Sometimes there just are no words

It's times like this that I'm glad I left daily newspaper life behind. The images from Aurora, Colo., are beyond disturbing and it's got to be awful to be on this 24-hour news cycle when there is a story like this. At least with daily newspapers there was time to process, think and put stories together in a way that made sense. Now it's just an ever-flowing stream of bits and pieces and stories never come together so much as they build like some information tsunami that drowns us in trivialities.


But, even worse is the instantaneous commentary drives people to Facebook and other venting places to express the way they feel about what happened in purely political terms. Words. Words. Words. Too many words. Not enough thoughts. It's all visceral and it's all meaningless. Guns. No guns. Ban guns. More guns. Executions. Terrorism. Death penalty. No death penalty.


Meanwhile, in Aurora, Colo., people are gathering at a school and waiting for words. Family members who were going to the movie and who now aren't answering cell phones. Bodies unidentified that could be a loved one. Wounded in hospitals unable to speak for themselves that are still being treated to save their lives by people too busy and desperate to figure out--yet--who their loved ones might be. The awful waiting. And the awful waiting coming to an end with the words nobody ever wants to hear.


A mother is fighting for her life as I write this and she doesn't know her six-year old daughter is dead. I'm sure it was all to be a wonderful treat for mother and daughter to go out late and watch the summer's most-anticipated movie. And this, this is just so senseless. Sometimes there just are no words.


So, why, can't we just set aside the words? Can we just spend the day in quiet prayer and contemplation of all that is dear and precious to us? Let us all pray thanks for what we have and pray for comfort and healing in Aurora, Colo. Set our words aside for a day and, instead, think about those at that school waiting for news? Let's all leave the opinions and loud yammering behind for a day--a week even--and instead think about those in Aurora trying to make sense of the senseless.Let's focus our energy and strength on healing and comforting in these dark days. Because, truly, there just are no words.

The more you know ...

One of the many things I've learned over the years as a journalist and writer (two different things, you know) is that more information is a sure way to create confusion. We are all so good at snap judgements and we wind up with our worlds set pretty firmly in place. Then we come across more information.

I look across the political debates going on today and think about my time as a reporter and what it was like to see that whole process up close. Pretty ugly actually. Truth is, these folks are actually, in many cases, far worse than we suppose they are. And that's quite sad.

The recent debates and accompanying high-dollar attacks show us that the more we know the less we understand in many ways. Or, perhaps, the question isn't really about how much we know but, rather, how well we understand it and turn it into something thoughtful.

We've reached a point where everybody comes to the table with his or her own set of facts. We've stopping seeking understanding and have turned our focus purely to seeking confirmation that what we thought before we knew anything is true even in the face of facts that get in the way of the world being as we want it to be. We hear but we don't listen. We look but we don't see.

I've often wondered why writers who are the most economical with words are the most powerful with their words. On the day Lincoln gave the Gettysburg Address there was another speaker who was the "headline" act and who gave a speech that was several times longer than Lincoln's simple one written on the back of an envelope. I can't remember that other speaker's name. But I can sure remember the things Lincoln wrote on the back of that envelope when faced with the memory of that huge bloody clash at Gettysburg.

Things got crazy ...

Wow, things got crazy beginning in the spring of 2010. Then there was starting school, spending four months as a hospital chaplain and, now, working part-time as an intern at a United Methodist Church in Alpharetta, Ga. Now that's a wild ride.

My writing life has taken on a new chapter. As a seminary student, I've returned to the academic writing I thought I left behind when I walked away from graduate school about 20 years ago. And now I'm back and learning ever-new ways to approach words and writing through this strange new task called exegesis. It is, in a way, writing about writing. I've never taken such a close look at words and their meanings in my life. And it's been kind of fun. I'm about to face a large dose of it with New Testament studies this semester starting February 13.

I'm doing my seminary work at United Theological Seminary in Dayton,Ohio. United offers a hybrid M.Div. program that allows me to do most of my work online while spending a week on campus each semester. This allows me to continue working and pursue my studies at the same time. While helpful, it's still not exactly easy. It's a real challenge to fit school into a schedule already packed with a full-time job and a family.

