This is not a complaint, not a lament. This is not a request of you. This is not my way of getting you to bring a bottle of whiskey and to say, “Let us go to a porch to heal.” This is not even my way of teaching myself to work toward improvement. This is just what’s real in the world.

It’s not an uncommon reality for those who consider themselves artists. Creative depression is well documented, and it would be easy for me to be pleased with this diagnosis. I am unhappy, therefore I am roiling with genius, and it is that roil that makes me unhappy because I have not yet unfurled it. That also is not what I mean.

What I mean is unburdened by subtext. I am simply unhappy. Why? Well, I could count the causes of my unhappiness. I could list for you a series of stressors, and perhaps we could become friends when you feel my unhappiness and grow a step closer. Perhaps you would say, “I, too, am unhappy,” and you could list your series of stressors, and we could mutually solve a few, and I could pour the whiskey for the ones we could not solve, and when we go back into our respective houses, we would feel happy.

But that would be untrue. It is Lent, and we must be unhappy.

Lent is pain. It’s pain that cannot, must not result in anything but unhappiness because Lent is about our separation from and longing for God. How can we be happy without Him? That list of stressors does not explain my unhappiness; it explains discomfort like the pea for the princess. Irritating, but so easily eliminated. I wish the gap of sin could be so quickly bridged.

But in this life it can’t. And this is why I’m unhappy. Rather, this is why I’m embarrassed to be unhappy. I don’t want to be in sin. I want to fix all my sin. But it’s my failure at that that causes my unhappiness. My unhappiness is because I’m humiliatingly unable to be beyond Lent, to be beyond a period of preparation and submission for resurrection and ascension. My humiliation is because I am man and not God. And because I am man and not God, I cannot create (or have) happiness.

So I admit unhappiness. I admit that I am not well, that I am not a good man, that I am not happy in the world. Nor should I be. It’s a bad, bad, bad, bad world, and to be pleased in it — no matter all its wonders — is a lie.

There is defiance in saying, “I am unhappy.” The world and the people in it, they all want us to be happy. They point to beauty, to kindness, to random acts of justice, and they say, “Here is a happy place.” And while we can find joy in rainbows, love notes, and stories with pleasant endings, these are not even shadows of the kingdom of God. Some would have us believe such events are glimpses of the divine. They are offended when we say otherwise because that accuses them of the arrogance of wanting to make heaven on earth.

Thus far, no one has succeeded. Big surprise. So we remain unhappy. We feel content for an hour or so, we have joy sometimes, we even get an occasional sniff of the divine. But compared to the kingdom? We are unhappy. And there should be nothing noticeable about saying it.

The strictures of Lent — those ascetic challenges that I so pride myself in meeting — are designed to displease us. Not to make us able to decline a gluttonous meal and feel stronger in our hearts, but to make us more aware of how desolately apart we are from God’s true creation. This split is all of earth’s pain. This split pains me because it needs both God and man to join worlds together, and I am only the latter.

As the latter, I am unhappy. I will remain unhappy here, yes, but I am, oddly, happier when I admit my unhappiness, because I know happiness will be brought to me when the pain — symbolic and also practiced — is overcome at Easter.

I’d been unprepared. I’d driven up, shown up, run around, worn myself down, and then returned to Ohio. I wished I’d put better verbs into that litany.

It was an embarrassing realization, although I wasn’t sure before whom to be embarrassed. Probably not most of the AWP attendees (despite certain awkward moments such as, say, misintroducing an author’s book’s title). My coeditors? But we’d all talked through our mutual guilt about being unready. God? Well, always.

Turned out, I was in A Conference Carol, and I was facing the Ghost of Christoffer Past. “You could have had that subscriber,” it said, shaking its chains at me, or, “You could have been wittier with that panel presenter you so loved.” The barren Hoosier landscape left me alone with these regrets — regrets I’d sensed but had not yet confronted. So I did, and how strange I felt.

How comfortable I felt! There was, in fact, no confrontation, because that burbling was nothing more than how I generally treat myself: judgment of Christoffer Past. And this is why, moving past Indianapolis into the lower half of Indiana As if there’s a difference to notice, I leapt from misery to ecstasy. I cranked up the song “New Frontier” (a live version) and played it four times straight. I sang and thought about raising my head through the sunroof.

One of the reasons I love Lent is that I’m accustomed to sin and shame. I operate as a continual judge, an internal ombudsman pointing out in painfully delightful detail even the smallest missteps, everything from how I didn’t quite shake that writer’s hand squarely to when I could have asked an insightful question after that panel. And I am sure to tell me all the results those failures prevented: self-serving ones, self-edifying ones, self-irrelevant ones, self-loathing ones. Introspection on meth. Yes, the contemplative side of Lent is not foreign to me.

