My First Diary
Note: This story contains some adult language. It may not be suitable for younger readers.
19 July 20--
Dear Diary, I feel like a little girl writing this diary. Maybe on your cover I should draw a kitty cat face or my initials encapsulated by a cartoon heart. (Note: Diary, do people use words like “encapsulate” in diaries? No matter, I guess. I just did.)
I’ve never kept one of you before, Diary, but tonight it just makes sense to start. I think anyone (at least anyone with half a heart) would think the same given what happened to me today. I just need some place to get it down, to talk it out, to feel it again by remembering it and expressing it – at least on paper.
And you see, Diary, the place I live right now does not offer many chances for that kind of thing. My current community is not too into touchy-feely stuff like that. (I guess every community has its blind spots.) :(
So, anyway, here you are, Dear Diary, and here I am, Dear Diary! (hee-hee!!!) So, let’s get started….
20 July 20--
Well, how to get started? It’s not too easy, Diary. I’ll try this maybe…
There’s this crazy old guy with a gray (and very passé) goatee who comes twice a month to tell us about God. A lot of times he tells us the best way to talk about God is to talk about what God is not.
His idea is that if God is infinite and we are – well – very much not (He says God’s infinitude could split-pop our heads like over-filled water balloons), then it makes sense – and is less gory :) – to list everything in our non-infinite, water balloon world that Infinite God is not. And by remembering what God is not, we can learn a little something about what God is.
The guy (he is our teacher, I guess) calls it the “Via Negative.” I call it a headache, and I’m not sure if I get the idea fully, but...
Anyway. Enough introductory theology. (And, Dear Diary, why should I bother with all that anyway? You are me (I guess), so you know what all that Via Negative stuff is because I know what it is – or at least I know what I think our teacher with the goatee says it is.)
Hmmm. I never knew keeping one of you would cause such existential conundrums.
(“Conundrums” – wtf, Dear Diary! There I go with the big words again in my private diary.
(Who am I trying to impress here?)…Let it go, man. Let it go. Any language here is fine. Even geeky language. Do. Not. Edit…Just flow. That’s what the diary is about. Isn’t that right?)
But, now, Diary, I’m wondering about all those pre-pubescent girls who keep you so faithfully and easily. How do those under-formed minds deal with the constant crises of perspective?
(Note: Perhaps I will explore this in a future entry.)
(Note on Note: Just talking about “future entries” makes me excited because it means I have a future, and it means I have a future I will want to think about…and even write about!!! New development in connection with the events of 19 July!!!!!!!)
Anyway, I have decided to use the Via Negative to talk about the unalloyed awesomeness of what happened to me during the afternoon of 19 July. In other words, Diary, I will write about what did NOT bring you into being as a way of getting at what did.
Between you and me, I find this pretty crafty and sneaky. Hopefully you will not find it boring.
But how could you? You are only paper and ink and the projections of me that I want to share with (drumroll) myself. There are those “conundrums” again! (HAHAHA!)
In other words, if I don’t find it boring, you also will not. Cool. Via Negative it is. But, how do I actually do that?
Fuck.
25 July 20--
I have cracked the nut. I know how to proceed. Sorry if my solution is a little formulaic. I know that this is a place to flow and emote and gush and weep, but if I don’t keep a tight rein right now, Dear Diary, I am going to lose it and get nowhere in the end. Just fucking lose it and stall out my engine before I even get on the highway, metaphorically speaking. Apologies.
All right…
Dear Diary, you are NOT about what happened to me during the month of March thirteen years ago. (Note: Here and elsewhere I can’t remember the exact date. Hopefully a by-product of keeping you, Diary, will be a better ability to remember the past specifically and in detail.)
So, Dear Diary, you are NOT about when I signed the papers finalizing my third divorce. So you are NOT about how I realized as I signed my name the last time (realized very suddenly and dramatically – quite like it would happen in a movie) that I was not capable of remaining married. Ever.
