Carry it onward, to hope or home I trod

Just sitting here, watching a long training video of sexual abuse awareness, reading over old blog posts, and pondering loneliness and unrequited affection.

A new color came up on the horizon recently, soon to join the rainbow of colors that wanted nothing to do with my grey world. She's kind, beautiful, caring, faithful, strong, and a host of other things I'll likely never be able to know in any sort of loving way. Part of me is genuinely grateful to just have met her as she's all I could ever want in a wife, but the other part of me knows this path and knows that when she says she doesn't know if she wants to go to coffee (yeah, coffee is a bullshit and lifeless pursuit but Southeastern girls scatter when the dreaded "date" is brought up, so I thought I had a better shot) she means that she doesn't want to but is nice and doesn't want to hurt me by outright saying no. So instead, as with H, I get to let time elongate my discomfort as I wait for the hammer to drop. Call me naive, but I really didn't expect her to give me a neutral answer. I thought that was a one time thing from H, and that "yes" or "no" would be the response going forward.

I saw her today. Mid lunch, and then like a finger snap I lose all sense of appetite and concentration just knowing she's near. Affection and desire sucks, man. Weeks of just feeling sad and afraid and hopeful and affectionate and small and courageous and cowardly and impatient and all for what is likely nothing but another notch in the rejection belt. And yet hope, like a freaking gnat, won't totally leave me alone. I know that this girl is a beautiful, godly young woman who deserves only the most handsome and godly man, which I am far from on both counts, and yet this little thought keeps telling me not to give up, not to roll over. But I don't know what to do. If she ever actually responds, huge odds are that she'll give me some form of vocalized disinterest and I'll do my best to act like it doesn't crush me, and I don't really have any logical reason to think she'd even consider me as a romantic option, and of the few things I'm confident of in my life there are very few I'm more confident in than that she won't ever want me back. But hope won't leave me alone.

Dan (or anyone reading this someday as if that's ever going to happen), if you ever do find romantic love in a wife, spend time every fucking day to tell her you love her and you're grateful to God for her. You know damn well how easy it is for love to be snuffed out or to die alone. If you or anyone is reading this and you have someone who chose you for life, please live thankfully to God as romantic love and commitment happening seems to be such a crazy and rare thing.

Hope not lost but squandered

It's weird to see someone I cared for greatly get engaged to someone else. It's even weirder to see her get engaged less than a year after she turned me down for a date without a reason. Weirder still is that she's engaged to this guy after dating for four months. Weirdest of all is that she's engaged to a rock golem / Jaylen Fisher.

I digress.

Truth is, this happened days ago but mercifully I didn't find out until today. I'm not really emotionally connected to her anymore (haven't been for many months), but to see someone with such beauty and kindness give her life and future away to both a man who's uglier than I am (at least on the outside) and to a life of being a disregarded pastor's wife in the south is pretty crushing. I've learned a lot from my mom and other pastor's wives and yet I know that in this area, particularly the rural church circuit, pastor's wives seem to be hidden away in shadow and insignificance. Maybe it will be different for her, but maybe it won't be. All I know is that she chose to double down on small town life and draw a curtain on life outside of the little she already know. In all reality, all this care for her is just desire for myself, for me to have someone so beautiful and kind and caring. I wouldn't hide her away or treat her secondarily, but that's not the path either of us are on. God alone knows the future.

I know he'll never deserve her, but I guess I hope he'll try.


"Now we're just liars. Now we're just liars."

"Au revoir, you probably don't understand what I mean."

"And now we're unrelated, and rid of all the shit we hated, but I hate when I feel like this and I never hated you." 

Thank God for Scott Hutchison

It's been a long time since I wrote in here and I don't quite recall why I stopped. I still journal from time to time, but I suppose I just got busy, or didn't feel the value of writing here. Well, I return to these keys as a way to process the death of Scott Hutchison.

Scott Hutchison, lead singer of Frightened Rabbit, Mastersystem, and solo as Owl John, drowned himself in the Firth of Forth about two weeks ago. He went missing for a day or two and I thought it was kind of crazy but thought nothing substantial of it, but then I went to work and looked on my phone and saw that they found his dead body. He'd sung for years of sorrow, loneliness, and suicide, and yet it came as a truly saddening moment when I found out he was dead. I've got a lot of thoughts I want to write down but I'm not sure how to organize them.

