Category: blog

Harsh and Dreadful Love

NB: I am writing about the days I did street engagement work among the unhoused population as a way of dealing with the trauma I experienced there. – HH

A few years into my work among the unhoused, I was making maybe $1200 a month doing this work, and it took all of my time. I was making ends meet (barely) by selling hotdogs on weekend nights on the corner between a porn shop and the leather bar.

When I talked about my work in churches (which was my major source of funding at this point), I was either revered or ridiculed – there was little middle ground. I was dispirited and exhausted.

So when I was invited to contribute a chapter to a book about love by a Christian publishing house, I got really excited. At that point, I was just desperate to be taken seriously.

If you are a creative person, there is no end of people who will want to exploit you for their benefit. For example, this particular project offered no pay for my work (other than the exposure and 1 free author copy). I assume the other 40 some odd contributors also were unpaid, but some of them were big names at the time, so maybe the headliners got paid and I didn’t. I have no idea. I just know I didn’t.

The publishing company would later go out of business, and while the book is still available on Amazon, I won’t link to it here, because when my author copy came in the mail (there is no feeling like holding a book in your hand that holds your words) the first thing I noticed is that it looked and felt cheap. The second thing was that it was full of typos. And then I saw that they had changed my story.

I don’t just mean it was edited – I expect and welcome edits, especially copy edits. No, the editor of this book literally changed the story I submitted, literally giving me interior dialog that suited their narrative, and that made it more “Christian”.

It might have been different if I had made the story up, but this was a real thing I had experienced. The struggles I felt were real. The whole point of my story was that love was hard, and the edits changed that narrative. They changed what I thought, what I believed.

I felt betrayed. I was already sick of a church industrial complex more interested in making things suit their narrative than reality. It was neither the first or the last time the world of professional Christianity would make me feel like I was being used.

Here is the story as I wrote it.

A Harsh and Dreadful Love

I’m not a huge fan of modern country music – but I love Johnny Cash. 

I know, I know, everybody loves Johnny Cash.  Now. But not many people were showing him any love back in the early 1990’s. He was washed up. Forgotten. Out of date. Just plain…old. 

But I was a true believer. I have always loved Johnny Cash, even when it looked like his career was over. I have digital copies of his entire discography. 

Every.  Single.  Album. 

I know the words to all of the songs, even the bad ones (If there were bad ones – a point I am not entirely willing to concede).

I love Johnny Cash. 

And I also love my wife.  But while my wife and I, like any married couple, have our ups and downs, Johnny and I have never had a bad day. It’s always been smooth sailing between Johnny and me. Johnny has never been upset when I forgot the milk. I have never snapped at Johnny because I couldn’t find my shoes. 

But that is because Johnny and I don’t have a real relationship. I never met Johnny Cash. He never knew my name. All I have is his music and the meaning I place on that music and the feelings and emotion I put on him. It turns out, Johnny and I hate the same people. 

 But that’s because I really just love the idea of Johnny Cash. 

Meanwhile, my wife and I have a real relationship.  On some days it is a lot like heaven, and other days it reminds me of the other place. Sometimes, it’s an act of sheer will to reach the end of the day.  But that is because it is a real relationship, involving real people and real pain and real feelings. 

In the Gospels, Jesus says the entirety of scripture can be summed up in just two statements: 

Love God with all you have in you. Love your neighbor as yourself. 

Love God, and love your neighbor. Sounds nice, doesn’t it? I mean, who can be against loving your neighbor? Hearing this over and over in our liturgies and our devotions for over two thousand years, we have lost sight of the radical nature of what Jesus is proposing. 

Because it’s not just “Love your neighbor”. It’s “Love your neighbor as yourself”. 

What does our loving our neighbor have to do with my love for Johnny Cash? 

Simply this: I don’t love Johnny Cash – just the idea of Johnny Cash. And we’re much better at loving the idea of our neighbor than we are at actually loving our neighbor. 

In The Brothers Karamazov, a young widow is speaking to the wise old priest. She confesses her dream of serving the poor, of tending the wounds of the sick, of feeding the hungry. But she is concerned: What if the poor are unappreciative? What if they are rude? What if they are petty and demanding?

The priest tells her that “Love in practice is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams”. 

It is into this harsh and dreadful reality that Jesus calls us. 

* * *

Erica is a pain in my ass. 

No matter what spin I put on it, she just isn’t a very nice person. 

Erica is one of the many at-risk people I work with every day. She is constantly on the brink of homelessness and several times a year ends up in a physical relationship where she gets physically abused. To protect herself, she has learned to be the abuser, not the abused. She is rude and angry and, often, very drunk. 

On Saturdays and Sundays, we have ‘Breakfast in the Park’, our little meal sharing initiative where we bring coffee and sausage and biscuits to the park and share with whoever comes. No agenda, other than sharing from our abundance. 