Dear Diary, you are NOT about what happened to me during the month of July two years later. So, you are NOT about when I was at my daughter’s YMCA league soccer game one fateful afternoon (cue haunted house music).
(Note: Three marriages, but only two kids. Lucked out there… Not that I lucked out in that there are only two kids. I mean, of course, every child is a blessing and all that, but only two – and not nine kids, for instance – makes a weird-ass situation a little less so. At least it has in my experience…
(At least it has in my experience – Jesus! Why am I qualifying everything I say, Diary? I must be one weird-ass person? (Like I didn’t know that already.) :/
But maybe I don’t yet KNOW that (my weird-ass-ness) like I need to know it in order to become less weird-ass and thus more normal-ass and so ready for the next chapter of my life scheduled to begin one year from now?)
Anyway, Diary, you are NOT about the afternoon I was watching my daughter’s team of four-year-olds play another soccer team of little imps of similar age. During that particular game, like during all their interminable games, my daughter’s team could not “turn the ball” and move it toward the proper goal.
Her team couldn’t (wouldn’t?) turn the ball no matter how much we encouraged them to do it, begged them to do it, yelled them to do it.
Good Lord, as I shouted with the rest of the parents, and as those shouts again and again landed on the deaf ears of three-foot-tall proto-humans, I felt this rage well up in me. Its strong vintage and sudden rise shocked me, Diary. It took all I had to breathe evenly, still it, and not screech all manner of curses and abuse because of it.
Well, in the second half the other team figured out how to turn the ball, and my daughter’s team didn’t, and so daughter’s team got fucking slaughtered. It was 9 to zero or some such bullshit as that.
Right after the final whistle, my daughter came over to me (came over to me FIRST, Diary!) ;), and she had this dead-eyed look on her face – numb, defeated, and non-comprehending. And my daughter asked me, “Daddy, what happened?”
I patted her on the head softly, and I told her the truth. Not angry-like. More this-is-the-weather-forecast-tomorrow-like. I said, “Well, sweetie, you all didn’t turn the ball toward the other goal when you got hold of it, and that is kind of a big deal in soccer.” She nodded. She sucked on her yogurt tube. I, with great gentleness, combed through her soft, straight hair with hungry fingers. All seemed well.
But by then my Ex and her boyfriend-now-husband-Jim had saddled up to us and broken our moment and heard my words. And Jim was looking at me with these tight-slitted, you-are-a-dumb-shit eyes.
He looked at me, and I knew instantly that his silent voice was saying inside his lawyer head that I should not talk about such things so close to her moment of defeat but instead should weep with my daughter and bathe her feet with my tears and sing lullabies into her ears.
So, the rage flooded back up, and I popped Jim straight in the nose. Jim bled. Quite a bit, actually. And I screamed (not proud of this, really), “Turn the ball, Jim! Turn the ball!”
But no charges were pressed, so that was something.
Well, Dear Diary, you are NOT about that.
But, now I’m tired. I need to sleep.
28 July 20--
Dear Diary, you are NOT about the day in October eight years ago when I was at my job at the city school district and discovered that I could smoothly and quietly redirect large amounts of money from the District to, well, me. (But it had to be done in very, very, very small amounts over a very, very, very long period of time.) :^/
Dear Diary, you are NOT about the March day six years ago when I paid off all of my outstanding debts (including student loans – YES!), bought a Rolex, and a convertible (third wife would never allow such a thing = small upside to her being gone).
Dear Diary, you are NOT about the June day five years ago when I realized that I had a pretty big appetite for roulette. (Great game!) Sadly, this led me to get a little more “aggressive” with my approach at work and eventually led to the confession that…
Dear Diary, you are NOT about the day in December five years ago when the police came to my office at the District and arrested me. (I remember a nice officer last named Williams – not Friday like in the old TV show!)
Dear Diary, you are NOT about the day in May four years ago when I – now out on bail and sensing what was coming next – pulled the previously mentioned convertible into the garage, closed the door, turned it on, and let it run.
(Note: Eventually (obviously!), I turned the engine off before it was too late.)
