Of Blind Dogs and Vicious Heart

What is my relationship with art and faith?

2011-08-09T16:48:00.000-07:00

Art first took root in my life in the form of abrasive music. Some wouldn't call this brand of music art, but that's another essay entirely. I started out playing drums in drumline in junior high, and went on to front several bands until I was twenty years old. After a year in junior college spent mostly on my last, and favorite band, I quit.

The last band left me penniless and exhausted. I'd spent so much money and time on it, booking shows, driving my friends and their gear from the practice space to the venues and back again. I'd stayed up late many nights, surrounded by people, living like the extrovert I was never wired to be. I'd enrolled in community college and done fairly well, but when spring rolled around I ignored my studies for the band. I'd graduated from Jackson Preparatory School, a place far harder academically than Hinds Community College, but I failed American History II. I'd stopped showing up to class on time, had disregarded assignments, and earned an F. A thing I hadn't done even in my difficult high school.

I left the band, though it pained me to do so. Writing lyrics and playing shows had meant so much to me, the kids who kept coming to see our work, who responded to it and felt something, that was a feeling like no other. One thing that was different about our last band, though, that hadn't happened in any other, was that we played with signed and touring bands, bands we had albums by and admired greatly. Our contemporaries weren't the locals anymore. We competed with the big leaguers, held our own, and were proud. But losing the band left me without direction. I'd watched our efforts grow from one song with two friends to ten songs with three brothers. What had started in a practice space in Madison, Mississippi, had been good enough to take to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, to play with established punk bands. I felt like I had been forced to let something go that was precious. And I had.

I'll refrain from the cliche, "But God had bigger plans!" I don't know what God's plans are, and I never have. Even Jeremiah 29:11, the verse almost all Christians recite when we need a pick-me-up, doesn't give us any specifics. "A future and a hope," it says. Honestly, that didn't do me much good. Again, I don't know what God's plans are, and I don't even know what God's will is anymore. I think God's will is mostly that we love him and love people, and if we're doing that, really working for that, then we're probably doing God's will. Dr. Green once said something about salvation, about how God invites us to live life as it was meant to be lived, and I believe that that is my story from the time I left the band to now. I believe I've lived my life as God intended for me, Ellis Purdie, a Christian, to live it.

Leaving the band wasn't the only thing I left behind. I'd been hanging on to a soured relationship during my year in the band and at Hinds. I'd hoped that Shellie and I would rekindle our flame, grow up a little and give things a shot again. She'd meant the world to me, just like the band. She'd supported my efforts in music, been at the shows, shared her writing with me and read mine. Like the band, I'd thought she was permanent, that we were permanent, but I let her go, too. Strangely enough, my faith had everything to do with letting her go. Our ideals were different, and we weren't on the same page in terms of our theology. She headed to Oxford, Mississippi, and went to Ole Miss, and I stayed behind and enrolled at Mississippi College: a Baptist university in Clinton, Mississippi, and alma mater of the late great Barry Hannah. Also left behind was an addiction to pornography. Some people would laugh at the statement, and that's fine, but I'm willing to bet those people have never seen a man broken down and weeping in the floor of a room, having been fired and facing potential prison time for the pornography found on his computer. Sobbing with the fear of losing his wife and children. See that sometime, and if you still don't think pornography is dangerous, I question your heart. My story with pornography is simple. I'd been introduced as an adolescent through the internet, and it maintained its presence until I was twenty years old. I'd grown unable to resist looking when I felt the urge, unable to refrain from lewd fantasy even while at work. Anyone who's been through this knows what I'm talking about. It was not a matter of mere horomones. It was the abuse of hormones. It wasn't a matter of simply being a sexual creature. It was the abuse of sexuality. The use of women for the sake of objectivity and short-term gratification. I'd filled my mind with it, allowed it to infiltrate the most sensitive and vulnerable part of me: my heart and mind. I was ready for a clean slate, and I found accountability and went to counseling. From that point forward, it was important for me to only allow good things into my mind.

Around this time I'd received a gift from a friend: Blue Like Jazz by Donald Miller. I'd liked the book so much that I'd also bought Miller's Searching for God Knows What, and in Miller I found a man who spoke my language. He understood that the world was hard, that we were in a human condition, and that life was full of a mystery that while heartbreaking was also stunning and beautiful. It was all about Jesus, what he said and did, and how it had traction in our present world. In Miller I discovered how much I liked reading. I'd never read much in high school, wouldn't do the assignment given me, read the books I was told to read, or involve myself in a discussion about the humanities as many of my classmates did. I just didn't care. I don't know what happened. I like to believe that leaving the band and Shellie behind and giving myself to my God gave God the room and the space to finally speak. Things were finally quiet. I could hear, and believe me, I was listening. I wanted direction, to do whatever it that the Lord wanted, to do whatever it was that I was made to do and to do it in abundance and joy. I do not recommend anyone spend as much time looking at pornography as I did. But when you switch from putting filth into your head to feasting on truth and beauty, the difference is undeniably real and tangible. I started reading. I started out with books by Donald Miller, Preston Jones, Henry Rollins, C.S. Lewis, and Shane Claiborne. I devoured the stuff, but then I took an American Literature course with Dr. James Potts, and my whole world changed. Dr. Potts introduced me to Raymond Carver, Flannery O'Connor, Henry James, Rick Bass, William Faulkner, Joyce Carol Oates, Barry Hannah, Tennessee Williams, Cormac McCarthy, Zora Neale Hurston, and I was hooked. I inhaled American fiction, and felt smarter overnight. Like the pornography had been diffused from my heart and mind and put in its place was The Story. Fiction. Literature. The heart of the matter. The blood and desire and pain. God Himself. The stuff Christ "could find brotherhood in" as Barry Hannah once said of William Dunlap's visual art.

I did not look back. I savored literary art, and God kept on feeding me. He is still doing so today.

2011-08-09T16:36:00.000-07:00

I don't know how to start this. I want to apply to Seattle Pacific University for their M.F.A. program in creative writing. The program is geared towards the relationship between art and faith and the exploration of faith through art. If I got to go, we'd study the greats. Flannery O'Connor, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Emily Dickinson, Annie Dillard, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Dante, Augustine, all of those guys. The people who wrote serious canonized literature, not genre fiction with Bible verses tossed in for good measure, sitting unimportantly in the Christian Fiction aisle of your nearest Lifeway. I'm not sorry I said it; I don't care for that kind "art," and I would rather publish nothing in my lifetime than be a part of that industry. There. I said it. My teachers would be really compelling, faithful, and artistically driven and smart folks. Gregory Wolfe and Brett Lott for starters, two men who've already impressed me with their own work.

So what is my relationship with art and faith? What is the relationship between art and faith? Are they intrinsically related or are they better off without one another? What do I think of all of this?

I'm going to write a few blogs trying to riff my way to the answer. I have a four page essay due with my application discussing my journey with art and faith. Prayers please.

2011-03-20T09:59:00.000-07:00

I'm often trying to see how the truth of art (literature in particular) and the truth of faith are in conversation with another, and then I read quotes such as these two. The first is found in Scott Bader-Saye's "Following Jesus in a Culture of Fear": "Fear can cause us to love less because we fear too much the seeds of sorrow that inhabit every love." I've read this line before, it also appears--in slightly different form--in Lewis Nordan's wonderful novel-in-stories "Music of the Swamp": "There is great pain in all love, but we don't care it's worth it." Praise God.

2011-03-16T08:32:00.001-07:00

I'd like to share a poem by Gregory Orr that I've memorized and have thus been carrying around with me for some time now. I'm not sure the order of the lines is the same as that found in the book, but you will no doubt get the point.

To learn by heart is to learn by hurt--grief inscribing its wisdom into the soft tissue.
Song you sing, poem you are
Finger moving precise as a phonograph needle along the groove of scar.

These days I am a little hesitant and annoyed when it comes to relating everything to the Christian life. I'm not saying people shouldn't do it--see my friend Matt Milstead's daily notes on Facebook on learning Kung Fu and its relationship for him with God in Christ for someone doing it well--I'm just saying I don't think it has to be that way, and that often we can miss the beauty of nature or the art object or whatever the thing may be when we attempt to take something already clothed in God's wonder and beauty and truth and run it through the theological blender in an attempt to make it evangelical when it's simply not meant to be evangelical. I do not know what is meant to be evangelical, and I do not know if some things some days are meant to be evangelical and on other days are not. As of now, I am no preacher and I do not work in a church vocationally, though I do care about what we do as the body of Christ operating in this world. What I do know is that God delights in beauty and truth, and that this is evident in how much creation alone prods us toward the questions of faith and origin, right and wrong, and a host of other things.

All that to say, Gregory Orr's poem is hopeful to me in that if grief can and does inscribe its wisdom into our everything, then surely other things must do so as well. If grief contains wisdom, it goes without saying for me--a Christian--scripture must also do something when I interact with it. I do agree with Orr that grief is indeed full of great wisdom, and I believe my aforementioned friend Matt Milstead would tell you that without the grief, pain, and hardship he has endured he would not be half the person of faith that he is today. And believe me, he should know the wisdom that grief brings. There is little I have observed in this world more heartbreaking than watching Matt rise in the near-dark of our dorm room, slowly easing himself over the bed and shuffling to the bathroom to get ready for another day of hardship in living with Cerebral Palsy. Seeing Matt's hardship, the grief I've observed is wisdom enough in itself, and I cannot fathom what it must be like to operate under such circumstances. Grief inscribing its wisdom into the soft tissue. My hope and my prayer today is that as I read Matthew 6:26-27 ("Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more important than food, and the body more important than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?") I will take Christ's words at face value, let them inscribe their wisdom into the (hopefully) soft tissue of my heart. I don't care how trite it sounds. That is all that I need. I do not think this was Gregory Orr's intention when writing this poem: to have me, a Christian, glean some additional meaning from it that simply did not originate with his work. But I know that his poem is true, and because it is true, he has encountered my God.

2011-03-05T08:45:00.000-08:00

This started out as a fiction exercise, but I thought maybe it would do well on my blog. So here we are.

Several weeks ago I was leaving the Hattiesburg Library, and knew on my way out that there was someone heading out as well, following pretty close behind me. When I got out of the building I turned around to see an African American woman, short with short black hair and dressed in black pants and a fairly nice dress shirt. Her daughter was behind her, and the woman stopped and took her daughter by the arm, scolded her and then gave her three or four slaps on the legs. She proceeded to walk away from the little girl, the child holding her hands to her legs and trying to keep up all the while holding back a sob. I don’t know why I kept turning around and looking back. I must have done it three times probably, and knew somehow the third time that the woman was irritated with me for doing it, and she said, “What you keep lookin’ back heah fo? Yeah, I beat her ass.” I have never taken kindly to authority, and I do not like it when anyone directs a stern tone of voice at me. “I’m not studying you,” I lied. “You need to get a real problem.” I knew she was right, and I was mad that she noticed. “That’s rude,” I said. “You don’t talk to a total stranger like that.” “Whatever,” she said. “No, you have a problem,” I said. “Fix it.” She said something back to the effect of “Yeah, you’re my problem.” I got in the car and cranked the engine, pulled up behind her and gave her the finger before heading out of the parking lot. My Christianity was nowhere in sight. Looking back I wish I had done things differently. Had said, "Ma'am, I'm sorry I was staring, and I'm sorry you're having a rough night. I hope things improve for you." I don’t know what the kid did in the library, but my assumption was that the woman just shouldn't have had the kid in the library in the first place. The child was four or five, six tops, and I know that it must be hard for a kid that age to sit still and be quiet in a setting like the public library. I also thought the woman could have handled things differently--as in not spank your child right out in the open for everyone to see, and then walk away from her as if she were leaving the girl behind. All of this may be so, but I don't know what happened to that woman during the day. I have been in a public library when a child got to crying so loudly that a librarian asked the woman and the child to leave if she couldn't get the child quiet. I don't know if this is what happened to woman above or not, but it's certainly possible. I also know that many people go to the library to use the internet because they may not be able to afford it or a computer at all. I also don't know what kind of day the woman had in general. If she was checking her e-mail about a job opportunity, about a loved one in the hospital, if she was job searching or trying to look at homes in another part of the state or country. I don't know if the child had a daddy to come home to, and I assume she didn't as there wouldn't have been any reason to bring the little girl along had there been another parent at home to let the mom go to the library in peace. None of these things at all may be the case, but I know that it is rare to have that perfect day. I am not obligated to the same kind of responsibilities that that woman deals with every day. It is often very hard for me not to be selfish, and to broadcast that selfishness to the world, mainly because I have not ever had to deal with the kind of selflessness that comes with being a spouse or a parent. I guess if I could explain myself to the woman, I would tell her that it was heartbreaking to see her child in pain and running after her mother in that pain in the dark to the parking lot. I'd say that I didn't understand why it was necessary to slap the child and to do it in public where everyone could see and embarrass the girl. I'd say that I was staring because that's what I do, that in the recesses of my mind I consider myself a writer and the writer is always staring, always observing the world around them for material, to try and understand or even to just celebrate all the mystery that we are subject to in a given day. I'd say that I was staring because I wanted to know the whole story, all the heartbreak and the frustration, and maybe I was looking for the good, because somewhere in there I know that there must be love from that mother to that child, and I wanted to see grace's victory in all the frustration. I could have said all of that to her. Why not? If could lie to her and flip her off, why couldn't I say what I was actually feeling? I wish I had. Such things are what mends the bad from the world. That night I failed.

Things I Know Today

2011-03-01T12:03:00.000-08:00

-Sleep is not your friend after seven or eight hours. Sleep may tell you to lie there another two hours, that it will feel good to do so. That's not true, especially when you have the strength and the ability to stand on both legs, walk to the bathroom or the kitchen, or wherever your morning begins, and get your day started. Yes, sleep is necessary to life, but it can also steal your life from you if you let it. Don't entertain thieves.

-God is not going to solve all of our problems. Had God solved all of David's problems, the Psalms would never have been written, or if they had, they would have been much shorter and less beautiful, resonant, and true.

-I am the beloved. There is nothing that I can do to make God love me more and nothing I can do to make God love me less.

-Growing up means that there is going to be a lot of hard work ahead. You can choose not to do the work, but you will be allowing the devil to rob you and the world of everything you have to offer, whatever that is. We are all here to create something. Do not allow Resistance or laziness (the damn devil) to deprive you and the world of what you have to offer.

-It is a lie to think that you cannot change the world. You simply cannot change the world alone. Not even Christ could do that. Even he had to die for someone. He, too, needed people or he would have died for nothing.

-I waste a lot of time. I'm tired of wasting time. Please pray that I will stop wasting time.

2010-11-17T13:00:00.001-08:00

I have been so very tired lately, wiped out in the truest sense.

This semester has stretched me beyond anything I thought possible. There's been a nervousness in my stomach this week over a lot of things, and sometimes I wonder why the hell I am here, what the hell I am doing.

Then I sit down and eat my turkey sandwich at T-Bone's, and Mik buys me a cup of coffee, and there's the pumpkin cheesecake they have this time of year. The Pixies' song "Gigantic" comes onto the stereo, and I sit there, my sandwich and side salad with thousand island on it near my hands, two cups--one holding coffee, the other ice water and a lemon--in front of me, that pumpkin cheesecake with the whipped topping and pecans sprinkled on its top resting near the corner, and I listen to the song and see my friends all the vinyl and the movies and the art and Mik talking Faulkner with me and I thank God I am alive.

That's all. I don't have a damn thing else to tell you.

2010-08-25T19:39:00.000-07:00

I'm putting off reading a ton of theory for class. I'm trying to care about Erich Auerbach, and let's face it, the guy is (was) way smarter than I'll ever be. But I'll be damned, where's the story?

There's a lot up in the air right now. A possibility that I'll work on a farm starting in June and ending in October of 2011. And...

I might go back to Brasil? This time for several months. The idea sounds like the last thing I would ever do. But a part of me is not entirely opposed to it. I remember when I was there, reading Rick Bragg's All Over But the Shoutin', and how comforting his voice was to me. A voice from the south, my home, speaking to me when I was so far away from the everyday, from my home. I remember how sweet it was to climb into that top bunk, freshly showered, pull the covers up to my waist, and read Rick Bragg. To get to experience home through language, rather than being smack dab in the middle of it. There's a sweetness to doing that that is unlike anything else I've ever done. But that does not mean I will not cry my eyes out when I have to leave Mom, Dad, Annalee, Leon, Minda, and the South altogether, depending wholly on my God.

I am not sure that life is at all well-lived if there is not a deliberate attempt into heartbreak. I am not telling anyone to intentionally mess up their lives. What I am saying is that you have to look, you have to do. You have to pay attention, and do the thing that hurts if you want to feel things, to live, have your imagination stirred and be that "searching dog in the rubble" (God bless Barry Hannah's soul).

I am twenty-five years old.

I'm still in the first half of life (with a lower-case l).

Lord, stretch them bones of mine.

A Recent Essay by Roger Ebert about Reading

2010-07-11T09:53:00.001-07:00

If they had their choice, 63.1% of people would value "a great video game" over Huckleberry Finn. That's the result of a completely unscientific survey I conducted in two places: Twitter, and my recent blog about video games.

The choice approached the abstract, because I didn't specify they had to play the game or read the novel. Like all web-based surveys, this one is a 100% accurate representation of whoever chose to vote, for whatever reason, whoever they were. In theory, no one could vote twice.

I'm publishing the meaningless result as an excuse to discuss a few of my own notions. I would have voted for Huckleberry Finn. In fact, I recently told a reader that if forced to choose, I would sacrifice every video game in existence for the works of Shakespeare and not give it a moment's thought. Such mental experiments are folly. It's likely that if we ever do lose the works of Shakespeare it will be at the same instant we lose all the video games and everything else.

