Strange Rituals and Cheat Codes

This last weekend, my wife and I said goodbye to the aging minivan that had been a fixture in our family for the last decade.  It was a Honda Odyssey, of course, and just as it had replaced the decade-old Honda Odyssey that came before it, so too was it replaced by a decade-newer, lower mileage used Honda Odyssey.  

I mean, I'd been hoping for a midlife convertible, but danged if minivans aren't just so relentlessly useful.  Where once it was for carrying kids and stuff, now it's for carrying elderly parents and stuff.  

The Van is dead, long live the Van.

The new van is a 2023, with just under 31K miles on it, and that means...even though it's a lower trim level...that it's brimming with features that are new to us.  Like, say, auto start/stop, that unjustly maligned system that saves owners five to seven percent at the pump.  I mean, sure, if you've been bought by the oil industry, it's a bad thing.  But for anyone who cares about pinching nickels, it's a great feature.

If it works.  Which it did not, not for the first few days of driving.  

Every time the engine should have shut down at a stop, it didn't, and instead flashed an alert that the "system wasn't charging."  We'd noticed it during the test drive, but figured it would resolve.  It did not.  It kept flashing the error, even after forty minutes of driving.  Even after an hour.  The engine was warmed up.  The alternator should have charged the battery fully.  Which meant that something somewhere was wrong.

There's a warranty on the vehicle for the first month, but I really didn't feel like taking it in if another solution could be found, so to owner's groups I went.  There, I found the usual kvetching and complaining and frustrations with dealerships.  Mechanics seemed at a loss, as did the manufacturer.  

But in all of that, there were claims of a strange and magical solution.

An owner by the name of BadWolfOdyssey (A Dr. Who reference, I assume) had discovered how to get the system working again, without a trip to a mechanic or dealer.  Dozens of commenters sang the praises of the method, swearing it worked perfectly for them.  

Here's what they did:

1. Drive the Van for fifteen minutes.  
2. Stop in a parking lot, checking that as you do so the error message is showing.  
3. Turn off the Van.  
4. Pull the hood release latch and open the hood.  
5. Get out, and fully prop the hood.  
6. Then get back into the Van, close the door, and turn it on again.  
7. A "your hood is open" alert shows.  
8. Turn off the engine, get out, and go shut the hood.  
9. Return to the Van, close your door, start it.
10. Hey presto, the system will work again. 

That sounded as mechanical as standing on one foot with your finger on your nose and saying "Start/Stop" seven times while hopping in a circle.  It felt like a secret cheat code for a video game.   It was wibbly wobbly, as one might expect from a Dr. Who enthusiast. 

I tried it on the way home from church on Sunday, and it worked like a charm.

Why?  It's not clear.  It likely interrupts whatever software glitch causes the error code in the first place, in the same way that breath control exercises can prevent hiccups.  Some sensor doesn't pick up a necessary state for reactivation, and the system locks, until you do the silicon age equivalent of giving it a good whack in just the right place.

It was, whichever way, a little bit delightful.  

If only there were similar solutions to other problems, ritual movements and arcane positionings that would reset the deeper failings in our glitchy human code.

If only.

The Perfect Clerk

My Presbytery (meaning the regional denominational body that governs my church) is hiring.

It's looking for a Stated Clerk, which is a very particular pastoral position.  Stated Clerks are responsible for managing the policies, procedures, and protocols that we Presbyterians are prone to inflicting on ourselves.  They've got to keep track of everything, be versed in parliamentary procedure, know the Presbyterian Book of Order backwards and forwards, and be able to graciously interpret the byzantine and endlessly emergent thicket of well-meant and impeccably wordsmithed regulations we Reformed-types generate.

That, and be responsive to the needs of scores of congregations, all of which are filled with their own complex interpersonal and organizational dynamics.  That, and know the histories of those communities, and the relationships between them, and their connections to and within Presbytery.

Being an effective Stated Clerk requires a very particular set of skills, with which I myself am not blessed.  That doesn't mean I don't appreciate the souls who've performed that task, because they're rare gems.  

Thirty years ago, when I entered the journey of ministry, there was a bench of folks who had that skillset.  They were process thinkers who enjoyed and found intellectual satisfaction in the intricacies of the systems we Presbyterians built. They had lawyerly minds, which I say as a positive thing.  And they'd spent time studying the process, because someone needed to know what the heck was going on when we fielded a motion from the floor to call the question on an amendment to an amendment to a motion.

