Mix-Tape #3 - The Concept Album

I wrote an ode to mix tapes a few years ago here and then after I found another track-list, I wrote a follow-up here. Now, it seems like I am finishing up a trilogy of posts about mix tapes with this post.  

I recently re-discovered another mix CD in one of my old CD cases. I had never really forgotten about this mix CD but it's been sitting in its sleeve for years, unloved and un-listened to.  I never had much reason to listen to it after I made it (early 2001). Subsequently, I never really tied this mix into my whole "track down every mix tape/CD" before the world ends blogging activity. 

Between the years of 1997-2002 I was a romantic relationship to friendship to somewhere in between romance and friendship with Marie. It was the typical young love, long-distance, on-and-off again type stuff.  I was committed to making it work, even if that meant giving space, being a friend and generally not moving on with the rest of my life. Don't try that at home, folks.

Eventually, this was finally resolved when I started dating my wife. Some of this is covered in epic fashion here for those suckers interested.

 I titled this mix (in hastily written permanent marker) "Concept Album - Mix 2000-2001".  The CD was created as cathartic exercise in healing from my heartbreak over Marie. Honestly, if you look at the track list I think  you'll agree it was clearly so cathartic that it became over-indulgent.  For heaven's sake, there's 19 songs. It's like eating too much soft-serve ice cream, it ultimately just doesn't sit well. I was in my early twenties, so cut me a break. Here's the track list broken into the themes for the sake of convenience. 


Part I
1. Ash - "Walking Barefoot"
2. The  La's - "There She Goes"
3. Sloan -  "I Can Feel It"
4. James Taylor - "Country Road"
5. Eric Clapton - "You Look Wonderful Tonight"
Part II
6. Green Day - Scattered Pictures
7. Breeders - Do You Love Me Now?
8. Fountains of Wayne - "Troubled Times"
9. Duncan Sheik - "Barely Breathing"
10. Elvis Costello - "Everyday I Write the Book"
Part III
11. Peaches & Herb - "Reunited"
12. Foo Fighters - "Up In Arms"
13.  Tom Petty - "The Wait"
Part IV
14. Everclear - "So Much For the Afterglow"
15. Ben Folds Five - "Evaporated"
16. The Beatles - "I'm Thinking Through You"
17. The Rentals _ "Say Goodbye Forever"
18.Coward - "I Don't Care"
19 Foo Fighters - "M.I.A."

(Insert embarrassing emoji here)

Thinking of this track selection almost twenty years later I find this mix overly earnest and entirely too long.  While I do like the whole idea of theme, rather than collecting the songs that were personally important to me, it looks as though I settled on trying to capture every possible angle on ALL of my feelings. This is what kills the album.

Also, Duncan Sheik? Embarrassing....

Ok, ok, I still kinda like that song....

Ahem....a surprising aspect about this album was that I included Sloan's 'I Can Feel It". This is a song I have long associated with my wife, in fact I had it playing when I proposed to her. It's funny how memory works, as soon as I started blogging on this mix, I uncovered memory of myself singing this song in my dorm room, of course thinking about Marie. But up until this rediscovery, I had convinced myself that my only attachment to this song was through my wife. It seems my brain had conveniently wiped away any associations I had with Marie and this song and dumped them in favor of associations with my wife. 

Finally, I think the mix suffers from too many disparate parts, it feels almost manic-like in its need to catalog "hey, here's a song, oooh, whatabout this song?"  From Green Day to Tom Petty to Peaches and Herb....I just think it's too jarring of a listening experience.  

Because I can't leave good enough alone, I succumbed to my temptations and made a new edit of my concept album. This time I used songs that I associated with Marie at the time (and still do). You might ask yourself, "Why bother?"; and that's a pretty good question. It's just with somethings in life I have to get it just right....and this is one of them.

Notable changes included exchanging Ash's "Walking Barefoot" for Ash's "Oh Yeah".  I had included "Oh Yeah" on Marie's first mix-tape (which just came to me in a flash and is mysteriously missing from my blog post about its creation...???). "Oh Yeah" is a romantic song about a summer love and the chorus repeats, "Oh yeah, she was taking me over and oh yeah, it was the start of the summer". After Marie had heard the tape she asked me, "So, am I taking you over?" That's one of  those lovely little memories that I've retained from that summer.