Let me speculate about who mighty have been voting. I first announced the survey on my Twitter account. The initial result showed a 70-30% choice in favor of Huck Finn. Then I tweeted it again, and asked people to retweet it. The circle began to spread. I also added it to my blog entry. On June 30, the numbers stood at 55.2 to 44.8% in favor of Huck. The trend continued until video games took their present commanding lead.

Your first assumption might be that gamers heard about the poll and raced over to take it. Maybe, but I don't think so. I think the 70-30 numbers are explained by the makeup of my blog readers and Twitter followers, and that as the poll fanned out more widely it became more representative of the population in general. I believe it's quite possible that there is a 63 to 37 majority for video games -- probably larger.

Oh, I heard from people telling me my poll was badly worded. I should have leveled the playing field by specifying (1) a specific video game, or (2) stipulating any "great novel." The poll was more or less created by the way it came up. A reader told me Mark Twain spent a year of his life inventing a game, delaying the writing of Huckleberry Finn in the process. Writers are gifted at procrastinating, but this seemed excessive to me and the reader suggested that if Twain had lived today he might have been a video game creator.

That's why I concocted the poll. But let's forget about it and focus on Huckleberry Finn. This is a novel I read for the first time when I was seven, and the most recent time about a year ago. Its greatness, in my mind, is beyond debate. I agree with Ernest Hemingway:

"All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn."
What did he mean by that? Perhaps that American literature too closely followed the British example until Twain wrote a book in American speech as he heard it growing up in Hannibal, Missouri, and was the first great writer to give voice to our native vernacular. More importantly: In the relationship between Huck and the slave Jim, he came early, unforgettably and influentially to that central fact of American life, racism. As Huck the scarcely literate boy slowly realizes that his friend Jim is a human being not deserving to be a slave (despite what his society had taught him), the reader is drawn to the same conclusion. For many readers, that would have been their first exposure to such an idea.

Twain does it so surely and persuasively -- and so naturally -- that younger readers might not even notice him doing it. Tragically, the book became the target of Political Correctness in the 1990s because of its use of the word nigger, a commonplace in Huck's America, and today. (The words "Nigger Jim" don't appear anywhere in the novel.)

Huckleberry Finn's prose is often poetic. Twain was always one of the most musical, engaging and humorous of writers, and is readable and entertaining today as he ever was. Consider my favorite passage from the novel:

Pretty soon it darkened up, and begun to thunder and lighten; so the birds was right about it. Directly it begun to rain, and it rained like all fury, too, and I never see the wind blow so. It was one of these regular summer storms. It would get so dark that it looked all blue-black outside, and lovely; and the rain would thrash along by so thick that the trees off a little ways looked dim and spider-webby; and here would come a blast of wind that would bend the trees down and turn up the pale under-side of the leaves; and then a perfect ripper of a gust would follow along and set the branches to tossing their arms as if they was just wild; and next, when it was just about the bluest and blackest -- fst! it was as bright as glory, and you'd have a little glimpse of tree-tops a-plunging about away off yonder in the storm, hundreds of yards further than you could see before; dark as sin again in a second, and now you'd hear the thunder let go with an awful crash, and then go rumbling, grumbling, tumbling, down the sky towards the under side of the world, like rolling empty barrels down stairs -- where it's long stairs and they bounce a good deal, you know.
Read it over a couple of times and then read it aloud to someone you like. It's music. Can you imagine a more evocative description of a thunderstorm?

For these and other reasons, choosing Huckleberry Finn over "a great video game" was a no-brainer for me. But no, no, I am not re-opening the debate about video games. That's over and done with. My previous entry was my last word. I'm beginning a discussion about Huckleberry Finn -- and reading. I believe reading good books is the best way we can civilize ourselves even in the absence of all other opportunities. If a child can read, has access to books and the freedom to read them, that child need not be "disadvantaged" for long. What concerns me is that reading competence and experience has been falling steadily in America. Most of the adults I meet are not very "well read." My parents were. My grandmother, born on a farm and raised in poverty, the mother of eight, was a voracious reader. Her 19th century high school education in Taylorville, Illinois, would have better equipped her for reading than most of today's university graduates.

Beyond a certain point, we take our education into our own hands. We discover what excites us intellectually, and seek it out. The world of books allows us to walk in the shoes of people who lived in other times and other places, who belonged to other races and religions. It allows us to become more humane and open-minded. In exposing us to prose of the highest level, it encourages us to think in a way that isn't merely "better" but is more fanciful, creative, poetic and expressive. It makes us less boring, and less bore-able.

I don't know who voted in my little poll, and I don't know why they voted the way they did. All said to that first reader some weeks ago: "Show me a man who prefers a video game to Huckleberry Finn, and I'll show you a fool."

Does that mean I believe 63.1% of the voters in my poll are fools? Not at all. I regret the hyperbole. Few people are born fools, and those we cannot help. I'm suggesting that some are still at a foolish stage, and have the freedom to evolve out of it. Sooner or later, they will either understand why Huckleberry Finn is more to be valued than a video game, or they will not. Getting to that point will be one of the best experiences in their lives.

2010-07-07T14:15:00.000-07:00

I've got to get more in touch with the life, do the thing that Steve said real artists do: take convention and make it wholly original, my own, unpredictable, and gorgeous. I know that something is happening though, when I recommend a book by Lewis Nordan to a friend who's never heard of him, and have that same friend use a piece of that book to instruct me in my own work--getting reminded of that gorgeous thing I didn't catch the first time, when the coroner is bitching about the shampoo he is using to clean a corpse's hair in The Sharpshooter Blues: an original thing Nordan did, taking convention and turning it upside down, that evaded me because of the time and place in which I read it, the ignorance that I couldn't help but have because of where I was and how little I had written.

I cannot quit the story. I do not want to. It's been about a year since I first gave Howard Bahr a story that he found something worth a damn in, a year since that time and I've gotten my first rejection letter. I want to believe that this is the work that we are promised will be completed in us until Christ's return, and maybe that isn't what that verse means at all, maybe it is strictly about the work of the soul, the mind, the heart, the things that Christ wants from us and wants to change as we keep living.

What I know for sure is that when I was twenty-years-old I started reading, and I did not want to stop. After all of the vile shit that I had put into my head, the novel, the essay, and the short story felt like nourishment to my everything. With time, I started to feel like I needed to give back. I still feel like I need to give back. I want to give someone what was given to me with the language--a thing that wasn't the Word of God, but pointed directly to Him, even if the author had no intention of doing so, and even when Scripture wasn't referenced to at all. I still don't even know if that idea makes a lick of sense, and I suppose I don't care because making sense of the thing isn't half as important as the thing itself, the story, which is all anyone should give a shit about.

Rick Bragg has been breaking my heart with his essays in All Over but the Shoutin'. Such intense attention paid to the life, the details, the stuff of the everyday, but at the same time he's gone for it. He hasn't sat back and been fortunate enough to experience adventure. He's gotten up and made it happen. An active dude.

Ph.D. you've gotta wait.

2010-06-30T17:59:00.001-07:00

"Artists are people who work harder, for less money."
-Frederick Barthelme

Sweet Jesus, I'm going to need you on this one. And the next one, and the one after that.

2010-06-30T07:31:00.000-07:00

Discovering The Depot is one of the best things that's happened to me since moving to Hattiesburg, and it was a total accident. The coffee is great, the staff wonderful, and they do have biscuits that are "too good for this world" as Rick Bragg said of the biscuits from his Appalachian upbringing--I'm sure he'd say the ones here don't compare, and they probably don't. Nonetheless, I've never eaten a biscuit from Appalachia, so until I do, these will more than suffice.

It's good to be home, and I can't shake that good feeling even a week and a half after coming back. I am obsessed and in love with familiarity, but I am certain that I could find the very same thing just about anywhere in the world if I stuck around long enough. Sao Paulo would be tough. The city is loud and moving all of the time. There's little in the way of silence and solitude. I cannot imagine what it must be like to live in a place like China, even more populated and busy. More than ever, though, I realize how important it is for me to learn another language and to be able to speak that language with another person. I know how much of a gift language is, whether on the page or from the mouth, and I want to be able to share the life with people through that medium. I do not know what the good Lord will do with these feelings of mine, about the language--what they will mean and how they will pan out--I only know that I care, and that I rarely let go of anything that I care even a little about.

It's summer and I haven't been swimming. I need to get on that, but without fail, whenever I swim in a public pool it seems like I come out with a sinus infection. I got a sinus infection while I was in Brazil, but I managed. It was one of my great fears to get sick away from home, away from the familiar, but it was all right. I got home. I didn't die. Another worry conquered. I'm waiting for the day when I don't worry at all.

What I wouldn't give.

2010-05-20T12:29:00.000-07:00

Rain's coming again. I woke up today in a terrible mood. I have no idea why. I can be the biggest asshole sometimes, really, and for no reason at all.

I probably don't exercise enough, eat healthy enough. A million other things. I probably read too much, and I know I buy too many books, hundreds that I haven't read. I think movies, records, and books are my idols sometimes. I don't want to get into legalistic territory, but if asked to let any of these things go by the good Lord Himself, I'm not sure I'd do it. I'm pretty certain I would not.

My excuse is that these things show me my God--the source of life and beauty. "The Earth is God's and everything in it." I never met Barry Hannah, sadly, but I refer to some of the things he said quite often. Especially about the finality language sometimes has...think Scripture, and to lesser degree authors like Cormac McCarthy, hell, even the last couple of chapters of Rick's book Waveland, dear Lord, so heartbreaking and full of truth (Truth?). Language like that just carries with it a sense of the way life is, its beauty and sadness, the brokenness and inadequacy of time and the human heart and mind. I do not think that I am making a lick of fucking sense, and that's fine. I don't care. If any of it made any sense I wouldn't be in such a bad mood like I am at times.

All that really means is that I do not like being human. Daily, I deal with the guilt of my transgressions, and no matter how often I am told that I am too hard on myself, I can never believe that. I want with everything in me to be perfect. To quit lusting after those women, to quit feeling that jealousy or envy, to stop being a slothful and selfish bastard, to trust my God to care for me even in the most frightening of situations, but I so often do not feel loved and cared for, even though my life has been practically nothing but a series of undeserved mercies.

I so often do not know what I am doing. Fiction writing? Dating Minda? Submitting my work? Reading Scripture after watching David Lynch's Wild at Heart which is full of more breasts and sexual references than I care to think of? What the hell is art and how does my God feel about the raw honesty of it all? When one of my characters lusts after that woman with the sincerity and vulnerability of my own heart and mind? That is me, hiding in plain sight.

Maybe I am just dealing with what Percy called "the reentry problem." What's wrong with that notion is I don't spend enough time staying gone in the creation of the story.

It's do or die, now or ever. Be okay with being whipped from the start or don't start at all. Lord, I don't want to turn around, and I'm fine with being too far gone. Find me then, here, and there.

2010-04-27T20:07:00.000-07:00

I'm behind the times. Everyone uses Twitter, Facebook, Myspace--all the things that make too much room for my vanity. I realize the only way for anyone to know what's going with me is to update this thing. There's a strange power in isolation, though. As in, hey, I don't want you to know what's up with me. As in, "Whatever happened to Ellis Purdie?" "I seriously have no idea." That kind of thing. I guess that's vanity too. I can't get away from it.

I'm feeling nostalgic tonight, however. Hell, I've been browsing Jackson Prep's webpage, looking at the faces of my old teachers, and missing them. I Myspace stalked Bethany Heath, gandered at all of her photos, and then missed her too. Denley didn't answer the phone yesterday. She might be mad I didn't make it to my God daughter's first birthday. I'll give her some time on that one. (Holy shit, I have a God daughter).

Really though, things are sort of hectic, but in the best of ways. I don't really even like life if I can't be swamped. I discovered Haruki Murakami this semester. He's the bane of my existence right now, but I love him. There isn't enough criticism on the guy to build a small campfire, but people he's amazing, and you scholars out there need to get to writing about him. I'm just going to try to write LIKE him...as in gorgeous, simple, sorta perfect, and totally heartbreaking.

Small wonderful things keep happening. As in, Sun Kil Moon on my sound system, my front door open to a breezy and sunny day, and my cat stretched out and lounging on my porch. I don't know if that's getting anything across to you, but you might have to be here. Speaking of cats, there's this blind cat that lives inside the independent bookstore downtown. His name is Patch and his eyes look like slivers of moon. I spread Friskies treats across the floor for him and he crunches them between his teeth, then rubs across me and purrs.

I read a whole lot, and should write more than I do, but maybe that's how it will always be. I submitted my work to a publication recently and so begins the many rejection letters to come in my lifetime. They say after a while they stop meaning anything, if you get enough of them.

I think of some people so often, and wouldn't know what to say if I saw them.

I'm a little tired.

2010-02-06T08:32:00.001-08:00

Another day at the Bone, Junior Kimbrough wailing through the speakers, hot coffee in my mug. I'm putting off work to do, and it's all right.

I'm ready for spring, sunshine, warm weather. The gray sky and cold temperatures overstayed their welcome. I want to sit in the shade of a tree, lean my head back, close my eyes, and doze. My cat, Leon aka Dutch, doesn't seem to care. Rain or shine, he's outside, flicking his tail and running ninety to nothing. Dude's a badass. I read where if they sleep on their back, stomach up, their trust for you "is in the stratosphere." Yep. He does that.

I won't be back to Jackson for a while. My mom and stepdad are moving to the mountains of North Georgia. They're refurnishing the house, and my room there doesn't even have a bathroom at the moment. Things are gutted. A paint smell sits in the air. It's good to have a place away from all of that here. Things will be strange when they're not in Jackson anymore. Trading Jackson for the mountains of north Georgia is worth it. Trust me. It's all Hemingway, Jim Harrison, and Rick Bass up there, stirring the imagination.

A few things up in the air for summer. I need some adventure, some stepping out of the comfort zone. That would be perfect. If I could join team corn detassling that would be killer, too. That's a few weeks of camping in Iowa, detassling corn, and hopefully meeting interesting folks, hearing their stories.

All right, work time.

2009-11-15T19:18:00.000-08:00

Got a kitty cat in my lap, and sirens blare outside my window. It's getting cold at night, and I've been using my electric blanket.

I've got to tell this story. For Christ, for humanity, for anything other than for people to see me. Lord let it be so.

2009-11-05T10:06:00.000-08:00

I've been writing a bit more lately, three hours last night. I need to keep that momentum up, go hard. My sister is going to smoke me if I don't watch out. She's eleven, and she's always trying to create: journaling during class, writing songs on the piano, lyrics in the bathtub, poems in bed. She's pretty unbelievable. She has fun with it, something I've forgotten about most days.

Everything's so damn intense for me. It's all life and death, love and hate, heaven and hell, no in between. I'm tired a lot. I take pills that don't work very well, and I sweat and go pale in the weirdest of times. I'll keep if it means that whatever it is about all of that that's good is really good, and means that Christ will use whatever that is and show people himself. I hope that's finding my identity in Jesus, because God knows everything else will fail me. If not now, then sooner or later. Anyone good at anything will, at best, be only as good as their lifetime. At fucking best. Even Faulkner saw the end of his run, when the years, alcohol, affairs, and mindfucks finally had their way. Life and death, heaven and hell.

There's all these small things that make my life wonderful, though. When my neighbor's dog, Deuce, a tough brown pitbull, runs over and licks my face with his big wet tongue. When Sue fills my candy jar with Milky Way because she knows I like them, when the end credits roll on Seven Samurai, and I know I've sat through one of the best stories I've ever been told. And good heavens, all the reading I've done, everything my classmates, and Rick, Martina, and Steve have done to sharpen my eye and make me fall in love with stories that had to be told.

I want to go do things. It's like Howard said, "It's one thing to read a lot of scholarly articles on Faulkner, but it's another thing to get behind a mule and plow." -Insert Tom Waits reference here- I want behind that mule. I want my fly rod to bring in a fighting trout. Somedays, only occasionally, I want to know what it's like to watch my friend die of a bullet wound in a trench. Then I realize how much I don't want that.

But I kinda do.

2009-10-08T14:47:00.000-07:00

I'm waiting on five o'clock to roll around. I've actually been productive around here today. Not that I'm usually worthless, I don't guess. I've been guilty of reading on the job: movie and book reviews, books, news, blogs. It makes a pretty tolerable jobe even more tolerable. Two birthdays at the office today, meaning cupcakes and ice cream in a span of five hours. Can't knock that.

I'm ready for things to cool down and stay down. My mail runs today were a little hot and uncomfortable. Anything to get out of the office a few minutes though, look at some pretty girls, and step on some acorns.

I've been reading some good stuff, lately. bell hooks wrote some interesting essays in her book Teaching to Transgress, Tanizaki's stories in Seven Japanese Tales are wonderful, Amy Hempel's interesting (not sure I get it yet, though), and Jean Rhys' After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie is supposed to be great. I've never read so much in all my life, and it's a good feeling. I hope the good Lord cultivates that thing in me, the feeling that I've got to read everything that's good, multiple times, and remember it. Indeed.

I've been looking around at going to Alaska. Gotta save the money, and get the tools of the trade. Time to go...

2009-10-02T10:35:00.000-07:00

Home for the weekend. I just finished walking the dogs, and though I hate getting started with them, finishing and coming home is always a pleasure. Walking feels good. Like I've breathed and sweat out some of the nonsense and the dross. Not to mention that they are precious animals: tongues out, tails wagging, noses in the grass. I love the hell out of some dogs. It's too bad I don't have one in Hattiesburg. Yet.

School has been really good. There's plenty of work, some of which I'm not sure how I've finished in time, but it always gets done. I'm somewhat on top of things, and enjoying myself. I need to go exploring, riding my bike on the trails, or going for a walk and seeing where it takes me. The workshop is great. My fiction was on trial last Wednesday, and things couldn't have been better. There's plenty to fix in my work, plenty I can do better on, and many ways in which I need to be challenged. There are things I need to think through, scenarios to weigh and consider. But I'm telling a story, putting it in front of people I care about, listening to their criticism, reaching around in the dark, and putting my fingers on my voice. There's a lot of voice to grasp. I'll need a whole lot of patience and a good deal of time. Praise God.

