Adeodatus in Wonderland

A Trial Picture

Stacy fell in love with Alias from the very get-go (she took up kickboxing at her gym the same week, for pete’s sake). It was a show without moral ambiguity: good guys fought bad guys, and Sidney, being the goodest of the good guys, always managed to end up just maiming people seriously with whatever she found at hand. A Christian might argue that the fornication was problematic (and it is from a larger point of view), but Sid & Michael loved each other and that’s what CIA agents ignorant of grace do after a stressful covert op. And the episode following the Superbowl, where Sindney struts out in some Very Skimpy lingerie, played a little too hard to the Wardrobe Malfunction demographic. But every week we could count on some great wigs & disguises, a few minutes of well-choreographed kung fu (rarely in lingerie; usually fully clothed), and a scene where you were sure that Sid would finally get caught but somehow she manages to get away (Phew!). Sure you must suspend all disbelief and logic, but there is an internal moral and procedural grammar that was followed, and the effect was forty-some minutes of escapist fun.

But this season the writers and kung fu guys must’ve been caught in the corner by that rowdy bunch of program directors at ABC. There they were in the boys’ bathroom when the gang came in, hair slicked back, torn ABC jackets hanging on their slouched shoulders. “Hey! Loookee what we got here, fellahs.” They throw the Alias writers against the wall. “A bunch of over-achiever, brown-nosin’ goody-goody boys.” Through threats and a few punches, the Eisner Bunch manages to terrify our Alias Honor Roll kids into the mediocrity that characterizes the rest of the network: “Just spin a convoluted, nonsensical yarn about long-lost artifacts, long-lost siblings, DNA encoding and vengeance. Go heavy on the vengeance. More dialog. People love lots of dialog! And none of you nerds gets hurt, see?”

This season we had 5 straight episodes without a single kung fu scene. In last night’s finale we watched a very poor reprise of season two’s final 12 minute fight, this time at night with a jumpy hand-cam (no choreography needed. “Ummm. You two just go out there and swing these shovels around. Fall down and say ‘Oooof” a lot. We’ll fix it all in editing.”) The low point of last year’s final fight: four graphic bullet holes exploding from the Black Bad Lady’s chest as Sidney fires then slumps to the floor almost weeping, a scene we had the pleasure of reliving at least five times this season. So, creative geniuses or cowards as they are, they ended this year’s season with the Blond Bad Lady getting her exploding bullet holes, including one in the head.

Other evidence that Alias has jumped the proverbial shark: the finale had not one latex mask identity switch, but two, straight out of the original Mission Impossible series. At least in earlier shows they crafted a complex “recombinant DNA” scenario where the bad guys altered their very DNA to take on the identity of good guys. But even worse was an attempt at morally ambiguous character complexity. A few shows back Sidney really wanted to find her long-lost sister, so she breaks into an Asian art-collector’s fortified basement (he may have been [GASP!] a drug dealer), steals an artifact that holds the clue, and slaughters all the security guards with her automatic pistols. And this one: agent Vaughn, ticked that his wife was really a Covenant Agent, catches her, hangs her from chains, and prepares to erase her features with acid. He must do this for closure, Sidney’s dad tells us. Vaughn is stopped by another Covenant Bad Lady, though. (She only punctured his lung with the stab through the back, though. It must’ve been one of those minor, outpatient collapsed lungs – he was able to escape the hospital a few hours later by sliding down the stairwell on a fire hose.)

It’s one thing to suspend disbelief for a campy spy show that takes itself just seriously enough to pull it off. It’s quite another to be force-fed pabulum, this poorly written adventure TV which alienates its core audience: Stacy stared at the dark screen for a few seconds after the show ended, shaking her head. If we are in the country come fall, we might give it a few episodes to pull it back together. Stacy is, after all, a fan. But I have a feeling that the show will fall into even murkier waters, and we will resort to other forms of Sunday night entertainment. When does the A-Team come out on DVD?

There I was whining on the phone with Tim about stealing his technical expertise to get some sort of comments system up and running on this blog of mine. "Snicker. Snicker," he snickers. "Yer still on Blogger, no?" Yes. "Well, then..." Oh.

Comment away! I would like some clever name for such comments like Lutheran Josh has, or the Rough Woodsman folk. Maybe, "Thought-out insights" or "Since you can't see which finger I'm holding up..."