I am not a stranger in this strange land, not an alien in these forty days, for Lent is outer spaceWant a real fast? Try giving up air.. And this is my toughest problem. How does a man who likes wearing sackcloth show real penitence? The story of Lent isn’t just somber thinking, quiet reflections each morning, meatless Fridays. The story is moving from the profanity of the ordinaryThe individual ordinary, the normality. to the sacredness of the wholly, holy other. And I haven’t been moving that dynamically.

My travel happiness wore off as I approached Cincinnati, largely on account of the E in caffeine. Plus sadness, which also has two Es and compounded the unpleasantness (2 Es) as I passed Shelbyville (again, 2 Es, plus a casino). It was a hard time, for obvious physical rationale, but it was a hard time for more difficult rationale as well, and I don’t yet know what those are.

There’s an atmosphere between the reception of mistakes and the turning from them. I’d thought that imagining a different reality — as I did so well with the Ghost of Christoffer Past — and liking that reality was the essence of change, but that’s merely practical and still on the ground. Where’s the dare?

In Arizona is a crater. Astronauts trained in it for the dusty terrain. I remember going there and finding it odd. Odd because it was a hole in the earth, and also odd because I could buy snow globes with lacquered scorpions. It was safely odd, and that’s how I’ve mis-experienced Lent for so long — bizarreness that I liked but did not find unsettling.

You want unsettling? Really. Go to Nicaragua. Go to the Parc Nacional Volcan Masaya. Learn that its last eruption was one of the largest ever. Ride in a “Jeep” up the volcanic cone. Get out and walk on the cinders. You’re supposed to wear a gas mask. There is one bar to hold at the edge. See the earth, the glowing core. Lean.

And this wisdom I tended while I lined up as — bizarrely — the favorite at my school’s indoor invitational meet. I was to get out in front, set a moderate pace for the first lap, let a few pass me on the 200m curve, sit in 4th for a bit, break out and zip ahead at 250m to go, and finish in glorious first. And exactly what happened at the starter’s gun was that the two guys on either side of me sprinted out like, well, sprinters, made a wall in front of me, and peppered me with elbows for the first half of the race as I stubbornly tried to fight through them so as to follow my perfect strategy. I did not finish in glorious first, and I woke up the next day with many bruisesMuscles and pride..

I might be explaining that history as a way of justifying my failureI mean, um, my sage decision. to prepare any real Lenten resolutions. But I hope this anarchic approach is a really long-awaited spiritual earnestness, admitting that the way I’ve tried to craft my soul has been arrogant, myopic, and, most importantly, stunting.

There was an interesting showdown a Sunday ago, and it was visible only on Twitter. I saw people talking about the Oscars, and I saw people talking about the NBA All-Star game. The two viewing experiences were a strange yin-yang of expected and unexpected. On the one hand, the Oscars have an unexpected outcome. Who will win? Who should win? We watch in hopes of being surprisedThat, and hoping to mock celebrity fashion so that we can feel cooler. The All-Star game, however, is very expected: showing off without really playing the game. I chose the easy.

It was enjoyable for the first quarter or so, then it got a little repetitive, and my mind wandered. I thought about the Oscars and how their (seemingly interminable) outcomes aren’t unexpected at all. You were already ready to be angry/ecstatic if FILM X or PERSON A won this or that. The only question was, which emotion was to be elicited? Regardless, you had probably imagined and experienced both previously. The Oscars, in your heart, had happened long ago.

So, having suitably delighted myself by coming up with a convoluted idea, I was ready for more pointless sports. Then an odd thing happened in the fourth quarter. The score became valued and desired. Actual plays were run. The word defense was spoken. The East closed the gap, seemed posed to win. I wondered how that might be. But I more wondered what on earth was going on, this strange approach to an All-Star game, and what it said about everyone involved. They were saying, “This story, no matter what you expected, will be concluded our way.”

Lent is a story we know. We have certain expectations. Passion plays and Gospel tales and the days and nights of fasting. Right? But no, right? Obviously I’m going to say, “Wrong, bozo,” and play that Price is Right horn of failure.

Which means this is the weird/frustrating thing — Lent doesn’t change. We’re stupid if we think it does. We’re stupid to think that this Lent is different from any other Lent. It’s the same story, stupid. The All-Star game? Still ended up fairly stupidly, players making show-off mistakes for the sake of entertainment. My track meet? Of course I got boxed in and elbowed. That happened every stupid race.

