Archive for August 2006

August 25, 2006

Why I Go

4:35 pm | Poetry | Comments: 13

Cicadas chirping, unrelenting;
Crickets do the same.
The sand below the tree-shade cools my feet.
I smell the forest, smoke and sweet.

A thousand pictures crowd my mind
Of summers long gone by.
I feel poetic as I ponder hectic times;
Wild child imaginations that defy my rhymes.

Spending many years in one place breeds contempt
Or is that true?
Some trees, some sand, a lake, much better in my youth,
But lying on the picnic table reveals the truth.

So oft before I’ve been here, and longed to come
In youth with much anticipation.
Now I’m old and wishing I could still make anything fun;
A pinecone on the sand had meaning then, but now has none.

As memories cycle through, my purpose here seems clear:
I’ve come here to remember.
The past reminds us who we were, how we became this way;
The person that resides inside was built not now, but yesterday.

That’s why it’s often worth your time to go
To places seen before.
Thus I go, to the forest green, up the long highway
And when they ask me why I go, I say,

There’s something up there worth remembering.

James w. Lanning

August 18, 2006

Go Read a Book

11:58 pm | My Life | Comments: 10

Have you ever sat in front of your computer, not wanting to be there yet powerless to think of something else to do with yourself? OK fine maybe you haven’t, but I certainly have. The primary reason it happens is because your brain is off. The difference between any other given moment that your brain is off and this particular moment is that your brain is off and you realize it. That’s what accounts for the attitude of, “ugh, I’d rather be doing anything than sitting here, and yet here I sit”. Always a good time for a weblog post; weblog posts can sometimes be like rolling your broke-down stickshift down the hill to get it started in the morning.

The realization that September is nothing special has begun to sink in. Since I turned 5 years old, September means school starting. I was talking about this with some friends the other day. It’s not just about college being over. It’s about finishing what began way back in 1987, when the toys were ripped unceremoniously out of my hands and I was dropped into a circle of loser kindergarteners getting yapped at by a woman with distinctly Bozo the Clown-esque hair. Kindergarten round-up, they called it. I realize now that they were using “round-up” in a sense similar to they way they rounded up draft-dodgers back in the Vietnam era. That’s what has come to its conclusion this August of 2006, a mere 19 years after it began. September has lost its sting; it bends me to its will no more. I am free indeed.

August 15, 2006

NASA Lets it Loose

7:47 pm | News | Comments: 6

I certainly hope nobody was dismayed or surprised that NASA “lost” the original Apollo mission tapes, including all the moon landings. People in the know know that the entire Apollo program was a fabrication of the United States government with the sole purpose of discrediting the Soviets. Moon landings? Faked. Wake up people. Big Brother is stealing your lunch money.

August 11, 2006

Getting a Breath

5:00 pm | Religion | Thoughts | Comments: 9

A word that is often used in the English language, yet seldom understood, is “inspiration”. You’ll hear people tell you they were inspired to do things. Such things tend to be works of art or some other creative endeavor. Ask people about why they enjoy a certain song and they might tell you it’s very inspiring. The funny thing about inspiriation is that it’s something you feel, but it’s not an emotion. So what is inspiration?

A dictionary will tell you that inspiriation means “stimulation of the mind or emotions to a high level of feeling or activity.” I think we can all agree on this, but what’s really happening there? A stimulation makes me think of reacting to a certain color, or putting your hand on a red-hot electric range. Is it really as cut and dry as a mere stimulation, a programmed response by the brain? Maybe. It’s hard to know where to start with this. From my own experience, I know that alot of weblog posts, for example, are the result of what I would call inspiriation: some form of stimulus that gets me in a particular mood, at which point thoughts and feelings just start coming to me from nowhere. I remember a long time ago asking a music store clerk if he’d ever listened to Randy Edelman’s iconic sound track to the movie Gettysburg. “Only when I want to get inspired”, he replied. If I can be forgiven for stating the obvious, music is a very powerful inspirational force, which I believe nobody can escape. Getting inspired can mean having emotions evoked within you; that certainly fits our original definition.

Music, of course, isn’t the only source of inspiration in life. Life experience in general is a huge source of inspiration; you might say it’s the only source, if your idea of music is that it’s one way of relating the human experiece without words. Being in love might inspire a poet to write about his beloved. In fact, almost any emotion can be the inspiration for a poem. So we see that emotions can be inspirational in themselves. You could say, then, that inspiration is a medium by which people relate emotions to other people. It’s still not that simple though, because it’s not simply the inspiration that relates the emotion; it evokes in us that which relates the emotion. So once again the actual nature of the matter is enigmatic. To me, at least.

Inspiriation doesn’t have to be so closely tied to emotion, as it so often is, however. As Christians, we talk about the inspiration of the Holy Ghost. This use of the word is very literal; we believe in the very “in-breathing” of God, which gives us renewed spiritual life. Overall, I’d say that I’m still thinking about it all. What is it, really, that moves us when we hear a certain song, visit an old familiar place, or embrace a long-lost loved one? A good question, my friend.

August 4, 2006

World’s Fastest Post

1:00 pm | Random | Comments: 3

It’s not short, but I’m not stopping my thought process. That’s what is making this post as fast as it is. It might be slow depening on how slow you are at reading it. However, that is not really my problem now, is it? I thought not. I think many things not. That way, when it turns out you were wrong, you get pleasantly surprised. I’m off to Canada. Aufwiedersehen.

August 2, 2006

Salt the Sidewalk!

5:23 pm | Religion | Thoughts | Comments: 11

Before I get written off as a criminal pessimist, allow me to illuminate you all. Work is a long, dark winter in which the only break in the clouds is knowing that we’re doing it for God’s glory. Christians don’t like their jobs or do them well because the work is so great; we do it to achieve a higher purpose. The work itself is what it is; long, tedious, frustrating, taxing, stressful, often quite a cutthroat business.

A Christian performs his calling willingly and gladly for Jesus’ sake; that doesn’t mean that Christians are all called to lives of glory and splendor - in this mortality. There’s a reason this life is referred to in the Bible as a “veil of tears”. This life is what it is: long, tedious, frustrating, taxing, stressful, often quite a cutthroat business. The only way we’re going to get through it without getting extremely depressed is looking to God for our help. All lasting joy is in Christ, none of it comes from this world.

I’m not saying that work is all bad. I personally enjoy long, dark winters. And I’m also not saying that there aren’t good times as well as bad. But let’s not get pie in our eyes and imagine that life and work is always going to be birthday cake and sparklers; it’s going to be tough and there will be lots of times when you will be looking desperately for a break in the clouds. I hope that you all know where to look when that moment arrives; in fact, I hope you will have been looking there all along.