When she shows up, however, Erica always has an agenda.  She breaks in line. She pesters folks for money. She bitches about the color of the free jacket we gave her or that Stephanie got a nicer one than she did. If you don’t watch her, she will get back in line, ostensibly to get another jacket or pair of shoes for her ‘cousin’, which will actually end up on Martin Street, traded for her drug of choice.

If that was not enough, Erica is a first class bigot, too. She yells at the Latino men she imagines are trying to cut in front of her. Since Erica is Black, this adds a delightful bit of racial tension to our little gathering.   

I often wish she would just go away. 

Just before Christmas, it hit a new level. Samir is a delightful Indian man who always lives in that gray area between housed and homeless.  He is always smiling and happy, and I have seen him take shoes we have given him and give them to someone who needed them more. He is not just a guest of ours – he is also a volunteer, helping us set up the tables and unpack the vehicles. I wish I had 100 volunteers just like Samir. 

Erica was at the head of the line. Samir was wrestling the coffee urn from the car when Erica shouts “I don’t want that A-rab touching my food. He looks like a terrorist or something”. 

I blew my top. “Shut up! Just shut the hell up!” I shout at Erica. “Samir is my friend and our guest – just like you are. If you don’t want food Samir has touched, you can leave.”

She mumbled something under her breath – I am not sure what it was, but I am pretty sure it was not “I love you”. She took her food and coffee and marched away, quietly, for which I was thankful. 

The next week, I saw Erica coming down the sidewalk toward where we were setting up. Samir, who was unloading the coffee, saw her first and pointed her out to me.  I thought, “Oh boy! Here we go again…” I had this bad feeling in my gut – like when you see the train wreck coming, but really can’t do anything about it. But she surprised me. 

She comes up to me.

“Hugh,” she said. “I owe you an apology. I am sorry for the way I acted last week. I was wrong, and you were right to chew me out. Are we still friends?”

You can look at this one way and believe that nothing has changed. Erica is still a liar and a thief, and her presence still brings tension to the group when she shows up. On another level, she at least owns up to her end of the relationship, and that is not a small thing at all. And I have come to realize I had not loved Erica as I did myself – I only loved Erica as I wished she was. I loved my idea of Erica. No wonder she kept disappointing me. 

Several weeks into this new aspect of our relationship, Erica and I are not yet pals, but we are civil to each other when we run into each other, which is often. Last time I gave her a biscuit, she said thank you and I didn’t want to punch her, so maybe she has traveled a bit farther than I have.   But we are working on it.

John the evangelist tells us that God is love, and that God loved the world. If the world has any hope of redemption, that redemption is only going to come about because of love. But it won’t be the love of dreams, but the harsh and dreadful love that only comes from real relationships with real people.

Long before we can ever learn to love one another, we are going to have to get to know each other.  

Even when it is hard. Maybe especially when it is hard. 

Frustration

NB: As I wrote about here, I am writing about the days I did street engagement work among the unhoused population as a way of dealing with the trauma I experienced there. – HH

I was frustrated.

I had been working on the streets of Raleigh for about a year, with no budget, no money, and damned little encouragement. How I had gotten there is another story for another day, but it was out of conviction and an honest attempt to reconcile my faith with what I saw happening around me.  

When church folk wanted to talk about homelessness with me at all, they wanted to either pray for folks or get them to heaven.

There was a “street ministry” I encountered early on in my time out there that would take pictures of unhoused people they were praying with, and then post them on their blog to fundraise. No attempt to recognize their humanity, no realization that they had their own stories and pasts and preferences and agency – no, they would post a photo of someone crying with a caption like. “Another of God’s lambs is saved from hellfire!”

The big steeples were more the praying kind. A huge downtown church had announced they were spending 1.8 million dollars on a pipe organ for their sanctuary. I knew several unhoused folks who lived on their property, and so when I met the pastor of that church, I asked if he could help me get some resources so I could provide relational help and pastoral care to those people. He told me the best thing we could do for those folks was to pray for them, and trust God to provide it.

So I was frustrated. I knew people who were dying because they lived outside, ignored, in a wealthy city, in the shadow of huge steeples. Churches with multi-million-dollar budgets were content to ignore them, and hoped they returned the favor. Street ministries used them as pawns and fundraising tokens, their rich inner lives reduced to being extras in a movie about street preachers. And I was convinced they were made in the very image of God, and that Jesus meant all those things he said when he identified with the poor, saying that when we feed someone who is hungry, we are feeding Jesus himself.

Jesus is fucking hungry and these people with all their fucking Jesus talk are content to let him starve. Goddammit.

Have I mentioned how frustrated I was?

So, I did what I always do when I don’t know what else to do; I wrote.

