Selected

So Rachel Held Evans has this book coming out, and I think her ideas she puts on her blog are pretty bitchin', so when the opportunity came about to be part of her "launch team," I threw my name in the hat.

http://rachelheldevans.com/biblical-womanhood-launch-team

Before I started filling out the application, I figured it was a shot in the dark - I've only been following Rachel's blog recently - but as soon as I looked at the application, I knew it was a crapshoot.  The whole point of a "launch team" is to help provide honest publicity.  I've got the honest part down, but publicity?  The application asked me my twitter name and my blog URL.  My blog?  My blog isn't something written for an audience anymore.  My audience is myself.  I am not a person who helps with publicity.  I am the unintentional hipster of the blogosphere.

But, I was selected for the launch team.  Out of 300 applicants, 75 were picked.  The indication from the link I posted above suggests that more applications have come in ex post facto.  But from the beginning, I have been an outlier for this text.

Then the facebook group.  (Some of you are reading this now; welcome, and try not to stub your toe on the embarrassingly transparent shards of emotional turmoil littered in the corners and early posts here.)  The majority of the others selected for the group are women (although there are quite a few men as well) who have their own blogs.  Many are married, and many are mothers.  Insofar as I can tell, they are all christians.  They have written books.  They have PhDs and are ministers.  They do book reviews and have their own websites.  I am not this audience.  I post reviews of death metal albums by using the word "fuck" as often as possible and mocking Travis Barker.  I have 46 twitter followers.  I have five blog followers.  I don't consider myself a christian.

My instinct was to complain to caroline.  "Why did they pick me?  I'm nothing like the group Rachel is trying to reach.  I'm not her audience."

Yes you are, says my friend.  She does not allow me wallow.  I suppose I've earned that.  Bit karmic.

"I am not a woman, a christian, a mom, a churchgoer, a blogger, a tweeter, or a promoter."

That's not what makes you her audience.  I wish I could quote you here, caroline, but I can't find what you wrote.  You are her audience because you choose to live and embrace a state of deconstruction.

Thanks, Rachel.  Thanks for the opportunity.  I don't mean for the blog traffic or the free book.  It seems to be harder than I expected for me to accept people who value me for what I present myself as, rather than what others think I should be.  It's hard to accept being accepted.  How fuckin' weird is that?

I think we're not as different as I thought.  I think my interpretation of myself is highly biased by a desire to distance myself from a group of people I've felt so wronged by.  But we both read Half the Sky and cried.  Apparently, we both throw books that frustrate us (you: Debi Pearl's Created to be His Help Meet, me, Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged.  Although I must confess that I was temped to buy a copy of Pearl's so I could throw it.  I decided the money would be better spent buying porn or crystal meth).  We both want, and try to maintain, egalitarian romantic relationships based on efficiency and communication - without what Dan called the hidden weapon.

We both are willing to watch what we knew be deconstructed.  We both recognize the futility of our understanding, and seek knowledge as grace rather than a solution.  I think you have a strong grasp on humility.  That monster that I'm coming to know.

Do you know how empowering it is to be asked for your opinion by a representative of a group who has by and large rejected your opinion as invalid or worthless?

Oh wait.  Yeah.  You do.  All you ladies do.  That's what this goddamn book is about.

And I end up at the same place as before.  Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues,they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears. When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me. 

For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.

We shall not know fully until we are fully known.  Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

Want to read what I wrote?

Of course you do; otherwise you wouldn't be here.  The more I interact with people who host massive blogs, the more I appreciate my tiny one.  I have no expectations of you, and you have none of me.  There is no shame in my words here.  Only memories of what I thought and felt then.

Anyways, trying to do 21 days of a page a day, every time a different topic, all fiction (ideally).  Kind of fell off the wagon again, but trying to get caught up.  Read what I wrote, if you will.  Unedited, all things thrown together in an attempt to get my fix for the day.

Moses

            When you say, “worshiping a golden calf,” you make us sound crazy.  It’s not nearly as sensational as you make it sound, especially when you consider what we had been asked to buy up until then.  Sure, we melted down the gold everybody had and cast it into a golden calf.  But think, for a moment, what that sculpture is a representation of: the nation’s wealth, gathered in donation from individual sources, channeled into a work of art.  That calf was a manifestation of our bitterness towards the leader who walked away from us.  It was an icon of unity amongst a people divided by loyalty towards a man who had left us with no answers, on promises of law from a source on high that none of us were worthy to contact.  Distance.  That’s what he promised.  More abstract manifestations of an in-concrete, fluid law.  Nothing was ever set in stone. 

            Tangible, controllable divinity was what the calf represented to us.  We all knew there was nothing supernatural or divine about a sculpture when we devised it – or at least, that’s what we said aloud.  There was an ethos about this calf, though, a foreign appeal that declared validity through popularity by means of the tribes around us.  But looking to the statue for comfort had no harm.  When our children were hungry and cold, and the only answers to why we remained stationary were the empty promises of a man so cowardly and awkward that he couldn’t speak to us without his brother translating, we could look to the artwork in the middle of the camp.  We could point and say, “Look children, that is why we stay.”  And our children would believe us, although we lied. 

