2024-11-21T14:17:32+00:00

Morrissey in Atlantic City, 2024

November 21, 2024/The Bridge Faith Community/1 Comment

Last week, I saw Morrissey in Atlantic City. (If you don’t know who Morrissey is, I’m sorry… you should find out immediately.) He’s been my very favorite since I was 13ish, and he’s still my favorite artist by miles and miles. My favorite song is “There Is A Light That Never Goes Out,” and number 2 is “Half A Person.” When I make lists of My Top 10 (or 100 or 500) songs or albums, I don’t include him, because he’s all of the top spots and the list begins for others much later.

The question is if we are one sort of person and find the artists that mean the most or if they find us and we become those people? And like so many things, the answer is yes. We are predisposed to Smiths (the band Morrissey fronted) songs. We are emotional, sensitive, weird, and they massage those already screaming places and make them grow. Where we were a little outside of the norm, we became complete misfits and put that on like comfy sweaters. We are the kind of people looking for artists to “save our lives” and so we find them, then we become the people who were “saved” by an artist. It’s an odd circle, but it’s not very complicated. It’s nature AND nurture. I was born and was raised into a Morrissey person.

So, when he plays roughly 3 hours from my house, teenage me would have walked. Now me checks the calendar for days off and the kids schedule and bank account to see about a fancy hotel. When they line up, I am very, very excited to go.

There are few casual Morrissey fans. He is either your favorite, or you don’t really care for him at all (like my brother, who HATES him). Everyone there wore t-shirts and knew every word to 40 year old album tracks. He played new songs, not on a released album, and we even knew those lyrics. How? Because we’re Morrissey people. How would we not know “I Am Veronica?”

The setlist was not the one I would’ve compiled. If you listed the 20 biggest hits for your favorite band, this setlist would have included only 2 or 3. He omitted many of the songs that soundtracked our lives, seemingly choosing by random. Which is really cool, in most cases. In others, it’s still really cool.

It didn’t change my life. I spent the night in the hotel with the Angel, and the 2 of us had dinner with my sister and brother-in-law. My sister and I then went to the show together. Those last 2 sentences were more important to me than any of the songs or even (gasp!) Morrissey himself. I’m not who I used to be.

In the song “Ouija Board,” there are 2 lines that perfectly touched every last bit of me. “..and I still do feel so horribly lonely,” and “I just can’t find my place in the world.” Even the famous lyric from “How Soon Is Now?” – “ I am human and I need to be loved.”

I’m not very lonely too much at all, anymore. I think I finally have found my place in the world, as well as the story of my life. And the 2nd half of the “I am human and I need to be loved…just like everybody else does,” is now what I can focus on, which has changed my life in such beautifully meaningful ways.

There was a sharpie in my pocket for him to sign my t-shirt, just in case we ran into each other. We didn’t, but if we had, I would’ve thanked him, told him how grateful I am to have found him. That’s true. I am a Morrissey person, only now that is only a fairly small part of me…But that fairly small part still listens to Bona Drag on repeat and carries a sharpie and makes me hoarse singing along to pop songs in a concert hall in Atlantic City.

A Few Observations On The Election

November 8, 2024/The Bridge Faith Community/Leave a comment

Maybe you missed it, but there was an election to decide the President of the United States this week. I am no different from most of the rest of us, we are all overflowing with emotions & observations that will take days, months, years to unpack and reconcile.

I don’t like to speak publicly about who and/or what, specifically, I politically support. Far more important to me is offering everyone a seat at every table, where we are comfortable and safe to explore and discover our own place in our journey. It’s never helpful to try to control others conclusions or beat them into changing their minds – not helpful to relationships and always unsuccessful.

What has hurt us, as a nation (of course) and as human beings, is the belief that we are not just one group, but we are 2, an us/them dichotomy, adversaries where I am right and you are wrong. I am interested in bridging imaginary gaps and reminding us all that we are all moms & dads, brothers & sisters, just people all in the same strange boat, inviting us all to the table. And big beautiful tables like that aren’t ever built by hanging signs on the front door that some aren’t welcome. We listen and try to understand, and when we don’t, we love anyway.

