Seattle, Washington, hopes to draw tourists and new residents by calling itself “metronatural.” For those of you in the back row, that’s like metropolitan with a part of that word replaced by another word so that the final word is–I don’t know–kewl.

What does “metronatural” say to you? If it doesn’t say, “Visit Seattle for your kind of vacation,” then you can add it to your list of ways to spell “failure.”

This reminds me of a breifly lived slogan my city did while I was away in college. In print with designed letters, it’s attractive enough that you may miss the words: “Live it, love it, it’s Chattanooga.” That’s close to “like it or lump it.” Perhaps others agreed with me, which is why the city’s current tagline is “The attraction’s only natural.” Similar to Seattle’s, when you think of it, but less hokey.

My mind is sterile, tonight, clean as a boiled sheet. All I can think of to do is to post a picture and tell you about it.



This comes from my last trip to Norway. There’s a place called Flåm, on a beautiful fjord. A funicular railroad runs up to a mountain station from there. Some people take the train for practical purposes, but much of its business is tourists (like me, on two occasions).

This picture shows a place on the route where they stop the train so people can take photos of the waterfall. The first time I took the trip, with my dad, we got out and took pictures, but they were a little disappointing. In two dimensions, it just wasn’t as dramatic as it is in real life.

This last time the tourist people had jazzed it up. When a crowd comes out to gawk, a girl in folk costume comes out and stands on the rocks. She mimics singing while a loudspeaker plays a haunting folk song. At one point she disappears behind the rocks, and another girl dressed just the same pops out of a building nearer by, as if she had magically transported herself. Clearly she’s a huldre, an elf maiden, trying to lure us to our deaths in the fast water.

It’s hokey and corny, but you know what? It works. Not just for the drama, but because including the girl in your photo adds perspective to the whole thing and makes the waterfall look much more dramatic. In other words, the fake thing makes it more real.

I don’t know what the moral of this is. Perhaps it means it’s OK to go over the top now and then, as long as it works and nobody’s fooled.

Thoughts thought while preparing to go to church for the meeting last night:

“Looks like rain. I’d better wear my trenchcoat.

“If I wear the trenchcoat, I’ll have to wear a tie.

“You cannot wear a trenchcoat without a tie. If you do, you look like a pervert hanging around a playground, not the International Man of Intrigue you bought the coat to resemble.”

Dave Lull sent me this link to a Reason article by Jonathan Rauch which explains Honor Cultures (one of my current obsessions) pretty clearly.

I don’t have much time tonight. I’ve got to go to church to participate in a long, boring, meeting. I know it’ll be long and boring because that’s the only kind we do.

I agreed a couple years back to serve on a constitutional revision committee. Since then we’ve held zero meetings. I came to look on the obligation the same way we Boomers think back on the atomic bomb scares of our childhoods, something we feared then but need not worry about now (oh, wait…)

But the call finally came.

I’m pondering whether to attend the meeting or just kill myself.

Decisions, decisions.

Being dead is an acceptable excuse for non-attendance, right?

I drove up to Fargo, North Dakota on Saturday, for a meeting of the Sverdrup Society (I edit their journal and newsletter). It’s about a four hour drive, with stops. Getting to Fargo from here involves passing through Fargo’s sister city, Moorhead, Minnesota. That reminded me of a story told by my brother Moloch (whose birthday it is today, by the way. Remind me to call him).

Moloch and his wife were visiting Concordia College in Moorhead, their mutual alma mater. They took a guided tour led by a young female student. As they passed by a small hill on campus, Moloch said, “There’s where the biology lab used to be. They tore it down and put in that hill.”

The student said, “No. That hill has always been here. The students talk about it. There’s an Indian legend about it and everything.”

Moloch and my sister-in-law assured her that the hill was modern and man-made, and they’d spent a fair amount of time in the old biology lab on the site.

Afterwards Moloch said to his wife, “You know what this means, don’t you?

“It means we’re older than the hills.”

I thought I’d link to a couple more Viking photos. Since I’m constitutionally incapable of balance in thinking about myself, I need to alternate my nihilist and pessimistic posts with posts of a more full-of-myself, “look at me!” nature.

This first picture is from the Viking Meet in Elk Horn, Iowa. The sinister gang I’m posing with is not my own Viking group, but the Skjaldborg guys from Omaha. And no, I did not tease the big guy about his pink tunic.

This one is from two weekends ago, in Dallas, Wisconsin. Here we see me demonstrating graphically to the others exactly how far my fame and fortune as an author take me in terms of… well, fame and fortune.

Credit to Eric and Shari Anderson for the pictures.

In May 2007, The Eshet Chayil Foundation invites all children of David, the King of ancient Israel, to a reunion in Jerusalem. If you happen to know anyone who qualifies, please let them know.

“We are part of all the things we know,

And we are forms of all the things we love.

Do you know what you are?”

from “Good Monsters” by Jars of Clay

I have to say thanks to all the people who took the trouble to encourage me in yesterday’s Comments. My natural response is to wonder what I’ve done to deceive you all so egregiously. But I appreciate the sentiment.

Forgot to mention the big news in my life yesterday. My street is open again! Not the actual street I live on, but the street that runs past the park into my neighborhood and makes my house easy to get to. In the absence of that access, finding my place involves a rat’s maze of creeping through torn-up streets around a strip mall and a park.

