I’ll be appearing on the “Atheism and Grief” panel at FTBConscience this Sunday, July 21 at 4 p.m. Central time.
Other speakers will include Rebecca Hensler, founder of Grief Beyond Belief, plus Greta Christina and Nicome Taylor.
Here’s the entire convention schedule, and here’s the page detailing just my panel.
I’d volunteered to be on the panel regarding the future of atheism, hoping to talk about Beta Culture, but there were already plenty of panelists included there.
Hope to see you there!
We DO want to fully engage society with the beautiful possibilities of atheism, right?
I just don’t see how we can do that without our own nationwide motorcycle club.
And if you DO do this, I demand to be a charter member!
Also, I’ll need a motorcycle.
Seriously, I think this would be a pretty cool thing to do. It could also get some serious publicity.
(BTW, this back-patch design is a rough approximation. There’s also a little something wonky in how the E in Riders came across when I converted my original to a jpeg. No idea why. Argh.)
Her name was Jean Mullen, but she called herself Green Bean Jean. She played bars in the small California mountain town where I lived at the time, and I first saw her on a night out with some of my mule-packer cowboy friends.
She was either skinny and gawky or model-thin and infinitely elegant — it was a time in my earlier life when I was between opinions on women — they might be little girls or alluring goddesses, either one. Eventually, I came down on the side of the goddess.
She sat on a tall stool, played a guitar and sang. She had an incredibly broad vocal range, from deeper-than-deep to glasses-shivering-on-the-table high. Four and a half octaves — does that sound right? It’s what I remember, but I could easily be wrong, this many years after.
I came night after night to see her, sat down quietly at a table and blew out the candle, and there in the dark was touched by her presence and her music. On braver nights, I’d sit in front and request some of her songs.
Live music has always had a profound effect on me. Put a song on the radio or CD player and I might sing along in my broken voice or slap the table in syncopation, jig around in my chair or car seat and become one with the music. But put me in front of live musicians and I sit there frozen and slack-jawed, banjaxed, perpetually astonished that, right here and now, these people are creating music.
As for Green Bean Jean, I was in love with her.
She never knew it. I was too shy at the time to even think about telling her, and besides she was a goddess and I was a little nothing-special cowboy, a comparative toad.
But for a time, in the lonely way of barfly music fans, I came in from the cold, huddled up to the warmth of her voice, and had her for my very own.
She spoke often of her music. “This is a song from my fictitious album,” she’d say, and launch into Owens River Symphony, or Sierra Minstrel, or Daddy.
She’d had offers, she told us, but they always came with strings. She was waiting for the real offer to make that first album. And we all knew, if that break ever came, she’d rocket to the top.
Even looking back on it so many years later, I’m absolutely certain that her presence, her elegant beauty, her incredible voice would have placed her in short order at superstar level. Really. I can’t think of anyone she couldn’t have equaled for talent, for stage presence, for beauty.
The offer came.
She drove east with the band she’d gathered together.
She recorded the vocal tracks.
She started back.
And somewhere out on the interstate, far from home, she died in a car wreck.
Friends and family took orders on the album, and pooled their money to complete it. The Green Bean Jean Album.
I didn’t have the money to afford one, but I borrowed one from friends, and listened to it many times over the years.
In my head, I have perfect pitch. Even without the record, I can still hear the vivid tones of her incredible voice. Thirty years dissolve away, her voice peals out in perfect clarity, in piercing high notes and soul-touching lows, and she sings for me.
My Green Bean Jean, my Sierra Minstrel, my once-upon-a-time Secret Love.
This post on Between a Veil and a Dark Place — What it is like to be a Muslim woman, and why we know what freedom is (and you may not) — is like a bad car accident. You pass by and it’s not you, but you can’t look away because it’s horrible, and it’s SOMEBODY.
I have keys.
When I first moved to the United States eleven months ago, it took me several weeks to grasp this bit of information.
I have keys.