I do have some observations, (hopefully) without endorsement or judgment of you and your conclusions.

Let’s say Pepsi and Coke are the only available soft drinks. And let’s also say we don’t like them. They’re not great, but we figure that one is marginally better than the other. Now, let’s say a new company comes along to disrupt the status quo. We complain about the 2 soda empires, but we continue to only buy Coke or Pepsi. Do you think anything would ever change? Do you think Coke will sink any time, energy, or money into putting out a better product? Do you think Pepsi will ever decide to transform the dual monopoly, if it means cutting their own profits and market share? Of course, neither of them would jeopardize their own power and wealth. Our participation in this 2 cola race (voting with our wallets to ignore any other drinks) is validation of an only 2 cola race. In this case, we deserve Pepsi & Coke.

I do wish we deserved/demanded a wide array of choices in our soft drinks.

I am a religious person – but maybe not the kind of religious that you might have in your head. What I actually mean is that I love and follow Jesus, and I love you, too. So, a really big problem is when we replace God with a person or party, and when we replace the enemy with a person or party. (After writing and deleting what I’ve written several times,) That’s all I’ll say about that.

What I know, after this and every election, is that we are still an us, there are no monsters here, and as long as division reigns supreme, we will drift farther and farther apart. We will dig our feet into our respective Coke or Pepsi camps, and hurl violent insults (and more) from our right-ness into their wrong-ness, killing our opponents, before we ever wake up to the truth that in killing them, we have been killing ourselves all along.

Episode 8

November 4, 2024/The Bridge Faith Community/1 Comment

The site asks me what my life will be like in 3 years? Well, I imagine we’ll be slaves to our machine overlords. Or maybe it’ll look exactly the same, because we’re already slaves to the machines? Or maybe I’ll still be loving you, trying to change the whole world one at a time?

Anyway, a few days ago I watched episode 8 of the Star Wars saga, called The Last Jedi. Many of those who hold Star Wars like a religion rather than a rad film series hated this installment. Probably because our hero was a woman (!!!), the bad guy was derisively called “emo” (as if that was somehow a negative?), there was an awesome character named Rose that received death threats because she had the nerve to be in a movie, but the most egregious sin was that Luke Skywalker was jaded and sour. We like what we like, and don’t always (i.e. never) embrace change.

Rey, Ren, and Rose are perfect, and I thought it was pretty reasonable that Luke might be sort of broken after what he saw and endured, his spirit buckling under his guilt and shame. I spent years depressed and isolated for far less than plunging the universe into bondage under a new empire.

(I’m about to talk about how great this film is, and I’m going to need you to forget, as I will, that scene of Leia floating through space. Deal? Deal.)

Beginning with the moment where Rey shows up in Snoke’s throne room, the next hour+ is my absolute favorite. There’s nothing else in all of the movies I’ve seen that can touch it. Not Captain America getting Thor’s hammer in Endgame. Not the reveal in Fight Club. Not Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men or The Shining or Five Easy Pieces. Not the heart-crushing Aimee Mann song at the end of Magnolia. Or the super-strange frog rain in Magnolia. Not Helm’s Deep or the battle for New York. Not “In Your Eyes” on John Cusack’s boom box or every word of the script of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Not the conversation between The Bride and Bill or “Say what again!!”from Pulp Fiction. Maybe the reveal in Fight Club… no, not the reveal in Fight Club.

Ren & Rey killing Snoke and fighting the royal guard, Laura Dern turning the cruiser around and hyperspacing into the imperial fleet, the mono-skis on the salt planet, and LUKE SKYWALKER showing up!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! It’s THE BEST!!!

The weirdos who say the movie was terrible could not possibly be more wrong. In fact, I wonder if it’s all some sort of organized troll, like a work in big time wrestling, where everybody knows the truth. Like if you know somebody who says “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and the Beatles are overrated. They can barely say it with a straight face. Maybe this is the same. It has to be, right?

But the Star Wars studio heads didn’t think so. They listened to this nonsense and retconned (a new term that I can’t say I totally like) the story, rolling it back to somehow cobble together episode 9. Sigh. So I’ll keep watching episode 8 over and over, at least until those same studio heads destroy the print, and pretend it was never made. But we’ll remember, won’t we?

