Jack Heald

I used to tell my children as they practiced their daily jam writing – I insisted that they practice writing in spite of their resistance – that you often do not know what you are thinking until you start writing.

 Around the time of my divorce, I stopped keeping a journal and I guess I quit being aware of what I am thinking. Do you ever experience that? Do you ever start to say something – either verbally or in written form – and then begin to open your heart and mind and be surprised by what is coming out of you? That’s the reason to journal, to jam write, to just write – to know yourself.

I think one of the most challenging things about keeping a journal is the pain of finding out what you really think – and perhaps the dissatisfaction with the person you find staring back at you from the pages of your diary. Sometimes it is too disappointing, too painful, to face that person – and perhaps that is another reason not to journal.

But really, that is likely the best reason to journal.

Here I am, 51 years old, shocked that I have reached that age. It honestly feels like I was 35 just a few months ago, but it was actually more like – uhmmm – (quick calculation in the head) – about 200 months ago. That’s a lot of moon cycles. When I think about the reality that I have less time in front of me than I had behind me, it makes me more serious about making the time count. I used to think “making the time count” was all about doing good and honoring God and all that blah-blah but I realize now that the only thing that will really count – to me at least – is to look back on the life I was given and be satisfied with what I did with that gift. Frankly, it really won’t matter what anyone thinks of me if I am disappointed myself.

I think that is one of the blessings of getting older – I care less about what anyone thinks of me than I used to. I’ve lost friends and had relationships fracture – sometimes because I’ve been insensitive or a jerk, but just as often because I refused to be anyone other than who I am. I hope that going forward, people reject me because I am me, rather than because I jerky. Although I suppose one may argue that if the person I am is fundamentally “a jerk”, then they are rejecting me both for who I am and for being a jerk. Meh.

Sometime soon I am going to write about the story in Science that compared intuitive versus analytical minds and their respective inclinations – or lack thereof – towards faith. Stay tuned.

I’m losing hearing acuity in my right ear. It’s very odd. I have high-frequency hearing loss, apparently from sort of genetic nerve damage/sickness/failure, and I am really starting to notice it. My dad and his two brothers are both wearing hearing aids, so clearly it runs in the family. With the high-frequency loss, it means that I can hear vowels just fine but have trouble with consonants. I never realized that the frequency of a consonant differed from its surrounding vowels, but that has been my experience.

It’s pretty bothersome to me and to those I live with and try to understand. The high frequencies are what allow me to discern pitches that are out of tune from those that are in tune. The thought of losing my musical “ear” is fearful; I’ve always had a gift for music, and this stupid genetic thing threatens to mute that gift. Of course, if you ponder it logically, I was born with both the gift for music and with the propensity to lose my hearing. If I take the one for granted, it is only reasonable to accept the other.

I always thought going deaf would be like someone just turning down the volume, but its really more like someone put a low-band-pass filter on my right ear. I still hear fine at the lower frequencies, but the higher the pitch, the less I hear. Who knew that consonants happen in the upper part of the hearing range? Not me. I still hear pretty well out of the left ear, and I recognize now that I clearly favor it.

Another odd thing – I have zero trouble with music, other than the higher frequencies being muted. It’s not such a problem when the “message” of the music occurs across the entire spectrum, but my trouble hearing consonants makes it much more difficult to understand speech – especially if my good (left) ear is turned away from the speaker.

Anyone else out these dealing with this? What do you do to compensate/fix it/deal with it?

Because stuff like this seems to just keep happening.

And the reason I think it is important is because the people who are committing these frauds ALSO want to circumscribe our lives and tell us what we can eat, where we can live and how we can spend our own money.  (I inherited my mother’s radical independence and my father’s stubbornness and persistence. I think it’s a pretty useful combination.)

I thought by the time I was this age I would finally have it all figured out. By “it” I mean “Life”.  ”How to do it.” The “Big Questions” finally answered. But no.

I thought that by this age:

• I’d be financially set. Wrong!
• I’d still be married. Wrong!
• I’d have lots of really good friends. Wrong!
• I’d have work that was deeply satisfying and made a difference. Wrong!
• I’d be surrounded by happy family. Wrong!
• I’d have put down roots and be well known and respected in my community. Wrong!
• All my questions about life, God, love, happiness, success would be mostly answered. Wrong! 
• I would no longer feel like I was making it up every single day. Wrong!