I have keys to my own front door and I can open this front door and walk down the street whenever I want to.
I can walk down the street without being watched through the windows and without anyone calling my parents and telling them I am roaming loose on the street.
I can walk down the street, sit down on a bench under a tree, and eat an ice cream cone. Then I can stand up and walk back home.
There will be nobody waiting for me at my house to ask me where I have been, refuse to let me in, call me a liar, and use my walk as renewed incentive to rifle through all of my possessions for proof that I am doing something wrong.
Because the simple desire to take a walk cannot but hide something deviant.
The piece speaks line by line of new-found freedoms, and you would expect subject matter like that to inspire joy. Instead it provokes horror: Every freedom described is a reflection of soul-sucking bleakness, a murderous militancy over matters so utterly miniscule it can only leave you gasping “Why? Why?”
A second reflection arises out of the robotic cadence of the writing. Thought the writer is free to do all the things she writes about, she still stands partway in that world of tortured bleakness; rather than relating a tale of victory in battle, the lifelong battle against frozen repression, she speaks merely as a stunned survivor.
If I spend more than five minutes in the bathroom, nobody will bang on my door demanding to know what I am doing in there.
I can shave my legs without being interrogated as to why I’d do such a thing when nobody ever sees them.
I can brush my hair and look in the mirror and try on clothes and try to feel like I can manipulate and move and enjoy my body, try to feel pretty, without being interrogated and asked who he is and how long I have been seeing him and what I am doing with him and whether I am a prostitute or pregnant.
I can slim down inadvertently or say I am not hungry for dinner without anybody demanding to know why and for whom I am trying to lose weight.
I can shower without being asked why.
I can smile because I had a good day at work without being forced to explain why I am so happy.
I can cry at my empty, robotic life without being forced to explain why I am unhappy.
I can have facial expressions. Facial expressions.
I can have facial expressions.
I can have facial expressions.
Here’s a Reuters article: Documents show Milwaukee archdiocese shielded pedophile priests
Someone correct me if I’m wrong here, but if someone commits a crime, and you act to help them hide that crime, doesn’t that make you an accomplice? Part of a conspiracy to evade justice?
The 6,000 pages of documents related to eight decades of abuse cases showed in great detail the Milwaukee archdiocese regularly reassigned priests who were accused of sexual molestation to new parishes …
Because that’s exactly what went on here.
Even more interesting is this:
One document is a letter that Dolan sent to the Vatican in June 2007 requesting permission to move $57 million into a cemetery trust fund in order to protect the funds from “any legal claim and liability.” The Vatican approved the transfer a month later, according to the documents.
So, knowing the money might be ordered paid as restitution to the victims, he acted to hide it, divert it, to a place where it couldn’t be reached. Sounds pretty conspiratorial to me.
I could easily be wrong about this, but if the Vatican is complicit in all this, how is it any different, legally, from the Mafia?
Is the Catholic Church a RICO — Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organization?
I’d say yes.
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In Dolan’s defense,
The documents also showed that when Dolan, the president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and the nation’s most prominent Roman Catholic official, asked the Vatican to remove priests, it was slow to respond.
… the Vatican took a glacial 6 years to remove a priest Dolan had earlier reported.
But considering that the Milwaukee diocese had an 80-year history of transferring molesting priests from place to place rather than removing them, it’s not all that comforting.
I’ve been meme-ifying over on Facebook lately. Just little nothings I tinkered up in Photoshop, and most of them no great shakes in the graphic design department — or even in basic message.
Apparently you have to click on an image, and then click on it again, in order to see any one of these full-size.
The top three are the coolest. If you have time for nothing else, take a look at those.
Things to be found on this newfangled Internet:
Including this one: Atheism: A Rough History of Disbelief
With the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and the emotional whiplash that followed, the monotheistic religions of the West took a more stridently political turn. It was in this context that Jonathan Miller, the British theatre and opera director, felt compelled to create a three-part documentary tracing the history of religious skepticism and disbelief.