This sort of person increasingly does not exist.  As the Presbyterian Church USA continues to contract, the souls whose lived experience and gathered wisdom lent themselves to the requirements of Stated Clerkdom are aging out.  There are some younger folk in the church, sure, but their interests don't tend to bend towards the care and tending of the aforementioned policies, procedures, and protocols.

Thing is, you need those gifts to manage the life of a complex organization.  In a small church, that's less the case, which is why I prefer the organic character of the intimate community.  

But in larger and more complex communities, the absence of clear decision-making processes can be catastrophic.  Where there's crisis or conflict, poorly designed or hazily understood policies can paralyze systems and deepen antagonisms.  Like faulty code in a program, the whole thing can crash.  Ever see a meeting go off the rails because literally no-one knew what to do next?  Or get trapped in a bureaucratic sinkhole that's as merciless as something out of Gilliam's Brazil?  Lord have mercy, do we not want that to be our future.

So I had this thought.  Perhaps the optimal Stated Clerk would be a cyborg.  

Meaning, a person willing to use fully agentic artificial intelligence to support their work.  Where a handful of years ago such systems were clumsy and prone to full-on Carlos Casteneda peyote hallucinations, AI is starting to become a more reliable partner.  It's particularly good at interpreting and operationalizing complex structural data, meaning legal and regulatory systems.  It can respond, via email or verbally over the phone, immediately to queries.  It can juggle a functional infinity of varying demands and tasks, and do so twenty four hours a day.  It can update itself instantly, as processes shift and change. It would never ever burn out or get frustrated.  Such a system could be remarkably useful.

Yes, it's impersonal.  Perhaps a weensy bit on the creepy side, assuming you're get the heebie jeebies around semisentient machines.  That's why you'd not go full AI, but have an adequately experienced homo sapiens sapiens partnering with an intelligent and optimally-pretrained system.

I'm not sure, given the increasingly reflexive resistance to AI, if my progressive siblings would be open to that.  Many might not, as AI crowds into the spaces where labor and creativity once met, and drinks all the water, and .

But what is AI good at, if not doing those things that require endless patience, granular detail, and a superhuman tolerance for oft-maddening complexity?  

At a bare minimum, someone should start a committee to discuss it, which I'm sure would result in swift and decisive action and clear policy.  

Ahem.

Snow's Long Leavetaking

For much of the last month, there's been snow on the ground.

It's been years and years since that's been true in our little slice of the Mid-Atlantic, but winter actually arrived for work this time around.   With March around the corner, it's all starting to melt now.  The gurgling and burbling of downspouts over the last week sounded like a benediction.  Patches of grass remade the acquaintance of the sun, and it was all lovely.  I've been eager for the snow to make its departure, and it's taken its sweet time.

I was meditating on this while walking the pup one morning this week, when the moist earth's return whispered a thought into my ear.  When rain falls, and falls all at once, the soil can only drink so much.  Get a three quarters of an inch of rain all at once, and much of that runs off.  The water table beneath gets a sip or two, sure, but the rest flows off down the watershed.

But get the equivalent amount as snow, and that melts off gradually.   It's a slow and steady drip line, saturating and then continuing, like a long, soft, soaking drizzle.  Like a dripline laid across an entire region, that timed release would improve aquifer uptake, more completely quenching the thirsty ground.    

It's so obvious, of course.  

But I'd never had that thought before, and it made the long melt feel less like an imposition and more like a blessing.

The Evangelist

I wrote The Evangelist back in 2015, back when I was all filled with writery hope following the signing of my first bona fide publishing contract. Yay! I was going to be an author, with lots and lots of books!

But that ain’t how the industry works, kids.

Getting your first novel published is hard. Getting your second novel published is just as hard, unless you’re blessed with a multi-book contract or are capable of mind control.

You loved this manuscript. It was much better than Harry Potter. You’re going to read it again and again.

The Evangelist didn’t go anywhere, despite the best efforts of my agent. This, in retrospect, is not a surprise.

It was and is a peculiar novel.