I first heard of Frightened Rabbit when I was a teenager. I heard "The Modern Leper" through an Amazon playlist and initially heard Scott sing "He's too fucked up to care" and was off-put by the profanity and decided I wouldn't listen to that band. However, some time later, I heard a couple Frabbit songs on the tv show Chuck and decided to revisit the band. From there, Frabbit songs brought me hope, company, and a sense of camaraderie and not-aloneness that I've never felt from any other artistic medium. I've spent the majority of the past decade feeling loneliness and unrequited affection for various girls and Scott's songs made me feel like someone else knew what it was like to feel left out, unwanted, alone. Like someone knew the weight of my own romantic hopes and the even greater weight of the disappointment of not being wanted by anyone I wanted. And it wasn't just the words he sang, it was the very tone and timbre of his voice. He sang as someone who knew loneliness well. I've never heard anyone communicate loneliness in such an accurate and unvarnished way as Scott Hutchison did.

It wasn't just the sadness of Frabbit's songs that I connected to. It was the resiliency that Scott sang of that drew me close. For all the loneliness, for the all sadness and pain, Scott still clung to some hope of light breaking through the darkness. What that hope was, I do not know, as it was not true hope that can be only found in Christ. But as much as any other artist has, Scott's words always met me as a friend in need but then encouraged me to hope. He would never have known this, but his words drew me near to God despite his own atheism.

And that's the absolutely crushing part of this. Scott sang a number of songs about how he didn't believe in God and how Christianity (or at least religion) was false. Knowing what he claimed to believe, it's devastating knowing that not only will I likely never see him, he is eternally separated from God and all good. God used Scott to bring me through a lot of dark, lonely times and yet Scott never bowed his knee to the Lord. That fucking sucks.

To compound the fucking awfulness of this, all the people talking about his suicide have only talked about his "mental health." But fuck those people. Scott didn't kill himself because he had a mental issue. He didn't throw himself into the Forth because he was unhealthy. He erased his map because he reached the end of his man-made hope and he couldn't see anymore light and without Christ, there was no hope to be found. He killed himself because unlike most people, he dug deep and searched himself and others and found this existence to be broken and wanting and because he had rejected Christ, he had nothing to cling to when all failed.

I owe Scott Hutchison a great debt. His words gave me encouragement and strength when A rejected me, when C said yes and then no to me, when S told me she only saw me as a friend, when AL gave up on the relationship, when H told me she "couldn't go out with me" and then proceeded to go out with someone as equally undeserving as me,  and even now as I'm forced to watch H be so much of what I desire in a wife and yet be so far from me. I do think that if God had not blessed me with the words of Scott Hutchison all these years, my varied thoughts of suicide might have been deeper and closer to actualization than I would care to think about. Hell, even my music taste and life have been shaped by Scott. Frightened Rabbit got me into other Scottish bands (The Twilight Sad, We Were Promised Jetpacks, There Will Be Fireworks, King Creosote, Biffy Clyro, Washington Irving, Glasvegas, Admiral Fallow, Broken Records) and part of my love of Scotland can be traced from Frightened Rabbit (I've got a fucking Scottish flag in my room). Someday I'll visit the Firth of Forth and say a prayer of thanksgiving for Scott Hutchison and pray for the hopeless of Scotland.

The only other time in my life that I've been as deeply affected by someone's death is when Dr. Travers died. Both men played huge roles in my growth as a young man. I believe I'll see Dr. Travers again, but I'm terribly afraid I'll never see Scott again. Damn.

I want to start writing on here again, if only in tribute to Scott because I want to speak from my heart, even if it's only on a web page that no one else will ever read. So often Scott bled through his songs so that those who listened might bleed a little less and I will be grateful for him for the rest of my life.


