Filed under: Adventures, Spirituality, Travel | Tags: Border Patrol, bus trip, El Paso, Immigration, Interstate Ten, Jesus, Juarez, Mt. Cristo Rey, new mexico, spirituality, statue of christ, Travel, United States
July 30th cont…
(It is with great trepidation that I sit down to write this, almost exactly a year since we began this crazy trip, this is the final entry from my journal, in almost illegible script due to the bouncing, shaking bus.)
We drove along that great expansive border fence that ensures American “freedom”, as if a fence can grant freedom, built by the same architects that construct wars, paid for by you, the “free” citizen. At some point that looming fence disappears, and there is only the Rio Grande, which has been a border for longer than America has been a country. We took a left, down a dusty, rocky road that looked like it probably led to those underground cock fighting rings Ben was talking about, and entered New Mexico.
As we passed a border patrol car, partially obscured by the gathering dust, Pual asked, “Are you guys sure we’re going the right way?”
“Well Pual, there’s never any way to be sure about anything, really. But this looks right, according to Tyler’s map,” I replied curtly.
Ben pointed out the window from his spot on the couch, “There’ s the sign for it, take a left up ahead.”
The road, which supposedly led to Mount Cristo Rey, was more of a dirt trail than anything, and it led up a steep hill into what looked to be a rock quarry, not a parking lot. Hoping this wasn’t a trap for drug cartels to kidnap unsuspecting blonde tourists, I pushed the pedal down as hard as I could, like I was squashing a beetle, and we bounded the hill, kicking up rocks behind us.
The trail led past yet another border patrol car, and weaved up and and down a few more gravel hills. Everyone was holding onto something as the bus bounced along, looking out the windows nervously, worried that we wouldn’t make it, or worse, we weren’t even heading in the right direction, but the heat was brutal, I was tired, and I just didn’t care. If this is where the bus met its fate, let it be, I’d pack my bags and hitch hike home, leaving it there to be swallowed up by the dust.
Finally, after a doubtful drive, we came up on the parking area, which was desolate except for one rusty work truck. Two Mexicans were putting tools and a ladder into an old shed. I parked the bus, leaped out into the rocky parking area and went to ask them if we could hike up, going over in my head how I would ask them in Spanish if need be.
Both men were wearing matching red caps that read “Mt. Cristo Rey, 69 anos”, and as I walked up to them, one of them took off his cap and wiped his sweaty forehead with a raggedy kerchief.
“Hey guys, is it okay if we go up?” I said, pointing at the lumbering statue of Christ on top of the hill, his arms outstretched as if waiting for an embrace.
“Sure, man, but remember, it’s at your own risk. We aren’t liable if anything happens to you and your buddies,” one of them replied from behind a patchy beard.
“There have been banditos in the area, and reports of assults. People go up there looking to pray, and sometimes they come back down in just their underwear. The banditos wait in the rocks and jump out and rob them,” The other one added.
“And there are a lot of rattlers this time of year, so no shortcuts, okay?”
“Yes sir, no short cuts. Got it.” I said, and started to walk back to the bus.
“I mean it, man!” he called after me. Continue reading
Filed under: Adventures, Spirituality, Travel | Tags: Bibliomancy, dance church, Fort Worth, Fort Worth Texas, hippies, Jeff Goldblum, Kerrville Texas, San Francisco, Santa Cruz, spirituality, Weatherford, Weatherford Texas
July 17th continued…
So we pulled into Santa Cruz around eight pm, hungry and tired. Our friend Leaf, with whom I had been communicating by interspersed texts over the past few days, was to meet us in Santa Cruz, his old hometown. He drove his little white Civic down from Stockton, which was about three hours away. Leaf had promised us his friends house to hang out at for the night, and said there might be a potluck in our honor, asking only that we would play a few songs.
