This is the dancing zombie that Blaire deserves for her mad directoral skills. Also because I just finished "28 weeks later" and am feeling very zombie-ish. Also because I was feeling like working with vector art again. Ironically, I just realized that tomorrow is halloween. Great. Now it's going to look like I made the zombie for halloween. Bother.

Oh, well. I guess if halloween doesn't affect me to make zombies and vampires and ghosts and witches, that it doesn't affect me to not make monsters of some sort.

It probably doesn't help that I found a very interesting book which explores the possibility of Neanderthal still being alive, looking at the historic, legendary, and contemporary tales of the Yeti, Sasquach, and a few other "wild men". Historically, there have been recorded cases of these "wild men"—rather, of the female, which is to say "wild women"—having children with humans. And said children are not (in the bits of data which the book has presented yet) more "stupid" than ordinary people are.

Which raises the question: Was Noah an Abominable Snow Man? Okay, I don't mean that we "evolved" in a positive sense, but maybe originally God gave us a whole lot more lattitude in the fur department—Which would explain how Jacob felt like Esau when he wore goat hair, and it would also explain that S4M, my ex-housemate, wasn't in fact hairy... I'm just freakishly hairless in the grand scheme of our genetic possibilities.

It would suggest that we are swimming in a rapidly disappearing gene-pool, and only by God's grace will we not be buck-toothed and extra-limbed in the next millenium.

Should the Bride of Christ see other men?

Why do Christians get married?

How can I, (who claims to love Christ with all of my heart, soul, mind, and strength) how can I love a girl as anything but a monk should?

In short, because I do love God with my entire being, I will gently but firmly refuse to fall in love with any girl, even if God tells me that "He can work it for my good." Why? Well, God can work anything for my good, anything at all. Just because He can work a relationship with a girl for my good, doesn't mean it's how I can love Him the best.

In fact, I don't think I should ever fall in love with anyone unless my Lover tells me to. Unless my Lover shows me so very clearly that my lover is what will draw me to His heart closer and faster, I don't need—I can't bear—a lover.

And I don't need to be afraid of missing out. The God who gave me this heartache for a lover will never give me a fragment less than perfection. He is my perfect Lover, after all. And at the moment that a girl is what I truly need, He'll put her in my life. And she'll be dang foxy.

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To be honest, though, sometimes my heart bleeds for a lover. I'd hate to patch a hole in my heart with a bandage that will only fester. I'm holding out, despite my self, for something better, and someone perfect.

The day is closed, as is my window. It is getting cooler, even colder, as October fades into history, falling leaves and blowing grass brown on the open pastures. I am thankful for the change, when the world loses the colours and the tones, and takes on the browns and the greys that make her respectable, if demure. She's lost the bright shocking colors of the spring and the summer, she's lost the smells and the sounds of young animals and late nights, and she is getting the wrinkled hands and the quiet manners of a gentle friend.

I suppose that I look back gratefully on the summer for its abundance of food—for the animals that spark through the pastures and the woods, the quiet ponds and the tree-ringe glades, but especially for the cows. Today was the first day this season that I've hayed the cows. It takes a while to properly move the bales from the haylot to the feedlot, and to remove the wrappings from each bale.

Leslie, the local travel agent, has a few horses that she keeps, and she's getting very excited about the price of hay this fall. She came into the coffee shop today, and sparkling her jewish eyes she announced that she was "shocked, just shocked" that really good Prairie hay was selling for fifty dollars per round bale, announcing that she didn't think they were worth a penny more than forty-five. "Besides," she added, "I'm going to convince somebody to take them to the pasture for a couple of dollars. That's how much I'd pay to have them deliver it thirty miles. It's not worth more than that." Leslie, honey, hay delivery's going to be a little bit more than pocket change.

It's fascinating just how well a person can be predicted when the only thing you know about them is their ethnicity. Jewish People are Smart with Money, the Ewells Don't Bathe, The Germans can Handle Their Beer, and Mexicans Love To Siesta. I've known many exceptions to all of these (except the second. I don't know any Ewells.) but the broad strokes have a bit of consistency to them. How much of this is genetic? How much of it is nurture?

That's a classic question fo psychology. How much nature? How much nurture? Which reminds me, I found a fascinating book at the college library booksale—It's called Introductory Psychology through Science Fiction. It presents various psychological concepts through the use of sci-fi. As I said, fascinating. I'm enjoying it right now.

Also on the subject of psych, I have a psych test tomorrow. I'd better go to sleep. Good night.

Short stories
A snapshot from my life

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Sunday, as I left church, I found that one of my tires was flat. I rode the rest of the day with Isaac, intending to fix it on Monday.