Home is sweeter for the distance. There's my cat, Leon, riding in his carrier in my passenger seat. Danielsen plays on the stereo, and white trash goodness every couple of miles. My friends here are all growing and changing, unfurling like a flower in the spring.

The river is everywhere.

2009-09-17T10:54:00.000-07:00

Last night was good for some reason. I stayed in the library reading for class, and there were a lot of kids in there. Studying, talking, earphones in, laptops out. I don't know, made me feel like I was in it again. Like I wasn't alone in the world.

I'm learning to be a better reader. Seeing the little things, the things that don't work, the beautiful stuff, the ruts, and the problems. We keep going back to how to make a story interesting. How to make someone "care" (another term for "be interested in the story"). I like it. I'm the worst writer in the classroom, but I like it. I'm humbled and small. I see all the work ahead, the hours that I've got to spend to make Maupassant's words "talent is a long patience" come true. There's a lot to look forward to.

When I'm not reading or writing I've been watching "The Adventures of Pete and Pete," "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia," or a movie worth the time: Say Anything, One Hour Photo, Magnolia...more to come.

My cat, Leon, spends most of his time outside climbing trees, chasing bugs, exploring beneath the house, or lazing in the bushes--he's got a good life.

The front porch awning is spotted with little holes where the driller bees have made a home. My dad said to spray them with wasp spray, and as he put it, "They will die in their tombs." Hilarious.

This deal ain't bad.

2009-08-22T18:56:00.000-07:00

I'm gonna try to write tonight. Thought I'd sit down and loosen up with a blog.

Hattiesburg isn't bad at all. The first three days were brutal. Irrationally sad and lonely and weird. I suffered through them, saw a doctor, and have been fine ever since. Praise God. My workshop met last Wednesday, and it was a lot of fun. All the kids in the center for writers met up at the Keg and Barrel afterwards, and these are good people. The church I've been attending is solid. My job is doable and lighter than Lemuria. You could say it's a little too good to be true at this juncture.

I've been home a good bit. But today I got the hankering to come back to Hattiesburg, so I did. My house is peaceful, my books are here, there's a lot of places to rent movies, and I'm learning how to cook some. I like it. To say I love it could take months, years. For now, however, this could be called home. If I could start to making a salary, paying for things, really growing up...that would be swell.

The Lord is my shepherd.

2009-08-06T16:28:00.000-07:00

I'm packing things up, getting ready to move into my new place in the burg. So far all I've got is my books boxed up. I'll take some clothes. Kitchen items. My bed and sheets. God knows what else. And God knows I'm apprehensive. I should have quit work a week earlier than I did. Too late now. Gotta roll with the punches.

I start my new job early Wednesday morning. Class starts on the 19th. Things are moving right along, and maybe it's a good thing. Maybe I won't have any time to worry myself out of sanity. Ugh, so much is actually happening, though. I'm just a little scared of what's ahead. I'm nervous about how good an English degree I got. We'll see how much I learned in the last three years. Just how much Mississippi College's English Department actually prepared me. I know I'm not stupid. I know that out of all the published writers living right now, at least a few of them have to be dumber and less creative than me. Have to. Come on. I mean really?

I was reading Frederick Barthelme's Author's Note in his short story collection The Law of Averages. He was writing about how he found his voice, about how good it felt when he realized what he was doing wasn't copying his brother. I hope I know what it's like to find my voice. I'm curious as to how people will respond to me in workshops. I fear at the moment that I'm too influenced by the Southern gothic tradition. Frederick writes about ordinary people in ordinary situations, and he writes them in a profound way, making ordinary things rife with meaning and truth. I wonder if the entire program is going to be centered around writing this way. I have to wonder if the kids with the dead folks at the end of their eleven page stories will get laughed out of the room. We'll know sooner than later.

I ought to be okay if this doesn't work out, though. I finished Tim Keller's book The Reason for God yesterday. Keller's book moved me especially when he began to describe the definition of sin. He didn't give the reader a long list of things we can't do if we want to be genuine followers of Jesus. Instead, he defined sin as failing to find our identity in our Savior. That definition hit home for me.

I love books, stories, and writing with all of my heart. The whole thing, no millimeter left untouched. Nonetheless, it may very well be that books, writing, publishing, or teaching English aren't what the Lord wants for me. I won't know until I get to Hattiesburg and start this thing. I won't know until I make all A's this semester, and find myself proud of the work I'm doing despite the criticism and the need for rewrites. That's why I'm scared. The not knowing. The having to do in order to see.

I'm still God's all the same. Even if I never publish a story, lecture a single english class, or write contemporary criticism. I'm still the Lord's. I'll still be alive. My desires, hopefully, will change.

The Bible is a big ole book of stories. It's violent, beautiful, it's got a dude blowing his load and dropping dead. The thing is rich. It's the reason I read. To find the Great Story in everyone else's story. To see God's work, his poema, alive and well and being revealed in every word and every breath and every cast and every blink of the eye. He's shown us himself through storytelling.

I just want to give a little back.

2009-07-15T18:50:00.000-07:00

It seems like if you do some living it's easier to write. Blogging gets old after a while. You do it because you know people read it, and they want to know what's going on in your life. Personally, I don't have anything to say if I can't do some living and then some reflection. I've been cranking out blogs because I know a few people I care about read them. I don't want you to read something unimportant though. Not that anything I have to say is ever that important. But it should be personal. I guess. Yeah, it should be personal for sure.

I'm moving to Hattiesburg in less than a month. I'm going to try to write some stories and learn how to get better at storytelling in general. Scary as hell, sort of, but not really. I mean if the whole thing comes crashing down and sucks, I can pack it up and know it's not for me. I just don't think that's the case, though. I don't think I'd be okay with going down there and things not being okay. Writing, reading, learning...it means way too damn much to me. I used to want to be in a hardcore band. Yeah, I know, right. I wanted that whole thing to be my vocation at least for a while. Four years later and all I want to do is write. Say something important with the word. I guess, important. Maybe the better word for it is heartbreaking. Say something heartbreaking. A good book is like a good relationship with a person. It's vulnerable, capable of breaking your heart, scalping it, sharing something with you that takes you aback, makes you thank God that He hears you when you pray. That's why I read.

Lately, for similar reasons, I've been spending time with some folks. I've taken upon the reputation of the "flake" over the years. Never committing to time with anyone, always bitching about how I want to be alone. And I do, very much, want to be alone, a lot. But I need people. I need their lives so I can borrow from them. I know that sounds awfully parasitic and selfish, but it would only be so if I didn't find the whole thing so precious. The wine with a friend three times your age. Hearing their stories from the first half of life. Taking note of it, knowing they've had their hearts broken, and jarred, and that they've made it to age 65. That is precious, that means the world to me. That's worth borrowing from.

I'm ready for something other than the bookstore. Something other than knowing my mom's house is less than a half hour away. Some place called mine. That has my things in it and no one else's. I guess I can only really have that if I ever buy a house. But you get the point. Striking out, doing the important stuff, the stuff you'll do maybe until you die.

I seriously need to go write fiction. Right this second. So I will.

2009-05-12T14:39:00.001-07:00

College is over. I absolutely loved it, and its end is bittersweet. Ready for that next leg of the journey. Whatever that may be. I'm hoping it involves some serious living, but that will be up to me.

Tonight John Pipkin will be reading from his excellent debut novel Woodsburner. I've got about fifty or so pages left of the book, and it's a great piece of work. Makes me want to go off and live the Walden experience. Perhaps that's in the cards.

I watched the news last night with my father. Remembered why I can't fucking stand the talking heads and the hateful two cents. Fuck us. I mean that.

The sky is gray and it is muggy outdoors. I've been wanting to read more poetry, but I do not fucking get it. I can pick up a book of Lorca's poems and I just want to smash things. New Criticism is hilarious. I'm fucking lousy at it.

I've been reading the Bible more lately. Trying to get it in there in the morning. Love, forgiveness, necessary change, the acknowledgment of those that helped me get this far. The stuff is worth thinking about. I've only read the gospels through all the way twice. Tried carrying the gospel of Mark with Barry's introduction in it around with me everywhere. I didn't want to scuff up the pages or the cover. Things, things, things. Henry David had no shelves, and therefore no books. What use has one for a book after he has read it? I am afraid I won't be letting go of my collection any time soon. But, I'll be damned, fishing, rowing, sleeping in the woods. It's all so intriguing.

I need to write fiction.

2009-04-28T15:10:00.000-07:00

The sky looks threatening. I am, you might have guessed, in the dot com building waiting for Steven Wells Hicks to read from his new novel. He reminds me of that cat on television with the fu manchu that rides the chopper. I don't know. Just my assessment.

Started a new story last night. This one's important to me (as if the rest weren't). Here's to hoping for a good result.

I've got a few finals coming up. Graduation shortly after. I should be meeting up with Frederick Barthelme sometime during the summer for one of his creative writing workshops. Sounds like a good time to me.

I'm super tired today. Migraine headache the past few days. I took my medicine and I am groggy.

Author's here. Gotta run.

2009-04-25T11:19:00.001-07:00

There is nothing at stake when writing the blog.

Nothing.

I've been reading John Pipkins debut novel Woodsburner. It's the story of a little known event in the life of Henry David Thoreau retold by Pipkin, and boy is it good. Thus far he's dealt with some very heavy, universal truths, and I am stoked with the story.

Other than what I'm reading, I'll write about what I've been doing (or haven't). Yeah, what I haven't been doing is writing fiction. I've got to hit the keys pretty soon. A good keyboard does a lot for my feelings when it comes to wanting to write. I've been at Dell.com looking at laptops for the past few minutes. Sort of pathetic, I guess. I mean Melville? Hell, Kerouac? These guys weren't concerned with the keyboard. I'm not even a fan of Kerouac, by the way, I'm just using him to make my point. I think he carried around a little notebook with him everywhere he went and wrote something the moment he felt it. God knows, he probably had plenty of things written in that notebook that he never used. It never stopped him from writing it down. We all have to say this for the man, he may have been a mediocre writer in the minds of many. He may have done a lot of drugs, or perhaps On The Road is overrated. He was indeed a confused and troubled human being. But the guy wasn't scared to write. He just wrote the damn thing.

I think to write boldly one has to forget themselves. I'm an extremely selfish person. To forget myself, to become invisible, to let the character speak while I keep my mouth shut, is not in my nature. I can go Freudian on all of this shit, talk about how there's no such thing as the completely disinterested self, but I'm not. To acknowledge it, to make an effort to forget me, even if I fail, is a step in the right direction. Though Freud didn't think much of God or Jesus, he basically spelled out everything that Christ said we are: broken, selfish, incapable of doing the complete and total good. In need of a savior (my take on it, not Freud's). I don't even know where I'm going or where I meant to go with all of this, but I'm just surrendering. Surrendering when there's nothing at stake so hopefully I can surrender when something is.

Whatever you're doing, wherever you are, be well.

-Ellis

2009-04-22T14:25:00.001-07:00

Back in the dot com building. Tonight, Mississippi writer Frederick Barthelme will be reading from his new novel Waveland. He's also a professor of creative writing at the University of Southern Mississippi. So I'm pretty stoked to get to speak with him and listen to him read from his new book.

It's nice to chronicle all my nights here in the building. There's so much more to come in the next few months, and I am a blessed, blessed soul to be in the middle of it.

I met Richard Ford at the Southern Literary Festival last week. That was quite the treat. I plan on digging more into the life of Frank Bascombe this summer. I miss the guy.

I'm graduating soon, Lord willing. I hope I get around to doing some very deliberate living in the coming months, year(s?). I got to spend five years in college. I suppose that's more than the average person (if you want to count that terrible year at Hinds). However, it was at Hinds that my Composition I teacher (now my fellow co-worker) Nan Goodman told me I was a great writer. Haha, she was just being nice.

Nothing to do now but sit, and wait for the reading.

2009-04-15T14:30:00.001-07:00

To sit down, relax, and write is asking me to do the impossible. I can't even blog without feeling like something is at stake with the end result. And I wonder why when it comes to writing stories I'm a million times more afraid. Something has got to give. I know people do this stuff and are eventually able to eat off of it, but come on. Who out there writes and feels the way my father feels about being a lawyer: miserable, unfulfilled, and jaded?

I spent the entire day yesterday writing a shitty critical paper on Hamlet. All that I am left with is the desire to read great stories and try my fucking damnedest with every morsel of my being to write something that is acceptable. Here I am, in the dot com building of Lemuria, about to celebrate with others the life of Eudora Welty. I'll never be that good. No one will. But dammit, it doesn't make me want to stop. I'll never be Faulkner, Barry, or Cormac. But surely to God I can reach the heights of a Richard Bausch, Padgett Powell, or Steve Yarbrough. The guys living it, doing it, no they'll probably not be canonized in the college textbooks. But they're ok. They're living, teaching, writing, and making ends meet with their craft. That's all I want.

I can't go to law school. I can't keep being a bookseller for the duration of my life. It's not in me. I pray and I pray and I pray.

God give me the calling if this ain't the one. And give me something that makes putting this aside ok.

-Ellis

2009-04-15T14:13:00.000-07:00

I hate my writing.

2009-04-10T12:21:00.000-07:00

Friday. I've got the day off tomorrow, and I'm praying for warm weather and sunshine. I have a lot of reading to do for this paper on Hamlet, but I'll be damned if the research and the writing isn't fun. Hamlet has been considered a man that "thinks too much." I don't know that there's any better way for me to relate to a character than for that character to understand the world of overthinking. And what a fucking good story.

I teared up a little the other night as I read the words, "Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio..." He goes on to describe riding on Yorick's back, kissing his lips more times than he could count. The futility and problem of being human coursed beneath his words like a vicious heartbeat. I am so blessed to have eyes that can read and a heart that cares about this stuff. The excursion has only begun.

I'm working until closing tonight. I've gone four days without buying a book. I'm going to try and hold out until Frederick Barthelme and John Popkin show up to sign their new novels. Robert Olmstead is coming next month as well for his new novel. Lots of good stuff going on around the workplace. I just hope it's a summer of inspiration and time for creativity.

In writing of summer, it looks like I will be living in a house in Clinton with seven other people. I'm stoked at our house. Two stories, four bedrooms (I think), another three months to live with Jay until he heads back to school, at which point I'm going to try and move in with Andrew Temple until I relocate for graduate school (whenever that is).

I don't have much of a desire to move back home for a while. I'm going to be 24 in June. I think it's time to give mother a break: gotta learn to cook, clean, pay for things. It's a small step in that direction, but it's a step nonetheless. I have got to learn to save, to plan, to get the work done without mama's help. It'll hurt a little; I don't know what or how to go about the important things. It'll be good though.

Peyton and Denley's baby is beautiful. I used to hate the idea of change. Now that the term "change" is a political slogan for the masses, I hate it even more. But to say that change never brought anything good is to be too ignorant. Learning to let change in. Want it, even.

I guess I better get to work.

-Ellis

2009-03-20T13:44:00.000-07:00

Nothing new to mention. Been reading Jim Harrison lately. I like it a lot. Wovenhand played last Wednesday at the George Street Grocery, and David Eugene Edwards is still too much of a truthteller musically to be considered a Christian artist.

I've been writing more. Howard shitcanned one of my stories and praised the second one. I suppose all hope isn't lost after all. Fuck, though, man if Jimmy didn't make it in round one the rest of us wanna be's are paddling through shit creek with our hands. Here's to waiting six months and trying again. More school is essential. God bless my endeavors.

Ran into Shellie today. She was sweet. Good. I used to (make that still do), pine over all of her failures and inconsistencies. None that I'd seen on my own, but heard. We are all fuck ups. Every last one of us. I'll never let a thing keep me from loving her like I should. If love isn't hard then it isn't love. Especially not in the Christ-like sense.

Been dreaming of Montana and fly-fishing. I hope it's more of a thing I will do rather than a thing I'll talk about. Sweet Jesus, be my light.

-Ellis

2009-02-17T13:48:00.000-08:00

I'm working the Kathryn Stockett reading this evening. Her mother is a precious, soft spoken southern woman. She's helping set up the wine and food in the dot com building right now. I hope I make my mother half as proud someday. I hope the world doesn't explode before I get good enough to be published, get good enough to read my work in front of people who care.

I finished another short story last night. Never has so much been at stake in a story I've written, and I hope I can mold it into something worthwhile.

Richard III awaits me, and Lewis Nordan has been telling me about Leroy Dearman and his wild and lovely family. There is never enough time for all the good stories there are.

I've made a point to do more living.

2009-01-28T18:44:00.000-08:00

I've worried less lately. Now I'm just worried that the devil'll come after me even harder because I'm not worrying. Logic.

My world seems a bit warmer, more exciting, and calm these days. Wars rage on, the economy continues plummeting, and losers keep leaving puppies and kittens on the side of the road. Still, the sun greets me every morning (unless it's overcast or raining, though sometimes the sun shines even in the rain). Perhaps it's because I'm only taking 10 hours this semester and spend more time surrounded in beauty and truth at work than in the pits of literary criticism (May graduation can't come quickly enough). Or maybe my joy has emerged through living with a friend that isn't afraid to lay his hand on me and speak aloud to the good Lord on my behalf--indeed prayer makes a difference. It could also be the fact that storytellers like William Gay have constructed worlds much darker and more real to me than my own, that a split second in reality is heavenly compared to the world his Tennessee characters don't so much live in as crawl through.

Indeed, my days are sweet, like honeysuckle sugar lasting for hours instead of seconds. I'll keep praying for a heart that loves my God even when things truly suck, and I'll keep living right now.