Broadcast by the BBC in 2004 under the title, Atheism: A Rough History of Disbelief, the series wasn’t broadcast by PBS in America until 2007, and only after “Atheism” had been removed from the title and the word “rough” changed to “brief.”
The complete program is in three segments, each an hour long.
Couple of things caught my attention this morning.
One is a list of America’s Worst Charities — thanks to the Tampa Bay Times and the Center for Investigative Reporting.
Imagine a “charity” that takes in tens of millions and gives out nothing — zero — in direct cash aid to the cause it supposedly champions. It’s on the list: Project Cure of Bradenton, Florida.
Since 1998, Florida-based Project Cure has raised $65 million to lobby Congress and educate the public about alternative treatments for cancer, diabetes and Alzheimer’s disease.
But its office off Interstate 75 south of Tampa is little more than a storage unit filled with plastic bins, unused furniture and Christmas decorations.
Percentages of direct aid range from 10.8 percent on the high end to zero on the low … and Project Cure is not the lone zero. Missing children, sick children, children with AIDS, burned firefighters, diabetes, cancer, disabled police officers, they’re all represented here … by parasites who bleed off our warmest feelings for the less fortunate, stealing-by-misrepresentation millions, over the years billions, in scarce money and resources.
Project Cure’s longtime president, Michael S. Evers, is paid about $200,000 a year.
[… ] Reached at the house he rents about five miles away from his group’s office, Evers, 60, said he frequently works from home. “It’s not necessary to go into the office,” he said.
When asked for details about how he spends his time, Evers ended a phone interview, saying he was “in the middle of editing a new report on Alzheimer’s disease.”
Oh shit. Is there enough pain in the world for someone who does something like that? But Evers and others like him sleep well every night, I’m sure of it.
On the other hand, there’s this. King Kong the musical, with a giant gorilla puppet that you just fall in love with.
Those of you who knew me as the Blue Collar Atheist, and who lament this high-falutin’ “Citizen of Earth” business, I may be getting back into the red-necky-blue-collary stuff in the near future.
Currently I drive a van for a drug and alcohol rehab facility. Five days a week, I drive more than 350 miles, round trip between my upstate New York town and New York City, to fetch and return rehab clients.
The work is interesting, sometimes fascinating. I’ve expanded my human horizons in that I’m interfacing with a demographic I’d never really dealt with before.
Oh, boy, have I wanted to write about them. But I haven’t, mainly because they’re humans, not … you know, things. Blog-fodder subjects I can casually deconstruct or joke about. Even at several removes on their identities — not telling you exactly where I’m working, not telling you their names, or any specific personal details — I would still feel uncomfortable relating any of their personal stories.
Mostly, as I’ve discovered, these are normal people with this Problem. Alcohol. Heroin. Crack. Xanax. Stuff I never heard of. And some have additional physical troubles such as a positive HIV status or hepatitis or … could be anything. But still, just people.
I have met a very few — maybe 3 or 4 in my 1.5 years of doing this — I might consider sociopaths, someone for whom the entire universe was created so they could be the center of it. You’d think someone like that would be some big ugly guy, but no, not generally. More often (in my sharply limited experience), they seem to be uber-charming, lovely young women. And I say I only “might” consider them sociopaths, because I carefully hold back on that judgment, fully aware that the field of drug addiction contains vast truths of which I am still pitifully unaware. I can’t begin to understand what drives one might come to have under the merciless lash of addiction.
I suppose I’ve known a few alcoholics in my life, but before this job, I can’t say I’ve ever really known a drug addict. And even among the supposed alcoholics, I’ve never known one who lost a job or had other serious problems from it. So this is mostly subdimensional physics to me — a parade of people who will always be mysteries, interesting and sometimes sad beings who pass through my day, touching me only very slightly.