(Note on Note: So glad of this. No this year without this decision four years ago. Whew!)
That’s enough for tonight. Apologies.
7 September 20 – (Part I)
Enough Via Negative. Enough NOT this and NOT that.
Here is what you ARE about, Dear Diary.
You ARE about this mammoth dirty clothes hamper with wheels that I see every day while I do my work. (And, seriously, it is huge!!! Half as big (or so it seems) as the bedroom I had as a child.)
Like I said, I see the hamper every single day as I go about my work. (No sabbath day off in this penitentiary!) The mammoth hamper is filled over and over by an endless supply of whitish towels. I collect them, and I wash them, and I collect them, and I wash them. This is my job, and I earn like 8 cents an hour for it. (HA!)
(Note: I bet the non-incarcerated culture thinks prisoners are dirty. We are not! (Bodily, that is. No comment on spiritual cleanliness. ;) Question: How do I know this? Answer: Many, many towels every day in my room-sized hamper imply many, many convict showers taken every day.)
Anyway, me and the hamper are buddies, and I think I know everything about it, but it turns out that I do not.
You see, one day, when our goateed teacher is here talking to us about God, he starts talking about getting baptized (i.e. dunked in water connected to the name of God –
FatherSonHolySpirit – connected to no longer being a dick to God or other people connected to now being a child of God by God’s grace.)
Anyway, he tells us a story from the Book of Acts in the Bible about some rich guy from Ethiopia who has a powerful job and a sweet ride (at least for the time period) but no balls.
And this guy wants water baptism in the name of Jesus. And the disciple of Jesus on the scene, Philip, says all right because people without balls can still follow Jesus.
Our teacher says he feels like Philip in the story, and he wonders if we feel like the Ethiopian. He says, don’t get him wrong, he knows we all have balls – big balls – but maybe we are like the Ethiopian in other ways, more important ways. (That is, he says, if anything can be more important than a good pair of fully-functioning balls.) CHUCKLE! goes everyone.
Well, I kinda feel like I want to do this water baptism thing. And so do some of the other guys, and we tell the teacher we’re up for it. Then he smiles and starts talking about the (my) huge-ass, mammoth dirty towel hamper. He says it’s waterproof (I did NOT know this before!) and so would make a great baptistery.
He says if we are ready to rock-and-roll with the new birth in Jesus, he’s ready to do the deed the next time he comes to talk. He says that the warden is cool with it. We say we are cool with it. So, it’s a date.
And, Dear Diary, I will stop here so the next, beautiful episode in my saga (and yours) has its own day.
7 September 20— (Part II)
Diary, I just need to finish tonight!
This need is just filling me and wanting to burst out kinda like that hamper filled and bulged and strained with all the water and the bodies our goatee teacher put into it. I can’t believe that shitty tool for jailhouse chores suddenly became a holy thing glowing with the works of the Lord.
So our teacher came back two weeks later, and he was true to his word. He filled up the hamper, and it didn’t leak – not even one drop out the stitching or the sides!!! Amazing. :)
He climbed in. And then, one by one, each of us climbed in separately, the same words said over each of us in turn.
When it came time for me, I climbed in as number four of nine. He read the last few sentences from the gospel of Matthew (again!). Then he asked me if I was willing to bow to Jesus.
I said yes, and then something came over me, and I free-styled a little bit. I said, “Yes, I’m ready to turn my life around and bow to Jesus and so give the Devil my ass.” Our teacher laughed (I remember watching his whiskers bob up and down), and he said, “Amen, brother!”
Then quick as a flash he took me and stuck me under the water, and it felt like he held me under there for three moments short of two eternities (i.e. a very long time).
(Note: I know it just felt like a long time, and in fact it was not. This is another one of those prickly perspective conundrums, but this one has to do with the ways the Holy Spirit changes the experiences of us lowly people during holy events. It has nothing to do with some weird diary-writing shit (see above entry)).
Dear Diary, this moment is why YOU ARE HERE, but now that it’s arrived, I don’t know exactly how to write it. The way I want to write it just feels too sappy, girly, and lame.