Literally nothing in my life has worked out the way I imagined. Nothing. Not one blessed thing. And life just keeps throwing me curve balls at me. And I keep swinging and missing.

Apparently, I’m not doing something right.

I wonder what it is.

St. John the Divine (Not Actual Size)

A buddy and I were discussing the sorry state of the world, and he mentioned that he’s pretty pessimistic about the future of our species. I asked him the reason for his pessimism, and he replied, “The Book of Revelation”. He then asked me what I thought, and this is what I wrote to him:

There’s likely no book in the entire Bible as controversial as Revelation. When I was a kid, I read it literally and believed it was a literal prophecy of stuff that was literally gonna happen. As I got older and a little more experienced and a little wiser, I began to see  it differently. It’s pretty hard to read it now with an unjaundiced eye because of all the “interpretations” I was exposed to as a kid, but I try.

I have little doubt that John is writing what he experienced. I believe he had an ecstatic experience, like Teresa of Avila, like various mystics throughout time, like many people who seem to be more spiritually “tuned-in” than the normal person. (And – if I may say so – unlike me.)

The “vision”, as it were, appears to be in 3 or 4 major parts. (Four if you count the intro.) At the intro, John has his vision of the Risen Christ standing amidst the  candlesticks. There’s a brief conversation where John is told to write what he sees and hears, and then it dives straight into the first of the 3 major parts: the message to the 7 churches.

If any part of Revelation was ever intended to be taken literally, it is perhaps this section. The seven churches named in those first few chapters are churches that actually existed in that time. Apparently, John was given a particular message to pass along to each of the leaders of these individual churches. My suspicion is that the churches – when they heard the message addressed to them in particular – understood exactly what was meant. I likewise suspect that anyone who takes those messages and applies them to different places and times than those to which they were are addressed are just plain getting it wrong. Not that the messages are not timeless, but they were clearly addressed to a specific set of people in a specific place at a specific time.

The middle section of the book is the freaky part: the “Whore of Babylon”, a beast with ten horns, dragons spitting out floods to drown babies, swarms of deadly locusts, stars falling from the sky, rivers turning to blood, seven angels sounding seven trumpets, The Book of Life! The biggest clue that this part should be read symbolically rather than literally is the beast and dragon stuff. If that part is symbolic, then the stuff about  stars falling and rivers turning to blood is also intended as metaphor. Although I can barely speculate what the bit about the beast and the dragon means, the bit about stars falling from the sky is a fairly common piece of imagery in Oriental literature – it is a way of talking about rulers being deposed and kingdoms being overthrown. The “beast with ten horns” can be interpreted as the Roman Empire with some degree of consistency. What is not at all clear is whether the one horn that grew and ruled the others refers to a particular ruler or a particular kingdom. I suspect again that readers familiar with Oriental imagery understood it much better than we do.

The end of the second part is the truly freaky apocalyptic stuff – the opening of the two scrolls, the appearance of The Lamb, the judgment of the Beast and the Whore of Babylon. Frankly, I haven’t a clue what to make of it. The only conclusion I can draw is that John had a mind-blowing vision. (An excess of pain-killers, maybe? Tradition has it that he survived being boiled in oil and ultimately died of natural causes at a ripe old age.)

The last major section is the description of the New Heavens and the New Earth. Pretty cool stuff, but a lot of it completely defies physics, so if we are to read it literally as a prophecy about what is to come, then we must of necessity also read it as a prophecy that the fundamental laws of the physical universe are going to be altered. What should we think of that? Well, if Death – the final enemy – is truly to be overcome, then the fundamental laws of the universe MUST be overcome. The whole universe is dying – entropy dictates the end state of everything, and there is nothing to prevent that from being the final state of all matter – nothing within the physical universe anyway.

A striking part of this book is the repetition of the number 7. Such repetition is a fairly common literary device that gives structure and cohesion to the work. Early oral literature made use of such devices to insure that the structure of the tale held together as it was passed on from generation to generation. Revelation shows many of the same influences. (And that’s kinda cool, because the Apostle John was certainly not a highly educated man – but this is clearly a work of genius or divine inspiration – take your pick.)