One part of the larger therapeutic environment is that bit based on 12-step programs, with liberal amounts of God and Jesus and Higher Powers sprinkled in. Knowing full well that my job is transporting these vulnerable people, with no scrap of it containing any right to meddle in their heads, I have given no hint to either clients or co-workers that I have the convictions you know I hold. And though other clients in the van might casually ask them what their drug(s) of choice are, or which prisons they’ve resided in, that’s stuff I’m careful never to do. Mostly I try to be nice to them, and smooth what is already a stressful day — a stressful life! — with music, a little tour-guiding, a listening ear, and lots of companionable silence for the long drive.
I can feel myself already getting tired of it though. There’s a certain strain in interfacing with addicts for many hours each day, day after day, week after week. And the job certainly doesn’t pay enough, even with benefits, to get me through my life in any halfway comfortable fashion.
So: I’m studying to get my CDL license, and sometime later this year I’ll be out hunting for truck driving jobs. Hopefully long-haul stuff, hookup-and-go loads along the interstates. There are a lot of hoops to jump through before it happens, but I think I’m headed that way.
I have to make a living, and I haven’t been very good at that for several years. I want to be able to pay my bills again, and get some dogs again, and live somewhere out of a city, where said dogs can enjoy some off-leash outdoor time and maybe a nearby creek.
I have several books yet to write, as I think I’ve told you, and I want nothing to get in the way of that. But book-writing for most of us is not a bill-paying enterprise. (You knew about this one, right? Hint, hint.)
Even if I break new ground in my book about dealing with death as an atheist (out sometime in 2014), it’s probably going to be anything but a bestseller. Who wants to buy a book about death and dying? Not even me, really … but there are still some things worth saying, and I think SOMEBODY has to do it. You know, for our people. For us.
I also want to carry on writing about — and hopefully speaking about — Beta Culture. Because I think it’s important, really important, and I’d like to see it actually happen.
But anyway, this time next year, I might be a trucker. Brace yourselves.
Hell, I might go all the way — pick my Southern accent back up, and start writin’ trucker love songs.
Baybuh, you done me wrawwnng,
Cain’t even think where to start,
I jist know I’m cryin’ tears,
For how you jack-knifed my heart.
Whoa. Eat your heart out, Johnny Cash!
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You ever have the experience of finding something in your head you didn’t know was there?
I just had one of those moments. I’m not totally surprised to find it there — it’s based on a memory, after all. But it’s a leftover from, oh, about the age of 6 or so, and at my current age of 60, it’s just curious to find it still in there somewhere.
It has to do with how I felt about Crayola crayons. And the memory bubbled up at this bit on the ColourLovers site: All 120 Crayon Names, Color Codes and Fun Facts.
You remember when you were a kid how much you loved your Crayolas? You could do anything with those great colors. I wasn’t much of an artist when it came to creating original works on blank coloring paper, but I was pretty good at picking realistic colors to fill in pictures in coloring books.
I couldn’t match Michelle, of course. Michelle was the little girl in my class – maybe in every class – who could color things perfectly. She was the Winslow Homer of coloring books, so good at coloring she wowed even adults.
I still remember the alien perfection of her coloring. She not only picked the right colors, she had this way of bearing down at the edges of each coloring block so that it gained a special brilliance. Under Michelle’s hand and eye, simple line drawings in coloring books took on a life beyond what their creators dreamed, leaping off the page at you in smooth chromatic brilliance. She even put in extras, added lines of shading or definition to give depth to the flat images of kittens and frogs and cowboys.
And whereas I, with my 6-year-old hand-eye coordination, sometimes slipped and let the waxy color wander over a line, when the Crayon was in Michelle’s hand, not an atom of color lapped over.
Worse, she wasn’t even snotty about it, so I don’t get to remember her as a nasty little brat. She was sweet, even generous, about showing others how she did what she did. (Pfft. Rotten little minx. Today she’s probably on the board of Crayola, or a member of the Presidential Commission on Coloring Books.)
Anyway, coming across that listing of all the crayon colors, I felt a moment of … hurt.