In case you’ve been wondering, a quick update on my work around the house:

The bunkbed fort now has a steep Victorian-style roof on it, including a skylight. It still needs lots of trim work, but the kids (or whoever) could hang out in it during a rain storm.

Most of the planting and landscaping and lattice installing has been completed. I still have some mint plants to shove in the ground somewhere. But now that the Kentucky Derby is over, I suppose my need for mint has dropped off significantly. And many of the spring bulbs are indeed coming up out of the earth.

The front yard is coming along slowly. I’m about 2/3 done with raking up the area to be sodded. Turns out the lawn we killed off didn’t compost itself back into rich, loamy soil during the winter. I probably could drop the sod on top of the small clumps, but it’s only 5-6 hours of work to get the surface smooth. Besides, I need to grade it anyway and one cannot grade a patch of dirt which is laden with clumps of dead grass root (thus the ancient Latin dictum).

It’s not unrewarding work, and the prospect of a small carpet of green on part of the front yard keeps me at it. N. ran across the dirt this morning happy to be out of the backyard, and I can picture us all having pleasant summer evening picnics like we did years ago when we had a soft green carpet across the front yard.

What’s left? A few sprinkler zones (we tilled under the old, poorly designed, inadequate system. Should’ve pulled all the heads first, but who thinks ahead when that burley tiller is racking up hourly fees?). Some native flower seeds need to be scattered in other parts of the yard. Rhubarb must be harvested. Then my conscience will be free! Then I can begin living again! Oh. I forgot about having to paint our kitchens & bedrooms. Dang.

What do you do with the Prophets? These voices crying out from crevices and rocks of ancient Judea or from the fig bushes of Tekoa? I thought I had settled on a workable Old Testament hermeneutic at some point, but I am having some doubts as I read through Jeremiah and some of the minor prophets. If there is a danger of leaving their laments and judgments to ring only in the ears of the originally hearers, such an interpretive snare does not spring up from the ground. However, there may be equal peril in a hermeneutic which hears those pronouncements of guilt delivered loudly upon the thresholds of most evangelical churches across the suburbs and sidewalks of this county. I cannot read the words of Amos or Jeremiah or Ezra and not look around to see us playing under every green tree.

For example, take Amos. After his proclamation of the pending doom against the pagan nations for the violence saturating their cultures (“…they have threshed Gilead with threshing sledges of iron…he pursued his brother with the sword…they have ripped open pregnant women…”), God’s own people come under the iron words of the prophet: they sell the righteous for silver, and the needy for a pair of sandals- 7 those who trample the head of the poor into the dust of the earth and turn aside the way of the afflicted. Amos 2:6-7a

After a few rounds of jabs to the body and glancing right crosses, the Prophet’s left hook cracks our jaw in chapter four: "Come to Bethel, and transgress; to Gilgal, and multiply transgression; bring your sacrifices every morning, your tithes every three days; 5 offer a sacrifice of thanksgiving of that which is leavened, and proclaim freewill offerings, publish them; for so you love to do, O people of Israel!" declares the Lord GOD. Amos 4:4-5

Imagine! God’s people following the religious rules so nicely, making their pilgrimages to all the right places. For so they love to do. “In all this, no one asks what actually pleases Yahweh, nor what he actually ‘loves – he ‘loves’ justice and righteousness, and ‘hates’ festival worship without these; these participants merely follow their own will to self-assuagement.” Jeremias, 69. Can you read that thinking of most contemporary worship forms and practice, and not fear the response of the Lord of Hosts? For all my understanding of the holy nature of the church -- Christ’s righteousness in her, the stones being built together into a holy dwelling for God himself, the sinews, muscles and organs all submitting to their Head and one another – I still hear the prophets voice landing with a thud on the carpet of our multi-purpose worship centers or the plush upholstery of the sofas in our welcome centers. That is, if you can even hear his voice above the amplifiers all set to eleven.

So we love to do. Dig out broken cisterns which can hold no water. You can see my problem here. I have serious questions about whether one should read the Prophets like this. We do have shepherds after God’s own heart, who feed with knowledge and understanding. Jeremiah 3:15 We do not see a man and his father go in to the same girl, so that Yahweh’s holy name is profaned. Amos 2:7b And our whoring, if that metaphor fits (it may indeed be too weighty for our ‘distractions’ and anemic worship forms), surely is not on par with the rampant idolatry and paganism embraced by Israel and Judah.

