Well, here we are. 2 January, Twenty-Eleven. I\’m playing Digital: A Love Story, waiting for a fake person to respond to a BBS message I didn\’t write, wishing modern operating systems had the option to look like an Amiga emulator. It\’s times like these you want to stop and evaluate where you are in life, to question the path your on and the direction that path is heading. Let us see if we can find out what it\’s like to be in the tweens and if it is, in fact, just as it sounds.


Spoiler alert: it is.

Truth be told, it doesn\’t seem like there\’s a lot going on up there in that garbage disposal mind of mine. There are a lot of vagaries about faith, life, and the future percolating in there, like sugar being eaten by yeast, but being intentional and conscious in engaging these things seems to get more difficult, if it ever was easy. Sometimes I feel like I just bound around from single point of inspiration to single point of inspiration, bare some half-connected moment with it, half digest it, and move on. This is the plight because there is some part of me searching my place in art and culture, a point at which I can regularly and comfortably create something I feel I\’m meant to be creating, and share it with folks.

I had that once; I was in several bands and there was a great joy and fun in creating music (even seemingly pointless hardcore punk rock), presenting it to people, and having it be received with some enthusiasm. There seemed to be a small pocket of joy in each step of the process. There was community, even in that shallow fashion show called a \”scene\”. It was good, especially for that time of my life.

In retrospect, I may have been looking for that place ever since.

But ultimately all purpose and inspiration comes from God. All motivation, all subcreation, all love comes from Him who first created. Trouble is that there is winding path to God (and by that I mean an intimate connexion to him) that I feel has gotten more convoluted in recent years and for which I am not ready to let Him show me the way through. Even writing that sounds silly and sounds as though I\’ve made it out to be a far more difficult thing than it actually is.

How would Hunter Thompson handle this situation?

Do quite a lot of illegal drugs and then write about the experience. Unhelpful.

So the point loops itself back around to the wisdom of Sir Henry Rollins, who said \”Do it\”. But doing it is hard, just as sitting down and listening to God is. There is the urge to reason yourself out of the discomfort and do something immediate and self-gratifying and easy (like, I don\’t know, play video games or drink beer).

So then, is it discipline I need? Simple, natural, old fashioned discipline that says \”suck it up and get on with it! It\’s not as fun as Streemerz but it\’s good and right and of far greater consequence!\”? I could continue this monologue and find it loop round and round so I\’ll save myself and you, poor reader, the trip.

A New Year is full of promise. It\’s a time for all of us, even a cynic like me, to put down the feeling of mundanity and fatalism and pick up a breath of fresh air; to vacate the sprawl, both literally and figuratively. And that, by God, is just what I\’ll do.

No more dead shopping malls.