Four in Four

I just got an email that says I have a job waiting for me, pending some paperwork, in Rockford, IL. I'll be working on regional jets, doing maintenance, which is a huge opportunity for a guy who is trying to break out of the single-engine and light-twin rut that comes with being a fresh A&P that hasn't had much experience. The A&P world is measured in years of experience on specific aircraft, not grades (mine were good) or ability or even years of experience in general.

So don't get me wrong, it's a good job. 

But it also means moving to another new city, another new state, making a new list of friends at another new church. It means, once again, going somewhere new and starting all over again. Rockford will be the fourth city I've lived in four years, and IL will be the fourth state at the same time. 

And Illinois, well, it's not exactly a friendly place for practitioners of the shooting arts. "Felony Possession of Ammunition" is actually a thing there, I'll have to clean my car just to make sure that a spare and lost .22LR round doesn't land me in prison. Taking my rifles is out of the question, and I can't even take just my reloading gear to make ammo in my spare time.
 

It's just not a particularly fun thing to look forward to. I'm not real quick at making good friends, and this job is only a contract gig, so I'll be there for six months, at which point I'll almost certainly move again. It will be a very great challenge to reach out to folks and make connections, knowing that not only will I leave at some point, but I'll be gone by Summer.

I was told at Orientation that I'm too independent and too strong-willed, and need to work on getting along with others in order to be a good missionary. It seems that the events of the past few years of my life have made me a certain kind of person, and I'm not sure if that was something that I could have avoided if I even wanted to.

I mean, you don't learn to work well with authority when you get thrown out of a school for getting sick and making someone several thousand miles away suspicious that you may do something.

You don't learn to depend on other people when you have to move 700 miles past everyone you've ever met to live with strangers, especially when those strangers turn out to be insane.

You don't learn to be (whatever the "good" opposite of strong-willed is) when a hard life forces you to buckle down and keep going no matter how much you want to find a safe place and hide in it until the storm passes.

I'm not worried about surviving in Rockford, I'm a tough, independent, and strong-willed man that will do whatever it takes to survive. However, I'm worried that by the time I'm done being a nomad and can finally return to HQ for my technical evaluation, I'll have only become more strong-willed, more independent, and tougher. And I'm not even sure why those are bad things.

BUT...

The way to live life is to do what needs to be done now, now, and worry about tomorrow's problems later. Right now I need a job, and this is a job. It's not ideal, but nothing is, and nothing ever will be.

Holy unBlack Metal

I'm sitting in the maintenance office of the MAF hangar in Maseru, Lesotho. There's no work for me to do, so I'm listening to Frost Like Ashes on YouTube. They're an unBlack metal outfit from St. Louis, if I remember correctly, and the current song "Adorers of Blood" is a wonderful praise song in the style of Black Metal. Before "Adorers of Blood", I listened to "Hardest Rocking God of All Time" by Grave Declaration, another unBlack metal outfit.

If anyone asks what I'm listening to, I'll downplay and dodge the question. I certainly won't try to explain unBlack Metal to a group of missionaries that thinks David Crowder is the hardest rock allowed at work. There's just no way to understand unBlack Metal without understanding Black Metal, and Black Metal is something I just don't talk about with strangers. Well, not unless I want to scare them off and make them think I'm Varg Vikernes' biggest fan, anyways.

There isn't a genre of music that's created more controversy than Black Metal. People think pop music sets the standard for shocking and bizarre behavior, but nothing ever done by a pop star has come close to the things done by black metal musicians. Lady Gaga and Madonna subverted Catholic imagery for their music, black metal musicians (and their fans) burnt churches down. Gangsta rappers boast about killing their rivals, black metal musicians have actually done it. There's no compromise in black metal, it's explicitly pagan. Explicity anti-Christian.

Black Metal isn't simply a genre that one listens to. Black Metal, in it's original form, is a lifestyle. The first wave of black metal didn't simply show up on the charts, it announced itself with a multi-year spate of murders, suicides, and church burnings. It's ideological music in the purest sense.

The fact that most people have never heard of Black Metal is simply due to the relative obscurity of the genre, as it's a tiny and extremist fringe inside the perpetually fringe world of heavy metal, but the fact remains that black metal is the razor's edge of music. It's way past "this album sounds too processed"  is a criticism and into a world where "(this album) is the aural equivalent of having your throat slit in one smooth motion" becomes normal. It's not "easy listening". It's not "soothing white noise".