We met leaf at a Shell station after maneuvering the bus around tight corners and briefly holding up traffic. The most mundane task, like pulling into a gas station, suddenly becomes work in the big yellow bus, firmly pressing your foot against the hot gas pedal, wrestling with the big steering wheel, whipping the back-end around like a dinosaur’s tail, lumbering, creaking.
When Leaf pulled into the parking lot, just minutes after we did, I hopped down the bus steps and gave him a full on bear hug. Seeing Leaf again, even in a gas station parking lot, was like a chilled glass of water: his boyish blonde hair, kind blue eyes, and the wrinkles on his forehead, earned from years of making a wide-eyed, surprised expression from being in complete awe with every magnificent facet of the universe. It was so good to see him away from Kerrville because it made him seem so much more real to me. Oh, this is a real person with a real life who exists outside of the maniac ranch of Kerrville.
Filed under: Literature | Tags: blue like jazz, christianity, donald miller, emily dickinson, ghost, hillsong united, iron and wine, left behind, pat robertson, religion, sex drive, spirituality, twilight
Donald Miller is an asshole. If you are a twenty-something Christian who listens to both Iron and Wine and Hillsong United, you have likely read Blue Like Jazz, Donald Miller’s New York Times’ Best Selling book about a twenty-something navigating what he nonchalantly calls “Christian Spirituality”. If you have read his book, and you are not an english major, you probably liked it a whole lot, citing it as “the best piece of religious-nonfiction since Pat Robertson wrote that one book in the 90’s, or Left Behind”.
(a christian documentary)
The book was suggested to me by a number of my friends at college. I assumed that since it was popular it probably wasn’t worth my time, so I never read it. But when my friend Steve, who was staying at our house in Houston, brought it over and said it was worth reading, and Gardy piped in that it was the only book he’d ever read voluntarily, I figured I’d give it a shot. Not because I valued their literary opinion, but because I didn’t have anything else to read at that time.
I started the book with low expectations, reading it in the bathroom and before bed. Sure, it was on the Best Seller’s list, but that doesn’t mean that it is worth reading, and it certainly doesn’t mean that it is literature. Twilight is on the best seller’s list. Twilight.
(Pictured: Literature)
Let me first say this: Blue Like Jazz is not on my list of top 10 or even top 20 books, but Donald Miller surprised me. He surprised me in the way that the movie Hot Tub Time Machine surprised me last night: I went in with low expectations, and they were exceeded. Miller wrote a collection of essays that were uber-approachable, sometimes teetering on banality, but there were nuggets of profundity surrounded by his neigh-base conversationalism. His style turned me off at first, but it made for a quick, light read that I saturated with yellow-highlighter ink.
But this entry is not to sing the praises of Donald Miller. This entry is a middle finger to the 30-something, published, and probably moderately wealthy Houstonian, Christian author from a 20-something, unpublished and definitely moderately poor Houstonian, formerly Christian non-author. Fuck you Donald Miller; I hope you’re reading this.
As I was saying, I read the book in a few days, and actually enjoyed it until I got to a chapter near the end. As I read the chapter entitled “Alone”, I was dumbfounded. With every paragraph I read I became more livid. I could not believe what I was reading. I wanted to find Miller and confront him. I didn’t know what I’d do to him exactly, but it wouldn’t be pleasant for anyone involved.
Let me back up a few years to when I was attending a Christian college in a Dallas Suburb. I made the acquaintance of a handsome, hip, probably progressive, English major named David in my American lit class. I haven’t spoken to him in some time but I still have his copy of Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five on my bookshelf. We got to talking about favorite poets one day and I told him that mine was Emily Dickinson. I told him that I had a crush on her since first reading her poem, A Fly Buzzed When I Died.
I explained to him that there’s just something about her. She is broken and beautiful and if I could have gone back in time, I wouldn’t have punched Hitler or stopped Pearl Harbor or whatever, I would have seduced Emily Dickinson. I became pretty obsessed with the idea of loving her. My girlfriend bought me her entire collected works, and I read her poetry before bed every night. She was a recluse and possibly a lesbian, but she had so much capacity for love welling up in her imaginably frail frame. There was a period of a few weeks that I was actually depressed upon realizing that I could never ever be with her, and I had a sick sort of fantasy of making love to her ghost.
