November 24: Wildest Dreams, Powerless, Charles Dickens Biography

So saying, they turned on their heels and walked out of the door and into a life-style beyond their wildest dreams.

If only finding happiness were as easy as that.

I believe there is nothing more difficult than to admit that you are powerless.  Human beings like to believe that they are in charge of their destinies, from first breath to last.  Of course, this belief is false.  Most of the big things in life--birth, death, love, an ABBA reunion tour--are pretty much out of our control.  On top of that, we have no control over other people, either.  As much as we would like to live forever or have our children live forever, we have no say in that.  Just as we have no say in who we love, or who loves us.  Death happens.  Or it doesn't.  Love happens.  Or it doesn't.  ABBA happens.  Or it doesn't.

Now, those statements are not profound or groundbreaking in any way.  In fact, in the grand scheme of things, I would say that's pretty much Being Human:101.  However, I need to remind myself of these truths pretty much on a daily basis, because I'm stubborn.  And because I like to play God.  I think I know what's best for me and for everybody else.  Certainly, I think I know what will make me happy.

Today has been a day that has reminded me, frequently, of all of these annoying truths.  I won't go into detail, but I'm sitting here now, typing this post, wishing everyone would just . . . do what I think they should do.  It would make my life so much easier.  Of course, I only have control over my actions.  For example, writing this blog today is challenging for me.  My heart isn't in it, because I'm struggling with its subject matter.  In short, this writing is not making me very happy.  Yet, I choose to continue writing.

Of course, I could choose to do something else.  Something that would make me happier.  I could log out, turn off my computer, and take a nap.  Or order a pizza.  Or watch It's a Wonderful Life.  Or work on my Christmas essay.  Or read a good book.  I haven't read Peter Ackroyd's biography of Charles Dickens in a few years.  That would be about 1200 pages of pure pleasure for me.

Perhaps reading that Dickens biography sounds like torture to you.  Writing for pleasure is also pretty foreign to most people, as well.  Jimmy Stewart might irritate you.  (If he does, by the way, you and I can't be friends.)  Happiness, you see, is a matter of choice, as long as you aren't basing your happiness on someone else's actions.

So, I am powerless.  I admit that.  I am going to choose to do something tonight that makes me happy.  It may involve Charles Dickens or Jimmy Stewart or a fountain pen.  I have control over that.  And I will not let anyone else's actions interfere with my happiness.  Until tomorrow.

After all, as Saint Marty says, tomorrow is another day to be powerless.

A picture that makes Saint Marty happy . . .

July 25: Nagging Little Problems, the Meaning of Life, a Miracle

Some more about Deep Thought's answer to the Big Question . . .

A man standing on a brightly dressed dais before the building which clearly dominated the square was addressing the crowd over a tannoy.

"O people who wait in the shadow of Deep Thought!" he cried out.  "Honored Descendants of Vroomfondel and Majikthise, the Greatest and Most Truly Interesting Pundits the Universe has ever known, the Time of Waiting is over!"

Wild cheers broke out among the crowd.  Flags, streamers and wolf whistles sailed through the air.  The narrower streets looked rather like centipedes rolled over on their backs and frantically waving their legs in the air.

"Seven and a half million years our race has waited for this Great and Hopefully Enlightening Day!" cried the cheerleader.  "The Day of Answer!"

Hurrahs burst from the ecstatic crowd.

"Never again," cried the man, "never again will we wake up in the morning and think Who am I?  What is my purpose in life?  Does it really, cosmically speaking matter if I don't get up and go to work?  For today we will finally learn once and for all the plain and simple answer to all these nagging little problems of Life, the Universe and Everything!"

The Honored Descendants of Vroomfondel and Majikthise are gathered to find out the meaning of the universe from Deep Thought, the stupendous super computer that has been working on the answer for seven and a half million years.  Of course, Douglas Adams is providing satire and parody here.  He's making fun of philosophers and "deep thinkers" everywhere.

