Judge Not Lest Ye Be Judged

There's a poor understanding of that phrase. I've never read the Bible, so I can't really say why. I can only tell you that for every person who uses that phrase to shame hateful people, there's another person who will use it to shame them.

From what I understand, the passage meant that you have to examine your own sins so that you can be a bit more objective when you judge. Because let's face it. You have to make judgment calls all the time, and trying to judge without judging is confusing and difficult. We're human beings, and it's part of what we do.

But the Bible also says to pass judgment on the sin, not the sinner. They say that only God (Jesus, but I used God because Jesus is not God; he was just a man who happened to be pretty tits) can judge whether or not a person is saved. That men may only judge sins based on the word of the Bible.

But of course, if we really followed that, then everything that extreme right-wing Christians do would be utterly useless and irrelevant, and if there's one thing is far-right nutjob hates, it's acknowledging that he's irrelevant. Holding up signs that say "GOD HATES FAGS" is irrelevant. Whether he hates fags or not isn't really up to you. Especially if the sin of faggotry get's washed away by being a Christian (as all sins apparently do; which is something that I guess I can accept).

So maybe I just get caught up in semantics. Maybe they're not saying that God hates the person. Maybe they really are just saying God hates that some dudes like a little dick in their diet. Maybe when they kill gay kids, they're just trying to help them wash the lecherous sins away. But is it really any of their business to judge that I'm a sinner? We're all sinners. What difference does you adding a little hate into the mix make besides being a big fat downer on top of it all?

Life

So I know that I have been terribly remiss in my duties to update this thing for the one or two people who pay attention to it. I haven't been especially inclined to write anything, as I'm still not sure I have that much to say. That, and I've been spending a lot more time trying to encourage someone else to be a little more creative (without much success).

So here goes.


I don't like to jinx things by saying life's been good, but the fact of the matter is that it has. I know that the last couple of life updates I've posted have been... well, less than inspiring. There was a death in the family, and that was hard. But life rolls on.

Big news would be that I moved. Well, the beginning of big news would be that I got myself a girlfriend. Danielle and I met at Blockbuster, my first job. She was my manager, but she left the company back in June. We were friends before that, but it was sort of an acquaintance kind of thing. Part of the reason she left Blockbuster was another person who is not to be named. I'm ashamed to say that I did my very best to swoop in an pick up the pieces. Long story short, a few months later we were a couple, and a couple months after that.... well, continuing.

Shortly before Travis died, I joined my girlfriend in Gun Barrel City, Texas. It's a small town (population: 5,989, status: Meth capitol of Texas), and options for entertainment are limited. At first, we were living in the spare bedroom of her parents house. That was difficult at best, because Danielle and her mother... well, they have hard time getting along sometimes. Her mother can be a bit of a drama queen, and although Danielle doesn't like to admit it, she can be quite... reactionary. In any case, by Valentine's Day, we were sleeping in our own house. Her Dad had spent the last six months rebuilding a squalid home that Danielle's "Uncle" Gene lived in before moving to a home (he hasn't been doing well lately, but I don't know too much about it). He turned this place, which reeked of old smoke and critter droppings, into a beautiful craftsman home.

This house is on the same street as the homes of her parents, her brother, and her grandmother. We own this street.

Danielle and I have been getting by on basically nothing and credit cards, but that is looking to change soon (fingers crossed, but pretty much a certainty at this point). We have an ailing wiener dog that Danielle rescued from the people at the end of the street (she basically stole him). He has heart worms and emphysema, but we take care of him and he's a sweetie. His name is Kaiser Von WienerDog (actually, we haven given him any official name besides Kaiser, but it doesn't matter because he only responds to "Wiener Dog").

On Valentine's Day we went out to dinner at the local Italian restaurant, which was very good. When we got home, I opened the door to candles and rose petals leading the way to the bedroom. She got down on one knee and asked me to marry her, and my response was a happy yes with very little hesitation. We don't have a date set or anything since we don't really have to money for a proper ceremony yet, but once we've saved up enough, we'll make it a good celebration.

School is still out of reach, since we only just barely have the money to eat, but a good opportunity just popped up, and it looks like it's coming back into the spectrum of a reality.

Things are still a little unsettled. The house hasn't been perfectly set up yet. I haven't really even gotten to unpack yet. But that'll sort itself out.

In the mean time, I'm taking some things with a grain of salt. Yesterday, for instance.

