If you could ask God one question what would it be?

At some point in everyone’s life, be it because they are totally baked or just because it happens to everyone eventually, they’ll have this discussion. If you could ask God one question what would it be?

To begin with, I think it is important to frame the question properly. Which God are you talking to? The Christian God? Allah? Yahweh? Zeus? Odin? Any one of literally dozens and dozens of gods that have paraded through the world over the thousands of years that man has been worshiping them?

The next thing would be to understand the circumstances under which you are being allowed to ask the question. For starters, if you have died and are standing in Heaven talking to God, then that alone answers a whole mess of questions. I mean, because if you were in Valhalla instead of Heaven then just by virtue of being there you’ve answered a pile of questions.

In the end however, none of that matters, because the only question I would ask God, no matter which god it is or under what circumstances, is “If you could ask God one question what would it be?” I figure God would probably know what the most important question in all of creation is, and once I know that I, being a pretty smart fellow, could probably arrive at the answer myself.

Unless God is a dick and tells me that the question he’d ask God would be “If you could ask God one question what would it be?” That’d be just plain mean.

Ask me anything

Kevin Brooks: Dec. 31st 1969 – Dec. 25th 2010

There was a point in my life when something was missing.  I had no idea it wasn’t there.  But one night sitting at the bar at Rio Bravo on Holcomb Bridge, I met Kevin and knew almost immediately that I’d been missing a best friend, and he was it.  I met my future wife Jodi there too around the same time.  The Rio Bravo bar, as it seems, had a fairly significant impact on my life.  Then for nearly a decade, Kevin, Jodi and I would continue hanging out at bars, talking about movies, books, computer games, history, politics, everything… anything.  The three of us might have been referred to as inseparable.  It wasn’t quite like that, but we did do a lot of things together.

Years ago, somewhere in the middle of our friendship, I announced to Kevin over a couple of beers at North River Tavern that I had no regrets in my life.  He was perplexed by this, I think in part because he, like many people, had several, perhaps many, regrets.  As we discussed the subject I explained to him that a person, for better or worse, is a sum of their experiences.  That who you are today is a result of everything you have done and everything that has happened to you, and by that reasoning, if you were happy with where and who you are in life, you cannot regret anything.  By regretting some mistake you made in high school, you were invalidating everything that had happened to you since because that mistake had ripple effects throughout your life.  The best you could do, I told him, was to realize you wanted it to have gone differently and learn from it, so that it doesn’t happen again.  You don’t dwell on it, you don’t while away the hours thinking about what could have been.  Instead, you take control of it and use it to make your future the one that you want.  His position, if I recall correctly, was that I was full of shit, and we spent hours going back and forth trying to find something in my life I truly regretted.

Most of our talks would be like this.  While on rare occasions we would discuss things in agreement, Kevin liked to take up the opposing side just to make things interesting.  The thing about Kevin is that, at his core, he was an asshole.  He was, what a Texan might call, an ornery son of a bitch.  And I mean in that in the best possible way.  It was actually probably one of his finer qualities.  You could be discussing something with him and even if he was out of his depth and completely wrong in every possible way, he never just took your word for it, you had to prove it to him.  He made you work for it.  It was annoying… it was frustrating… but when you’d made your point, when you’d proven it, it also felt so much better than when someone just acquiesced to your side.

Another of his better qualities was that Kevin was fiercely loyal.  He’d take a bullet for you, even if you weren’t in danger of being shot.  Even when you asked him not to.  His heart always was in the right place even if his actions weren’t.  Sometimes I think he just liked the fight.

Kevin was my best friend right up until these two great qualities of his collided.  My wife, who was at the time still just my fiancée but recently upgraded from girlfriend, had become unemployed and had remained unemployed for longer than she probably should have.  Kevin took it upon himself to hate her for it because he knew I wouldn’t.  He fought with her, and she fought back, and sometimes it got so bad that I had to walk out of the room.  I asked them both to stop, and she tried, but Kevin persisted.  And in the end it was Kevin’s doggedness, his ornery nature, in this matter that drove the wedge between us.

At some point after that, at one of the few times we did get together, Kevin told me he understood what had happened, and, calling back on that conversation we’d had years ago, he said to me, “It’s hard not to have regrets when you are at the bottom, and while I have less regrets every day, I think I’m going to hold on to that one for a while.”  And all I can think right now is, “Me too.”  I regret that I allowed our friendship to fall apart without much of a fight.  And some day I might be far enough from all this to learn something from it, but right now I think I’m going to hold on to this one for a while.