Somebody Else

October 30, 2024/The Bridge Faith Community/Leave a comment

The site is asking me for One Thing I Believe Everyone Should Know, and I have a few answers. First, that each of us is loved beyond reason or limit, and has value far exceeding what we would ever guess. And the second is to take the weight plates off of the bars at the gym, and wipe their equipment down.

We talk a lot about the first one, but not too much about the second. A few weeks ago, a woman asked me if the squat rack next to me was in use (because the bar was still loaded with weights), and I told her I didn’t think so, but I would ask the guy that was there and was now on a different machine. I asked him if he was finished with it, and he said yes, so I offered to help him unload it, to which he was incredulous. “What?” I said it was common practice to strip the weights. He looked confused and pretty aggressively answered that he didn’t know that, nobody told him. But does anyone really have to be told that?

Apparently, based on the frequency that weights are left on the bars, YES. So, I’d like everyone to know that. But a better question is, why don’t they? Why are some people so rude? But maybe they don’t know it’s so rude, and in that case, how could they possibly not know? When/Where did the philosophy of “Somebody Else” come into such popular fashion. “Why should I do it? Somebody Else will.” “Oh, don’t bother, Somebody Else will take care of it.” Ugh.

I actually have an answer to this Why, and at the risk of sounding like The Oldest Man In The World, I think the answer is, obviously, our phones. We used to pay attention, to have an awareness of our surroundings, to walk around in a fairly awake state of consciousness. This is not a romanticism of the past, when I was young… I’m not a man who thinks the past was the good ‘ol days, and everything was better. Much of our culture, most of our lives, are probably better now in so many ways. We have evolved.

But there are some things that have been lost. One of them is personal contact. We mistake screens for people, “Friends” for friends, DMs for conversation. A Zoom meeting simply isn’t a straight 1:1 substitute for a conference table. We go to the gym and, between sets, put our noses into our phones, texting, scrolling YouTube videos or Instagram reels, instead of watching those around us, seeing and learning the norms of living in a society. It’s much harder to relate in person than on a Snapchat message, and requires so many more skills and attention. We have to recognize non-verbal cues as well as tones and inflections. But we also can connect in far more depth. We will see their faces, their struggles, accomplishments, exercises, forms, etc. And we will notice easily that grown-ups (of any age) unload their weights.

We are tied to an entire world, but we are increasingly disconnected to our neighbors and separated from those we see every day. This happens to be absolutely anti-human, and it’s why we end up finding it so easy to be so mean online, categorizing each other as monsters, “us vs them” instead of how it actually is, just a great big pile of Us.

Of course, we all want everyone to strip their weights, but mostly we want to see each other in real life again, right?

Tolerance…

October 17, 2024/The Bridge Faith Community/Leave a comment

We’re having an event (where I’ll speak and a fantastically talented singer-songwriter will perform) at our church. You’re invited, of course, but that’s not exactly what I want to talk about right now. A very great friend sent out an all-staff email with the flyer to invite those at the company where she works. Maybe this was a horrific breach of the separation of church & state, sacred & secular, religion & profession. Or maybe this was an irresponsible use of corporate communication channels. Or maybe this was simply a woman sharing her interests with her co-workers. (It was probably all of those.) Either way, she was quickly reprimanded, because…someone was offended and complained.

Is it an issue of ‘personal use’ or religious content? Who knows, the administration is appropriately vague. I wonder if all personal communications (like “Sally had her baby!!!” “Sally has extra tickets to the Phillies game,” “Sally’s husband is in surgery right now,” or even, “Sally is raising money for hurricane relief in North Carolina”) are banned. Or just religious messages (the only religious vocabulary or imagery on our flyer was the word “faith” in the address)? And who says what’s religious? The national religions are sports and/or commerce, so does anything having to do with those topics get flagged? Can I remind people to vote? Can I send a birthday card around? Or are we automatons strictly confined to professional conversation? Is it just email? Can I still ask you about your car accident or pet’s death, or is any acknowledgment that you have an outside life offensive?