When it comes to Christians listening to music, if there's any one genre of music that we were probably supposed to avoid, that we should have left alone, it would be black metal. It is hands-down the most vile, sick, and evil genre of music ever created. So, naturally, Christianity invaded it in the early 1990s, because we will allow no pit of darkness to remain unlit.

Black metal has always been about the message. And not in the cheeky way that Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin played around with dark imagery, but in an explicit way, where the message in the lyrics was played out onstage, and in the lives of the band members themselves. UnBlack Metal retains the look (minus the sacrificed animals and most of the blood), the sound, and the intense, message-first lyrics, but has swapped out the lyrics for Christian ones. 

Personally, that makes it just about perfect to me, because I'm sick and tired of ever-fancier versions of "Jesus Loves Me" that somehow still manage to be repetitive, technically simple, and theologically empty. Yes, Jesus loves us, but that's a small portion of what Christianity is about, and I want music that reminds me that to be a Christian is to be at war with Darkness.

There's a hell of a lot more to fighting that war than just remembering that Jesus loves us. Let's go kick some ass.

HAIL CHRIST!

Frodo Lives

So here I am, in the mountains of Lesotho a couple hundred kilometers from where Tolkien was born. I'm here as an MAF maintenance intern, and it happens to be just coming into the rainy season, which means the mountains are covered with soft, puffy clouds.

I wouldn't say my internship has gone well, objectively speaking. I screwed up in Orientation, buckled down and aced the second chance I got, only for a bunch of durkas to screw that up by causing a ruckus and forcing the program I was supposed to work with to evacuate the house I was supposed to live in for fear of being mortared.

It's the latest portion of a quest that's included spending nights in a psychiatric ward, a night in a homeless shelter by necessity, and calling a friend at 2330 because I got thrown out of the place I was living. I've been penniless and have had to choose between buying tools for school and food (I chose tools). I've had to choose between ever seeing people I loved again and staying healthy (I chose staying healthy). I've had to drive 1500 miles past home to live with strangers because my family wasn't willing to let me come home (I've never asked why).

I've endured all of this because I believe God has directed me towards entering mission aviation. I knew in advance that it would be hard, it's just a different kind of hard than I was expecting.

I'm at this point where I could get home from this internship and walk away from the entire quest. Nobody would fault a man for saying "You know what? I sacrificed a hell of a lot to get there, and it didn't go very well. I'm going home."

But on the other hand, Frodo.

Frodo got stabbed at Weathertop just trying to take the Ring to Rivendell. His quest, at that point, involved being chased by Ringwraiths out of his happy little life, traveling far beyond anything he'd ever known, and then it involved getting stabbed and nearly dying from the wound.

Nobody would have faulted him for saying "You know what? I brought the Ring to Rivendell, got stabbed in the process, and people much more suited for the task can do the rest. I'm going home."

But...that's now how the story of Frodo ends. He didn't call it a day, he didn't choose to place his own happiness and well-being ahead of the necessity of the day, he instead volunteered to go all the way to Mount Doom and finish the job. He didn't even know how to get there, but he still volunteered.

By the end of it, he'd seen friends die. He'd endured being separated from all but one of his friends, nearly murdered by an ally, poisoned and nearly eaten by a giant spider, and had his finger bitten off. And he had to fight, run, and hide from overwhelming enemy forces the entire time.

There are thousands and millions and billions of people who, at the end of the day, do whatever it is that they think will make them healthy and happy. If something should arise that they don't want to do, they do anything they can to pass the job off to anyone who will do it, no matter how poorly.

I'm sure, that at some point, Frodo wished that the Ring had never come into his life. That the entire thing had been handled by someone else, and that he could have spend the rest of his life in Hobbiton. But when it came down to it, Frodo stepped up to the situation at hand, and put his dreams and desires and well-being second to what needed to be done.

I'm with Frodo.

I'm sure there are people in this world who would make better missionaries than I will, but that doesn't change the situation. The task has been set before me, and I will see it done, even though I don't know the way.

