Author: Joel M.

2012 ~ The Year in Review Begins

2012 - The Year in Review

Beginning on December 21, 2012, I am posting a daily encapsulation of the year’s finest attributes.

One year ago, I awoke for the first time in Southern California as my home. Though I was barely unpacked, with my wife and two cats in tow, I was giddy with the possibilities and challenges the coming new year would hold.

We had driven from Texas in our little Honda, with worldly possessions and said cats, and arrived in San Diego in the midst of pouring rain (really?) on the evening of December 17th, 2011. Our first home was in the guest room of a house built in the 80s. We slept on an air bed and used an old bookshelf for a dresser.

We found church by way of a garage sale and attended on our first Sunday in town. Nearly every family in this church actively homeschools their children. Both of us grew up homsechooled. Needless to say, we are an active part of the very same congregation here today.

The winter was the first one I spent without so much as a snowflake or gust of frigid wind. Born and raised in Ohio, I was accustomed to a windswept environment framed by the skeletal branches of hibernating trees. Instead, I was treated to a sometimes-rainy, mostly green winter with frequent trips to the beach.

In May, we moved out of our first home and I flew back to Ohio for a little gig shooting a feature. Bree house-sat at an apartment in L.A. and took care of the cats. When I returned, we searched for a new place to live and found one right down the street from our previous place. The day after we moved in, I was called in to interview at a natural foods grocer 3 blocks away, hired 2 hours later, and began work the very next day. Prayer works, people.

Over the next 7 months, we gathered stability as I worked and Bree managed the homestead. In August, our roommate left and we gained a new one, a dental assistant in-training who is also a Christian and a terrific person to boot. Together, we have gradually been turning our humble apartment into something that is more “furnished” and festive. We still have a long way to go, i.e. obtaining actual communal furniture, but we are very thankful for our home.

As the holidays descended I was initiated into a conversation about the possibility of filling a position at a local company doing some really incredible work. That conversation extended on for a couple months and culminated in a job offer, which I accepted on a Sunday morning with a handshake. Kind of crazy how these things transpire, but then again, looking back at 2012, I can say for sure that God has never been more obviously maneuvering in my life, before. It’s as though He’s planting flags all over my road map, saying, “I was there!”

I could go into plentiful detail about all the ways in which God showed up this past year, however I will save some of those stories for journals and future postings.

Stay tuned for my next post, 2012: The Year in [iPhone] Photographs.

Moon Killer

This song won’t leave my brain alone. In much the same way that Small Black’s “Despicable Dogs,” that impeccable track from their early EP, moved me, so does “Moon Killer.”

I don’t know precisely what it is. There is some kind of intricate, labyrinthine reason I am filled with a longing for that promised land. Who will go? Who will enter? Who will prepare? Who will show the rest of us how? Those who put their gifts to use. Those who labor on, honing bright fragments of the firmament into the jigsaw pieces of a sublime vision.

Never Make You Try Never Make You Try

Up in the morning & Out the door
One of mystery
One of heaven’s bored
God is lifted
She says you’re the one
Good for nothing servant of the bunch

There’s an ugly way to do things
Here’s the tools I’ve laid them out for you

Never Make You Try
Never Make You Try

Here’s the tools I laid them out for you

Touching them but don’t know how to use

I hear there’s a better way to do it
I hear there’s a better way to do it
You hear there’s a better way to do it

You want to put the work in, but
I’ll Never Make You Try
Never Make You Try

There’s an ugly way to do things
Here’s the tools I’ve laid them out for you

Never Make You Try
Never Make Your Try
One try, Moon Killer
One try, Moon Killer

Book Review: Ubik by Philip K. Dick

Ubik

I am Ubik.
Before the universe was, I am.
I made the suns.
I made the worlds.
I created lives and the places they inhabit; I move them here, I put them there.
They go as I say, they do as I tell them.
I am the word and my name is never spoken, the name which no one knows.
I am called Ubik but that is not my name.
I am.
I shall always be.

I have a favorite science fiction author. His name is Philip K. Dick. If you find yourself reading this blog or in my company having a conversation about, oh, anything, you may hear me drop his name. His fame has only grown since his death in 1982, roughly one year before my birth. Like other heroes I have come to admire, such as Townes Van Zandt and William Wyler, I will not get to meet him, in this life.