Of course, this hermeneutical angst may flow from my context of non-liturgical, non-reflective worship, which turns out to be both the source of my conviction that the Prophets speak to my own context and the concern that conviction raises. There is no Law proclaimed in the assembly, no sense of God’s righteous demands upon his people. Without the Law, what is the Gospel but a happy, nice-feeling self-help program? The Church may be the holy and pure bride, but that does not mean that every local (or cultural) manifestation is without qualification the vibrant, powerful Israel of God:Therefore repent. If not, I will come to you soon and war against them with the sword of my mouth. 'I know your works. You have the reputation of being alive, but you are dead. 3 1Wake up, and strengthen what remains and is about to die, for I have not found your works complete in the sight of my God.

Thus is the tension: to hear the voices of Yahweh’s prophets in the chorus of the Gospel of Christ. We are holy, set aside by grace for love and good works, but yet He has this against us. Assuming that I can manage to hold that tension in mind as I read the God’s messengers, now the question becomes on of courage: dare any of us even hear, speak and teach these words?

That is a topic for another morning. The sun has risen. More coffee needs to be made, for so I love to drink.

Here I am, a man of quite ordinary means, and I get to enjoy these pleasures at this very moment: sitting in a warm spring sun in my backyard, in front of a hot grill spitting and hissing as two small racks of lamb sear over the blue heat. The smell! Olive oil, fresh basil from our forgotten herb garden (Thank God for his provision in perennial plants), and rosemary waft over with each frenetic flameup.

To my left, resting on the stump of a main branch of our cherry tree (lost in last spring’s blizzard), is a cold, cold amber lager, the product of last winter’s homebrewing. And I get to type on this little computer which rests on my lap, a technological marvel which saves me from having to shuffle parchments, repeatedly dip my quill into ink or haul an extension chord over for an IBM Selectric.

There. The seared lamb has moved to the top rack to slowly roast. The best lamb I’ve ever had the pleasure to eat was in a dark restaurant somewhere outside of Patras, Greece. (If you are headed to Patras, the only hint I can give about its location is that it was across the street from a junkyard which had a towering statue of Apollo over the entrance. That might be enough to get you there). From our table we could see into the kitchen where the cook brought in bundles of sticks no bigger than your finger. He tossed them onto the coals beneath the grill and stoked them into a crackling inferno by waving a small piece of cardboard. That’s the right way to crisp up the fat on a lamb chop. Delicious. When we finished and waddled to the counter to pay, the polite, apologetic woman looked up repeatedly from her calculator and pencil, smiling weakly and saying, “Es kleeptoh, huh?” We squinted at her, looked quizzically at each other and shook our heads. She waved her hand over the counter with that sad smile. “Kleeptoh.” Someone in our family had a little dictionary and together we looked it up: klepto. Stolen. Poor folks. You could see, then, where the cash register used to be.

(Another whiff of lamb just leaving the world of Too Rare. Another 5 minutes should do it.) The mother-in-law is over for dinner. She and Stacy are drinking a merlot and laughing in the kitchen.

This is one thing that I will never begrudge our country: the availability of meat. This rack of lamb cost me $3 at Sam’s Club. I shop during the early hours, when the store is only open for its “business” members. My dad & I share a membership, so there I am buying milk, eggs & bananas for Applied Weather Associates. Not only do these early hours let me avoid all the crowds, I am guaranteed a cup of decent coffee, a danish, and the best selection of meats about to expire. Today I picked up a tray of baby back ribs for less than $2 a pound. That’s dinner tomorrow night. In college our writing class hosted a writer for Outside magazine, Jenkins (Thom? Rick? Buckminster?), who had just published a book about his bike ride across Siberia. He read from an encounter with a Russian on the Steppes: “Is it true that in America you all have airplanes? Can you really go to the moon for holiday? Is it true that you can get meat whenever you want?” Yes. There really is a 24-hour butcher in every major city. We don’t eat meat at every meal, not even every dinner. Last night we had beans and rice. Thursday was veggie nachos. But grilled meat is a pleasure right up there with cold, handcrafted beer and a conversation on the patio tinged with grins and laughter.

It has stopped raining. We never have those days-long drizzles that many parts of the world enjoy. In fact, our 24-Hours-of-Wetness earlier this week itself was a strange atmospheric event in this land of 11-minute thunderstorms.

