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September 18th, 2009: Work work work. Play play. Play play. Work. Play play.
I’m so irresponsible lately. This will change tomorrow. Or tuesday. I’m too busy restoring myself right now. Or making myself, I don’t know which one. Either way.
I love? No, probably not. Well… maybe.
I think I lost Tyler’s gas cap. I feel really terrible about it. Like… you couldn’t possibly have any idea. I haven’t even been able to call my best friend all day.
I’m going to dance with beautiful people tonight. Probably to Paper Planes. And try to forget about the gas cap.
Sheryl Crow’s Redemption Day is criminally underrated. The snare work is more than you could ever ask for.
If I ever move north of the mason-dixon, I’m opening a legit sweet tea stand.
Yes, I realize that all of my blogs/tweets/etc lately have been incredibly self-important. Maybe it’s just that season. Or maybe it’s always been there & is just now coming out.
Starting a freelance design thing. Called Queen Jane Approximately. For less self-important bullshit, visit the Queen Jane Approximately Tumblr. If you need anything designed, lemme know. I’ll have a portfolio up soon-ish.
August 13th, 2009: This is my justification for making music.
I was thinking tonight about the record I’m going to eventually record & about how shallow & trite all of my songs are. But then I realized the aren’t. Well… they are. They’re all about relationships. Each song is about a girl. None of them mean very much on their own. But taken as a collection, a narrative forms and describes a shift in how I’ve learned to perceive myself, relationships, and boundaries.
When I first moved to Atlanta I was terrified of boundaries. I thought safely within bounds was the way to live life. I thought that would pay off in the long run. I thought safety was substance, but I was mistaken. All that is unknown is not, in fact, evil. And people who set boundaries have motives. These days I think that life is about defining your own boundaries. That’s the difference between living & existing. And you can’t set a boundary without first passing the boundary, or at least exploring the general territory. Because that’s where wisdom is, on the other side of the boundary. And all of that is in the songs. The older songs are confused as to why there’s no true satisfaction in safety. And then it moves towards entertaining these boundaries and even passing the boundaries. I now have no problem with having the lines “I’d buy you a drink if I were a drinker, but I’m not & so this song will have to do” and “I’d like to take you home, but I think I’ll have another drink instead” on the same record. (I was planning on rewriting the former, but couldn’t figure out how to without destroying the song. Now I don’t have to worry about it.) The line of thought there is an about face turn, but that’s what living is about. It’s taking a boundary & running straight towards it & past it as far as you can. And then you eventually backtrack to somewhere in the middle, which is where the forthcoming songs will land. And I’m very satisfied with that.
I love that I have songs about sexy legs and pretty pink lips, about drinking whiskey & making love by campfire, because they serve to balance out the idealism & fear of participation in the old songs. I love that I’ll have songs that bear experience on both sides of the line, because that gives a weight to the songs I haven’t written yet. And while I think a few of those songs are really good (particularly the ones that trek on past the boundaries), the ones I’ll write in the future are the ones that will matter. They’re the ones that will offer something worth digesting.
I learned this weekend that the missing piece of the puzzle is love. Which… it would seem that all of my songs are about love, but really they aren’t. The love is obfuscated by acceptance or justification or loneliness or desires. And you don’t know this until you explore all of these, until you can, at the very least, identify all of your needs. I realized that, as much as it’s on my mind, I never knew love. I even though I purport to have ridiculously high standards, I’d been compromising in order to fill these felt needs. And I knew it… I knew I was imagining these girls to be a lot more perfect-for-me than they actually were, I knew I was filling in the unknowns with all my ideals. Partly because there’s no risk in that, rejection is much less an issue. But it was all… it was a journey, that’s what it was. I was learning. It was necessary.
But love isn’t being desired by the girl you once thought would never give you the time of day. Love isn’t about being desired at all, in fact. It’s about being inspired. Christina was right. Love is about being inspired, not about being satisfied or justified. It’s about being terrified… it’s weighty & it’s risky. And so it can’t exist in a bottle, it’s bigger than just two people. It has to play itself out in the world.