On the one hand, the central protagonist is a deeply faithful evangelical Christian, whose voice is represented as respectfully and authentically as possible. Darren is deeply earnest, gentle of spirit, and genuinely believes that Jesus Christ is his Lord and Savior. He’s a basically decent human being, whose faith I share, even if I express it in different ways. So at some points, yeah, this will read a bit like “Christian fiction,” because it is. Secular publishing houses really really don’t grok to that.

On the other hand, it’s also filled with non-Christian characters, who speak and act in ways that are, again, as real as I can make ‘em. Meaning, they don’t say “dang it” and “gosh diddly darn it” when they’re frustrated or angry or afraid. There are “bad words,” which pretty much rules out Christian publishing houses. That, and it’s sci fi.

I mean, real hard science fiction. With aliens. And multiverses. And H.P. Lovecraft references. And it’s overtly political, in a way that would make Christians gullible enough to buy into Christian nationalism and kleptofascism a bit uncomfortable. And it’s short, barely more than a novella.

Finding a publisher willing to take a swing at such an odd fish of a novel? Lord have mercy, but that didn’t work.

I’ve ended up repurposing scenes, characters, and relationships from this novel for other manuscripts, but I still like *this* story. It’s set in Poolesville, the sweet little town where I’ve been in ministry for the last 15 years. And though it’s over 10 years old now, it tracks a ginned-up “emergency” a fascist president uses to justify ending the rule of law, free speech, elections and the like? It doesn’t seem far-fetched. Except for the aliens.

Also, years ago, I promised a church member that I’d write her into a novel manuscript as part of a fundraiser. Which I did.

I Bezos-published it on the cheap a few years back, but you can now have the entire thing gratis on substack if you’re willing to read it online. Enjoy!

Peace, Peace, where there is no Peace

What is it that will solve all of this mess?  What can we possibly do that would bend the divisive, snarling, bloodstained arc of human history towards something a little less obviously horrible?

It's a paradoxic conundrum, a Gordian knot of a puzzler.  Because on the one hand, we clearly don't have it figured out, in a quod erat demonstrandum sort of way every time you hold still and bother to listen.

And on the other hand, we all think we know the answer, and every one of us answers that question in a slightly different way.

That is both a blessing and one of the reasons the story of our species is so consistently monstrous.  Our desires crash into one another, our countless disparate songs of the best possible future creating a terrifying dissonance.  

Where, then, is the solution?  Where is the path out of this wreck of dust and ashes?

I was recently asked where I thought folks might come together in my community to build understanding, to listen and to find something that would restore the breach between us.  Where might we convene, and what might that look like?

I admitted that while I had an answer, I wasn't sure it was the answer that my good-hearted questioners were looking for.  My answer is Jesus.  That's precisely why I'm doing the Jesus thing, after all, why I've made living according to his teachings the goal of my existence.

I mean, that's what we're attempting, every single time we gather at church.  We're attempting to live in a way that defies our histories, both collective and personal.  Trying, at least.

"Because you know," I said to my questioner, "we Christians always get along just great."  I got a little laugh at that, Lord help us.

Still and all, it's where I choose to put my hope.  Because where nations are ruled by the sword, and markets are ruled by Mammon, a community that defies those norms with a fierce gentleness seems the only viable option.

When Salt is Salty

 

"The news of the new life is this: bringing joy precludes murder; love hates no one; truth brooks no compromise with deceit; the heart can remain pure only by making no concessions. For the Father of Jesus, who gives all, enters no mutual settlement with mammon, least of all in a heart that belongs to him.

In short, if we truly have joy in life, and love for all people, we will not tolerate any compromise with death, any concession to loveless indifference or murderous injustice and brutality, because the way of love reaches out to all people, touches all things, and transforms every situation. This is the essence of the new life, the message of the kingdom, the meaning of Jesus’ teachings. Here is his heart."  

-Eberhard Arnold, Salt and Light

 

You are the Smallest Thing

Every day, if we are not wary, we can be overwhelmed by the inhuman torrent of information that blasts our consciousnesses.  It's a riot-hose of data, knocking us back, making us angry and anxious as events utterly beyond our control consume our attention.