To Mordor if need be, to Mortarville if at all possible, but no matter where this journey ends, I'm with Frodo.

A Cacophony of Sex

I have a confession to make, and coming from a guy that loves Holy unBlack Metal, this is one hell of a confession:

I don't hate Miley Cyrus' song "Wrecking Ball." I kinda like it.

But there's a story attached to this that brought up some interesting thoughts:

I don't think it's possible for a modern netizen to be unaware that Ms. Cyrus has a new video for her song "Wrecking Ball" that's risque. There's some nakedness, some tools, it's basically porn. I haven't bothered to look up the video and watch the whole thing, I saw a bit of it while I was waiting for a pizza at a mall here in Maseru, and decided that it probably isn't good for me to see the whole thing. I'm not going to link it.

At that point, I hadn't actually heard the song, as far as I know. I don't listen to pop music when I can help it, and the radio station at work is normally set to a classic-pop station out of Mozambique, so I only rarely hear the new stuff.

So a couple weeks later, with the batteries on my MP3 player dead, I'm listening to the work radio and I hear this song on the radio. My ears perk up because it's well-sung and seems soulful compared to the usual variations on the theme of lust that come over the airwaves. The singer sounds like she's sorry that she screwed up a relationship and hurt the guy, but is slightly defiant in that she gave it her all.

The line "I never meant to start a war" intrigued me, so after the second or third time I heard the song, I made a mental note to google the lyrics when I got home.

Turns out, that song is "Wrecking Ball'.

Simply looking at the lyrics, some girl decided to insert herself into a guy's life, it went badly, and though she tried to save it, it fell apart. Simple enough, and the way it's sung makes it somewhat sorrowful, but perhaps not repentant. It would not appear, lyrically speaking, that "wrecking ball" would be by any stretch a complimentary term. No, instead the girl's a wrecking ball, and is sorry that she wrecked something.

But pop music being what it is, new pop singles must have a video to accomany them, otherwise...well, who knows. I don't know the business, and I'm fairly certain I don't want to understand how pop music works.

So a video was filmed, and in part of it Ms. Cyrus is sitting on a wrecking ball naked, and then a little later she's licking a sledgehammer, and that's all I want to know.

The problem, from the perspective of a philosopher who pays attention to such things, is that the song's message does not match the video's message. While the song that's dubbed over the video (nobody actually sings these days) talks about how the girl screwed up and damaged everything, the singer is portrayed as an hyper-sexualized wrecking ball who glorifies her destruction of the building that represented the boy or the relationship, I'm not sure which.

So which is the real message? Admitting that she screwed up and didn't mean to start a war, or sexually reveling in the destruction she caused?

There's a word for music in which parts clash with each other: Cacophony. It's the antithesis of "Symphony", in which all the parts work together.

I don't know, and perhaps I don't want to know, what exactly is going on with Ms. Cyrus. I don't generally follow celebrities, nor do I have a particular taste for pop music, so all I know is that she used to be a fairly decent girl, and is now a slow-motion train wreck. From what I can tell, society is waiting for her to crash and burn so that we can mourn the loss of her talent instead of trying to save her before that happens.

What I do know is that there's something very wrong with society when it's perfectly acceptable to accompany a sad song about a relationship gone bad with a video that glorifies and sexualizes the destruction of that relationship. I mean, I've seen an outcry from the usual "we're DOOOOOOOOOOMED" crowd that thinks (falsely) that we're the most decadent civilization in history, but what bothers me isn't the decadence, it's the discord between the lyrics and the video.

Have we really fallen so far as a intellectual society that nobody bothers to understand the message anymore, and focuses instead on the sounds and the visuals? Because to me, that's exactly like focusing on what's on the cover of the book and not even bothering to open it to understand the message.

Folks, if that's what we're doing as a society, we're doomed.

DOOOOOOOOMED!

Dissecting Depression

"How're you doing?" my boss asked.
"Surviving." I replied.
"Just surviving?"

"Surviving" means a lot to me. What I went through in Spokane nearly killed me. There, I was struggling with depression so dark and deep that I couldn't eat. Couldn't get off the couch. There, emotional pain translated to the physical world and took me off my feet. That wasn't "surviving", it was walking numbly through life as I shut down piece by piece in response to overwhelming misery. It was dying, another week or two and I might have eaten a bullet. It wasn't impossible, even though I hate the idea of suicide.