But in a different way every time. Where the Oscars hide what/why/how FILM X or PERSON A won this or that, I was able to watch exactly why and how the East’s comeback fizzledAnother Lebron James 4th quarter failure..

Lent is sports because it’s the same rules every time and even the same outcome — not just about Jesus, but about ourselves. We’re always already thinking either “Hooray, I’m saved!” or “Weep, I’m sinning.” We’ve already won and/or lost. “And the Oscar goes to…” is far from the point, because we’ve already awarded it. Watching Lebron throw a horrid pass and throw the game away — that’s the story to consider, not because it meant the West won, but because of what it revealed about his character in the drama.

Easter is coming, I’m told. The kingdom of God is at hand, I’m told. I’m told what’s going to happen. I know how it will be when, on Easter morn, I’m either ashamed about the angry thoughts I continue to harbor, the lazy approach I’ve taken to my writing i.e. this was planned to be a weekly Wednesday thing — obviously I didn’t learn my lesson from track.; or, I’m humbly pleased that I’ve allowed Lent to shape me a little better.

It’s the training, of course, that tells the story, the laps before the finish line can even be considered. The race? It only brings to light what was prepared in the unseen time before — and how wisely or unwisely, how stubbornly or humbly, that preparation is used. The end is near, or it is far. It’s not the point. It’s how you play the game.

If you ever watch a half-mile race, you wouldn’t care at all unless you knew that they’d be done after two laps. Without the rules, who could say what’s worthwhile running out there?

Once, in a pointless 3 mile race, I decided to have some fun and win the first mile. I did. I probably looked amazing. I wound up 100th. The sport of Lent is finding the true triumph.

So what was vexing this morning as I started the car in the sunlight, already bothered that my traditional Ash Wednesday gray shirt was missing buttonsAlthough rent raiment is apt., was what I heard on the classical station, expecting a cello sarabande or an oboe adagio or, best yet, some dreary Chopin, perhaps even his funeral dirge. Instead, I was greeted by the most un-Ash Wednesday song I could imagine — Mendelssohn’s violin concerto. Mendelssohn! He of the wedding march! The violin! Syruped in vibrato and glissando, notes spiraling up and up like a sparrow chirping after snapping the juiciest bug from the dew. Odious joy.

I began to cry. I have cried before to Mendelssohn, and to this very piece which, despite being in E minor, has always struck me as obliquely triumphant. It’s unsettling — most especially midway through the opening movement when the violinist plays alone, darting up and down the entire range of her instrument with held notes, fluttery tremolos, and striking double- and triple-stops — and then astonishing. You’re certain there are two, maybe three violins. The tempo is fast enough to make you feel some pity for the violinist and her fingers, so you applaud all the more when she drops down her bow after drawing out the final low E.

You suspect it was a prank from ol’ Felix, the shifts from gentle repeated notes to expansive pyramidic runs and back to tranquility again, the entropy rising and falling unceasingly as if on a trampoline. You suspect Mendelssohn got away with one here, that he tricked you into thinking this was something so much more larger than a virtuoso playing difficult-but-not-that-inventive-melodies over a fairly simple score. He made it sound like all the music in the world.

It’s not a piece that I can listen to without feeling expanded, enlarged. So I cried. When we are pushed outward, there are pains.

I arrived at the Ash Wednesday service red-eyed and suitably distraught. It was five before nine, and I was glad for a few minutes to cleanse myself of the inappropriately upbeat start to such a day as this. But I walked in to hear the priest proclaim, “Rise and sing!” I had had the wrong time; I had missed the ashes; I was there only for the celebration of the Eucharist. Someone even smiled at me.

I gave up. I have been wrong to view Lent as a time of yummy suffering and splendid self-restraint. For Lent comes from the Old English lencten, which was also used as the word for how, as winter dwindles and spring gains, the days grow, extend, lengthen. It’s high irony, then, that our first thought of Lent is about lessening, trimming in order to show our dedication and our faith. But the aim of pruning must be not the pleasure of snipping off branches and watching them pile somberly beneath the bush; it must be for increase, growth.

For Lent, I am giving up nothing. Sure, I — even in my affinity for the ascetic — have my excesses. But this year, for once and for good, I, my spirit mimicking the suntime, am lengthening.

Oh, and after the Mass, I learned I was wrong that Mendelssohn was the most un-Ash Wednesday song imaginable. Turning on the car, I was hit by the aggressively happy arpeggios of Carmen — and what is less austere than operaAn opera about a fiery gypsy, a lovehurt soldier, and a Spanish bullfighter, I suppose.? “I get it already,” I said as I drove out of the parking lot.

It’s going to be a long Lent. Hallelujah, I guess. I’ll get there some day.