23 is all right.

2009-01-01T10:05:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year to all!

I spent the night at the home of my favorite married couple: the Herringtons. Honestly, I wanted to bring in the new year with a bang, I think, but instead I decided to drink half of a Hoegaarden, get really sleepy, make a pallet in their study, and read Richard Ford until I conked out around 11:00 PM. I still say it was a good way to spend New Year's Eve.

Nothing new, really. Graduate applications, Lemuria, writing fiction, and trying to figure it out. The panic button is dying to be pressed for some reason around the mid-twenties I think. Nothing to do but extend my middle finger and give em a snotty look that would put Johnny Rotten to shame.

I need to read the Bible.

2008-12-17T10:45:00.000-08:00

Fall semester of 2008 is behind me. I can finally take a deep breath and sleep soundly again, not to mention read everything I want for a while.

It hit me not long ago that I've read a lot of books by white males. I'm going to try and branch out and read women writers for the next month or so. Marilynne Robinson, Toni Morrison, Joyce Carol Oates (even if she did steal Barry's book title), Ayn Rand, Annie Dillard, and Carson McCullers. I'll let you know how it goes.

I need to work on my own fiction stuff too. I'll have to send a writing sample to these M.F.A. programs and such. I really don't know what's going to happen in the next year or so. I feel like the odds of my being able to create something worth a damn in about a month for these programs is pretty slim. Spending a year working at Lemuria and writing on my own time doesn't sound so awful. It's just so different from the initial plan. I spent all that time looking at the M.A. programs only to discover that theory came closer to breaking my heart than giving it to me. I know theory isn't worthless, and God knows I wouldn't mind getting better at it, but I honestly think I've got the Lewis Nordan problem, i.e. getting published in that capacity would be hell for me.

It's all right, though. I know I can cope with the loneliness, frustration, and fear ahead because Jesus faced a lot more than I ever will. There's not a science to take care of me during the darker days and there's no way in hell I'll ever trust in myself or think that I alone am strong enough to shoulder the weight of my world. Really, I mean, to hell with all of that. I'll do my damnedest to have faith, to "Be glad in the Lord, and rejoice" (Ps. 32) because the mystery is what makes it all lovely and worth living for.

I listen to a lot of Dinosaur Jr. these days. J. Mascis's ability to write a riff that makes a desire to live bloom throughout my body is astounding. It sounds like his guitar strings are covered in love and youth like thick, hardening honey. I believe him when he says "this is all I came to do," and I'll be damned if I don't understand what he means.

This is all I came to do too. It really is.

2008-11-27T15:32:00.001-08:00

I feel alive this evening. I finally got into the swing of working on this term paper and am feeling immersed and lovely the way we English kids feel. I know I'm not the only one that ever felt this way. If no one else ever felt this I'm not sure why anyone would do anything work-like and enjoy it. I'm writing my paper on introversion, narcissism, and the projection of the soul-image in Walker Percy's The Moviegoer. I ought to know enough through experience to write this paper with complete authority. The New Frontiers play quietly on my stereo and I've already made two pots of coffee today. I purchased a bag of tanzania peaberry so as to not have to drive all the way to Fondren for a cup. This is the most important paper I'll ever write in my college existence.

Better make it good, brah.

-Ellis

A Few Words on Dr. Roger Greene

2008-11-22T13:20:00.000-08:00

I'm a Christian Studies minor. There was a time when I thought I might want to pursue the ministry as a profession. I quickly decided after taking Dr. Johnson's "Ministry of the Church" course that I wasn't as interested in church work as I thought. At least, not in the sense that I wanted to be paid for it. The next semester I switched my major from Psychology to English with a literature concentration and have been much happier (most of the time) since. All that to say even after I took "Ministry of the Church" with Johnson I had already taken enough hours of Christian Studies courses that to change my minor along with my major would have put me even further behind. I kept the minor, understanding that I liked theology and such a minor would suffice.

If there is one professor that is renowned in the Christian Studies department it's Dr. Roger Greene. You immediately hear of how difficult his exams are, what a great teacher he is, and how intimidating he can be. Of the courses he is most famous for teaching, "Discovering the World of the BIble" is certainly the most popular as well as dreaded. Lucky for me, due to a conflict with my required German course meeting at the same time as Dr. Greene's Discovering course this semester, I was able to exchange Discovering for a different course with Dr. Greene: "Paul: The Man and His Letters."

I am also lucky because, frankly, most of the English courses I've taken have trumped any course I've endured in the Christian studies department as far as difficulty is concerned. Henceforth, I've been able to experience Dr. Greene in all of his goodness rather than having to view him as the hardest most demanding professor I've ever had. Most certainly such a title can be granted to the likes of Dr. Potts or perhaps Dr. Miller, but not Dr. Greene. As far as love and wisdom go, Dr. Greene, or "Big G" as he is fond of being called, holds the record.

He walks into the classroom each Tuesday and Thursday morning, sipping water from a reusable, green, plastic container with the letter "G" painted in yellow on the side of it. A long, white, ribbed straw protrudes from the cap and he places the container to the right of him. Some days he wears a green dress jacket, never a tie on his collared shirt, and usually black dress pants with comfortable black dress shoes. The look on his face is calm and serious as he says, "good day, good day" from behind the white trimmed beard around his mouth. Glasses sit neatly below his gleaming bald head with the grey wraparound that's left. He opens his Bible, gives the name of a letter of Paul and the chapter and verse he will read from. Immediately, the slash of thin inked pages turning can be heard around the room. We want to read along; we have to know why he thinks this is special. He reads the verses quickly, pauses for moment and says, "let's spend time in prayer and meditation." We all close our eyes and pray. In a minute or two, Dr. Greene breaks the silence praying aloud, each word carefully chosen, spoken slowly and with great thought. He doesn't make a song and dance of it because life is not a song or a dance. He prays because not praying is like not breathing, like passing by a cold, clear body of water while trumping chapped and thirsty through a desert. He's a man in need. God's love is his lifesblood.

He teaches well, but more than being a great teacher he invites us into the Truth. He tells us that he spent five years in seminary and never once learned anything more important than Galatians 5:1, "Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage." He stresses to us that Christ is freedom. He acknowledges the inconsistencies of the texts. Views them with great joy, as mysteries to chase out and study for all the rest of his days. As questions he can hold dear until the day he dies because to know everything is to stop growing. To stop growing is to decay. To decay is to die. In Christ, he will choose to LIVE. Indeed, man is worth more without knowing it all. Man is worth more with the search.

One day we're nearing the end of class. He opens the Bible and reads a verse from one of Paul's letters; I forget which one specifically. It was about Christ dying, coming back to life, defeating death so that we can all take part in eternity, and go and be with him when our bones go brittle and our heart stops beating. He reads and he looks up. The smallest smile forms on his face and very quietly says, "Amen." He sits there, legs crossed, still beaming that small little smile that is so real you can feel it. He's inviting us to walk out of the room and go live. He keeps smiling, rocking ever so slightly and looking up above our heads. He's not a teacher anymore, he's a child of God, a kid that trusts his daddy. We all pack it up and leave silently. We know he's right.

Amen.

2008-11-02T17:27:00.000-08:00

Long time no blog.

I needed to take a sabbatical from the thing. I haven't had anything to say that you couldn't scroll to the previous posts and read. And hell, truth to be told I'll probably sit here and punch out a few more paragraphs about how beautiful literature is and about how I'd kill to write my own beautiful Wolf Whistle or Beloved, but you know all of that already. To be honest literature has been my enemy this semester. I've spent more days downtrodden over it than completely in love with it and that's terrifying. Is this an indicator that I need to stay as far afuckingway from theory as I can? As of now it feels that way. I've had my ass handed to me for the last three months every time I walk into Senior Seminar. I know that's a good thing. If a professor can't make you feel inadequate something is wrong. I believe that and I, with a bit of nausea, appreciate it, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't hurt. It doesn't mean that it hasn't left me feeling directionless and frustrated.

New paragraph. I really think a lot of myself. The fact that my generation really isn't reading a whole lot doesn't scare me so much as it enhances my pride. What a terrible thing to be able to say. For the past two or three years I've spent a lot of my time looking down on all of the "peons" that gave up on reading The Sound and the Fury or just can't believe that in my free time I'd attempt to scratch the surface of The Brothers Karamazov. All of this has served to grant me the biggest fucking head one could possibly carry. But, really, let's just cut the bullshit right here. Do I honestly have any fucking clue what those books are about outside of completely fucking superficial "another notch in my belt" kind of way? Hell no! I said it. Hell. no.

To take things even further towards humility I'll keep on breaking this thing down. If I never say one thing worth a damn about any of this beauty, this stuff of Christ Almighty, then in reality it's only entertainment. Sure, there's all the warm fuzzies every time I read, "how often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home," but what good are those guttural lovelies if I can't make some of my own, if I can't tear them from from the pierced hands of Jesus and give them to the world? Cause He's not going to just give them to me, just like He's not just going to give us life without going through the route of death. And maybe that's where the answer is. Here I am, bitching and complaining about the status quo, the monotony of everydayness like I'm fucking important or something. Like sitting here and choking this out could possibly change a fucking thing. Here's the deal straight from the brain of Lee K. Abbott, "You, except as a son and yellow dog Democrat, aren't important; only the story is." And how fucking truer could those words be? Not even a little. Do any one of us Christ followers really give a shit about Matthew, Mark, Luke or John, more than we care about the story of redemption, hope, peace, resurrection, love, and death and beauty that is the blood and bones of Christ Himself? For the love of God in heaven I surely hope not!

I've been getting out more lately: smoking cigarettes, drinking beers, watching terrible horror movies. October killed the best of me. Here's to November.

2008-09-10T11:06:00.000-07:00

It's Wednesday and in about half an hour I'll be going through the motions of literary theory with Dr. Potts. I've been wary of it lately, especially after hearing Tom Franklin say, "I usually tell my students not to take the literary theory classes." And sheesh, the man should know what he's talking about. Poachers is one of the most searing and heart wrenching collections of stories I've encountered in some time. And to think, these people live in Mississippi.

I've been super content about that. Feeling privileged even, to be from this place and living here. All that hogwash about us being illiterate and shoeless or ill-mannered. What's so wrong with going shoeless anyway? I'll bet Socrates didn't wear shoes that often. Who knows? The point is that my desire to be on the same team with all these dudes with doctorates and expertise in literary criticism and theory has somewhat diminished. I am more in love with books than ever, but that is the problem: I just want to read, tell stories worth a damn, say something about the heart and the values and the blood.

I don't know why I blog anymore. I am the brokenest record on the internets.

2008-08-25T18:21:00.001-07:00

Pizza and beer alone in the house. Class starts Wednesday and I'm sort of losing it. And by God, I cannot quit listening to this YouTube video of Guided by Voices singing the extended version of "My Valuable Hunting Knife." Eudora Welty is fucking unbelievable. I know because I don't understand most of what she says so that says everything. Literary theory is right around the corner and so is Walker Percy, Richard Ford, Barry Hannah, Faulkner, and the aforementioned Eudora Welty. I toured her house just the other day. It made me feel small and inspired. And the mountain of books I need to read grows beside me. From Richard Wright to Ayn Rand and Goethe I've got em waiting and I'm going to know them and love them like a mess of kittens rolling around in the barn with the sunlight coming through the beams.

You can't call it obsession anymore. That's unfair.

2008-08-11T08:20:00.000-07:00

I've been avoiding the blogger. Couldn't tell you why other than that I have been working like a madman at Lemuria for the past two weeks and it's left little time for anything else. I am loving it, nonetheless.

Things comes around from time to time that leave you humbled and cowering like one of those flee-ridden, ribbed and ticked dogs on the side of the highway. I am way behind on my reading of contemporary authors. I thought I was a reader. No, no sir, not even a little. My co-workers on the other hand? Readers. Voracious and obsessed like I've never been. My boss? Thousands upon thousands of books read and held dear. All I know is that I've been tossed into an ocean that I begged to be immersed in only to discover (once again) that I don't have a life vest. Only to be certain that the only way to get one is to keep swimming. Keep swimming 'til it hurts. And right now it hurts.

And writing? Shit, don't get me started on that madness. I've been working on a short story all summer. And it doesn't help every time I pass the picture of sweet William Gay in front of a broken down old barn, smoking a cigarette, and looking like the kindest sheepdog ever. Saying under my breath each time, "Noh, Ah never whent te cahlegge." I swear when he comes to do an author signing again I will kiss him on the lips. Who wants to bet me?

So what it comes down to is seeking first the Kingdom and I'm going to do that. I'm going to try to do that. Even though I'm guaranteed to wander off like I always do. Because it's not ever about being as good or like anyone else other than Jesus. And Jesus never wrote short stories or novels and he probably didn't read much other than old testament scripture because I'm pretty sure there wasn't much else to read. Just the essentials. Just the bread, the water, the wisdom, the friendships.

Sweet simplicity. I'm coming for you.

2008-07-25T10:38:00.001-07:00

I got a fishing license yesterday. While I was browsing the sporting goods section I noticed that they carried fly fishing rods. I really want to learn how to do that. The skill and patience that's involved in fly fishing might bleed over into the everyday things that I do and I wouldn't be opposed to that. And of course, I wouldn't mind sharing a hobby with the late great Norman Maclean.

I also had an interview with the folks at Lemuria yesterday. They were friendly and seemed to want to hire me, but at this point I'm not certain I want it anymore. I do want it, no doubt, I just don't know if I can be as much a part of the place as I would like to be and keep myself within the realm of the 3.5 GPA. It sure as hell would be awesome to meet all those beautiful-minded contemporary writers that pass through, though. That seems essential. My papa used to hold Donna Tartt in his lap when she was a wee thing. Jesus Christ, the stories you can hear about her life in Grenada, MS will make you want to weep. We've tried tracking her down, but she keeps to isolation. I understand.

I'm heading to Grenada later today and not for reasons that I'm happy about. My Memaw passed away yesterday and I'm a pallbearer. I hate blogging about things like this because I don't want people coming under the impression that I'm seeking sympathy. But it's true, she's gone from here. It wouldn't make much sense to me to make a post today and not mention her. The mound of sugar and scripture that she was. A lot of people--meaning most, if not all, of Grenada, Mississippi--will miss the hell out of her. And certainly I will too.

Summer is fleeting.

-Ellis

2008-07-18T16:34:00.000-07:00

Three cheers for The Dark Knight. One of those pinnacle moments of summer sort of things. I was left in awe of its beauty, horror, and triumph. There is nothing like the midnight showing of an epic film with your friends, nothing like it at all. We're all actually so young, snotty, and excitable. Even me. So maybe we're not so damned jaded after all. We're still capable of just being kids in the midst of all this confusion, darkness, and misgiving. Praise be to God.

I listen to Guided by Voices all the time nowadays. Robert Pollard says and does things that mean the world to me. The way he claps his hands during songs, lets his beer foam over the top of the bottle and soak his clothes during the set, blows smoke from his cigarette just before going back into his melodramatic, gorgeous pop croon leaves me wondering how the hell I did without them for so long. And his words are like beautiful, palmable stones of youth that you can pitch into your grandma's lake with great joy and elation:

"Decide now!
Decide now before you continue
The list is complete without your permission
I finally know how, I finally can't quit
And ancient ideas are on fire, my love..."

By God, I'm living.

2008-07-14T19:53:00.000-07:00

I don't do much thinking about things these days. I remember when I first made this thing I wanted it to be some kind of Don Millerish, Christian inspirational thing where everyone thought I was enlightened and knew Jesus. Then I started reading books. Haha, the crazy ones. Lately, The Brothers Karamazov has overwhelmed me. I've been listening to Hubert Dreyfus's lectures on the novel, picking up on everything I missed, gaining a greater understanding how much of a genius Dostoevsky was and becoming certain of the mediocre at best sort of mind that I possess. And my thoughts have changed. My scope is deeper, darker, and more confusing than it has ever been. All my friends have changed or aren't around anymore. We're all older and more confused and jaded than ever because we sought out wisdom and knowledge. The things of despair. The world and our history is frightening and full of despair and secrecy. But there has always been the good. Always.

Stanley Kubrick said, "However vast the darkness we must supply our own light," and I call bullshit on his quote. And I do so because a bulb is just wires and glass if it is separate from the Source of beauty, depth, peace, justice, understanding and Truth. I don't care how hackneyed it sounds it is all I am certain of anymore. It is the only thing that makes me want to live. Because if that source does not exist then "everything is permitted" (thank you Fyodor), and I am terrified of the creature I would become if such a statement were the Truth. I reject it with everything in me. I do not reject the world because I can't. I am not detached from it. I am part of the problem. I am in need of mercy and salvation. I'm guilty not for everyone, but for my share of the damage done. I'm a hell worthy sheep bathed in voluntary, innocent blood. And I want to burn until I'm finally awake and there is no more night and day.

'Til our bones are dust!
'Til our ashes are one!
Oh world your tomb is that of your brothers and sisters beside you!

call if you need me.

2008-07-10T13:57:00.001-07:00

Rained so hard everything became blurred and shrouded in white. I've always liked it when that happens. I tried describing it once in the worst short story I've ever written. God, that thing was horrible. Nothing happened. Absolutely nothing happened. I wanted to capture that feeling of loneliness and change. I felt it one day in my ex-girlfriend's dad's house. We were right at the outset of summer when all the blades of grass gleam golden after winter packs up and leaves. They'd gotten a divorce and you could tell a woman hadn't visited the place in at least a year. I'm not being sexist and saying that all women are good for is cleaning. However, I am saying that I've never seen a woman live alone with an interior that looks the way a man's does when he lives alone. Everything was stacked up and out of order. No rhyme or reason to anything, right there at the beginning of summer. When everything is warm and blooming, easy to move and breathe in. I mean, Mississippi summers get hotter than hell and everything, but once again, this was right at the beginning when everything is tolerable and new again. I used to love winter. I don't anymore.

