Letters 2, Day 5

Spent the day writing for Letters 2. An incredibly rich day. A friend loaned me a book last week and he read this paragraph aloud to me as he did so, and it's very deeply informed my writing today.

"I have come to believe that by and large the human family all has the same secrets, which are both very telling and very important to tell. They are telling in the sense that they tell what is perhaps the central paradox of our condition - that what we hunger for perhaps more than anything else is to be known in our full humanness, and yet that is often just what we also fear more than anything else."

- Frederick Buechner (from the book Telling Secrets)

Is this all?

There's a quote I've been trying to find for a week now. I can't remember where I read it, or who said it, but I'd like to get it right and give them credit.

There was so much hype for the new Batman movie and I was all caught up in it, but walking out of the theatre, my thoughts turned to this quote. (If you are familiar with it and can direct me towards the original, I'd appreciate it.)

"There comes a point when one must say of all the things of man, of Shakespeare, even of Mozart, is this all?"

Is this all? Hundreds of millions of dollars, IMAX film, great writing and visuals, some of the best actors alive, and even the haunting power of a final performance, and you know what? It was just a movie. We gave our money, ate our popcorn, and headed back out to the parking lot to drive home and see who was on Conan.

Not that it wasn't a good movie. It was. But it revealed to me, (again and again, will I never learn?) that I put my hope in the wrong things.

Was I really putting my hope in some movie, you might say? Hoping it would do do what? I don't know, honestly, but I do know I was disappointed that I wasn't different after watching it, that it hadn't changed me. Which means, at some absurd and obviously flawed level, I was putting my hope in a movie.

And this is something we all do. Whether it's Batman or the new Coldplay or U2. We can put our hope there. Or we can put it in our pastor's sermons or our small group's honesty. We can put our hope there. We can put it in the girl that got away or in making love with the one we married. We can put our hope there.

We have some bit of hope that it will change us, make us better. Or we're trapped in some cycle of secrets and habits we can't escape. Maybe this thing will curb our appetite for the sins that we feel define our secret selves, or at least it will let us not think about it for a while. Or at least it will make us feel. We've been so numbed for so long, for some unknown and hated reason, that we can't feel anymore, and maybe this thing will connect us, revive us.

And at some point we'll have to look at this thing, this movie or relationship or feeling, however truly good it may be, and say: "is this all?"

It was an accident.

In a word: "Oops."

Letters 2, Day 4

Nerd Heaven

There's a definite connection between how much my children sleep and how much I blog. Obviously, they have not slept much this past week. I'll leave it at that.

Tonight was a bit of nerd heaven. First, I was finally able to reserve tickets for "The Dark Knight" on IMAX. Tuesday night. Bring it.

Then I got home to find my two magazines had both arrived. Wired and Tape Op, which is not only my favorite recording magazine but the ONLY one that's free. Awesome.

Tonight my wife had to run some errands, so I updated my operating system (this is my second attempt at Leopard) while watching an animated Batman prequel thing called "Gotham Knight". It tells some of the story between "Batman Begins" and this new one. It had some cool moments and it further got me in the mood for tomorrow. Many thanks to Rae who let me know about this movie via twittter.

In Letters news: I'm halfway through the recording of my third tune, a track called "Shepherd". I haven't had as much uninterrupted time to work on this project as I did last time, and it's been a bit disappointing to get an idea and then have to wait a couple days to do anything about it. But I'm about halfway through already, so I shouldn't complain. It always look different in the middle. Anyway, tomorrow morning I'll finish that song up and then run some amps over to Steve and Derri to borrow for a couple weeks.

Well, that's about it for me. Hopefully sleep will be more gracious tonight. See you tomorrow.