How did this happen? I read the Advent stories, heard the prophets’ calls: “The kingdom of God is at hand,” “Prepare ye the way of the Lord.” The Christman cometh! And he caught me naked as Adam. No wonder the shepherds wore their dusty cloaks; the magi, their oldest robes.

Even mom and dad swaddled the child, forced him into our costume. Some irony: the one who could live nakedly without shame — who died nakedly without shame — was thrust into clothing. Why? Are we so vainly insecure that we can’t cope with being exposed? That, when confronted by the bare reality of fragile humanity, we put fabric between it and our eyes? We are all Peter, weakly denying that we are but dust.

This is not about nudism. This is about seeing the short truth of our efforts to make ourselves and our world: not enough.

On Christmas I wear wrinkled pants and a broken heart. So does earth. Both will continue. Salvation will arrive another day, an ordained day, no matter what I do or how I dress.

I have worn my humanity arrogantly and childishly, believing it to have power beyond what it was made to have. But there was born a man who tells his father, our father, to look beyond the wretched ways I array my life. Gracefully, I may wear the perfect nakedness of a son of man — shedding the trappings of sin, denuding my soul, and making me clean in a borrowed birthday suit.

I’ve always wondered where Jesus went while he was dead. Or rather, where his soul went, what it did and saw. Popular tradition says it went to hell for a spell, a three day/two night vacation to beat up on Satan. A fun thought that fits with the notion of his being separated from God so as to suffer the weight of our sins, although I struggle with the concept of only temporarily participating in an afterlife that’s supposedly eternal and timeless.

The problem in these cogitations is that I rarely feel Easter. I get so distracted along the way, preferring to dwell on theological curiosities, or to tend the world’s practical demands, or, most grievously, to remain in fasting and repentance. I’d rather continue scourging myself in hopes that, given enough time, I can preclude the need for a dying and rising savior. By Holy Saturday I find myself wishing today were a day for Jesus to come out of his tomb, see his shadow, and proclaim six more weeks of dark, delicious Lent.

I’m never ready to celebrate Easter, never satisfied with my penitence. It is far easier to continue to lament my sin than to rise and leave it behind. It is easier to try to redo what Christ already did than to go forth and do what I was made to do. It is easier to try to not die than it is to live, to really live, to live so abundantly that death is ultimately nothing but a victory.

I have a fully invented and scripturally baseless idea of where Jesus went while he was dead. Released by his patient sacrifice, he went straight to the hearts of all who knew him, rejoining them in their souls. No wonder so few went to the tomb; they were ashamed to be caught mourning while he was triumphing. They didn’t want him to see their failure to understand that the time for living had finally come.

He is risen. And we are risen whether we like it or not.

As I glided away, I imagined what that man must have said to his wife before stepping out. Honey, I’m going for a run. At which I laughed: “run” being the last word I would have used to describe his activity. Any runner will be quick to help you differentiate between running and anything else (labeled scornfully as jogging). It’s easy: we runners are far more adept at our form of bipedal locomotion than joggers. We seem to float down the sidewalk, whereas joggers creep. We are held by impeccable balance, whereas joggers totter. We, with elegant form and a quick cadence, cover vast swaths of land between each footfall, whereas joggers shuffle and slog and toddle along. In short, we are good.

Yet while being good at running, I enjoyed a boastful thought that was far from good, which brings up the big difficulty of such a little word. The Oxford English Dictionary lists twenty different meanings (not including four idiomatic phrases) for good’s adjectival form, and each meaning has several variations of usage. As has already been seen. Earlier in this paragraph, good denotes morality. In the previous paragraph, it denotes skill. And in the opening paragraph, pleasure, which is form eleven in the OED‘s catalog and is the form that fuels the old joke regarding today: “How good can it be if that guy gets killed?” And thus God, according to such linguistics, is not good.

Well, sometimes God isn’t good. He does not always give pleasure, and life is not a bowl of cherries. Good Friday is sometimes not good, especially not when one is fasting, trying to focus on spiritual things rather than food, and one drives past a steaming food truck, receives a package of Easter candy from one’s parents, and has a USDA prime steak in the refrigerator. Not good.

Silly wordplay, that — for anyone can see that the goodness in such a situation refers to the moral form of the word. It is very good for me to know that I could, in under twenty minutes, be eating a well-seasoned medium rare steak (or, in even less time, be halfway through a chocolate bunny — but to choose otherwise. Good in two senses, in fact, for there is some skill involved in not (yet) tearing into the Peeps and Whoppers.