Obviously, I’m overreacting, using absurdity to illustrate the absurd. But there is something here, isn’t there? This is not “persecution” or Christian “censorship.” We sometimes lob these kinds of words like grenades that do nothing but de-value and desensitize us to actual persecution, which does exist (just not here).

If you sent out an email I don’t like – or if, in this case, if I would NEVER go to your event – I would delete it. That’s all. Then I would go on with my day. Maybe someone else would go to your event, and in that case, I hope you all have fun. In fact, I want lots and lots to go, because we are human beings and people should enjoy themselves. Even if I wouldn’t enjoy myself at their shindig. But I still want to know about Sally’s life, Joe’s passion for pickle ball, or Jim’s grass cutting business.

As the notion of tolerance grows, I wonder why we’re all so much more offendable? Shouldn’t our pretend tolerance make us all very open to your thing, whatever your thing is? This is why tolerance is a ridiculous joke – because no one actually believes it, in the slightest. I would’ve put it in the above list of American religions, but we build our lives around Sunday afternoons and Black Friday, but almost no one cares what tolerance actually is, and less than ‘almost no one’ follows it’s basic tenets.

The only time tolerance matters is when I ask you to tolerate MY idea, belief, or opinion. Tolerance is a one way street, not a revolving door. It’s a farce that’s time has come and gone. How about we let it die and Rest In Peace.

Tolerance is such a low bar, anyway. How about we love each other? How about we celebrate each other’s differences, instead of merely tolerating them, like I tolerate the ulcer in my mouth or the bunions on my feet? We’re people, not social nuisances. Sometimes people have interests that you might not, and that is wonderful. It gives us and our world texture and color. Maybe you’d like my event, even if you don’t like singer-songwriters or brownies or my face, and maybe you wouldn’t. But that’s not the point at all. The point is that pretending to worship tolerance has gotten our feelings in such a twist, we are offended at mostly everything, enjoy nothing, and our world continues to divide and shrink. Love can open us up to new people, new experiences, new stories, new hands to hold and songs to hear, and in this season of divided, small perspectives, can’t we all use a bit of that sort of new?

More Than 1 Thing

October 1, 2024/The Bridge Faith Community/Leave a comment

Pete Rose died yesterday. The fear that was looming large over the new documentary was, will Baseball indict him into the Hall Of Fame before he dies? That answer, we now know, is no. I think that’s pretty sad. He certainly deserves to be there, based solely on his contribution to the game on the field. Of course, his personal character wouldn’t get him into anywhere nice and fancy, but it’s not the Integrity Hall Of Fame, it’s the baseball Hall Of Fame. Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens (and many others) should be in, too. It’s impossible to tell the story of baseball without them.

There’s a new documentary on Vince McMahon called “Mr. McMahon,” the visionary head of big time pro wrestling. I loved wrestling, and watching the doc was overwhelmingly nostalgic. My heart ached for the simple beauty of my experience of the time. (That’s the thing about nostalgia – it might not necessarily be an accurate depiction of the time, but it is mine, in my head.) Vince McMahon created this wonderful thing – he didn’t invent professional wrestling, but he might as well have – that was so meaningful to me, but he was, my almost all accounts, an awfully bad person. The law has been chasing him and his behavior for years and may have now caught him. We’ll see.

Another new doc is on Lyle & Eric Menendez, 2 brothers who murdered their parents. They were severely physically & sexually abused (I never know when it’s proper to use the word “allegedly”), had enough, and killed them. This story is full of conflicting truth and emotion. The parents were monsters (allegedly?), but did that mean they deserved to be murdered? Of course not. The boys were victims of horrible evil (allegedly?) and killers. They are all, at least, 2 things, probably a million more.

Lyle is apparently a husband, too. He’s been married twice while in prison. Incidentally, this is something that is totally unfathomable. Is this commentary on the sad state of men, where a woman would have to look in the prison population (locked up for homicide, no less) than at the local fitness club or on Match.com, OR is it an illustration of the mental health epidemic? Either way, it’s aggressive.