I think it is a freaky, amazing, disturbing and comforting vision of a realm that most of us never suspect exists, let alone have the opportunity to see. Are there lessons we are to learn from it? That I honestly cannot say. There are some really wise things said in the book, and some really cryptic things, and some really downright silly things. (A city that is a CUBE? Really? C’mon, man!) It contains some of the most famous literary imagery and phrases in all of western literature, so it is certainly worth reading, studying even. But is it a reliable, trustworthy description of actual events that are yet to take place? To be honest, I doubt it.

Nostradamus had a series of similarly fantastic ecstatic experiences, and his “prophecies” are ambiguous enough to be interpreted as being accurate – but only in hindsight. Teresa of Avila had ecstatic experiences that were clearly life-altering, and that make for worthwhile contemplation, but aren’t remotely prophetic. I think the quality of John’s vision falls somewhere in between those two.

The Revelation of St. John the Divine is an extraordinary work. Like all works of great art, it bears the marks of a divine touch. But I think interpreting any of it literally is a mistake.

This post comes under the heading of “Not Exactly Scientific but Darned-Reliable Nonetheless”.

I was driving home the other day amidst the normal horrors of the southbound 101 at rush hour, and was irritated to see that traffic was stalled and slowed much farther along my route than normal. As I approached my exit, I saw the reason.

On the side of the road was a single traffic cop with his pretty blue and red flashing lights, and a single driver receiving a citation from said cop. As soon as traffic got past the cop by the side of the road, the traffic jam ceased and I was able to resume normal highway speeds.

Ordinarily, I would have forgotten this incident as it doesn’t seem particularly meaningful. We’ve all cursed the stupidity of people who seem to insist on slowing down to look at something on the side of the road, and this experience was no different. But the next day something happened that put the incident in a whole new light.

The next day I drove home the same time, same route, but traffic was moving at normal highway speeds the whole trip. At almost precisely the same point near my exit, I saw a car stalled on the side of the road. The only difference between this day’s trip and the previous day’s is that there was no cop with pretty flashing lights next to the stalled car.

And suddenly it hit me: cops cause traffic jams.

I’ve since noticed that this is almost ALWAYS the cause of traffic jams: whenever traffic on my commute is clogged up, the source of the bottleneck is almost always a cop on the side of the road writing a traffic tickets. I challenge you to start observing whether or not this is true in your community as well.

I hate traffic jams, especially unnecessary ones, and have been pondering the problem for years. I’ve always blamed the general stupidity of the populace for most traffic jams, but this observation has changed my opinion. Rather than condemn the populace for slowing down in the presence of flashing red and blue lights, why not just accept such behavior as a given in human behavior, and figure out a way to manage around it? And the way to manage around it is simple: prohibit the police from stopping anyone for traffic violations during rush hour.

I have proof-positive that if the cops would leave us alone to manage ourselves, we’d do just fine. (I know cops don’t believe this, but cops don’t believe anything.)

I propose that the cops stay off the road altogether during rush hour, and only show up in the event of a traffic accident. I’m sure some faint-hearted limp-wristed milqutoast will protest that the presence of traffic cops keep us safer, but my experience says otherwise. My experience says that the presence of cops – especially with their flashing lights – is the cause of the type of traffic snarl-ups which inevitably lead to multiple car rear-end collisions. I’d be willing to bet that those are the main sort of traffic accident that occurs during rush hour.

Want to have a faster, safer commute?

Get rid of the traffic cops.

…it only makes sense that the next one should be an actual clown.

What would you do if the world were already exactly as it should be? How would you spend your time?

…for admitting I watch “Dancing With The Stars“, but I have to say something about the television production. First, though, I guess I must defend myself for watching the show at all.

Here’s why I deserve to keep my Man Card in spite of my viewing habits. First, I don’t initiate the watching. My Best Beloved watches regularly and likes me to watch with her, so Imy primary reason for watching is to be a  Good Mate. Second, the female dancers have fabulous bodies, wear very little clothing and move like they are double jointed everywhere. EVERYWHERE. (Which reminds me: where is Edyta this year anyway? I always looked forward to seeing how close to naked she managed to get with her “costumes”.)

