The Early Bird Gets Beat Up

This month I am being preemptive in my posting.  It is only the 7th and my monthly post is here.  Another story or two.

I saved my brother's life once.  I am a good brother.  We came home from the lake one Sunday afternoon and my mom said we could jump in the pool because it was really hot inside our house, we already had our bathing suits on and we needed a shower anyway.  My older brother George and I ran through the house into the back yard and jumped into the pool.  By the time my chubby younger brother Steve got to the back yard George and I were already getting out of the pool so we could jump in again.  Steve ran and jumped in.

He forgot that he didn't know how to swim.

We had been wearing life jackets all day at the lake and I guess he didn't realize he wasn't still wearing one.   I immediately jumped in from the other side of the pool and swam with all my might toward him.  I remember opening my eyes underwater and faintly seeing him on the other side of the pool.  Thinking about it now makes me think of that old Nirvana album cover of the baby in the swimming pool.  He was frozen with fear floating there.  He was in the shallow end of the pool and but couldn't touch.

When I got to him I promptly put my hand under his butt and pushed him up and towards the steps.  He coughed a bit but was fine.  And thus I saved him.

I suppose that makes up for all the times I almost killed or maimed him, my other brothers, family members or neighbors.  Like the time I hit George right above the eye with a hockey stick.  One inch lower and he would have been wearing a pirate patch over his left eye.

Or the time George and I pushed my youngest brother Mike down a hill in a wagon as the "test driver" for our "race car." Three barrel rolls and not even a scratch.  We did put him in full hockey gear before doing it.

Or the time I let my cousin Matt ride down the same hill on my bike.  I neglected to mention that the brakes didn't work.  It was only a broken arm... big deal.

Or the time I made Steve bite through his lip on a trampoline.  You know how you can make someone's knees collapse if you time your jump just right?  Well I did.  My parents were on vacation and we were staying a some friends' house.  That was the only time my mom ever forgot to leave a release for medical care.

Or the time I almost lit Mike on fire when my friend Ben and I were making a flame thrower with a Bic lighter and a can of WD40.  How was I suppose to know he was going to walk through the garage door right at that moment?

Or the time that I almost lit my neighbor on fire when George and I tried to make homemade dynamite with PVC, gasoline and duct tape.

Or the time I performed a DDT (ala Jake "The Snake" Roberts, WWF) on Steve while wrestling on my neighbor's front lawn.

I could go on and on.  I was one of four brothers who lived on a street with 17 boys and 1 girl.  Nuf said.

I Used to be Retired

Seeing as how I am on pace to post one blog a month and September is almost over I figured I ought to post something...My students are writing Narrative Essays and it has gotten me into story mode so I think I will tell a story:

When I was 15 years old I bought a hat at Kmart.  It wasn't just any old cap though.  It was a wide-brimmed straw type of thing with a brown band around the base of it.  There was a plastic gold kangaroo shaped pin that held the band together on the overlap.  It was $3.99 and I couldn't resist.  I wore it to school frequently and when people would ask me about it I would tell them, "I'm retired."

One day I was in a Salvation Army shop and found an old Members Only jacket.  It was a grayish blue to varying degrees all over.  It probably used to be blue blue but it had come to a point where it looked like someone had left it outside a couple of times and the sun had faded the parts that were exposed quicker than the other parts.  Or maybe someone's dog had slept on it.  My dog Velzy can wreck a towel faster than I can run.  

It kind of smelled like it had been in the trunk of an old El Dorado for a couple of years before finding its way to an old dresser that didn't have liner sheets in the bottom of the drawer.  Perhaps during a fateful spring cleaning it was discovered in its stronghold at the bottom of the drawer underneath an old train set.  I like to think that its owner pulled it out of the drawer and smiled at the many memories in that old jacket before stuffing it in a garbage bag to take to the Salvation Army.  