But, hell, that was how I felt about beginning this diary in the first place, and this very moment was why I began you, Diary, so I guess feeling like this makes sense. Besides, this diary is a good thing (yes?) even though it seemed ultra-girly to me at the beginning.
So, why not just go with it? I bet this specific entry works out the same way as the whole diary idea. (aka Good.)
Don’t. Edit. Your. Self. And. Worry…Just. Flow.
(And don’t even say, “bet”. Not going down that path again.)
OK, Dear Diary, so I was stuck under the water. And this is what it was like without any editing of any kind. Unvarnished truth here (deep breath taken into lungs right…here):
Under the water I felt like a mermaid for a second or a minute or maybe for my whole life from that moment on. I felt the hand of God. It was at once both heavy and light upon me. It was giving me the power to be a mer-person, to breathe the water, to be the water. And the water was love. And, so, I was love. And it was good. And it felt good. And it was good.
Then – and I don’t know if our teacher started pullin’, or I started jumpin’, or Jesus started raisin’ me from the dead – but I rocketed out of that water, Diary. My feet must have been high enough in the air to mess with the salt and pepper hair on the top of teacher’s head. I was a whale! I was a merman leaping high! So high!
I’m exaggerating (but not much).
My hands were raised up, and the water shone on my slick skin, every bead a separate, complete universe of rainbow-ed light unto itself. I was alive again, or maybe I was alive for the first time for real.
I bellowed long and hard and loud. Then all the other boys there started bellowing with me, and we sounded like a happy pack of hounds (or maybe walruses – or is it walrusi?). I think even crazy gray goatee teacher howled with us a bit. :) :) :) (One smiley for the Father, one smiley for the Son, one smiley for the Holy Spirit!)
And this is why I gave birth to you, Dear Diary. This is why YOU ARE HERE! Hopefully, in a year when I collect my 8 cents an hour plus interest (HA!) and leave this place, God will give birth to something new in me for a new place and a new time. Who knows? I sure the fuck don’t. But I trust.
24 December 20--
Dear Diary, I feel that this experiment with you is not through – fully through – until I use the Via Negative just one more time.
In regards to all those things I said during the past months about what you were NOT about: I gotta say that I did NOT ever hear God or Jesus or the Spirit speaking through that crap – both the crap done to me and the crap done by me over the years of my life.
Maybe other people hear the Lord speaking through those sorta broken-down instruments. But not me. At least not yet.
I’d like to be all pious and say otherwise, but it wouldn’t be right because it wouldn’t be true. And I can’t speak bullshit to my own diary, Diary, ‘cause that would be like speaking bullshit to myself, and I am dead to the bullshit days when I did such things.
19 July made me born to a new day and a new way.
Today our teacher came back, brought his goatee, and did his talk thing with us again. He was talking about how the prophet Elijah met God. He told us how right before Elijah’s gaping, shocked face God was splitting rocks with just his breath, shaking the foundations of the earth with his stomping feet, and lighting the world on fire with his radiant glory (WHOOSH!).
But then the show was over, and there was only silence. And in the silence was when Elijah heard the Lord and covered his face.
Our teacher said that the day before Jesus came to us the world was as loud as it ever is, even nowadays with our phones and drugs and porn on the net. He said then and now people’s lives are often broken like stones or shaken by earthquakes of awe and fear. He said fires can rage in our souls and sometimes God sets them aflame and sometimes we set the damn fires our own damn selves.
But. But. But the Word of God was not fully spoken in all that noise, and so it could not be fully heard. The Word of God was fully spoken in a baby slipping wet out of his momma. His Word was spoken fully in the silence before that Baby’s first suck of air and his first bellow. Then all was made new.
And that, Dear Diary, is what it was like for me in that water and what it was like coming out of it too. And that is why you are here. And it felt good. And it was good.
I never really sensed God – never really heard God – behind the bars. Only under the water. But it felt good when I finally did hear. May all be new. May I hear God again someday.
Will it? Will I?