I also added Jimmy Eat World's heartbreaking "Your House". It fit so well, it's hard to leave it off.

I was also quite smitten with Ben Fold Five's "Emaline" and "Evaporated". They seemed to speak to me in a way that other songs couldn't. They were a big part of my life between 1997-2000.  I decided to keep Peaches and Herb as I find it kinda cute and I remember it vaguely being the inspiration to create my own concept album.

So, here would be my 2018 edit, trimmed and more focused:

1. The La's - "There She Goes"
2. Ash - "Oh Yeah"
3. Ben Folds Five - "Emaline"
4. Breeders - "Do you Love Me Now?"
5. Elvis Costello - "Every Day I Write The Book"
6. Fountains of Wayne - "Troubled Times"
7. Peaches & Herb - "Reunited"
8. Foo Fighters - "Up in Arms"
9. Tom Petty - "The Wait"
10. Beatles - "Looking Through You"
11. Jimmy Eat World - "Your House"
12. Ben Folds Five - Evaporated

So, there ya have it, possibly my last post on mix-tapes. Then again, I am a pack rat, so  you never know!

Acting on Faith: The Parable of the Two Sons

In my recent faith journey I have been reflecting on the importance of acting. You know, actually doing something. Unfortunately , like most people I find this hard to do.

I'm busy/tired/being a father/washing the dishes/writing a blog/reading a book/watching television/eating a meal/ grading papers...I think you get the idea.

I grew up in a church that preached a "soterian gospel" as Scot McKnight puts it. The soterian gospel emphasizes that salvation is given by the grace of God in my faith in Jesus Christ. You believe and you're saved, it's all that simple. You see this message often in churches, television and billboards. It's seducing because it feels good to be saved and frankly it is half true, it's just not the full story. 

We are saved by grace but we are judged by our actions. Never once does Jesus judge someone based on the wrong theology. This wasn't due to a lack of opportunity either. In his meeting with a Samaritan woman at the well (John 4) he doesn't correct her theology but her actions ("Go and sin no more"). When Jesus heals the Roman centurion's daughter (Mark 5) he doesn't stop to ask what the Roman believed about God (likely he was one of the "God fearing" Gentiles but how well could he have understood God?) - instead Jesus praises the faith he does have.

We find believers fighting until they are blue in the face about theology, rules, traditions, worship practices, rituals...all the things Jesus spends little to no time preaching about. We have made faith primarily about the way we think about God instead of the way I act in life.  Rather than uniting behind righteous deeds, endeavoring for justice, and good works, we find ourselves judging those who don't believe the same things about God that we do.

I am reading a great book about Jesus' parables by Snodgrass called,  Stories with Intent. A few weeks back I came to the section on the parable of "The Two Sons".  As is often the case with the Bible, it hit me for some reason as if I had never read it before. 

What do you think? There was a man who had two sons. He went to the first and said, ‘Son, go and work today in the vineyard.’ “‘I will not,’ he answered, but later he changed his mind and went.
“Then the father went to the other son and said the same thing. He answered, ‘I will, sir,’ but he did not go.
“Which of the two did what his father wanted?” “The first,” they answered.
Jesus said to them, “Truly I tell you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes are entering the kingdom of God ahead of you. For John came to you to show you the way of righteousness, and you did not believe him, but the tax collectors and the prostitutes did. And even after you saw this, you did not repent and believe him.
Matthew 21: 28-32

According to Jesus, judgement always comes to people based upon their actions (or lack thereof). This parable is a double-edge sword. It makes me feel good that God can see through all the b.s. we put up - the divisions of religion, domination, theology, etc. I think Jesus is discussing "the kingdom" here on earth (and not necessarily "Heaven"). As Jesus reveals elsewhere and multiple times, one can't be too sure who will make it to the other side based on our earthy knowledge.