The most serious part of this satire is that all of this race of beings is looking to a machine to provide purpose and guidance and happiness in their lives.  Of course, that is not going to happen.  I could pose the question to Google, "What is the meaning of life?"  Here is one of the answers I will get:

Life has different definition in the eyes of different people. ... For many life is all about love. For a few, life is all about religious practices. For philosophers like Aristotle life is about happiness: "Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence."

So, that isn't necessarily a definitive answer.  It's simply an overview of several philosophical and religious and cultural responses.  Those responses weren't created by Google.  They were compiled by Google.

Last night, I spoke about the current financial circumstance my wife and I find ourselves in at the moment.  No money to get groceries.  Bills we can't pay.  I was feeling pretty desperate.  I simply was at the end of my rope.  I had no answers.  I had no where to turn.

After I published that post, I said a prayer.  Gave all my worries and problems to God.  I couldn't think of anything else to do.  Then, I went home, heated up a frozen pastie, made an omelet with the last four eggs in my house, and I fed my daughter and her boyfriend.

Then I received a whole lot of grace.  I'm not going into any details, but, by about ten o'clock last night, our cupboards and refrigerator were full.  God sent some angels our way, and I am so humbled by this act of love and generosity for me and my family.

You know, it's really easy to look at the state of the world and be really cynical about the human race.  Then, God steps in and does what He does best--restores your faith.  I want to thank those angels who helped us out so much yesterday.  They made a miracle happen last night.  I went from feeling alone and desperate to loved and hopeful.

We're not out of the woods yet.  The credit union turned down our loan application this afternoon.  Still trying to figure out how to pay a pile of bills.  As I said last night, it has a whole lot to do with the lack of a paycheck from the university over the summer.  And a few other things that I had no control over.  It's a little frightening being this powerless.

However, last night proved to me that God is on my side.  I place these worries and problems in His hands tonight, because that's all I can do.

Saint Marty learned last night that God really does listen to prayer.  And angels are right around the corner.  That is the real meaning of life, the universe, and everything.

July 22: Deep Thought, Hypomanic Episode, Powerless

Deep Thought needs a little time for some deep thought . . .

"Yes," declared Deep Thought, "I said I'd have to think about it, didn't I?  And it occurs to me that running a program like this is bound to create an enormous amount of popular publicity for the whole area of philosophy in general.  Everyone's going to have their own theories about what answer I'm eventually going to come up with, and who better to capitalize on that media market than you yourselves?  So long as you can keep disagreeing with each other violently enough and maligning each other in the popular press, and so long as you have clever agents, you can keep yourselves on the gravy train for life.  How does that sound?"

The two philosophers gaped at him.

"Bloody hell," said Majikthise, "now that is what I call thinking.  Here, Vroomfondel, why do we never think of things like that?"

"Dunno," said Vroomfondel in an awed whisper; "think our brains must be too highly trained, Majikthise."

So saying, they turned on their heels and walked out of the door and into a life-style beyond their wildest dreams.

I really don't have a whole lot of time or energy tonight for deep thought.  I certainly don't have seven and a half million years.  Plus, my thoughts will never put me on the gravy train for the rest of my life.  They probably won't even buy me an order of French fries from McDonald's.

I think my big problem right now is that I'm trying to control circumstances over which I have no control.  My wife, at the moment, is in a hypomanic state.  For those of you not familiar with that term, here is the definition:  "a hypomanic episode [includes], over the course of at least four days, elevated mood plus three of the following symptoms OR irritable mood plus four of the following symptoms:  pressured speech, inflated self-esteem or grandiosity, decreased need for sleep."

I, myself, don't sleep much when my wife is rattling around the house at three o'clock in the morning or jumping in a car to go for a midnight drive.  If you haven't noticed, I'm kind of a worrier.  I want to help fix her situation, but I can't.  That's makes me feel quite alone and helpless.  I can suggest to my wife that she take her sleeping pills and go to bed, but she rightfully resents when I do this.  She feels like I'm treating her like a child, which is never my intention.

Last night, I got a total of about two hours of sleep.  I'm kind of exhausted.  I'm hoping that tonight will be different. 

I love my wife, and I only want what's best for her.  Unfortunately, her bipolar doesn't always make that an easy process.  At times, I simply have to step back and let God take over.  That's where I am this evening.