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Monday, waking up, planned to go into town with Isaac. It turns out he had a flat tire, too.

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Isaac's spare tire was inaccessible as long as his trailer hitch was attached. We spent a couple hours removing bits of the truck and putting them back together, then got his tire changed.

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There aren't sixteen inch wheels anywhere, except on my car.

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Fortunately, Selby's Tire Shop had a couple used tires that fit. I spent forty bucks, figuring that new tires would be just as quickly destroyed on the country roads I live on. Plus more expensive.

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I made a gas-cap out of a bit of metal and an old inner-tube. It's for a tractor.

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Noelle called me and offered me some pears. I gave her and her husband some of my kefir seed, so they can make kefir. It is very sour kefir. I hope the pears are not sour.

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I also saw Nick and Noelle (who I just mentioned) riding bikes up sixth street.

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Since Neewollah interfered with our bible study last Friday, we planned to do it on Monday. We didn't. I think we're taking a week or two off. I don't like Neewollah.

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I heard that they've trademarked Neewollah (Trademark!). I guess that means I'm not allowed to talk about it—especially in a negative way. I suppose I should face the consequences.

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Neewollah (Trademark!) spelled backwards is Halloween. It's the equivalent of a city fair/carnival.

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I wore my coveralls all day yesterday, then hung them up over my window last night. It kept the wind out of my room pretty well.

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I was rushed to get to school this morning, and didn't do an extra-credit assignment. Actually, two extra-credit assignments. Oh, well.

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We reviewed in Psychology today. We play a game like Jeopardy (Trademark!), except that we play in groups and not as individuals. I'm on the team with the smart kids, so we always win. (Props to a certain Bethany Manyo, M.K., P.K., etc.)

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Now I'm in Geography, were we just took a map quiz. It required me to know the country names in central and south america. I think I probably aced it. Thanks, Mom.

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And now we're studying South Asia. More later.

I am very tired tonight. I taste like limeade and stale cigars, asphalt and grease. There is sand in my hair and under my nails, and slowly it is creeping into my eyes. Also, my hand feels as though I knocked it into something.

I suddenly remember how to dance. It doesn't matter if you know the steps or not, not in dancing. What is so important is that you can speak silently a language that especially someone knows. And I feel sad that I am speaking silently a language that nobody understands because nobody can see me right now. I suppose that is what loneliness is.

One of my favorite cures for lonliness is falling asleep. There is awhile that isn't remembered, and then slowly waking, and knowing that I am going to the coffee shop or to the school, or perhaps to the post-office with a letter and a bill tucked under my arm. I think I will avoid my loneliness by sleeping, now. After all, I am very tired tonight.

And I feel the missing of things that I once had, and things that I have not had yet, but hope for.

A decade ago—no, more than that—I was much younger than I am now, a kid trying to find his place in the world. I remember in quiet whispers the pain of feeling lonely, of wanting to belong, and even now there are some days that I feel the old (and young) feelings and emotions—There was a great bright world out there, beautiful people, glistening glamour and the thousand red carpets in a Hollywood dedicated to its own red-carpeted parties.

I remember wishing that that was me, trying to figure out how to become someone, someone great and something classic. I never did, but that story was told later.

At the time, I didn't have to shave, I never seemed to sleep (not at night, anyway), and I was still wearing short pants. The internet was in only one-in-three homes, the Web was a booming thing, wild, untamed, uncertain. It was before the dot-com boom, or just at the same time, perhaps. Google wasn't a household word.

I remember learning to write web pages (on Geocities.com) from scratch with my best friend Justin, who always had a better eye for the beautiful design that was waiting to be discovered in raw code,

And in raw words, the beauty found within. I remember e-mailing bits and words of letters to a group of friends that started out as just Justin, but quickly grew to include much of the home school group that was capable fo abstract thought at the time—I remember long (sometimes embarrassing) questionnaires written by Krystal and Brittany—when the one was still a Koen, and the other a Sawyer.

I remember Clint's parody of Cake, and Al and Ju's parody of James Russel Lowell.

I remember trying my best to relate to a culture that I had never really been privy to—a culture that was at once pop-culture but also had a thick layer of something else, an older culture, the writings of the poets and epic battles from a thousand years ago. It would no more have surprised The Poetry Wars (which name we gave it while it was still warm on the ground) to find a rhythm and a meter from Shakespeare or the Preacher than to find political commentary pulled from suck.com or WIRED news.

Between the juvenile jabs and compassions that we shared, we discovered friends that we never could have imagined. And though we no longer e-mail twenty times in a day, I still keep quiet tabs on the other warriors.

