Dave | unobtrusive lucidity

That Creeping Blackness

I’ve written a lot about the uniquely American tradition that is Black Friday over and over again here…I doubt my opinion on the consumerist pseudo-holiday is any secret. Usually I’m inspired to write about it just after the insanity has ended and the stories begin to run about the atrocities that were committed in the name of getting a bargain. However, it appears that “Black Friday creep” is all the rage among big retail businesses this year, so I guess I’ll let the posting begin early, as well.

It’s so comforting to know that our national ethics are in such a strong state. After all, profit is the most worthy of goals, and thus must supersede the basic treatment of employees as human beings as all worship at the polytheistic altars of money and consumerism. Don’t you agree?

I’ve avoided Black Friday for a long time, and this year will be no different. I certainly can name the stores that I will intentionally not visit this Friday, thanks to the media coverage of their poor decision to rob employees of their dignity of being able to spend time with their families.

The irony of the situation is that Thanksgiving is not currently a holiday with any religious affiliation, so, were we to choose a holiday that culturally could be universal without regard to the religious affiliations of many citizens, this would be the day. Yet corporate profits are so precious that we can’t allow even that one day with family to be guaranteed. And, honestly, it’s not like the basest of our human desires don’t already cause all of these retail stores to make a proverbial killing in profit on that day. Moving sales up a few hours is simply the underbelly of greed.

My sincere hope is that the retail stores that are open tomorrow in anticipation of beginning Friday’s sales early find themselves in a deficit of customers, as that is the only language that they appear to speak. I earnestly hope that they lose money this year, and are able to trace it to the fact that they didn’t care about the family lives of their employees.

And, unfortunately, I’ll likely be doing yet another post about someone being injured or arrested or in some other way humiliated as people fight for a deal on Friday morning. Or perhaps tomorrow. I don’t look forward to hearing about it.

And I certainly won’t be any sort of participant in it.

A Socially-Acceptable Identity Crisis

While this may not be any huge secret, I’m one of those people who could never decide what he wanted to be when he grew up.

The issue with that is that…well, apparently, I’ve grown up. It happened when I wasn’t looking, I swear. You wake up one morning and all of the sudden you’re eating breakfast and going to a 9-5 job. I mean, who knew?

In case you missed it, I’m in school. Again. This time, an arts school, just a quickie, to do some technology certification work. This harkens back to my New Year’s goal of changing my day job, because I needed something more creative. While I’m having a bit more difficulty than I had anticipated in adapting back to the life of a full-time student, I’m noticing that I have the flexibility to be very creative a lot of the time. I’m juggling two writing projects, brainstorming design ideas for two different websites, and doing theatre work with students who are on the Autism spectrum. Life is hectic (as you may have guessed, what with my writing a Friday post at 12:30 on a Sunday morning, and all), but its good.

The problem with my having so many interests is that there’s always stuff for which I don’t quite have time. I wish I had more time to read fiction, to study theology, to get back to my two-books-monthly reading schedule (textbooks and technical manuals on things like Javascript not included).

Ultimately, though, I need to learn to be content with where Karen and I are in life’s adventure, and to focus on doing what I do have time to do well. That’s a hard lesson for me to learn, because I don’t do contentedness well…and I say that much to my own chagrin.

The good thing about the stressful life of a student is that stress forces you to grow. So does paring down your lifestyle for a while. If I can learn these personal and spiritual lessons along with what I need to learn for career-change purposes, I’ll be really have come out of this situation a better person.

Adventures

My wife’s slogan about life is, “it’s an adventure!” I usually find myself with simultaneous excitement and anxiety about where the adventure takes us. The most annoying tendencies that I see in myself are entering new parts of the adventure with expectations, and then becoming discontent with the adventure. There’s much to be said for soaking in the experience of the journey.

Illumination by Laser

I grew up in a rural area. I have always wished that it were otherwise, but its one of those things in which you really have no say. While I wouldn’t trade my family environment for anything, there were parts of growing up in the 80’s that I always wanted to experience, but was only able to experience from a sort of peripheral perspective…the outside looking in, if you will.

When Laser Tag exploded onto the scene in the mid-80’s, I wanted little else than to own a set of the equipment and play with friends. I even got a strategy book complete with exercises to improve your skills, and different games that you could play with different sizes of groups. Ultimately, however, none of my friends’ parents would invest in the equipment, so, no matter how many of us wanted to play, it just wasn’t an option.

I became acquainted with Photon through the short-lived television series (not really such a great piece of small screen history, but it remains supremely exciting in my memory as it was viewed through middle-school boy eyes), and was even more enamored by having a set of equipment for that game. I was attracted by the large arenas, complete with mazes, catwalks, smoke and lights in which teams played tournaments of Photon, and the rougher, more swashbuckling aesthetic of that game. No such arenas existed anywhere near me, though, and this game was a bit too geeky for the area. No one else was interested. So, I pined in secret, watched the television program, and even bought the book series to read further adventures. Playing “capture the flag” with friends and fully automatic water guns just wasn’t the same. It missed the essential geeky ingredient.

Ultimately, I did what I frequently did and still do: I imagined wild stories based around my dream, and I wrote them.