And so all of these questions… I spend so much time trying to figure out what’s “right” & why that matters, if there’s purpose to anything, etc… but there is no answer to any of these. There’s only love & the practice of love, of being inspired. There’s no reason you can come to for being “good,” for going above & beyond what will keep you out of jail. There’s only inspiration. The ultimate is to be inspired to be something. Anything. To be good, to be excellent, to be an astronaut… where this inspiration doesn’t come from within, there is love. And love is beautiful. And terrifying. And at times completely fulfilling & at times absolutely painful. And it’s a drug. And it’s a risk. But at the end of the day it’s all there is.
At least that’s what I think right now.
July 19th, 2009: Just posting to post.
It’s been difficult to write lately because I’ve had a girl on my mind. So all of my free thoughts go towards scheming up ways to make her fall in love with me. I’m still on the fence about whether or not the scheming helps… about whether psychology can do anything more than create a short-term illusion of a connection. But I figure it beats standing idly by. Either way, I’m pretty content with things.
I have been filling up my evernote, though, with photos that I find to be compelling for whatever reason. It’s not safe for work, though, so browse at your own risk. There’s boobs on the other side of the link. evernote.com/pub/joncole
June 16th, 2009: Podcast 01
Tracklist
————-
1. The Working Title - Physical Love (Bone Island, 2009)
2. The Films - Holiday (Oh, Scorpio, 2009)
3. Cary Ann Hearst - Ghost of teh Good Girls (demo, 2009)
4. Dustin Welch - Don’t Tell ‘Em Nothin (Whiskey Priest, 2009)
5. American Aquarium - Louisiana Beauty Queen (Dances For the Lonely, 2009)
6. Tent Revival - Legs & Scars (demo, 2008)
7. Derek Webb - Name (The Ringing Bell, 2007)
8. Tres Bien - Knock You Out (demo, 2009)
9. Ponderosa - Midnight Revival (I’m Your Pistolier, 2008)
10. Blair Crimmins & the Hookers - Mean Mean Man (Meet the Hookers EP, 2008)
11. The Bridges - Dry Sky (demo, 2009)
——————————
running time: 41:25
June 15th, 2009: Bob Dylan knows how to say it.
The man in me will hide sometimes to keep from being seen. But that’s just because he doesn’t wanna turn into some machine. Take a woman like you to get through to the man in me.
June 10th, 2009: Crisis Points.
I had lunch yesterday with Nikki, the most beautiful person on the earth. And I spent a ton of time just kind of ranting about the church & faith & I think I articulated a few things better than I have been lately.
Regarding faith, I’m starting to feel as though prioritization is what things rest on, ultimately. The idea is that whatever rests at the top of this totem pole is an ends to which faith is a means. For instance, if you value yourself more than anything, faith is likely an attempt at self-preservation. If you value your loved ones more than anything, it’s more than likely a way to ascribe protection & survival to them. If you value an explanation of the world & where things came from the most, faith is a means to explaining where shit came from & why we’re here. There are all sorts of felt needs that faith can meet. But I have a hard time believing these are “saving” faiths.
I had lunch with Tyler on Monday & I was telling him about these comments I was leaving @ relevantmag.com on an article about being a dude who was a late twenty-something who had a hard time dating because he “Kissed Dating Goodbye” as a teen. And we discussed how common this was with our generation, & how so many of those who seemingly had success with this method (abstaining from dating in the teen years, then finding “The One” at 19, 20, or 21 & marrying them right off) are actually divorcing or are unhappy because they realized that they had idealized concepts of who their spouse was, or who they themselves were, or of what they needed out of a relationship or of what they thought God’s plan for their lives were. When these kinds of things are influenced by hormones & this grand belief that God is “in control,” things can get out of wack. And at first this sounds tragic, but in reality it’s a great thing because it leads to individuals to a crisis point. They’re either going to discover a true faith in God, one that’s independent of Joshua Harris’ books & WWDJ bracelets & all of the perhaps well-intended but ultimately mind-fucking ideologies of the church, or they’re going to realize that their faith was only meeting a felt need to tie up the philosophical loose ends of life, or to stave off worrying about things like bills, career, relationships, etc (”Just waiting on God to open a door, y’all!”), or whatever. This kind of crisis point is incredibly important because it separates the true believers from those who are just following for whatever reason.