Seriously.
My family was poor. Not starving and freezing poor, but raggedy-ass hand-me-down poor. Occasionally even charity-case welfare poor. I never lacked for my own socks and shoes, but until I was 13 or so I don’t think I wore a single shirt or pair of pants that hadn’t been worn by one or both of my older brothers. My “rich” uncle once bought me a chemistry set for Christmas that cost all of $15, and I felt like I was king of the world for months after.
The relative poverty played out in other ways. Toys were all hand-me-downs, or Goodwill acquisitions, and even so, there weren’t many.
Which leads me to Crayons.
They came in different-sized boxes. Still do, in fact, but I’m relating the memories of the 6-year-old at the center of this memory.
There was the 8-crayon box, which anybody could afford. Crayola says “8 ct. Crayola Crayons are the classic kids’ art tool. They are the colors generations have grown up with — includes red, yellow, green, blue, brown, black, orange and purple!”
There was the 16-crayon box, which included the coveted gold, silver and copper. There was the 24-crayon box, and then 48, which moved into ethereal realm of colors called yellow-green and sky blue and flesh.
There was the 64-crayon box, which I think I saw only a handful of times in my entire life, so I can’t say what colors it contained.
And then there was a box that contained 96 crayons. Ninety six!! Tangerine! Jungle Green! Fuschia! Red Violet! Royal Purple! Pacific Blue! Sea Green, Dandelion, Sepia!
The colors were ranked in disciplined rainbow rows in the huge box, like an invading Crayola army.
This was WEALTH. Raw, in-your-face goddam opulence.
Only two kids I ever met had it. Michelle was one. (The other was a kid in the 6th grade, long after any of us really cared about such things, so he doesn’t count.)
The first time that box came to school, it nearly caused a riot. Unheeding Miss Calvert’s orders, we left our seats to crowd around and gawk. There were gasps. There were wows. Even fat old Miss Calvert waddled over to marvel.
When Michelle opened that box for the first time, a kind of glow emerged, something like really religious people might imagine emanates from holy shrines. It wasn’t just glorious, it was Glory itself. Thinking about it now, I even seem to remember a sound, the distant choral notes of a heavenly choir (although this may only be the constant tinny whine in my aged ears) that accompanied the opening of the full 96-crayon box.
A brand new box of 96 crayons, in untouched splendor. Pristine tips. Not a scratch, not a tooth mark. Perfect, unpeeled paper covers. Unbroken. And the colors! None of us dared touch them, but Miss Calvert and Michelle read off their names as the rest of us stood in stunned, slack-jawed silence. Periwinkle? Cerulean? We’d never even heard of them.
Damn.
Eventually I went back to my desk and my own coloring book. I opened the page to the horse. I opened my own box of crayons. They were new and perfect, just as unbroken and unblemished as Michelle’s. But when I looked at my color selection, there was only red, yellow, green, blue, brown, black, orange and purple.
I had the 8-color box.
Sweet, wealthy Michelle might have colored her horse brick red or mahogany, desert sand or almond, but I had only brown.
The memory ends there. Surely I picked up the brown and started coloring, doing the best I could with what I had. Even at the age of 6, you know life doesn’t end just because it hurts. And there’s a hazy something in my head that suggests that later in the year, Michelle even lent out certain colors to special friends, and that once or twice I qualified to borrow her sunset orange, or silver, or even copper.
But carried unnoticed and unsuspected across half a century, there’s still a tiny little wound on the heart of that 6-year-old boy.
Being poor sucks. Certainly there are plenty of children in the world who have less, and the sensible-adult me of today well knows it.
But 50-plus years later, there’s a 6-year-old in me that still yearns, impossibly and hopelessly, after Crayola’s Big Box.
And I still have no idea what periwinkle looks like.
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[Afternote: I looked up the history of Crayola on Wikipedia, and I’ve misremembered some of this. The 96-box came along well after I was in first grade. It was the 64-box I recall.]