I found one of his more well-known and oft-referenced books, Ubik, at my local library. I checked it out, and I read it. I digested it. For some reason, when I take a book by PKD and sit down to read it, I find my mind wanders. As a writer, his form is not especially bracing, nor is it overly stylized. Often, his books read like the diary of a solitary, washed-up, blue collar worker at or near the end of his rope, as indeed his protagonists are often cast. I think the particular aspect of his writing which causes my mind to wander- vigorously wander, as a top set free from a string- is its prescience. Dick’s incisive wit sizes up our present, evolving situation to an uncanny degree of accuracy. Oh sure, in his vision of the future we might all be flying on rockets to the moons of Jupiter, but the basic structure of human society is vividly realized in a way that seems both plausible and unsettling.

Ubik paints a future where humans have evolved the capacity for psionic powers such as telepathy, precognition, and other fascinating abilities. Think X-Men or Heroes, but without the grandiose notion that the responsibility to serve all mankind- or destroy all mankind- is the primary function of such humanoids. No, indeed, the primary function of such humanoids is to go to work for a firm which specializes in deploying them as agents who will infiltrate target organizations to accomplish the goals of a paying customer. Taking this basic idea of adaptation / survival of the fittest one more step, the book also introduces a subset of humanity with the ability to negate the psionic powers. These humanoids go to work for a rival firm that deploys them as agents to track the psionic humans and perpetually dampen their ability to perform.

Naturally, the protagonist of this book is, drumroll, a normal human being who operates equipment designed to detect psionic fields. He is, of course, a bachelor, and he is destitute and constantly needing to bum a nickel or quarter from a friend or coworker in order to get by. His name is Joe Chip.

The book also concerns a concept of reality that manifests itself in several of Dick’s short stories and novels. Richard Linklater’s film Waking Life is quite possibly inspired directly from this idea. In my opinion, the most eloquent explanation of this concept actually takes place in the fractured internal monologue of Robert Arctor, the drug-addled protagonist of Dick’s latter-day masterwork A Scanner Darkly (which was given the silver-screen treatment by Linklater in 2007, using the same, rotoscoping animation technique as on Waking Life).

This will give me time to think, he reflected as he wandered into the cafeteria and lined up. Time. Suppose, he thought, time is round, like the Earth. You sail west to reach India. They laugh at you, but finally there’s India in front, not behind. In time — maybe the Crucifixion lies ahead of us as we all sail along, thinking it’s back east…

The First and Second Coming of Christ the same event, he thought; time a cassette loop. No wonder they were sure it’d happen, He’d be back.

Ubik, the namesake of the book, doesn’t manifest itself until a good chunk of the main storyline has transpired. A team of inertials (the humanoids with anti-psi powers) is assembled to investigate a serious threat from a rival team of psionics on the moon. When they get there, all is not as it seems…

There is a girl among the inertials with the disconcerting power of being able to alter the past, thus altering the present. The people she involves in episodes displaying her abilities still retain memories from the previous timelines, however they are never quite sure whether these memories are reliable. Various events take place in the story which may- or may not- be caused by a greater power. Writing appears on walls, messages are found inside of cigarette cartons, and a holographic commercial for a product in a spray can, called Ubik, plays for the protagonist. When the inertials start to mysteriously disappear, a sinister purpose is slowly revealed.

Only Joe Chip, the regular human, the one who is perpetually broke and hopelessly single, can muscle through to figure out what is at stake. In the process, he encounters various incarnations of Ubik: a balm, a tonic, and a spray can. He refrains from using it, because, after all, he has no clue what it even does! Meanwhile, currency begins to rapidly lose value, newspapers begin to report older and older news, and household appliances slowly revert to their more ancient incarnations.

This novel actually references and borrows heavily from an earlier PKD short story entitled, What the Dead Men Say. In that story, there are cryonic coffins which recently-deceased people can be put into, allowing their brains to remain alive for decades longer, and for conversations to be carried out with the dead. Technically, these individuals are in a state of “half-life” as the book calls it, and are preserved so that the living may consult them for advice, or just emotional relief. It’s a fascinating concept. The Spanish film Abre Los Ojos borrows on this idea, as well. Joe Chip’s boss has a wife in “half-life” and she is consulted for help. The cryonic “moratoriums” where the dead are filed away are devoid of psionic interference.