It’s interesting how Jesus never made it easy for anyone. He spoke more in riddles that forced people to look at themselves & dig up what their own motivations were. I’m starting to believe that he was leading people to these crisis points. “What? I have to give up my possessions to receive salvation??” He was deconstructing their concept of how faith fits into their lives & exposing what their true motivations were. And the American church is not interested in this kind of thing at all. The American church has no problem with complacency & actually tends to run in the opposite direction of crisis points. “What? Doubt??? That could lead someone to decide that they don’t believe! Which could lead to others deciding they don’t believe! Which could really hurt our bottom line!!” Doubt, questioning, thinking outside of what is assumed to be Christian theology (and therefore validating or invalidating it) is not welcome in the church setting. All that’s required is that you say you believe, truly looking at what you’re believing & why you’re believing are not demanded or even encouraged.
I’m starting to think that American Christianity is funded by folks who won’t find themselves in Heaven. It doesn’t take a real hard look to see that the Christian economy is mostly catering to these felt needs of assurance, community, conservatism, etc, not a radical, uprooting faith in God that trumps all of these concerns. And that what masquerades as Christianity in America is merely a club for conservative consumers, something that doesn’t even matter. And THIS is what’s tragic, that so many folks are lead like sheep into complacency while being promised eternal life. Comparatively, those who took the Joshua Harris Detour & ended up divorced at least come to a point where they encounter what it means to have faith. These people will like never get that opportunity.
If the government began persecuting the church, if it became illegal & punishable by death to be a Christian, the number of people who claim to have faith would shrink to god knows how few people. And these gigantic megachurches would cease to exist. And pastors would no longer be driving mercedes benzs. Because all of this bullshit is the product of complacency. As much as anything, it’s rich folks buying off their conscience. “Yes, I’m a lawyer. Yes, I just got a child rapist off the hook on a technicality. But I’m only doing my job. In fact, God, here’s your 10% cut.”
I mean, seriously… the path is narrow, & yet most folks I encounter seem to be travelling at high speeds down some kind of Autobahn in a party bus with the cruise control set at 85. This does not compute.
But what are you gonna do?
June 3rd, 2009: You are who you are.
I had a lot of super interesting conversations en route to & from & while in Birmingham over the weekend. Most notably Shane & I discussed the concept of free will (Shane is a man of principle & I love that) & later Jess & I discussed identity. And they tied together in a really neat way.
I can’t buy into Shane’s argument that we are entirely the product of our environment. I think that our environment shapes us in incredibly significant ways, but I don’t think that this influence is focused enough to make our decisions for us. More to the point, I believe that our environment shapes the initial parameters we use to make decisions, past some degree of self-awareness we can overwrite these parameters &, indeed, create a completely contradictory set if we choose to. Perhaps Shane’s actual argument is that every decision we make is a reaction to our environment, & as such our choices are defined by our environment, but I would add that our decisions aren’t necessarily defined by our environment, especially once we become sufficiently self-aware.
In biological terms, it comes down to pattern recognition & the functions of the neocortex. The idea is that our neocortex picks up patterns & is constantly referencing these patterns & allowing us to predict what is going to happen. We can then build upon this & shape our decisions around social causes or accumulation or whatever. Or we can compare things & create personal taste. These sorts of things tend to transcend personal survival & point towards free will.
That said, our reference point is still our reference point. But I’ve come see a distinction between WHAT I am (i.e. a product of a certain culture… country music, fishing, 4wd trucks, etc) & WHO I am (i.e. my reaction to that culture… my reaction to country music, what type of fishing I enjoy, how I treat the environment, how I treat other people, whether or not I’m trustworthy, etc). Becoming comfortable with WHAT I am had something to do with realizing how little it mattered, & how much more it mattered WHO I am. I’ve lost the sense of rebellion on this surface level because I understand that whether I wear boots or sneakers or dress shoes doesn’t mean jack shit. Whether I drive a Mercedes or a Grand National w/ chrome rims or a Jeep doesn’t mean jack shit. To prefer being “artsy” over being “hip-hop” over being “indie” over being “regular” over being “corporate” is to miss the point entirely & to get hung up on something pretty trivial. This is all to say that some people try too hard & don’t get anywhere.
It’s funny how the people who think they have things figured out are the ones who miss it, & the ones who don’t give a shit seem to get it right.
May 30th, 2009: You gotta have faith.
What I’ve come to question the most as of late is the definition of faith. The popular idea of faith, at least within the lexicon of western christianity, seems to be incredibly liberal. But the reasons that belie typical faith don’t seem to support the biblical definition, at least in terms of faith as a means to salvation.
