BLM

The church that I have called home for the last six and a half years was Trinity Baptist Church. I recently made a difficult decision to leave Trinity for various reasons, but I miss the people most definitely. Coincidentally, I was going through my CD and DVD files and backing up computer data when I came across a video I made about Trinity several years ago while I was enrolled in the English Education Post-Bac program at the U of M. We developed “Sense of Place” projects, and I focused on Trinity. I erased the video from my website to clear some space, but I think it really gets at the heart and warmth in residence at Trinity. God is definitely in this place.

Anyway, I thought I’d repost it and give this tribute a home:

Soul Food

For my birthday Josh Lewis got me a gift to pacify my dreams of being shot out of a cannon:

This summer, early June, I found myself having a hard time getting to sleep. This is very rare. I generally can sleep anytime anywhere. It wasn’t coffee that was keeping me awake. What was brewing were clear visions of being a human cannonball! It made sense. It’s the only thing I could think of that would closely imitate superhero flight(superheroes without wings, that is.). I pictured the long cannon aimed to shoot slightly over a small forest alongside a sandy beach. I, of course, would be shot out of the cannon at about 70 mph, glide over the tops of the trees(trees to maximize the feeling of speed), overshoot the beach and, like a flat stone, skip over the water until I slip into the water like a knife sliding under the skin of a fish. I often feel that if I can visualize it, I can do it.

Anyway, Josh caught wind of my lofty reverie and probably following the same path of research I trod he found that there are no weekend human cannonball retreats! No human cannonball classes! No human cannonball kits or Human Cannonball Guide for Idiots!! Nothing!!! Any possibility would involve extensive training and I’d probably have to follow around a circus for a few years before they’d let me near a barrel. Also and sadly, human cannonballs don’t really make their bang for their buck. Waka waka waka!

So. Josh looked elsewhere. He looked for a solution where I wouldn’t have to sell the home and car for the Big Top. Where he found it was right here in the Twin Cities (Well, actually, it was in Shakopee, but close enough; at least wouldn’t have to drive to Sarasota, Florida). His discovery was hiding in the not unlikeliest of places…Valley Fair!!! The ride: The Ripcord!!!!!!!

*scream in Doppler effect*

It can hold up to three people (I went it alone) and is basically an 18-story swing. It is situated as such:

Poles A and B both have wires permanently(one hopes) connected to a midpoint. This midpoint has some connecting gadgets that hook up to the harness. The harness is a big canvass diaper of sorts with a foot bar, which tightens all the straps when you step on it and keeps you from flailing your feet around. When you are strapped into your harness the operators lead you to a hydraulic lift. They bring you up to the midpoint hookup, attach you to the wires, then suddenly drop the floor out from under you. The operators seems to enjoy the shock produced from nearly smashing your face into the metal platform. At this point one might considering the idiocy of putting one’s life into the hands of highschoolers. Only, before you can express change of heart a wire from behind yanks you up to the top of Pole C. In less than a minute you are facing 18 stories of atmosphere. Looking down your eyes see chain-linked fence. A concrete sidewalk. Some grass. Your girlfriend with her phone camera pointed at you. Awed faces of children not yet 48″ tall. Go-karts. While your mind fills in bits of guts and blood trailing the pathway your are about swing over.

Somewhere behind you a loud speaker jolts, “Onetwothree.” This is where you are supposed to pull the ripcord, the ride’s namesake. Near your right armpit there’s a little red handle, not unlike something you’d find on a lawnmower. This, you pull. And it really does feel a little like suicide. The image of your body hanging over the chain-linked fence is still floating in your retina. Your brain is not so sure you won’t die: wasn’t there a horrible accident earlier this summer where a snapped wire sliced off the feet of a teenage girl on some thrill ride down South? But that’s why you’re up here, right? To tease Death? To dive into his rank expiration and come up again reborn, so to speak? You pull; you choose flight.

The first few seconds feel like when you are swinging too high on a swing set and the tension in the chains slackens. You are actually free falling those first moments. When you finally do feel your weight you experience one of the best underdogs of your life. It doesn’t quite feel like flying, or a least flying on your own. It’s more like what Samwise and Frodo must have felt soaring in the talons of the great eagles; you have no control really, but it’s still a great ride. Butterflies!!!

