Borat; Depression Series # 4

Had a great night with a friend from Chicago who's now in Dallas. Had a six-course meal (all homemade except for some sushi); some double chocolate stout and big 'ole bottle of tasty cheap wine. This made watching Borat after dinner all the funnier.
Can't believe some people fell for Cohen's shtick, especially a local news station. I couldn't stop laughing while Cohen interrupted a local news weather segment. Genius.
---------------------------
Depression Series # 4 (Contains violent content)

This is an essay I didn't do anything with, and you can probably figure out why. It started with a good idea but then turned into something else and got a little violent by the end. Not sure what kind of mood I was in at the time, but I'm sure I must have just watched Fight Club or something like that before writing this.

Fighting Against Fundamentalism (2004)

I didn't realize I was one until met people who weren't and people who were worse off than me. And as much as I try to fight it, somewhere in the tissues of my brain lurks the evil, growth-stunting, self-exalting, self-isolating principles of fundamentalism.

I grew up with it like an extra head sitting on my shoulders. As I grew, matured and began to shave, so it began to get acne and feel akward. My brain and it's brain began to think similarly as we grew up. "I don't smoke, drink or chew or go with girls who do." That was actually a line from my parent's version of fundamentalism but it echoes so closely what my own thought.

"I don't watch R-rated movies, break the rules or question what I'm told or hang out with anyone so bold."

This is what my second brain would transmit from it's slightly off-center spot on my shoulders to my real brain which was in the center of my body and being. So many other transmissions were relayed to my true head through the church I went to, how my parents saw the world and how I confused spirituality with a tortuous sort of self-discipline. They were all that made it into my moldable brain during the adolescent years.

My second head would always tell me of how everything was spiritual and that there was always s spiritual reason for something happening. I could do well at baseball, then there must be someone that I hadn't reconciled myself with. Other completely unrelated disappointments or failures would be instantly diagnosed as blinking billboard that said, "Something is really wrong. Pray now so God can show you what you've done wrong."

I'd soon begin to misdiagnose everything that hurt or confused me. If people said something that hinted of a truer understanding of God's grace, of the complexity of being human or of Scripture and theology, I would think, "You're almost right but not quite." They weren't as spiritual as I was and if they were, then they wouldn't say or do those kinds of things. They should be so much more discipline and do what I do or else they'll run into a lot of problems.

My two heads soon became one as the off-center brain latched onto my own and began to meld with the beautiful gray matter that God had given me. I now saw through it's eyes instead of my own and thought it's thoughts. I couldn't believe how many other people had it all wrong. No wonder everyone else in the world was having problems with life. They weren't doing what I was doing. If they could only do their daily devotions ( merely an exercise in writing down meaningless phrases that would never impact my life) and see how bad those movies were (when if fact they were the most accurate depiction of humanity, grace and redemption.

All of my life was easy to explain and understand and the rest of the world was too, if you only thought like me. Complexity and confusion were suppressed and not dealt with because it didn't fit with my own paradigm of how God worked. The Bible was the Bible and there was no question about how life was. If something was wrong in your life, there had to be some spiritual roots.

But thank God for depression and the results. A small, dull pain began as an ax was pushed into my bloated and confused head. An inch at a time, the ax began to cut through the skin, muscle and bone until it found the carnivorous fundamentalist head that attached onto my own. A little dramatic? Yeah, but everything was when you had a fundamentalist mindset.

When the depression ax had succeeded in splitting my head open, my judgmental eyes were plucked out. My sight was gone. I didn't know how to look at the world anymore.

With a gaping gash in my head and two bloody sockets, I realized that something was wrong. Maybe I was wrong. I started to see that there was this other way of thinking. Some better way of looking at others, at my faith, and at how God saw me.

The one thing my fundamentalist mindset was right about was that there was something wrong with me. I had deeper problems.