Tuesday, February 28, 2006

The Mind Dwindles

As I sit down to write to you, ideas seem to flee from my mind, and everything poignant that I was going to say disappears like a vapor on a windy day. But tonight, I've decided that I will push through, and maybe by persistence I'll get a fire kindled in this wordless storm.

I'm not sure why, but writing seems to come a bit more elusively these days, and to tell the truth, that scares me. It's not that I'm a professional or that my wife is depending on my writing necessarily, but I have to run harder to chase this dream. I suppose that my lackadaisical approach to reading and my work-loaded, unstudious behavior doesn't have anything to do with that. But the mind is a muscle (unless you're a medical expert), and I don't want it to succumb to atrophy. Thus, my tale. I had the pleasure of dining at Sunny and Brantley's tonight. It was CheeseFest 2006, because cheese is about to be off their menu for Lent. So, amid heaps of smoked and raw cheddars, ricottas, mozzarellas, and two jars of Danish Bleu in olive oil and spices (one of which I got to keep), we concocted loads of gourmet pizzas, that migrated to the grill to become succulent cheesy dreams. Stephen wowed us with a sweet, dark German beer, and our gall bladders went on strike. But the thing that always challenges me the most in being around Brantley and Sunny is their endless cocktail of knowledge and passion rolled into one. Their lives center around Jesus, and their minds are empires of thought. Another challenge of late came in the form of my pastor. Whenever he and I meet mono y mono, all his rapt attention is focused on me, which tends to make me very uncomfortable. The reason - and I just figured it out today - is that it's near impossible to fool the man. Lies that I can easily tell myself stand naked before the scrutiny of this man of God. I might as well meet Larry King over coffee.

Intelligence is a virtue that I recently dismissed as overrated. But, overrated though it may be, it is not wholly unimportant. In fact, for those who have the capability to be intelligent, it is certainly a gift. My reasoning for dismissing intelligence was that I saw that it outranked Love in a world beset with a diseased ideal of cold logic. I was never really one who wanted to see the picture painted by the numbers. But now, the possibility of a disengaged stance comes into play. The old precept of, "Use it or lose it," doesn't appear without merit. So, with the disadvantage of being a working non-student, I shall nontheless attempt to set goals of writing, reading, and learning. Some of this, I suppose, will be somewhat revealed here, but let's not jump ahead. Anyway, I hope to make this sound less like a blog and more like a prosaical news article. I'll try to list some of these goals to give myself a reasonable degree of accountability. So with the dictionary at hand and the poets at heart, let us wade - slightly deranged - into the deep end of the pool.

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