I'll ask a question of a mutual friend about someone, getting answers back that seem completely irrelevant, but which answers are truly the breath upon a spark long-shielded, in hope that someday it will once more burst into a booming bonfire of bad rhymes and true friendship. Something red carpets can never inspire.

And so, in memory of the thing that once was, and as an echo of the brilliance that we once shared, I raise my glass and bow my head in honor of the poetry wars. We were young, we were classy.

Good night, my young friends. Good night.

Day number 40 preparing for the election. So far, candidates I support:

My Dad seems to be the most intelligent about the time he has spent following the coverage: He's grateful that he's missed the brouhaha.

Other than that, Bill, an old fart from the coffee shop (who's been in law—both applied and political—for the last fifty years or so. His comment? "Hell. This election is less d__m sensible than any I've ever seen. 'Course, I been in Oklahoma for awhile." I'm not sure what Oklahoma has to do with it, nor what hell has to do with it, either—though (regardless of intention) I'm not sure his diagnosis is too far wrong.

But why? Why is this election so thoroughly irrelevant?

Who cares?

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Some things I'd like to see addressed by the people running the political system:

1. Independent election of president and vice president (Front runner gets presidency, runner-up gets VP. I think that would put a nice screw into party politics.)
2. Political parties. After the GOP spent 150k on their VP's wardrobe, I wondered how many of the GOP members would feel comfortable with knowing that that's where their donations went. Of course, nobody's got a chance to be elected unless they kowtow to one party or another.
3. Secular humanism. Man being the measurement of everything. Society being the summum bonum. Would somebody just take it out of my misery?
4. Oh, also federal education, welfare, communications, housing, religion, economy, etc.

In fact, I think I'd be just as happy if we re-wrote the Articles of the Confederation and went back to that.

Random digressions:

I'm becoming a late-poster. I sit in my bed, my blankets pulled up close and my big fleece hoodie flopped over my hands, and I try to think of something important enough to write.

It's a comfortable place to be.

I guess, looking back at my day, it was the perfect day for Neewollah—my town's dyslexic answer to Halloween—it was cold, rainy, blustery, and altogether nasty. I enjoyed it immensely.

I find delicious the irony that now that I've redesigned this site to be a bit more classy, I can't think of anything classy to say. I blame it on video games, tacos, late-night hopes, and fuzzy dreams. Speaking of fuzzy, I think my cat got into the house (she's a barn-cat, not a housecat) and I haven't seen her since. I hope she gets out—I hope she already has, since she's got babies around here somewhere.

Babies. Cats. Newollah: There's a white-tiger exhibit in town for the hallowday, two great big cats. The gentleman in charge of them says that one of them should have a litter of kittens this weekend, which is pretty awesome. Incidently, the cats are from Kaufman, TX, a fact which made me very pleased inside of me.

Since I'm rather wandering anyway, I'm going to get to sleep. Have a good night.

Oh, somebody just e-mailed me this: Christians Threatened in India. I feel like responding to it, but I'm not going to tonight.

My heart is saddened by the Godlessness and the hopelessness of my country. Sometimes I want to grasp my neighbors by their shoulders and shake the truth into them, that any nation that builds itself without good feet will trip and fall on its face—that is to say, when God said "Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord," he wasn't deciding something out of the blue. It was unavoidably true: If a nation recognizes the infinite-personal Creator God as the source of all things, including law, society, the breath in our lungs, even the universe we inhabit, then the nation will be blessed as sure as gravity pulls things together. This becomes tearfully true to me when I look at my country in the throes of election, unsure of what is best for the nation.

I think I figured it out: If a nation follows Enlightenment thinking (think Thomas Jefferson) which says that Man is the measure of all things, then that nation will destroy Man because it has an improper understanding of the purpose behind the universe and the way that the Cosmos is designed. If a nation follows Christ's thinking, which says that God is the measure of all things, from which all things come and for whom all things are created, then Man will be saved because he finally understands his own purpose.

And then, as I consider that, I realize that it doesn't matter if the whole nation understands that or not—it doesn't matter who gets elected to office, whether the nation remains vaguely capitalistic, republican, democratic, or communist or even whether the United States of America continues to exist—what matters is that I understand my own relationship to God. I need to understand that I was created by God, not as the greatest thing ever but as His creature. It becomes my right and responsibility to make God the boss of me, because that is where He is best praised and thus where I am most praiseworthy.

Talk about a lift of spirit! Suddenly, I'm not nearly as concerned about the election!

How serious can it be?

Okay, the truth is that I created this particular running pair, but at the moment I think that they would be far better than either of the current front-runners. Also, I decided that I wouldn't vote for Zombie after I realized that zombies aren't technically alive, and therefore can't technically hold office. Also, I realized that "zombie" is a class of thing, and not the proper name for a thing.