You aren’t supposed to spread your arms until you pass over the metal platform (I’m sure to minimize the severing of limbs). At this point, if you can ignore the feeling of gravity across your chest and crotch, there is that soundless sensation of soaring, much like an albatross catching thermals. It’s fairly calm after you reach zero-velocity in your first swing and your body is slowed by the air. I kind of felt like a caterpillar hanging.

I rode the Ripcord twice that night and got the chance to be more present during the first few moments. During my second descending swoop I understood that this super-swing experience must be fairly parrallel to the experience of getting shot out of a cannon. They’re just reversed arcs really. There’s the same taste of flight, but without the control. The inevitable return to a bottom. My desire to get shot out of a canon dissolved with the waning swing.

In it’s place grew a new fantasy, one only slightly less realistic and indubitably aeronautic: jet-packs!

I’ve had several leaks spring this summer in my ceiling. I live on the top floor and our roof is bad and will be fixed soon. It’s patched now so there shouldn’t be any more leaks in my unit, but the damage is done. I’ve poked several holes in my ceiling to route the water away from electrical lines and have plaster falling off in several areas. I’ll have to have someone in to check for mold one of these days, but until then I thought I’d try to kill whatever might be growing where I can reach it.

So, I took my spray container(originally used to discipline Pumpkin. Never really worked, but she does do this cute squinty thing when the nozzle is pointing in her direction. I digress.) and filled it with bleach. I then proceeded to cover the spots in question with a mist of this sterilizing liquid totally forgetting how dangerous it is to things you want to keep colorful. Say, like one’s bright red kitchen rug, or rich green bathroom towels, or even a painted wall? Even a falling mist of this stuff can ruin a perfectly wonderful towel in seconds. There are dried yellow riverbeds running down my green bathroom wall now. My scarlet rug has donned a blond bullet-hole. My towels look like an experimenting teenager.

Honestly, I tell myself this every time I use bleach: Forget not the powers contained beneath this blue cap; there’s a reason it hurts your eyes when you smell it. But invariably, two minutes later color is bleeding from where there was once solid vibrancy.

Bleach: the power of Apollo and Dionysus in one.

I need opinions. I just made a rough version of a new song I wrote, called Green. One version is solo, the other has the vocals doubled. I’m not sure which one I like better. Help me. Keep in mind also that I will be re-recording this (with stuff to fill in the instrumental break), so the levels will be mo’ better balanced and the doubled vocals mo’ better matching.

Green (potted)

Green (grafted)

Green
Come along with me
Climb the family tree
Kiss the bumblebee
And make me yours
All around us the sky is blooming red

Don’t you hear me now
Balance on the bough
Let’s not wast this row
And make sweet love
All around us the clouds are breaking up
What a night to find us making up

Something’s happening here
When I kiss you ear
Returned another year
Our green love
All around us the people build their towns
Still our sighing is the only sound

I’m not a big guy, so every once in a while some jerk singles me out and wants to fight me. This doesn’t happen very often, mind you, because people in their right mind, I think, generally get the sense I can hold my own in a scrap if pushed. Fortunately, it nearly never unfolds to that. There was one fight when I was in sixth grade with a bully that provoked me enough by breaking open the back of my head with his book-filled backpack (I still have the scar). I was sticking up for one of my best friends, Jordan, when this Goliath turned on me. This guy was probably nearly a foot taller than me; I was probably no more than 4′ 8″ at the time. After he smacked me with his bag I went a little ballistic, knocked him over and started jumping on him and punching him in the sides until the 8th grade safety patrol pulled me off of him. With the help of a peaceful record, a top student in my class, him known as a school bully, my parochial school uniform-white shirt covered in blood from my head wound, and several witnesses to retell the event, I was in the clear. He, on the other hand, got suspended. Not very often is justice so clearly served. Goliath continued to prove his stupidity by repeated efforts of attempting to anger me. By this point I understood he was mentally unstable and I even felt a little sorry for him. I ignored him, for the most part, or deflated him by acting unaffected by his jibes.

Nearly twenty years later, last night Jordan and I are sitting in the Metro on the way back from a tiring day walking the Mall and sacking several Smithsonian museums. I lean back against the train window and rest my hands on top of my head and my sandaled foot against one of the vertical poles installed in the middle of the aisle. My foot couldn’t have been more than 18 inches from the floor. Jordan and I zone out a little bit.

“Motherf**ker, get yer motherf**cking foot off the f**cking pole! Yer spreading yer germs all over the f**king place! People have to hold onto that f**king thing!”

