Edina: An Okay City, You Know, If You're Into That Kind of Thing

If you’ll let me go meta-textual for a moment, I generally get my ideas for posts during runs*, and when I headed out to come up with today’s topic, I decided to write about the first thing I saw: the city of Edina. After all, I’ve written a post about every other place I’ve lived, and it seemed like the perfect time to write one about Edina, since I’m back for a couple of weeks between the end of my junior year and the start of my summer work with Americorps. But, while I’ve talked about the true beauty of every other place I’ve lived, the post that formed in my mind during the first few miles was bitter, almost vengeful against the entire suburb. If I were to expand that abandoned first idea into a full post, it would look a lot like a submission that I got for Inklette once, which was just an extended rant about how Salt Lake City sucks, encrusted throughout with pretentious literary allusions. Even with its deft prose, I couldn’t understand why this guy would complain about a city that, judging by the one time I’ve been there, seemed pretty nice. If I couldn’t vote to publish an essay like that, I shouldn’t write one, and it’s disturbing to think that I’d get so worked up about a place where my family has been very happy for the past couple years. Still, just sight of the name, the school colors, or the mascot make me angry on the same instinctive level that it makes most loyal Edina high School alumni teary-eyed for their home town.

All this might be because I’m experiencing low-grade Stockholm Syndrome after my stay at Grinnell. Most students are either from the twin cities themselves and know Edina’s bad reputation, or they know about it from hearing Edina jokes. For those who don’t know about suburban Minneapolis-St. Paul stereotypes, Edina is thought of as the home of spoiled kids coming from family money. At first I fought back against that description and pointed out at every opportunity that Eden Prairie is just as bad. Then, sometime in sophomore year, I just laughed along to Edina jokes. By junior year, I took it as a compliment when a friend told me, “You’re the only person I know from Edina, and you’re one of the least Edina people I know.”

If I had to debate for or against that stereotype, I could definitely cite more evidence in its favor. As far as opulence and waste go, the town has been on a “teardown” kick lately, a trend towards demolishing perfectly good one-story homes and building generic mansions in their place. Politically it’s nowhere to be proud of, given the high school’s alt-right movement and push to strike books written by non-white authors from the reading lists. Maybe the best encapsulation of all of this is the fate of Arden Park, a cute little patch of woodland and lawn on the banks of Minnehaha creek. The woods were one of my favorite places in Edina for how they provided a scrap of wilderness in the suburbs; overgrown and filled with elementary schoolrs making huts out of sticks, middle schoolers shooting each other with illegal airsoft guns, and high schoolers lighting up joints on the bank of the creek. There were secret parts you could discover by stumbling through the brush, islands in the stream you could swim to in the summer or walk to over the frozen ice in the winter. Now the woods are mostly cleared away, just stumps and mud and rubble, in the city’s quest for a more photogenic park. The river, which used to be wide and unmanaged, now curves gently and precisely in a way that could only have been engineered. When I first came up with this essay, the river was the key example that led into my thesis: that Edina is a simulation of life rather than the real thing, a place where authenticity is replaced with some idealized fake.

Other than my English-major instincts making me immediately suspicious of talk about “real” or “fake,” I worried about this definition because it probably says more about me than it does about the town of Edina itself. As much as I loved Waco, I always wanted to live in a town that looked like towns I saw on TV and read about in books, where kids ride bikes on their own and it snows in the winter and schools have more than seven kids per class and don’t feature morning chapel. I’d told myself so many stories about what my new life in Edina would look like that it’s no surprise I was disappointed with the real thing. Calling it a simulation is just displacement: my real problem is that it was never the simulation I wanted.

Because, no matter what crap they pull with the river, Edina is a very real place, so, like any real place, it can’t be summed up in any thesis statement. That’s part of the reason why I always had so much trouble pledging allegiance to the flag; what even is it that we’re saying is under God? A piece of fabric? A government? A landmass? A population? There are parts that are beautiful, but you can never reduce that to the whole. The same with Edina. Sometimes I think that all the time I spent unable to break into the closed circuits of Minnesota social life are what define Edina, but so are the precious times I did, like when I camped out with friends in the middle of a thunderstorm on some lunatic notion that we’d be able to see a meteor shower through the clouds. The new generation of asshole conservatives represent Edina, but only as much as the student group who preformed a slam poetry rewrite of the Pledge of Allegiance to protest racism at the Multicultural Assembly are Edina too. The wasteland that Arden Park has become is Edina, and so is the weird haven of underaged outlaws that it was.

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* On the off-chance that anyone actually cares, I generally dedicate five miles out of any run to come up with an idea. Any less and I don’t have a fully-formed idea by the end, but any more and I let the idea spiral into so many different areas that I’ll never be able to whittle it down to one post.

Writing About Writing

I’m back in Grinnell for a couple of days to fill out my paperwork for a summer job, and I let my friend Griffin*, who’s also here, know that I was coming so that we could meet up and hang out. When he got off work on the day I arrived, he called to ask me where I was, and when I said, “Burling Library,” he broke down laughing. I didn’t know what was so funny at first, so he explained: I’d complained all school year about spending all my time in the library studying, and now that I was back, I was right where I left off. We later joked that I was like a non-playing character in a video game, the kind that stays in one place forever and says the same line whenever clicked on (mine would probably be something like, “Huh, you’re off to slay the demon king? That sounds like a good idea for a blog post!”).