It's all at such a scale that it can seem beyond our ability to do anything.  Wars and storms, murders and corruption, our knowledge ecosystem bludgeons us into sputtering helplessness.  How can we hope to change such a vast and catastrophically borked system?  How can we bring justice to a world that is so utterly unjust, and hope to a world where every moment serves up moral horror and outrage?

We can't.  You can't.  I can't.

I can't change geopolitics, because I am so small.  I cannot change the great blind injustices of our economic systems, our our species-wide eagerness to inflict suffering on one another in the pursuit of power.  Even community tensions and family conflicts seem to at times become so complex and intractable that no amount of my effort can bring them to resolution.  The activist's mantra...that injustice anywhere is injustice everywhere...becomes a recipe for despair and dysfunction.  We stress and we rage, and Lord have mercy, does it seem futile.

Where, then, can change occur?  Where can we make things better?

It occurs first and foremost at the very smallest level, meaning it's a quantum thing.

We tend to think of "quantum" as a word that shimmers with futuristic promise and cutting edge resonances.  Quantum computing!  The insights of quantum physics!  Brands slap that label on themselves if they want us to imagine they are Very Forward Thinking.  

"Oooh!  Quantum.  It must be good!"

But "quantum" just means "the smallest possible thing."  

The term replaced "atom," which Greek philosopher Democritus used to describe the invisible and indivisible particles that he believed made up the whole world.  Science once used the term "atom" to describe the atomic elements, but eventually realized that "atoms" were in fact not the smallest possible thing.  There was a "subatomic" realm, a philosophical oxymoron that would have given Democritus conniptions.  Rather than science saying, "Oops, our bad, those elements aren't actually atomic,"  we called the things smaller than atoms quanta, teeny tiny spooky indivisible units upon which all other things are somehow made.

What does that have to do with making things better?

That's you, morally speaking.  

You, in your unique personhood, are the smallest possible thing.  Your soul, your personhood, your agency?  That's the fundamental unit of analysis, the Cogito that Ergo Sums.  You have agency over you, assuming you are a sentient being, which you hopefully are.  You are the place where change happens, and where you are empowered to make change happen.  The place where hate ends.  The place where compassion begins.  Where grace reigns.

Unless it doesn't.  

All you have to do, again, is allow yourself to be changed.  Which is just super duper easy, as y'all know.

But it can be done.

Always start small.  Small is plenty hard enough.

Of Masks and American Sovereignty

There are rules, new rules for a new era of human exchange. Like, say that you can’t open an email enclosure or click on an embedded link unless you’re 100% sure you know who sent it and why.

You can’t make a phone call without texting first to make sure it’s ok, which still strikes me as kind of a significant step backwards. I mean, I used to call people to see if it would be ok if I came over to talk, but now we need to text people to see if it’s ok to call them to see if it would be ok if we came over to talk.

And no matter what, you should never, ever read the comments. Comments are the place where our shared humanity goes to die.

This wasn’t how it was supposed to be.

Back in the naive first few years of internet culture, the idea was that the comments section was a new and exciting place for human discourse, a place where we’d dialogue about issues and concepts and come to a new and enlightened understanding of one another.

It’d be funny, if it wasn’t so sad.

I used to have a comments section on this little blog, for example. For a while, it was a place where I actually talked to people. Then the trolls came, those souls who were just there to yell and cast aspersions. I never actually knew who they were, because there was no way to know who they were. There’d never be evidence of an actual “person” there, just a picture of a Rottweiler or a wolf or a hawk, or some other strong wild animal that let the troll imagine they were powerful and not simply cruel and inhuman.

All of that toxicity comes from one place: anonymity. 

If we allow ourselves to hide away ourselves from another, it does something strange to the human soul. It frees us from a sense of connection, from a sense of engagement and relationship. By not being ourselves with another person, we are given permission to not act as if that relationship matters.

Hiding our personhood is dehumanizing.  It's why I was so very grateful to finally unmask when the pandemic ended, so blessed to finally see the faces in my little community, one on one, real and human and there. 

Which is why the rise of masked and militarized secret police in the United States is so remarkably dangerous.  There are rationalizations made to justify this, involving safety and protecting identity, but those rationalizations for masking are the same ones made by the violent masked Black Block on the far left.  The far left is and has always been a disjointed, inchoate, fractious rabble.  The far right is fascist and authoritarian, and has the full coercive power of the state behind it.  Both want to hide who they are, but one is far more effective at projecting force to suppress liberty.  When an authoritarian state masks up, things are going very, very wrong indeed.