One topic that came up often for discussion between us and a number of our other friends was religion.  I think Kevin loved the topic so much because of its incredible complexity, the tightness to which people hold to their beliefs, the conflicts between differing beliefs, and the fact that so little of it can be proven which leads to everyone, despite how wide spread their views, being equally as right as everyone else.  It appealed to his love of discourse.  In my life, I have varied in my level of participation and belief in religion and God.  I’ve gone to church and I have abstained from going.  I’ve believed in one God, in many gods, in ancient mythic gods, and even entertained the idea of no god at all.  But right now, I sincerely hope that there is a God and there is a Heaven, and that Kevin is there, and that from time to time he’ll get a beer with God, and with a wry smile argue to His face about how He doesn’t exist.

Movie Round-Up: July 10th, 2009

Bruno:

Did you like Borat?  If so, you’ll probably like Bruno.  Personally, I can’t stand Sacha Baron Cohen.  To me, he’s one of those people who has really funny ideas, but then his execution of them is too long, to the point of become uncomfortable and losing its appeal.  Perhaps that is his intent.  In an event, I won’t be going to see it.  I can only hope that this movie doesn’t produce as many quotes as Borat.

I Love You, Beth Cooper:

Beth Cooper is the head cheerleader.  Denis Cooverman is the invisible nerd who has alphabetically sat behind her in many classes for many years.  And he decides that since he spent all his life not talking to Beth Cooper, that his valedictorian speech at graduation is his last chance to do it.  He also uses the speech as a platform to air a number of other unsaid grievances from his high school days, and the rest of the movie follows the consequences.  Beth and her two best friends show up at Denis’s party (which is just Denis and his best friend Rich), Beth’s military school high strung boy friend shows up, and Beth and Denis and their friends run off together.  Really, there are no surprises here.  Denis is the sort of guy for whom high school sucked and the end of it is the beginning of his life, and Beth is the sort of girl for whom high school rocked and the end of it is leaving her with nothing.  Throughout the night, Beth becomes real for Denis and he has to ease up on the dream image he has built up over the years, and Beth comes to see herself through his eyes and that maybe life after high school won’t be so bad anyway.  The movie is full of crazy happenings and funny moments, and I enjoyed myself all the way through.  Perhaps I Love You, Beth Cooper isn’t worth a full price ticket, but its definitely worth a matinee.

The Plague

Normally I reserve Wednesday posts for discussions of all things Zombie. This week, despite the title of this entry, I will not be speaking of zombies, unless you count the fact that I have felt like one.

One of the wicked cool things about WordPress, which is what I use to do this blog, is that you can post entries in advance. When I’m in my rhythm, I run about 3 entries ahead, so that on Monday I’m writing Thursday’s post while you are reading the post I wrote on Friday. Now, this isn’t always true, sometimes I just can’t think up or find stuff to write about, other days I’ll sit down and crank out a week’s worth of entries. The best part about this is that it allows (forces) me to think about what I’m writing. Often times I’ll write up an entry and then during the next two or three days while it waits in queue, I’ll think up new thoughts on the subject and go edit my entry. The bad part about this is that if I’m away from the PC for a few days and I’ve accidentally “published” items I wasn’t really finished with, they make it to the front page while I’m not paying attention.

So, a little over two weeks ago, I started feeling a tad under the weather. I wrote up a post for the 5th and one for the 7th, and then I vanished into a cloud of illness and phlegm.

There is nothing so oppressive as not being able to breath. There were days that I felt like someone was stepping on my chest. Of course, that didn’t stop me from trying to go see some free movie screenings. However, not being able to take a full breath and hearing a disturbing rattle in my lungs if I exhaled too deeply was just bad… when I realized that the never-ending pounding in my skull was actually from lack of caffeine, I felt like a complete idiot. Thankfully, the fine folks at Papa Johns will deliver Cokes along with pizza. Also, NyQuil works much better if you get the kind with the alcohol still in it. Its hard to feel sick when you are asleep.

However, illness does have its upsides. We did watch all of season three of 24. Now I’m only three seasons behind. I also played a lot of Dead Rising (hey, look! zombie games!) working my way toward the Zombie Genocider achievement (you have to kill 53,594 zombies, enough to equal the stated population of the town).

There comes a point, though, when you’ve missed all the work you can miss and slept all the sleep you can sleep and driven over all the zombies you can drive over… okay, driving over zombies never gets tiring, but there comes a point where you get sick and tired of being sick and tired. My point is at about 10 days.

Sometimes, a person just needs a break. I got sick, and I let myself be sick because I needed to be sick. Ten days of sick and I was ready to rejoin the world. I’m all better now, and I’m more certain than ever before that attitude and outlook affect your physical state.