I caught myself thinking about the fall earlier, though. I'm hoping for one of those ideal semesters full of learning and the crunch of the dead, golden leaf. Trees skinny and bare like skeletons after getting skinned alive. And Dr. Potts will most certainly skin me alive. Make me understand that I don't know anything, regardless of whether or not I'm one of the few kids my age that's read The Brothers Karamazov. And fucking A to him. Man's wisdom has never saved the world. Not even once because wisdom and knowledge can't save anyone. If anything, it comes closer to ruining us. Truth, belief, faith. Those things...

There's no one liner or paragraph for those things.

2008-07-01T19:28:00.000-07:00

I've been to the movies two days in a row. Going to the movies by myself is relaxing and very much a recharge. Yesterday I took in Wall-E and today I dug on Kung Fu Panda. I thought about seeing The Happening, but rotten tomatoes slammed the hell out of it, and I mean every reviewer just about slammed its ass into the dirt. Count me out.

My sabbatical from hardcore and punk has continued this week. I've been listening to The New Pornographers, Okkervil River, Townes Van Zandt, The Black Keys, Joe Callicot, Dax Riggs, Dinosaur Jr. (damn that's a lot of Fat Possum), Yo La Tengo, Guided by Voices, and all things emotional and creative. It seems easier to think and live when I'm not listening to hardcore. God, that's strange to say.

I typed up part of a new short story on my typewriter this past weekend. I need to keep going, but I've gotten distracted the past few days. It is surely a discipline that I am not entirely disciplined in. Maybe deadlines are the ticket after all. So much for bitching about Dr. Potts and his time frame on creativity. At least I consistently pushed out decent work when it counted against me to not.

I've been meaning to call a few folks lately and I don't get around to it. I'm a selfish kid. Moreso today than I've ever been. Hopefully the good Lord will still find some use for me. I'm still alive.

I'm also 23 years old. I miss the us from way back then. The way we were so sure of Jesus and getting saved and evangelism. They way "but if you wanna stay, wherever exactly it is you are, that's ok too..it's really none of my business" used to make our hearts weightless and prone to dancing. People seem so fucking jaded nowadays. And I mean fucking everyone. Only the kids at work are carefree and lacking in pretension. I understand Ivan Karamazov's disdain for adults, "devil take the lot of them!" We could use a dose of ignorance holding the judgement. And I am the worst.

I damaged the fuck out of my head today. Running away from a kid. Hahaha...that's the point I'm trying to make.

2008-06-23T17:03:00.001-07:00

And Denley and Peyton are wedded. It was pretty cool. At the reception I drank a beer and danced to "Brown Eyed Girl" with miss Laura Logan Smith and basically just had a hell of a time. This has been the most wonderful summer in recent memory for so many reasons. I don't really know what to make of it. I just know I will be depressed when it comes to an end. And though I am at my best when I am swamped with academic obligations, summer of '08 has been awfully sweet and mama-like. It will be sorely missed.

There isn't a whole lot else to say. Coffee with Jimmy is good. Random run-ins with Douglas Ray are rad. Dostoevsky, Gay, and Carver are still my satchel crew and I've been visiting nicotine again for some reason as well. I've been working on some new short fiction and I'm going to try to keep it adverb-free and devoid of strange dialogue tags.

Fucking A, kids.

2008-06-14T12:46:00.000-07:00

It's 2:46 PM and I have to be at Galloway Methodist Church at 4 PM to have my picture made many times. I expect to be half blind before I even take the stage with my groomsman brothers. Things are moving and changing; life is going like a noisy, confusing freight train of beauty across newly bolted silver tracks. What we've left behind is rusted and lovely like my 90-year-old, bedridden Memaw reading her Bible aloud for 45 minutes for the first time in months. Jesus Christ, seriously, we're always asking "where does the time go?" (thank you Innocence Mission), but God never has. And I thank Him for that.

And I can't kid anyone. Time, change, and seasons kill me in the most tearful of ways. Last night when they played Denley and Peyton's slideshow depicting both their lives before they met and then their lives once they had converged to the sound of "You Say It Best (When You Say Nothing At All)," I damn near croaked on my own weepiness. No more consistent nights in Denley's room, the three of us, talking God, donuts, and our future. The next time we do those things we'll be in a different house, in a different neighborhood, in different circumstances. And it's painful in the most worth it of ways (thank you Lewis Nordan).

I'm not sure what I'm trying to say, really. I never do on this thing. I'd kill to write like ole Jimmy or Modern Life is War's Jeffrey Eaton, but I don't and I can't and that's ok. But as much as I fear change, I welcome it because it allows me to feel things. And I like to feel things. I like saying goodbye. I like seeing how things are after you leave them alone for awhile. The way we all are when we go back to school once the summer ends. How we come back more tan, learned, and grown. Or perhaps more hungover, high, or sad. I don't know. The hammer hurts, does it ever, but it makes us beautiful. It makes us complete.

I want to read Wise Blood again now that I've left it alone a couple of years. That's a really good idea.

I bought my dad some Cormac McCarthy for Father's Day. He loved No Country for Old Men on film. The book is better. I hope he feels the same.

It's 3:03 and my tux is hanging in the closet. It's time to go.

2008-06-11T16:19:00.000-07:00

Home is good.

I told a funny story to the kids today about a Mexican named Rico who eats a bean and rice burrito containing a vampire bat; naturally, the only realistic result would be that he gets rabies. And he does. The funny part (though I say the whole thing in this ridiculously stupid Mexican accent and also pretend to convulse and foam at the mouth) is that Rico goes to the doctor, gets 18 shots in the belly, and then says to the disease, "hasta la vista...rabies." It kills them, every single time, without fail.

There's also one that is almost identical to my 12-year-old self. His parents divorced in fourth grade, he loves Slipknot and that godawful Hot Topic, and he even approached me today with fingernails cloaked in a coat of black. I'll be damned, finding your identity when you're 12 might be the funniest and perhaps most endearing thing I've ever seen. We talk metal and rebellion sometimes. He says to me today, "I just wish my parents were more like me. And not so goody goody." I smile and look at my shoes before replying, "Yeah, I used to think my parents didn't know anything either. That they were too strict, too ignorant, and too full of rules to understand anything. The truth was they just loved me a lot. Believe it or not, one day you'll think your parents are actually cool." "Yeah, when they give me 1000 dollars," he says. I'm asking him to believe the seemingly improbable, the last thing in the world he would think possible.

And yeah, that Jesus has asked me to do the same. You know the routine here, the part where I tie all of this stuff together, right? I don't aim to make one of those sweetly Christian blog posts. I've been reading the Brothers Karamazov and naturally, Ivan and his story of the pre-Second Coming have me thinking about my God. How he's asked me to do the impossible. To believe that I'm the worst and that suffering is necessary. It's that whole Yeatsean idea that Christ just made things way worse. He came here, gave us this list of things we couldn't do, and then left leaving us all the more frustrated and confused and dying and without any real experience of the transcendent. But the most important thing, to just believe it in spite of any doubts and counterevidence, that I think we can do. I mean, we do that everyday. All of us do it with something.

When Preston Jones and Greg Graffin of Bad Religion discussed science as salvation, Jones said to Graffin, "to believe that science will be the answer to all of our problems is a faith statement." Graffin didn't disagree. It takes faith in something to stay alive. Faith in something else other than this, or in Graffin's case, this world without the pain and suffering...really something other than this. Seriously, how is that not heaven?

It ain't not.

2008-06-03T20:03:00.000-07:00

Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Finally.

I've been driving for a good 4 hours, my eyes are burning and I am beaten by the miles. Atlanta was wonderful yesterday and Andrew and I were able to stay with the beautiful Miss Brittany D. White. Sheesh. Makes my heart skip a beat. The quotes from great men and women in the halls of the English Department made Emory all the more appealing. The whole city just seems like it's run by kids and by adults who still know how to be kids. Dogs are in. I slept most of the way to Columbia and USC's campus was verdant and fair like always. Leaving wasn't so easy though. I think we were lost for a good hour before we reached I20 North and headed towards Charlotte. Three hours later and we were in Chapel Hill. I'm halfway through a William Gay story and I'm neglecting Dostoevsky at a pivotal moment. I just want to sleep.

Yeah, it's been long and it's been hot. I've even done the thing where I start to think about a panic attack, but to hell with all of that. I'm glad to be away from home. Jeans sticking to my body as I'm walking some campus I might attend within a year. I feel like I'm headed towards some new season and maybe it's just a feeling. But I live in space and time. In seasons and change. And perhaps it's ok to feel like you're on the verge of something else. Not bigger, not necessarily better. Just something else. We're all headed for something else. Everything seems bigger and when I scale the stacks of these massive libraries and watch all these kids I don't know walk down the street with their sweethearts to the ice cream shop I feel small, know MC is small and inconsequential, and am certain that the number of books I've read means nothing when compared to how many there are to be read. It keeps me humble.

I'm sniffly. I would get sick when I finally decide to do what I say I'm going to do. Sleep.

Music:
Sun Kil Moon - April
Guided by Voices - Bee Thousand
Sufjan Stevens - Michigan
U2 - War
Avalanche - Demo (ha ha ha)

More to come. andbrittanyimissyoukthnxbye

2008-06-01T14:13:00.001-07:00

The allergies are acting up and I've been cleaning and doing dishes and laundry all day. I've yet to start packing. Andrew's some two to three hours away and there's a pretty girl I'm going to see for the first time in a good three years tomorrow. I don't hit the road often. I'm a stranger to it and home has always been preferred over everything else. Nonetheless, it's time to get the hell out of here for a second or two, get lost, get weary and come home beat down and ready for my own bed.

Modern Life is War recorded a video while on the road in Richmond, Virginia swinging into the James River from a bridge. I'm pretty sure I want to find the bridge and the rope swing and crash into the James myself before coming home. Even though it's the pool that made my sinuses act up the last couple of days, I think it'd be worth it to take on a full blown sinus infection if that's the only way to swim in the James. So be it. I'm taking The Brothers Karamazov, I Hate to See that Evening Sun Go Down, and Where Water Comes Together with Other Water with me. I'm hoping Dostoevsky, Gay, and Carver will be my traveling companions and friends. Henry Miller used to do the same for Rollins.

It hit me the other day I'm not a very deep thinker; I just like to read the words of the deep thinkers. And even if the waitress at Styron's in Brandon is uneducated and has never read a book in her life, I'm sure when she goes home and puts her dishes in the dishwasher she doesn't come back to a kitchen floor full of white, bubbly soap. So who is the idiot really?

I need to write another story soon.

2008-05-30T21:39:00.000-07:00

For months a big ole frog has been living in the miniature pond in our backyard. I sometimes go to the kitchen window with a pair of binoculars and peer out at the creature warming himself on a rock or the small board leaning diagonally from the water to the rocks. However, this evening no binoculars were needed as my keen and intelligent feline brethren Milton brought the amphibian right into the kitchen unscathed. Here are some pictures of the small hog. I've never held a frog this big. He or she certainly is a beauty.

For those wondering I returned the fat lily padder back to its home shortly after these photos were taken. Cat hair and all.

2008-05-15T20:21:00.000-07:00

So earlier this week I took the cord running from the back of the tv into the cable outlet and I snipped it in half with a pair of scissors. Took me years to finally do it. I've thought about it more times than I can recall, but I just got really nauseated with what it is. I got tired of it dictating how I feel and making me think about things I'd rather not. I've never fasted from anything. I think I tried to fast from music once and I didn't last a week. My mother used to have a Sunday school teacher named Miss Nan, a sweet lady for sure. Miss Nan professed to never fast because when she did all she thought about was the object she fasted from and was never able to focus on what was important. I believe she decided to swear off any foods containing white sugar for life, however. I'm not proclaiming a fast from tv here or anything because you're not really supposed to talk about what you fast from. That's arrogant and boastful, so I'm not fasting from tv, I just sort of said to hell with it. Nonetheless, it's strange how lonely the nights can be without the noise from that machine. I don't miss tv, but I miss the noise. The sound of someone's voice speaking in the same room that I dwell.

A lot of people use the tv to watch the news. I'm not knocking people who love the news; after all, I've watched my fair share of it. But in these few days without it it's sort of come to my attention how dim the news really is. I don't mean dim in an evil, violent, grim sense. Although it can be that. I can say this better by saying that most people who chide others for not watching the news do so by saying something like, "you know, it's important and perhaps even cool to know what's going on in the world." But what does the news really say about anything that I didn't already know? I already know the world is a hell hole, that people do awful things, and that there's always some wicked endeavor somewhere, some tragedy, and some bloodshed. It's been that way for as long as I can remember and I don't need the news to tell me that. Not to mention the news can't even cover the magnitude of the negativity going on in the world and that is what I mean by dim--it doesn't even paint a proper, accurate picture of the way the world is. This saddens me because the news also rarely, if ever, focuses on the beauty and peace that can often be found in this very "awful" place. One thing is for certain: I'm tired of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, I'm tired of hearing about race (which, by the way, has caused me to see color for the first time in my life which sucks), I'm tired of talking heads, and foreign affairs and I don't want to talk about it anymore. In the words of the great Wendell Berry, "I don't need technology to let me know that things are awry. I need only to walk outside my front door." And I love him so much for that.

In much the same way that I love "Alien Lanes" by Guided by Voices. I've been listening to "Blimps Go 90" on repeat this evening and it is so ebullient, pleasant, youthful and sweet. The whole album is really. And for some reason the lyrics mean a lot to me on this summer night, alone, in my room, missing a few people, feeling awfully sentimental, and for once in my life aware of how much I need someone else sitting here right beside me. I leave you with the lyrics. I hope they make sense in light of all I've written. But, you should also listen to the song and the album too. For me please, but also for Guided by Voices because they're great.

Blimps go 90 on with the show
Couldn't you see that?
Now didn't you know?
Aerosol halos---films of the flag
Rifle games for seven-year-olds
What a drag
Yeah now that's a drag

This is not a vacation
There is no place to go
Weep, sad freaks of the nation
Where blimps go 90
And you can't find me

Senator sipping on Gentleman Jack
"Oh boy" they told me "now don't you look back"
But don't you worry
I promise to not
I'll join your Canary Court
Fit into the slot
Say now what have you got?

Oftentimes I'm reminded
Of the sweet young days
When I poured punch for the franchise
And thus was knighted
Got so excited

Blimps go 90 on with the show
Couldn't you see that?
Now didn't you know?
Hey now didn't you know?

2008-05-15T05:23:00.000-07:00

Hearing the rain from the second story in the morning is wonderful. It sounds like a great gusty hum from an airplane engine on the roof and like a big nest of wasps tapping some full body jig in mid-air against the window. The idea of the latter makes me laugh. The same way Kyle Moore and I used to laugh from the second floor of his house at the wasps that flew repeatedly into the big glass window of his playroom, trying desperately to sting our asses.

I didn't sleep much last night. Honesty and adrenaline (in that order) aren't conducive to slumber, but that's all right. I'm better for it...way better.

Today is Kenyan AA and Dostoevsky. The Brothers Karamazov is a giant. I knew the moment I started reading it that I was dealing with something way beyond exceptional and of crystalline beauty. The very idea that some people read the novel more than once is just baffling, but I want to be that guy.

My eyes burn and my mind's a scrambled egg. Not to mention I wouldn't mind eating a couple of those.

I will swing from a rope attached to a bridge over the James River into the river itself this summer. Mark my word.

2008-05-06T21:42:00.000-07:00

I said goodbye to Valerie earlier. She heads back home to Germany soon and it's a bummer to let her go. There are very few people who are as pleasing to be around as Valerie. She's so pleasant, kind, content, devoid of any desire to draw attention to herself. I am really going to miss her. I bought her The Essential Calvin and Hobbes volume as well as a cheap copy of Franny and Zooey. I hope the latter brings her much joy..the same kind that I've acquired in knowing her.

Goodbyes absolutely kill me. The way I'll walk all the streets and pass down the hallways my friends have, but they won't be there anymore. They'll be somewhere else, doing something new, learning something different, sharing the best of themselves with strangers...who won't remain strangers for long. How I will literally, never speak to or see some of them ever again once they graduate and ship out for whatever's next. It's sad. And it's beautiful.

I moved out of the dorm today. My body aches from lifting heavy things and going up and down stairs for hours. I left the drill bits Justin and I bought from Wal-Mart to bunk our beds last fall. Haha, bastards ran out of the normal pegs. Our bunks were a good 3/4's of an inch higher than they should have been with a regular peg. Wobbly as hell and we were always sure it was going to come crashing one night in the wee hours. Hurt like hell and everything crooked, smashed, and in a mess. Never happened. I'm hoping whoever moves in come August will find some use for them. Everything is sentimental right now. I need a friend. My room is full of unpacked bags and stacks of books. I finally have my summer, haha, and I officially don't know what to do with it.

I'll cuddle with my dog and read Vonnegut.

2008-05-06T02:49:00.000-07:00

Been working like a madman for the last eight hours.

Spring Semester 2008 - 0

Ellis - 1

2008-05-04T22:11:00.001-07:00

I finished Mere Christianity yesterday. The book was a good read and was very healing in a lot of ways. Sometimes I forget how imperative it is that I remember things. Lewis says that that's essential to the Christian life, that we simply be reminded of the things that are crucial to our existence with others and the adventures we have. I can agree with that. It's so easy to forget sometimes all of the things that Jesus said. What his followers said. All of the human things that all of the patriarchs and the prophets and the judges said and did. It's easy to think that Jesus said a lot of good things and overall it comes down to "loving your neighbor." And there is legitimacy to that idea, but the way he physically touched people, the way he used spit and dirt to help people see, the way he wanted to live his human life in spite of understanding how much more there was to die for is incredibly encouraging.