Saint Marty is ready for a long winter's nap, in the middle of July.

June 30: Dentarthurdent, Mystery and Myth, All the Wonder Things

Arthur is trying to unravel the mystery of the old man he has just met on the surface of Magrathea, which itself, up until a couple chapters ago, was a myth--like the Golden Fleece or the city of Troy . . .

Arthur, a regular Guardian reader, was deeply shocked at this.

"That's a pretty unpleasant way to behave, isn't it?"

"Is it?" asked the old man mildly.  "I'm sorry, I'm a bit out of touch."

He pointed down into the crater.

"Is that robot yours?" he said.

"No," came a thin metallic voice from the crater.  "I'm mine."

"If you'd call it a robot," muttered Arthur.  "It's more a sort of electronic sulking machine."

"Bring it," said the old ma.  Arthur was quite surprised to hear a note of decision suddenly present in the old man's voice.  He called to Marvin, who crawled up the slope making a big show of being lame, which he wasn't.

"On second thought," said the old man, "leave it here.  You must come with me.  Great things are afoot."  He turned toward his craft which, though no apparent signal had been given, now drifted quietly toward them through the dark.

Arthur looked down at Marvin, who now made an equally big show of turning round laboriously and trudging off down into the crater again, muttering sour nothings to himself.

"Come," called the old man, "come now or you will be late."

"Late/" said Arthur.  "What for?"

"What is your name, human?"

"Dent.  Arthur Dent," said Arthur.

"Late, is in the late Dentarthurdent," said the old man, sternly.  "It's a sort of threat, you see."  Another wistful look came into his tired old eyes.  "I've never been very good at them myself, but I'm told they can be very effective."

Arthur blinked at him.

"What an extraordinary person," he muttered to himself.

"I beg your pardon?" said the old man.

"Oh, nothing, I'm sorry," said Arthur in embarrassment.  "All right, where do we go?"

"In my aircar," said the old man, motioning Arthur to get into the craft which had settled silently next to them.  "We are going deep into the bowels of the planet where even now our race is being revived from its five-million-year slumber.  Magrathea awakes."

Arthur shivered involuntarily as he seated himself next to the old man.  The strangeness of it, the silent bobbing movement of the craft as it soared into the night sky, quite unsettled him.

He looked at the old man, his face illuminated by the dull glow of tiny lights on the instrument panel.

"Excuse me," he said to him, "what is your name, by the way?"

"My name?" said the old man, and the same distant sadness came into his face again.  He paused.  "My name," he said, "is Slartibartfast."

Arthur practically choked.

"I beg your pardon?" he spluttered.

"Slartibartfast," repeated the old man quietly.

"Slartibartfast?"

The old man looked at him gravely.

"I said it wasn't important," he said.

The aircar sailed through the night.

The old man could be the last survivor of Magrathea or Atlantis.  He could be Methuselah or Noah.  A resident of Shangri-La or Brigadoon.  He may be a man or a god or a demon or a robot.  At this point, Arthur isn't sure who or what he is dealing with.  It's all mystery and myth.

As I've said before in this blog, I'm fine living with negative capability, to borrow from John Keats.  Living with uncertainty is part of the human condition.  That pretty much describes my whole life.  Especially these last couple months, I'm never sure when I wake up what the day will bring me.  Ever.

Now, I would be happier living in certainty, but that's not a realistic goal.  Benjamin Franklin said, "In this world, nothing can be said to be certain except death and taxes."  However, even that quote is draped in mystery, for it may have been Daniel Defoe or Christopher Bullock who first uttered it more than 60 years before Franklin, making one of the Founding Fathers of the United States a plagiarist.

We all live in negative capability.  There are no guarantees when you wake up in the morning that you will come home at night.  No guarantees that you will keep your job or your wife or your children.   I think that everyone has to fool themselves every day in order to face life.  For instance, when I got out of bed today, it was with the understanding that I would be going to church and then spending the afternoon mowing the lawn at my mother's house.  Those were my plans.