I woke up and found that the wiener had pissed a trail from our bedroom door to the front door. Then, having gotten off to a bad start, Danielle and I decided to go get some cigarettes. This is bad, because we both need to quit (her especially; she's had horrible asthma since she hit puberty, and the smoking definitely makes it worse). I went to check my bank account and credit card to see if I could swing it (our paychecks hadn't come in yet). I was quite upset to see that I was in the red by about $90. I had told Samia a couple of weeks ago to take my debit card off of her Xbox Live account, and she apparently had not. I only had about $2.57 in the account, and was waiting for my check to come in. When the fifty something dollars for the year's subscription was charged, I not only overdrafted, but was immediately charged a $35 fee. I called Samia as soon as I saw this, and bitched her out over the phone, which she did not take lying down, though she did immediately offer to transfer enough money to cover the cost of the subscription and the fee. I'll be honest, I cried a bit.

After that, I had to go to work. That's never fun, especially since they don't give me enough hours, and I'm the only one that actually gives a shit about the store being presentable. When I got there, I spent the entire day reorganizing the Television section (total intake for my till: $98). When I finished about 15 minutes before closing time, I saw that we had accrued a hefty number of movies that were checked in and needed to be run. At this point, I had to tell my manager that next time I was farting around in the sections (which I wasn't actually farting around, I was doing what I was assigned to do), that she ought to feel free to tell me to get my ass up to the front and do what needs doing. It's sad that I have to tell my managers what to tell me, but this store is a sorry excuse for a business. Anyway, all that work having not been done meant that we were still there an hour after closing.

When Danielle picked me up, we stopped at MeMe's place (MeMe is Danielle's grandma) for some goulash and had a nice chat for a while before heading home. When we got home, nothing really special happened except for this one thing.

Danielle was leaning down to give the Wiener Dog some lovin'. They were both on the couch, and I was standing behind it. I leaned down to give her a kiss on the head, and at exactly that moment she sat back up. Very quickly. She knocked me in the nose, which at first didn't seem like much. I was a little dazed, but it didn't feel like anything was broken. Then suddenly it felt like my nose was flooding and Danielle rushed me to the bathroom to stop my nose from bleeding all over the place.

That was a dizzying experience, but nothing was broken, and it was safe to take the frozen bag of mixed veggies off my face withing fifteen or twenty minutes. Danielle made me pudding because she felt bad, even though I repeatedly told her it wasn't her fault that I was an idiot. Then we watched a movie and then went to bed. That was it.

Honestly, after reading all that back, it sounds pretty bad. But it wasn't. If you look at it all together, yesterday sucked. But nothing was left unfixed. Nothing really was a lasting trouble (well, except for the nose bleed; when we were going to bed, I kept getting all queasy and uncomfortable because I couldn't stop thinking about blood vessels in my head breaking and bleeding out of my nostril). So I can't really complain about it too much. The Dude abides, you know?

It's all a part of....

"Some viruses, like Ebola or the new avian influenza, are basically runaway replicators, effectively burning their own life bridges in the process. But the majority, as Villarreal puts it, strive 'to persist, not make a lot.' Those that do persist eventually become both stable within, and staples of, evolution. The overwhelming majority of viruses are not harmful to their hosts. Each of us is infected with a huge array of viruses. The human genome, considered as a mass, contains more retrovirus sequences than actual genes.

"'They're not doing anything,' says Villarreal. 'They're just persisting. And they were around long before humans evolved. The better part of the human genome is composed of viral DNA. That's true of nearly all eukaryotes, and the more complicated the organisms, the more of those sequences you have. We aren't sure exactly what they all do, but they are part of our genetic identity, this stuff we dismiss as junk. "Junk" and "parasite" are both words that will get you into a fight if you use them improperly. And yet they are where all life's creativity lies—its very origins.'"

-From Unintelligent Design

Bobby Jindal

Two things ol' Bobby's GOP response did not do for me:

1. Make sense.
2. Stop me from laughing.

The Spaghetti Monster Flies!

