“Tiny Deaths” (not all Truth is true)

I recently found myself, at the recommendation of my pastor, reading a collection of short stories by Robert Shearman entitled Remember Why You Fear Me. It was a collection of all things weird and macabre, sort of like what you might expect from a contemporary British Poe, albeit with a bit of a mildly blasphemous streak.

Toward the end of the ebook version (not the print version) is a short story entitled Tiny Deaths, which opens with Jesus’ death on the cross. In this interpretation, he hears the Father’s voice from heaven while he’s hanging there, asking him if he’s sure he wants to go through with the plan. He assents one last time, and breathes his final breath. This is followed by a resurrection…of sorts:

Prebylutheranism 2nd Anniversary Spectacular! (My Top 10 Posts Ever)

Just because.

The other day was the second anniversary of my foray into blogging, and what a long, strange trip it’s been. I haven’t proven to be the most consistent blogger on the Web, or the one with the biggest following, or the smartest, or the funniest, or the most talented, or the best-loved, but I’m certainly…one of them?

I guess?

But one thing I am sure of is that starting this blog was a good call. Some of the things that have happened since I began it:

• I’ve been published by Cracked a couple of times;
• My work has appeared in Reader’s Digest;
• I’ve scored a book deal;
• I’ve been made a weekly columnist at Christ and Pop Culture;
• I’ve almost finished a novel (which is more of a distraction from blogging than anything, but whatever).

I thought that for this august occasion (which, ironically, is a June occasion), it might be fun to run down my blog’s top 10 posts, along with some of my commentary on them. Unless it’s not fun, in which case, I’m sorry.

Grood* Housekeeping: Three Things I’ve Learned as a Man-Housewife

*[pointlessly obscure reference explained here.]

For the record, I’m not some rich kid whose daddy owns a yacht. I was actually working on this ship.

A week before I proposed to my now-wife, I was sitting on the roof of a ship, talking to her on someone else’s cellphone. I may have also been a little drunk.

We were talking about our dreams for the future, and how neither one of us really had any. “I’ve been thinking a lot about it,” I slurred, Captain Morgan running down my chin, “and it turns out that all I really want out of life is to be a housewife.”

Flesh Like Grass: Flappy Bird, Fame, and the Fall From Grace

Illustration by Seth T. Hahne

Just a quick PSA that my long-form essay Flappy Bird, Fame, and the Fall From Grace is available for your reading pleasure in the latest issue of Christ and Pop Culture Magazine, which you can buy from the iOS newsstand here. It’s a reflective piece on what fame means, why so many yearn for it, and why so many, having experienced it, run from it. The issue has a lot of other good stuff (okay, I admit: better stuff), too, like D.L. Mayfield’s experiences with some of the Somalis who starred in Captain Phillips, and her thoughts on the Twitter flamewar between noted comedian/talking rat Patton Oswalt and RUF campus minister Sammy Rhodes. It’s three bucks, and it’s more than worth it. I promise.

Also, that three bucks goes to pay the writers. Like me. So there’s that.

Cults of Personality: I Promise I Only Talk About Steven Furtick a Little Bit in This

I was sitting in one of those ugly, overly lit conference rooms that literally every hotel on the planet has. The ones that are huge but feel cramped because of their low drop ceilings, where the carpet is always a hideous, mass-produced Victorian-esque pattern, and the walls are pockmarked with pee-colored folding dividers and the ceilings are cheap, foamy tile studded with fluorescent lights.

I was at intern and staff training for Reformed University Fellowship, the Presbyterian Church in America’s campus ministry program.

A Break-up Letter to Matt Walsh

Dear Matt Walsh,

It’s not you. It’s me.

Or was it the other way around? Yeah, that. It’s totally you.

Donald Miller Left Me Standing at the Altar, in More Ways Than One

[NOTE: If you’d rather read something less squishy and more concrete, or less Lutheran and more Reformed, my total-BFF-who-I-just-met, Derek Rishmawy, has a great piece over at Christ and Pop Culture.]

In addition to being a blogger, memoirist, and in-demand speaker, Don Miller is also known for being hungry like the wolf.

Oh, Don Miller. You used to be cool.

I admit it. Like pretty much every Christian my age, I had a torrid love affair with Blue Like Jazz (the book, not the movie, but also kind of the movie). What can I say? Jazz is to us post-evangelicals what Atlas Shrugged is to libertarians, or what The Lord of the Rings is to hippies, or what Martha Stewart Living is to really terrible people.

But now I kind of want to take it all back.

Radio, Rats, B.F. Skinner (Pandora): a descent into madness

Am I just a rat in a Skinner Box?

Those who have taken an intro to psych course will have to have heard of the tale of the rat in the box — the one with electrodes jammed into his brain in the part called the “pleasure center,” hooked to a switch he could push. He liked pushing the lever so much that he never ate food or drank water — just sat by the lever, and tapped at it, over and over.

Till he died.

I’m not quite a Luddite. I’m not one who feels that he needs tons of gadgets around at all times, but I don’t think I’m scared of technology, either. I mean, I do have a blog on this newfangled Internet thing. But I think I’d be lying if I said I was never part-wary of any new means of dispersal for new information.

What I’m trying to say is: Pandora has murdered my brain.

That’s all I’m really trying to say.

The real reason I won’t be buying a videogame system this week.

David Wong’s comic horror novel John Dies at the End posits a race of inter-dimensional beings who can play with our universe’s timeline as they see fit, inserting and removing people and things at will. Towards the end, a middle-aged character pontificates on his first encounter with a videogame system (which is one of the things they’ve inserted):

So, My Baby Got Vaccinated and It Made Her Sad

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My little girl asleep, wrapped up in sun;

A life, half-stirring, buried under sighs;
A thousand lives, unlived, inside of one.

A bronx cheer from your lips (the sound of fun;
A faux pas soon far buried under lies).
My little girl asleep, wrapped up in sun.

Five months you’ve been alive (life just begun,
And yet, a sober wisdom in your eyes?);
A thousand lives, unlived, inside of one.

My life becoming yours (not quite half-done);
A wrinkle ticks away each time you rise.
My little girl asleep, wrapped up in sun.

You sleep to meet the world (a life begun
As one whose burial precedes his rise) —
A thousand lives, unlived, inside of one.

Ten-thousand wars to fight, and only one
Has thus commenced (the Band-Aids on your thighs!).
My little girl asleep, wrapped up in sun;

A thousand lives, unlived, inside of one.