The best documentaries are interesting, in exactly this way. Lou Pearlman was a great Svengali for boy bands, pouring money & energy into these groups betting on their success. He was also a thief, building his own pyramid scheme as an altar to himself and his own greed. A prison administrator, Vicki White, was awesome, a competent worker, loving to everyone, a great friend and co-worker. She was also a woman who fell in love with a prisoner (also locked up for homicide!!!) and busted him out, and when they were finally caught at the end of their escape, committed suicide.

People are complex, with lots of facets. Some of those facets are the most glorious & pure you have ever seen. And sometimes they’re cracked and discolored. And, most of the time, we find all of them on the same person. You wouldn’t want Pete Rose as your friend, but he belonged in the Hall Of Fame, and will probably get in now. I would thank Vince McMahon if I’d ever meet him, but I kind of hope I don’t ever meet him. Barry Bonds gained 25 pounds of muscle and 2 hat sizes in 2 months, lied about how he did that, and was the best I’ve ever seen. We’re all more than just 1 thing, and empathy (or what I like to call, “becoming a human being”) is about learning to hold all of them with 2 hands.

What Would The Algorithm Think?

September 19, 2024/The Bridge Faith Community/Leave a comment

I think I told you I re-signed up for a Netflix subscription when I picked up the NFL Network for Sunday RedZone. I love football, and perhaps even more so, I love the ritual of Sunday afternoons with my family, all of the games, and the host Scott Hansen.

(Now, this makes me think about the Greeks having lots of words for love. I love my sons, my wife…and football? Surely, I don’t love them the same. It shouldn’t be the same word, right? But we only have one, and under those rules, I do love the Dallas Cowboys. And now that I think about it, my love for a faceless organization is pretty unconditional. I can’t think of another product that I would continue to patronize if the product was inferior. I would stop using Dawn dish detergent if it didn’t clean the dishes. Why don’t I move away from the Dallas Cowboys after nearly 30 years of heartbreak? Heartbreak? It’s not heartbreak, it’s just sports. Maybe we need to rethink the words we use.)

So, this Netflix subscription has unlocked many new documentaries. I know more now about Jessica Wongso, Laci Peterson, a couple that was so badly mistreated over a home invasion/kidnapping/sexual assault that nobody believed, and several others. Most of them have, as their subject, murder or, at the very least, violence. I don’t mind violence in movies, but I mind it a lot in real life. (I mind sexual assault the most, I stay away from that at all costs. I did not know about it’s inclusion in the home invasion doc, and I was sorry immediately.) And I always recoil over any discussion on murder. So why do I gravitate to these sorts of films?

I prefer quirky, like Chicken People or Super Size Me, where no one dies. Even the Chimpanzee one on Max was pretty strange & terrific. There aren’t that many of those, though. Especially in relation to the tsunami of serial killers and psychopaths. A series on bad roommates and exes is good enough, tickling weirdos and toy collectors is better yet. (Not that all ticklers are weirdos because they enjoy tickle competitions, but some of them are. There are weirdos in any avenue. I would surmise there are more per 100 in competitive tickling, though.)

I wonder why there are so many murder-docs? Why are they so popular? This seems to say much more about us than it does about the filmmakers or even the subjects. So, what does it say about me? I wish a little that we could see our own AI algorithms, made up of our aggregate thumbs ups and downs, and how we actually choose to spend our time. What would my algorithm think about me?

But I probably don’t really want to know that. Sometimes, it’s best not to ask questions and enjoy the games, instead.

Judgment

September 6, 2024/The Bridge Faith Community/Leave a comment

This post, I imagine, will touch on lots and lots of different topics. So, we’ll dive in and see where this takes (and leaves) us.

I recently resuscitated my Netflix subscription, and immediately dug into the documentary wing, devouring one on Laci Peterson and another on Ashley Madison. Laci Peterson (and her unborn child) was (were) murdered by her husband, Scott. Ashley Madison is a website where married people can find other married people with whom to share their infidelity. Both of these situations are significant to me, I am married to the Angel, and I also wrote a book on marriage (called Be Very Careful Who You Marry, that you can get on this very website;).

