I pulled over early on the way home from work to record that the last song I added to my playlist is wrecking me again. This happens. The playlist is a playlist I made of songs that wreck me.
There are art works I experience on a level that breaks my own heart a little, if I think: “I may die without ever having expressed my own feelings this clearly”—this beautifully. Tonight it’s “The Road, The Rocks, and The Weeds” by John Mark McMillan.
To get any farther with my post here, you’ll have to go on reading it even when I tell you that I’m about to make a point by referring to the movie Lord of the Rings and not to the books. This has been sticking with me.
Gandalf urges Bilbo: “All your long years, we’ve been friends.” He needs Bilbo to give up a ring that has become too special to Bilbo. It’s not good for him. “Trust me, as you once did,” Gandalf tells him.
And so Bilbo making a great effort holds out his hand and turns it over and he drops the fate of the world on his hobbit hole floor.
Gandalf again, in Moria, with others some of whom knew Bilbo—some maybe not—remarks casually about Bilbo’s gift of mithril from Thorin. “I never told him, but its worth was greater than the value of the Shire.” Gandalf didn’t tell Bilbo that—Bilbo, his friend. He tells others, some of whom Gandalf perhaps hardly knew. He tells these others that he didn’t tell Bilbo. It doesn’t bother him to do so. He throws it out as an interesting factoid for the road.
Bilbo meanwhile, at Rivendell, is at peace. He is not aware of any of this. Perhaps occasionally a stifled pang of yearning comes over him and he wishes he could briefly hold that old ring of his once again.
But he will never know that he had the fate of the world in an envelope over there on the mantelpiece, or rather in his pocket.
He’ll never know the value of the gift Thorin gave him. It was strong, and pretty. Quite a nice gift. Worth more than his house and the houses of everyone he knew—but he didn’t know.
There are different kinds of friends.
There may be an amount of time which it was reasonable for me to spend thinking about this, and I may have spent more than that amount.
Maybe some of my problem is that I’ve been looking to be a Jonathan to someone’s David when in fact to someone’s Gandalf I was a Bilbo.
Originally written May 2025
I’ve always been bad at record keeping. I easily lose track of all kinds of things—people’s birthdays, upcoming bills, items on the grocery list, and (relevant today) how many hours I’ve spent missing Rich Mullins. I know that it’s somewhere in the neighborhood of “most of my adult life”. Which, now that I think about it, may not amount to super many hours after all. In any case.
And I wasn’t even meaning to talk about Rich Mullins. But listening to Steve Bell’s music tends to make me think of him. Today I discovered “Peace Prayer”.
That thing where you stop and stare up at the sky and think how strange and short this life is and suddenly the next life doesn’t seem so far away.
Originally written August 2, 2024
I just came across this, by Kent Beck of Extreme Programming fame:
For the first 40 years of my life I believed safety consisted of holding up a mask so I controlled how other people saw me. Heaven forbid they should see me as *I* saw me.
At 42 that mask became unbearably heavy. I had to drop it on the floor. The mask shattered.
It took a decade to become comfortable that I couldn’t control how other people saw me. That lack of control didn’t matter because I was already safe.
The remainder of my life has been spent getting used to clothes that actually fit. Apologies for the metaphor salad but I’m trying to say something that was incredibly important to me.
It might be helpful for me to learn that one now. I don’t have time, energy, or strength to even attempt to control how others see me. My pitiful attempts are in shambles and were probably poisonous to begin with.
I don’t have a ton of free time to blog lately so I’ll throw in a couple of other, possibly related lessons that I’ve been pondering recently, which I may also need to learn:
Maybe recognizing an inescapable reality helps one to accept it, too.
Like coming to a theological position from which one doesn’t know how to return, and which leads to one disagreeing with nearly every other Christian individual and family that one knows personally. That’s somewhat isolating.
It’s also reality. One doesn’t set aside what one has come to believe is Scriptural, simply because one misses being in the same theological camp or because it’s sad and lonely turning away from the camp and trudging out in the dark night into the vast unfamiliar wilderness.
Perhaps this realization will help me in accepting my current reality.
Sigh.