            What we said as comforting lies at first became reality soon enough.  We told our children we stayed because of the calf, but that’s not what we were really saying.  It wasn’t Baal that kept us together – it was our act of unity, the expression of oneness that our people demonstrated in sacrificing the gold from their very ears, the trinkets and heirlooms reminiscent of generations whose words had been lost, whose trials and enslavement forgotten, that tied us to each other.  We could look to Baal and know that each man, woman, and child could speak to the calf and listen for the same silence that we knew our prophet professed not to hear. 

Pop

            Pop, like bottle of champagne.  Sploosh, like sound of a boulder in a swamp.  That’s what heads popping would sound like, I imagine.  Maybe there’s a little fizzing sound before the cranium separates into individual bony plates, deconstructing itself like some sort of accelerated reverse pregnancy.  It’s like a pressure that coats everything around it, dust settled on your ears and scalp, static, waiting to discharge.  And then, pop.  Brains stuck in the grout.  Crusty blood underneath the linoleum, too awkward for the sponge and too narrow for the mop. 

            I mean, I know my head doesn’t actually pop – I’m not stupid.  I’d be fucking dead.  But I swear, when the stress settles in, my peripheral vision turns to tunnel vision and all I can think about is the blood pounding into my head.  There isn’t that much room up there!  If you keep filling it up, it will pop.  No, mom, I haven’t seen your cat.  Yes, Sandy, I did send you the productivity reports from last June.  No, Elise, I don’t think it’s fair to bring another man into our bedroom because you think my penis is too small. 

            Sometimes they think I’m ignoring them, but I’m really doing my best to listen.  It’s difficult to try and clench your arteries to slow the bloodflow to the brain.  Most people can’t flex their arteries, but I can – it’s just difficult and takes concentration.  You probably wouldn’t appreciate it if I stopped focusing, either.  I think Elise just likes me for my money, so my mushy grey matter caking her foundation and eyeliner would probably make her file for divorce.  My doctor might get sued if I exploded brains in his office.  My job would probably sue me for the carpet damage.  Lord forbid if my cranial shrapnel get lodged in someone’s eye.  I’d feel awful if that happened, and I hate apologizing. 

            I’ve had some close calls.  Once, my dad made me clean up dog shit he thought our retriever Goldie shat on a lawn at the dog park, but no, it was that fucking chiuaua, and even though I TOLD him, he still made me clean it up and I almost painted his idiotic beard with brain juice. 

Bellkeep (my favorite so far)

            The bellkeeper ran his thumb along the aged bronze, rust scraping atop his fingernail like caked blood.  These seven bells – some were hundreds of years old – had always struck him still with their majesty.  He had watched as a child as the youngest was forged by the bellmaker, long dead in his casket now, each curve lovingly released from the bronze, shapely, like the hips of a beautiful woman, but with a resounding stoutness that spoke of character.  The oldest of these had lost its youthful sensuality, but none of its beauty, intensified by storms weathered rather than dulled.  Just another thing, thought the bellmaker, which differs from people. 

            The central bell of the tower was the largest, it’s body reaching greater than seven feet in height and the bronze almost ten inches at its thickest.  The bellmaker traced his hand across the circumference of the mighty giant, as he had done almost daily for the past sixty-eight years, and the rust peeled from the metal like skin from a scab, coating his wrinkles.  His hands lovingly explored the crevices and depths of the bell, tracing deeply into the gash than ran up the side of the metal, nearly halfway to the peak of the bell.  Once, this bell had tolled indiscriminately from the town, alerting all listening to funerals and fires, weddings and holidays, pealing loudest at noon, declaring its voice brazenly over the bustle of the townfolk.  Now, the crack on its side, a product of the salted breeze and an unforgiving clapper, ran too deep for the bell to sing.  With these old bells, the man knew, it was a matter of surgical ambition to extend the bell’s life, for the crack and all the weakened bronze would have to be removed to preserve the continuity of the bronze.  She may sing again, but never as deep, never as full. 

            A rasped breath escaped the old man’s strained throat, and he wiped a few droplets from his face, smearing rust like paint.  He felt the cold aching in the scars along his bones where the poisoned marrow had been siphoned and replaced.  The bell would be retired, he knew, within the next few weeks, upon his own recommendation.  The metal was too brittle, despite the craftsman’s care and intent, and the hanging monstrosity posed a danger to those below should an unfortunate peal rend the metal in two.  The bellkeeper gripped the rope firmly and pulled with determination that masked his knowledge that the clapper had been removed days before.  The bell swung wildly and silently, creaking and shaking the tower with its mammoth might, mute in a way that nearly negated its status as a bell. 

Shaking from effort and cold, the old man creaked his way to the edge of the tower where he briefly surveyed the landscape before turning back to his bell.  It’s silent voice stilled as the motion of the bell slowed, and the man smiled and took a step back.  He turned and spun as he fell, and on the bricked road below, his brittle bones broke like twigs.  No one was privy to witness the old man’s fall save the choked, bronze behemoth from which he fell, whose mute voice stirred none.