I don’t know, but I will be happy to find out.
Dear Diary, I feel like a little girl writing this diary. Maybe on your cover I should draw a kitty cat face or my initials encapsulated by a cartoon heart. (Note: Diary, do people use words like “encapsulate” in diaries? No matter, I guess. I just did.)
I’ve never kept one of you before, Diary, but tonight it just makes sense to start. I think anyone (at least anyone with half a heart) would think the same given what happened to me today. I just need some place to get it down, to talk it out, to feel it again by remembering it and expressing it – at least on paper.
And you see, Diary, the place I live right now does not offer many chances for that kind of thing. My current community is not too into touchy-feely stuff like that. (I guess every community has its blind spots.) :(
So, anyway, here you are, Dear Diary, and here I am, Dear Diary! (hee-hee!!!) So, let’s get started….
20 July 20--
Well, how to get started? It’s not too easy, Diary. I’ll try this maybe…
There’s this crazy old guy with a gray (and very passé) goatee who comes twice a month to tell us about God. A lot of times he tells us the best way to talk about God is to talk about what God is not.
His idea is that if God is infinite and we are – well – very much not (He says God’s infinitude could split-pop our heads like over-filled water balloons), then it makes sense – and is less gory :) – to list everything in our non-infinite, water balloon world that Infinite God is not. And by remembering what God is not, we can learn a little something about what God is.
The guy (he is our teacher, I guess) calls it the “Via Negative.” I call it a headache, and I’m not sure if I get the idea fully, but...
Anyway. Enough introductory theology. (And, Dear Diary, why should I bother with all that anyway? You are me (I guess), so you know what all that Via Negative stuff is because I know what it is – or at least I know what I think our teacher with the goatee says it is.)
Hmmm. I never knew keeping one of you would cause such existential conundrums.
(“Conundrums” – wtf, Dear Diary! There I go with the big words again in my private diary.
(Who am I trying to impress here?)…Let it go, man. Let it go. Any language here is fine. Even geeky language. Do. Not. Edit…Just flow. That’s what the diary is about. Isn’t that right?)
But, now, Diary, I’m wondering about all those pre-pubescent girls who keep you so faithfully and easily. How do those under-formed minds deal with the constant crises of perspective?
(Note: Perhaps I will explore this in a future entry.)
(Note on Note: Just talking about “future entries” makes me excited because it means I have a future, and it means I have a future I will want to think about…and even write about!!! New development in connection with the events of 19 July!!!!!!!)
Anyway, I have decided to use the Via Negative to talk about the unalloyed awesomeness of what happened to me during the afternoon of 19 July. In other words, Diary, I will write about what did NOT bring you into being as a way of getting at what did.
Between you and me, I find this pretty crafty and sneaky. Hopefully you will not find it boring.
But how could you? You are only paper and ink and the projections of me that I want to share with (drumroll) myself. There are those “conundrums” again! (HAHAHA!)
In other words, if I don’t find it boring, you also will not. Cool. Via Negative it is. But, how do I actually do that?
Fuck.
25 July 20--
I have cracked the nut. I know how to proceed. Sorry if my solution is a little formulaic. I know that this is a place to flow and emote and gush and weep, but if I don’t keep a tight rein right now, Dear Diary, I am going to lose it and get nowhere in the end. Just fucking lose it and stall out my engine before I even get on the highway, metaphorically speaking. Apologies.
All right…
Dear Diary, you are NOT about what happened to me during the month of March thirteen years ago. (Note: Here and elsewhere I can’t remember the exact date. Hopefully a by-product of keeping you, Diary, will be a better ability to remember the past specifically and in detail.)
So, Dear Diary, you are NOT about when I signed the papers finalizing my third divorce. So you are NOT about how I realized as I signed my name the last time (realized very suddenly and dramatically – quite like it would happen in a movie) that I was not capable of remaining married. Ever.
Dear Diary, you are NOT about what happened to me during the month of July two years later. So, you are NOT about when I was at my daughter’s YMCA league soccer game one fateful afternoon (cue haunted house music).
