Christ Came To Nickelsville

Tonight I drove my codeine cough syrup addled ass down to Nickelsville for a 7 pm "strategy meeting" to discuss how the homeless campers were going to deal with their eviction, scheduled for sometime after 5 pm tomorrow. The media keeps asking us for a convenient time to arrive for the requisite dramatic footage. The answer, for the record, is "We don't know. Ask Greg."

The meeting was all about morale boosting and solidarity building. With media and cops in attendance, little actual planning was either possible or desirable.

There were numerous moments that made being there worthwhile. Within moments of my arrival, for instance, El Centro de la Raza Director Roberto Maestes greeted me as "young man." While this was probably because he couldn't remember my name, it still did my about-to-turn-48 heart good. This is a guy who was in the thick of Wounded Knee when I was just a pimply thirteen-year-old stoner.

I also spoke with a mysterious man named Harry. The last time I saw him was when we met at the Camp4Unity demonstration last June. A few hours before my arrest, we had a brief conversation that culminated in him handing me a hundred dollar bill he'd found on a sidewalk. "I don't want you to just pay the electric bill with this. Do something special." I told him tonight that one of our more challenged vendors had told me that he and his equally challenged wife were having a very tough time, and he just wished they could afford go out for dinner. I was able to say, "I'm going to make you very happy. Go somewhere nice." This, in turn, made Harry very happy.

Jim Page told me that if Mayor Nickels evicted the campers, he'd retaliate by playing a concert on his front lawn. This is the most original threat I've heard in years.

I told Nickelsville organizer Scott Morrow that I'd been spending my idle moments while home sick pondering what his life was like right now. This made him smile.

But the moment that had me thinking on my drive home was my conversation with the young man in the tan cap. He was PTSD, he said, and had lost a good ninety jobs in recent years. "I can't stay in shelters," he said. "I can't cope with the people." His cap said Heb. 10:10 across the bill. "What's Hebrews 10:10," I asked.

He grew slightly agitated and reached for his pocket bible. "You'd think I'd know this by now," he said, "since people keep asking."

He found it. "By this will we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all," he read. His face grew serious and he looked me dead in the eye. "I think that if Jesus were alive, he'd be right here in Nickelsville."

"Jesus is right here in Nickelsville," I said, believing every word of it. "Places like this, where people come together to love and care for eachother, is where Jesus lives."

As I drove home, I considered how it is that I, an existentalist agnostic if ever there was, could say such a thing and actually believe it to be true.

The answer is surprisingly simple. God is love, and you don't need to believe in God to believe in love. Our notions of God are just framework for what's real. What's real is love, and love is real. And anyone who was at Nickelsville tonight knows just what I mean.

Love Is All There Is

Last night as I was writing the post below Twin B woke up and came out to sit on the couch with me in the dark. She pointed to the donations badge at the top right of my blog and asked "Who's that." "That's Margaret," I whispered, "She's nice."

"Is she a boy or a girl?"

"She's a girl."

"I love her," said Twin B.

A moment of silence as she settled in next to me. "I love everybody."

Please God, Make It Stop

"L-O-V-E. There's a lot inside of me. L-O-V-E. There's a lot to share."

This 26 seconds of hell is brought to you by my kids' daycare for Mother's Day. The one in the middle of the front in the purple dress is Twin B, and the one off to the far right who looks as though she might be on another planet altogether is Twin A.

My turn is coming up. For Fathers Day, I get to miss half a day of work so I can drive to some park, eat hot dogs, and make small talk with a bunch of other dads who probably don't want to be there either. I've been told that the girls will be looking for me. Blowing it off isn't really an option.

Personally, if I'm going to miss work to be with my kids, I'd really rather take them to the beach or something on my own, but that's because I don't do social convention so well. I'm liable to offend someone just to liven things up. Who knows, maybe I already have.

Dido's Big Love

Every once is a while, an artist improves upon a classic. Think of the Red Hot Chili Peppers doing Search and Destroy by Iggy and the Stooges. They played it faster, added a kick-ass bass line, and rocked it up a few notches when one wouldn't have thought that possible.

On the other hand, there's Virgil's Aeneid. This pale rip-off of Homer mostly suffers in the comparison. Except for Dido. She kicks Calypso's skinny little ass.

It helps that Calypso was pretty much the lamest thing in the Odyssey. Sure, she loved Odysseus. But it was in the way that I love Ruffles BBQ potato chips. It lacked conviction and depth. And then there's Odysseus. Stuck in paradise with a beautiful goddess who anticipates his every need and wants to fuck all the time.

I've always had a tough time feeling his pain.

But Dido. Now there's real, gut-wrenching, rip your heart out, drink battery acid, over the top love. Personality-disordered love. Humiliating love. The kind of love that turns into unquenchable hate when it's wronged. A love that won't see reason.

And I love how Aeneas, who really is screwed, tries to explain himself, winds up sounding like an insincere jerk even when he's not, and finally does the only thing possible. He just goes out for a quart of milk and never comes back.

