with cool air-conditioned sweat dripping down my face, that I looked at the three of them and realized the obvious.

These stupid kids don’t know a damn thing.
 
Well, they know how to travel through time
 
I suppose there’s that.

I laughed. “You fucking kids...you don’t know shit, you know that?” And then they laughed, seemingly with me rather than at me for the first time during this exchange. The ash of Pete’s cigarette fell to the floor whole and silently exploded into dust on the industrial carpet. He didn’t seem to notice. We just stood there laughing like idiots. A gym employee passed through, but barely gave us a glance.

With the tables flipped over in my favor, I thought I’d have some fun and drop a few hints about what the future had in store for them.

“So Chad...” I started, ever thought about joining the Army? But before I put voice to the question, he disappeared. Pop. The air rushed to fill the space that had become unoccupied so quickly. Jen and Pete looked at each other, at me, then they disappeared too. Pop. Pop.

Well, I thought, that was....

By this time I was all cooled off and didn’t much feel like hopping back into the routine. I shouldered my backpack and headed out the door, slipping the buds back into my ears. It was right in the middle of a song.

....then when confronted we ask them the question
What's wrong with their mind?!?!
What's wrong with your mind?!?!

Hell if I know, Phil. Hell if I know.