By:
On:
With: 0 Comments

Psychosis & Plans for the Future

I can’t stop thinking about how strange the world is right now.  There are many people who believe tomorrow they will be raptured.  There are stories online of people quitting their jobs, selling their stuff—one lady is keeping her kids home from school, so they can all be together when it happens.  It’s like a collective psychosis.  It’s funny, but it’s actually disturbing.  What are those people going to do on Wednesday?  Sure, the prognosticators will choose a new date to grift the gullible, but what about the people who gave up so much on a lie?  I’m concerned.

The influencers have convinced millions that a slain racist is a martyr, but they don’t look into it.  The system is set up for people to follow blindly.  If someone says it with a podium in front of them and a cross behind them, they cannot be lying.  And so, they are losing their minds.  Some are convinced that he will be resurrected, comparing him to Jesus.  The man who advocated hate and fear and division, the man who would take food out of a child’s mouth if their parent wasn’t sufficiently deserving.  The man who believed that LGBTQ people should be stoned to death, as it says in The Bible.  That man, that hate monger.  They are wrapping him into their belief system.  It’s gross.

My walk was warm, but good.  It’s been a year and a half, but I am still amazed when I can do these walks and not be out of breath.  I am a little under the weather today, but that’s the ragweed.  We just can’t seem to get a good break from it and the longer the pollen count is high, the worse I feel.  It’s going to be even higher tomorrow.  I’ll just have to take some extra meds.  I don’t know when we’ll get a reprieve.  We need a good sustained rain, but there are just more of these showers in the forecast, and those don’t really help much.  

In honor of walk #333, which I will be doing tomorrow, I’d like to get in 3.33 miles.  I just think that would be fun.  I’ve been going around the park 4 times, and that doesn’t even get me close to that.  I’d have to go around about 12 times.  I can do it, and I’d like to do it.  Maybe I’ll have to incorporate some of the sidewalks as well.  If I go really early, I can walk the sidewalk along Noble and go across the train tracks.  It sounds like a lot, but I can do it.

[Walk #332, 1.39 miles]

Continue Reading

By:
On:
With: 0 Comments

Stillwater, Oklahoma

1. HEARTBEAT

“a vast and magnificent landscape. The prairies bordering on the rivers are always varied in this way with woodland, so beautifully interspersed as to appear to have been laid out by the hand of taste… to rival the most ornamented scenery of Europe.” — Washington Irving

I’ve felt your beating heart;
thump thump… thump thump… thump thump…
thump thump… thump thump… thump thump…
Old folks still make weekly
pilgrimages to pray,
to seek God and solace.
Many hours of my youth
I spent rubbing the hands
of my grandma, wrinkled
and loose-skinned like mine now,
while the congregation
sang hymns from “the blue book,”
while old family friends
talked about love, dryly
reciting the red words.
Three times or more a week,
we’d gather to worship.
Thump thump… thump thump… thump thump…
I have felt the comfort
of belonging there, fell
for empty dogma long
before my welcome stopped.

Notes

Written 19 February 2020

Brian Fuchs, “Stillwater, Oklahoma” from Scissor-tailed Flycatcher (Scissortail Press, 2020)

By:
On:
With: 0 Comments

It’s been a stormy weekend, which I love.  The rest of the week felt  a little chaotic, but life in general seems a little chaotic right now.  I did start working on an art project, which I hadn’t done in a very long time!  I’m excited about it, but more I’m excited to just get a few things done finally.

I’ve been working on my Thoughts On Humans series, and I’m enjoying writing it.  I do worry that I babble a lot and say very little, but I’m hoping that I get better at making coherent thoughts as I do it more.  I’m also trying to figure out how to get the word out that I’m active again.  I love having people who are reading and commenting, but I had been inactive for so many years that I need to rebuild that group.  I don’t want to annoy folks for sure, but I do want to figure out how to get the word out.

This world seems to be falling apart.  I try to keep my politics to myself, but I cannot fail to comment on the imprisonment of children whose parents are seeking asylum.  I don’t know why anti-immigrant sentiment has gotten so bad, but it is unAmerican to not allow in those in need of help or in search of new opportunities.  There is never a time when someone needs to be repressed.  When we lift people up, we all rise and this world becomes a better place.  There is a persistent narrative being pushed that immigrants are coming to take our jobs and commit crimes against us.  That is blatant racism in my opinion.  There aren’t droves of people just waiting to come destroy us.  We are a melting pot, a mix of native, immigrant, and forcibly relocated people.  We are a country without a single culture or color, a land where the rest of the world should be able to look and see endless diversity.  Tribalism and racism dressed up as nationalism is unacceptable.  It’s also antithetical to the values so commonly invoked: American, Christian, human.  Hate cannot be defeated with hate, and so the way forward is difficult.  Those of us who believe that loving our neighbor is a core piece of our morality will have to work hard to combat the hate with love.

