hard bought

Recently I attended a small memorial service with a friend. And by small, I mean that there were 5 people, including a pastor. (Sorry to be cryptic here; it can't be helped.) It was short and tasteful.

One of my friends had written down something to say. Out of his back pocket came two unlined white pieces of paper, wrinkled like an old treasure map and curved slightly from riding pressed up against his backside for the 45-minute drive to the church. I think he had planned to just "say a few words," but in a weakened state he could naught but read the blue sentences in front of him. They were good sentences, and his oration was everything a piece of music, or eulogy, should be: Prepared with forethought, but delivered without any at all. His sadness and despair came in waves--and we know from ocean swimming that every seventh wave is bigger than the previous six. At times his voice shifted into new and strange registers that could never be reproduced outside of pain--this pain. Cliches of comfort cried out for air inside my head as I frantically tried to suffocate them or at least get them to shut up for now.

Reading, he spoke about how he had always had a vision of himself suffering. Suffering would give him clarity and purpose. Suffering would make him better, make him new. And now that he was experiencing the worst suffering he had ever known, he wanted nothing more than for it to be over; he felt no clarity or betterment at all.

Maybe later on he will.

I sure hope he does, because I've been desiring pain or at least chaos for some time now. I feel like a perpetual "Before" picture and I want to know how to make the thing happen to get the "After" part. I guess I want God to throw some shit at me. That's got to be a dangerous and naive thing to wish for. But all the really amazing people seem to have gone through some kind of badness.

Afterwards, another friend who is a Springsteen fan related an anecdote: At a concert, the Boss was talking about Jacob from the Old Testament. The gist was that Jacob was always screwing things up, and yet God seemed to keep helping him out. Bruce says (more or less), "I don't know if Biblical stories really have a moral, but if they do, I think this one'd be 'God Loves F---ups,' and that's good news for all of us."

You may note my double standard of censoring the F word but leaving in other profanities deemed slightly less noxious by society. This may irritate you. Well, ---- off.

***

Gabe, I haven't heard of the Acts 29 society. But I will now be sensitized to hearing any mention of it.

On the "being free" thing from the last post: Chloe, I guess there are a lot of ways that being free could be defined. I was thinking (maybe like Gabe and CT) that I don't really feel up to the task of making all of these decisions and holding my and other peoples lives or well-beingseseses in my hands. There's something about this kind of freedom that seems more like homelessness and oblivion. But I think you're onto something too.