(Sexy…)
I was sort of embarrassed admitting all of this to David, but he wasn’t phased by my confession.
“Actually, I read a book that says that some huge number– I don’t know the statistic or anything– of high school males, especially those interested in literature, develop these uncontrollable crushes on Emily Dickinson. I don’t know what it is but it’s a pretty interesting phenomenon. You’re not alone, man. I felt the same way about her in high school.”
I was so relieved to hear that I wasn’t a creep, and I found the idea pretty provocative. I started planning on writing a short story that revolved around the idea of a delusional English major falling in love with Emily Dickinson, his graphic masturbatory fantasies of making love to her ghost, and a climax in Amherst, Massachusetts (her burial place and hometown) ending with his untimely death. The point of the story would be that one can fall in love with just about anyone, proving that the idea of the soul mate is flawed, and that practicality should sometimes override emotionalism.
I thought long and hard about the plot, and even talked with a published Christian author about the story. We discussed that it could even involve some pseudo-time traveling and that he would very explicitly have sex with Dickinson, saving her from her depression and lonliness, and ultimately saving himself.
I never wrote that story. Like all of my ideas for short stories, I simply never got around to it. Fiction is hard for me, and it’s hard to muster up the motivation to commit to something of that scale. But I always planned on writing it. I thought it was subversive and provocative and relatable enough to be worthwhile.
But do you know who did write that story? That exact same story? I’ll give you one guess: well it’s Donald Miller. What are the odds? You just took one-third of my decent fiction ideas from me and just jammed it into your book. I’m not saying I could have written it better, but it feels completely awkward and out of place in a book on “Christian Spirituality”, whatever the hell that is.
I’d say go out and read it for yourself, but I don’t want you supporting his psychic-demon-future mind reading plagiarism so I’ll include a few quotes straight from Blue Like Jazz:
(I hope that cigarette kills you, you demon-psychic bastard)
“I would read the poetry of Emily Dickinson out loud and pretend to have conversations with her…I asked her if she was a lesbian. For the record, she told me she wasn’t a lesbian…She was lovely, really, sort of like a quiet scared dog, but she engaged fine when she warmed up to me…
Did he just compare my Emily to a dog? Miller, You asshole.
And explaining why guys have crushes on her: “…Emily is an intellectual submissive, and intellectual men fear the domination of women”.
He goes on to explain that he drove all the way from Portland to Massachusetts to visit her home in Amherst and that he saw Emily Dickinson, or her ghost, or something there. He described her thin neck, her red lips, her ankles, her waist, and sure, he didn’t go as far as pining her down and having his way with her, but its all in the subtext.
I thought back on my conversation about Emily Dickinson with my classmate in Dallas. I realized that David was referring to this book. Of course he was. He wore skinny jeans and had a hipster beard and read Vonnegut. They all read Vonnegut. I didn’t know it at the time, but it was a conversation about Blue Like Jazz that got me thinking about writing that story, and it was finally reading the book, four years later, that made me decide not to write the story– the idea came full circle. It was Donald Miller’s idea all along, and it was mine, and it was David’s and it was all of ours collectively. He was using the story to illustrate the problems of being in solitude, and what loneliness can do to a person, and I was using it to illustrate the idea that proximity and practicality are more important than romantic emotionalism, but both streams sprang from the same well.
I was robbed of a story that would have been Sex Drive meets Ghost and a Bronte novel; I feel a little cheated by Donald Miller. I mean, he already has a few books under his belt and supposedly an upcoming movie, why does he need my simple love story about Dickinson’s ghost? But I suppose it isn’t your fault, Don. I’ll blame it on the collective unconscious; great minds think alike. Or in this case, delusional, mediocre minds think alike.
RAISED WITH WOLVES 