I'm struggling in my internship, to be sure. From what I had reasonable expectations of when I first walked through HQ's doors three months ago, everything got FUBAR'd. I had applied for, been interviewed for, been medically cleared for, raised funds for (3/4 of which came from me working two jobs), gotten a VISA for, and had plane tickets for a certain internship. And it was something that I was, that I am, very passionate about. 

Instead, everything went sideways. I'm on the wrong continent. I'm working on the wrong airplanes (Cessna 206s instead of King Airs and Quest Kodiaks). It took something of an argument with my supervisor to even be allowed to do as much as I am doing, since interns normally do a couple weeks of bitch work around the shop and then go home, they don't spend two months doing engine overhauls and airframe inspections. And even then, I'm not learning anything new, nor am I allowed to do as much as I have been trained on, since the Organization's regs are strict about mechanics who haven't gone through Standardization.

From the reasonable expectations I had (spend 3 months in a certain country, working on certain aircraft, etc.), absolutely nothing has come to be. That's disappointing, as one might expect. 

And the process of me getting here wasn't exactly pleasant, to say the least.

So even just the internship has been a struggle.

But it's stacked on top of being homesick for a home that doesn't exist. Odds are pretty high that I won't get a job in Nampa or Tulsa, the two towns that are the most like "home." I don't have a job to return to, so I will have to travel to wherever I can find work. Which I don't mind in and of itself, but when I'm struggling here, I wish I could look forward to returning home, not being at a pseudo-home for a few days then spending two days on the road.

And I'm broke, too. I'd saved up some money for the post-trip expenses, but then I had to buy health insurance, and then I got laid off from my primary job a week early, and then I had to buy a new fuel pump for my car. Came out to over a grand that I don't have now between the three. Life is what it is.

Those are situations. Bad situations can make anyone depressed, it's the nature of being human. People get bummed out when they lose their jobs, when the car breaks down, when things just don't go their way. It's part of human nature. 

I'm also manic-depressive, though, and so I'll be struggling when I'm making A's in school, my after-school job is going well, and I've got friends that love me and whom I can talk to when I'm down. It's part of who I am, that I deal with clinical depression for a good chunk of the year.

Then there's the existential questions. I've taken on faith, over my logical objections, that God is calling me into missions. I said three and half years ago that I'm not the guy for the job, and I still don't believe that I'm the guy, but I also believe God is calling, and God doesn't make mistakes.

But I could be wrong. It's happened before. So the fact that everything has gone sideways on this internship brings up very real doubts that I was ever right about being called into missions. Doubt is cancer, and it eats at my faith that this is where I should be, that this is what I should be doing with my life, that what I believe is real is real.

So as I'm struggling with everything that brought me to Maseru, as I'm struggling to keep moving forward, the real question becomes "Where does one stop, and the next one start?"

What is simply situational depression, that needs to be ignored and answered with Faith that God has a plan beyond this? What is clinical depression or mania, and needs to be addressed medically? What is the Abyss of existential despair, trying to swallow me whole?

Where does one stop and the next one start?

I'm surviving, and while that doesn't mean thriving, it also means that I'm not slowly shutting down, I'm not moodily lashing out at everyone, and I'm not emotionally numb and just waiting for the end of the trip. This sort of thing doesn't concern me for the short term, and I'm not entirely sure if it really concerns me for the long term.

This, by my standards of life as a manic-depressive person, does not qualify as unhealthy. I worry about mania when I can't sleep, can't sit still, and get frustrated with how laid-back everyone else is. I worry about depression when I can't get out of bed, when I can't keep moving through the day, and when I start shutting down.

This, what I'm dealing with now, isn't me being unhealthy. It's simply part of life as a manic-depressive.

However, if I want to make missions a long-term thing, and I *do*, then I need to find a better way of staying healthy. In Tulsa and Nampa, I lean pretty heavily on my friends when I'm down, and I'm very active when I'm up, those combined with proper meds help me stay functional.

Here in Maseru, I don't really have the support network I had back home. It takes months to develop that, I'm only here for sixty days total. That's hardly time to develop a support network out of a group of guys who are all married and all have kids. They don't have free time, which means there's not a lot of free time that I can borrow to just have men to talk to.