I look for the intercom, from where I assume the voice is coming. I begin wondering how the train operator can even see me since Jordan and I are sitting in the middle of the train. Surely, that can’t be standard procedure when speaking to patrons on the DC metro! I look to Jordan.

“Yeah, I’m talkin’ to you motherf**ker! Don’t act all innocent like you don’t know what I’m talkin’about. You don’t want to mess with me, f**ker!”

I look over to the opposite side of the cabin near the end of our car and see a handlebar-mustached mouth moving from behind the checkerboard tinted plexiglass. I had noticed this man earlier, sitting in the corner holding onto his bike. He was just another passenger then.

“You weren’t born with the tools too mess with someone like me, little man!”

He starts getting up and walking toward me, spitting his insults. One part of my brain takes in the space around me, sees the pole in the aisle and I am ready to swing my body around it and bring my foot to this guy’s temple. Another part of my brain sees that this man is clearly off his rocker! Drunk or otherwise, he’s looking to fight. My hands are still relaxed on top of my head.

This man is big. Jordan is 6′ 2″ and this guy is definitely taller than him. He is also fat, his torso rolled into three parts. Easily twice my weight. I was confident that I could take him, and, as he told me later his plan of attack, I also had Jordan on the ready.

Hollywood Hogan moves closer. I look into his wide-set eyes and ask him why he is so angry. He’s a little stunned. By this point I had consciously set my foot down, not feeling this was a matter of defending my freedom, so his original fodder was sapped. He can tell that I am not intimidated and I let him know I honestly was not trying to offend him. I can see his fight deflating.

“Don’t act cutsie with me!” He sits down. “You know what I’m talkin’ about. You’re gonna act cutsie like you have no idea. Yeah, you know. You want to act cutsie and put on your eyeliner and lipstick. You don’t fool me.”

I tilt my head not unlike how Tim on BBC’s “The Office” cocks his head with a confused grin when Gareth says something particularly asinine.

“Do you know what ‘deadpan’ is?”

“Yeah.”

“What?”

“Showing no emotion…”

“Wrong! It’s pretending to not know what the f**k I’m talking about.”

I can see he’s only bark now and I really want to know this man’s back story. We have several more stops before we get off, so I cross over and introduce myself.

“I’m not going to shake yer f**kin’ hand. Go sit down! We’re not going to be friends. We’re not going to have a beer and sh*t. Go sit down!”

“You know, I never intended to make you angry?”

“The f**k you didn’t.”

“If you thought I was being disrespectful you…”

“F**k. If. If! You know what my father used to say about ‘if?'”

“What?”

“‘If the dog, then the rabbit.'”

“…Okay?”

“If a dog sees a rabbit go by the fence, but the dog has to take a piss what do you think the dog is gonna do?”

“Chase the rabbit?’

“There ya go.”

He is too far gone, so I sit back down. Our eyes meet a couple times and his eyes seem more vacuous than anything.

When the Wheatley station comes, he stands up with us and pulls his bike to the doors, clearly out of it. I lightly mention that it looks like we have the same stop. He absently looks at me, almost as if seeing me for the first time.

Jordan and I leave the train and we race up the world’s longest escalator holding our breaths until we burst out laughing at the top, reenacting the rigmarole, singing out our plan b‘s.

Part I

I just came from a reception that followed a performance at the Red Eye Theatre, here in Minneapolis. There were three highlight works: two of which made me laugh out loud(very rare for me in a space like this one, where I barely get through some performances by fantasizing about leaping over the patrons in front of me and maniacally bolting for the door screaming, “Free! I’m Free!!! Hahahahahahahahaha!”), and one beautiful, creepy, and nostalgic piece created and performed by fellow dancer and friend, Leslie Oneil.

Anyway, back to the post show performance.

They had one of the best spreads I have ever had at a reception like this! Cheese and meat, of course, with little slices of sour dough. But also little mini-chocolate covered cakes and wonderful cream-filled puffs that exploded in your mouth like little, chilled spore sacs. There were pickled things and steamed things and fermented things. Three choices of wine! There was also beer.