Ashe, who is now my friend but then was not, ran a popular blog (now defunct) called Jesus Manifesto, which sought to be “a clearinghouse for propaganda meant to frustrate and disrupt quaint notions of Jesus”. 

I dashed off a piece and asked Ashe if they would accept it as a guest submission. And they did.

I recently came across it as I began cleaning up my archives. I had been writing for a while about what I was doing on my own blog, but this was the first time I wrote about my work for a wider audience.

As I read it now, even though I would write it differently now, I’m proud of me for being bold, for turning my frustration into action, and for doing both storytelling and preaching in the same piece. The foundations of my personal theology – that it is not we who wait for God to act, but God who waits for us – is there, even in those early days. Later I would learn and then embrace the words of Miroslav Volf, who said that it is deeply hypocritical to pray for a problem you are unwilling to resolve. I did not know those words then, but I already knew the thought.

Anyway, here it is, warts and all. This guy was very, very angry. And it would get worse.

Evelyn and the failure of the church

Content warning – mentions of death and sexual assault, but nothing graphic.

A heavy girl, perhaps 250 pounds, Evelyn’s greasy, stringy hair only served to accentuate her poor skin. Her weight made her shuffle rather than walk and her head was always bowed, seeking not to offend, avoiding eye contact. At 23, most people her age are very conscious of their appearance, but Evelyn’s wardrobe consisted of thrift store finds and cast offs, leaning heavily toward stretch pants and sweatshirts that advertised events she had never seen and places she would never visit.

It was my second month in Raleigh. I was volunteering with a group that fed the homeless in the park on Sunday when I met her for the first time. She shuffled through the line, mumbling thanks for the watery mashed potatoes and chili-mac, eyes on the ground. Several times I tried to engage her, but between my maleness and her demons, it just was not happening. Like a dog that had been struck once too often, she flinched at contact, muttering secrets only she knew to people only she saw.

When there was an open bed, Evelyn would stay at the woman’s shelter, but more often then not she had to make other arrangements. On cold nights, she would trade sexual favors in exchange for a warm bed. To pick up spending money, she would give men oral sex for $5. Because of her weight and mental issues, often the promise of a warm bed was revoked, or the money not paid after the oral sex had been given. Several people later told me Evelyn was often sexually assaulted and raped, unable to resist her attackers.

The last time I saw her was on a Thursday in early November. I remember it was inordinately cold that day, with a sharp, piercing wind.. Evelyn shuffled down the sidewalk, huddled down into her jacket, oblivious to my wave, ignoring me when I called.

That night Evelyn made it into the women’s shelter. In here she could sleep, secure in the knowledge she was safe. In the night Evelyn died of complications from sleep apnea. At age 23, she was another statistic of life, and death, on the streets.

* * * *

I told Evelyn’s story in a church once, and when I was finished they prayed fervent prayers that Evelyn would be at peace in the loving arms of Jesus. They prayed that those who would injure and molest women like Evelyn would be caught and punished. They prayed for God’s kingdom to come and for shalom to rest on our city.

At the end of the talk, a lady came up to me, obviously moved by my story and asked me the question I dread most: “How could God have allowed this to happen to Evelyn? Was this all part of God’s plan?”

If you spend much time working in the inner-city, you try not to ask yourself those kind of questions–not because you don’t know what the answer is, but because you do. Because if you think about it too much you get mad and because if you tell people the answer, you will not be invited back.

What I wanted to tell that lady, but did not, was God did have a plan to take care of Evelyn; God’s plan was us. God’s plan was to put us here to be his hands and feet. We are to show mercy, to love justice. We are to show mercy, as he is merciful. We are to feed those who are hungry, with the assurance that when we do, we are doing it to, and not just for, Jesus himself.

I wanted to tell that lady God did have a plan and we screwed it up. I wanted to tell her that it is not we who are waiting on God, but rather God who is waiting on us and that what Evelyn really had needed was not this lady’s prayers but a safe place to sleep at night. What I wanted to tell that lady, but didn’t, is that it is very obvious that we have the resources to help invisible people just like Evelyn but we simply lack the will to do so.

I did not tell that church lady any of that. But often I wish I had.

Reclaiming my stories

Six years ago, in an effort to stay alive, I walked away from a decade and a half of work on the streets among the unhoused population.

It was good work, and I was good at it, if not good at being as loving to myself as I was to the people I encountered. It was, to use a buzzword, unsustainable.

I have a lot of trauma from that time. It took years to regulate my blood pressure, to sleep all night, to not have panic attacks every winter. My relationship to money will probably never be right.

Because my storytelling during that time was our primary fundraising technique, I have resisted writing about that time since I left. It began to feel exploitative of me – as if putting my wounds on display was the only way I was worthy of earning a living wage.

