You can watch live video of BP’s oil gushing into the Gulf Coast by clicking here. Psych. Actually you have to click here.

I drank a lot of water today. So I had to pee a lot too. Then I washed my hands a lot. So my hands are really dry. I can’t twist off the damn lid to the damn lotion bottle. Thanks BP for screwing everything up.

It was nice of Obama to take the blame and say that he was wrong for not responding well to the spill. It’s hard to forgive him though. I mean it’s raining like crazy here in Oregon and if it wasn’t for that stupid BP oil spill I’d be tanning right now.

In one story God is a married couple who fight and then make up. In another, people created their consciousness in computers so that they could make their afterlife whatever they wanted it to be. In another, a man chooses to become a horse in his next life and then realizes when he dies again as a horse he won’t be smart enough to change into something other than a horse. In one, those who die wait in a waiting room and don’t move on until their name is completely forgotten and uttered for the last time.

I first heard him talking about some of his ideas on Radio Lab’s podcast.

I was so struck by one of the vignettes I reproduced it here. Of course I don’t believe in this version of the afterlife (they aren’t meant to be believed, they’re intended to make us reflect on the life we have now), but the metaphor struck me and I wanted to share it. It’s titled, “Ineffable”.

When soldiers part ways at war’s end, the breakup of the platoon triggers the same emotion as the death of a person–it is the final bloodless death of the war. This same mood haunts actors on the drop of the final curtain: after months of working together, something greater than themselves has just died. After a store closes its doors on its final evening, or a congress wraps its final session, the participants amble away, feeling that they were part of something larger than themselves, something they intuit had a life even though they can’t quite put a finger on it.

In this way, death is not only for humans but for everything that existed.

And it turns out that anything which enjoys life enjoys an afterlife. Platoons and plays and stores and congresses do not end–they simply move on to a different dimension. They are things that were created and existed for a time, and therefore by the cosmic rules they continue to exist in a different realm.

Although it is difficult for us to imagine how these beings interact, they enjoy a delicious afterlife together, exchanging stories of their adventures. They laugh about good times and often, just like humans, lament the brevity of life. The people who constituted them are not included in their stories. In truth, they have as little understanding of you as you have of them; they generally have no idea you existed.

It may seem mysterious to you that these organizations can live on without the people who composed them. but the underlying principle is simple: the afterlife is made of spirits. After all, you do not bring your kidney and liver and heart to the afterlife with you–instead, you gain independence from the pieces that make you up.

A consequence of this cosmic scheme may surprise you: when you die, you are grieved by all the atoms of which you were composed. They hung together for years, whether in sheets of skin or communities of spleen. With your death they do not die. Instead, they part ways, moving off in their separate directions, mourning the loss of a special time they shared together, haunted by the feeling that they were once playing parts in something larger than themselves, something that had its own life, something they can hardly put a finger on.

Sometimes the thoughts don’t come, sometimes I just don’t have the time, other times what I do say seems stupid or irrelevant.

That’s why I hadn’t posted anything for awhile. Except about how you should take the time to prepare and plan and write your best stuff. Which of course I don’t always do.

So here are two things that I found super interesting, but don’t have the time to comment on.

The first comes from an article in NewScientist titled, “Invasion of the mind-snatchers” about how Western notions of mental illness are one world view out of many and aren’t always helpful when crossing into different cultures. It’s adapted from Ethan Watters’ book Crazy Like Us. Here’s an excerpt:

[In post-tsunami Sri Lanka] Sri Lankans didn’t report pathological reactions in line with the internal states making up most of the west’s Post Traumatic Stress Disorder checklist (hyperarousal, emotional numbing, and the like). Rather, they tended to see the negative consequences of tragic events in terms of damage to social relationships. Fernando’s research showed the people who continued to suffer were those who had become isolated from their social network or who were not fulfilling their role in kinship groups. Thus Sri Lankans conceived the tsunami damage as occurring not inside their minds but outside, in the social environment.