There’s a handful of reasons that people “believe.” Primarily it’s a way of coping with death… the idea that we will continue on after death in some form of paradise is much more pleasant than the idea that we’ll simply disappear. It’s a much more pleasant fate to ascribe to our loved ones, also. It’s a way of holding onto what we know.
For some it’s a means of acceptance. It’s community, it’s assurance, & it’s a point of common interest by which to relate to people. For others it’s a framework for “understanding” the world around us & the behavior of others. And I use “understanding” only the most self-satisfying sense of the word. It staves off curiosity & provides a sense of confidence. Still others believe as some form of life insurance or as an outgrowth of a fear of hell.
In these instances what it seems to imply is something like “I’ll agree with you & participate because it suits me to.” This is tantamount to saying “I would like to go to Heaven, it seems like a good idea, now tell me how.” This is not consistent with way that Jesus presented salvation.
Therefore I would argue that these reasonings for “belief” do not qualify as “saving faith.” By that I mean that faith as a means to an end implies a set of priorities akin to the rich man in Matthew 19. That is to say that anything except faith as an end to which all other things are means is not a qualifying faith. Jesus goes as far as to say ”…everyone who has left houses or bothers or sisters or father or mother or children or fields for my sake will receive a hundred times as much and will inherit eternal life. But many who are first will be last, and many who are last will be first.” This is not a chastizing of gluttony, but of self-satisfaction.
This raises a very important question… does seeking salvation disqualify you from receiving it?
I’m starting to see faith as something beyond a self-serving means to salvation. “…It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” Unless God is paramount to your own well-being, your loved ones, your comfortability, your possessions, etc, you will not enter the kingdom of God.
The way is narrow, indeed. And yet the mentality of western christianity is best-sellers & megachurches, a diametric opposition to the words of Jesus himself.
It was easier to be a theist before Darwin. In fact, Darwin was a theist who lost his faith through his own research. Were he born a hundred years earlier, or had he decided on a different vocation, would that have had an affect on whether or not he would make it into heaven? Or, more importantly, would it have had an affect on whether others who read his works & “lost their faith” could have salvaged their faith? I would argue that what this points to is a faith in the Bible, or in the christian explanation of how things got here, not God himself. I would have to suppose that, hypothetically, none of these faiths were qualifyingly directed at God, only at explanations & assurances.
Therefore I would assume a transcendent, qualifying faith would be independent of all ties (possessions, persons, assurances, etc) and yet prioritized above these ties.
That doesn’t sound easy at all.
May 28th, 2009: How small is you?
This might be the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen. (via Casey)
It shows the size of the earth compared to the size of planets & stars that we know. And at the end it shows a photograph taken with a 4 month exposure from the Hubble Space Telescope of total black, which revealed that in what we see as a tiny spec of total black, there actually exists 10,000 galaxies each with up to a trillion stars. That means each black spec in the night sky could house a trillion stars. The possibilities there are mind numbing. The perspective it provides on what it means to be a human is perhaps even more mind numbing.
Furthermore, some of these stars are shining from 13 billion lightyears away. According to the supposed 13.8b age of all things, that would make these stars just 800 million years old. What’s crazy about young earth creationism is this… If the light from these stars is coming from 13 billion light years away & yet God created everything between 6 & 10 million years ago, the light from these other planets would not have reached us yet, God would’ve had to put light into motion & stretched it across the universe 13b lightyears. Maybe that’s plausible, though… the more I think about it, the more the story of creation works as a metaphor for macroevolution.
If we suppose that time was accelerated for ~13b years, the creation of light/darkness, land/sea, sea life, birds, mammals, man, & then woman from man doesn’t seem like too much of a stretch. There are still discrepancies… sexes would have to develop early on through an organism with damaged DNA attempting to replicate another organism’s healthy DNA, or through some mishap of cannibalism, or whatever, as there are plants who reproduce sexually & would therefore likely share the common ancestor.
So did Adam have a penis? Perhaps that’s not the right question. Maybe the question revolves around how “history” was treated pre-history. I think we romanticize what early life was, as if historians always existed & that “revelation” was a secure means of understanding previous transpirings. What was good enough to be a recording of “history” for the Jews simply doesn’t hold up to the scrutiny that we apply to historical documentation today. To me it seems quite reasonable to assume that a “beginning” worked itself into Jewis accounts of history quite naturally. (I’ll expound on this idea in a later post.)