But what’s the good in sacrificing your only son? Certain progressive theologiansLike, say, pastors of megachurches near Grand Rapids, MI. would say there’s no good at all in it and that to celebrate the macabre passion of this day is a misguided and barbaric delight in bloodsport. Good Friday is not good, they would say. I see the point. Do we want a God who requires death before life? Do we want a God who chooses to make a way to him paved by the flesh of his own? Is that a good loyalty to have?

It’s not entirely pleasurable, I know that; it’s rather frightful and demanding; it certainly engenders a fear of GodThe notion of the fear of God seems to indicate how poorly some atheists really get religion. If God is to be feared — and most Abrahamic religions would say so — that’s hardly the fairytale told for comfort some atheists haughtily deride.. It doesn’t even seem skillful, for couldn’t a more inventive God have come up with a kinder method for atonement? Like throwing a pebble into a pond for each sin? (There go the oceans.)

But morally — is this a good day? Can anything good come out of collective murder? Collective murder is the implication, the indictment, of Good Friday. By our sin we have slain him, and we are rightly ashamed of it and driven toward penitence. But we benefit from it and use it for our own good (meaning pleasure). That does seem twisted.

I will probably never carry a cross or be nailed to its planks. I doubt I’ll die in anything near martyrdom. Part of this is the blessing of living in 21st century America; part of it is pure statistics; part of it is my own avoidance of physical peril. So I don’t know everything about sacrifice, and I’m about to get presumptuous. But it’s possible — just possible — that dying brutally can be good for a man (and for mankind), and that our fright of the cross comes primarily from pridefully clinging to our flesh. Perhaps we think that a mercy killing is evil only because we aren’t humble enough to understand that the kingdom of God is greater than the kingdom of earth that God built so fragilely on sinew and wrapped so vulnerably in skin.

Over the course of Lent I have denied, like Peter, the opportunity to sacrifice in small ways, and only on my foodless Fridays have I been able to experience a different denial: the denial of desire, the same denial Christ practiced for forty consecutive days. He was a man, yes, but he was a better man than any of us, and who are we to think we know what was ultimately good for him? If anyone was born to be killed, it was he, the lamb. I don’t know anything about that.

Can you see what I’m trying to say? I’m not writing too good (skill, pleasure, maybe moral) right now, and it’s killing me because all these thoughts were so well-formed while I was running — yes, running, not jogging — through a fine rain. In those moments, my feet lightly brushing the ground in a flawless rhythm, everything bad was made good, and I understood. But I can’t convey it perfectly to you, just as I can’t convey the multitudinous feeling of goodness. Many would call today’s forty-five degree drizzle miserable; many would consider a tempo run to be the truest form of pain; many would say my oxygen-deprived brain was subhuman. But I was good then, and it wasn’t all that long ago. I was hurting, but I was good, and I knew what was skill-good and what was not pleasure-good and they were one and the same: running.

It is a small word in a large world, but it trips us up. I often don’t know what is good. I mean really know, because if I knew I would do it and not let cravings (like my growing hunger for that steak) overrule real spiritual desire: the desire for the moral good, which is the good that is greater than other forms of good. Whenever we talk about what is good (pleasure, skill, or moral), we are, by association, describing God, and that is a dangerous endeavor. God is good by definition, and what God does is good by definition, and it’s a sin of the highest order to reverse that and try to map our ideas of good onto God. I think that it’s not good — not moral and certainly not pleasurable — to stick nails through someone’s wrists into old trees and let him hang there until he dies, but that’s largely because my understanding of good is limited to this world, and I have no idea what is good in God’s kingdom.

The frames are entirely different. Running, to me, is pleasure-good partly because I’m skill-good at it, but that’s not the case for everyone, and often it’s not immediately pleasure-good even for me. But later it is, and I know that as I pound through the final wheezing mile. We’re good at seeing this sort of relativity, mostly because physical frames (size, age, shoes) can clearly show who’s a runner and who isn’t, and temporal/causal frames show us that other forms of good can and often do result from the sacrifice of pleasure-good. But this isn’t as easy when looking from the frame of this world to the frame of God, because God’s is a frame that is defined only on the outside: we know mostly what God is not.

But we also know, from the ways God has revealed good (in so many forms) in this world — the wonderfully marbled steak awaiting the breaking of my fast, what joy I receive from pursuing my vocation and becoming the man I was made to be, running in the rain — that what is good to God must be very good indeed.

It was hard for me to accept that that old man’s running was good. In my frame, he was everything that good running was not, from absurd apparel to ridiculous form. But who am I to know? He may have been eighty-five, a stroke survivor, and finishing a twenty mile outing. It was a small span I saw of his story, as this earth we see is a very small span of God’s story. Let us know that what he reveals is good and ever will be.