I imagined myself a barker, shouting, “Come see the street pastor have a mental health crisis! In exchange for donating 1 dollar a day, you too can enable his slow nervous breakdown!”

It was a wild time. I married a lot of people who spent their honeymoon at the homeless shelter. I buried a lot of people. I spent far more time in a soup kitchen and at AA meetings then I did in church. Because of my work, some folks who probably would have died did not die. Some laws got changed, and some folks in other states began to do similar work, and some folks I trusted tried to take me out, and along the way I almost died. It was a wild time.

After some discussions with my therapist, I have decided that over the next few months I will write some stories from that time – not to raise awareness of the plight of the unhoused, and not to get you to donate money to my cause and not to show you how spiritual I am – but to take ownership of my stories back.

I have essays I write each week for people who give me money – but none of those essays will come from this series. These are not stories I’m trading for money. These are the stories that shaped me, taught me, saved me, and almost killed me. These stories are mine.

It’s not a perfect world.

Content Warning: Mentions of trafficking and sexual assault, but no descriptive content.

It was Maria who made it clear to me that my middle-class sensibilities would not survive working on the streets among the unhoused community.

Maria was a natural leader, attracting the respect of the other folks who were in her circle, and eventually I would learn that when I needed support in that community for something that would be unpopular, winning Maria over would be an essential, early step.

She was attractive, vibrant, and intelligent. Her partner Jake beat her often during the more than three years they had been together. He accompanied her everywhere, constantly referred to her as “his woman”, and I knew of several occasions where he had beaten men who were a little too attentive to her.

I was one of very few men he allowed her to be alone with for any length of time. I think it was that I was a pastor – even people who are unbelievers often grant unearned respect to clergy folks. But maybe he just saw me – someone who taught nonviolence – as no threat to someone as overtly masculine as he was.

One day I ran into her in the park. She was sitting on the bench, alone, scrolling her phone, her bags beside her. I was walking toward the soup kitchen, and she saw me, and flagged me down. I sat next to her.

After some initial pleasantries, we sat there for a few minutes in silence as she worked up her nerve to tell me what was on her mind. Then I notice she has a bruise on the side of her face.

“Are you OK?” I ask, pointing at the bruise.

She sighs. “Yeah. I just got too mouthy with Jake when he was high. I should have known better.”

“Oh, Maria. You should get away from him.”

She looked at me with sad brown eyes – eyes not filled with sadness for herself, but at my naivete.

“You really don’t understand, do you? The first month I was homeless, I got raped twice. Got groped dozens of times. It was hell. Then Jake told me that if I was his woman, nobody else would ever touch me again. And they don’t. Everyone is scared of Jake.”

I was beginning, unhappily, to understand.

“So Jake protects you?” I ask with a bit of snark in my voice.

“Dammit, Hugh. My choice was get fucked by random men who would always hurt me or get fucked by one guy who is mostly nice, and who protects me from everyone but him. And sometimes, it’s really nice. He will bring me flowers he picked in the park, or we will go for a walk in the Azalea garden over by the TV station. And he always smiles when he sees me.”

Sounding meaner than I meant to, I said, “And sometimes he beats your ass.”

She touches her face distractedly and says, “Yeah. But it’s not a perfect world.”

She looked at the time on her phone, and said, “I got to get to the soup kitchen if I’m gonna eat. You coming?”

I told her to go ahead without me, and I walked the other way, head down, lost in my thoughts. Because I still wasn’t sure why she had flagged me down in the first place – what it was she had intended to tell me.

But one thing was clear: I had a lot to learn.

Proverbs

My father was self-educated and a voracious reader, and was attracted to proverbs. I do not mean the book in the Bible found after the Psalms, purportedly written by King Solomon, but rather short pithy wisdom statements of the sort made famous by Benjamin Franklin in Poor Richard’s Almanac. And he used them as a teaching tool all the time – almost as a form of punctuation, or as the moral of the story after something happened to illustrate the proverb. 

For example, he hated to argue. Once, I watched him and another man talk about something they disagreed on. It was rather embarrassing, because I knew Dad was right, and yet Dad didn’t even really try to convince the guy that he was wrong. The teenage me was all about winning and dominating your opponent, and here my father was, literally refusing to argue. Later, I asked him why he didn’t try to convince the guy.

“It would have been a waste of time,” he said. “He wasn’t ready to hear it. You can’t convince a man to change his mind if he has made up his mind not to change it. It’s like wrestling a pig – you both get dirty, but the pig’s having fun.”

I laughed at the pig comment.

“Mark Twain said that.” Dad said. He loved to attribute the quotes he knew, probably as a compensation for his lack of formal education, and as an appeal to authority. As if to say that these are not just the thoughts of a working class man from rural Mississippi, but those of one of the great writers of our culture. Sometimes, his attributions were wrong, but always enthusiastic nonetheless. I joked once that all of his quotes were from either Benjamin Franklin or the Bible.