I had a Summit Pale Ale for the first time and it wasn’t bad. I have found an affinity for Rolling Rock and for a few others, one being this excellent Oatmeal Stout that has a dark chocolate aftertaste brewed at the Town Hall Brewery, but Summit had a new and interesting flavor that I could appreciate. Drinking beer is a fairly new thing for me. I’ve only been able to find it amiable in the last year or so. The buzz from it is nice, but the largest benefit, I’ve found, is how it creates social bonds. People you hardly know, before the beer even has a chance to chemically affect them, open their conversation to you like a twist off cap. It’s amazing to me. It’s totally cultural and beautiful. Maybe it’s the psychology of having somewhere to put your hands that puts people at ease, but it can’t only be that because for it to work both parties need something in front of them. And it’s primarily beer that has this queer bonding affect. You know, one of the guys. Old tavern chums. Barley brothers. You have history with someone when you share an ale.

That was happening tonight. A friend of mine at the show brought her boyfriend, whom I know only slightly. He’s from Brazil and his English is spotty, but we had beer. We had beer! So when his girlfriend left to talk with the starving artists, we had beer! Hey friend*clink*! We relaxed because we had little brown bottles filled with bitter liquid. I am so bad at small talk that I generally feel an awkward distance between my eyes and their eyes. But with a bottled brew I feel partly understood and partly understanding. And I am the king of nursing, so a beer can easily last me an hour, which can translate into working the house! Wine is similar, but with it comes also the pressure of intelligent conversation and pompousness. Not with beer! With beer, burping becomes part of the conversation!

So, we talked and maybe understood every other word the other said, but we felt at ease. We felt like brothers. We just came back from the hunt, the lake, the pooper, and we are trading stories of the one that got away!

Part II

So, I was walking home from the theatre(oh, a thing of beauty to live in the city) and saw a couple of guys that seemed a little freaked out. One of them, a guy I always see on Fridays cooking ribs out back, also lived next door to me. They were peering into his apartment complex when the guy I didn’t know saw me and said, “Hey, this dude looks like he could help us out.” I recognized my neighbor and walked up to them. They proceeded to tell me there was a flying rodent, a bat, no less, stuck in the hallway. Sure enough, I look in and I see a fluttering black shadow patrolling the first floor.

The guy I knew propped open the doors to leave a way for the bat to get out. This scared off his friend and my neighbor quickly retreated as well. I suddenly had a flashback of John Candy in The Great Outdoors as I snuck into the hallway. I had lost track of the bat and was half expecting it to dive down and cling to the back of my shirt while while Dan Akroyd pummels me with a tennis racket.

The hallway was lit with incandescent light at either ends, so when I saw the black, furry mammal coming at me it’s silhouette was huge and it’s flight pattern was totally unpredictable. I thought to myself, “What the heck did I think I was going to do when I got near it. I sure as heck was not going to catch it with my bare hands.” So I found the most logical form of defense/net I could find: a hallway rug. A dirty, light blue one, to be exact. So I made a swirling fan out of it thinking I could round the bat up, like a border collie, and force it out the door. I mean, they do sense sonically right? And if I spin the rug fast enough his little sound waves will bounce back at him and he’ll figure he’s about to hit a wall and turn back, right? Well, unfortunately he didn’t hear my wall and he didn’t turn back, so I ended up whipping him to the floor. No worries, he was all right. I know this because as I went to pick him up he took to the air and clipped right past my head, heading back the wrong way down the hallway.

By this time a shirtless Latino joined me in the hall and tried to swipe the bat down as it passed him. He missed and quizzically looked at me as if to say, “What was that? That wasn’t a bird!” He kindly let me take care of it as he pointed to the window screen the bat was grappled to. As I inched toward it I started wondering if bats know when someone is sneaking up on them. Although, he did seem pretty certain, nudged against the corner of the window frame, that he was invisible. He didn’t even flinch when I placed the rug over him. He just clung to it like baby blanket.

It was so tiny. Those wings made it look like Batman himself was swooping through corridor. I showed it to the Mexican guy as I passed him, his eyes widened, but then he followed me down the hallway as if he were my Sancho Panza. I took the bat outside and the two men hollered from across the street, “You got it? Awww, das right? You it, man. You it!” I set the bat on some mulch beside the building and it got right up and danced down First Ave.

Coming back into the building, I slipped the rug back in front of the door from which I confiscated it. The Mexican guy triumphantly came walking towards me, smiling, about ready to shake my hand. And as he moseyed past me he seemed so happy that I almost invited him over for a beer…

…but I didn’t. He didn’t have a shirt on. And I only had milk.

This is the opening sequence for Billabong’s “Odyssey.” It’s Mike Parsons surfing in Hawaii.