But there are other forms of power that have masked up, too.

Just as dangerous are the rising voices of masked propagandists, as clandestine organizations spend millions upon millions to manipulate public opinion, while at the same time doing everything in their power to hide their identity.

Take, for example, the organization "American Sovereignty," which ran pro-ICE ads prior to and during the last Superbowl.  Look them up, and you find a website.  But what does that website look like?  It's one page of boilerplate right-wing language about "safety" and "security" and a contact form.  No one responds to that email address.

No human beings are in evidence, no staff, no funders, no faces, nothing at all to tell you who they actually are.  This is intentional.

Even tiny little churches with thirty members all over the age of seventy have more detailed websites.  A family run restaurant has a more sophisticated online presence.  This, for an organization that has the money to produce and drop a Superbowl Ad, which y'all know ain't cheap.  If you're making a political statement in our republic, but your identity is a mystery, Ты лжец, товарищ.

Journalists dug deep, into Federal Communications Commission filings, and found just one name associated with American Sovereignty. He was a Republican operative, located in Arizona.  He wouldn't, of course, return any calls.

Reading this, you know who I am.  I make my case, and argue for that case, as a citizen in our frayed but precious republic.  Meaning, I don't pretend I'm anyone else, or prevent you from knowing me.  

Sure, on occasion I've written things pseudonymously.  Like my last novel, written in the name of the narrator.  Or a sharp-tongued work of theopolitical satire, written in the name of the Devil Himself.  But there, I've gone out of my way to be sure a reader can trace the text back to me, the real live human person who made it.  One quick Google, and I'm revealed.  That, and I've said: this is made by me, and this is why.

That's what you do, when you have integrity.

We're going to be seeing more and more masks and secrets, as our political system is flooded with money from corporations and billionaires eager to do everything they can to hold as much power as they possibly can.  

We'll see more propaganda, more lies masquerading as truth, as this year progresses and the hundreds of millions in dark money sitting in political war chests is tapped.  

How much of it will be from groups that operate behind the veil?

The Destroyer of the Gods

It was, or so she told me, her favorite of all of my books.

I can still remember the evening my wife settled in next to me in bed, her tablet in hand, immersed in the short manuscript that I had sent her just a few hours before.

"Still going?" I asked.

"Sssh," she said.  "I'm reading."

She stayed up until the wee hours, and finished THE DESTROYER OF THE GODS that night, after which she pronounced it her favorite.

It's a tight little sci fi novel, too long for a novella, too short to be one of those great sprawling epics that publishers seem to prefer these days, as if the value of a tale is measured in word count.   

I'd initially conceptualized it as a story about four beings on an alien world ruled by a pantheon of powerful machine intelligences, each of them the priest in service of a different Deity.  One of those priests, though, worshipped a God that did nothing, a God that had no obvious powers other than to call faithful adherents to both action and compassion.  Each of the primary characters was to be a nod to an archetypal AD&D party, meaning a fighter, a magic user, a cleric, and a thief.  When their gods are consumed by a hegemonic AI, the one whose deity was less obviously part of the material world suddenly becomes more relevant.  That was the original idea, at least.

In the writing, it became set a distant future earth, with the writing intended to be more YA-friendly.  I stuck with the balanced role-playing party as a schtick, because it was entertaining to write it that way.  The novel got both darker and more playful, and it was a complete hoot to write.  It became an exploration of our manipulation and infantilisation by the very technologies that make life easier for us, and about the fundamental value of our messy complex human natures.  

The title is both apropos and stolen, borrowed from a book by theologian Larry Hurtado about an epithet thrown at Christians in Roman times.  Back then, Jesus people were viewed as threats to the religion of Rome, as "destroyers of the gods," and as atheists.  

My wife loved it.  And then my agent really liked it, too, and sent it on to the publisher that had acquired my Amish novel.

There, the editor who so wonderfully refined my postapocalyptic Amish novel resonated with it, and pitched it to the editorial committee that made the final call on publication. 

That committee chose not to pick it up.  It was science fiction, after all, not literary fiction, and that was outside of their area of expertise and interest.   A near miss.