By:
On:
With: 0 Comments

It was Cinco de Mayo 1991 when I decided to be baptized. My brother and I made our request together, saying in effect that we bought what we had been sold. We believed that Jesus was not only the son of God, but that he’d died for us. I was 11. Brent was 12. And I really did believe it, I still do. It’s a fundamental part of one’s growth in a Protestant church. And I appreciate the message that your relationship is a decision you make and not something thrust upon you as an infant. What I didn’t know at the time was that I spend my adult life feeling like my baptism was something I need to apologize for.

I don’t know where the shame came from. I wouldn’t have done anything differently. I’m glad to have my faith and think it often affects who I am and what I do in my life. But the world we live in has become increasingly tolerant for all types of faith and belief with the exception of Protestant Christianity. No, for us there is increasing skepticism. I keep my Christianity quiet in most cases, but when people find out there is often the raised eyebrow and a look on their face that seems to ask “how can a rational person buy into that?” I’m sure a lot of that has to do with the fact that I’m gay and with the televangelists who claim to speak for God (they speak only for themselves). There are plenty of things that are off-putting about Christianity as it is practiced by so many ignorant Americans.

I’m not going to explain what I believe here. It is complicated, as I think it should be. If your faith is simple, you’ve missed something. There is far too much to consider to blindly follow or never question yourself.

“Be yourself. Everyone else is already taken.” — Oscar Wilde

I struggle with that and this whole Christianity issue is only a small part of that. I have to be unapologetic about being who I am… fully who I am. And I hope others can learn to do that for themselves too. I don’t just think it takes all sorts of people to make this world interesting, I love that it does. This world would be so boring if we were all the same.

By:
On:
With: 0 Comments

Open your arms (and welcome Love)

A fervent plea to those people I’ve seen my Church family morphing into, slipping away from me, from Love. A prayer for the many who’ve seen the backs of their loved ones too often, shivering alone because they were misunderstood or openly judged for being human.

My neighbors turned towards themselves
and forgot my face.
Backs towards me with multitudes of assumptions.
My heart feels the hymns,
feels the joy still.
I’m unchanged.
My image fails me; refuses to take the shape of the mold
[the idyllic life]
the person I was supposed to be.
I’m neither broken nor lost.
I’m Love’s child, regardless of whispers and raised eyebrows.
My home,
our home.
I never felt so unwelcome from a family, silently, passively.
Judgments. Silence.
Silence.
From my perch high above the elders,
the deacons, the little old ladies
who wait for death on the third pew from the back,
my mind stretches, finding thoughts far from my body,
dreamily.
I welcome judgment.
Don’t pray for me in anger
or sorrow
or disappointment.
Don’t welcome be back from depravity.
Be family; be true to Love.
Love. Love.
Open your arms — not only to me,
not to selfish or petty concerns of mine,
open your arms because they should be open.
Because they are there for welcoming,
uncrossed and warm,
welcome the children, your family,
forgotten innocents,
the joyful, the content,
the exuberantly happy,
the depressed, and the angry.
Keep you arms open to those whose lives you don’t understand,
whose lives are full of light and laughter,
but cannot find comfort in rigid conformity.
I’ll join them too — march with them
into the auditoriums across distances,
across situational divides.
Be Love.
Kiss your neighbor on the forehead and have them over for dinner.
There is nothing important like Love.
There is nothing but Love.
There is Love.
Love.
And Love will take our hands — yours, mine,
the multitudes huddled in the rain.
We’ll find ourselves then.
We’ll free ourselves and be family again.
And selfish concerns and trivial differences will never be able to keep us apart.

8.21.2008Continue Reading

By:
On:
With: 0 Comments

On this beautiful August morning, I find myself focused on my soul. God has been at the at the front of my mind for a while now, tugging gently at my spirituality. Having just read My Trip Down the Pink Carpet by Leslie Jordan, I feel less alone in the world than I was starting to feel.

I have some of the best friends one could hope to have. Not only have I been able to retain a whole host of occasional friends from Oklahoma, people with whom I never need to catch up, but love spending time with when I have a chance, but I’ve made some amazing new friends in Alaska. These Alaskan friends are the most giving, warmest people I’ve ever known. But as far as my own faith goes, I cannot begin to relate to any of them.

At best, I’d lump the majority of my friends into the agnostic category. But that is such a religious term. I don’t care for it because it seems to imply a deficiency on their part. And it isn’t them I see as the issue. Although they were all raised Christian, it seems that Christianity failed each of them in some way, keeping them from retaining faith in faith. And to me that is infuriating. It is a clear sign to me of the common treatment of people who insist on being individuals — those who seem to have no choice but to live outside the parameters of strict Christian thought. I’m not only talking about my gay friends whose persecution is well documented, but of anyone whose life doesn’t fit into the idyllic dream of the conservative Christian community.