Also, I can't be nearly as active, because I'm in a foreign country, and there are rules in place here for security reasons. I can't hit the range on a Saturday, I had to leave my rifles in Idaho. I get a lot of exercise, but I have to be back by nightfall, so I can't go backpacking or go walking until I've talked with God about my day and am at peace with it. And with very limited internet, I can't really hide in music and talk with my friends online.

While I was in the ward in Spokane, they talked about having multiple layers of safety nets to avoid coming back to the ward. Take the meds AND develop a safety net of friends to talk with AND develop a comforting place to go for alone time, etc.

I don't have most of that here, and I *MUST* find a way to change that if I want to do this long-term. I need to get better at developing support networks. I need to find a way to have a comfort place (my bedroom normally works great, but this one has ants that seem to be immune to the local ant-killer spray) when the city itself is off-limits after 1845.

(I'd say I should find a wife, but that becomes a frustrating and depressing subject without any help from the rest of my struggles in life.)

I'm surviving here, and that says a lot, but I need to be able to thrive in adverse situations, not simply survive.

That said, I'm not losing the struggle, and that's important to keep in mind.

When In Doubt, Attack!

I've heard the phrase "When in doubt, attack" attributed to the US Army Special Forces as one of their SOPs. Apparently, they train themselves to default to attacking the enemy when they're unsure of what do to, because that way, there's never a doubt about what the other guys in the team are going to do, nor will they ever accidentally break at the first sign of the enemy.

I could be wrong, of course, about whether or not the Special Forces actually operate this way as I know very little about how they do anything. I'm not sure that it's a particularly good idea for a 8-man team to always attack, but perhaps with their level of training, they're able to win firefights that most soldiers would lose, and their team leaders would know when to break contact.

SF: Supremely cool, but not the focus of this article.

What is the focus of this post is the concept of defaulting to attacking when confused. It's about moving forward when the path is uncertain, about not retreating just because you have no idea what is going on.

A couple months ago, I went on a field trip to a Muslim cultural center (AKA a mosque that wants to get around city zoning ordnances) and a Hare Krishna shrine. I went because it was part of orientation with a missions organization, and it was meant to get us some cross-cultural exposure.

As it happened I got the worst case of the heebie-jeebies I've ever gotten in my entire life. I've been less creeped out by haunted houses and scary movies. I literally felt unclean, like I'd been covered in motor oil and needed a shower, only worse and in a sinister manner (I'm a mechanic, motor oil doesn't bother me much). So in each case, as soon as I got the chance to do so without being socially offensive, I walked outside and sat down across the street.

If one thinks rationally about it, to a Christian, a shrine to a different religion is in effect a shrine to false gods, and at best can be considered blasphemous to God, and at worst (also in reality) is a shrine to evil. It's not simply false, it's actively anti-God, anti-Christian. So I don't mind that I felt unclean, that being inside those shrines to evil made me want to get out, immediately.

The organization I'm with didn't take that as a good sign. For reasons I don't actually understand, I was told that they thought it was a bad thing that I got creeped out. I was asked, several times, if perhaps I should forgo my internship and not go into missions after all.

I can't think of one bad experience as a particularly good reason to not move forward, so even though I was in doubt, I moved forward with the internship. After all, when in doubt, attack. And while very little of my internship has worked as it should, and in fact has gone mostly wrong, I'm still moving forward as long as I'm unsure of what to do. I'd rather wait for a clear sign to break contact than to wait for a clear sign to move forward.

See, combat's a simple thing, really: If the enemy retreats every time he's not sure what to do, then all I have to do to win is to keep him off his footing. Defense becomes a simple matter, because the enemy will break and run at the first opportunity. I won't need to actually defeat or destroy the enemy, I just need to keep his head down and wait for him to break.

If, however, every time he gets shot at he charges, if every time he's confused he moves forward, if every time he's scared he tries to kill me, if every time he's struggling he gets more pissed off at me, then I have a very serious problem. I can't rely on scaring him off, I need to kill him, immediately, otherwise he is going to waste me in short order.

Time and again, the Christian life is described as spiritual warfare. We're supposed to bring light to darkness, to cast out demons, to heal the sick, and to spread the Gospel of Jesus Christ. It is describe quite literally as a war against Satan, and small wonder that the Prince of Darkness would be fighting back.