Yes, I do like Ash Wednesday. Eager to get my forehead smudgedWould it be a weak, wispy smudge? Or a firm, fully four-pointed brand? The anticipation!, I flipped through my dress shirts for the drabbest, grayest one. I laid out my charcoal suit pants. I tugged up my blackest socks, and I ate poorly to ensure a properly sullen demeanor. Ah, this splendid time of year when death is in the air.

We, alive, have one more promise: we will find life. We are given a life knowing we might yet find a greater life. If we seek, if we seek with all our heartJeremiah 29:13, we will find it.

This is the promise of Lent. All throughout this time of repeated repenting, of waiting for absolution, of sacrificing, we ultimately know that, practically, nothing comes of it. Lent deals in pain, in punishment, in loss, in death.

And yet it deals — if we are willing, if we wait and let it — in inexplicable life again. But we must seek with an unrelenting heart, holding back nothing, yielding all, giving everything. The truth of the quest demands acceptance of the reality of the program: to surrender the very life we have in order to receive the greater life we are merely promised.

I find it impossible to give up everything. What a life I have! I have a job, I have a love, I have a body, I have so much joy, so many outlets for delight. The call to fast seems extreme — I must surrender this? Please, Lord, I’m not ready.

Waiting for the imposition of ashes tonight, I looked down at my belovedly morose outfit. In my shirt is a tear, and its cuffs are thinning. I saw chalk spots on my pants. My face itched; I hadn’t shaved. What kind of penitent comes so disrespectfully? Lord, I’m not ready. I cannot surrender anything now. Please, wait until I can prepare myself. But now? I would rather die.

And such is the point. Here we have only a little life, whereas all life is promised later. Here is dust, and only dust will come of this life if I cling to it. Even if I maximize it, even if I translate it into stunning beauty and joy, still it is only a life formed of this earth, hardly a thing worth holding out against the eternal, the indissoluble living beyond this dirt-based realm.

It has become popular to shun the surrender of things. What good does that do, ask the pragmatists; shouldn’t you instead add something to your life? Instead of stopping something trivial, why not start something beneficial? These are questions to which there can be no objection. Of course we should always start beneficent deeds; we should always add acts of charity to our routines.

But I cringe to see basic fasting get discarded. Did not Jesus fast (for forty days, notably) before beginning his public ministry, including the many miracles and reforms he wrought? Perhaps, before the fast, he was not ready. Did not Jesus say there would come a time for fasting? Is not Lent that time?

I support every Lenten resolution (well, maybe excepting one friend’s resolution to, daily, cause a person to break his/her resolution), but I worry when resolutions become increasingly practical and decreasingly spiritual, as though social justice has no relation to internal justice. As Henri Nouwen wrotein The Wounded Healer, “No mystic can prevent himself from becoming a social critic, since in self-reflection he will discover the roots of a sick society.” But now the discipline of denial is dying.

The discipline of denial is dying. It is a practice in remembering that we are dust, and to dust we shall return. When I deny myself throughout Lent, I find myself humbled. How weak I am to struggle with such small physical surrenders. How shabby I am to fail to come to the Lord’s house in anything better than rags that suit my vain enjoyment of dour rituals. And still I cling to this little life as if I know so well how to run it. Wait, Lord, until I am ready to release it. Then, take it.

No! Even now, God calls — even now, God insists — especially now, in your overworn clothes and underwashed face — even now, return with fasting.Joel 2:12

And I remember I am not just blood, nerve, fiber, hair, air, and dust. I remember I am spirit, too, and more than a life designed for death. I remember the eternal, impractical promise: all the life I can want, if only I will leave mine and seek a Kingdom instead. The rest will be added later — including the impulse for charity, the good works and world-improving deeds — but first I must die.

And the cats! They are everywhere. Hessler should have a checkpoint only to ensure that feline allergists avoid what would be a den of lions to their sinuses. Tabbies and bobtails and blotchy black-and-whites roam from porch to sidewalk to road to tree lawn to anywhere they wish. Try, see if you can walk the single block without being brushed by a tail. Slink through, I dare you, without being espied and nuzzled by olive eyes and a button nose. Do not take this route after buying salmon.

I used to go out of my way to walk down Hessler. At least on the way back from class. When I was late, I had to avoid Hessler, lest a marmalade furrpuff delay my arrival. Perhaps I had no need for fear; perhaps professors knew of the trap, and would have forgiven me upon seeing slathers of orange and cream fur upon my sleeves. “Ah, so Rudi’s on the prowl today?” they would’ve said, as the other students nodded and smiled.

