Bill's Notes

Hail, mildly pleasing solitude,
Companion of the wise and good;
But, from whose holy, piercing eye,
The herd of fools, and villains fly.
Oh! how I love with thee to walk,
And listen to thy whisper'd talk,
Which innocence, and truth imparts,
And melts the most obdurate hearts.

-- James Thomson

I ain't saying you treated me unkind
You could've done better, but I don't mind
You just kind of wasted my precious time
Don't think twice, it's all right


-- Bob Dylan

If others had not been foolish, we should be so.

-- William Blake

...nor till the poets among us can be
"literalists of
the imagination" -- above
insolence and triviality and can present

for inspection, imaginary gardens with real toads in them, shall we have
it. In the meantime, if you demand on one hand,
the raw material of poetry in
all its rawness and
that which is on the other hand
genuine, then you are interested in poetry.

-- Marianne Moore

And these vicissitudes come best in youth;
For when they happen at a riper age,
People are apt to blame the Fates, forsooth,
And wonder Providence is not more sage.
Adversity is the first path to truth:
He who hath proved war, storm, or woman's rage,
Whether his winters be eighteen or eighty,
Has won experience which is deem'd so weighty.

-- Lord Byron

Is it like this
In death's other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.

-- T.S. Eliot

And as we wind on down the road
Our shadows taller than our soul.
There walks a lady we all know
Who shines white light and wants to show
How everything still turns to gold.
And if you listen very hard
The tune will come to you at last.
When all are one and one is all
To be a rock and not to roll.

-- LOL, Okay I'm just kidding about that one.

Don't it make you feel bad
When you're tryin' to find your way home,
You don't know which way to go?
If you're goin' down South
They got no work to do,
If you don't know about Chicago.

-- Yeah, I'm kidding about that one, too.

Alas! regardless of their doom,
The little victims play;
No sense have they of ills to come,
Nor care beyond to-day.

-- Thomas Gray

Done.

Wrestled those two deadlines to the ground and killed 'em death inside of the three rounds.

Off to lunch. Next up: The weekend.

I'll try again.

When he awoke, she was staring at him again. Mooning over him. Uh-oh. Serious red flag. Serious violation of their arrangement. Serious sign to scoot. In his mind, he reviewed the deal:

(1) She services me when I want and goes away when I want.
(2) She pays me nearly $1,000 to polish her car, which has nearly 250,000 miles on it, so she'll have to get rid of it within six months — but cash is cash and I don't make a lot; and
(3) She doesn't get to pressure me about anything emotional. I mean, when she told me she was lonely and wanted love, didn't I get her a dog? I mean, that's a loving dog — a loyal companion who will never leave her. No friggin' gratitude.

He gave her copious breast a squeeze. She wasn't the best he'd had, not the worst, just in that fair-to-middlin' range — certainly worth a long drive if things got dry enough, but certainly not good enough if there was something closer to home. He could feel the whole emotional situation here heating up and so it was time to go back south, back to his mechanic's garage, back to getting some distance between himself and that gooey look in her eyes. He pushed her off him and asked her to make some coffee.

He'd been through this before and he knew he'd be all right. He was a strong swimmer, he just needed to keep moving.

******

For the feedback in the comments.

What I believed in my spiritual journey:

1. There are ghosts in the basement. Stop sending me down there.
2. School sucks.
3. I can make the Major Leagues.
4. Belief? I believe I'll have another.
5. Women are great!/women are treacherous.
6. Hope I die before I get old.
7. Noble eightfold path, eh?
8. ... er, something about my life being unmanageable.
9. Jesus Christ is who He says He is. Wow!
10. This is still difficult, except with God's grace.

So that's me. How about you?

Okay, it seems that at least five people read IndustrialBlog. I appreciate the comments from the regular readers. Seems some people like the politics, even if they disagree. I've found it exhausting ... it's a kind of anger that just feeds on itself. I'm definitely taking a break from it.

If anyone else would like to chime in in the post or email me, I'd like to hear your thoughts.

Busy on deadline crunch right now, but some random stuff:

1. I'm going to continue to post for a while here, but I may move to a new blog for my more personal stuff.

2. Praise God.

3. Condolences to a friend and her family who just lost an aunt. I met her aunt several times, and she was a nice woman. I pray she's at rest now.

Oh yeah, Paul? You got me. Totally. Until I read the date.

I'm thinking of shutting down Industrial Blog and starting again with a new blog.

I've given this IndustrialBlog thing two full years ago and found that I've gotten sidetracked in political fights and stuff that's just not important to my life. Worse, it's distracted me from what's important and the blogosphere became a place for me to hide.