Scott, who appears to be without any form of actual human emotion, is in prison serving a life sentence, largely due to the testimony of his extramarital girlfriend, Amber. Ashley Madison was the victim of a hack that revealed its customers and a nearly endless well of fraud. (I know, it’s shocking that a company that exists to facilitate deception and betrayal would deceive and betray it’s users. Shocking.)

Many of the participants in both docs repeated the mantra, like the chorus in a pop song, “I don’t judge,” or some version of that particular command of Jesus. It’s always interesting when we choose to refer to the Scriptures. But Scott’s family doesn’t think we should judge Scott, Ashley Madison doesn’t think we should judge it/them or their clients. Is it judgment to think dishonesty is a bad thing? Is it judgment to abhor the act of killing your family? Is it judgment to notice the emotional destruction that comes from infidelity?

I wrote about Oppenheimer a few weeks ago – is it judgment to think that, even if we can blow up the whole world, maybe that’s not something we should do? And if we do, maybe that sort of thing is wrong? And while we’re there, is it judgment to believe in the notions of right and wrong?

I watched an episode of Ashley Madison with my son and we discussed it afterwards. Is it judgment to watch this wreckage and learn a lesson, so he doesn’t have to suffer in similar footsteps? Is it judgment to tell him not to cheat on or murder his wife?

All of these questions are somewhat facetious – I’m not honestly asking. The purpose is to expose the ridiculous nature of a culture that has misidentified ‘judgment’ and has turned it into some kind of catch-all rationalization for bad decisions. To call a bad decision a bad decision isn’t judgment, it never was and never will be. To learn from other’s mistakes requires that we categorize them as mistakes, and not simply different equal paths.

I understand judgment just fine, and that’s for a few reasons. I was born with empathy coming out of my ears, so it makes me uniquely qualified to see your perspective (or anyone else’s). However, if you get to live long enough, you see too much of the fallout of this kind of relational dynamite. And you can easily begin to get a little hardened by crying so much, so often. So, like quadriceps, you’ll have to train those muscles, so they don’t completely atrophy. These documentaries are the gym for me. I watch and my heart still breaks everytime. And I can see (sometimes from a great distance) why they may have made these particular decisions.

Inside the Ashley Madison story, there’s a couple who became internet famous as Christian marriage YouTubers. “This is how you have a healthy marriage…This is how you love God & each other…” Except he was not what he pretended to be. So.

To live an honest life of faith, or a human life, fully present and engaged with the world and those around us, it’s integral that we get comfortable with the dichotomy. He was a pretender, who was completely disrespectful to God, his wife, family, the women he cheated with, and himself. This is true. But he isn’t only that. He’s also a child of God, created in His image. And his story isn’t over. The thing about judgment is that it assumes it is over, etched in stone. He doesn’t have to continue to be disrespectful, he is not exiled, confined to that locked box forever. There is forgiveness. He can change.

Now maybe I don’t necessarily think he should get the privilege of returning to his beautiful wife, but that’s not judgment, that’s consequence. I don’t think someone needs to continue to be a punching bag in the service of a mis-defined non-judgmentalism. But my opinion doesn’t matter too much to these people I’ve never met. She thinks he should, and we can all pray he can/will change.

On this, Scott Peterson is in jail for the rest of his life for his actions, but maybe he isn’t that same person anymore. I don’t need him to be. In fact, I really really hope he’s not. I can hold both things. He did this and there are consequences, but while this is legal judgment, it’s certainly not mine to carry for eternity. Right & wrong are real (murdering your wife is wrong) AND have nothing at all to do with our status as human beings (Scott Peterson is a child of God, dearly loved, he’s a son, brother, friend).

I can see why people join cults or sign up and give their credit card information to sleazy websites or listen to Coldplay or CrossFit or go vegan or vote for either party. It doesn’t mean I will. It just means I can see why you might. (Ok, maybe I can’t see why you’d listen to Coldplay, but they’re the exception.) And when we choose to start there, and keep training those muscles, we can consciously choose our values and avoid the pitfalls that come with sleepwalking through closed-minded lives. And love somebody, love everybody, instead.

THE TV Show

August 26, 2024/The Bridge Faith Community/Leave a comment

The site prompt is, “What TV shows did you watch as a kid?” This is very easy, because the answer is as true for when I was a kid as it is now. I watch(ed) Three’s Company.