 "I have fallen in the forest, did you hear me?"
 "Let's call me a baptist, call this a drowning of the past. She is there on the shoreline throwing stones at my back"
"Won't you give me two minutes please? Just let me cover my eyes. All the hammer and scrape has been chipping away At the lustre of life"
"I wonder if they'd notice that I'm not around The loss of a lonely man never makes much of a sound" (I do notice. And in this instance, it did.)
"I have never wanted more to be your man And build a house around you. But I am just like all the rest of them, Sorry, selfish, trying to improve. I'm here, I'm here, Not heroic but I try"
"So will you come back to my corner?
Spent too long alone tonight
Would you come brighten my corner?
A lit torch to the woodpile"
"After months of grieving
Fuck the grief, I’m leaving
Will you leave with me?"
"A slipped disc in the spine of community"
"I might never catch a mouse and present it in my mouth
To make you feel you're with someone who deserves to be with you"
"This is my warmth behind the cold war
That day is what I’m living for
Forever coming home" (She's not my home, she wasn't his.)
"I can’t call you all mine anymore
I can’t call you full stop
But you know you can call me up anytime
Call me whatever the fuck you want"
"Just this drink to hold my hand, one glass of anything, anything cheap. And I'm here just because everyone else has come just to be seen."
"I'm working on drawing a straight line, And I'll draw until I get one right. It's bold and dark, girl, can't you see? I’ve done drawn a line between you and me."

Excerpts from Coming Up for Air by George Orwell

“I wondered why it is that we’re all such bloody fools. Why don’t people, instead of the idiocies they do spend their time on, just walk around looking at things? That pool, for instance-all the stuff that’s in it. Newts, water-snails, water-beetles, caddis-flies, leeches, and God knows how many other things that you can only see with a microscope. The mystery of their lives, down there in the water. You could spend a lifetime watching them, ten lifetimes, and still you wouldn’t have got to the end even of that one pool. And all the while the sort of feeling of wonder, the peculiar flame inside you. It’s the one thing worth having, and we don’t want it.
…
I know it’s a good feeling to have. What’s more, so does everybody else, or nearly everybody. It’s just round the corner all the time, and we know it’s there. Stop firing that machine-gun! Stop chasing whatever you’re chasing! Calm down, get your breath back, let a bit of peace seep into your bones. No use. We don’t do it. Just keep on with the same bloody fooleries.
…
There’s something that’s gone out of us in these twenty years since the war (WWI). It’s a kind of vital juice that we’ve squirted away until there’s nothing left. All this rushing to and fro! Everlasting scramble for a bit of cash. Everlasting din of buses, bombs, radios, telephone bells. Nerves worn all to bits, empty places in our bones where the marrow out to be.”

—	Coming Up for Air by George Orwell, published in 1939.

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

"Living with somebody you love can be lonelier than living entirely alone when the one you love doesn't love you."

"With my eyes closed, I just see you."
"You'll make out fine, your kind always does."

"I'm not living with you. We occupy the same cage, that's all."

"I don't mind making a fool of myself over you."

"You can be young without money, but you can't be old without it."

"People like doing what they used to do, after they've stopped being able to do it."

"How does one drowning man help another drowning man?"

"You won't live with mendacity? Well, you're an expert at it! The truth is pain and sweat and payin' bills and makin' love to a woman that you don't love any more. Truth is dreams that don't come true, and nobody prints your name in the paper 'til you die."

"Mendacity is a system we live in." 

"Sometimes I wish I had a pill to make people disappear."

"It was the Cotton Bowl, sister woman."

"You can't buy love! I don't want things!"

"But, there's one thing you can't buy at any European fire sale, or any other market on Earth. That's your life. You can't buy back your life when it's finished."

"The men who build empires die, and empires die, too."

"I don't know what to believe in. Now what's the good of livin' if you've got nothin' to believe in? There's gotta be some, some purpose in life, some meanin.' Look at me. For the sake of God, look at me before it's too late. For once in your life, look at me as I really am. Look at me. I'm a failure. I'm a drunk. On my own in the open market, I'm not worth the price of a decent burial."

"You... you got pain - at least you know you're alive. It's easin' somewhat now. When you got pain, it's better to judge yourself of a lot of things. I'm not gonna stupify myself with that stuff. I wanna think clear. I want to see everything, and I want to feel everything. Then I won't mind goin'. I've got the guts to die. What I want to know - do you have the guts to live?"

"Ain't nothing more powerful than the odor of mendacity...you can smell it. It smells like death." 

Good movie.

Stood there like a fool when it started to Snow

“I’m falling for a heart of Snow, your winter spell won’t let me go. I’m frozen. I’m drowning in your arctic sea, can’t break the ice that covers me. I’m frozen.

...

Couldn’t walk away and let you go, stood there like a fool when it started to Snow.”