I liked Cleveland and I liked Ohio. The Heart of it All™ raised me well, though it is a flawed place, full of bigotry and resentment. If you want to witness mob justice, spit on a Ford in Toledo. If you want to hear racism, bring up the forty-fourth president in Dayton. But these, though inexcusable, are only hisses from frightened kittens whose protective tom has vanished. If you talk to them, if you listen to them, the purrs will come.

There are any number of stories about the excessive politeness of Ohioans. I’ve been apologized to by a spice lady because she didn’t notice me within five seconds of my browsing smoked salts and dried herbs. I’ve been given fig gelato because they remembered that, last time I was there, my burger was a little overcooked. I’ve swapped dubious homebrewed beer for fine pancetta and mozzarella di bufala. And once, when Zorro, my childhood cat (a wiry thing we rescued from the street), ran off, we found him again because someone across town (Zorro had hopped into then out of a moving truck) noticed him and put bowls of milk and Fancy Feast out so he could nibble even if he never stuck around or let them pet him.

Zorro, like many Ohioans, was willing to get his kicks from unsavory sources.

I don’t live in Ohio anymore. I don’t even live in a state. I live in a district that gladly calls itself a seat of power and the center of the free world and other abstract appellations. It is a strange, constructed thing, and no one really lives here. They stop by for awhile, then, well, I don’t know. Most of these areligious pilgrims vigorously take up the three-starred flag and wave it around, but I’ve never seen much DC pride anywhere else. I’m pretty sure this local fervor is mostly to pat themselves on the back for being in a supposedly important place where I’ll (hopefully) never live again.

Apart from “Taxation Without Representation” (which is absurdly true, but a separate issue), the motto of this place is probably “Work Hard, Play Hard.” It fits because most of this town does work hard. The legions of nonprofiteers and advocates toil tirelessly for assorted causes, and I have good reason to believe that they (and even some of the Hill staffers) are earnestly invested in bettering this nation, this world. I have talked to a cross-section of this populace, and they want mostly to fix a particular problem of today’s existence.

There are asshats, of course, and they tend to dwell on K Street, the epicenter for bombastic toolholes (read: law firms and lobbyists). These, when you meet them at a party, clearly hinge the entire conversation on your answer to, “So, what do you do?” It has come time to be categorized: are you a housecat, a pussy? Or are you a tiger? I — a strange academic, a Pallas’s catInsufferably adorable videos of Pallas’s kittens — also known as manuls — can be found on youtube via the WildlifeHeritage channel., a not-big but not-domestic — am fortunate to have a response that makes the asker suddenly need a refill, or feel full-bladdered, or hypnotically wander away in search of the nearest source of political relevance, Nosferatu for new blood.

Alas, this peripatetic method of socializing — this is the “play hard,” the aggressive after-hours quest to further their interests — means that they, like a rabid cat, infect a multitude of those who, unlike this fortunate scribe, must play in the games of government. So even the noble-hearted become affixed on practical, personal benefits. Can you help me? You cannot. Fare thee well.

It plays out subtly, too. The elitism of power relationships trickles down to leisure. Do you like author X? Yes? Have you read book M? What did you think? Really? I thought it had its lapses. And now you are lowered on the taste totem. You have been Districted.

And it trickles out to everywhere. Grocery stores slather themselves in anti-theft signs, insistent in reminding you that they are watching and can punish you. Waiters and clerks decide that they will serve you on their schedule (unless you flash an important badge). I’ve heard stories of runaway cats being claimed and kept; finders keepers here.

KJ, our fiercest feline ever, would stake her claim beneath any object of furniture. Extracting her required oven mitts.

Yes, there are cats in DC, too. I hear them more than I see them. At night I notice a sudden rustle of a bush as I walk by. In the day I see a blur of black as something skitters away. They are very afraid here, because, to them, I am a large man, and why wouldn’t they fear my hands? Except sometimes they don’t. Each assesses me. “This one,” a Georgetown Abyssinian thinks, “whose wallet barely bulges his slacks. Ha.” Or the Dupont manx: “Uh, please! That lumpy jacket and tattered shirt?” And the Capitol calico taunts, “Too slow, can’t keep up with me,” while walking just ahead, a few leaps to stay way forward, walking again.

What if I caught them? What if I held them awhile? I’m sure they’d squirm, claw, howl. But if I did it again and again? I wonder.

Sometimes, when I see one from a distance, I can scoot forward in a squat, drop to a crawl. Mewing and purring, I slink toward the skeptical feline. Her eyes widen, and she slants back her ears. She crouches, ready to spring. For a moment, she sees that I mean her no harm, that I am a nice midwestern boy with soft fingers and a careful touch. She thinks, “This one is different. This one knows to scratch at the root of my ear and on the tuft of my chin. I will go to him,” and takes one step forward.