So the last shall be first and the first shall be last... (Matthew 20:16)

At the same time it makes me fear that I am not doing enough. As we wait for our son to get home we're stuck in middle of maybe (possibly) doing something radical. But maybe I am just using this as an excuse - I mean when is it a good time to start all over and do something scary/crazy/life-altering? “Let the dead bury their own dead, but you go and proclaim the kingdom of God.” Luke 9:60

Deep down I'm scared about letting go (this has been a reoccurring theme of this blog). I am plagued by doubt about myself and about God. Maybe this is all a charade I am playing in my head. I question my assumptions and beliefs to the point where I undermine myself. I am learning to let go of it, but the self is a hard thing to defeat (ask anyone trying to be "spiritual').

So it seems the words of Jesus have brought me down, maybe even bummed me out a bit. The truth is that I need to be challenged. Who said life was easy anyway? However, I have also found comfort and encouragement as well. Even my own blemished and fractured faith can be enough to change everything.

If you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mulberry tree, 'Be uprooted and planted in the sea,' and it will obey you. (Luke 17:6)

"We are Here" or How to Defeat the Total Perspective Vortex

My youngest daughter loves the movie, Horton Hears a Who.

If you are going to sit through a kid's movie over a hundred times, it holds up pretty well and believe me, there are much worse things to sit through than this film. One afternoon on the 132nd viewing, the film's theme of being a minuscule person in a giant, unfathomable universe struck a nerve.

Please note 132 is a vague estimate, there was a period of time during nebulizer treatments that we watched portions of "Orton and Jojo" at least three times a day. My two year old loves Jojo, the misanthropic, non-speaking,Who most of all. Totally fits her personality....

The film deals with the heroism of Horton, who trusts in his big ears and the fact that "a person's a person no matter how small". However, another strand of the film is how the Mayor of Whoville accepts his infinite smallness in the universe. This is much more fleshed out than in the book, "fleshed out", as in the character doesn't exist in the book. I could only think of the great scene from Carl Sagan's "Cosmos". It's amazing, so, you know, watch it.

If you're too lazy to watch (shame on you) let me briefly summarize. Looking back on earth from a satellite thousands of miles away, the earth is only a pale blue dot. That's it. All that we've believed in, accomplished and fought and died for happened on a fraction of a pixel in the universe. The pale blue dot is about accepting the earth's rightful place in the universe - a tiny, unknown planet. It should humble us all and remind us that for all our pomp, we are really a primitive and disconnected race. It should in, Sagan's words, inspire us to "deal with each other more kindly and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot".

The fact is, we are the Whos.

We live in denial of this, almost as well as the Whos do - when Horton flaps his ears over Whoville, over and over again, the Whos just take their sunglasses on and off to adjust to the insanity.

"Nothing ever bad happened in Whoville, never has, and never will" -- as the lead on the Whoville city council says. We take our sunglasses on and off - we tell ourselves the narratives until they fit us like warm comfortable sweaters. Most of all these narratives (nationalist and consumer identities, religions, etc.) tell us we are important. We are the center of the universe.

yeah, i know it's only the world revolving around "me" but it's late and i'm tired...just go with it.

Let me stop here. For long-time readers (ha ha ha ha), you may or may not know that I consider my self a Christian. So these words you might find confusing, troubling, or crazy.

One day I might find the willpower or time to outline my exact theology, but until that unlikely day, just take my word on it - it's complicated. For now, it will be suffice to say I believe God created a universe that is (from my limited human viewpoint) ultimately unknowable. As far as the human mind can conceptualize, the universe is bordering on eternal. If God made the universe, then, we must be small.

In Douglas Adam's excellent The Restaurant at the End of the Universe a torture device called the Total Perspective Vortex, "annihilates you by showing you just how infinitesimally small you are compared to the Universe".

Books 1 and 2 are outstanding and then the series just kinda goes down from there with each successive book.  I don't think I finished the last one. Although if I taught an absurdist, existential literature course, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy would be on the reading list.


I don't think this smallness is necessarily inherently good or bad. In fact, the recognition that we are small is critical to letting go of our self-inflated importance and seeking a more authentic existence. Have you ever looked up at the stars at night and had the feeling of being inconsequential? The universe has created awe in theists and non-theists alike although with the size of the universe provoking (of course) different response and conclusions.