So, with that defense of my manhood complete, can I please speak directly to the producers of the show?

Would you guys try to remember that dance is an art form performed on a stage by an audience that is sitting still? And could you try to keep in mind that the choreography is designed for an audience which is seated in front of the stage?

In the couple of years I have been watching DWTS, I have been subjected to bizarro camera angles, quick cuts from camera to camera and zoom focus on small parts of the whole stage – all of which makes it impossible for the television viewer to actually see the piece as choreographed. Why do the producers think that swooping camera angles, fast cuts from image to image, and zoom focus on individual dancers makes for good TV? It might work for a drama filmed on a sound stage, but it SUX BIG HAIRY DONKEY BALLS for a stage production.

Can whoever produces this show try to think like an audience member sitting in front of the stage, and give us that single, static view of the whole stage without flicking back and forth from the camera in the attic to the camera backstage in the wings to the camera on the remote control helicopter? Please? I just wanna see the dancing. I’m not remotely interested in how creative you can be with camera angles.

It’d be like showing a football game and flicking through 20 different camera angles during the play. It makes it IMPOSSIBLE to follow the action. You wanna demonstrate how swoopy and artsy you can be with the cameras? Do it during the replay and the slo-mo. During the live action, we wanna see it like we have the SINGLE best seat in the house.

Okay?

Okay.

I have devoured Nassim Taleb’s “Fooled by Randomness” and “The Black Swan“. The ideas contained in these two books are profound, disturbing and very, very liberating. For some reason, these books occasionally get labeled as “Business” or “Markets” books. They are not. They are works of philosophy that everyone with the slightest inclination to think about life should read. (Josh: take note.) Christians in particular should marinate in these ideas.

I gave up on “Witness to Hope“, the biography of JPII. The first third of the book, which dealt with his pre-pope days, was terrific. The stuff after he was elected read like a diary or a press release. Boring as hell. I can handle a little bit of boring, but the stark contrast between the two sections of the book was more than I could bear. Since it’s 1100 pages, and I wasn’t even halfway through, I was not willing to devote any more time to it. Anyone who wants my copy can have it.

(Does anyone else always have multiple books going at the same time? I realized a couple of weeks ago that I was reading five books at the same time – and that’s just pretty normal for me.)

I just finished J.S.Mill’s essay On Liberty and am now working on his autobiography. Mill was educated at home by his father and lemme tell you, Daddy should be very proud. What an extraordinary mind that man had.

If you would permit me one quote that I found quite relevant:

The third, and most cogent reason for restricting the interference of government, is the great evil of adding unnecessarily to its power. Every function superadded to those already exercised by the government, causes its influence over hopes and fears to be more widely diffused, and converts, more and more, the active and ambitious part of the public into hangers-on of the government, or of some party which aims at becoming the government. If the roads, the railways, the banks, the insurance offices, the great joint-stock companies, the universities, and the public charities, were all of them branches of the government; if, in addition, the municipal corporations and local boards, with all that now devolves on them, became departments of the central administration; if the employés of all these different enterprises were appointed and paid by the government, and looked to the government for every rise in life; not all the freedom of the press and popular constitution of the legislature would make this or any other country free otherwise than in name.

I think Mill would look at the state of the modern west and say, “I toldja so…”

I finished The Sovereign Individual just before finishing Mill. Highly recommended.

On deck is Jacques Barzun’s From Dawn to Decadence. This comes very highly recommended and I am eager to get started. Also  The Gods of Athiesm by Vincent P. Maseli, S.J. (Apparently, the Jesuits pay attention to these things.)

I am also doing my annual re-reading of Lewis’ Mere Christianity. I started reading Lewis when I was maybe 10 or 11 with The Chronicles of Narnia. I’ve read almost everything he ever published – in most cases, multiple times – and as I was going through MC again this past week, was struck with wonder at how much his thinking has influenced mine. Virtually every significant belief I have about God, the world and myself can likely be traced back to something I read somewhere in Lewis. Not that we don’t have our disagreements, but it is safe to say he is the single most influential thinker in my life.