you don’t want to know

Posted on by August 30, 2013

AdamandEveAdam and Eve had a pretty good thing going.

Think about it….they really did.

It was Paradise.  With a capital P.

And there was only one rule, really.  Just one.  That should be pretty easy to remember.

“Don’t eat from that tree.  Don’t eat from the tree of knowledge.”

I’m listening to an mp3 Bible that I downloaded from a link here.

It’s pretty familiar…fortunately, I grew up with the Bible…and, once I wade through all the killing and begetting, it’s pretty exciting.

This Adam and Eve thing is pretty bizarre, though.

God tells them, basically, “OK, here you go…I’m setting you up nicely, you’ve got everything you need, you should be just fine here.”

And it’s pretty nice for a while until an acquaintance…some snake up in a tree…tells Eve to just try this fruit and she’ll know as much as God and her eyes will be opened.

Wheeeeee.

And then the fun starts.  Welcome to the modern world.

People say that ignorance is bliss.

You have to wonder if it wasn’t so much a matter of God saying, after the fruit had been sampled and awareness came flooding over Adam and Eve, “OK….you’ve done it now…didn’t I tell you not to eat that?  Now it’s going to get really bad for you. I’m going to make things really bad for you.” but instead, maybe, “That’s really disappointing…but you’re not puppets…I gave you a choice…and now YOU KNOW.”

From something as simple as being naked in the world down to the worst of sins, now “you know”.

It’s no picnic in the Garden of Eden to have your eyes opened like that.

Maybe Hell is knowing?

The “Bible Scholars” would say that Hell is much more than that….”how naive a viewpoint” they’d think.

And I suppose there are a lot of levels to the situation.

I do wonder if the things that really bring us pain are the things we bring the most attention to. Until we were given the “gift/curse” of knowledge, we were oblivious to all but the gifts we were given.

God set this world up to be something better than just “good”…and until we made the mistake of having our eyes opened, that’s what we saw in the world.

We saw the good.

That probably is a pretty naïve and simplistic way of looking at the story of good and evil.

Evil already existed in the garden…(where’d that snake come from otherwise?)…but it was only at the moment when Adam and Eve only stopped looking for the good in their world that things fell apart for them.

To lose that ability to be unconsciously expectant of only good things is a real curse.

I know people who would say, “THAT AIN’T REAL!!!  THE WORLD’S A REAL PIECE OF CRAP!!! EVIL EVERYWHERE…ROBBING, KILLING, FAMINES, PESTILENCE…IT’S ALL GOING STRAIGHT DOWN TO THE FIERY PITS OF HELL!!!! AND IT’S BECAUSE ALL YOU PEOPLE ARE SINNNNNNERRRRRRRRSSSS!!!!”

Actually, I don’t think they know the word “pestilence”…so leave that one out.

Unfortunately, too, sometimes those guys are thumping on a Bible while they’re doing the yelling about how bad things are.

Some people really like to beat up a Bible.

What excites me, in spite of being fully aware of the bad in the world, is the possibility of something good.

We missed our shot at paradise….but we can make things better.

That’s something I really do believe.

 

pre

Posted on by August 29, 2013

I plod.

I don’t think I’m a runner yet.

This guy was a runner.

I was thinking about being single-minded and how focus and natural ability and mental toughness can lead you to greatness.

Then I started thinking about something else.

Just kidding.

I have seen this movie “Prefontaine” a couple of times and it’s pretty good….seek out a movie called “Without Limits” if you can find it or have any interest in it.  It’s probably the better of the two movies that came out about the same time that told the Steve Prefontaine story.

This guy was like a rock star in the running community.

And from what I’ve heard, there were never any allegations of doping or any kind of performance enhancement…just a guy with a lot of ability and heart who loved to run.

There’s a hero for you.

 

 

 

 

 

how far?

Posted on by August 28, 2013

The_Long_Road_Ahead

I was running this morning and thinking.

I can’t disconnect the two activities completely.  If I’m breathing I’m thinking.

That doesn’t mean that if I’m running and I’m breathing hard that I’m thinking more than usual.

It doesn’t mean that I’m thinking any better than I usually do.

It just means that I’m always using my brain…if only at a rudimentary level.  (What did Einstein say about using 3% of our brain?  I don’t remember….)

Anyway, I was thinking about a lot of things this morning.

I was thinking about why meth heads always burn the insulation off copper wire at night and how stinky it is.

That was a temporary thing….I ran away from that thought.

That got me thinking about China spewing tons of pollution into the air and how it’s going to join with all the other pollution and how stinky it is.

I thought about where the skunk carcass went that used to be in the greasy spot in the road…and , even though the skunk is gone now, how stinky it still is.

And then I started thinking about the thing that carried me through the rest of the short run.

I thought, “How far would you go if you didn’t understand the concept of ‘far’? “.

What would limit us if we had no markers or defining measures?

It’s a weird thought, sort of.

Would I continue to run if I didn’t understand that the church was .8 miles up and .8 miles back and together it was about a mile and a half and that was a good distance to start out with and when I finished with that I would be able to stop?

Or that if I ran for half an hour…when I’m running a little longer than a mile and a half…that would be enough and I could stop when the time was up?

How far could I go if I didn’t understand that I was supposed to stop? If I hadn’t planned the finish before the race even started?

What would I do if I didn’t understand what time or an “average lifespan” or distance or “being practical” meant?

How far would I go if no one told me how far “too far” was?

It’s an interesting thought to wonder that.

We work for retirement.  At least most of the Postal workers I know do.  I don’t get the feeling that many of my co-workers consider their jobs a calling or a mission.