Is the narrative of Ubik confusing? Yes, a bit. Dick actually wrote a screenplay version of the novel during his life. It has never been put into production. He had a very interesting idea for how to actually film the story and present it in theaters. Perhaps someday, someone will tackle an audiovisual adaptation with success.

Until then, I am left to imagine the sight of someone holding up a canister of Ubik would look like, though I do have Terry Gilliam.

Terry Gilliam holding PKD aerosol can
From an episode of the BBC show Arena, entitled, “Philip K Dick: A Day in the Afterlife”

I am Ubik

Thoughts on The Dark Knight Rises

The Dark Knight Rises is a more fitting and visceral third act than any other superhero series hitherto created. I believe it will be successful and popular, though I also believe it will be open to rather broad interpretations by the audience.

I did not prepare for this viewing by re-watching the first two films. In point of fact, several years have elapsed since I last viewed Christopher Nolan’s second entry in his Batman saga, The Dark Knight. I watched it in true 15/70 IMAX in the theater on Navy Pier, Chicago, a place which was also one of the picture’s physical filming locations. The experience was one of titanic, mesmerizing awe. The Dark Knight Rises meets and/or exceeds this level of stunning grandeur in multiple ways.

Batman Begins was all about exploring the conditions and choices that lead Bruce Wayne to consider becoming the Batman. One of the core themes of the film is overcoming intense fear. “And why do we fall, Bruce?” is the memorable line delivered by Linus Roache, the actor who played Bruce’s father, Thomas Wayne, “So we can learn to pick ourselves up.”

The Dark Knight was about ratcheting up the tension by confronting Batman with a chaotic force of evil, personified in Heath Ledger’s portrayal of The Joker, a villain so incomprehensible, even his own ‘explanations’ for his existence are laced with obvious falsehoods. Batman does battle with purposeful, wicked villains, and then he must deflect, and somehow diffuse, the chaos The Joker induces as well. By the end of The Dark Knight, Batman himself has become even more vilified by the city he is trying to protect, and suffers profound personal loss.

I’m not a huge Batman buff, meaning I haven’t obsessively read all of the comics, watched the television programs, and I didn’t grow up with the absurd, live action cartoons that Tim Burton directed, nor the two follow-up duds that killed the character’s Hollywood potential for a spell. Therefore, I cannot attest to the purity of these films’ vision concerning the translation of essential threads from the massive corpus of Batman stories that exist. What I can say is that Christopher Nolan has crafted a nuanced, layered, and thoroughly complete arc for Batman’s character in these three films. I find this to be a terrific achievement, and one that is likely more important and more astounding than many people presently realize (and it sure seems like a lot of people are in Nolan’s corner).

The completion of this trilogy is satisfying, contains tremendous action sequences, and exudes a richness in layers of subtext to be discovered and debated. And that is all I will say on the film.

Book Review ~ Galactic Pot Healer by Philip K. Dick

Galactic Pot Healer
Cover for the 1st Edition

One day, my wife decided to explore her way down to the Escondido Public Library. She found a wealth of books and a relatively awesome selection. I followed her back and immediately did what I had the habit of doing anytime I visited a library: search their catalog for books by Philip K. Dick.

What I discovered was a relatively large selection of PKD’s work. I promptly checked out an armful of them.

Hithterto, I have primarily fed myself with PKD’s short fiction stories, having amassed just about the entirety of his work in the medium. I’ve read about a zillion of them. Of his novels, I have only read four:

and now, Galactic Pot Healer (1969)

I’ll spare any of the major plot details and simply say this: Galactic Pot Healer is a glorious mess of competing themes.

Joe Fernwright is a pot healer. He possesses the long-forgotten skills to practicing the art of ceramics repair. Nothing is made from pottery anymore, as everything is composed of plastic. The entire Earth is subject to one, vast mélange of a government that is basically a socialist police state.

“Our government is the ultimate version of socialism, everyone is aced out in the end.” ~ Joe Fernwright

When reading a book- particularly a science fiction book- one has to mentally engage that mechanism of imagination, in order to fully inhabit the world of the book. In the case of Galactic Pot Healer, one has to quite literally take the boundaries of the imagination and shatter them against the wall. The pure quantity of literary, theological, and philosophical information being tossed about would be enough to glaze the eyes of most laymen.