This, to me, is the true, eternal stuff of tragic love. After Chapter 4, everything else in the Aeneid is fairly forgettable. But without Dido, there wouldn't be anything to remember at all.

Confessions of a Quaker Camp Follower

Slowly, I'm finding that my life is populated by closet bloggers. There's the friend whose blog shall, at her urgent request, remain secret. I'm probably missing something. The magic wand thing didn't really phase me. I mean, we all do that.

It's actually a great metaphor for blogging itself. Or maybe it's a euphemism. I can't decide.

"Generally speaking, I blog at least once a day."

Another friend, Mary, just told me about her Beginners Mind blog. Her last entry inspired me to offer a few spiritual observations of my own.

I was raised Catholic, which means that I went to Catholic schools until they kicked me out and attended church when my mother made me. By the 4th grade, having declared myself an atheist, I scandalized the other kids at Saint Mary's School.

Despite this absence of enthusiasm, some of it stuck. As a grade schooler, I was steeped the social gospel of Vatican II. I remained struck by the Sermon on the Mount and was deeply affected by Jesus' radicalism.

In 1970 came Jesus Christ Superstar, which was blacklisted by the Catholic Daughters of America and, by extension, my mother. By listening to it over and over again in my friend's basement across the street, I committed the thing to memory — beginning to end — for the rest of my life. I was eleven.

My secondary religious influence was a half-assed mysticism that began with mail order lessons from the Rosecrucians at seventeen and culminated in my late-twenties with a mushroom inspired moment of universal insight.

I still regard this as my one authentic religious experience. The fact that I cheated doesn't matter to me in the least.

Buddhism, which is more of a practice than a religion, speaks to me as well. As they say, a watched mind never boils.

Finally, I married into the Quakers. I often accuse my wife of being the worst Quaker in the world, but that's not fair. She's probably about average.

George Fox, the barefoot nutcase, is the real deal, and the Letters of John Woolman are a remarkable document of the spiritually engaged life. The Quaker notion of "speaking to that of God in everyone" just works for me. It's something I try to live up to.

So I've been known to sit quietly through the occasional Quaker meeting, but I'm basically too shallow to be serious about it.

This makes me a Quaker camp follower, which is as close to organized religion as I care to come.

But I do have a theology.

Love, I have concluded, is the thing that keeps life from being a piece of shit. It is those sparks of divinity that we carry, drawn toward each other by a kind of cosmic magnetism, that are the glue of the universe. We can choose to abet this process or not, and this is what gives our lives meaning.

I don't need anyone to tell me this. I just know it, like I know that water, ice, and steam are all the same thing. It's an observable phenomenon.

Love, love, love. Love is all you need.

Terms of Endearment

Real Change is one of those places where you can always learn something new about yourself, if you're into that sort of thing.

Take Monday. I hadn't been in for 10 minutes when my phone rang. It was Rachael at the front desk. There were about a half dozen vendors hanging out getting their papers and a schizophrenic guy I'd seen around the office was outside shouting and banging on the window.

Rachael said things were under control, but that he kept popping in and out and she could use me as back up. I was editing the Street News Service newsfeed, and had promised that to Lisa in Scotland within the hour, so I grabbed my laptop and took a chair behind the door.

One of the great things about being ADHD is that you can read and write while a crazy guy bangs on the window behind you. It actually sort of helps.

I was summarizing an article on homeless hate crime legislation in Maryland when the door flew open and our friend made a beeline for the back.

"Dude!," I shouted, laying the laptop aside, "Where you goin'?"

The Dude thing confused him just enough long for me to catch up.

It's possible to move someone along without touching them by just sort of walking into their space with your arms out. It helps to be 6'2.

And that's pretty much where things were at when I said, "Hon, you need to go."

First he looked amazed. Then furious. "Hon! Hon! Shove it up your ass! I oughta take a gun and then we'll see about this place ..."

But by then he was on the other side of the door. I'd pushed it shut, and he was shouting through the glass. Rachael was already doing the 911 thing. Within two minutes we saw him with his hands on the hood of a police cruiser across the street.

You can be crazy as you want at Real Change and the worst thing that'll happen is you'll get shooed out the door. But start talking about a gun, and things get more serious.

We had him trespassed and declined to file charges.

After it was over, I had to ask, "Hon! Where the fuck did that come from?" Here was this skinny, bald, 40-something apoplectic crazy guy, and I'm calling him hon? What was that about?

This wasn't hard. I was responding as I would to my 3-year-olds. I actually think of them sometimes as being my little drunken schizophrenic dwarfs, unrolling the toilet paper and pulling it around the house. Smearing food coloring around on the kitchen floor. Decorating the walls with handfuls of peanut butter.

You don't get mad. You just deal. And you love them.

So here's this poor crazy bastard. Raging around for no reason that we could tell or that he could control. And without thinking about it, I slipped into daddy mode.

And the word dropped out of my mouth. And we both looked at it and wondered.