I've pissed off some people I care a lot about — people I never would've alienated if I hadn't had a politically based blog that they read. And some of them have gotten under my skin by saying hateful things back to me. Other bloggers handle a lot this stuff much better than I do, and realistically, I'm not really contributing to the political discussion, anyway.

I really wanted the blog to be about some personal writing, the kind of stuff I don't normally publish, and that's not where it went. I wanted to be more creative and more fun ... short plays/screenplays, scenes from life, maybe some memoir-ish pieces, and talk about spiritual journey and writing.

Instead it got repetitive about my political opinions, which is usually the least attractive side of anyone. Anyway I'm sick of political fights. There's more to me than politics.

I have a few loyal readers, but I don't know how many. There could be as few as 10 and as many as 30. I don't know. If you like to stop by and read my stuff, this might be a good time to give me some feedback at industrialblog at hotmail dot com. Or comment in the comments below. In any case, if you're a regular reader, I'd like to hear from you.

Do you like what I'm doing? What do you like about it? What do you hate about it? How do you feel after you read IndustrialBlog? Do you come here to get angry? Inspired? See how dumb I am? Do you ever get surprised by what I write?

If IndustrialBlog isn't generating some positive emotions — and let's face it, a lot times it doesn't — then it needs to change. I don't want this to become "pollyanna blog," but I don't want to be one more of those "hurray for our side" blogs or just another person contributing to the negativity / anger of the world. And too much that's what my blog has been.

MSN Careers has 10 Top Reasons They Don't Like You at Work.

Six of these characteristics never applied to me. The smoking one did at one time, but I've quit. One I'm guilty of but I've usually been discreet, so no harm, no foul. And two hit home. Ouch!

Despite these two, I was never burned in effigy/otherwise hated. Whew! Mustn't have been that bad. Well, I was once called a freak (as in, "You're such a freak. What the hell is wrong with you?") for using the work "sagacious" in an email ...

God has been working on me in a powerful way this past week. This has happened before ... these encounters with God always initially involve a recognition of my own sinfulness: Self-involvement. Know-it-all-ism. Grandiosity. This time God showed me something far deeper, my lack of love, and His solution.

The Eastern Orthodox are right. Hell is knowing just how much we have sinned against love. I had a glimpse — just a glimpse — of the lack of love I've shown others. The missed opportunities to listen, the times when I tried to score points instead of trying to understand, when I just shut down rather than try, when I couldn't be bothered.

That would be enough to cast me into a self-loathing little depression, except that this uncovering came at a time when God showed His great love. A sin against love is a sin against God, because God is love. But God who has been sinned against still God, and thus is still loving and merciful. God has saved me from self-loathing and self-pity by helping me to love. I feel joy, not shame or regret or annoyance, in talking with others. Joy! Can you believe it?

Praise God, and may He bless you this day. Hug your loved ones real tight, and give thanks for them.

Two weeks ago after work I couldn't drive up my street because of a flash snowstorm. To get into my house I had to wade through the drifts on my driveway and deck. In the dark.

Today after work I drove home with the windows down and then sat on my front deck in a t-shirt and shorts, watching the sunset, having a coke and listening to the Shins!

Life is good. And this is a three-deadline week.

Can you really find faith?

It's not magic. It's not under a rock somewhere. It's a gift. Faith finds you. People don't find God; God finds them, as Karl Barth says.

The entire language of Christian faith is ironic ... it means one thing to people without faith and an entire other thing to people with faith. To people of faith, these ironies confirm the wisdom of the scriptures. And to people without faith, these ironies represent proof that people of faith are making it up for their own psychological reasons ... the ambiguity represents not a method for God to sift your heart but proof that everyone is just reading into texts what they want.

Matthew 18:1-6: "Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven."

The faithless say that this passage is proof that Christians are childish and are asked to shut off their critical thinking skills which would otherwise not believe the collection of contradictions, errors and historical documents called the Bible; at the most cynical, the faithless might suggest that the Bible was written by an organization which was seeking to control others, oppress women and enrich itself, and want childlike followers to just do what the church wants. The faithful would say that it's a statement that takes into account the comparative intellects of God and man, and suggests that we must approach God as a child because God is so much more wise and informed than we are. Approaching God as if we are intellectual equals is pride and arrogance, and it doesn't get us very far.

As you can see, both sides have good points. Neither argument gets us to faith.

No, faith is something else. Faith is a gift from God, but it's a gift that can be asked for.

If you want faith and have none, pray to God that you want to know Him and worship Him in truth. Open yourself up to the possibility of God working in your life. And don't be surprised if your life starts to change.

God bless you, and may you find faith if you don't have it, and may your faith be strengthened if you do.