(Note: Three marriages, but only two kids. Lucked out there… Not that I lucked out in that there are only two kids. I mean, of course, every child is a blessing and all that, but only two – and not nine kids, for instance – makes a weird-ass situation a little less so. At least it has in my experience…
(At least it has in my experience – Jesus! Why am I qualifying everything I say, Diary? I must be one weird-ass person? (Like I didn’t know that already.) :/
But maybe I don’t yet KNOW that (my weird-ass-ness) like I need to know it in order to become less weird-ass and thus more normal-ass and so ready for the next chapter of my life scheduled to begin one year from now?)
Anyway, Diary, you are NOT about the afternoon I was watching my daughter’s team of four-year-olds play another soccer team of little imps of similar age. During that particular game, like during all their interminable games, my daughter’s team could not “turn the ball” and move it toward the proper goal.
Her team couldn’t (wouldn’t?) turn the ball no matter how much we encouraged them to do it, begged them to do it, yelled them to do it.
Good Lord, as I shouted with the rest of the parents, and as those shouts again and again landed on the deaf ears of three-foot-tall proto-humans, I felt this rage well up in me. Its strong vintage and sudden rise shocked me, Diary. It took all I had to breathe evenly, still it, and not screech all manner of curses and abuse because of it.
Well, in the second half the other team figured out how to turn the ball, and my daughter’s team didn’t, and so daughter’s team got fucking slaughtered. It was 9 to zero or some such bullshit as that.
Right after the final whistle, my daughter came over to me (came over to me FIRST, Diary!) ;), and she had this dead-eyed look on her face – numb, defeated, and non-comprehending. And my daughter asked me, “Daddy, what happened?”
I patted her on the head softly, and I told her the truth. Not angry-like. More this-is-the-weather-forecast-tomorrow-like. I said, “Well, sweetie, you all didn’t turn the ball toward the other goal when you got hold of it, and that is kind of a big deal in soccer.” She nodded. She sucked on her yogurt tube. I, with great gentleness, combed through her soft, straight hair with hungry fingers. All seemed well.
But by then my Ex and her boyfriend-now-husband-Jim had saddled up to us and broken our moment and heard my words. And Jim was looking at me with these tight-slitted, you-are-a-dumb-shit eyes.
He looked at me, and I knew instantly that his silent voice was saying inside his lawyer head that I should not talk about such things so close to her moment of defeat but instead should weep with my daughter and bathe her feet with my tears and sing lullabies into her ears.
So, the rage flooded back up, and I popped Jim straight in the nose. Jim bled. Quite a bit, actually. And I screamed (not proud of this, really), “Turn the ball, Jim! Turn the ball!”
But no charges were pressed, so that was something.
Well, Dear Diary, you are NOT about that.
But, now I’m tired. I need to sleep.
28 July 20--
Dear Diary, you are NOT about the day in October eight years ago when I was at my job at the city school district and discovered that I could smoothly and quietly redirect large amounts of money from the District to, well, me. (But it had to be done in very, very, very small amounts over a very, very, very long period of time.) :^/
Dear Diary, you are NOT about the March day six years ago when I paid off all of my outstanding debts (including student loans – YES!), bought a Rolex, and a convertible (third wife would never allow such a thing = small upside to her being gone).
Dear Diary, you are NOT about the June day five years ago when I realized that I had a pretty big appetite for roulette. (Great game!) Sadly, this led me to get a little more “aggressive” with my approach at work and eventually led to the confession that…
Dear Diary, you are NOT about the day in December five years ago when the police came to my office at the District and arrested me. (I remember a nice officer last named Williams – not Friday like in the old TV show!)
Dear Diary, you are NOT about the day in May four years ago when I – now out on bail and sensing what was coming next – pulled the previously mentioned convertible into the garage, closed the door, turned it on, and let it run.
(Note: Eventually (obviously!), I turned the engine off before it was too late.)
(Note on Note: So glad of this. No this year without this decision four years ago. Whew!)