After that rejection and at the recommendation of the committee, my editor sent it with blessings over to a brand spankin' new sci fi imprint being created by the conglomerate that owned their imprint.

But once again, the result was rejection, because...this being  eight years ago...that imprint was being created exclusively for queer authors writing LGBTQIA+ sci fi.  Ah well.  So it goes.

I still enjoy THE DESTROYER OF THE GODS, for a whole variety of reasons.  It was my wife's favorite.  It got tantalizingly close to publication.  

And the spirit of the protagonist, a smart and fierce young woman named Beki?   She was in part inspired by a smart and fierce young woman who grew up in my congregation, one who was years later taken from all of us far too soon in a tragic car accident.  

I self-pubbed it a few years back, just to get it out there.  

And now, it's  the first of my novels to get put up on Sloppy Beta Books, a substack dedicated to giving you the option of reading the whole thing for free online.  Follow the link, and you can start reading right now.

Giving Solace

I wonder, sometimes, at the limits of my capacity to give comfort.

I know, I know, there are folks who say the task of the prophet is to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted, but mostly what I see in the world is suffering.  Hurt and loss, fear and trembling, those things are everywhere and a near universal.  I ache at the inescapable ubiquity of the world's pain. 

The pastor's task is primarily to give solace, but there's a boundary to that calling.

That boundary lies in the unique needs of every soul I encounter.  What gives comfort to one person will be of no use to another, and words that are bright with grace to one ear might be gibberish to another.  

Almost all of my own resilience in the face of loss and sorrow lies in my trust in the reality of God.  I know, from my faith, that nothing that has occurred in our time and space is ever forgotten.  It's all there in the mind of God, and that includes the reality and personhood of everyone I've lost.  I am blessed with the knowledge that they are completed, and that their completeness is a blessing.

I also trust, in my understanding of the infinite creative power of God, that everything that could possibly be is as real to my Creator as that which is.  All of the universe as we can see it is not the limit of God's work.  So the loved one who was taken from us too soon, where we feel the loss of all that they could have been?  Where we lament that we never reconciled, and there are parts of us we never shared with them?  All of those lost moments may be beyond us, but they are not beyond our Maker.  In God, nothing of what they could have been is gone.  In that, I find comfort.

I also know, from the heart of my faith, that our seasons of suffering aren't something God inflicts upon us, as if the Lord were some distant, demanding and monstrous tyrant.  God participates in the fullness of our struggles, knows them round about and within.  Everything we experience is known and felt by our Creator.  Being Itself bears the weight of our sorrow, and I am comforted by that.

But if Jesus is not shared between you and I, how can I share that comfort?  

If you believe the universe is a blind trampling machine, a churning murderous thrum of quantum cogs and mindless algorithms, I will struggle to reach you with my words of grace.  You will hear my words as delusion, as foolishness, as the prattle of a fanciful, willful child.

I could, in that knowledge, simply withdraw.  Coil back into my own bedrock certainty, leaving you infidel and alone.

What an ugly and selfish act that would be.

If you suffer, now, and do not find purpose and solace in Jesus as I do, then my task is to walk with you.  

To hear you.  To celebrate with you.  To weep with you.  To offer you food and warmth and encouragement.

To be your friend, even in our difference.

The Parasociopath

Last night, the wife and I went to see a comedian.  It was her birthday present to me, one both thoughtful and welcome.  The comedian: Josh Johnson.  I'd "discovered" Johnson whilst scrolling endlessly through short form videos in 2024, most likely on Instagram, and his slow-paced, slightly awkward, and utterly genial delivery was charming and unique.  I'd shared him with her, and she found him as delightful as I did.

It made for a pleasant night out, as the opening act was solid, and Johnson was exactly what I recalled him being.  Only, you know, physically present.

As always, it was peculiar seeing a human being one knows only as an image on a screen actually standing on stage, close enough that I could have thrown him a football.  If you know the limitations of my throwing arm, you know that meant we were quite nearby.  

His first few bits were interesting, in a meta sort of way.  Funny, naturally, and a pleasure to listen to, but also peculiarly recursive.  He lamented how pathologically online he was, and how anxious all of that made him.  He then proceeded to engage in a long retelling of an amusing video that's making the rounds.  Which is exactly how I encountered him, and how I shared him with the person who bought me the tickets to come to see him.

