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Well, it would appear that we are destined to return to Portland. We found a decent apartment within our price range in Portland, on Munjoy Hill near the Eastern Prom. It has off-street parking, a cool yard, and is in walking distance from a lot. I miss walking in Portland. This will give me a chance to walk in different parts of it.

Indeed, it is time for some Urban Ranger to go with the Shovelglove and the No-S Diet…

It’s been light on the blogging front here on JWL.Freakwitch.net. It’s been one of the most intense 10 days of my life. I won’t go into details here, but suffice to say my attention has certainly been elsewhere recently.

But the immediacy of that situation is now behind me. For now. So it’s a matter of recovery, re-entry into my life, into my created reality, with new lessons learned and a new resoluteness. One thing that has become clear to me is that my own happiness must take a higher priority. My immediate goal, apart from just grounding all the various (like all-over-the-map, the full spectrum) emotions of the past week, is to cultivate opportunities for me to be happy. And this resoluteness extends to all facets of my life. One thing this time has shown me is just how important parts of my life are.

So for now, I will try to throw myself back into the things that need my attention: my body (shovelglove and NoS are going very well, btw), my family and my music.

Speaking of music, for those readers who want to hear a closer idea of what the Freakwitch album will sound like, I present a rough mix of Sway. This still isn’t finished, but it’s the closest thing to finished that we have at the moment. There are several tracks on the heels of this one. Watch this space.

“Why so hard?” the kitchen coal once said to the diamond. “After all, are we not close kin?”

Why so soft? O my brothers, thus I ask you: are you not after all my brothers?

Why so soft, so pliant and yielding? Why is there so much denial, self-denial, in your hearts? So little destiny in your eyes?

And if you do not want to be destinies and inexorable ones, how can you one day triumph with me?

And if your hardness does not wish to flash and cut through, how can you one day create with me?

For all creators are hard. And it must seem blessedness to you to impress your hand on millennia as on wax.

Blessedness to write on the will of millennia as on bronze — harder than bronze, nobler than bronze. Only the noblest is altogether hard.

This new tablet, O my brothers, I place over you: Become hard!

— Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

After my recent rants against the new pope, I ran across a new article by Matthew Fox, a mystic, writer, and scholar whom I’ve long admired. What he says is right on the money, particularly this paragraph:

The silver lining in the election of this, the first Grand Inquisitor as Pope, is this: Now people of conscience the world over have a clear choice between Religion and Spirituality; Fundamentalism and Wisdom; A Punitive Father God and the Mother-Father Creator of Justice and Compassion; Fascism and Control vs. Letting the Spirit Work; between a preferential option for the rich and powerful (cf. Opus Dei) and a preferential option for the poor (as in liberation theology).

Now all people–and Catholics in particular–are called to find their consciences and take a stand about the Punitive Father God of Fundamentalism and the Divine Wisdom of Justice and Compassion and against idolatry including religious idolatry and papalolatry and the television cult of personality, and between lies and truth.

These are important questions and observations. It is interesting to consider how the Catholic Church will react to this new pope.

It’s been raining steadily for 48 hours, a deep, consistent rain, one that is not cold. It’s not a winter rain, definitely a spring rain that nourishes rather than freezes. This rain awakens, gently rousing life from its wintry slumber.

The next sunny day, life is going to explode in new greenery. I look forward to watching that.

And yes, this post contains at least one primary metaphor.

Yes, I’m an old D&D geek; I’ve played off and on since I was in 7th grade … mostly off for the past 15 years. But I still use its metaphors on a somewhat regular basis: “make the X roll,” “alignment,” etc etc etc. Those of you who play know what I mean, those who don’t, well, there’s always google.

Anyway, Freakwitch (actually Matt and I as a duo) played an open mic last week. It was our first time playing in front of an audience in way too long. It was fun; we did 4 songs and got a decent reception.

But by far the highlight of the evening was during the opening guitar riff of Seems Like, the ambient conversation in the club dropped instantly and noticeably.