Now, those plans kind of panned out.  I did worship with my wife, and then I did spend a couple hours pushing the lawnmower at my mother's.  However, it could have easily gone in another direction.  My car could have been sideswiped in the parking lot at McDonald's as I was picking up breakfast.  The lawnmower could have refused to start.  It could have rained.  None of those things happened.

Today, my wife is struggling with her bipolar disorder.  She hasn't been sleeping well recently.  That, in itself, is not cause for major concern.  However, she's also been unable to be restful at home, suffers from racing thoughts.  (She told me this afternoon, "I feel like I'm jumping out of my skin.")  She also had a pretty bad episode of depression on Thursday evening.

All of these things point toward a problem that needs to be addressed with her doctor.  My wife has already called her doctor's office once.  She's going to call again tomorrow.  In the mean time, she didn't go to work today.  Instead, she stayed home and slept.  (She only got three hours of sleep, if that, last night.)

Bipolar is a mysterious disorder.  It can be completely controlled for years with a certain medication, and then, one day, that medication can stop working properly, with serious results.  My wife and I have been through some difficult times with her mental illness.  I remember nights where my wife would jump in our car and disappear to Walmart to go grocery shopping at 3 a.m.  She would start home improvement projects that went unfinished.  One weekend, we drove to Wisconsin and bought a brand new minivan.  (Several months later, we had to trade in the minivan for a car we could actually afford.)

So, you see, I have some experience with myth, mystery, and negative capability.  I know that a day can turn from mundane to insane very quickly.  I also know that I can't do anything to control the negative capabilities of my life.  This may sound very twelve-steppish, but I have come to accept very recently that I am powerless.  I can't control the weather.  I can't control my wife's mental illness.  I can't control what happens in the Star Wars franchise.  (If I could have, Han Solo would still be alive.)

What can I do in the face of mystery?  I can confront it when it happens.  Deal with it.  Move on.  I certainly can't live my life trying to avoid it.  If I did that, I wouldn't ever get out of bed.  I'd just live my life in fear of the unknown.  And I would miss all the wonderful things God sends my way.  A daughter graduating from high school  A son winning a poetry contest.  A dinner of lobster ravioli.  A evening walk with my wife, holding her hand, talking about tomorrow and the next day and the next.

Yes, the future is full of myth and mystery and unknowns. 

But it also contains hope, and that (along with a little bit of chocolate and a good book) makes Marty a happy saint.

April 25: Extermination Camp, Geneva Convention, Powerless

The train had arrived on a siding by a prison which was originally constructed as an extermination camp for Russian prisoners of war.

The guards peeked inside Billy's car owlishly, cooed calmingly.  They had never dealt with Americans before, but they surely understood this general sort of freight.  They knew that it was essentially a liquid which could be induced to flow slowly toward cooing and light.  It was nighttime.

Billy has been on the prisoner-of-war train for ten days, traveling across Germany to different internment camps.  He hasn't slept for a good portion of that journey, and the cuisine along the way has been sparse to nonexistent.  To put it simply, the Germans are not really following the rules of the Geneva Convention.

I appreciate organizations that fight to insure that people are treated fairly and humanely.  The United Nations.  ACLU.  Labor unions.  The rules of the Geneva Convention regarding prisoners of war have existed since 1929.  That doesn't mean that those rules have always been followed in times of war, but those standards of conduct exist to hold countries accountable.

I work for two large organizations--one a healthcare system, the other a university.  At the healthcare system, I am not a part of a labor union.  In fact, the healthcare system has done everything within its power to dissuade its employees from unionizing, and those tactics have worked, over and over and over.  At the university, I am a member of the faculty union.  I am accorded certain protections because of that union membership, including seniority and class assignments and promotion.

Really, the Geneva Convention and labor unions exist for the same reason--to help people who are not in a position to help themselves.  To protect the powerless from the powerful.  To make sure that everyone--rich, poor, white, African American, man, woman, gay, straight--is treated with respect and understanding.

Of course, the United States--and the world at large--has been swept up in a tidal wave of xenophobia recently.  Refugees from war-torn countries like Syria are not seen as human beings.  They're seen as would-be radicals and terrorists, ignoring the fact that the five million people who have fled Syria are victims of state terrorism. That is not an alternative fact.