The cliché is “I always wanted to make people laugh,” but you’re supposed to say it on the flip side of a long and storied successful career as a humorist, and I’m just an unemployed former technical writer with a Substack. It also doesn’t help when the cliché is sort of true. Have you ever been part of an emotional parting and genuinely had something in your eye? Who believes you.
I don’t know what it is about humor, I just find it funny. I have at least since I was perhaps 13 or 14 and holed up in the tool shed at the childhood home (one of them; we moved a number of times) in Texas, scouring through my brother’s old copies of AOPA magazines for Rod Machado columns. I remember thinking then: how is he making me laugh? How does this work? When the family would play a game we imaginatively called “Dictionary”, in which, with a real physical dictionary, slips of paper, and pens, we tried to come up with plausible fake definitions for whichever obscure word the leading player picked, I figured it was more fun to make an incredibly obviously fake definition than to try to fool the other players, and focused on making people laugh with my absurdities.
Absurdity. That’s another thing. At some point—not quite in childhood—I discovered Lewis Carroll, then much later Monty Python. I found that I was drawn not only to absurd or surreal humor but to literary humor, the kind of refined and crafted stuff that you hardly find anywhere nowadays in an age where cheap and repetitive insults at political figures we don’t agree with count as “comedy”. I had always wanted to be a writer, and not being an experienced practitioner compelled to get my expertise on anything out into the world, the craft of writing was part of what drew me, not so much the simple saying of things.
I think I always figured that the truly hilarious people, the Dave Barry and Eric Metaxas types, were simply born with a genetic predisposition toward humor and were always going to just naturally make me near fall out of my chair with their sentences. It was much later that I discovered that even comedians have to learn and work and study and try, and then the whole thing struck me as an education that I wanted, and not having access to the resources or the people who could give me such an education, I started to dig into it on my own. This may partly explain why people I know are out watching Mr. Robot or reading Dostoevsky and I’m over here with my stupid Substack and my iPhone Notes app accumulating “writing ideas”, overdosing on Wodehouse and working tentatively through the 9 or 12 so-called “clean” episodes of Seinfeld.
I have a longtime habit: when I come across someone with a blog or newsletter or etc. that I enjoy and they’ve mostly let it drop, I bug them to start it up again; when I realize that someone I know is a sharp or interesting thinker, I try to coax them to start creating things. I spent large chunks of my life believing that I didn’t have anything interesting to create, myself, and even now I haven’t proven that I do. But as part of my nagging, bugging, coaxing habit, I’ve started handing out this video containing a quote by Ira Glass, because it hits me strongly and I want it seen by others who do have something to say. It’s on my mind again lately so here you go.
It only took 32 years and I finally may begin to understand the first verse or two of “I Can’t Believe It”.
There is nothing new
I could give to You
Just a life that’s torn
Waiting to be born
I need to listen to the whole song again, and others of his. As with Rich Mullins, there was life I had to live before I could discover the depth to the songs.
Rivers overflow
Friends may come and go
But You’ve been by my side
With every tear I’ve cried
That bit—“Friends may come and go”. I fought that for so long, once I was even aware that it was there to be fought—I took for granted that friends stick around and that who’s close today will be close ever after. People that you have lived life with, especially in uniquely weird or formative times, seem fixtures, at least to the lazy and entitled mind. Once I knew that friends could drift apart I didn’t want to accept that it could happen in my own life.
And speaking in terms of human friends, there are friends who last for decades and (what feels like to me) multiple different lives of yours. There are ones who know you well and yet stick around and continue to know you, friends with whom you can be free and at ease and not wonder if they’re going to report the conversation to others afterward. They’re just hard to find.
God is not fully comprehended by finite human intellect and I don’t expect ever to have learned all that I could about Him and to sum up every reason I have to give Him praise. But there was a moment—so long as I’m “oversharing”, which is mostly what I do on this blog—when it so hit me that God is unchanging, that I thought: we could never “finish” praising Him for that alone.
What a contrast to us as friends is Jesus.
I know You never lie
And so I’m giving up my pride
So I can receive it
I have so much to learn. I need a lot more prayer and Bible reading. Maybe I could also listen to more Keith Green.