"What could define God [is a conception of divinity] as the embodiment of the laws of nature. However, this is not what most people would think of that God," Hawking told Sawyer. "They made a human-like being with whom one can have a personal relationship. When you look at the vast size of the universe and how insignificant an accidental human life is in it, that seems most impossible." -  Stephen Hawking (in a recent interview)


Because I do believe, I think our smallness shows us how special we are. At worst, we find ourselves alone in a vast, cold, life-less universe. Even in the best-case scenario, the universe is populated with islands of life surrounded by an almost unimaginable, life-less ocean. There is no doubt about it, humanity does seem to have a special place in the universe by virtue of being alive.

Ok, as you can tell I am not one of those "the universe is teeming with life' people. I could be wrong - but even if there is intelligent life, even lots of it - we still are millions, trillions of light years apart. It would be like telling you that you have a long lost sibling somewhere in the world but we don't know anything about that sibling. So, great you have a sibling but no way of knowing or communicating with he or she nor any idea where they might be in the world....So, so what?

Anyway, back to the film. At first, the mayor lives in denial of the entire possibility (thinking himself mentally unstable).... but eventually, he does accept his insignificance in the universe. He begins to trust a giant elephant in the sky for Whoville's very salvation. Don't confuse the mayor as one of Kierkegaard's "knights of faith" - his faith is based on verifiable evidence. Nonetheless, accepting his place in the universe means he must trust something above himself. Eventually, we all have to let go of something, and ultimately, I think it all ends up being about control.

Once we have accepted our role, and relinquished our ideas of self-importance we can move on to figuring out how best life should be lived. Now that I know I am no longer the center of the universe, what is my role? I answer that question by embracing the smallness - trying to integrate my role as a servant in my life. I struggle with this - but as I continue to surrender self to God every day a little more, I know my role must be one of helping and putting others first.

As the movie crescendo's the Whos must rally together and make enough noise so others hear them (and not get dropped into a boiling pot of oil). They shout "We are Here!" over and over - until they are heard.  I imagine that's what we are all trying to do on a metaphoric level every day.

"We Are Here!"; indeed.



Letting Go

I had these big ideas for this post but instead just keep rambling. Considering this post is all about letting go, I decided just to post what I got. :)


I was coming home from work the other day and I read a church sign that simply stated, "God is in Control". At first I imagined a mad man reacting in total defiance of the sign and slamming his car into the car next to him. Yeah, that's my first thought.

Beyond this transitory insane thought, I began to ponder the whole idea of giving up control and gaining something else far more satisfying back. It seems at the bottom of every belief system (or for that matter some non-belief systems) the first step is to give up control of your life.

"Whoever tries to keep his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life will preserve it." - Jesus as quoted in Luke 17:33


The whole idea of control stands firmly in the way of a walking a spiritual path because giving up control means giving up your own pride. It means admitting that you don't know what's best for you. It means letting something (or someone) else determine your ultimate fate.

 I figured it was time for a cheesy, inspirational photo symbolizing all of our spiritual paths. Often I find symbols to be too idealistic, causing myself to wonder if I am even on a spiritual journey at all. So, if you find yourself looking at the above photo and wondering if you are "spiritual" or not, the answer is to stop over-thinking it and just enjoy the photo.  

I'm the first person to admit the dangers of reading too far into our past history. Then again, to not give meaning to the past, means we can't even understand our own narratives. So, with significant doubt (and wonder) I can look back at my life and begin to see I was in denial of how much control I even had at the time. I can look back and see what some would call fate, luck, or I would call God's fingerprints all over my past.

I can firmly say my wife Kathryn and I feel we have been led to this time and this place in our lives. As we travel the road of adoption together, we feel like we have had our hearts opened and this is where God had been leading us all along. We let go of a lot of fears and doubts and (so far) have gained much in the process.