So why on Earth would I run at the first sign of trouble? or the tenth sign of trouble, for that matter? Why on Earth would I say "Man, I don't know what to do and this is really hard, so I think I'll go home and sit on my couch"???

To Hell with that notion, I'm not going to do any such thing: When in doubt, I ATTACK!

The Mad Genius of Soren

A while back, I read an article that contained a brilliant explanation of the old phrase "There's a fine line between genius and insanity". 

"When your brain works more efficiently than everyone else's, that means it performs most mental tasks more efficiently than other people, including go crazy. Worse, because a smart person's brain is so good at running through hypotheses and rejecting them, it tends to come up with insanity that's more resistant to basic therapy, because the rationalizations are built to withstand the assault of a genius level intellect. When people say genius and insanity are close cousins, this is what they're talking about."

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/12/22/i-was-adam-lanza-part-2.html

And while I don't actually claim to be a genius, I am a highly intelligent person, or so I'm told by the people who tested me once. The problem with being smart, like the author of that article stated, is that when normal people rationalize something, it only takes someone equally smart to talk them back out of it. I'd add that things like tradition and social pressures also work more effectively to keep people of normal intelligence from going too crazy, because most folks don't really bother to question everything and aren't willing to buck society in order to go their own way.

I did, though. I've spent most of my life asking the "Why X?" question, and for all the good it has done me, it's done an equal amount of damage. See, the problem is that there are very few people who can rationally talk me out of anything, and even fewer who are willing to try. I win most of the debates I get into, regardless of whether or not they turn into arguments, simply because I can recall more facts, lay down a stronger philosophical foundation, and rip the other guy's argument apart faster.

The problem with methodically doing this for the last decade or so (I don't actually remember at what point in life philosophy became an obsession) is that there are very few areas of my life that haven't been examined rather ruthlessly to see if they're acceptable. Which in turn means that there are very few areas in my life that anyone can, no matter their motives, actually change my opinions in. Trust me, I generally know why I do what I do, and I've thought it through several times...

...But I need to make some changes in my life, because as it turns out, some of my opinions are wrong, and some of the ways I do things are causing more trouble than they prevent. Surprising, right?

See, the thing about having a strong intellect is that it's like an oak tree. It only gets stronger and stronger as time goes on, but if it doesn't grow up straight, like if someone ties ropes around it as a sapling so that it grows up bent, then that incredibly-strong tree can't easily be straightened out.

I'm bent. I understand how I got bent, of course, not that it particularly matters. I can point to incidents I've been through that have caused damage in my life. Not all of them are my fault, but some of them are, not that "fault" matters at this point, either.

I still need to get unbent. Which means that something stronger (or more accurately smarter) than me needs to make a point of unbending me. It's going to hurt, and all of my bent strength is going to resist. Which is actually as it should be, because it's important to resist forces that threaten to change me, at least until I'm convinced they're positive changes, and not negative ones.

But I still need to make some changes, and it's not going to be pleasant. Anyone familiar with the concept of blacksmithing and metallurgy can understand that the strongest steel is made in the hottest fires, and that an item smithed out of steel has been heated red-hot and hammered on many, many times.

To quote the late author Robert Jordan; "A sword may be grateful to the fires that forged it, but never fond of them."

I have spent a good portion of my life striving to be the strongest, toughest, smartest person I could be. I still think that's a good goal, but what I didn't do when I started was to ensure that the person I was making myself into was going to be made on a firm foundation, with straight lines and a level head. So I became very smart, very tough, and very strong, but I didn't make sure I wasn't bent.

Umm, whoops. My bad.

Now, I'm not writing this to say that I've suddenly figured out how to unbend myself, I haven't. The real problem with being bent is that no matter how strong, tough, and smart I am, I can't be stronger than myself. I will always equal I, so I will never be able to apply enough force to straighten myself back out.

No, unfortunately I need to fine something stronger than me to do the hard work. Looking to other people won't work, if they were smarter than me, I'd not have gotten bent in the first place.

Thankfully, God is most certainly stronger than me, and although He cannot be rushed to straighten me out on my schedule, He is definitely willing to do it.