Windows

Right foot Left foot repeat.

I used to walk the city at night two blocks over to 12th St. Then up to Vine St. then over the tracks to 5th St. Back to Oak then home. I did this most nights. The liquor store was on the way, and so was the bar, or many bars. Wyandotte, Michigan is weird because they have more bars and churches per square mile than any other city outside of Detroit in Michigan. There are literally churches and bars in peoples houses. I would walk for hours drunken around the city looking into peoples windows as I passed by. I used to wonder wish I were inside their homes watching TV, eating dinner, decorating the Christmas tree. Christmas was the hardest time for me, it never really felt good until I met Laura and started going to her families. Christmas made me sad. I had great Christmas' growing up, so I have no idea why they made me sad, but they did. I remember a Christmas Eve, I went to a midnight mass to listen to the choir sing while loaded, I left and sang in the streets while walking around the city looking at the Christmas lights. I sang like a guy on death row, not like a guy that one the lottery. I just walked and watched through the windows as people celebrated Christmas with their families. The windows outside were frosty, but the inside was full of warmth. I always wanted to be on the warm side of those windows and now I am. It is better inside than out. There is no point to this blog but to remember out loud who I used to be.

The Chinaman And The Faceless Super Hero

Leaves falling towards me reminds me of an October night in 1997. I was coming home from a weekend at my daughters house visiting. She was in the back seat with an ear infection screaming murderous shrieks that filled the car like an piano punched with a tuning fork. It was damp and cold outside as we drove down the freeway behind a Taurus carrying one nameless Chinaman. The traffic was clear, so it was moving at a pretty furious pace when the Chinaman was cut off and run off the road into the guard rail that just so happened to be on a bridge that overhang Ford Lake. The guard rail gave way to the car and the Taurus flipped upside down and over the edge of the bridge into the lake. We stopped, I ran out and looked over the edge and saw the car sinking into the water below. No one was struggling to get out. I dove into the lake and swam to the car and looked inside the window, which was now underwater. I expected to see blood, I expected broken glass, I expected a mangled dead guy, I expected to be scarred with this image for the rest of my life. Instead I saw a Chinaman hanging upside down from his seatbelt. He was still, so I knocked on the window trying to rouse him. As I did, he came alive like a zombie fresh after reanimation and looked at me. He was confused and I think in shock, he would not move. I pried the door open and unlatched his seat belt as we sank. I pulled him out. He had no injuries at all, he was not hurt, but he would not try to swim, he nearly killed us both trying to get him to shore. But we made it, by God's grace, we made it. I asked him if he was hurt and he replied by asking me to go back and get his keys out of the car before it totally sank. I respectfully declined as I was not about to be trapped in a sunken car over a set of keys, plus it was freezing in the water. Another guy came running from the freeway after climbing down and asked if we needed help. I left the Chinaman with this new stranger as sirens flashed above. I walked away, got back into my car and drove away. I felt something very cool when I walked away from the crash. I felt good not taking credit for the save, they had this other guy as a witness, so I got to be an anonymous super hero that disappears into the night without a face. A man to make them all wonder. I think this is how Jesus wants us to live our lives. To love others for Christ, not for recognition. Since, I have tried to do random things in secret just for the fun of making people wonder who did it.

Fireworks In Virginia

Fireworks In Virginia- By Trent Dabbs was the song I put on repeat on my ipod while sitting at Denny's on New Years Eve actually at the time I guess it would have been New Years Day. It was about to be 2007. I sat there all night long alone. I wrote things down. I looked up a lot to see who else was there. Mostly drunk people inhabited the place, smoke filled the room, people were talking about the stupidest things. I sit and listen to other people's conversations a lot. It started when I was practicing dialogue to write scripts, then it became habit to eavesdrop on the happenings of others without them knowing. It is harmless until they say something funny and I laugh like in Something About Mary. I was sitting there deciding on a life change. Things weren't going well for me. I battled more that year with depression than most years, I felt more alone and more lost than ever before. I felt far from God, I felt like I had been acting for my family, my friends, my church, and my students. I believed, yet I was stale and fake and I knew it. I still hadn't made the choice to embrace the truth of reality. I was to myself disgusting and I felt that I was that way to God too. I was oppressed, buried under the weight of guilt and bleeding from the wounds that I had denied to feel. I decided on New Years Eve that I needed change, but had no idea what it would look like or what that meant or even what I was going to do first, I new I just needed change because this is not what God had in mind for my life and I new it. I saw a therapist, he literally could not help me, I tried everything, nothing worked, so the issue was with me and God. How had I got here, where was the wrong turn taken. I felt tired and kicked around. I guess that is what has to happen to a stubborn person to show them that we need God. Maybe I lived a little too much for myself. Maybe I finally realized just how much I need God on a day to day basis. The song reminded me that when we are broken, our colors are shown like fireworks. Before they are blown apart, they are lifeless cans filled with explosives. They are set off and broken and they show their beauty. I think this is the change I needed. I needed to let people see how broken I am and maybe through that God inside me will be glorified. I pray daily for God to break me again and again. To tear my heart into shreds, to shatter me like glass. Because when I am broken I see the need for God every day in my life.

The Greatest Show On Earth

The Shins- New Slang was the song I was listening to the first time I saw him. He was tall, he had white ringlets of hair peeking out the bottom of his Detroit Tigers hat. He was a bit feeble, he was standing right in front of me, but I could see only a silhouette of his profile through curtain less frosted glass as he dropped his pants and sat down on the toilet. World meet pooping guy, the man I have grown to revere. The guy that is a real American hero, as he sits on his throne with no care of who may be watching him or who he may offend by wiping just once. He performs his show 3 times a day free of charge and the world is a better place with him here. We get a clear view of his wrinkled behind from our living room couch that only fits in the living room if we have it facing his way. Directly in front of our kitchen window which of course is directly across from his bathroom window. We don't even have to buy tickets, we have a season pass to the greatest show on earth.

Brick

Ben Folds- Brick reminds me of driving with my friend Joe talking about how much better we were than everyone else. The memory of the car I was driving is a little sketchy, but the conversation isn't. We were talking about how we would never, ever let a girl change us from who we were. We would never stop being stupid, we would do as we please when we pleased. We almost meant that at least I did, because a year or two later, Joe left for the military and let them change him. Me, I let Jesus change me. I was an arrogant little prick that none of you would have liked very much. Well maybe some of the people in the world who had low self-esteem and were looking for a bad person to be with. Someone who had the ability to self-destruct and drag everyone else down with him. I was a virus. My mom use to look at me and say, "Get behind me Satan." Ouch. Don't mince your words ma. But really, she was quite right. It wasn't that she didn't love me, It was that I had systematically dismantled everything goodin my life. But anyway I actually never believed I needed change. I always planned on killing myself and never needing it. God had other plans though.

I realize I have been a little preachy lately on this blog. Sorry I am not trying to do that, I just get so pissed off about stuff, and I am usually preaching at myself. So for a little while, I am going to write how I catalog memories with music. Not that you are interested but I want to write all of these things down before I die, or forget them. I think the best feeling is when you remember something you forgot a long time ago. My favorite Scottish grandma has Dementia and I think it is really sad because she is starting to lose the only real thing that isn't controlled by other people. Her memory is something the world can't touch or take away and she is losing it. I think that would be worse for me that being a vegetable.