That’s enough for tonight. Apologies.
7 September 20 – (Part I)
Enough Via Negative. Enough NOT this and NOT that.
Here is what you ARE about, Dear Diary.
You ARE about this mammoth dirty clothes hamper with wheels that I see every day while I do my work. (And, seriously, it is huge!!! Half as big (or so it seems) as the bedroom I had as a child.)
Like I said, I see the hamper every single day as I go about my work. (No sabbath day off in this penitentiary!) The mammoth hamper is filled over and over by an endless supply of whitish towels. I collect them, and I wash them, and I collect them, and I wash them. This is my job, and I earn like 8 cents an hour for it. (HA!)
(Note: I bet the non-incarcerated culture thinks prisoners are dirty. We are not! (Bodily, that is. No comment on spiritual cleanliness. ;) Question: How do I know this? Answer: Many, many towels every day in my room-sized hamper imply many, many convict showers taken every day.)
Anyway, me and the hamper are buddies, and I think I know everything about it, but it turns out that I do not.
You see, one day, when our goateed teacher is here talking to us about God, he starts talking about getting baptized (i.e. dunked in water connected to the name of God –
FatherSonHolySpirit – connected to no longer being a dick to God or other people connected to now being a child of God by God’s grace.)
Anyway, he tells us a story from the Book of Acts in the Bible about some rich guy from Ethiopia who has a powerful job and a sweet ride (at least for the time period) but no balls.
And this guy wants water baptism in the name of Jesus. And the disciple of Jesus on the scene, Philip, says all right because people without balls can still follow Jesus.
Our teacher says he feels like Philip in the story, and he wonders if we feel like the Ethiopian. He says, don’t get him wrong, he knows we all have balls – big balls – but maybe we are like the Ethiopian in other ways, more important ways. (That is, he says, if anything can be more important than a good pair of fully-functioning balls.) CHUCKLE! goes everyone.
Well, I kinda feel like I want to do this water baptism thing. And so do some of the other guys, and we tell the teacher we’re up for it. Then he smiles and starts talking about the (my) huge-ass, mammoth dirty towel hamper. He says it’s waterproof (I did NOT know this before!) and so would make a great baptistery.
He says if we are ready to rock-and-roll with the new birth in Jesus, he’s ready to do the deed the next time he comes to talk. He says that the warden is cool with it. We say we are cool with it. So, it’s a date.
And, Dear Diary, I will stop here so the next, beautiful episode in my saga (and yours) has its own day.
7 September 20— (Part II)
Diary, I just need to finish tonight!
This need is just filling me and wanting to burst out kinda like that hamper filled and bulged and strained with all the water and the bodies our goatee teacher put into it. I can’t believe that shitty tool for jailhouse chores suddenly became a holy thing glowing with the works of the Lord.
So our teacher came back two weeks later, and he was true to his word. He filled up the hamper, and it didn’t leak – not even one drop out the stitching or the sides!!! Amazing. :)
He climbed in. And then, one by one, each of us climbed in separately, the same words said over each of us in turn.
When it came time for me, I climbed in as number four of nine. He read the last few sentences from the gospel of Matthew (again!). Then he asked me if I was willing to bow to Jesus.
I said yes, and then something came over me, and I free-styled a little bit. I said, “Yes, I’m ready to turn my life around and bow to Jesus and so give the Devil my ass.” Our teacher laughed (I remember watching his whiskers bob up and down), and he said, “Amen, brother!”
Then quick as a flash he took me and stuck me under the water, and it felt like he held me under there for three moments short of two eternities (i.e. a very long time).
(Note: I know it just felt like a long time, and in fact it was not. This is another one of those prickly perspective conundrums, but this one has to do with the ways the Holy Spirit changes the experiences of us lowly people during holy events. It has nothing to do with some weird diary-writing shit (see above entry)).
Dear Diary, this moment is why YOU ARE HERE, but now that it’s arrived, I don’t know exactly how to write it. The way I want to write it just feels too sappy, girly, and lame.