Of course, Photon no longer exists today, but Laser Tag does, in various iterations. When an arena arrived in my college town, I jumped on my first chance to play. Since then, I’ve played various times, and attempted to recognize that its a nostalgic wish of my childhood that I’m now getting to fulfill, and attempted to resist the urge to make it a full-blown hobby.

Honestly, though, there are times when its more difficult than others. Recently, while playing for the first time in months at a local arena, I listed my name for the scoreboard as Bhodi Li, and was simultaneously struck by how easily I could do this every weekend, and how no one else understood my reference.

What’s always been missing from the experience for me, though…either in childhood or in the years since college…is that, in these sporadic encounters, I’ve never been around a group of people interested enough to play with any degree of regularity. The game still attracts mostly teens, and showing up solo at an arena to play when nearly everyone else there is in high school…well, I’ve never done it, but I imagine it would be awkward.

Since our move, I’ve played at a local arena once, and then discovered that a family member here owns some equipment. Its not the original Lazer Tag or Photon equipment from the 80’s, but neither is the equipment at any arena in which I’ve ever played, and here’s the thing: once you’re playing, it doesn’t matter. It’s about the experience.

So, last night, we went to the park after nightfall with a group of four of us, and played several rounds. We won’t discuss how I fared in these rounds, but what’s important is that I had more fun than I’ve had in a long time. I’ve never played outside of an area, before. It was very different, challenging in a different way, and I love both equally.

And, I’m even more dangerously close to making it a hobby if I thought for a moment that there were enough adults around who loved it as much as I do. I see how easily it would be more about the camaraderie than the game, which is the case with much of what geeks like me love.

When I’ve played, I sometimes become the kid who wanted to play the game so badly for a few seconds (this usually occurs in the briefing room as everyone is putting their gear on and getting ready to enter the arena). I wonder if, had I lived near an arena and played Photon seriously then, would I love it as much now? Would I love it in a different way? Is there a difference between re-living a nostalgic love and experiencing a childhood desire for the first time? I’m not sure what that difference would be, but I love every second of the random occasions when I get to play this game.

The light shines.

Rough Beauty

A few months ago, Karen and I were on a road trip, and Pandora was set to (I’m about to date myself and/or cause you to laugh at me…likely both) my Def Leppard station. Whether it is because she is genuinely interested or just wants to make me feel smart, I can’t tell, but my lovely wife, knowing that rock history is one of those strange interests of mine, will ask me here and there about bands and songs and that sort of thing. A lot of times we talk about lyrics, and, eventually, she’ll ask me to change the station. That last part is inevitable.

Periodically, I return to a specific collection of songs from my head-banging years. One of those is a classic ballad by Guns N’ Roses called Sweet Child O’ Mine. In my iTunes library, this song is classified as metal. I’m picky about my genres…another conversation that Karen and I sometimes have during road trips…but Guns N’ Roses’ work falls firmly under the broader heading of metal in my mind. What makes this odd to some is that I find this song to be one of the most beautiful pieces of music I’ve ever heard. Slash’s guitar line is melodic, entrancing, and nearly brings tears at times (listen to the full-length album version, not the radio edit). The love for another person that’s contained in this song pours through those notes, even when the guitar work becomes more “dirty” and distortion-driven at the end of the song. Now, I certainly have a bit of nostalgia attached to the song: the memory of the music video…witnessed not long after my parents first got cable television and I had access to MTV for the first time, with Slash’s face completely obscured by his hair as he leaned into his monitor and let the passion flow from his guitar…is a very strong recollection for me.

I think, though, that, beyond that nostalgia, this song points out something about the way that I perceive beauty.

When I was in undergrad, I remember being drawn to plays that were different, odd…to playwrights that were quirky and raw. I like fiction that has a raw component to it, so raw at times that it is difficult to read, but that carries a poignancy that causes to you see something in life that is better, that rewards you if you force yourself through to the end.

I guess what I’m saying is that I see beauty in really rough places. Art that would often be considered rough, edgy, or even offensive to some, is the art in which I find these hidden moments of breath-taking beauty. I can’t articulate why…I suppose we could psychoanalyze my childhood insecurities, but I doubt that anyone, including myself, would really want to read that here. I just know that I do.

A little while ago, I was struck by one of those impulses to be spontaneously romantic. I wanted to let Karen know that I was thinking about her, and I decided to write a post on her Facebook wall. I could have said something poetic, or quoted a poem or something. Instead, I quoted four lines from a Warrant that I heard one afternoon on that same Def Leppard station, and that suddenly found new meaning at this point in my life as I thought of my wife.

This isn’t about old 80’s hair bands, despite my previous examples (and the fact that you really can’t beat those ballads). Just, for some reason, I find beauty in unexpected places.

Perhaps this is because I also often find Divine experiences more readily accessible in the rough moments of daily life than in intentionally carved, so-called sacred moments. Embracing the imperfect sometimes seems the only way to get a glimpse of the perfect for me.

The beautiful is sometimes hidden in the rough if we take the time to look for it…just as the princes and princesses of fairy tales were disguised as things that might initially prove repulsive…almost as if there’s a reward intended for the patiently seeking.