I told my father the other day that I was really worried about the economy, about this war we're in, about what the intentions are of these assholes that want to run this country. He told me he knew where I was coming from. That during Vietnam he used to lay in bed at night and tell God, "You know, I know we're meant for heaven and all, but I would have liked to live out my life." He was thinking the world was going to end. That everything would fall apart the way I feel it is when I look around. That I won't get to live out my life. And I guess that's just the thing, this life isn't mine to live out and moreover, it isn't truly living. It's at best some small dirty window that gives me the faintest idea of what is to come when those latches are lifted for me and I'm ready to go to the other side. And though I'm scared as hell of suffering, disappointment, death, and all the other things like cancer, car wrecks, being down and out, it's all essential to busting the glass and getting on to what's real.

Haha, I guess I'm most scared of getting to heaven and there being no evidence of the works of J.D. Salinger, Flannery O'Connor, James Joyce, Raymond Carver and the like. But I shouldn't worry about such things. Because I'm certain that the expression of those men and women, the way they were so human and so honest is the stuff of God. That perhaps those thoughts, those ideas, and feelings are more real outside of this world than in it. That those things could only come from a place embedded within the definition, the source of beauty and honesty, whether they knew it when they wrote it or not. And the idea of that alone is enough to make me burst with disbelief and joy.

I hope I can hang on to those ideas someday when I'm being prodded for prostate cancer. God help me. Hahaha...

Last final tomorrow and one more paper due Tuesday afternoon. Summer time can't come quickly enough. Oh, and Jimmy, if you're reading, I sent some short stories that I wrote to your gmail account. I seem to have forgotten your Ole Miss address. Inform me!

-Ellis

2008-04-28T22:02:00.000-07:00

Nerves are charged on black coffee and a burst for hard work. It's past midnight and I'm not so tired after all. Over three pages down and I'll probably go for a solid seven. Who knows. Last paper of the class. Want to give it a good K.O. My desk is a mess of commentary, empty mugs, books, pens, post-its, and emptied snack packages. My own private world of beauty and madness.

God is that infinite summer.

2008-04-26T17:41:00.000-07:00

Rained the entire day almost. I am way into the rain. The way it can put the scent of blooms and honeysuckle in the air and make everything pleasant, clean, and cool. I walked Holly wearing a rain slicker. All I needed was to find a dead body in a ditch and I'd have had the authentic southern gothic experience. Hell, I guess you could say I did sort of have the southern gothic experience in a more minimalist way. As we were coming back up the street to home, one of the families living across the street and down a little ways opened the front window of their house to let in the scent of the fresh rain. This left only the screen attached in the frame. Well, this little bastard dog, I don't know what the hell kind he was, white with big black spots, starts barking, tears through the screen and charges with gnashed teeth at Holly. All I could really make out of the whole thing was incisors and dog limbs entwined. The dog skids away cowering, and Holly is yanking me with force for more. The family, all three of them, come running out of the house as I'm trying to keep Holly restrained. "I am so sorry!" the woman kept on saying. "Bad dog! No!" I just looked at them, "It's okay," I say, "she likes to fight too. It's mutual." And continued walking. I checked her for blood and teeth marks, but she came out unscathed. She's tough as nails.

Speaking of the southern gothic literary experience, I've applied to practically three bookstores to work at this summer. I can work at the day care center again this summer, but I am seriously not feeling it. I just want to be surrounded by the thing I love. Is that too much to ask after two summers of getting the shit kicked out of me by six-year-olds?

Three days of class left. Oh summertime.

-Ellis

2008-04-14T22:25:00.001-07:00

I missed Modern Life is War Sunday night; I was too tired to move. The entire weekend was spent in Memphis going and going to someplace past exhaustion. I am not equipped to spend a lot of time with people. I've known that a long time, but the past three days have only granted me more certainty than ever that my mind is fine-grained and intolerant of too much association. Deadlines and little time. I guess you start loving it or you'd have left it a long time ago. It was good to be home, sleep in my own bed, see my pup and cat, absorb the silence like it was my lifesblood.

Narrowed college down to 19 hours. Unbelievable, really. I'm ready for the next couple of weeks to pass. I need a summer of reading: Ayn Rand, Richard Wright, Herman Melville, Barry Hannah, and Fydor Dostoevsky are on the mind. Just a couple more papers, another short story, a one-act play, and a few finals and I'll close the door on it. I'd never dare say good riddance. Oh, no, it meant way too much.

I had to give an opening statement on pluralism in philosophy today. I'm pretty sure the holy ghost carried me the first four minutes just fine and after that I realized I was walking on water and sunk. Felt lightheaded, anxious, and stupid. I repeated my main point and sat down quickly. I don't get it. It's just fucking hysterical if you want the truth. I mean who gives a shit really? Sometimes you have to search for that inner Rollins and cherish it: "fuck these people!" I have to read my Faulkner paper at Tougaloo Friday at a literary conference. Hopefully I won't repeat yesterday's trash. I was exhausted and unprepared. Bury it. Spit on it. Walk away.

Live.

2008-03-29T12:53:00.000-07:00

I put every one of those photos and letters in a bag and I pressed it beneath the worthless scraps and the envelopes torn. Call it spring cleaning if you will, but it was far more meaningful than that. I'll be damned I couldn't tell you why they stayed where they were for so long. I couldn't.

Been reading William Gay's short stories from "I Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down." He's such the equivalent of a mulleted sheepdog, friendly and harmless. Shy and lovely like a precious woven blanket of Truth. I stopped loving this place a long time ago and some days it's awkward to stand next to the rest of humanity who have hope in a way much different than my own. But by God, I need it no other way. Because love is overflowing from my heart like rich molten gold, fluid, and gorgeous. And as imperfect as I am and as wrong as I can be I am right about this.

Jesus Christ, Colour Revolt's new album is a brooding viper in the gentlest of sunsets. Been thinking a lot about my characters in the stories I aim to tell. Sawed off shotguns, love in hell, and all the scars and redemption they're going to show me. I need to learn from them more than I need to teach anyone on the ways and things that I feel everyday. Listening to and watching Barry Hannah kills me. "I don't kill off as many as I used to," he says, "people are more precious to me now." Such things make me smile and then he can turn it all around and make me guffaw with his vicious homosexuals and pink eggs in a jar. By God, I tell you it gives me more hope than I can hardly explain.

Tonight Valerie is coming over to my house for dinner. She's the German foreign exchange student who I have come to admire and think a great deal of. And she's pretty too. She took all of the red gummy bears out of the package, put them in a bag and gave them to me.

And such things are the small and yet many victories of grace.

2008-03-24T20:43:00.001-07:00

And sometimes I am so overwhelmed by the beauty of this thing called writing that I want to weep.

2008-03-23T11:41:00.000-07:00

I am constantly pointing out the errors of people and their ideologies. Being politically conscious is a dangerous undertaking for the man who wants to be like Jesus. It forces me to judge and to criticize. It forces me to weigh my own beliefs against that of other people's and to come out with the verdict that I am indeed closer to orthodoxy than they. I should be certain of about only one thing in life and that is that my God, like a fellow church member recently stated, "wants me to love people more than ideas." I am only supposed to be right insofar as that what I believe is right is justifiable for the greater good of everyone and in the dispensation of a love that can do no one any harm. In fact, my love should be so strong that in the face of dying for it or cutting and running I should choose the former. I've been reading Wendell Berry's What Are People For? lately and one of his essay's titled "Writer and Region" plucked the strings of my heart like a guitar in the hands of Sam Beam on a river bayou.

Berry's argument is that we remain steadfast in our belief that we are the improved successors of generations worthy of being deemed despicable and unjust. We rightfully label such things as slavery or the wrongful displacement of Native Americans from their territory unjust, and at the same time we ignorantly assume that had we been there living in the context of those times that we would have chosen not to participate in those injustices. We forget that in enough years time there will be new successors who look back on our attitudes, actions, and belief systems and will criticize them, deem them unforgivable, and perhaps view our ideology as despicable. Berry's words, for the time being (I am imperfect after all), have shattered my ability to believe that my orthodoxy can be better than that of my neighbor. For instance, I used to believe that in voting one subjected themselves to the opportunity to have to vote for evil. Even if that evil be the lesser of two, a man should never vote for evil at all. The truth of the matter is, is that by waking up everyday and choosing to go into the world, I subject that world to a heart with as much potential for wretchedness and wrongdoing, if not more, than the man in which I place my vote. One thing remains immune to the criticisms of this world and that is the action based on transcendence.

Love, at it's bare bones definition, it's purest, most wrapped in Truth incarnation, can never, for any reason, at any time, be deemed despicable and wrong. When you feed the homeless, wrap the wounds of the leper, stand against the violence and hatred towards homosexuals, and are willing to die (rather than kill) for what is held dear in the beating muscle beneath your chest, you've done the things of the transcendent.

My life should not be governed by what ideas I believe can make this world better, but by the attempt to squeeze that massive Kingdom of God into this small ravine called the universe. A greater undertaking than being politically correct, but a far more effective one I am certain. Such things cannot be done with quickness and bullet points, but slowly, humbly, and with great contemplation for the good of everyone and then the self.

God help this to be all I know.

Home again.

2008-03-22T16:34:00.000-07:00

I was able to fly on my non-rev passes to Atlanta and on to South Carolina. Getting back home wasn't so easy. After failing to get on the flight out of Columbia to Atlanta at 7:35 am, I rented a car and started the drive nine hours back home. I made it in seven.

I am so damned tired.

Columbia is absolutely lovely. Everything blooming and made of brick. And I ain't into writing about it right now.

The Queers are awesome and I'll marry the next girl that says "Psycho Over You" can be our song.

alive,
Ellis

2008-03-19T20:29:00.001-07:00

I wish I could tell you I'm an experienced kid when it comes to traveling, but that isn't so. I've been overseas a time or two but someone has always held my hand. I mean, dear God, I'm almost 23 years old. At some point the common things in life must come my way. At some point I have to get a clue and that's what I'm most afraid of: looking like a clueless asshole in front of people who "do this sort of thing all the time."

What do I do all the time? Read, walk the dog, talk to Andrew Hinds about the deeper things in life, go to class, sleep, avoid responsibility, change my fish's water when it's convenient, buy music, buy books, think about naked girls way more often than I should, sometimes I pray, sometimes I read the good book. I've lived more of my life through Flannery O'Connor, William Faulkner, C.S. Lewis, Raymond Carver, Ernest Hemingway, and Cormac McCarthy's stories than I have in standing up and getting out and doing the whole deal of breathing, talking, and living next to others. To do it is pretty foreign and I'm sort of tired of that. Dr. Miller told me yesterday that "it's time." Two simple words that pack it up better than anything I can sit here and punch in with these squares. Well, maybe I can say it a little better: by God, it's time.

Tom Waits is snarling on the stereo and "Alice" is somewhere between the downtrodden beauty of "Closing Time" and the eccentricities of "Bone Machine." I'll be jamming this record non-stop the next few months. Bought it at the new Barnes and Noble in Ridgeland. Spent part of the evening reading on the writings of Edward Taylor. Lots of Puritan studies this semester and in it's own way I think it's beautiful and charming. Sure they made a ton of mistakes, Salem Witch trials and such, but they clung to God with a fear and ferocity that I think Cormac McCarthy longs for in "No Country for Old Men." Minus the paranoia, sexism, and unfortunate ignorance, I think the Puritan love for God was something awfully special. Something that might make our world more livable could we be salted with it.

Early flight tomorrow. Big Fish on the t.v. Ole hound dog on the sofa. Living to be had.

-Ellis

2008-03-15T16:43:00.000-07:00

Andrew's been here the last two days. It's been a joy to have him around and today has actually been active and alive. We hit Broad Street for lunch and then Lemuria, where I picked up Rick Bass' "The Watch." We drove around Fondren and took in the new blooms on the branches and the sun through the petals. Took the scenic route to Raymond, past the chopped down corn fields and the verdant green pastures. Sometimes I forget how incredibly lucky I am to be a kid in the south. And I don't mean that in the whole, "American by Birth, Southern by the grace of God" sense. I mean it in the I really love driving through the old parts, thinking about Eudora Welty, with Paul Wine Jones wailing through my car speakers sense. That feeling always seems to go away in the colder months when I spend so much time inside, away from the beauty and sweetness of it all.

I'm flying to South Carolina on Thursday to visit USC. It's all really happening and it's strange and wonderful and something like exciting because I've never been excited enough about anything to really know what it is.

Much living,
Ellis

2008-03-11T21:36:00.000-07:00

I have a fucking migraine from hell. Studying German and I'm about halfway there. Mark Kozelek is covering AC/DC on my stereo and Tuesday's almost gone (no I'm not trying to reference Skynyrd).

I voted today. I sure as hell did. I don't believe in anarchy anymore and I'm not naive enough to think life will ever be war-free, and I'm done giving a fuck about being that cool kid that's "against the system." What anarchy literature I've read is mostly full of shit, really. If I want heaven today then I'll have to be okay with dying young. I ain't. Over it like nothing else. *middle finger extended*

Swamped. Tired. And needin' kisses.

God bless.

2008-03-10T19:19:00.000-07:00

Working all the time and playing more than I should. I've consumed my black coffee today, finished a short story, and am on the verge of beginning yet another paper. I've been listening to The Band this evening and I am hooked on their country rock 'n roll sound. The weather was warmer today and their music is a fitting soundtrack to spring in Mississippi.

Next week I'll be leaving home and hitting the road for a few days. Stopping in South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, and wherever else Andrew has booked as far as grad school visits. It's odd to think in about a year and a half I may be relocating to study literature in some other town in some other school. Finding a new normal and a new routine. I'll never be hard pressed to say that I am in need of change. I don't like change. Not even a little. But I'll find a heart for it and I won't be buried by circumstance with the potential to be glorious.

I think I'm going to marry a brunette. Just get that feeling. I don't know where she is, but I'd like to talk to her, fall asleep with my head on her shoulder breathing the light sweetness of her skin and perfume. Haha, this is what happens when you listen to Lucero. It's all right.

Back to work.

2008-03-04T10:16:00.000-08:00

Cold again.

I've been dying for spring weather to stick around for a while. It doesn't help things that I recently acquired the Rites of Spring album-a D.C. jewel-and all I want to do is go swimming, climb trees, and bathe in those clear-gold rays of that big bright star. But I've been listening to Black Flag and drinking my black coffee and trying to make my way through yet another English paper. And I suppose at this point the good weather would only prove a legitimate distraction.

Still making my way through the Screwtape Letters. C.S. Lewis is crazy. And I mean crazy brilliant and I have nothing but the deepest respect for the man. He has certainly cultivated in me this desire to go to Narnia and if an author can ever make me want to step outside of the world of 20th century American or British literature, he's something awfully special.

Lucero played Jackson last Thursday. It was good to see my friends, listen to good music, and visit the smoke-filled four walls of a music hole. Sometimes I forget how much I actually love watching bands play. I've become too jaded to quickly. I miss real hardcore shows. I miss discussing the world and all of it's ugliness and beauty with real hardcore kids. And I miss having the time to do it all in the first place.

I watched a video today of a crow that adopted a kitten as it's baby and took care of it. They're still friends. They're so different and are supposed to be mortal enemies and they play, eat together, and love one another. It's all that I can hope for in this world.

Much living,
Ellis

2008-02-26T17:12:00.000-08:00

Cold as hell out tonight.

I have an early American writings test tomorrow that I'm a bit weak in the knees over. I need to do well. And I will so long as restlessness doesn't take over. So long as I stay right here in this chair and keep fighting the battle behind my forehead like James Joyce once said.

The Innocence Mission is playing quietly by the wall and it's tempting to make another pot of coffee. Stuff gives me the shakes though. That's the last thing I need.

I've been running a mile and a half three times a week. Trying to keep that goal afloat, anyways. It's a wonderful thing for balancing feelings and stress. It is as therapeutic as everyone claims. And it's nice to feel like I'm not another confused youth stumbling the streets. I'm running them. Sweating out the excess. Bearing my teeth in their face and keeping the blood squirting like a small geyser. Praise God.

Birds of my Neighborhood just ended and I've got to decide on some more study music.

I ain't done.

Modern Life is War disband

2008-02-19T10:48:00.001-08:00

The official statement from MLIW came today about their decision to disband. I am floored with feelings of all they have meant to me the last three years. Nothing in punk rock history ever summed up humanity quite like the chorus of "Clarity" when Jeff screams "...we've lost control!" I remember reading Jeff's blog for the first time, glancing over his favorite books section and knowing I had to get a copy of "The Catcher in the Rye." I went to Borders that very day and bought a seven dollar cheap copy of the novel. The book changed my life forever. Not only did it dismantle everything I thought I wanted to do with my life, it gave me hope and direction and an identity. By the time I was done the front and back cover were tattered, smeared with fingerprints from the mixture of the sweat from my hands and the pages of ink, the spine rippled with folds. I have been a reader and an English major ever since. It's one of those stories of how God uses everything because everything is in God in spite of itself. I wish books still did that for me as often today. Overwhelmed me and made my heart beat and captured me. I have to fight to keep that feeling alive these days. It comes with the territory of immersion I assume. I will be forever in debt to them and what they've done. Bands that good never last long. And they didn't.

2008-02-14T06:48:00.000-08:00

I bought my German friend Valerie Bopp some dark bread for Valentine's Day. She said she's been looking all over for dark bread. Haha, there is something slightly sad about the fact that America, especially the rural parts like Mississippi, isn't overflowing with the kind of bread that's actually really good for our bodies.

I like doing things for other people, though. It's nice to do something for someone else. To keep your word. It's a good cure for the whole self-obsession I find myself in everyday.