No doubt that it had been on the rack for quite some time when I found it.  The musty Salvation Army smell was in a tooth and nail fight with the dank wood smell of the dresser drawer.  I reluctantly washed it because my mom made me but it still (much to her chagrin and my delight) retained a great deal of smell.  After setting my kangaroo laden retirement hat upon my pate I donned my glorious new prize.  It completed the look perfectly.

Mr. Dunne, my history teacher, asked me why I wore my hat and Members Only jacket.  He told me he used to wear one in college.  I told him that I was retired.  He nodded sagely.  Janet, who sat next to me in Mr. Dunne's class requested that her seat be moved because my jacket stunk and I wouldn't take it off.  Everyone's got a threshold.

Coach Webb asked me if I planned on coming out of retirement to attend spring football practice.  I asked him if I could wear my hat during warm ups.  He said he was worried about me but that wouldn't stop him from killing me if I wore the hat to practice.  I didn't.

Mrs. Berry, my neighbor, told me that being retired is boring.  I told her that working for 50 years sounds more boring than waking up at 10, putting on a hat and drinking iced tea while sitting in a hammock.  She told me that I was romanticizing retirement and that it also entailed worrying about having a fixed income, going to frequent doctor visits and talking about politics.  I told her that I already had the hat and jacket.  She told me that sticking feathers up your butt doesn't make you a chicken.  I nodded sagely.

Greg bought the same hat a couple of weeks later and started telling people that he was retired too.  I gave my hat and jacket to Goodwill.  Retirement was much more fun alone.

Shame and the Catechesis of Wine

Seeing as how I didn't even last a week at the  task of being an "occasional" blogger I have come into this here courtroom with a look of contrition (possibly even shame) on my face.  The judge asks me, "What have you been up to that has kept you from blogging?"  I really don't have a good excuse but I nervously open up my briefcase and I eyeball a paper I wrote for my Christian Worldview class at New Saint Andrews.  I look upon the title with what is probably too much pride, "A Comparison and Contrast of Antithetical Worldviews: The Drinking Habits of Secularists and Christians."  It crosses my mind to pull this paper from my briefcase and slap it down with a satisfying thud in front of the judge.  As if the sheer sound of said "thud" would explain everything.  Knowing this will probably be a futile gesture I sigh, flip through the paper, tear out a sheet, close my briefcase, bring my little sheet to the judge and say, "Here's what I got."

The Catechesis of Wine
“In meditating on Christ’s miracle of creating wine, Augustine lamented that we accept the normal creation of wine as any less miraculous, for even as water ‘turned into wine by the doing of the Lord, so in like manner also is what the clouds pour forth changed into wine by the same Lord. It has lost its marvellousness by its constant recurrence.’” (Wilson and Jones, p.83) If a man who had never had any clue as to how wine was made were to sit and think about what he would expect if someone were to leave a vat of crushed grapes out in the open air for about two weeks, his first answer would most definitely not be, “Wine.” More likely his first word would be, “Yuck.” Or its equivalent. A man would no more expect wine from two week old, unpreserved crushed grapes than a man would expect a chicken to pop out of an egg if he weren’t so used to seeing it or hearing about it.

Of course the naturalist will swoop in and tell us that there is this natural process by which the natural sugar in grapes naturally transforms into natural alcohol.  It is called fermentation. This naturalist would likely be smug and say something like, “There, I have dispelled the mystery of grapes transforming into wine. Now we can put away all this silly superstitious talk of some Ultimate Being doing it.” To which a stout man ought to respond, “Sir, all respect, but you did nothing of the sort. All you did was describe what happens. You didn’t explain anything.” The naturalist may heave a great sigh and launch into a detailed explanation of the chemical processes involved in fermentation. After thirty minutes, the same stout man should restate, “Again, all respect but all you did still was describe what happened, just in fancier terms.” The naturalist in desperation may scream, “Don’t you see that it MUST happen! Natural Law demands it!” To which are stout man ought to chuckle, take a sip of his wine and ask, “Why?”