We push through something that’s “less” to get to something that’s bearable.

It’s the best job I’ve ever had.  I love the independence of the job.  I like driving the mail around.

Any complaining I do is really kind of crazy.  I have a pretty good thing going.

But a “good thing going” feels kind of cramped up sometimes.  It would be a good thing to be going one of these days.

I want to jump into the ocean while my knees are still up to the jumping.

This world is huge.  HUGE.

And, at the same time, small in some respects.

I wonder if I’ll ever be satisfied with not being able (yet) to experience it all?

 

 

harmonic balance

Posted on by August 27, 2013

harmonic balancerI love learning about cars.  I like driving cars. I like going places.

I love learning about cars when it’s on my terms.

The other day my Jeep broke down and I got to learn what a harmonic balancer does.

I’d never had a reason to really understand that part of an engine.

Sometimes, until something is really broken, it’s hard to pay any attention to it.

I listen to my cars like I could fend off disaster if I just pay close enough attention.  Every new squeak and rattle usually means that I need to figure out what’s broken or about to explode.

When the squeak at the front of the engine got louder, and eventually the pulley at the bottom of a whole bunch of pulleys finally came apart and started hitting the fan blades, I knew it was probably time to address the issue.

You don’t want to drive very far if something is making a death rattle against the metal fan blades.

Actually, you don’t want to drive at all.  You can’t drive.  You are dead in the water as far as vehicular locomotion goes.

So I ran the three miles to my house and got a different vehicle, finished the route, and came back to wait for the tow truck to drive it over to the garage that I had do the work.

The next morning, the mechanic started it up to see what was going on with it and the harmonic balancer fell apart in the garage’s parking lot.

It looked like this:

harmonic balancer brokenReally, it looked like that but more “spread out”.

I imagine the mechanic had to crawl under the car to get it.

This is a part that’s supposed to be one piece.

Two stout, round pieces of metal with rubber in-between that absorbs the vibration of the engine so everything doesn’t rattle apart.

When the rubber part fails and the parts start to break away from each other, the one can become two.

That’s a bad thing when a part designed to be one becomes two.

Anyway, long story short…the car is whole again after fixing the harmonic balancer and the water pump that got taken out as collateral damage when it all started to hit the fan.

Like a lot of things, it came on without a whole lot of warning.  Squeaks and rattles, wobbles that shouldn’t be wobbling, things that felt normal until I felt what normal really was after the repair had been done.

It is too easy to draw a spiritual metaphor out of all of this…so maybe I shouldn’t.

But you do have to wonder about things that seem to be all right…until they break.

You do have to wonder about things that are breaking in secret…middles falling apart until you just aren’t whole anymore and need to be fixed.

You have to wonder about a middle that no one can see…encased in a strong veneer and forgotten about….taken for granted until things become desperate and you start hearing the clanking of metal on metal.

I guess that sometimes you just have to wonder about some of these things.

hallelujah, I’m running slow

Posted on by August 25, 2013

This is why I run in the dark.

I’m less than a week into my renewed attempt to run again.

I’m slow…but I don’t stop.

That could be the title of a really great autobiography…

“I’m slow…but I don’t stop.”

I’ll have to remember that one.

Clear and cool this morning, roosters crowing, not many cars out at 5:30 AM ( I slept in this morning…usually it’s around 5 when I run)…it was a nice morning to be out.

banging on it all day long

Posted on by August 24, 2013

We went up to Asheville last night to pick our daughter up at school.

This was the middle of one of her PE classes…something about “rhythmic aerobics”.

Kidding…this is the drum circle that goes on in Asheville every Friday night during the summer.

Bunch of freaking hippies.

“Freaking hippies”….what do they call that? A synonym?

Asheville is an interesting place.  I think that it’s gotten a little more self-consciously “interesting” since it’s become more recognized as being a “hip refuge”.

I guess everyone is nostalgic for “what was” 20 years ago.

Everything changes.

The community we live in is pretty rural.  Most of the people here have lived here for a lot of years.

To them, Asheville is where the Devil lives.

It sure is colorful and lively, though.

Anyway….this is the drum circle.  You really can’t imagine how powerful it is to hear all those drums coming together…it’s a pretty loud synchronized noise.

It’s a good thing to be around all that life and enthusiasm.

something to ask your insurance agent about

Posted on by August 23, 2013

I believe that ignorance really must be bliss.

It seems like the more I learn about, the more things I can add to my arsenal of “maybe I should worry about that?” lists.

Now here’s a video of a sinkhole in action.

Now, I don’t live in a swamp.  I don’t think I even live very close to a swamp.  There’s some funky ponds around here but that’s about as close to a swamp as we get.

But if it can happen there, it can happen anywhere.

So next time I’m talking insurance with my agent, I should maybe ask her something like, “OK…no floods.  I’ll cross that off my list….but let me ask you this….HOW ABOUT SINKHOLES?!!!”

This scene of the trees getting sucked down into the swamp was pretty bad.

It was kind of scary to see those big trees disappear like that.

Check this out if you want to see something really scary….

That was pretty scary and gross.  Maybe you shouldn’t watch Richard Dreyfuss fall into the water and get eaten by the piranhas.  It’s pretty gross.

I think it was a pretty dramatic sinkhole, though.

I don’t know…there’s always going to be something new to worry about.  And if it isn’t really new, it might be a slightly new twist on an old theme…like maybe the clown will be wearing a slightly orange nose instead of a red one.

Just when we get over our fear of clowns, up pops a new one with a new nose and a new attitude.

It could be pretty scary.

This sinkhole thing is pretty weird.

I blame FRACKING.

Freaking Fracking.