What this means, aside from my own greater convenience, is that I’ve lost my last excuse not to advertise my spare room for rent.

I am not a wealthy or a highly paid man. I’ve already spent all the money I’ll probably ever see from my published books. I made the down payment on this house with the money I inherited from my dad and my aunt. I was still left with a mortgage that’s just a little more than I can reasonably carry, barring emergencies (and emergencies always happen, as any homeowner knows). I knew from the beginning that I had the options of a) selling another book or b) renting my spare room. And I haven’t sold a book.

I put up a poster at the seminary where I work, but those people know who I am, so small hope there. I delayed advertising more widely because of the torn-up street, figuring anybody who came to look at the place would probably never find it. But that’s fixed now.

I regard the prospect of sharing my personal living space with another hominid with all the enthusiasm of an Ivy League university president reviewing an application for professorship from Jimmy-Bob Hawkins, Arkansas Boy Evangelist. I can think of a whole list of likely drawbacks and very few advantages (except for the money). I plan to place the ad in the local Christian giveaway newspaper, in hopes that I can get someone reasonably congenial in lifestyle. Still, I expect that paper is read regularly by gay activists looking to find Christian landlords they can drive into evicting them, then sue for the benefit of society.

Still, the worst might not happen. Having someone around would probably add accountability to my life, and I can’t deny I could use that.

Maturity calls.

I hate it when that happens.

Yesterday’s post drew more attention than I expected, and I guess it would be in order to address the issue of My Single Blessedness in a post. I try to avoid this sort of thing (I know it doesn’t look like it, but you’d be amazed the things that never get uploaded) because I have a well-founded suspicion that the rest of the world doesn’t share my fascination with the precise configurations of my emotional viscera.

I’m not upset with yesterday’s comments. Shoot, for a passive-aggressive like me, that kind of attention is like mother’s milk. But I want to explain the reasons why I’ve essentially given up on finding a soulmate.

I’m open to correction. I’ll tell you how the world looks to me. You tell me where I’m wrong. I’m self-aware enough to know that having an emotional disorder means precisely seeing the world wrong.

My perception is that women want “bad boys.” Not bad men. Very few women really want a bad man. But they want a man with something of the bad boy in him. They want all the proper things too, of course. They want him to be supportive and nurturing, and they want him to be a good provider and a good father. But they also want to know that now and then Rhett Butler will come out in the open, kiss them hard while they pummel his chest with their little fists, sweep them into his arms and carry them up the staircase. They yearn a bit for the motorcycle gangster, for Billy the Kid. (See my review of Shotgun Alley the other day, and the descriptions of nice guy Weiss and bad boy Bishop.)

I’m not a bad boy, Heaven help me. When a woman encounters me or any of my (fortunately few) eunuch brothers, she immediately reads, in our eyes and in our body language, that we possess all the thrill potential of a virtual checkers game. She sees the word “BORING” inscribed on our brows. If she’s generous enough to grant us a date, she quickly regrets it as the hours drag and she smiles stiffly and mentally composes excuses for an early escape. She knows instinctively that if she married such a man, she’d have to initiate intimacy herself, because he’s too emotionally fragile to run the risk of a physical rejection.

All in all, she’d rather treat herself to a day at the spa. Or just adopt a cat.

I do not blame her for this.

And if there is, out there, some woman who’s actively looking for a man who’d be easy to dominate, I don’t think I want to meet that woman.

I feel kind of lousy tonight, and it’s not just because it snowed today.

I get to feeling under the weather once or twice a year. Usually a good night’s sleep has me feeling better again by the next morning. I’m rarely sick enough to take a day off work. Also I self-medicated with Chinese food tonight. I haven’t gone out to eat much for a while, due to budgetary constraints, but my body said to me, “You need Chinese food.” So after work I went to a buffet which isn’t very good, to be honest, but has the virtues of being near my home and employing an attractive hostess. When I don’t feel well, I do what my body tells me. If it doesn’t actually help, it’s at least a defensible excuse for self-indulgence.

The snow came down thick and fast this afternoon. It only did so for about fifteen minutes, and then the sky cleared again. But it was enough. Notice had been served. Our annual Siberian exile has begun.

The only man I ever knew who hated winter more than me was my dad. All his life, as he ran a Minnesota farm, he dreamed of moving to a warmer clime. Sometime in the late 1950s (I think) he began working for that dream by signing up with a Florida land development company that had a booth at the state fair. He paid ten dollars a month for a lot in the Sunshine State. People joked with him about swamp land. He smiled and joshed back, but it wasn’t really funny to him.

Through the years he paid off one lot, then another, then a third. Then he sold one lot and used the proceeds to build a house on another. The idea was that he’d rent the house out and use the money to make payments, until he was ready to retire down there.

And it came to pass, on a winter day in 1980 (I think) he paused while shoveling snow in the farmyard, tucked his frozen fingers under his armpits, and said to himself, “I own a house in Florida. Why the heck am I doing this?”

So he put his farm up for sale. This was at the peak of the agricultural real estate boom. I believe he got the highest price per acre that any farmer had ever gotten in our community (and it wasn’t that great a farm). It may have been the highest price anybody ever got, since the boom didn’t last much longer. Dad moved to Florida with a nice nest egg to finance his early retirement.

I don’t think he ever saw Minnesota in the winter again. If one of his sons had died up here during the winter, I think he’d have thought long and hard about whether to fly up for the funeral or just send a card.