Returning to space, though, the size of the universe is something incredibly interesting. The possibility of life on other planets becomes a lot easier to swallow when you get a glimpse of the depths of space. But, supposing there was intelligent life in a solar system surrounding one of these stars 13 billion lightyears away, it would take us 13 billion years travelling at the speed of light to reach that solar system. And if we could build a space ship that could travel for 13 billion years at the speed of light without running into a planet, 13 billion years worth of generations would have to live and die on that space ship before we would reach this place. And if we got there, it would be 26 billion years past what we were perceiving from Earth (or the Hubble Space Telescope). In practical terms, we can never conclude with any certainty that life elsewhere does not exist. Space is too big & we don’t live long enough.
May 28th, 2009: Regarding the big questions.
It’s hard to unbrainwash yourself, to step out into uncharted territory & to rely on your own cognizance. But I’m slowly realizing some things.
Life is what you make of it. If you are on a bastard quest to find truth or objectivity, it’s only because you choose that. There is no universal meaning to life, we each formulate our own meaning. Some people seek out illusion upon which to build their lives, & that’s their right. This was an important realization because of what it means for the relationships in my life… I’m most satisfied & most fulfilled when I’m around people who consider their personal purpose to be a quest for truth, or something similar. And other people have other purposes & that’s fine & I don’t need to hold them to standards that presume that we’re trying to get the same things out of life. This narrows my field of vision in regards to romantic relationships considerably, which is a wonderful thing as it serves to make things much clearer. The more criteria by which to mark names off the list, the closer I am to getting my freak on.
Christianity is self-serving. I’ve sung in key regarding this issue my entire life… Christianity is hard, Christianity is self-LESS, Christianity is about God, not me. But when things really get down to the brass tacks, I’m terrified of not believing because I’m staring down what I’ve always been told is the fiery gates of hell. The source of my charity is not a love of God, it’s a love of myself. It’s self-preservation. If I’m convinced that hell is real, faith in God is merely a formality. It’s easy. It’s like believing in the door of a burning building, doing whatever you have to do to get outside to safety. Of course this doesn’t reveal itself until you’re really confronted with disbelief.
If you believe that atheists are generally seeking to justify their ego, you are brainwashed. Christian apologetics involves taking a leap of faith that God exists (presumably to save one’s soul from eternal damnation) & then working backwards to justify that leap of faith. The antithesis of this would be that atheists take a leap of faith that God doesn’t exist (presumably to satisfy one’s own ego) & then work backwards to justify that. This allows Christians to easily write off scientific commentary that causes them to reconsider their worldview. However, science is a generally agnostic field & does not tend to be pursued with this sort of prejudice. I watched an interview with Richard Dawkins recently & I was surprised at how easy his worldview was for me to understand. If you think that Dawkins, himself one of atheism’s most vocal proponents, is espousing an unreasonable, illogical, or easily debunkable worldview, you’re brainwashed.
I’m currently on the fence about atheism vs theism. Generally any issue has a “with consideration for God” & a “without consideration for God” explanation… what makes most of the “with consideration for God” explanations unattractive to me is that they seem to serve me in some way. And though I acknowledge that this is a prejudice, I feel compelled to resist self-serving solutions until it becomes absolutely unbearable. If there were no reward system in place, I would find it to be much easier to buy into Christianity.
What a lot of Christians fail to realize in their debates & their apologetics is that “Darwinism” as a faith does not need to be defended because it was never intended to be a faith. Christianity, however, was, & does need to be defended because of the implications of the leap of faith. If Christianity turns out to be lore, Darwin’s theory stands as our best yet attempt at explaining where we came from. It doesn’t have to be right, only more right than our last idea. The war is not Christianity versus Darwinism, it’s Christianity versus Disbelief In Christianity.
The one thing I keep returning to is the prophecies regarding the City of Tyre. I might be able to rebuild a faith on that. I need to really look into whether or not that stands up to scrutiny.
Bear in mind that this is a personal pursuit that is not necessary for everyone… I’m simply an individual who has to scrutinize everything. But any comments are super welcome, especially regarding Biblical prophecy fulfilled in secular sources.