Joe receives a job offer to go heal some pots from a mysterious, off-world, possibly even divine, source. He struggles with whether or not to accept the offer and leave Earth for some distant planet in order to participate in the undertaking. Obviously, he must go. He meets a pretty girl. Various supranatural events occur.

In my view, the basic story was primarily about a man trying to find his place in the universe, and to discover whether or not the work he performed actually mattered. Dick casts overtones of immeasurable significance are over Joe’s potential undertaking, yet the ultimate purpose of the work (ostensibly, to reverse entropy and challenge a manifestation of the concept of deterministic ‘fate’) is ultimately left to the side of the narrative.

The book’s conclusion would seem to throw into doubt the ‘good-ness’ of creation as spawned from the efforts of any being lacking perfection. Even the divine elements of the story exhibit qualities of indecision, volatility, desire, rage and selfishness.

Joe Fernwright, pot healer, individual, and an essential component of a greater plan, is faced with a choice that pits his individual will against the will of many. His struggle to produce meaningful work may end in triumph, or it may end in tears. Can any being aside from God create, then rest, and look upon that creation and call it “good”?

Next up is Radio Free Albemuth (published posthumously in 1985)

Beer Diary #1

Medley of Beers
Some of my recent tries.

One of my hobbies over the years has been tasting new craft beers. This was a sometime indulgence of mine, where I would make a trip up to The Anderson’s (arguably the best place to discover and acquire fine beers and wines in Ohio) and see what there was to see. A visit to other local watering holes might yield a few brews from Stone, Sierra Nevada, or Bell’s. The state of Ohio’s premier craft brewery was, and still is, the Great Lakes Brewing Company, based out of Cleveland. They have a number of memorable brews, bearing names like Dortmunder Gold, Edmund Fitzgerald Porter, and Holy Moses White Ale.

When I became a married fellow, I moved down to Texas, itself a haven for home brewers and some upstart craft breweries (The Foam Rangers and Jester King, for example). However, my fortunes were cut short by the cold, hard fact that the area of the Lone Star State into which I had relocated was peppered with ‘dry’ counties. This meant that there were no places to legally purchase alcoholic beverages to take home. There were plenty of restaurants with bars, but none of them served anything remotely unique. Budweiser, anyone? Best of all, many grocery stores carried non-alcoholic ‘brews’. Any Bavarian purist acquainted with the Reinheitsgebot would scoff at any such beverage’s existence.

What really kicked my hobby into high gear was our subsequent move out west, beyond El Paso, beyond the Rockies, beyond the Mojave, to southern California. San Diego, to be more precise. Imagine my surprise upon arriving and inadvertently discovering that the one and only Stone Brewery was situated just a few miles across town from where I now live, in Escondido, CA. I visited and went on a free guided tour of the brewery, followed by a flight of free tasters. Our tour was conducted by none other than Ken Wright, the self-described Minister of Evangelism and Indoctrination at Stone. He described, in no uncertain terms, the many reasons why San Diego is among the most vibrant and exciting craft-brewing hotspots in the entire world.

And lo, I was baptized into the richly abundant culture of home brewers, nano-breweries, micros and macros and local pubs with flowing taps, dispensing some of the tastiest, hoppiest, and most-decidedly different beers. Leave it up to Californians to be as contrarian as possible when it comes to the status quo (we’ll leave out the miserably-failed state budget plan).

And so begins, in a way, my beer diary. I will update biweekly to describe the most recent brews I have had the pleasure of tasting. Below is a minor accounting of some delicious libations I tried over the course of May and June, 2012.

Turning Over a New Cheek

I currently live in a complex with a number of other tenants. We are situated very close by to a main road in Escondido, and there is a near-constant level of noise emanating from the passing cars. It’s not all that bad, but every now and again, a huge, noisy truck or ancient jalopy will go chugging down the road and vibrate the windows.

I have a neighbor who lives downstairs from me. I met and had a few, brief conversations with him shortly after I moved in. He sure seemed like a decent, hardworking fellow.

The other morning, I was awakened to the sound of car alarm going off. The alarm was one of those that goes through about 8 different iterations before shutting off, not unlike the battery-powered, toy laser guns I played with as a child. You know the kind. The alarm went through its cycle and then shut off, only to come back on again about 30 seconds later. This continued for what felt like a very long time.

