Live from Dystopia: Snapshots of People

Live from Dystopia

Welcome to Live from Dystopia, an on line multimedia letter to friends known and as yet unknown. This blog began as an extension of my letter and email writing and contains stories, essays and commentary on life and events. Comments are welcome on all posts. Please, get a cup of coffee and make yourself at home, shuffle around get provoked. As I get more comfortable with the blogification of my writing, I hope to change the format into a full-on website to make up for limitations of the rent-a-blog format. - Thomas

The Spontaneous Gospel

The stories on this blog constitute a creative push I have called the Spontaneous Gospel. My focus is writing as a structured task within my normal daily grind. The super short format reflects my goal of writing a complete thought piece in about an hour. In this I have been influenced by my experience in teaching ESL essay writing for the GMAT and TOEFL tests (considerably less than an hour!) and by writer Barry Yourgrau, whose super short pieces in the book 'A Man Jumps Out of an Airplane' inspired me to get down to writing for myself. Primarily I want to get to the point where clarity and transcendence converge to produce a sketch that is as much a product of the readers interpretation of symbols and images as it is of my attempt to strike a note of otherworldly insight in the cramped format. Let me know what you think.

Red Village

The church as an architectural phenomenon is only the threshold of the Church. The inner church, however, is not a personal construct. Neither is the church a mere accountability before a community of the like minded. The Church is the communion with the historical, physical and eternal body of Christ. The Church is present anywhere kindness is done in the name of God and it is absent even in the most splendid cathedrals with the most sumptuous rituals if one does not have God in one’s heart.

Bable

The Tower of Babel was built on the principle that we can achieve the Divine by our own efforts, and was crowed by the division of language. Did God destroy the unity of mankind or create diversity? Man’s audacity is not offensive to God so much as it is futile and the wrath of God is not directed at punishment for punishment’s sake, but as a means of restoring conditions in which our dependency will be more evident and conditions toward communion with God on a level increasingly simple to understand for creatures that have lost the mastery of their original rationality.

Harvey

"Harvey and I sit in the bars... have a drink or two... play the juke box. And soon the faces of all the other people they turn toward mine and they smile. And they're saying, "We don't know your name, mister, but you're a very nice fella." Harvey and I warm ourselves in all these golden moments. We've entered as strangers - soon we have friends. And they come over... and they sit with us... and they drink with us... and they talk to us. They tell about the big terrible things they've done and the big wonderful things they'll do. Their hopes, and their regrets, and their loves, and their hates. All very large, because nobody ever brings anything small into a bar. And then I introduce them to Harvey... and he's bigger and grander than anything they offer me. And when they leave, they leave impressed. The same people seldom come back; but that's envy, my dear. There's a little bit of envy in the best of us."

Wednesday, May 27, 2009

Snapshots of People

I was asked recently what person has had the biggest impact on my life and I squirreled around the question by dropping a few names to satisfy the curious. I wasn't satisfied though, because there have been so many people that have had tremendous impact on my life. Some of them lord it over me and some haven't a clue. The lords know who they are, but the clueless can't even begin to imagine. It is my design to dedicate a little corner of Dystopia to these people, to pay a little homage to what they have meant for me.

I will use their real names whenever possible, but I can't promise I won't switch names to protect my innocence.

Some of these people I hardly know at all. Some have wandered in and out, and others have larger or smaller hooks in my life from odd angles. I have no hope to do any of these people justice for who they really are. I just want to share a few sketches of interesting people and the fleeting moments in which I saw them shine or reflect something significant.

Thomas

Live from Dystopia