The next article is from Patrol Magazine about a journalist who was forced to ask Amy Grant to apologize to the readers of CCM Magazine for divorcing Gary Chapman. It’s adapted from Hear No Evil by Matthew Paul Turner.

A few days before the interview [with Amy Grant], I received an email from Gerald, my publisher, asking me to come to his office at my earliest convenience.

Just reading the email caused my heart to beat like a conga drum. Gerald frightened me. At least half of what came out of his mouth was meant to break somebody down.

I deleted the email and told myself to think of Gerald’s office like Daniel thought of the lion’s den. God will shut the lion’s mouth, I thought as I poked my head into his office.

“Gerald, can you talk now?”

Without looking at me, he said, “Yeah, come on in.”

He threw an old copy of CCM on his desk in front of me. It was the issue with Amy on the cover, and the interview inside focused on her divorce from Gary Chapman.

“Have you read this interview?” Gerald asked.

“Yeah, I read it.”

“Pretty pathetic, isn’t it?” He thumbed through the pages of the interview, waiting for me to agree. When I didn’t say anything, he looked up. “Well?”

“How is that interview pathetic? I loved that story.”

“She doesn’t apologize, Matthew. For getting a divorce.” Gerald shifted in his chair. “Not one time. It’s as if she’s not sorry for disobeying God’s command to stay married. She needs to apologize.”

He closed the magazine.

“Who does she need to apologize to, Gerald?”

“Her fans. Us at CCM. And everybody she failed.”

Our chat went on like this for fifteen minutes. Eventually, Gerald got to his point.

“On Wednesday, when you do the interview, get her to apologize. Ask her to apologize if you need to.”

“Are you kidding me? You’re asking me walk into Amy’s house and get her to apologize for something that happened more than three years ago? She’s remarried, Gerald.”

Gerald threw his hands in the air. “I want her to apologize.”

“Gerald, this isn’t Watergate. We cover Christian music. Can’t we do a fun story and let the stupid divorce topic remain in the past?”

“God has rules.” He spun his chair toward the laptop sitting on a table next to his desk. “Either get Amy to apologize or we won’t run the story. Period. Get out of here.”

I walked out.

5. I woke up at 5am, I’m sick. I’m driving 10 hours to San Jose. Well I’ll probably be riding shot-gun and sleeping, but still it sucks. We lost 6-0 to #7 San Jose St. The guys played great though. They’ve almost mastered the 1-4 forecheck.

4. [The] cataclysm will begin 75 miles off the Oregon coastline. The ocean floor will split, sending shock waves racing under the water as fast as 17,000 mph. Those shock waves, felt first as a rumble, will slam into Portland in 30 seconds. The rattling will grow into a pulsing undulation that will repeatedly shove the ground up and down as much as 6 feet. (Quake-Up Call)

3. Super human tape measuring skills.

2. Vanishing Genitals! Be vigilant, it’s a real thing.

1. Jumpsuits for Men: Designed for people like you who make things happen.

I’m sick right now and that makes it hard to read and write. I’m also am taking a road trip to San Jose as my hockey team faces the #7 San Jose State Spartans this weekend. So today’s post is the first installment of my Top 5 of the Week.

5. Anytime Dubinsky gets smoked, it’s a good day. (Watch)

4. Massive 10 year olds hockey brawl. It’s okay, they’re Russian. (Watch)

3. Amazing cheese steak sandwiches, burgers, and even waffl-wiches at Theo’s in downtown Ptown. Open late on the weekends.

2. The sweetest goal I’ve seen in awhile by the Winterhawk’s Nino (Watch). You can watch me dangling Nino here.

1. I’m still waiting to be approved by Itunes, but soon my own Iphone and Android app will be released. Make yours at iSites for only $25. They’re a little backed up with requests, so it might take awhile to be approved. I’m on day 5 for my wait.

Geez, this is more anti-climatic than a James Cameron movie.