I made my “mass charm” roll! Yeah!

Seriously, this is why I play music. Those moments where I can connect with complete strangers through the sounds I am making on my instrument, those moments where my attention commingles with everyone else’s, that is what it’s all about.

There is a suspicious ship docked in Portland Harbor that is causing some … concern. The rumor is that the ship will be tracking the space shuttle discovery, in case it is hijacked by terrorists and crashed deliberately into the International Space Station.

Or something.

… I make sandcastles with my daughter:

It was a gorgeous day today, well into the 80s. First time for the season. Presently, however, a cold front is moving through; we’re supposed to get a thunderstorm tonight. The highs will be in the 50s for the next week-ish. Ah well.

I’ve been reading up more about the new Pope Benedict XVI. Not sure why this is so interesting to me, apart from being an ex-Catholic who is very interested in the pope selection as a nice barometer of the spiritual reality of billions of people in the world.

Here’s what I’ve been able to gather about this man (nearly all of it paraphrased from the Wikipedia page linked above):

• He joined the Hitler Youth at the age of 14, in 1941.
• He was drafted into the Nazi army at age 16, and served in the Flak (anti-aircraft corps), shooting at Allied planes in Ludwigsfeld, Unterfohring, Innsbruck, and Gilching. To his credit, he did eventually desert the army, but did so only as the Reich was crumbling into chaos, along with thousands of other German boys.
• He later became a priest, and a professor. He occupied the chair of dogmatic theology at the University of Tubingen, where his thinking took a decidedly conservative stance after the student movements of 1968.
• In 1981, Ratzinger became prefect of “the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith,” which had its name changed from its former tarnished and politically-inconvenient name: the Holy Office of the Inquisition.
• He has argued that homosexuality is a “strong tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil; and thus the inclination itself must be seen as an objective disorder.” He has — on the record — reprimanded compassionate priests who “do not unequivocally accept … the intrinsic evil of homosexual activity.”
• Philosophically, Benedict is opposed to birth control, abortion, same-sex marriage, and moral relativism.
• He has minimized the child abuse crisis rampant in the Catholic Church, dismissing it by saying “less than 1 percent of priests are guilty of acts of this type.” (well, perhaps… but how many thousands of priests are there? And how does this percentage differ from the percentage of pedophiles in the rest of the population?)
• He has argued that “only in the Catholic church is there eternal salvation.”
• Argued in the US, before the 2004 election, that voters would be “cooperating in evil” if they voted for a candidate supporting legalized abortion or euthanasia, thus contributing to the Christian Right’s manipulation of the 2004 election by smokescreen issues.

So yeah. This guy is hardly consistent with my idea of the Spiritual Leader for 1.2 billion Catholics. This is also why — at least in the US and in Europe — Catholicism is becoming increasingly irrelevant. The fact that an old white man will preside over further migrations away from Catholicism, while millions more people are becoming Catholics in South America, Africa, and Asia, only reinforces the racism inherent in the church.

To all the Catholics out there: you get what you deserve. It is my prayer that this election will cause you to think, meditate, and pray about why you are still a Catholic. The Catholic Church (as my father would say, the “big C church”) is a formalized, institutionalized bastion of racism, sexism, oppression, intolerance, bigotry, pedophilia, social control, and persecution. It always has been, and it is not likely to be otherwise anytime soon. Any good that has come about from the church is, from where I’m standing, in spite of the political structures of the church. I’m certain that there are good priests, and good congregations, in the Catholic world. But rigid structures presided over by intolerant racists can only get in the way.

“We are moving toward a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal one’s own ego and one’s own desires.”
Joe Ratzinger, aka Benedict XVI – Apr 19, 2005

This is one reason I am no longer Catholic. Of course, these days I have very fundamental metaphysical differences with organized religion in general. But to elect a 78-year-old, ultra-conservative guy is going to push more people away from the church.

I want to write more, but it’s quite late and I’m fairly incoherent. Or at least, very sleepy.