As anyone who has known me moderately well for very long in real life could tell you, I am (alas) the talkative type. I don’t do well at pausing to let others speak, or at prompting or encouraging them to speak. If not reminded, I can go on for some time about myself, what I have been doing or thinking, or other things to do with myself, or possibly with what I think of other people or happenings.
I am not a poet, so perhaps it’s partly my unmanliness. Where most guys—surely many if not most men—value time spent out golfing, or fishing or hunting or whatevering, with their friends, I value more time spent discussing: time with words, ideas, writing, reading, speaking. I have a particularly fond memory of one winter night spent with a friend in front of the fire, explicably (I’d say inexplicably, but it’s explicable: we were out West, where such things make sense) drinking coffee, and chatting of this and that. That was some free time spent together. For the poor folks I text, I tend to feel honored when they take time in their busy lives to write to me or to read what I write to them.
One companion of olden times I’ve somewhat kept in touch with. I did not know him as well as I wish I had, but when I could communicate with him he was always an incredible encouragement to me. Looking back I now wonder: was he very close to anyone hardly at all? He was a friendly and good acquaintance to many, but did he have friends?
I’ve been thinking for some while now (ironically perhaps, including a good bit of the time since I started this blog) about shutting up. How many times, regretting a particularly bad outcome or trouble I’ve caused someone else, I’ve made great resolves—“From now on, I will (or won’t) do XYZ”—and then failed to live up to them. So I won’t clearly make any such resolve here, but just ponder a bit what it might look like to shut up, and about the pros and cons.
Your words may be somewhat more valued. I don’t think there’s a guarantee here. Causation and correlation, and all that sort of thing. But for the one or two persons I can think of who simply don’t say much very often, I do think it’s a bit more noticeable to me when they do speak up. Maybe that is just me. And presumably, in order to benefit from this you would need to refrain from speaking up except when it was important that others pay attention.
You are less likely to annoy people. People are all different. It may be rude, I think, to say too explicitly to someone that they’re annoying you by constant chatter, but some people will do that. Others won’t. I expect that for most people, if anyone simply won’t leave them alone but keeps texting or calling or messaging or writing or following them around and trying to carry on a conversation, that may be trying, even if they don’t say so out loud.
You’re far less likely to put your foot in your mouth. Could I stand to have done this a good bit less in my life!
You may sometimes find it easier to live in peace with others. It’s rare to come across a very large group of people with whom you agree on every issue and who all agree with each other, and some people deal better with disagreement than do others. If you are able to hold a view (or reject a view) and yet not express it, you have the advantage over someone who proclaims to all acquaintances what it is that he thinks.
I’ve been going through The Adventures of Sally (Wodehouse, once again). Bits describing lone thought-wrestling, in the car at night, while looking out at the passing scenery, appeal to me. Also some of her letters. “Proud! That’s the real trouble, Ginger. My pride has been battered and chopped up and broken into as many pieces as you broke Mr. Scrymgeour’s stick!”
You may unwittingly offend people. It’s not always certainly clear when someone expects you to communicate, either to respond or to initiate a conversation, or to bring up something. Again, some may not even say it aloud (at least not to you), but they may be bothered all the same. It’s hard for me to imagine, though, that this would happen as often as people would be bothered by one’s speaking too much.
You may be a bit lonely. What if you already are, though? Conversation is such a warming and helpful sort of a thing, when it involves sharing what one has in common with others. As I said before, for me it’s one of the chief pastimes that involves friends. You don’t have to speak every interesting thought you have. (For me that’s a tricky thing to remember.) But when an idea occurs to me and I’m excited to share it with others and it just doesn’t seem to excite them the same—well, after the 434th time or so of that, it does become easier to consider shutting up. It’s not their fault in any way. I still can become lonely, though.
If you were to drop off the face of the earth tomorrow, the people who call looking for you, those are your real friends.
— Noah Stokes
I’m running out of words for now.
At long last, an update. In the last (say) two months:
I have also fallen sadly behind in my Bible reading plan. I must work on that. I also want to work on talking (that is to say, texting) less. But I may try to blog a little more often…
Blog Of My Sojourn 