And, as of September 2011, I added work at Midway United Methodist Church to that mix. I'm serving as an intern there and spending about 20 hours a week in church work at all sorts of levels. Pastor in Charge Stacey Hanson keeps me busy as the church keeps him busy. I knew Stacey from Roswell United Methodist Church and when he moved to Midway we stayed in touch with each other and when I need a place to do contextual ministry, I got in touch with Stacey and asked if he could find a place for me at Midway. The fact that I am unpaid probably made the offer even more attractive!

And, again, I face new styles of writing and wrestling with words. There are the weekly pastoral prayers and occasional sermons. All new styles of writing for me. And the idea of delivering my words out loud in front of others is a sometimes daunting task to take on. Preaching. It's what this calling leads to. And it's all about words.

What a bunch of wusses!

There is apparently something in New York called The Writers Room that rents space to writers and would-be writers to give them a place to work. A pretty cool concept, I think. But it's obviously populated with a bunch of wusses. Yep. Wusses. This article in the New York Daily News reports that a member of this little colony has been voted out because he uses, get this, a typewriter. Apparently the delicate nerves of the rest of the writers in this little colony are just too sensitive to deal with the muscular sound of words being slammed into shape by metal keys striking paper. Poor babies.

What's really funny is that the logo for The Writers Room is--get this--in a typewriter font!

It seems member Skye Ferrante took an eight-month hiatus from lugging his mother's 1929 Royal typewriter to his spot there and found, upon his return to the space he pays $1,400 a year for, that those in charge at The Writers Room had decided that all of the typewriter users had finally died off and such things would no longer be welcome in the quiet as can be confines of this high-minded colony of writers. They did relent and allow Ferrante to keep coming until his deal runs out at the end of June. Well, that was sure swell of them.

I know we all approach that scary void that is writing in different ways. Believe it or not, I still do rough drafts with a fountain pen and I even have some manual typewriters here I use to write rough drafts, letters and other things. I also compose on the computer many times but it's usually not my best work and it's usually not meant to be. My computer keyboard is where the workaday writing gets done. For things I care about, the best place to start is always with words directly on paper. I've got many reasons for that and chief among them is the ease of the delete key. I find many times I would like to have back words I deleted when I got distracted by the temptation to edit before my work was finished. I've already written about this process here in this blog, so I'll not go much deeper there--just scroll down.

I am prejudiced by my background here. I entered the newsroom after the days of typewriters on reporters' desks but not by much. And I learned to write under all kinds of pressure in a room without even the silencing effect of cubicles. It was just a bunch of desks shoved tight against each other and every desk was occupied by a reporter who was constantly talking on the phone, typing madly on the noisy keyboards of the early days of desktops and, oftentimes, the cacophony of reporters listening to tapes of interviews to try to double-check quotes on deadline. There was a copy desk still attached to the engraving department with pneumatic tubes. It was a noisy place and I cranked out 300 bylined stories a year in that din. And I never noticed. My words were always there in my head not hanging in that mid-air confusion of sound and furious activity.

Poor babies. They have to sit there in pristine silence with their own precious thoughts so ethereal that they could just drift away in the noise of someone banging those typewriter keys. Poor babies. I'm so sorry that writing is such a painful process like a migraine headache that requires a retreat to a dark, silent room to wrestle with the agony of getting words on the LCD. I'm sure their muses are such soft whispers that the sound of toilets flushing on the next floor up could drown out the most precious of nuggets of literary gold. Poor babies. It must be such a pity to have that thought stream broken by the sound of the doorknob being turned every time someone new enters the colony for a day's work. And, oh my God! That rustling sound of them taking off their coats! Really! I can't see how anybody can work in an environment so beset with noises that fracture the delicate dew-coated spiderwebs of words hanging right there in the mind. Poor babies.

Wusses.