Like the time he told me, “Son, remember, like it says in the Bible, we have nothing to fear but fear itself.”

“Dad, Franklin Roosevelt said that.”

He said, “Sure, but he was quoting the Bible when he said it.”

I didn’t argue with him. He wasn’t ready to hear it. After all, like Benjamin Franklin said, “A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still.”

New Membership Perks

Trying to make any money as an independent writer is tough these days. Especially if you have scruples. And I do.

I don’t want people who read my stuff to be baraged by pop-up ads, videos that start playing automatically, privacy scraping cookies, or sponsored posts. I don’t want anything to come between me and my readers – not just graphically, but ethically. If I am holding a Yeti mug in a picture, I want you to know that it is because I chose that picture, not because I have a sponsorship deal with Yeti.

And I paid my bills for a few years in the early days of the web by writing marketing copy – I never want to have to do that again. I don’t want to write “teaser copy” to get people to click things they would not normally want to click. I don’t want to chase clicks, be sensational, or make you angry in order to increase my traffic or to curry favor with advertisers.

So, I have a Membership Program. It’s ~ 200 folks who give somewhere between $5 and $25 a month to support my various writing projects, such as this blog and my weekly newsletter.

What do they get out of it? Well, it’s sort of like NPR – there are perks, of course, but the major benefit is that they get to make sure there is more of my writing in the world.

But there are perks – and today, I’m adding a big one.

Beginning this weekend, Saturday the 17th of August, people who support my writing as part of my membership team will receive an original, unpublished essay in their inbox every Saturday morning. It will be around 800 to 1,000 words, give or take, and while the subject matter is flexible, there won’t be surprises – if you like my writing, you will enjoy this. I’m not going to suddenly take up writing romance or erotica or anything. Not that there’s anything wrong with romance or erotica. It’s just not what I want to write about. 

It does not matter what membership tier you are, either, Whether you are a $5 a month member or a $25 a month member, you get the same perks, including the weekly essay in your inbox. I am a big believer in the idea that we support the things that matter to us based on our capacity, so I’m intentionally not going to differentiate access because of the amount of money you send me. No matter your membership tier you get access to this.

You can learn more about becoming as member, what perks there are, and so on by going to this page.

Writing against the clock

It’s 5:30 AM, and the sky is still dark outside, but not as dark as it was 15 minutes ago when I woke up. As I write this, it’s Friday, but  it really doesn’t matter, as most days, the same thing happens.  The birds are singing the song of their people, letting their friends know they made it through the night. The kettle is almost ready, and the coffee grinder just finished. My kingdom for a quiet coffee grinder.

After making a cup of coffee in my Melitta (best $6 purchase, ever), in my Fiesta bistro mug (this one is Poppy colored, but the Meadow Green one is my favorite), I walk, cup in hand, to the room at the end of the hall that once was the bedroom of six different foster children, but is now my office. 

I have a hard time writing in silence – my ADHD won’t let me – but I also have a hard time writing when the music has strong lyrics – my ADHD won’t let me – so I end up mostly writing to instrumental jazz, classical or, rarely, techno. My audio setup is a bit of a hybrid of an old school stereo tuner (a cheap bookcase-sized Sharp) paired with my phone on bluetooth, via which today I am streaming this playlist from Amazon music. 

Now it’s 5:45, I’ve been up for 30 minutes. Daylight is breaking through, and the birds are much louder, and the music is playing and the chair is adjusted. I shut the door to the office (we have cats who will want to get on my keyboard otherwise), open Google Docs, open a new doc, and begin to write for the next hour. 

Hopefully. 

I don’t mean that I write hopefully, although I generally do. I mean that hopefully, something to write about will occur to me. Some days, it’s like a firehose, just pouring out of you, the words are. On those days, it’s hard to keep up with the flow, especially if you are a three finger and a thumb typist, like I am. 

On other days, nothing goes right. Nothing is interesting to you. You have nothing you want to say. You are bored with the world, and with the people in it, and have nothing to say to them, and wish you had not committed to yourself that you would hold this time sacred, this first hour of work each day. On those days, the words do not come. 

There are a variety of ways writers deal with this. Some people have word-count commitments. They apply their ass to the chair and stay there until they have 500 words, or 2,000 words, or whatever their daily goal is. I think this makes sense, assuming you have control over your time and are working on a specific project. 

I’m more of a time-based writer. This is the amount of time I have to write, and so I write, or try to, during this time, and how many words I get is just how many words I get that day. Some days, I might get 1200 words during that hour. Most days it’s 700 or thereabouts. Some days, when it’s particularly bad, it’s 50 words. 