However, these same non-religious people who I love so much are the ones who make my soul shine brighter than those people I spent years worshiping with. They are my spiritual base. They are some of the most healing and spiritual people I’ve known in my life and recognizing that would do wonders for the religious community.

I often feel like I exist far beyond the norms of any group I’d possibly belong to. But why do I long to belong to a group, to be categorized? That is a silly notion and I do understand that. I’m going to try to be myself more than I have been… and by whatever means I need to… and with or without the support of others. I only know how to be me the way I am.

Jonathan helped to define my belief. Perhaps I need everyone to show me how to get there. Daniel, David, Heather, Denis, Justin, Travis, JD, Kendra… everyone has something to offer and as a whole, it all seems to work together.

Take Back the Word :: Robert E. Gross and Mona West {2000}
My Trip Down the Pink Carpet :: Leslie Jordan {2008}
Stranger at the Gate :: Mel White {1995}

By:
On:
With: 3 Comments

“I am the least difficult of men. All I want is boundless love.”
–Frank O’Hara

Perhaps one thing I developed as a child of Oklahoma is an innate sense of faith. It is something I take for granted; something I assume we all have in common. When I am proven wrong about faith — when I discover the great numbers of beliefless people, I am dumbstruck and a little bit sad.

Faith is often the only thing I have to hold onto, the rest of life’s trivial issues slipping away and seeming increasingly less important. That isn’t to say that my “willingness” to have a belief system has made me apathetic about the world. In fact, I think quite the opposite has happened. Life is filled with meanings — deep meanings. Everything seems so charged and alive, knowing there are forces working around us that are greater than we are.

It also seems that the further I get from home, the more bitter those around me seem about any sort of organized thought (and religion in particular). That is likely just part of working with books. Bookstores attract thinkers. One of the wonderful things about thinkers is that they often arrive at conflicting conclusions concerning existence. I love being surrounded by such a difference of ideas.

Faith seems like a foreign notion here in Alaska. Those of us with belief systems, regardless of those beliefs origins, are certainly not the majority. It is all very unsettling.

But I believe very strongly that the blame for this goes entirely to the religious leaders of the world. In their efforts to speak for God, a contemptuous act, they have alienated too many. With such a variety of people, it is hard for many to feel they belong into the rigid molds cast by well meaning theological dictators. That is unfortunate.

Christianity has already lost one fight. The hypocritical and belittling treatment of gays and lesbians over the decades has pushed us away. Feeling ostracized by an organization we weren’t sure we wanted to belong to, the community seems to have moved on. Faith isn’t important to the outcasts of religious society. And it seems that this isn’t a lesson the Christian community has learned. The persecution continues. And so it does with many groups who don’t fit the ideals of these individual schools of thought… these approved ways of being by the religious communities.

A well-organized effort to cater to and serve those who think for themselves or who don’t fit the exact mold of the perfect Christian could have had a positive effect on the spreading of Christian “values.” Exclusivity, a lesson not found in text, has become the hallmark of a people who cannot see the forest for the trees. They are too busy concerning themselves with superiority that they have not noticed that the power has already been surrendered to the angry and faithless. This is probably true of any religion. I can’t say anything on behalf of those I am not associated with.

It isn’t about these specific religious thoughts, but about faith. Simply having faith is the important part. For myself, I will continue to feel my way through blindly. My own faith is hardly shaken. I am saddened that there are so many without a place to turn when life gets to be difficult. They end up turning on themselves. I don’t feel that it is too late for the major religions of this planet. The most important thing is to eliminate hate. Without hate, the anti-faith movement has less footing. Without hate, support can be found in surprising places. Without hate, there will only be love. Love is something all types of people can support. With more people joining the efforts, support systems are built and mankind can only benefit from such a system.

30 March 2007

{edit}

When I wrote these thoughts out, I had intended them to reflect a general impression I have gotten from fundamentalist Christian “leaders” in America. I realize that there are still understanding individuals whose values are based on love. I didn’t mean to generalize to the point of excluding those Christians from my argument. And I didn’t mean to say that there is no longer any hope. I think the battle has long been lost, but certainly not the war. In my opinion, it is up to the open-minded members of the Christian faith to bring the message to those who have otherwise been ignored. Those who preach hate have made that task very difficult, as there is now a resistance to faith of any kind.

My family attended a Church of Christ. Not strictly a denomination, Churches of Christ are gatherings of Christian worship where beliefs seem to be individualized. I felt encouraged to come to my own conclusions about the issues of the world and I didn’t have to share those beliefs with the person sitting next to me. This made church very personal for everyone. And that sense that it is your walk with God that makes the Churches of Christ so great. If anyone felt offended by my rant, I apologize, but this sense of increasing alienation is very real. And you should be offended. You should be offended that there are Christians spreading hate. You should be offended by apathy. You should be offended that the values of good people are being routinely dismantled.