I named my betta fish Colin after Colin Smith in the Loneliness of the Long-distance Runner by Alan Sillitoe. He is yellow, his scales running along his sides are black, and his fins the color of the statue of liberty: rusted copper green. To feed him is a joy. The airstone shoots bubbles into the tank and when I drop a bloodworm in the bubbles push the freeze dried morsel around and for a few seconds it is once again alive. Colin turns his eyes inward, follows close behind for three to five seconds before he lashes into the worm making the same sound a tongue makes shooting out and back in quickly. The worm disappears and Colin nods his head up and down pushing the worm into his belly. Nature is crazy rad.

I have to write a short story by Saturday morning and e-mail it to Dr. Potts. He told the class to write a story mimicking another author. I chose Raymond Carver. I was talking with J.J. about him some months back and we both agreed the guy is the king of the "one liners." Seriously, he finishes his stories with the best lines I've ever seen. I used to describe such things as "saying so much in so few lines," but I've kind of decided that he really just says all that needs to be said and doesn't turn it into a wedding cake. He is buried in Ocean View Cemetery in Port Angeles, Washington. One day I will go to his grave.

I will be initiated into Sigma Tau Delta today. Kind of cool think. It's nice to know that working hard actually amounts to something. But mostly I just want to go to Dr. Potts' house for movie night and meet his terrier Bonnie Jean. That's more important than a good reference.

I haven't talked about music in a while. Lots of good hardcore and punk records have made it into my collection as well as good indie and folk. In the last few months I've bought and listened to:

Shipwreck A.D. - Abyss
Andrew Bird - Armchair Apocrypha
Feist - Let it Die
CocoRosie - Noah's Ark, Le Maison De Mon Reive
Antelope - Reflector
Life Long Tragedy - Runaways
108 - A New Beat From a Dead Heart
Saves the Day - Stay What You Are
Songs:Ohia - The Lioness
Helium - The Dirt of Luck
Striking Distance - March to Your Grave
..that might cover it.

I've also heard some unfortunate rumors that Modern Life is War is calling it a day. What a loss for the hardcore and punk community. They have meant so much to me the last four years. No hardcore band has ever challenged the community, mastered storytelling through music, and put more heart into their music than those guys. They're literally the Bruce Springsteen of hardcore...I hope I can sing along one more time before they call it a day.

That's enough for now.

2008-02-13T18:19:00.000-08:00

What a day. I experienced a puking spell around 2 o'clock. I have no idea why. I took a phenergen to kill the nausea. Knocked me out. I woke up around 4:30 and went to Borders, read some of my William Bradford assignment, was too tired to finish.

I've been trying the last couple of days to write something worthwhile in this thing. I've written a couple of posts and didn't publish them. Wasn't feeling it. Stuff about nihilism and Flannery and hope and everything. But I don't feel like writing about that stuff. I'd like to say something I haven't said before.

I think I'm more concerned with storytelling these days than saying something profound. Yeah, I just want to tell a good story.

But how dare i try to do that if I ain't up and living.

2008-02-09T14:03:00.001-08:00

Money is the devil. And no I don't mean the love of it is the devil, I mean money is the devil.

I bought some dress clothes earlier today. The kind that actually fit and look decent and shoes, a tie, a belt, and even socks. Pretty standard necessities for a guy like myself, but dear God the cost.

I'm making the trek towards 23 years old. Taking care of my needs will be my responsibility before too damn much longer. I feel so unprepared for the world all the time. I know worrying won't fix it, but at least I'm not too naive to think that everything will just be taken care of the rest of my life.

I'm not going to make a lot of money. I want to be a college professor. I think I want to be a college professor more than I want to be married or have kids. This could be a good thing. I don't give too much of a damn if I'm going without certain things. But to have to deny a wife or children their wants because I'm broke as hell may be too much for my people pleasing propensity. However, I am getting at never having sex with that whole hypothetical scenario there and frankly, that just won't do.

I have totally skipped over why I bought the clothes. Denley is having her engagement party later this evening and I have to be there. I'm a groomsman in the wedding. Never done that before. Don't plan on having to do it much in life.

Nothing much else to say. The Smiths play on the stereo and the sun is heading west and I have a short story to revise, a ton of reading to do, and sleep deprivation to attend.

There is a lot of love in my heart.

2008-02-07T12:50:00.000-08:00

First test in A History of Israel tomorrow. Gotta kill it. Can't stop until the right hand is broken. Knuckles shattered like ice cubes underfoot.

I'm liking the weather today. I am ready for warmer temperatures and spring again. I always feel as though I'm done hibernating when it's finally warm enough to sit under the trees and read in the shade of the oaks.

I've been studying on The Screwtape Letters by Lewis and still making my way through Blood Meridian by McCarthy. The latter I am on the last leg of. Things in that novel are just downright mean in every way. I think I understand it though. A little. Becoming just as awful as the thing you are trying to eradicate when you leave compassion behind and blood becomes green. The resounding words of Mr. Caulfield, "goddamn money, it always leaves you feeling blue as hell."

I go to German these days because Laura Murphy sits across the room and she's beautiful. Haha, there is no shame in the words I write. Not an ounce.

I pray for contentment and joy these days. I pray for the ability to learn and for peace and justice and motivation. I spend too much money and I should probably pray more often for financial wisdom. Sometimes it pays to be young and stupid.

Has it ever paid to be old and jaded?

2008-01-31T20:12:00.001-08:00

Thursdays are my no-class days. Today was incredibly gray, rainy, and cold. I dropped into Borders, ordered my coffee, placed an order for some new music, caught up with an old friend briefly, and worked on my paper for The Remains of the Day. I couldn't take it for long though. Eventually I bailed, went home, closed the shutters on the grayness and went back to sleep on my bed with two kitties and a pup. Probably slept for three hours or longer.

On the way home from Madison this evening I was pulled over by a policeman on the same road I received my last ticket a little less than a year ago. Here I am, praying to God almighty, no music, no distractions just prayer, and I fail to watch my speedometer. I dodged a bullet. The guy pulls me over, takes my license and proof of insurance, tells me I have death on my mind this evening and for me to hang tight. Next thing I know he gives it back, no ticket, speeds off with his lights flashing in the opposite direction. By the grace of God, something more important came up than putting a punk kid going 10 miles over the speed limit in his place. I think it was God's way of breaking me of being like the D.C. hardcore kids and always referring to cops as pigs. They're only pigs until I'm about to be slammed with a heavy fine I can't afford. I'm all "sir" from that point forward.

I'm back in the room drinking Dunkin' Donuts coffee and intending to study for philosophy tomorrow.

Weekend agenda: a whole lot of living.

2008-01-28T22:03:00.000-08:00

So restless these days. The coffee pot has become a mistake. A gulp of gasoline on an engine of anxious, squealing, and breaking belts. I'm failing to meet deadlines like the champion I was two months ago. It's irritating. Gotta find that Rollins-esque go hard, go again heart. "...but Christ is his name"

I'm tired. There aren't enough lifetimes for me to learn everything I want to know. With three I'd be nowhere close.

The constraints of time and space hurt like a blackened eye busted and in need of a good 37 stitches.

Lord, I'll sit still.

2008-01-24T14:18:00.001-08:00

My recent obsession with Lewis Nordan has caused me to spend frivolously on Batman comic books. How's that for an update on general dorkery?

I've always liked Batman, though. He's an extremely angry and violent hero. He's a man of deep thought. A mind in chains and overwhelmed with his inability to carry the world on his shoulders. And in a sense I reckon that means he'd like to be the Christ and he knows he can't. He's flesh and bone. Mortal lifesblood pumping through the blue hallways of his anatomy. And who was it, Faulkner that said you should read everything you can possibly get your hands on?

I used to come home to get away from the noisiness of the box in Clinton. I think I come home nowadays because it's too quiet. I'm really tired these days for some reason and I do all the things I say I won't. I'll stop lusting, spending, staying up so late, worrying about the world and the religions. Home simplifies so much. Maybe it sounds a little agoraphobic, but there's no louder sound of love than for Milton to be spread across my belly purring with his eyes mere slats in his head.

I went out for a walk this evening. Taylor sees me in the hallway and asks, "who you livin' with these days?"

"No one," I respond.

I walk out into the cold, dark, and wet Clinton. I descend the rusted and creaky steps of the Naturals center and I look out over my college town of the Christ.

Solitude is tougher these days.

And so I'll be too.

2008-01-15T20:43:00.000-08:00

I keep having this recurring mental image of Sugar Mecklin in Music of the Swamp when he grabs a wasp nest tightly in his hand and the "red dive-bombers" puncture his hand and body with poison. He talks about how it's basically a metaphor for the pain of his daddy and the marginalization of being in the goddamned delta his whole life.

Certain things only happen in some places particularly. I remember a time when my dad, mama (they were still married at the time), and I went to the Civil War museum in Vicksburg. The day hot and summery, ripe with that smell of grass and honeysuckle and all the wasps were buzzing about the place, agitated because that's what they are all the time if you ask me. My fascination with swords at the time could be matched by no child in the rest of the world. I recall specifically my father telling me there'd be Civil War swords there for me to look at. In my imagination I was sure they would be for me and I'd get to slash them around and be the hero. "Silver war swords!" I said.

I don't remember much about the swords I saw that day, but I do remember this particular instance involving a cannon. This big, heavy black thing that apparently dismantled peoples bodies when lit and fired. On wheels, no less. Christ almighty the things we make mobile in this world. Anyway, I remember this boy and his mother (no average mother mind you, this is a Mississippi trailer park mother, big, boar-skinned, thing) walking the path, taking in the historical remnants of that war that stole 2% of America's population at that time (a good 6 million if taken from our population today). I was standing at the back of the cannon when the boy put his face to the barrel and yelled into it hoping for a great resonance from the big black gun. What flew from the great war pipe was a horde of wasps that tagged him in the face a couple of times. Of course, the kid grabbed his face and yelled, " Owwhh!!" and his mother runs over and grabs him only to be stung herself in the finger. I know that she was stung in the finger because once it happened she yelled, "The son of a bitch stung me in my goddamn finger!"

The child is crying, the mother is cursing a storm greater than any sailor on the roughest of seas, and everyone watching sort of just stares and keeps on walking and living as though nothing at all happened. I remember my dad repeating what she said in the car, "The son of a bitch stung me in my goddamn finger!" I asked why the finger was so bad and daddy said there's a lot of nerves in there and, "it just hurts." I laugh hysterically when I think about it. Really hard, without fail. I told it to someone else today and they only laughed at the story because I was laughing so hard. I clarified by asking, "What is not funny about a kid sticking his face in a pipe and getting his ass stung off?"

I think life is way full of pain. Way full of loneliness and risk and the possibilities of bullets, breakups, and bee stings. I also think it's beautiful. Full of the best of words, love, colors, and laughter. And can one really exist without the other? I mean what is laughing if you can't stop? Or cry? Going back to Nordan, "there is great pain in all love, but we don't care it's worth it" and I have to agree. I don't think there can be storytelling without pain, or at least, the very possibility of it. Even the shitty, thick, romance paper in the grocery store check out line gives you enough possibility of pain to keep you reading. And without the endurance of some bloody and hours-long pain my heart wouldn't be made of flesh.

And that pain...has made for the most hopeful story of all time.

2008-01-13T22:40:00.000-08:00

My mom brought my fish to the dorm today. His oxygen is buzzing behind me, the bubbles spraying across the surface with that whizzing, small-popping sound. I should be sleeping, but I haven't quite mastered the art of the new and much-needed sleep schedule.

Counting the Days played in Flowood earlier this evening. It was good to see a hardcore band play before the semester begins. The kids are disappointing, though. I miss seeing and experiencing the shows of a few years ago. Terror, Modern Life is War, and Converge were all shows that burned a real brand on my heart and mind. Just kids being troublemakers, stage dives, shout alongs, and rushing the stage to sing "D-E-A-D-R-A-M-O-N-E-S." Those were good times. And not times that are over or have to end. I guess I just don't have the kind of time I used to to enjoy that sort of thing anymore. And especially not locally, I always feel old and out of place.

I seem to have also gained the reputation of a book worm. Whenever I go out these days someone's always cracking a joke on me saying things such as, "Oh, the kid got away from his books long enough to come hang! Amazing." I don't know, it's kind of funny. It's true though. I don't know what to think about it.

I have five classes tomorrow back to back. Honestly, I'm scared as hell. I don't know, that's an exaggeration, but I do fear exhaustion. I fear loneliness in the months to come and I fear the very thing I think I'm so good at: isolation. My mother tells me I have no faith in God. I have faith in God, but I don't have a lot of faith in my ability to wait some things out. I'm hoping somehow, some way the fat is getting trimmed, the dross is getting removed, and that my heart is getting stronger. More capable, tougher, harder to break. I need that much to be true.

I'm going to lend my eyes to Cormac for awhile.

"Come find me. You first, then her."

2008-01-13T10:52:00.000-08:00

I have officially moved in for the spring 2008 semester. Everything is neat and clean and in it's place and to tell you the truth it's downright cozy. I experienced a small bout of depression on arriving and seeing that Justin's things were all gone. I'm going to miss him a lot. Nonetheless, I am a man of isolation. I have never shunned living and entertaining myself alone. There will be an adjustment to never seeing the kid, but he's a good one, and he will make an effort to keep in touch. He's got the good heart like that. And in light of him I believe it's time that I actually told a story on this thing as opposed to the typical entry of rambling, stream of consciousness, and downright melodrama.

I remember the day I moved into this room for the first time. I was stoked to be living with Justin because he's hilarious, quiet when the hours call for it, and extremely worry-free and simple. I arrived with my father at MC and we drove around to the back of the building to unload and carry the heavy furniture, bags, and my small library that I tend to travel with whenever on the go or on the move. I phoned Justin and he said that he'd come up with a brilliant idea: we could open a window in our room, which is parallel to the staircase running up the side of the building, and push in the luggage and furniture. This way we wouldn't have to travel the actual stairs inside the building and cross the hall in order to get things into the room. It sounded really good to me.

If anyone has ever seen a futon cushion, certainly (unless you have less than the average number of brain cells) you'd be pretty hard to convince that it would fit easily through the average college dorm room window. The old saying goes "where there's a will there's a way" and this is often true; however, the will and the way combined can often lead to unexpected consequences as I am about to get to in this story. I took the staircase up the side of Chrestman and began to push the cushion through the open space in the window. The cushion went in about halfway before getting stuck and requiring more force to be pushed all the way through. I shoved as hard as I could. The bottom part of the window comes out of the frame and falls on top of the desk sitting below the ledge. Justin starts laughing hard and my father laughs as well. I'm standing there looking like an idiot that is too lazy to go the typical move-in route who is now paying the dues for such an endeavor.

By the grace of God, my dad decided to attempt the fix the window himself. He struggles with it for a good 10 to 15 minutes and decides that it's only fixable if he yanks a piece out of the frame that actually looks like it might be important. Bottom line is we need the window in the frame before an R.A. comes in fining me for destroying a dorm room window. He removes a spring-like structure from the right side of the window and shoves the piece in and locks the window so it doesn't move. The window is still like that to this day and I have yet and will never attempt to open it.

There are other stories about Justin and me that I think I'll post later. I miss him. And I love him unconditionally.

2008-01-09T20:43:00.000-08:00

I sleep until about 1 PM or later these days. At night I read for a while and watch mindless tv until I finally try to sleep. I keep promising myself I'll wake up earlier, dedicate more of the day to being awake, learning, reading. Hasn't happened yet. I get to that point when I read where I get restless and can't anymore.

Cormac McCarthy is driving me crazy. I'm reading Blood Meridian and I hit a line on page 66 today, "What's wrong with you is wrong all the way through you." Don't know what it means. Wish I did. Makes me doubt myself. I can't do that though. That's overreacting terribly. I just like the idea of having an exceptional mind. Who wouldn't?

Now I'm watching the Real World finale and watching them all separate and go home. Goodbye's kill me, even if they're not my own. Something about them.

I'm going to make some decaf, read this novel some more, and keep hoping McCarthy pushes a little bit of light towards me.

2008-01-01T12:42:00.001-08:00

"The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it."
-Flannery O'Connor (who I am sure I could have loved and even gone Roman Catholic for)

I am certain that I typically hate it when anyone posts Bible verses on their blogs. I am certain that whenever I viewed anyone's posting of Bible verses in their blogs that I always skipped right over reading them. Sometimes you have to, though. Sometimes I have to I guess is what I mean. I need to stop reading about Islam, the Jews, the United States, and the turmoil that has followed and resulted in these things since the practical beginnings of existence. My heart weighs heavy sometimes and I feel sick to my stomach at the thought of things. I know it all sounds "so ridiculous" as David Bazan says in "The Longer I Lay Here," but it is inevitably real and true and I am unable to ignore these things.

I am unable to deny the wrath of God in the Old Testament and neither am I allowed to ignore the love of Christ in the New. G.K. Chesterton said that the mystic, "...has always cared more for truth than for consistency. If he saw two truths that seemed to contradict each other, he would take the two truths and the contradiction along with them. His spiritual sight is stereoscopic, like his physical sight: he sees two different pictures at once and yet sees all the better for that." He also said that it is mysticism that keeps humanity sane. And without a doubt I think I would go insane if all I had was my reason. So. Very. Insane.

Ezekiel 5:1-4 "Now, son of man, take a sharp sword and use it as a barber's razor to shave your head and your beard. Then take a set of scales and divide up the hair. When the days of your siege come to an end, burn a third of the hair with fire inside the city. Take a third and strike it with the sword all around the city. And scatter a third to the wind. For I will pursue them with drawn sword. But take a few strands of hair and tuck them away in the folds of your garment. Again, take a few of these and throw them into the fire and burn them up. A fire will spread from there to the whole house of Israel."

And I like that fire and I need that fire today to be love. The real kind. That would devour everything perfectly and beautifully into its belly and then vomit it back up changed and burned and practically eaten alive and immobile to anything more than seeing the transgressions of the self and not that of the brothers and sisters. I think that's mysticism and I think that might be all that there is and ever was to live for.