There are times I wish I was a word – count writer, with the ability to just sit there, ass in the chair, staring at an empty page until the words come. But alas, the writing I do only supplies a portion of my income, and the mortgage must be paid, and the cat kibble purchased, and the living earned, so if I am to have words on the page today, they must show up before 7AM, or else they will just have to wait until tomorrow morning, unless time gets stolen from other obligations. It’s like having homework you are behind on, everyday, for the rest of your life. 

Because the time available to write is limited, and the words must show up then if they are to show up at all, you take pains to be careful with your words – or at least, it does for me. Sometimes, my limited writing time is spent staring at the screen, not because I do not have the words, but because I am forming the next sentence in my head, repeating it over and over, listening to the rhythm and the meter, because writing is for me just transcribing the words I already hear in my head. On the better days, it’s much faster, like transcribing the words you hear as they are being said.

But it also means the words seem more valuable, more scarce, more precious than they would otherwise. It makes revision particularly offensive – striking out a paragraph that you spent 30 of your precious sixty minutes on is viscerally painful. 

I turned 52 this year. Every time I mention this, folks older than 52 love to tell me how young I am. I realize 52 is not old, per se. Although, I was reading an Agatha Christie novel not long ago and a character described someone as an elderly man in his early sixties, and I put the book down, as I was not ready for that sort of violence. 

However, I turned 52 this year. Somewhere around my mid-forties, something shifted. Instead of the future seeming wide open, my dreams began to be accompanied with a Use-By date. Instead of thinking, “I would like to go hiking in the Alps one day,” it became, “I would like to go hiking in the Alps while I am still healthy enough to do it.” Instead of enjoying the first day of Summer, it became, “I might, if I am lucky, get to do this thirty more times.”

Time began to move quicker. I notice this especially in my writing, where words are already valuable because of the lack of writing time. If I get an hour a day to write, and I live to be 82, that’s only about 10,000 hours of writing left. 

The words are precious, and time is scarce.

And tomorrow, I will do it again.

When people choose to leave

There is a popular internet meme that makes the round from time to time that says something to the effect of, “You are going to be too much for some people. But it’s OK – those are not your people”.

And while I really want to cheer the sentiment, and applaud the self-confidence the idea pushes us toward, the cold hard reality is that, sometimes, the people we are too much for are our people.

Almost twenty years ago, in the beginning of my work around homelessness and hunger, there was a couple that was nearly always by my side. We had all moved to this new town at the same time, and none of us had any friends here, and so we latched onto each other.

We all became friends. We were often at each other’s houses, we ate together, we supported each other vocationally, and they both played a part in my wedding. I still own a coffee cup her mother gave me at Christmas. He had gotten me plugged into some churches where he had connections, and I played a part in his journey of deconstructing the religious fundamentalism he had grown up with.

We were, by any definition, friends. Close friends. And then we weren’t.

How the thing fell apart was epic, and a conversation for another day. If we are ever in the same room sharing a beverage, ask me and I will tell you about it. But for today’s purposes, just know that they are the ones who left me and that I am still proud of how I handled it.

But at the time, I was really confused and hurt. Eventually, I came to understand that at the core of the disagreement that led to our “breaking up” was the simple fact that, despite our having begun at roughly the same place, I had become far more radical in my view of the world than they were. And that was a threat to them and their belief systems, and so if it came down to sticking with me or holding onto their belief systems, they had to choose, and they chose, well, not me.

Years later, I was telling Brian McClaren the story, and he looked me in the eyes and said, “Hugh, not everyone who starts with you will finish with you. And that’s OK.”

While that seems self-evident, at the time it was a huge relief. Eventually, I came to peace with it. Sometimes the people who can’t journey along with us are family members, or romantic partners, or just good friends who have known us for years. And when they leave, it leaves a jagged hole in our lives and we wish they had stayed.

One of the hardest things for us to remember is that not everyone learns, grows, or develops at the same rate. And sometimes, when we grow or learn faster than our friends, they resent that. Or they have reasons for not being able to accept what you have come to see as self-evident.

In fact, that last sentence I wrote is often it. Sometimes, they do the math and realize that if they went where you went, it would cost them too much in terms of relationships and social standing, and so they must reject what you offer because it would simply cost them too much. And as Upton Sinclair famously said, “It is difficult to get a [person] to understand something, when [their] salary depends upon [their] not understanding it”.

People are endlessly complex, and while their actions and motivations don’t always make sense to us, their actions always make sense to them – there is always an internal logic that supports their actions, even though the logic eludes us on the outside.

But again – it will happen. Not everyone who starts with you will finish with you. And that’s OK.