This all means that today I have no clear reason to stay here in my study in front of this machine. Sun is out. Sprinkler parts must be assembled. Sprinkler, then walkway, then sod. After that I can retreat in here again (or to my patio table, or to my hammock. Or to something that perchance impacts this world).

I have been listening to To Kill A Mockingbird while working. Its been about 6 years since I've read the book, and that's been just too long. When I taught freshman English (high school), I used to read this out loud to them, even when I knew they should be reading it themselves. It's just too dang fun to perform outloud, with all those great southern voices to try on. Stacy and I started reading Peace Like a River a month or so ago with the intent to join the One Book, One Denver discussions. Even though that story is set in the upper Midwest, I still read it as if it took place in Maycomb County, Alabama. It carries much of Ms. Lee's voice and characterization. After I caught myself and started reading it with the correct local dialects, Stacy rolled over and said, "No. It may be wrong, but I like it better the other way." I put in the first audiobook CD clearly prejudiced against someone else's verbal rendition of Harper Lee's prose. But this reader is doing a great job thus far; my only qualm is her attempt to give Atticus a deep, slow voice.

Off I go to get digging...Strange how I made that connection above, from yard work to Mockingbird, but now that I think about it, I haven't seen my neighbor in around six months. His windows are all covered with taped-up notebook paper, his yard is mowed occassionally by people from the bank, and the new phonebook's still sitting on his front step. I'm pretty sure he's living somewhere else, but if he's not, maybe this summer I should set my mind on how to make him come out..

I'm thinking it happened during my freshman year of college, but if you asked the right questions and looked at the right documents buried in my personnel file you could probably find roots of it all in the eighth grade. I am very picky when it comes to movies. Sure, I can sit for two hours playing Age of Empires with J., or read my way around sundry internet sites, but if those two hours are spent in front of a trite, confused, or hackneyed movie, I get mad.

Last night I watched The Emperor's New Clothes, and got up from the couch feeling that my time had been well spent. Other recent films watched in my house (I rarely make it to the theater. Sitting in a dark place is not my idea of a fun date with my wife. That is, a dark place where there are other people and we need to be clothed and we can't have strong drink in glass tumblers) include the following: Bus Stop, As Good as It Gets, Mulholland Drive, Phonebooth, Fletch, Moulin Rouge, and Zoolander. Some of them were recommended by friends or critics I respect, and others just caught my eye at the library. And looking over even this short list, I’m thinking I’m hitting on only half the cylinders.

Being picky about movies does not make one lots of friends. I have learned that I should not ever watch a movie on the advice of a friend (or parent). Never. They will inevitably asked how I liked it, and when I tell them that I found the story predictable, the acting ho-hum, and the photography unimaginative, there will be a moment of awkward silence before they respond, “But wasn’t that scene with the tripwire a riot?” Denerstein and I have similar aesthetic and literary convictions, so I trust his opinion almost always. He takes a movie on its face and according to its genre, so a silly movie still needs to be a good silly movie.

My roommate in college (later to be my best man and later still to drive off into memory after a traumatic weekend visit in Aspen) got me to think seriously about movies. He gave me his list of favorites, and I methodically went through it that summer. I don’t remember all of them, but Apocalypse Now, the Godfather, and Cry Freedom were on there. It was light on comedies, if I recall, but Dr. Strangelove got a showing during a late summer thunderstorm. But not to leave you wondering about what happened in eighth grade…

John Simoniello read real books. I didn’t have much body hair yet and was still reading movie novelizations of a particular genre. Star Trek III, Gremlins, ET, and The Last Starfighter, all with very shiny covers. He read Salinger. It was like looking up from your kids meal of a hotdog and some soggy French fries to see an adult cutting into a juicy ribeye, with steaming freshly buttered sweet-corn and a dollop of sour cream & red potato salad on his plate. Rather suddenly I found myself walking down the classics aisle of the local Crown Books rather than grabbing another relflective consumable. It was years before that taste of aesthetic wonder filtered down to my movie watching. We watched a lot of very forgettable movies through high school, but it was only a matter of time before the likes of Meatballs II and Missing in Action began to leave a bad taste in my mouth.