But, hell, that was how I felt about beginning this diary in the first place, and this very moment was why I began you, Diary, so I guess feeling like this makes sense. Besides, this diary is a good thing (yes?) even though it seemed ultra-girly to me at the beginning.
So, why not just go with it? I bet this specific entry works out the same way as the whole diary idea. (aka Good.)
Don’t. Edit. Your. Self. And. Worry…Just. Flow.
(And don’t even say, “bet”. Not going down that path again.)
OK, Dear Diary, so I was stuck under the water. And this is what it was like without any editing of any kind. Unvarnished truth here (deep breath taken into lungs right…here):
Under the water I felt like a mermaid for a second or a minute or maybe for my whole life from that moment on. I felt the hand of God. It was at once both heavy and light upon me. It was giving me the power to be a mer-person, to breathe the water, to be the water. And the water was love. And, so, I was love. And it was good. And it felt good. And it was good.
Then – and I don’t know if our teacher started pullin’, or I started jumpin’, or Jesus started raisin’ me from the dead – but I rocketed out of that water, Diary. My feet must have been high enough in the air to mess with the salt and pepper hair on the top of teacher’s head. I was a whale! I was a merman leaping high! So high!
I’m exaggerating (but not much).
My hands were raised up, and the water shone on my slick skin, every bead a separate, complete universe of rainbow-ed light unto itself. I was alive again, or maybe I was alive for the first time for real.
I bellowed long and hard and loud. Then all the other boys there started bellowing with me, and we sounded like a happy pack of hounds (or maybe walruses – or is it walrusi?). I think even crazy gray goatee teacher howled with us a bit. :) :) :) (One smiley for the Father, one smiley for the Son, one smiley for the Holy Spirit!)
And this is why I gave birth to you, Dear Diary. This is why YOU ARE HERE! Hopefully, in a year when I collect my 8 cents an hour plus interest (HA!) and leave this place, God will give birth to something new in me for a new place and a new time. Who knows? I sure the fuck don’t. But I trust.
24 December 20--
Dear Diary, I feel that this experiment with you is not through – fully through – until I use the Via Negative just one more time.
In regards to all those things I said during the past months about what you were NOT about: I gotta say that I did NOT ever hear God or Jesus or the Spirit speaking through that crap – both the crap done to me and the crap done by me over the years of my life.
Maybe other people hear the Lord speaking through those sorta broken-down instruments. But not me. At least not yet.
I’d like to be all pious and say otherwise, but it wouldn’t be right because it wouldn’t be true. And I can’t speak bullshit to my own diary, Diary, ‘cause that would be like speaking bullshit to myself, and I am dead to the bullshit days when I did such things.
19 July made me born to a new day and a new way.
Today our teacher came back, brought his goatee, and did his talk thing with us again. He was talking about how the prophet Elijah met God. He told us how right before Elijah’s gaping, shocked face God was splitting rocks with just his breath, shaking the foundations of the earth with his stomping feet, and lighting the world on fire with his radiant glory (WHOOSH!).
But then the show was over, and there was only silence. And in the silence was when Elijah heard the Lord and covered his face.
Our teacher said that the day before Jesus came to us the world was as loud as it ever is, even nowadays with our phones and drugs and porn on the net. He said then and now people’s lives are often broken like stones or shaken by earthquakes of awe and fear. He said fires can rage in our souls and sometimes God sets them aflame and sometimes we set the damn fires our own damn selves.
But. But. But the Word of God was not fully spoken in all that noise, and so it could not be fully heard. The Word of God was fully spoken in a baby slipping wet out of his momma. His Word was spoken fully in the silence before that Baby’s first suck of air and his first bellow. Then all was made new.
And that, Dear Diary, is what it was like for me in that water and what it was like coming out of it too. And that is why you are here. And it felt good. And it was good.
I never really sensed God – never really heard God – behind the bars. Only under the water. But it felt good when I finally did hear. May all be new. May I hear God again someday.
Will it? Will I?
I don’t know, but I will be happy to find out.