Happy Valentine's Day, presumably future Dan who is likely the only one ever to read this!

12:16 This is going to be a progressive blog post. I got called off work tonight, so today will be a movie day. Among the possibilities are Taxi Driver, Citizen Kane, Dumb & Dumber, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Blue Valentine, and Her. With the exception of Her (only seen once, reserving judgment), all of those are movies I love that deal with ideas of love and/or loneliness. I'll likely put the names in a hat and just draw 3 of them out.


1:52 The films will be Blue Valentine, followed by WVU vs. Iowa State, followed by Eternal Sunshine and finally Her. 

9:41 Blue Valentine is always such a weighty viewing. It's so well-done and artistically beautiful, and yet it just tears at whatever sense of optimism I have left. All the feelings of doubt and insecurity and "you'll die alone" sound so much more believable after watching such a realistic portrayal of a broken relationship. How can you trust feelings when they can just change? I know that marriage means more than just feelings and desire, that it requires commitment and "a loyalty sworn," I just don't have much faith anyone I have that towards will have it towards me. Who knows. On to Eternal Sunshine. "Why do I fall in love with every woman I see who shows me the least bit attention?"

9:51 I forgot to post earlier. The Smiths' song "I Know It's Over" is an awesome song. It was on the Amazon Anti-Valentine's playlist and man, it's so good. "Oh Mother, I can feel the soil falling over my head."

11:31 Beginning Her. This movie seems like a conglomeration of Blue Valentine, (500) Days of Summer, and Eternal Sunshine, but with Spike Jonze's weird style. It's also more blatantly sexual in a way that doesn't add to the film like Blue Valentine's sexual content does. 

12:10 Explicit language warning: from Her: "I wanted somebody to fuck me. I want somebody to want me to fuck them. Maybe that would have filled this ti-... tiny little hole in my heart, but probably not... and sometimes I think I have felt everything I'm ever gonna feel, and from here on out I'm not gonna feel anything new... just... lesser versions of what I've already felt."

12:58 Her is a movie that will grow with me I think. One that I will make more and more sense and have more and more meaning as I grow older and develop more relationship knowledge. I've got plenty of the loneliness, but hardly any of the relationship.

1:25 Romantic love is too big and yet too elusive a thing for me, I think.
"If you're so funny, then why are you on your own tonight?
If you're so clever, then why are you on your own tonight?
If you're so very entertaining, then why are you on your own tonight?
'Cause tonight is just like any other night
That's why you're on your own tonight
With your triumphs and your charms
While they're in each other's arms
It's so easy to laugh
It's so easy to hate
It takes strength to be gentle and kind
Over, over, over" - "I Know It's Over"

A land of half measures

Perhaps a return to semi-regular blogging is in order?


It's often difficult to live in a land of half measures. To live in a place where nobody really loves anything or has true passion towards something. I love movies. I am passionate film and how it engages people. And yet, I don't know anyone who loves film like I do. I know people who enjoy movies and will sometimes come to my movie nights and others who really like film and will keep an eye on current films, but I don't think I know anyone who loves film. In fact, I'm not entirely sure I know people around me who have passion for anything in the same way as I have passion for movies. I don't mean that to sound arrogant, only that there is so few instances of people who pursue something or feel towards something a full measure of passion. The closest I can think of is people at Southeastern who are truly passionate for bringing the gospel to the world through mission work. The problem is, those people's passion is an active passion and they go and do it. They become church planters, missionaries, etc. I think that is fantastic, but it means that the passionate people around me (At least at Southeastern) don't really stay around.
It just seems to me that if you're passionate about something, if you truly love something and it truly means something to you, then it will make a daily difference in your life. You're going to act upon that which means the most to you (Matt.6:21). If a man loves his wife, then every day should be at least partially directed by that love. If a man passionately cares about his work, then his work should be driven, even in the minutia of it. Maybe that's why I don't see many full measure people around me. Maybe after being here almost 11 years, I've seen the full measure people come and go. Maybe full measure people don't lay roots in the intermediate stage. Maybe they, to quote the Avett Brothers, decide what to be and go be it. Maybe that could be me. Ultimately, Christ should be the definer of our (including my) measures. I think we so often become consumed in ourselves and our sin that living a half measure life is our fallback. It's easier to live without passion. It's easier to live in the halfways. Apathy is easier than love. But there is no Life there.