Strangely enough though, it doesn't feel like an end point. I don't mean necessarily we are done adopting (that's an open door) but we feel like we have open hearts for what God wants us to do. We don't have any firm ideas right now as we are (well, for lack of a better word) entrenched in our adoption process. We are open to any number of scary, exciting, crazy paths for our lives to become. This doesn't mean anything will happen soon or even that it has to wind up me leaving my job. I am just trying to let go of dictating my own future.

"We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to accept the life that is waiting for us." - Joseph Campbell

So in this intermission of sorts (although, it doesn't feel like any kind of intermission I know about) I want to just wait and listen.  I want to ask God for where he wants us to serve. It's a crazy idea really. Letting go of my dream job, financial security and family expectations. Letting go of the comfortable "good life" and embracing the unknown. Letting go may not be easy, but it will sure keeps you on your toes.

Wu Wei: The Art of Doing Nothing or How to Change the World Without Really Trying

Some people might call me lazy.

I often go with the flow or wait for things to happen. If I have a big problem or project I like to let ideas drift back to my mind for awhile before I make a decision (I call this "marinating"). This is often a trait that is unappreciated.

It turns out I was practicing "Wu Wei" my whole, lazy life.

Wu Wei is one of the central tenets of Daoism. Daoism is the ancient traditional philosophy/religion/wisdom from China that places emphasis on non-action rather than action - on our ability not to force something but to act "within opportunity". Wu Wei is literally translated as "non-action" or "without action".

The concept asks us to stop trying so hard and to be patient. We can't fight fire with fire, so stop trying already! In class I often use the example of "fighting" a cork to stay under water. Of course, when I first had the idea to actually demonstrate this in class, I didn't have a cork, only a rubber toy (and since that's going with the flow, that's how I roll).

Here I must quote from the classic, "The Tao of Pooh" to illustrate the point;

"The harder you hit (the cork) the more it yields; the more it yields, the harder it bounces back. Without expending energy, the cork can easily wear you out. So, Wu Wei overcomes force by neutralizing its power, rather than by adding to the conflict. With other approaches, you may fight fire with fire, but with Wu Wei , you fight fire with water".

There is a reason it's a classic. So, do yourself a favor and go read it.

My other favorite example of Wu Wei is Tim Duncan.

 Spent four mintues looking for a Wu Wei Tim photo and figured that was not "going with the flow"

 so I just gave up and clicked on a random one.

I've never seen a more patient or possibly unselfish player. The guy never cared about stats (at least his game never showed the usual flashes of selfishness displayed by many of the great ones). If Timmy was posting on the block he would wait to see what the defense would give him before taking action. If he had a weak player defending him, he would bully in. Stronger or athletic defender he might take a jump shot or try to draw a foul. If he had a double (or in his peak a quick triple) team, he would pass out and trust his teammates to knock down the open shot. Just recently Tim had an opportunity to complete a triple-double, as he was one assist short when he re-entered the game.  His quote after the game reveals a true wu wei attitude;   “I wasn’t trying to get it, it was just the flow of the game and the plays being called.”


It shouldn't have been a surprise that Tim and the Spurs have been called boring because they didn't force their offense or defense. They didn't overpower or overwhelm, they just reacted accordingly to their opponent's strategy and/or players.

Wu Wei is hard for many Americans to "get". We are taught to be "go-getters" and to "make a name for ourselves". We are told to create are our opportunities. Our dreams lay just beyond our reach, only waiting for us to get to work achieving them.

These myths often work against our very self-interest that they seem to be promoting. We take a career path or the first job offered because it's a good salary and we're trying to make something happen. Later, we find ourselves miserable because the career or job isn't a good fit for our personality. We force ourselves into relationships because it's what we're "supposed to do" and later find out we're highly incompatible with our mate.

One of my favorite quotes from the Dao De Jing shows that working for ourselves just leads to ruin:

"There is no greater mistake than following desire; There is no greater disaster than forgetting contentment; There is no greater sickness than seeking attainment; But one who is content to satisfy his needs, Finds that contentment endures."

So, if we can't trust ourselves to find happiness - who or what do we trust in to find happiness, purpose and meaning into our lives?

That will all be explained in part two.....if I feel like it.