We'll Make it Up on Volume

Newsweek is up for sale. Another in a long series of media tales of collapse and change. The clip below from The Daily Show features the editor of Newsweek talking about the announcement of the sale and what it means, in his eyes, from the perspective of what is being lost in America as more of the traditional journalism outlets consolidate, shrink, close and simply drift away. Jon Stewart, as always, is razor sharp in pointing out the many realities of the world around him. And, in this case, it strikes me as being critical in that he notes that the "Emperor has no clothes" observation to be made about content aggregators is that they will have nothing to aggregate if nobody is around to do works of journalism. And we are fast approaching that time.

Meacham also notes that it's impossible to do quality journalism if people are unwilling to pay for it. And if that becomes the case, the audience will get exactly what it pays for--FOX News. All opinion and no reporting. Comment and analysis without journalism is empty. A meaningless, uninformed shell for deliberately uninformed people. And I think it's sad to face a potential reality of an American public that goes in a generation from being daily consumers--willing to pay for it--of news and information into an uninformed, easily inflamed, unthinking mob. I can remember the daily newspaper that showed up at my parent's house everyday. And we were clearly a working-class family complete with my mother being a stay-home mom and my dad carrying a lunch box out the door every day along with the tools of his carpentry and brick mason trades. No elites here. And at 6 p.m. every night, it was the local TV news from stations in the closest cities followed by the network news. We were an NBC household so it wasn't Uncle Walter.

I'm not advocating the clinging to print journalism. I think print on paper has lots of life left in it but it is much less life than we used to think and I believe that print will continue to shrink as the ad revenues that support continue to wither. But I also think that we have to get back to seeing that there is value in hard work and reporting. You can't aggregate what isn't there and, as Meacham points out, we don't see any of these various aggregators getting rich and building Rupert Murdoch style empires on content aggregation. It's as empty as the dot-com bubble with all of those companies that were losing money on every transaction who justified it with the statement that is at the head of this entry.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Jon Meacham
www.thedailyshow.com
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Long days

As we slide toward summer (thermometer says we're already there in Georgia!), I'm struck by how discombobulating the day length is after that time change a few weeks ago. As I work to finish my workdays, I'm thrown off by how light it is outside and I have to keep an eye on the time or my mind-clock waits until twilight begins to creep and I find myself still at my desk at 8 p.m.

I wonder when  most writers find themselves at their most productive? Is it the long daylight days of summer or does it take the dark, long, cold nights of winter to put writers in their chairs banging away at their work? I've always been either fortunate or unfortunate in that my writing was dictated by a paying job that required regular output. Daily newspapers were kind of funny that way--they came out everyday regardless of the number of hours of sunlight available. But I also know that those papers we put out in July and August were challenged for news in many cases as it seems folks just slowed down and stretched out across all of those hours of daylight like some chaise lounge on a shady porch. Being in the Southeastern U.S. likely influences that a great deal--who wants to be out there in the 90-degree, 90-percent humidity doing something newsworthy? No wonder we had lots of pictures of kids in pools and eating ice cream in our local sections along with short stories about the heat and the lack of rain.

I've often wondered when I'm at my most creative with words. I think my production and ability to create is stunted in the long days. Heat. Humidity. Too much to do outdoors. It's hard to say. Maybe my mind gets muddled by the heat and the distractions of sunny days. Or maybe it takes the short daylight days to put me at my desk like Bob Crachit scribbling away.

So, as I look out at the green-yellow cloud that covers Atlanta in the spring, I'm wondering where all the words went.

Some words are ugly ...

In watching the zoo that is our nation's capital this week, I've been reminded that not all words are good words. And I'm not talking about the "Seven Words You Can't Say on Television" of George Carlin fame. No, I'm talking about how we have seen reasoned debate sucked from the public square like a mobile home in a tornado. Instead we have people standing outside Congress shouting racial epithets and making slurs about any number of groups that they have decided stand against them. We have a Congressman yelling "babykiller" and later apologizing saying that he wasn't talking about the person who was speaking at the time. Well, are we really that stupid or does the Congressman just hope we are?