I don't have a problem with religion. When that ridiculous documentary about how oppressed the poor proponents of a made up "theory" that has no empirical evidence to support it (Ben Stein, you've alienated pretty much all of the people who thought you were cool), Mom tried to tell me I was... what did she say? Too logical, or practical. Something like that. Oh. Sorry it makes me angry when people make up a bunch of propaganda (a conspiracy theory put forth by the idiots in power). And maybe I do tend the think logically. But what get's me isn't that they try to insert God into the classroom. It's that they assume that by making some shit up and calling it science, they've made something better than what the world actually is. Look at this place! So many different species created in a process whereby if you just have what it takes to make a baby, you've done your part to keep the species going. Where rock and metal and water are constantly rolling over one another, changing each other over a timescale too long for any human to be able to see. Life covering this planet top to bottom and creeping even in the most unexpected corners. And then there's the fact that there's the out there. The stars and the moon, the planets and the sun, the galaxies and black holes making up the entire universe.

And then there are people down here on Earth with the gall to assume that because they believe in a book written in metaphors, that obviously the way they believe in this world- the one that God has allowed us to be born in- is better than how awesome the world truly is. That it would somehow be more pleasing to God to assume that he made a bunch of shit really fast just for us to be born in, rather than appreciate how amazing it is that the world came to be as it is now from a single point when God touched the universe and we came from that amazing touch. As if we were Schrodinger's cat, existing or not, until God looked down and suddenly the universe was decided and we were there (because quantum physics is how I know with a certainty that God exists). We were certainly there.

Instead, they condense down the process into something that sounds as simple as making a cookie. That is why I don't like Intelligent Design, and that is why I don't like a very large portion of religious people. Because religion isn't about loving God and the world that was given to us. It's about being holier than everyone else and using it for your own political gain.

I'm losing my train, so I gotta go.

There's something missing now....

Travis Cousins was born April 14th of 1986. He died December 6th of 2008.

Travis was my friend. My sister's love, and so my brother. Some people would say he took the bitch way out. But it's like Mr. Adams said at his funeral. He was an actor, and he fooled us all.

I'm not resentful... He needed help and none of us knew how badly. It's no one's fault, and he made this choice himself. But I miss him.

During the funeral we, his friends, listened to the preacher spout off religious rhetoric about a man he never knew. Kelsi and Melissa amused themselves by imagining what he would've been doing had he been there: standing behind the preacher in his werewolf costume, mimicking sincere words that resonated with the family they were meant for while alienating us, his friends.

Us who could see him there in his werewolf costume, making fun of people putting beliefs in his cold mouth.

Last night we saw comets of color and a halo around the moon. Maybe he was laughing.

Miracles

It would take a miracle.

Recently I've seen several articles on Digg pointing out that the reason Prop 8 (the proposition in California that effectively banned gay marriage) was passed was largely due to huge contributions from the Mormon church.

I'm not going to call the church evil. I'm not gonna call religion or religious organizations evil. I understand the purpose, I understand the faith. I believe in God, and I would be silly to completely trash an entire institution when there were plenty of things I learned through the example of religion. But what I do believe to be truly evil is the idea than any one group of people's rights should be completely impaled... completely fucking crucified just because their existence makes another group slightly uncomfortable.

There's a horrifying notion that because I am gay, I will make you gay or I will make you gay. What bothers me most is that the same people who say that "we can't allow these people to have the same rights as the straight people because it will teach our children that homosexuality is okay" turn right around and say "but we're not attacking gay people." The hypocrisy of it is ridiculous. How is that no attacking an entire group? I could use the tried and true logical argument that it's the same as telling a black person "I don't hate you, but the color of your skin is wrong." They'll say "Well, there's not any kind of proof of empirical evidence that suggests that being gay is in any way, shape, or form genetic; it's not the same as being black." Ignoring the fact that they're ignoring scads of data that says otherwise, the argument is irrelevant. You could pick anything to compare this denial to and it would be irrelevant.

Because the truth is that even if they work at (and typically succeed) at denying me and those like me the same rights that these straight, God-fearing, bible-thumping, Jesus-loving (and ignoring) people enjoy, it doesn't actually take away what it is that they're trying to steal from us. I support people protesting. It's our right, and I believe this is a cause worth bringing to people's attention. But it's important to keep this in mind: they can't take away our ability to join together before God and before the people who matter. We may have no rights, but neither did the slaves.

When I decide to get hitched, it won't be on their terms. It'll be on mine. Even if the state refuses to recognize us, even if I'm denied the right to visit her in the hospital, denied the married status on my taxes, denied the ability to introduce this woman as "my wife," well.... If it really is as important to God as they say, then I'll be getting married in full view of Him, and may He judge me as He will.

Forever

Never say forever anymore than never. Not to say things go away, but people change and they decay. We won't be around forever. But hey, that's okay. I'd never say forever, but gladly would I ever spend that time with you.