Now, you’ll snicker and joke that it’s a dumb show about misunderstandings and outdated humor. Maybe those 2 things are true, but it is certainly not dumb. I’ll never agree with you on that. The foundations of me – and no doubt the reasons you love me so much – were forged in the late 70’s & early 80’s with Jack, Janet, Chrissy, Cindy, Terri, Larry, the Ropers, and Furley.

Does that sound ridiculous? Probably. Whatever.

But listen, the outfits and silly plot lines (some used and re-used over and over) were simply the structure for the real purpose: the relationships. The love they had for each other was the show. They argued and made up. They threatened to move out, and they fought for, cried with, and protected each other – like a beautiful cocoon of love in a world where love is forever in too-short supply.

There was never enough money, the rent was always late, eviction was always right around the corner, bosses harassed, they were hired and lost jobs, made dumb purchases, dated the wrong people – just like us. We have bills and conflict and money that runs out too soon. But what we might not have, and desperately need, is a tightly knit group surrounding us to face those monsters together.

Of course, I learned that I am heterosexual and have a type – maybe I was genetically predisposed to be wildly attracted to all Janet Woods, or maybe I am because of Janet Wood/Joyce Dewitt. It doesn’t matter, I suppose. Chicken & egg, right?

But much more than sexuality, I learned that we aren’t made to live alone. We are made for each other. Probably I am impatient with separation because the anxiety I felt when the roommates fought was over in 30 minutes. 30 minutes that felt impossibly long. Nothing was ever more important than the connection, than the ties that held them together, and I still believe that.

I cry with them when Janet marries Philip and when they turn the lights out for the last time. Everybody does. But I also cry when Jack buys Janet’s pendant back from the pawn shop for her birthday, when that scumbag dance instructor tears Janet up and Jack is there (of course, he’s there) to dance with her, and when Jack chooses Bernice for dinner. And I cry for different reasons altogether over a hammock or roller skates.

It’s the best show ever, and it’s not close. And I’ll fight you over that fact, as long as we make up in a half an hour.

Small Towns

August 22, 2024/The Bridge Faith Community/Leave a comment

Jenny From The Block filed for divorce from Batman yesterday. We probably all knew this was coming, as they were having multiple weddings (some very, very public), telling anyone who would listen, and making movies of their unstoppable love. Most likely, this news was met with an eye roll and the assignment of blame. Each of us know who’s fault we think it is, right?

I am an animal of the popular culture, and I have always been interested in things like this. I like details, and am embarrassed to say, gossip. Today, though, I feel different.

I grew up in a small town, went to college in a small town, and then stayed in that same small town. Pretty much everyone knows each other (and their business.) Maybe we don’t know their names, but we kind of know our neighbors stories, hear them fight, see the sirens of their recent DUI’s, and guess at how many times they’ve been divorced. (J.Lo will have been divorced 4 times after this one.) Batman and his soon to be ex-wife live in this kind of small town, too, except it’s comprised of the whole world.

We still don’t know what exactly happened or why, but we kind of do, we read online quotes from “sources,” and we are all armchair psychologists, reading into each facial expression, and injecting each holiday spent apart with inferred meaning. I think, while he might not hate fame or wild paychecks, he hates celebrity, and she absolutely does not, and that creates a certain tension that is difficult to navigate. He seems like you’d love to be his buddy, but that you might not love to be his partner. Like me. She seems like she would need a lot of attention. Like me. I guess I’d guess it’s his fault (because my default position is ‘it’s his fault’). But who knows???? I only know, for sure, someone who doesn’t know, and that’s me.

Small towns can be really great. I love mine, but I bet I wouldn’t quite as much if I knew what everyone thought of every decision I made without ever having as much as a conversation with me. But this is the curse of a small town. I do wish them peace, broken relationships are very hard, no matter how much money is in the bank. Maybe this sort of thing would be a little easier if our ‘small towns’ of voices and opinions were only made up of those we actually know.

Love With A Capital L

A journey towards living an inspired life of love in the modern world

Tag: culture