I'm a Southerner. I've grown up hearing the ugliest of words used in everyday conversation during my childhood years. I've been happy to hear those words slowly disappear from the public discourse over my lifetime. And I'm saddened beyond measure to hear them back again. And while I understand the decision-making process in the national media when it comes to covering these protest groups, I also hold them accountable for not revealing more to us just exactly what these protesters are. Racists. People of hate. Screaming toddlers standing in the public square yelling "Mine!" and "No!" at the top of their lungs. Spoiled children. And they are not the heirs to the legacy of the Founding Fathers nor are they the heirs to the generation that bled, died, and sacrificed for the freedom of the entire world only 60 years ago. No, they are not. Franklin, Jefferson, Paine, Washington, Madison, Hamilton--all were men who believed with their very souls that the ultimate good they could do was to serve their country. Not to stand on the sideline and hurl ugly words at the ones who have chosen to sacrifice and serve their country. To travel on good roads, fly into safe airports and stand behind the protection of police officers on the public payroll and act like spoiled toddlers is the ultimate in hypocritical selfishness.

I believe that there is legitimate debate in our public square. I believe we have serious policy issue discussions to be had. But I don't think standing outside the nation's seat of representative government and using racial epithets is any of that. I think it's spoiled children who are too immature to carry on a reasoned debate. Grow up America. Your ancestors are ashamed at how some of you are behaving today.

Yes, some words are just ugly.

Survival is a strong urge

Meet Uno. In recent weeks, this pine warbler has become quite the center of attention for our household.

He first came to my notice a few weeks ago when (I hope) the last spasms of cold weather from an already cold winter were gripping the Southeast U.S. I had scattered some birdseed across the top railing on the deck while filling up the feeders and I noticed this bright yellow pine warbler sitting there in the pile of seed. Not standing, sitting. He was comfortably plopped in the seed with his belly on the rail and his feet tucked underneath. I thought that was odd as most of our birds hop around on the railing and forage for the seed I leave behind as I'm filling the various feeders on the deck. I went back to washing my hands and fixing coffee and didn't pay much attention to the outside scene for a few minutes.

After getting my coffee made, I looked again and it occurred to me that something was different about this particular pine warbler. He had only one leg. The right leg was drawn up tight against his belly and he was hopping around on one leg. Observations over the next few days confirmed we had a one-legged pine warbler who was coming regularly to our back deck. He wasn't able to get to the feeders like the other birds as he couldn't manipulate the claw on his right leg. He could, however, hang on to the suet feeders with one leg long enough to get a few bites and he was pretty good about foraging on the deck for spillage.

A few days later, I pointed out this bird to my wife, Amy. She began to watch for him and we began to put a soft suet--called Bark Butter--on the top of the deck railing for him and the other birds as it was still cold outside. The Bark Butter can be spread with the back of a fork against the vertical railings on the deck, across the rail on top and even into the bark of a tree--thus the name. As it turned out, the pine warbler loves Bark Butter. So much so that he came up to Amy one day--he's quite brave--and snatched some off the fork as she held it out toward him.

Well, that was the start. As you can see from the photo above, he is a very brave pine warbler. This photo is of Amy's mother visiting recently to feed the bird I've come to call Uno. Within a day of the incident with the fork, Amy had him regularly coming to her finger to snatch off bits of Bark Butter. He would hop away a bit, eat that and then return. Sometimes he doesn't even wait for us to get to the rail--instead flying right at us and hovering just long enough to grab the treat and fly off into the trees to enjoy it.

So, there's Uno. About three times a day--sometimes more--he will land on the deck railing and look at us expectantly awaiting his favorite treat. When I go out into the yard with the dog he will come to the deck and sit and look at me. He'll wait patiently while I go inside and get the Bark Butter and come out with some on my finger. He'll dance nervously on the rail and then confidently come up and grab some off the end of my finger. He still likes Amy best but, as the photo attests, he has become quite fond of all of us as long as we produce the Bark Butter.