What was the point of all this? Oh, likely just so that later I can justify to myself why I failed to reach 50,000 words for the NaNoWriMo by pointing and saying “I was sick!” But then again, I do still have ten days… 5,000 words a day. Maybe…

Winning the War

I am happy to report, my efforts are showing. I’m down now to getting maybe one credit card offer per week between my wife and I. Other junk has also cut back quite a bit, to the point where usually once a week my mailbox stays empty all day. As my requests to be removed from lists continue to filter through I expect that to get better.

And while I appear to be winning the war, there are some battles I am losing. The Golfsmith is a hateful spiteful company and I call on people to boycott them. My attempts to get removed from their lists have instead signed me up for more lists. I get at least one mailing per week now, correctly addressed to me, sometimes two. In addition, I’ve had to block them on my email since they decided to send me more than one email per day advertising their wares. My attempts to get removed from the email lists have been about as successful as getting off the real mail lists.

They do appear to be the only company so far that has done this. Most companies, at most, will ask for a reason why and I just say “I would prefer not to receive the mailer as I do not shop regularly at your store.” That seems to be good enough. If they press I’ll tell them I usually throw it in the trash and would prefer they save the money and my time and not send it to me. With the Golfsmith it appears that I may have to actually have to go to their distribution office and physically force someone to delete my address from their database.

Carpe Demon

The wife convinced me to read Carpe Demon by Julie Kenner. The story is basically Buffy the Vampire Slayer, if she got married, had kids and grew up.

It is a fun book, not horribly complex, but enough that I’ll read the other books in the series at some point (but not now, I tend to avoid reading series books back to back).

A Tiny First Step

In an effort to move forward on my little game idea, I’ve downloaded (once again) the tools from Multiverse to see if I can make heads or tails of building my own game world. I make no promises, of course, but any motion is good motion at this point.

Bring on the Zombies.

The Wizard Knight

I don’t want to be overly harsh here. But ultimately, I didn’t like The Knight and The Wizard, the two volume tale The Wizard Knight by Gene Wolfe. However, your tastes may vary, so if you see it in the book store, flip through the first few pages and see for yourself.

Now, why didn’t I like them?

The story was pretty good: a boy crosses into another world, one of giants and ogres and more, and becomes a man and a knight. Fairly typical, but with some interesting twists, like this world isn’t just one world, it’s seven worlds that layer over one another and the normal world, as far as normal goes in a fantasy setting, is smack in the middle, with three worlds above and three worlds below. Plenty of the characters were likable, and overall I enjoyed meeting them throughout the tale.

The one drawback, and to me it was huge but may not affect other readers as much, was that the entire story, across both books, was told as if the main character was writing down what happened in an enormous letter to his brother, back in our world (you know, the one we live in, without magic and dragons). As such, almost the entirety of the two books feels like someone is telling you a story, so as much as I wanted to get immersed in this world I was constantly kept at arms length by the writing style. It bugged me.

Along with this was also the author’s choice of weird formal language. The following is NOT an excerpt from either book, but is just an example of how many conversations go within the story:

“I have something that I must tell you, and I need you not to ask me questions while I do.”
“That is fine, but before you start I must know how you got here?”
“I came in a strange manner which will be clear when I tell you what I must tell you.”
“Then I will hinder you no longer. Tell me your story.”
“The story I am about to tell is strange and you may not believe me, but I ask you to trust that I am telling the truth of it.”
“I will take you at your word as I have no reason to doubt you.”
“I knew that you would as you are a trusting man. Here is my tale…”

About a third of every conversation between characters was verbal foreplay, telling each other that they want to tell each other things, interrupting each other to say things that didn’t need to be said at all. Now, this actually happens in real life. You are sitting with your friends at the local pub and you say, “Hey, I’ve got to tell you this story about work.” And they say, “Its not about the copy machine again is it?” And you say, “No, it isn’t, and if you let me tell the story you’d know that.” However, in real life this doesn’t happen all the time. In the book it happens all the time. It got to the point where I would literally see it coming and then skip two or three paragraphs to get to the point where the foreplay is done and the real conversation would begin.

Despite the style of the writing though, I did enjoy the world Gene crafted in his two volume tale. So, as I said before, if you see the book in the store, read a few pages, maybe a chapter or two, and if the writing style doesn’t bother you, pick up the books, it’ll be worth it. If the style bothers you, pick these up only if you are into world crafting and don’t mind it not being a smooth easy read.

To debate a point…

It’s one of those things that just annoys me. Sadly, I hear it almost every single day.

“The point is mute.” “It’s a mute point.”

Listen people… its moot, not mute. MOOT.

Moot is what these people intend to say. They want to tell you that your point is not worth arguing, or unwinnable. Instead, they tell you that your point doesn’t speak or make sound.

Telling these people this, however, is a MOOT point.