We all must figure out what lines we will draw, and what is a bridge too far, in keeping with our values and internal logic. But one useful tool I have settled on is that, barring abuse, I won’t be the one to end the relationship. (I may, however, decide to invest less in the relationship.)

So, for example, in the example of my friends who left – they were the ones who left. I was OK with us not being at the same place. I was OK with them believing different things. I was OK with us disagreeing. I won’t pretend that it wasn’t sometimes hard to be in a relationship with them, but it was, on balance, worth it to me.

I’m not telling you that is the right line, or boundary. I’m just saying it’s mine.

But when people decide that they can’t be in a relationship with you, when they write you off for your beliefs or convictions, when they decide you have gone too far – please don’t take that personally.

Some folk who started with you won’t finish with you.

And that’s OK.

Complication

My first car was a 1971 Ford Torino. It had two keys – one for the ignition and one for the doors. The keys, when I got the car in 1987, were already 16 years old, and functioned perfectly. The ignition key had a square head, and the door key a round one, so they were instantly indistinguishable in the dark, by feel. I could go to any hardware store and have a duplicate made in minutes for about the cost of a McDonald’s hamburger.

I am the owner right now of a 2001 Ford Ranger. It’s beat to hell, but I use it to haul mulch, take things to the dump, and scoring marketplace finds. It only has one key for both the door and the ignition, which I see as a logical improvement on the old system. The key on my keychain is the original key, currently 24 years old, and it works perfectly. It can be duplicated at any hardware store in minutes for the cost of a McDonald’s hamburger.

My wife’s car is a 2018 Hyundai Tucson. We bought it used, and it came with exactly one key, which has a computer device in it that prohibits anyone other than Hyundai from duplicating it, at a cost of hundreds of dollars. I spent hours researching and found a hardware store that could order the key blank, and then program the key, but Hyundai would not give them the codes to do it. Even the blank was more than $100.

This does not feel like progress to me.

When I owned the Torino, I dropped my keys in a swimming pool once at a party (it was that kind of party – it was the eighties, man). After fishing them out, I dried them off roughly with a towel and then drove home.

That would have destroyed the keys to the Tucson.

I now have a much more complicated thing than the old thing. It’s more fragile, has batteries that need replaced periodically, and because the key contains both mechanical and electrical functions, it will eventually fail. It can be damaged by water, by heat, or by impact. Duplication cost is easily 100 times what the old system would have cost to duplicate.

To replace the ignition switch on the Torino, I could have ordered the part through my local parts store and installed it myself in an afternoon with a relatively minimal toolkit. The Tucson would require, among other things, a computer and proprietary programs.

The new system is worse in literally every way, except one. Fans of the new system would say that yes, all of this is true, but I gained a panic switch and the ability to unlock my car doors remotely. This is a marginal benefit, to be sure, but I question if this benefit is truly worth the cost, and could surely have been accomplished by  other means – for instance, having a key fob as an upgrade that contained those functions.

By now, you are no doubt tired of hearing me prattle on about my keys, and wish I would get to the point. And the point is this – things are being needlessly complicated in the name of “progress”.

As another example: we live in a place where the power goes out often. Our infrastructure is fragile here. Part of our resiliency plan involves having redundancy built into the system – so, for example, when our power went out last winter, we still had a gas fireplace to keep us warm.

We are currently renovating our kitchen, and looked for ages for a simple gas range with mechanical controls. These are user-repairable, use 100-year-old technology and should last a lifetime. I grew up eating food cooked on these sorts of stoves. They existed. They should be easy to manufacture.

The starting point for these stoves is around $2,000, and the “good” ones are closer to $4,000. I can buy a better (in terms of specs) stove with digital all sorts of things for $800. According to the reviews, they will last about 8 years and are unrepairable.

In the end, we bought a relatively affordable stove that hits all my buttons, except it has digital controls for the oven, and according to the reviews, if you use the self-cleaning oven feature, it will melt the motherboard. It was either that or get the one that had Bluetooth, and I refuse to own a stove that can talk to anyone.

I’m already saving for the next, lifetime stove, after we send this one to the landfill in a few years.

This stove is not an improvement on existing stoves in any way. It does everything the stove we had in our kitchen in 1984 did, with the addition of a digital clock and timer, and in exchange we got a motherboard, lack of user serviceability, and planned obsolescence.

But it is not at all easy for a company to make billions of dollars by making affordable goods that a reasonably handy person can repair, and that with care will last decades. These companies have shareholders who demand ever-increasing profit margins, and so a thing – like my truck keys – which reached its design and usability peak as an analog device and will last at least 24 years with no care at all is now replaced with a vastly more complicated and expensive machine.

 

 

 

My back against the wall

The biggest problem with a new office? Desk Placement.

Last week, in my Member’s Only newsletter, I wrote about moving into a new office. I described it thus:

It’s Monday morning, and I’m sitting in my new office. Or maybe it’s my new study. My new den? 