In any 60 minute hockey game the amount of time one player has possession of the puck is 30-120 seconds.

Which means football players spend more time walking and waiting then they do playing. And hockey players spend most of their skating away from the puck.

This means that what we do when we’re not in possession and when we’re not in the limelight is more important than what we do when we have possession and we are in the action.

If a player spends all his time trying to keep possession he’ll get tired and burn out. But if he waits, practices, plays his position, and anticipates, when the times comes to have possession he’ll score.

The Spanish chef Ferran Adria, who owns the restaurant El Bulli, which was voted the best restaurant in the world four years in a row, said he was closing down his restaurant for two years to “dedicate time to generate new ideas.”

His restaurant was only open six months out of the year.

The time we take to prepare is more important than when we perform.

By the time the puck is on our stick, the ball is snapped, the curtain is drawn, the crowd is waiting, we already know what to do.

Ted Genoways, the editor of the Virginia Quartetly Review, (which is a journal of literature and discussion) is lamenting the fall of literature magazines with the “Death of Fiction?“

I arrived at some of Genoway’s points independently in the last few months. And I’ve been meditating on them. Two of them are:

Indeed, most American writers seem to have forgotten how to write about big issues—as if giving two shits about the world has gotten crushed under the boot sole of postmodernism.

In the midst of a war on two fronts, there has been hardly a ripple in American fiction. With the exception of a few execrable screeds—like Nicholson Baker’s Checkpoint (which revealed just how completely postmodernism has painted itself into a corner)—novelists and story writers alike have largely ignored the wars. Even our poets, the supposed deliverers of “news that stays news,” have been comparatively mum; Brian Turner is the only major poet to yet emerge from Iraq.

When I first started analyzing literature seriously my junior year in high school I read Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, a shocking novel about soldiers in the Vietnam War. I have yet to come upon anything based on this almost decade old war. Movies have come out, but not any novels that I’m aware of.

I’d like to incorporate that into my fiction.

My other thought, which Genoway brought up, was a thought about my own writing,

I’m saying that writers need to venture out from under the protective wing of academia, to put themselves and their work on the line. Stop being so damned dainty and polite. Treat writing like your lifeblood instead of your livelihood. And for Christ’s sake, write something we might want to read.

I often wonder if I’d even want to read my own fiction. I know many people, like my friends, would rather not, fiction just doesn’t interest them, regardless how good the story might be. But if I think about it, there have been a few times when my non-reading friends ask for a novel.

Everyone loves a good story. That’ll never die.

In a world that is struggling with political solutions to big problems like the environment, hunger, poverty, and disease, we need a challenge like Mars now more than ever. We need to “sharpen up”…

Politically, we always struggle. In the history of human kind there has never not been a political struggle. As far as sharpening up, the people who do eventually participate in space travel won’t be the people needing sharpening up.

It’s good to dream big and reach beyond the clouds, but let’s not use our failures here to runaway somewhere else. We’ll screw things up in Mars the same way we screw up Earth.

Starting life on Mars might be, “an escape, a chance for a new start,” but starting new needs to begin not with the setting, but with the people.

It’s the inward change that propels the outer.

To you I say, This has never happened before,

this feeling.

And somewhere above the mountains the clouds rise dark and rumble and shatter.

You say, I miss you.

And now I’m afraid to move. The walls flash white and the smell of dirt rises to meet the falling rain.

I say, And when summer is gone?

And you say, I’ll miss you.

The clouds move pass the mountains and fall on other towns. Perhaps yours.

I’m afraid to go outside. I’m afraid of what I’ll see. I’m afraid of what you’ll say.

You like the mountains have power. You create and move the storm.

And I am down below, looking to the sky, wondering if you’ll come down, or if I can go up.

It is only miles between you and I. Only mountains and dirt and air.

I want to destroy them. Suck them into the vacuum of space.

But what are we without the distance? It defines our movements and shapes our words.

Mine are simple words. Unlike the storm, they go on. Like the mountains, they stay the same.