the point

I think I have figured out what I am going to do on this blog.  In my first post I made a list of all the things I am, the things I do or am doing and the things I am interested in (for a composition teacher, that was a lousy sentence...I digress.) Since my wife keeps everyone updated on her blog with the goings on in the less-than-wild world of our life I do not feel any pressure to do a running autobiography here.  Instead I am going to apply antithetical thinking to each of those things one at a time.  Sine I have adult ADD, these posts will probably be short and poorly argued (i.e. overgeneralizations, anecdotal evidence, massive presuppositions on first principles, etc... in other words, all the things I will try to beat out of my Critical Thinking students) but hopefully mildly entertaining.  

I will make my first post a little description of what "antithesis" actually is and what it isn't.  I will also outline a few of the presuppositions I am working with.  I will not argue for them, I will just assume them.  I figure that if the modern intellectual establishment gets to take all sorts of things for granted, why can't I?  After all, it wasn't until about 200 years ago that my presuppositions that ruled the world for a few dozen millennium, were cast aside for a series of ephemeral fads (fads that had changed every three month or so ever since.) Alas, I am jumping ahead of myself.  More on all of that later.

Chet

another blog

I think I have started about 8 blogs at this point in my illustrious blogging career. Only one has lasted and really only because it is a group blog. This will probably see a flurry of action for a month or two and go down as Jon Bon Jovi has so eloquently put it, "in a blaze of glory." Oh well, low expectations begets blessed satisfaction....or so I've heard. I suppose I ought to introduce myself:

I am Chet. I live in a little slice heaven called Somis, California. Also know as "God's County," where indeed milk and honey flows.

I am a husband to a pretty little lady. She smells like coconut and finds me mildly humorous. We have travelled to a bunch of places and are planning on travelling quite a bit more but still find Somis better than anywhere.

I am a high school teacher at a Christian school. I use to teach the Bible but now I am teaching Critical Thinking and Composition. Not because I don't like the Bible anymore...because I do...

I am going to grad school. I am getting a Master of Studies in Classical Christian Studies from New St. Andrews College. I start in August and just got my 1000+ pages of books today. Latin, Plato and Aquinas...Fun stuff.

I am a photographer (for a little extra coin.) I do all sorts of different types of pictures. If you look at the Proctor Surfboards ad in the latest Surfer Magazine, you can see one of them.

I am a surfboard maker. Accumulating a legion of surfboards would be too expensive if I did not make them myself. Not to mention that my neighbors love the smell of resin wafting through the air as it mingles with the smell of their pot roast at dinner time.

I am a farmer (of sorts.) I actually have a modest garden that I derive entirely too much pleasure out of tending. I am growing tomatoes, which I do not like. I am also growing corn, which I love. I was growing strawberries until my dogs ate them. I was also growing radishes until the local Somis rabbit posse ate them. I plan on planting a vineyard and making my own wine.

I am a builder (again, of sorts.) I am building an addition onto my house. Mostly learning as I go and bribing people who know already with beer and surfboards.

I am interested in: theology, beer, philosophy, dachshunds, Notre Dame football, G.K. Chesterton, music, poetry, ukuleles, 1965 Dodge Darts, surfing, The Reformation, agrarianism, the hookah, spy novels, Mexico, the kinesiology of ankles, the Middle Ages, the NHL, barbecuing, satire, Dirty Jobs with Mike Rowe, hummingbirds, old Bibles, mowing my lawn, The Great Books, and collecting and drinking wine...the list goes on and on.

To tell you the truth, I don't have any real goal in mind for this blog. It'll probably have something to do with, or at least relate back to the title of blog. "Living in Antithesis" is basically the desire to live by principles from God's Word. As these principles are more often than not set in direct opposition to the world, Christians ought to find themselves living in antithesis. I want to do that.

Chet