This is where I always get hung up – on the naming of things. Some writers even have studios, like they are painters or podcasters. 

In any event, I am sitting in the new room where, going forward and likely for the rest of my life, I shall do my writing. 

It’s a bedroom on the northeast corner in our house – some 11 and a half feet by 13 feet (3.5 x 4 meters) – with a double closet and three windows letting in lots of light, but none of it too aggressively. 

Long-time readers will remember that a bit more than a year ago I had moved into a storeroom off the carport. It was fine, if cramped, but was always suboptimal. So, when our housemate moved out, I took over his room and turned it into my office. Or study. Den? 

Anyway, it’s the room where I write.

It’s such a larger room than I had – almost twice the size, and laid out much better, squares being better suited to the human body than narrow rectangles. After I moved all the previous resident’s stuff out, I put a folding chair in the doorway of the room and just sat, waiting for the room  to tell me what it wanted to be. 

This is, honestly, my favorite part of any project. In the beginning, everything is possible. Built-in wall of shelves? No problem. A massive desk and credenza? Sure thing. Before such minor inconveniences such as budget and time factor in, I just let my mind roam with all the possibilities. 

But quickly, the main limitation became desk placement. 

The two general defaults I have seen are either putting the desk in the middle of the room, or putting it facing the wall. Neither made me excited. 

Putting it in the center of the room would be OK if I were Wendell Berry, dutifully typing out stories of Port William on an old manual Underwood, or Shelby Foote writing about the drama of the Civil War with a dip pen, but alas, I am me, writing on a modern computer, complete with a loud mechanical keyboard and a large computer monitor. And all of that needs to be plugged in, and whatever aesthetic value is gained from having your desk in the middle of the room is negated by having cords running from the wall. And yes, one can have outlets moved to the middle of the floor, but I’m still renovating my kitchen, so this office project needed to happen both quickly and cheaply. 

I have never really liked having a desk that faces a wall. I dislike having my back to the room, and especially to the door. I am told by webpages that purport to extol the virtues of Feng Shui that having your back to the door is unlucky, and while I know nothing of Feng Shui, I have no problem believing it. 

In addition, I find myself on a decent number of Zoom calls these days, and need a backdrop that doesn’t suck, to use a professional term. So facing the wall is out. 

I am not the first writer to struggle with desk placement. 

In his memoir On Writing, Stephen King advises:

The last thing I want to tell you in this part is about my desk. For years I dreamed of having the sort of massive oak slab that would dominate a room–no more child’s desk in a trailer laundry-closet, no more cramped kneehole in a rented house. In 1981 I got the one I wanted and placed it in the middle of a spacious, skylighted study… For six years I sat behind that desk either drunk or wrecked out of my mind, like a ship’s captain in charge of a voyage to nowhere.

A year or two after I sobered up, I got rid of that monstrosity and put in a living-room suite where it had been… I got another desk–it’s handmade, beautiful, and half the size of the T. Rex desk. I put it at the far west end of the office, in a corner under the eave…I’m sitting under it now, a fifty-three-year-old man with bad eyes, a gimp leg, and no hangover. I’m doing what I know how to do, and as well as I know how to do it. I came through all the stuff I told you about (and plenty more that I didn’t), and now I’m going to tell you as much as I can about the job…

It starts with this: put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn’t in the middle of the room. Life isn’t a support-system for art. It’s the other way around.

My desk isn’t handmade, and it isn’t beautiful – perhaps one day it will be, but remember, this needed to be fast and cheap – but I put on the Northern wall in front of a window, but perpendicular to it, so my back is to a wall, but some five feet from it, so I have room for a small credenza for storage. I’m also some six feet away from another wall, on which I have hung many photographs and long shelves, which contain a number of talismans and my working library. 

To my right is a large  north-facing window that looks out over the neighbor’s backyard. Cafe curtains ordered off Amazon block my view of his deck, but allow me to see the pine trees and the clouds, reminding me that I am part of the world, and not retreating from it. I hung a shelf just above the cafe curtains, on which half a dozen potted plants sit, serving as a sort of living portcullis between me and the world outside.

To my left as I sit is an open space large enough for me to stretch out on the floor and stare at the ceiling, as I do sometimes when my brain is just in too much tumult, and beyond that the door to the hallway. I leave that door open unless I am on a call, because I like seeing my wife walk by as she goes to check the mail, or that our two cats will sometimes walk in and sniff around to see what has changed in their absence. This too, is part of my world, and I am not retreating from it, either. 

So, here I sit, between shelter and the wild, back safely protected from the unexpected, looked upon by generations of people who loved me and believed me capable of great things, and facing the hundreds of books that shaped me into being.

And in this protected space, I write.