So here's this actual human being, live and in the flesh, doing precisely what so many of us often do with one another when we gather these days.  "Hey, Person We Actually Know," we say.  "Would you like to look at this amusing thing that I just saw on my screen?"  And so we share it, just as we've likely already shared it in whatever corporate media ecosystem we first encountered it, and we laugh together at some absurdity.

What aren't we sharing?  Our actual life.  That video is not a thing that happened to us.  Nor is it something we're encountering organically.  It's something that is being fed to us by semi-sentient systems designed to show us exactly what we want.  It's not actually part of our life.

And here, I find that I'm increasingly at a remove from the flow of culture.  The flow of culture is parasocial, and I am no longer significantly part of those systems.

Parasociality is the term used to describe our sense of relationship to a human being who we know only through media.  We "know" the famous and the celebrated and the influential, and we project our desires for real human relationship onto them.  I, for example, "know" Josh Johnson.  He shares himself, or appears to, in his comedy routines.  He projects a late night small room raconteur vibe, and it feels intimate.  But it is not.  Intimacy does not occur in a two thousand seat arena, or on Insta.  He has no idea who I am, or who 99.975% of his audience is.

Now that I am no longer on social media, and have used a nifty Chrome extension to shut down all of the compulsion-engines of the still-useful Youtube, I realized that this is having a substantial impact on my ability to engage in this type of relationship.  I am at a remove from the influences of influencers.  More of my time is my own, because I have chosen not to connect.  I have willfully withdrawn from parasociety.  

I am, if you will, a parasociopath.  Meaning, those flows of social exchange no longer run through me, not in the way they have been designed to flow.  I no longer encounter an endless stream of amusements.  I no longer receive most of my social information through algorithmic filters.

And unlike sociopathy, which is a particularly damaging pathology, parasociopathy seems necessary for our sanity, less a disease and more a healthy immune response.  It's a bit like feeling overwhelming vertigo when standing next to a potentially lethal chasm, or having a fear of poisonous snakes.  There's a necessity to it, the aversion of an organic system to something that does it harm.

A Hard World for Little Things

As I drove down the winding rural two lane that leads to my church Sunday morning, all around me the fields and woodland were encased in a deep hard layer of ice, a solid mass of frozen slush that had frozen and refrozen into a surface fully capable of holding the weight of a large adult human being.

The morning was bitterly cold, with temperatures in the low teens and a strong biting wind that tugged and buffeted our old van.  A fit day for neither man nor beast, as they used to say.

I was reflecting on news of a dear friend's recent tragic loss when there was a sudden flutter of wings.  A sparrow rose abruptly from the edge of the road, flew for a moment in front of the hood of the van, and then darted downwards.  There was a small thump, which I took to mean it had flown directly into my front bumper.

A pointless death, I mused, with some lament.  It didn't need to die, and I wished I'd not killed it.  All it needed to do was flit upwards, or to the right, and it would still be living the life of a sparrow.  

I went back to driving and meditating on loss, and was startled when just two minutes later, a second sparrow did the same thing.  It rose up from the edge of the road, and in doing so, flew directly into the windshield of the van.  There was another small thump, and a brief vision of a tiny tumbling feathered wreck.

"What the..." I muttered to myself, a little unsettled.  Two bird kills in two minutes?  I'd listened to a 1953 radio play of Daphne Du Maurier's The Birds with Mom that prior week (produced 10 years before the Hitchcock adaptation).  This was starting to feel a bit familiar, and mirrored the sorrowful character of my thoughts.

I slowed down, and started paying more attention.  

What I saw was that here and there along the roadside, sparrows were gathered in groups of a half dozen or so, pecking about in the exposed grass and startling upwards whenever a vehicle grew near.  I realized that the plowed roads were the only place where grass was exposed, and thus the only place where birds could forage.  The deep hard snow everywhere else would be impermeable to little claws and beaks, and after a week, the sparrows were undoubtedly hungry.

And cold.  And quick to take flight, even if that meant flight into the path of fast-moving metal objects.  Nature and the natural world destroy so quickly, and without mercy.

The words from a Cohen Brothers classic...themselves an homage to another, older film...rose in my thoughts.

"It's a hard world for little things."

It most certainly is.