I'm not saying these things because I'm Democrat or liberal or anti-Trump or pro-Bernie.  I'm saying these things because I'm part of the human race, and I think that every life is important.  Sure, there are radicals in the world.  Extremists.  Terrorists.  But, if I turn my back on a person in need because of fear, then the bad guys have won.  I refuse to let that happen.

Saint Marty is thankful tonight for love and compassion.

March 18: "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring," God's Love Number Twenty-Nine, Vacation

Ives kneeling, the choir started to sing "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring," and his head tipped back.

Ives is at the end of his life.  He's tired, but happy.  At peace.  After decades of pain and grief, Ives can listen to music, pray, attend church without the torment of grief and anger.  In some ways, he has reached a kind of enlightenment, backed up by a church choir.

It has been another really long day.  My head hurts, and all I can think about is getting to Friday morning.  I will be getting the hell out of town for a few days.  No work.  No teaching.  Just eating, reading, drinking, and more eating.  Oh, and my daughter's dance competition.

I have not reached any kind of enlightenment like Ives.  For the past three or four days, I've been praying that I can somehow give my worries over to God.  After all, I can't control whether I get one or two classes to teach in the fall.  I can't control where I'm told to work in the medical office.  Yet, I'm losing sleep, getting headaches because I'm powerless.

So, tonight, with my head throbbing and my eyes burning, I'm grateful for the promise of some time off.  A vacation.  That's God's love number twenty-nine.

Maybe Saint Marty will find some enlightenment on the road.

I wonder if they sell enlightenment at Starbucks

May 26: Comfort, Other Ministers, Powerless, New Cartoon

"Jacob," he said, imploringly.  "Old Jacob Marley, tell me more.  Speak comfort to me, Jacob."

"I have none to give," The Ghost replied.  "It comes from other regions, Ebenezer Scrooge, and is conveyed  by other ministers, to other kinds of men.  Nor can I tell you what I would.  A very little more, is all permitted to me.  I cannot rest.  I cannot stay.  I cannot linger anywhere.  My spirit never walked beyond our counting-house--mark me!--in life my spirit never roved beyond the narrow limits of our money-changing hole; and weary journeys lie before me!"

Not a very comforting passage this morning from Charles Dickens.  It appears near the beginning of the novel and doesn't paint a very flattering picture of the afterlife.  Or at least Jacob Marley's afterlife.  And it also doesn't provide much solace to Scrooge, who seems to be one step shy of being condemned to the ninth circle of the Inferno.

I have to say, the last couple of days have been a little difficult for me, ever since I received the news about the repair needed on my wife's Subaru.  Out of all the things in life that can cause me worry, finances top the list.  I hate having, as the old saying goes, to rob Peter to pay Paul.  I think there's a reason why finances are the number one cause of divorce in the United States.  The worry is insidious.  I haven't slept well since Wednesday.  Scrooge (and Marley, when he was alive) is in the business of creating financial stress.  He makes people lose sleep.  He provides no comfort, even though he has the financial means.

This morning, as I was taking my shower, I was really thinking a lot about money and worry.  I came to two realizations.  First, I can't do anything about having too little money.  I already have two, basically, full-time jobs, plus a couple part-timers.  My wife has been applying for jobs all over the place.  She just had another job interview yesterday.  Unless Scrooge's nephew, Fred, offers one of us a better position, we are in an economic holding pattern.  Second, worry is a waste of time.  It helps nothing and just consumes huge chunks of energy.  I need to take a cue from Bob Cratchit on this issue.  Bob seems to worry very little and has faith that everything is going to work out for the best.

Therefore, today I'm going to try to practice a little less worry and a little more faith.  A little less Scrooge, a little more Bob.  There are "other ministers" to provide comfort, as Marley says, and I'm going to have to trust in those ministers.

Embrace your limitations, Saint Marty.  You are powerless.  Until you win the Pulitzer and/or Nobel Prize.

Confessions of Saint Marty