December 2nd…

It’s another cold morning and winter hasn’t arrived yet. In a usual year I have to get to January to really begin hating the cold but my whole clock has been set back one month. Call it winter hating savings time.

I remember as a child there was a certain thrill about snow and winter days. We’d often come into the house after school noses red, wet with snow, and oblivious to the cold. Snow was what we played in. Snow was our art form. Snow was the medium in which we expressed our childhood.

But I’m getting older and the charm has gone away. Snow is something in my way. Cold is what traps me inside. The early descent of night is rarely ever charming or romantic but mostly just dark. Every fragment of sun in these days is precious as gold even as I know this is how it will be until nearly April.

Someday, I promise myself, I’ll move to a place where there is reasonable warmth all year around. I don’t need to be in the tropics, just somewhere where I can take a walk outside in January with, say, just a sweater on. That doesn’t seem to much to ask but for now I’m tied down here and left with this cold December 2nd and a hundred days or more like it to come.

Sigh.

Pictures from home…

Just a picture of me standing next to the Plymouth Brethren church in Wausau, Wisconsin that was such a large part of our lives.

There were good people there, and a few cranks too, but it helped me learn to love the Bible and grow in my appreciation for the Eucharist (we celebrated communion each Sunday) all of which would prepare me for my later life.

Like any close knit family I could probably drop in and have about 30 people know me right away even though its been decades since I last went there.

Ahhh life in a small town!

An ecumenical gathering…

I’m scheduled to return to LaCrosse on Tuesday to present a short lecture/homily on the life of St. Paul from the Orthodox Christian perspective. I’ll be writing and polishing for most of today, a process I actually enjoy, and hope the weather is good for the trip tomorrow.

My basic thesis will be simple. If you want to know who the Apostle Paul imitate him as he imitated Christ. I’ve tried to avoid lots of theological jargon and I realize this may be one time when I get to present a large number of people, mostly not Orthodox, with a little sample of our Faith.

Pray for me! Thank you.

The header…

The header at the top of this blog is a picture of the altar at St. Augustine Orthodox Church, a Western Rite Orthodox Church in Denver, Colorado. If you wish to see the Orthodox Western Rite served with grace and intention this is one of the places you should visit.

It should be noted that this time of year, what I knew as Advent, is the time I miss the Western Rite (through which I came into Orthodoxy) the most. I can function and be blessed in the East for all of the year but in this time of year I remain occidental at heart.

Here comes the sun…

Around this time people get notions to talk about what they’re grateful for.

I’m grateful for the sun. Now that’s so odd or generic that some of you reading this may start to wonder, but not if you live in Minnesota where November is often a perpetually cloudy day. November in these parts is soggy, enough snow to make mud, enough cold to keep you inside, sunsets around 5 in the afternoon, and gray skies everywhere and every day. But this past week has looked more like January, when the winds descend on us from Canada and bring cold, brilliant, air on cloudless days.

It can be a miserable time, a typical Minnesota November, and some day I will leave this place for good and live where there is no such thing. But until then these past few days, sunny, cold, but bright, are more precious than gold and I’ll do my best to take full advantage.

Wausau…

Later on today I’ll take to the road and travel to my home town, Wausau, Wisconsin.

I haven’t been there in a while and it will be interesting just to drive around the place and see what things have changed and what remains the same. The truth is I’m most curious about what has become of my friends from those days. I would like to think they all still live in the neighborhood and we could just look them up and get together again but that’s just a wish. They, like me, have scattered to the winds, their kids are in college and I’m a fragment to them as they are to me.

In the years since I’ve left Wausau I’ve had a recurring dream. I’m at the middle school I left in the winter of 1975, and there’s a store there with shirts and items with the school’s name which I either try to find, or having gotten there, fail to find one that fits before I awake. I think that dream is about my disconnect from those days, that place, my friends and everything that was there, a disconnect I cannot mend.

Many good things have happened since I left Wausau, but I often still feel like a visitor wherever I am, like there was unfinished business in that small town in the middle of Wisconsin which I sometimes hated but where I also felt like I belonged. So I’m not feeling the best, and I’ve been awake with coughing for too many hours this morning, but I want to go for what reason I’m not sure.

Maybe I just need to buy whatever it was I couldn’t get in my dream.

A love story…


I’ll seek and find you. I’ll take you to bed and have my way with you. I’ll make you ache, shake & sweat until you moan & groan. I’ll make you beg for mercy, beg for me to stop. I’ll exhaust you to the point that you’ll be relieved when I’m finished with you. And, when I’m done, you’ll be weak for days.

All my love, The Flu

The Bassist of them all…

A commenter asked me about my bass influences. If I had a magic wand I would like to be 1/10th as good as Vic Wooten,

or the baddest of them all, John Entwistle…

Compared to these guys I’m just a thumper. But if I had no need for money and a lot of time to practice I’d sure chase after them…