So now I try to keep up my standards. Fletch was a throwback, a movie I remembered from a decade ago as really funny. I give it a 6.5 for the great on-liners, maybe even a bonus .5 for being the only movie I know if that visits Provo, Utah. Bus Stop is a classic, but it really never leaves the realm of caricatures and stereotypes. Mulholland Drive was enough of a conundrum to keep me interested. Aside from 45 seconds of unsavoriness, it was a wild ride of symbols, dreams and the sort of profound terror Lynch can fester in me.

There is a danger in all this, in that I can mistake certain thematic elements for creativity or even beauty, while dismissing anything with less profound ambitions as trite or worthless. Magnolia, tackling the themes of remorse, death and fate, sits up much higher on the list that does a really funny movie like Bowfinger. Saving Private Ryan trumps Bourne Identity. Call it degree of difficulty. Regardless, when the credits roll, I want to know that the whole production -- the screenwriters, directors, actors, grips – has created something with at least a longing for beauty and quality.

I am done with the backyard. Mostly. There are still some seeds to scatter, and the fort could use a roof. But all the big aspects are done: the deck, groundcover, GFI'd outlet by the little table by the deck, stereo speakers for your late evening listening enjoyment. Now comes the front yard. This is Grand Landscaping at its finest, with none of the micro-scaping that contented me in the backyard.

In a backyard as wee as ours, one nicely planted perennial or spread-out bag of bark imparts aesthetic pleasure far beyond the labor or costs involved. Not so in the front. Our front yard isn't small enough to cover with rocks and bark, but it's not big enough to afford wide open swathes of lush grasses. Oh, we will be laying down grass all right. You can't live in these United States and have no grass. But it will be limited.

The backyard allowed me to attack piecemeal. I would look around in the morning and go to work on whatever struck my fancy. The frontyard is all contingencies and flowcharts. Until I run the zones for the sod, I can't install the walkway, and I can't work on the rock garden or the river-rock areas until I've used the removed walkway dirt to level out the berm and give the south end of the yard some texture. Now, if I were motivated and confident to attack those sprinkler zones, we would see the nicest yard in the neighborhood take shape in short order. Instead, I'm reading about GPM's and PSI's and PVC vs PE. Today I bought some of the supplies (clamps! hose! risers!), and tomorrow I'll round up some more sprinkler heads. Then maybe I'll knock out this irrigation, drop on some prefab lawn (Instant Yard! Sod is truly a modern miracle), and maybe look for a job.

A few months ago N. sneaked into my study (not uncommon. He likes the same spaces I do). I had left on the desk a mess of fly-tying materials, including a pill-box used to hold my dry fly hooks. In keeping with his curious character, he opened each compartment to gaze at the dozens of shiny wire hooks. At some point he also tipped it over, spilling all the hooks from big #10’s down to wee #20’s all over my desk and old linoleum floor. I screeched when I saw it, and promptly ejected the laddie from my study. I grumbled as I cleaned up all the hooks I could find…
This afternoon Pat and I went out for coffee. We ended up in a sparse Yugoslavian café where I ordered some strong Balkan coffee (which is the same as Turkish, Greek, and Arabic coffee. You would think they’d have settled this years ago). When I reached for my wallet in the back left pocket of my jeans, my left ring finger found a sudden and disconcerting sting. A #16 hook was tangled by the eye in the pocket’s decorative stitching, and the thing was buried up to the bend in the middle of my finger.
I promptly excused myself as Pat paid the kind Balkan proprietor. I rushed to the bathroom with my hand firmly on my own butt. After locking the door and taking off my pants, I found that I couldn’t slip the hook out of my finger or the thread, and each jiggle made my whole body sweat. I peeked out and called Pat, “Hey! Can you find me some pliers or scissors?” He came through, I freed my finger, and we enjoyed our coffee and conversation.
Stacy helped me pull the thing out when I got home. It was barbed, which makes things a lot more interesting. In case you don’t know this basic bit of first aid, lemme tell you how to remove a small hook from one’s skin (large hooks are another story. Hopefully I will ne’er need a segue toward sharing THAT bit of first aid knowledge). You just slip a loop of strong monofilament (or string or thread. Most people with hooks in their body – unintentionally, that is, have mono close at hand) under the hook shank and pull it back to where the bend enters your flesh. Hopefully a willing partner can press down on the eye as you firmly pull the mono up and back. That’s it. Once the hook is out, it looks mighty small. How does such a small thing cause so much pain?
Hooks have been showing up regularly in people’s socks and in corners of the floor, but I’m hoping we are nearing the end of the discovery phase.