But a car blasts past, a man tromps near. Little Lulu hears them and shrinks against a townhouse wall. She slips, paws in a presto patter, around the corner and into another yard. That is the only place here, alone and away.

Rudi, though initially intimidated by the NOAB, has grown into a thoroughly amicable and erudite kitty.

Usually, the following night fades rapidly to sleep. But this year, I was so filled with rage that I again could not slumber, and so I arose to type out this unrequited, uncensorable rant.

Like you, I’m pissed off about people being killed in Arizona. Murder is (must always be) enraging. But unlike, say, every political wonk and pundit, I’m not pissed off because of “uncivil rhetoric,” whatever the fuck that may be. See, I’m pretty sure that this gun-toting assholeYes, I know he had problems; we’ll get to those; but he was still an adult, and there are thousands, maybe millions of mentally disabled/disturbed persons who don’t make massacres. wasn’t driven by a map with crosshairs on it.Speaking of which, if you’re a self-righteous Democrat, which seems to be the loudest sort in recent days, take a look at some of your party’s previous cartographic renderings: http://www.verumserum.com/?p=13647 — both parties are massive toolsheds. From my irate vantage, there are three tragedies here, and none of them is directly about the way in which American political discourse is framed.

Tragedy One: that people died. This trumps the rest, and I won’t demean it with excessive prose or profanity. I pray for their souls, their families.

Tragedy Two: that a person fell into such a state where he felt the need to murder. Someone fucked up. A lot of people fucked up, and most of them were not named Jared Loughner. I’m not going to condemn any particular persons, because I don’t know shit, but I will state a few relationships he had: parents, teachers, peers, professors, counselors, friends. Fuck you. Some of you fucked up because, apparently, none of you was human enough to notice that he had problems and to take significant action. It wasn’t your fault? You didn’t see it? A real human — a real neighbor — would look more closely. Fuck you, navel-centric assmongerers. And yes, I’m guilty of not prying into lives that seemed a bit awry. And yes, I tend to let people go along their less-than-merry ways because I’m afraid to butt in. But no, I’m not right. I’m a timid human paraquat, too, but at least I’m honest enough to admit it.

Tragedy Two-point-fiveRead: related to Tragedy Two, but greater than it: that the systems of this nation are constructed in such a way that a Jared Loughner can easily fall into an outcasted place without anyone showing concern. In this aspect, peers are absolved, and so are teachers, mostly because they’ve been shackled by ridiculous standardse.g. national tests, college admissions requirements, state assessments whose requirements crush time to care for actual human beings. This fuck you is directed at you, school assministrations and state legishitures, you prickknives who seem to think that human development can be assessed by narrowly manufactured multiple-choice exams. And this fuck you comes from someone who thrived on such exams.

Tragedy Three: that the mainstream reaction to this is so self-serving in thinking that “political rhetoric” is what really needs to be reformed here. Fuck you, too, you solipsistic wankhats. As previously noted, everyone has been doing it, so you’re already an assgrape for not having called it out before now, and you’re even more of an assgrape for singling out Sarah Palin when plenty of others from everywhere on the spectrum have used violent imagery. You biased twatknots. But that’s not a tragedy so much as an expected idiocy. The real Tragedy Three is that we’re all such shitsouls for being complicit in a society that is so fraught with fear, it won’t trust the hoi polloi to handle parlance that is obviously rhetorical, not literal. I don’t know when everyone became suddenly unable to handle metaphor or exaggeration, but I sure wish that moment could be undone. Obviously I have my antidoteIt starts with some damned fiction, you fact-minded fucktweeds, but rants are no place for rational solutionsSeriously though, a more literate nation would not suffer from such a discomfort with phrasings that might suggest the slightest bit of aggression.

Tragedy FourYes, a bonus, and a sort of prognostication: that the frivolous uproar will ultimately be mostly, Your side said this — But your side said that, and nothing relevant to the actual conditions and environments that funneled Jared Loughner (who has plenty to account for himself, the dickwart) into where he wound up. I’m not saying that rhetoric is meaningless. Obviously I love languageMy profane manglings come from affection!, and I uphold its power, but I am deeply disturbed to see the primary and dominant reactions focused on something that is so secondary, so minor compared to the causes of Tragedy One.

If this isn’t (yet) an(other) indictment of the way in which American society raises children, I don’t understand what else needs to happen to demonstrate the deeply degraded and strangled roots of this nation. The lot arguing about rhetoric and imagery need to get their heads out of each other’s asses and see where the real wounds are falling and why.