"But seek his Kingdom and these things will be given to you as well."
Luke 12:31

...seeeekking....

2007-12-31T22:14:00.000-08:00

My Memaw and me

My New Year's party. Things got krunk...on sparkling cider (XXX).

Basically cool.

In a response to the previous post I decided I'd post some pictures of people I love dearly and who have been gracious enough to love me back these 22 years. Happy New Year! Have a blessed 2008..

2007-12-31T18:33:00.000-08:00

I am so ready to fall in love. I say that as though it is the answer and I am well aware that it certainly is not. But I don't know anyone who is immune to loneliness. I have even met people that are married and express that at times they've been lonely as husbands and fathers, wives and mothers all the same. I have to wonder why that is. What is the source of loneliness? Where does the origin of the void reside? As a theist I suppose it's derived from that whole deal where there was a fall and things separated and left all that was good and wonderful and beautiful to be found, traced, and handled with gentleness and humility as my would-have-been good friend G.K. Chesterton said. I honestly hate discussing loneliness through the medium of an internet blog. It tends to defeat the purpose of medicating loneliness when you realize you're choosing to be alone in front of these pixels while the world moves and breathes outside the door. And God knows I have enough work ahead of me that I'm in no position to really give any time away to anyone if I intend to do my best. Still, loneliness creeps in from time to time. Gotta turn to the Christ and not spending, masturbating, gossiping, and hating the now as though any of these things could change the world for the better.

I have a few more stories to read in Music of the Swamp. Nordan is perhaps the most delicately redneck storyteller I have ever encountered. Truly, there is meaning and metaphor and relation in the smallest and simplest of things and how can there not be when it is all the creation of Christ as God. I have also been dabbling in Cooking for Dummies and I scrambled my first egg yesterday. It was edible and even tasty and it made me feel like there's hope in the world for the culinarily challenged as myself.

Sometimes it just feels too damn good to write in this thing.

I have 18 hours to overcome beginning in a couple of weeks. And sadly I feel that I haven't read enough books or accomplished as much as I'd have liked to in the time I've had since fall semester ended. There is not enough time in the day for the learning I'd like to do and I'm not sure that I've the brain to hold it all anyway.

Read.

2007-12-29T14:55:00.000-08:00

Lewis Nordan is amazing. I use that word a lot when describing my favorite albums and books, but Music of the Swamp is too wonderful. I find it also strangely special that there are those out there that could never understand (and perhaps wouldn't want to) the southern soaked atmosphere, dialogue, and reality that is Sugar Mecklin and his home of Arrow Catcher, MS. The guy just makes me want to write like the devil in his plea out of hell. Simply great.

I have bought way too many books for my own good since Christmas ended. Those gift cards have been put to some serious use. I got more Cormac McCarthy, Barry Hannah, Flannery O'Connor, Donna Tartt (who my father knew as a baby and who I would like to have a sit-down with whenever I finish enough short stories to prove that I actually care) and then some new additions in the likes of Dostoevsky, Walker Percy, Graham Greene, and G.K. Chesterton. Needless to say, the bookstore haul has been good.

Been reading Ezekiel. I've been trying to open my mouth and eat what the good Lord has for me. Even if it doesn't taste like the sweetness of a honeybee's best.

Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.

2007-12-27T11:23:00.000-08:00

Christmas in Grenada felt oddly strange this year. And I feel that I can say that also about Clarksdale. I know for certain almost that my Memaw (father's mother) won't be around the next time Christmas Eve rolls around. That's ok. Not because I don't love her dearly, but because certain things have to be ok if you plan on waking up everyday, getting the work done, being a blessing to others and not letting the precious seconds go to waste. Some people are way too good for this earth and some people escape that whole Hemingway ideal about the world that, "It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry." And then, like my Memaw and my Grammy in Clarksdale, there are those who are brave, and good, and gentle, but that are untouchable to the death that wishes for everyone lovely to die real young. And perhaps compared to Methuselah we're all way young when the brain finally unplugs and the heart stops it's lub-dubbing consistency.

I wish I could stay in my 20's forever.

2007-12-24T14:27:00.000-08:00

I spent the night here in Grenada last night. Stayed up most of the night in the sweltering hotel room. My father's gettin' old. I figured he was cold-natured and more than likely needed the heat on. I love the man. There is something strangely wonderful about having a southern lawyer for a father. You know, the To Kill a Mockingbird, Gavin Stevens of Yoknapatawpha kind of father. God bless the man who can break every mental bone in his head everyday day of his life like my father has. I spent some time thanking God for my family last night. Truly, I'm undeserving of the blood of which I sprang.

I saw No Country for Old Men Sunday night. Absolutely breathtaking, haunting, and chilling. Cormac McCarthy makes me want to write nothing but violent southern literature. I even came home and worked on a short story. Put some more blood in it. Put some more terror in it. It's like Dr. Potts said though, "southern literature is so violent it's unbelievable." And it's true. Faulkner, Flannery, Cormac, Barry Hannah, and the like all contain those moments of skipped-heartbeat madness. The blood, the heartlessness, the fear, and the horrific. The kind of thing that helps us understand that the heart is evil and that we all have to have some of Jesus in spite of ourselves. Amazing.

My father and his brother are playing the guitar downstairs right now. My grandmother who is in her nineties, is soft the core. She speaks sweetly, feels sweet, and looks like a mound of sugar. And on that note, I should probably go hold her hand for a little while. Such things cannot be preserved for an eternity, not on this soil. Not with these bones.

Merry Christmas,
Ellis

2007-12-19T15:53:00.000-08:00

Mom told me to get over myself and write. Stop being afraid, stop worrying about the eyes and what they think. Stop worrying if you're writing sucks compared to Barry Hannah, Raymond Carver, or even your good buddy Jimmy Cajoleas. Stop giving a fuck if people think you mimic the aforementioned. Stop caring if you look dramatic. Stop thinking so hard about this shit that it dismantles your heart strings. You're you. You're insecure. They bleed too.

I ran this morning at 5 AM. Nauseating, painful, head-throbbing, and humbling. I thought about Colin Smith in the loneliness of the long-distance runner. Still wondering what he meant when he said, "I was always trying to get lost when I was a kid. I soon found out that you can't get lost though." The Christ. I mean it, the Christ. None of us are lost, forgotten, or dying. Some of us lack touch (thank you, Jimmy). Some of us aren't hearing our love language spoken. Like the nurse when she bathes Henry down in "A Farewell to Arms." I can smell her perfume, see the smile on her face, and her beauty in the midst of the hellfire. I want to live long enough to hold that and let it feel protected. Even if I'm a skinny hardcore kid that can't run a mile without spewing bile.

And I walked Holly this afternoon. The reservoir. Thinking of Grenada, thinking of "Walden" amongst the ghosts in the branches above, the deliberate living, and placing my back against the rough skin of the tree. That sound the air makes in the winter, that slight howling like things are alive in the grey. My bare hands feeling the cracked and bloody cold. I'm doing enough living for now, I think.

That spider across the twigs. The emergence of the predator, the flattening the begging to believe that he's nothing more than the brown in the bark. In the world and not of the world as we beg for our blood in the face of the barrel. I just want to live long enough to share this with enough of you, to hold you, whoever you are, and listen to hardcore when I haven't the hairs.

God be praised.

2007-12-11T06:49:00.001-08:00

I read a Stephen King article this morning on why we enjoy horror movies. I don't read King (yet), but he has a neat command over words that I would love to have. I'd prefer it to be uniquely Ellis, of course, but a solid and flowing way with words that make the page feel natural and conversational.

Too many people are just too good at the whole writing thing. I'm definitely guilty of coveting my neighbor's way with words. But I am the child of a God that sews the seeds of desire and reaps with the great scythe all of the beauty that this world contains. In that way that Huston Smith describes it with his shaky nature and muted voice, "God is everywhere and everything is God."

Today I am a work in progess, but in the great circular wheel of time I'm whole. Complete.

Praise God.

P.S. Meet Maddie! She is a sweeeeeetheart!

It looks as though this story is going to have a happy ending. We've contacted a shelter that specializes in the adoption of pit bulls. We are getting her spayed on Thursday, that way she can no longer be exploited for her puppies and if the bastards who mistreated her come looking for her..she will have no value to them as a spayed female. It's looking like she is definitely adoptable and that she's got a real chance at a good life. I am stoked.

2007-12-10T11:39:00.001-08:00

I found a skinny lady pit on the side of Cynthia this afternoon. To hell with me and my compassionate heart. Why couldn't I just keep driving? The Animal Rescue League isn't open today and don't get me started on the fact that the majority of animals dropped off there get put down. I bathed her, fed her, and right now she's chilling in the wood shop in the garage. I'm hoping my aunt in Grenada will take her..she's got a lot of acres and several dogs on her property that were originally stray. I'm just not comfortable with her staying here and being another burden on my mom and Tom. I know I'll be moving out in a year or two and I could take her along with me then, but that's just too far away. And then there's the fact that all the animals that live here already get very irate over a new addition. It just fucking sucks. Why are people so irresponsible? If we can't care for "the least of these" like the dogs and the cats and the other beasts of the earth how in the hell will we ever accomplish the things that comprise the bigger picture in this life?

It's just discouraging.

But...maybe she's found a home.

I'm praying.

2007-12-04T21:50:00.000-08:00

Faulkner class ended this evening. It is always an emotional thing to walk out of the final lecture of any literature class for me. Perhaps it is just how Potts always manages to get that tone in his voice like he's bidding farewell to something so substantially beautiful..as though the class, like the literature itself, should be this unending well of joy, learning, confusion, frustration and overall just splendor. Even the works, like Faulkner, dealing with the constraints of chronology have page numbers and an end. The finite nature of everything we do. But that's the beauty of art, books, and records..these things that can be continually revisited until there's not a beat left in your heart and then all you can hope for is that whatever is next could perhaps be some strange amalgamation of it all that makes sense in some way it never could in this dark limited and surprisingly wonderful at times sort of world

I keep having those moments where someone will speak up in class and connect something between two books I'd have killed to see first. Those humbling seconds of understood ignorance. Another bullet in the chamber of a gun called analyzation. I need the years to lend me the wisdom. Growing older getting smarter. God knows.

It's cold outside this evening and I have a paper to write. The days to come when I'll see my family again and those dogs in their pine box shelter on that old porch where I've smoked cigarettes, laughed, and breathed those silver apparitions from the holes in my head.

Stay gold..

2007-12-01T14:53:00.000-08:00

"The Remains of the Day" is finished. A beautiful read with much to think about. Haha, somehow, God knows I don't need anymore room to make mistakes, but Ishiguro has paved some sort of thankfulness in me at having the ability to make my own mistakes. They are mine...after all.

Absalom, Absalom! is now on the agenda. I hung out in the Mississippi room at Eudora Welty and sat in front of Faulkner's picture and read for a while. Barry Hannah to the left of me saying, "write more, talk less." Absolutely not a problem for me at all. And Christ as my witness, if it means that I churn something as beautiful as "Dragged Fighting from His Tomb" out of this ferocious soul and cramped mind of mine well then by all means I will forever remain silent as the snake in the grass. No, I don't mean the rattlesnake, that thing that warns you loudly before you take a step further, dissuading you of the explosion of his venomous prongs. I mean the python, the Flanneries, the Carvers, oh hell maybe even Joyce, who wrap around you slowly and make a corpse of you before you realize you're in heaven.

...it doesn't take a pair of pliers.

2007-11-28T17:39:00.000-08:00

Nothing new to speak of. Just felt like writing.

I'm terribly ready for Christmas. I've been thinking about extending my stay at my Aunt's country home this Christmas a few days to read and write. Hang out with the dogs, take a walk through the woods, spend some time with my grandmother before it's too late and I'm wishing I had. We'll see. But everyone knows saying ain't doing with Ellis Purdie.

I'm going to try to read as much of Kazuo Ishiguro's "The Remains of the Day" before I crash this evening. Seems to be a novel about dignified marginalization, an inability to feel, and a failure to express. Basically, I need to open my mouth in class tomorrow so I don't look like a jackass staring at my notebook. There is no worse feeling than to have to sit in a Dr. Randle class having not read. The awkward silence as he asks questions with a response of nothing. Who do you think I am? I'm still learning to walk.

I can't figure out what I want to read over the break. I think Ayn Rand's "The Fountainhead" would be great, but it's something like 700 pages or more and I'm not sure I'd finish it. I could polish off several books in the time it'd take to read that one. But it's a wonderful read I hear. I talk about books and reading way too much. But there isn't a lot else that I care about...hardly anything really.

On a killer note, Justin and I purchased a new betta fish for his learning class. The other one died while he was away at break so we decided to head to Petsmart just before it opened and buy a new one. I named it Mickey after Mickey Rourke from Coppola's infamous (and my favorite) movie Rumble Fish. Of course, another name for betta fish is a rumble fish. So, the name only made sense. He's doing well. Swam through the tube on his own today. It's impressive.

I need to read.

2007-11-24T19:24:00.000-08:00

So fucking tired of writing this paper. Every page I finish just means I'll start another one that seems to take twice as long as the last. I can hardly believe at all that at some point this semester will end, it will all be behind me and I'll have some time to read for fun again, to spend freely with the boys again, and not worry about being criticized and turning in shitty, half-assed work that I'm not proud of. Ugh...mom told me recently that everything that comes out of my mouth is negative. I can't say she's all that wrong. I, like all the others, have a few thorns in my side. Some of them I put there myself.

I spent the day with a beautiful girl yesterday. Haha, dear Lord, she'll get a laugh if she reads this. I'm just another cog in the machine of all the boys that would love to be the apple of her eye. Adorable though...really.

Half-drunk coffee beneath the lamp. Mountains of opinions. Post-its and bedroom eyes.

This..my friends...is the life.

2007-11-19T13:59:00.000-08:00

Life was way easier when all I had to think about was Raymond Carver and J.D. Salinger. Broken glass, drunk nights, pretty ladies. That glimmer of hope at the end of a long road of growth, confusion, and regret.

I saw her on the quad earlier. I couldn't help but wish she looked my way...gave a fuck. Those long legs, that laugh. How come I ever fucking cared? I don't wish things were different. I just wish I'd never spent the time. God, this sounds so unbelievably pathetic. There is an authenticity to writing down the things you feel that's downright frightening. Almost like making a map of things you've done..places you've been. Documenting where you never want to go again. Those aforementioned feelings above are just that. Came back to the room and flailed to "Life Moves On" by Blacklisted. Felt better...dear Lord, who am I?

Hanging out with Corley Wednesday. The girl is wholesome, good, solid, and smart. Easy on the eyes as well. Sometimes I wonder if what I want out of a female is what I need. Sometimes I wonder if what I want is even so much as logical. I am fucking tired of thinking about this stuff. I would give anything to never feel lonely. I'd be practically invincible. What I wouldn't give..

Joy.

2007-11-18T21:36:00.001-08:00

I don't know the first thing about what W.B. Yeats was trying to say when he wrote "The Second Coming." Some how, some way, and definitely by the grace of God I will write a 10 to 12 page paper about the man and his poem.

Today was one for the books. Just good. Cloudy, rainy, cool. It was a good evening at the journey. Delightful people with hearts of gold. I need sweet Jesus.

Hung out with Matt earlier, went to Domino's and killed two pies over good conversation. Came back to the steam rising off Chrestman's roof. I need sleep...and strength.

Work ahead.

2007-11-16T17:52:00.000-08:00

Getting my serving of vegetables via V8 juice. Went to Barnes and Noble earlier, worked on my paper for Potts for a bit. Saw this girl that worked with J.J. at Basil's for a while. Short dark hair, stylish cut, beautiful face, with some guy. I ducked out after some time and saw them kissing passionately in his SUV. Heaved a heavy sigh. Called him a lucky bastard.

I saw a girl on t.v. today with severe tourettes sydrome. She can't cook cause she'll grab the burners. She can't drink coffee cause she'll fling it on herself or someone else. Can't cut into her meal cause she'll stab herself. My first inclination was total complete dismay at the things God allows to happen in this world. Some people just need an iota of relief. Some people never get it. God help us. Such things will help you quit bitching...if you don't forget them and get lost in yourself again.

I'm am all right with the fact that no one can read this anymore. And if you're reading this...well, then things have changed.

Work.

2007-11-15T21:13:00.000-08:00

I reek of cigarettes and restaurant walls. Jamming the new Bruce Springsteen and I'm not able to get past the first song due to repeated listens. I hope the rest of the album proves to be as infectious.

I'd be lying if I said I wasn't in need of a serious break from this place: these walls, these ideas, these textbooks, the day-in, day-out routine. I've got a stack of books waiting to be read, held in my heart, and carried with me through each sunrise and sundown. Lately I've been reading a lot of commentary on W.B. Yeats's "The Second Coming." Poetry is beautiful. Way the hell over my head...I'm just a punk. Even if I get a Ph.D. someday..I ain't no scholar. Nonetheless, dissecting the hard stuff is rewarding and it's also a task done better with company. Easier that way, I think. Especially if the company has more experience with such texts.

I've been daydreaming of someone warm lately. To hold hands with, laugh with, talk to. Solitude is a gift..a gift I cherish. I think solitude can be good shared though. Such things call for being selective. But what the hell do I know at all about what's right for me? If history is any indicator...

Dr. Potts used the words "amazing considering the time crunch I faced" to describe my shitty term paper. Humbling and encouraging. I love the guy. Such a pain in the ass, but I owe much to him. The guy knows how to stir passion in kids. I found it through his guidance, for sure.

Waiting is the hardest thing I've ever done in my life. I want to cherish the minutes...I'll choose to today.

2007-10-31T09:50:00.000-07:00

I ain't bloggin' for a while.

There's another way to do this.

Perhaps it's better.