I was still a bit groggy, and, being a heavy sleeper, had decided to just weather the nuisance in faith that it would eventually go away. My wife, not content to lay in bed and put a pillow over her head, peered out the window and exclaimed that she saw our downstairs neighbor walk by with his key fob held high, and push the button to SET OFF the alarm, apparently on purpose. I replied that such an observation did not make any sense, and that she must be imagining things. Meanwhile, the honking/beeping/woop-wooping continued unabated.

Annoyed and curious, I eventually managed to peel my body from the bed and take a peek out through the blinds from sleep-filled eyes. Sure enough, there was my neighbor, walking out to his SUV, key fob in hand, and as the alarm ceased, he dramatically pushed the button and set it off again. I was still tired, and very confused.

My wife decided to go downstairs and ask him point-blank why he was repeatedly setting off his car alarm. I had only begun to get dressed when she returned and told me, “He is setting off his car alarm on purpose because he says we kept him up all night stomping around above his room.”

At this point, I’m sure an incredulous expression appeared on my face.

I went downstairs, still a bit bleary, but with my nerves steeled. And I listened to my neighbor, I listened to his complaints and excuses. I listened as he rambled about his short temper and bad experiences in life and long hours of work. He mentioned being already vexed by his son, and being a light sleeper who is too annoyed by earplugs to bother trying to sleep with them in. And I listened as he gestured and pointed to the specific spot in the ceiling where the supposed “stomping” sound came from at 2 am (during which time, both myself and my wife were sound asleep). I did my best to remain calm and friendly, despite his juvenile behavior.

What motivated him to do this kind of thing? Did my neighbor honestly think he was going to solve the specific problem of his inability to sleep due to the noise we were making by passive-aggressively baiting us with his obnoxious car alarm? Why would anyone even go to such lengths just to bother someone else?

Behavior like this is inexcusable. However, it is not unforgivable.

“To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you.” ~ C.S. Lewis

The origin of this behavior goes back to habits and attitudes, and beyond that, it roots itself in the overall health of one’s spirit.

When my neighbor listed his afflictions and openly acknowledged his quick-trigger temper, in his mind he was stamping a big ‘OK’ on his behavior, as if to say, “this is who I am.” The problem with this mindset is that he was merely hiding behind a series of excuses. The bottom line was that he chose to act in a selfish, disrespectful manner, based entirely upon an unspoken, mental assumption he made that every other person should behave exactly the way he wants them to.

“…human beings, all over the earth, have this curious idea that they ought to behave in a certain way, and cannot really get rid of it. Secondly, that they do not in fact behave in that way.” ~ C.S. Lewis

I suppose nobody else has ever behaved in a similar fashion to my neighbor, eh? Right. On the contrary, I myself am guilty of acting improperly based on the exact same line of thinking.

Maintaining a rich, mental fantasy world where everyone else must appease your needs and be able to intuit them without you ever so much as telling them is an unhealthy habit. Frustration, dashed expectations, and a poisoned temperament will be quick to follow. Worst of all, you can become a slave to bitterness. And as the saying goes, “bitterness is like drinking poison, and then sitting and waiting for the other person to die.”

“You shall not go about as a slanderer among your people, and you are not to act agains the life of your neighbor; I am the LORD.” ~ Leviticus 19:16 NASB

“I will set no worthless thing before my eyes; I hate the work of those who fall away; It shall not fasten its grip on me. A perverse heart shall depart from me; I will know no evil. Whoever secretly slanders his neighbor, him I will destroy; No one who has a haughty look and an arrogant heart will I endure.” ~ Psalm 101:2-5 NASB

When evening rolled around, I saw my neighbor again. We chatted for a little while about this and that, and he shared about the difficulty of going through a separation and his current living situation. Eventually, he issued me what seemed like a half-hearted apology for his behavior, though not without quickly following it up with anecdotes about how previous tenants who lived above him had been jerks and purposefully tried to make noise to keep him awake at night, just to spite him. I listened, and I will continue to listen, and probably ask from time to time, “And what else?” until, God-willing, he eventually runs out of excuses.

The next time I am tempted to explain my own behavior with any kind of qualification or trite excuse, I am going to stop myself. At the end of the day, I am responsible for my own actions; I own them. I am an adult. I should act like one. That means taking responsibility for my daily words and deeds, respecting others, and finding the means to forgive- but not to excuse or to tolerate- the wrong attitudes I encounter.