I’d gone to the library to read All is Forgotten, Nothing is Lost, a novel by Lan Samantha Chang, who gave a reading at Grinnell this winter. It’s about a man named Roman and the way that his pursuit of poetry affects his relationships. While I deeply enjoyed it, I’m not sure that I’d recommend it to anyone else, especially someone who isn’t a writer of some sort. Every single character that Roman talks to, with the exception of a couple brief lines exchanged with his grandmother and son, is a poet. The relationships with Roman’s mentor, wife, and friend, which define the emotional tension of the book, are centered around poetry. The questions that the book explores pertain to leading a life of writing. Which makes me wonder if this book means anything to anyone who isn’t already deeply invested in the world of writing.

I’ve always disliked the Oscars for the way that they give movies about filmmaking and the Hollywood lifestyle a better chance for major awards, or for the more pretentious strand of postmodern artists, who seem so much more interested in the meaning of art than the meaning of anything else. So, if I were a fair person, I would call out anything that panders, and therefore shouldn’t like All is Forgotten, Nothing is Lost. But I do, I really liked it, and I wonder if the reason is the same reason why I’m proud to essentially live in Burling library during the school year: I define myself as a writer. As I discussed in another post, there’s a real appeal to putting yourself into a box, and identifying as a writer and English major has always been a weakness of mine on that front. Even though this novel offered a pretty grim look at what the life of a writer is like, it still lit up some the old instinct in my brain to know what symbols define you and stick with them by beginning in the smoke-filled, wine-stained room of a graduate writing seminar.

But, aside from being hypocritical, this kind of self-indulgent writing about writing is something I’ve always been warned against. At the New York Writers Institute, someone trusted elder writer told me, “The best thing you can do as a writer is develop interests other than writing. If your whole life is just sitting in a room and writing, then you won’t have any experiences to draw on other than sitting in a room and writing, so you’ll end up doing those pretentious naval-gazing type books.” 

Maybe it’s because I’m sitting in Burling right now, at the exact same cubicle where I’ve read hundreds of academic books and articles and written dozens of essays, but I can hear a chorus of professors in my head chanting “Beware false binaries!” Which is a good point, and an excellent way to avoid throwing Lan Samantha Chang under the bus for her great, if writing-centric, novel. Because writing is still life, as authentic a part of it as any other. Maybe All is Forgotten, Nothing is Lost is built on the language of creative writing in the way that, say, noirs are built on the inherent coolness of dark and rainy alleys, but it’s more than that. It’s about bonds of friendship, uneasy relationships with mentors, and the odd disconnect between success and happiness. These are universal ideas of inherent value that anyone can connect to, writer or not. I’m probably right to be wary of defining myself so much as a writer that there isn’t anything left of me. But, at the moment, I don’t think that’s much of a danger.

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* Fun fact: Griffin and I also collaborated on a video for Grinnell's annual film festival. Check it out!

New Bionicle

I know that Monday posts are usually archival stuff, but today I’m going to break tradition a bit and write something original about a topic that maybe only four or five people I know really care about, and excuse the narrow focus by saying that it’s only a Monday post. Granted, I don’t really need an excuse because it’s my blog and I can do whatever I want, but it’s a nice ego-inflator to assume I have a rabid and easily-offended fanbase who will riot if deviations from the schedule are not well-explained.

So I’ve written about Bionicle extensively here. In doing so, I’ve probably taken the toyline that has been discontinued for almost a full decade a little too seriously. As if a rambling thinkpiece about it wasn’t enough, I went on to use it as a topic for poetry, and then theology. And now I’m back at it again, because ever since this April, Christian Faber has been posting cryptic images hinting at a return of Bionicle.

For those of you who don’t know, Christian Faber is the artist who turned Bionicle from a one-off toyline with the ridiculous name “The Boneheads From Voodoo Island” into the layered, surreal work of science-fantasy that it became. He created the project when he was struggling with brain cancer, and had the idea for what Bionicle became when he imagined the pills he took contained little soldiers, battling the tumor so that one day he’d arise healthy again. As great as Bionicle was, bits of his original vision promised something much larger and stranger. For example, while Le-Koro ended up as a generic jungle, albiet with some fascinating settings, his first idea was a forest of bio-mechanical plants, with flowers blinking in binary code and trees fashioned after microscopic cells. So I’m understandably thrilled that he’s begun showing off concept art for some new Bionicle-themed project on his Instagram.

I should clarify that it’s been a strange and unclear road to this point, and it will continue to be one for a while longer. He has admitted that Lego has not signed on for a Bionicle reboot yet, and even if they had, it will be a long road to something real. Lego started development of Bionicle in 1995, before I’d even been born, and by the time it came out in 2001, I was old enough to understand the convoluted plot and not choke to death on the little pieces. If this is a real toy theme, it could take a full decade to get off the ground, if not longer.

But here’s my thinking: it doesn’t have to be a full toy theme. Faber doesn’t need Lego to produce millions of plastic pieces, which I doubt they’d fund give after the second generation of Bionicle flopped so hard. He just needs their permission to use the intellectual property. Because, as the son of a great European history teacher put it: “Just as Prussia was an army that happened to have a country attached, Bionicle was a story that happened to have action figures attached.” Granted, the Bionicle toys were great, but they were great for an entirely different reason than the story. The physical Bionicle toys looked like really cool robots that you could take apart and build in a new way. But the Bionicle story was all about setting and atmosphere. It featured massive landscapes and magic powers, which were great imaginative inspiration, but impossible to express in the toys themselves. Rather than robots, the Bionicle characters of the story were cyborgs, flesh and skin plated in metal, cool from afar but always unsettling up close, in a distinctly H. R. Giger type style.

So, instead of another round of toys, which I wouldn’t have money or room for anyway, I’m hoping that we get pure story this time around. A webcomic would be the perfect format for this new iteration of Bionicle, I think, or a point-and-click adventure game akin to the Mata Nui Online Game from Bionicle’s first year. That isn’t to say that I’d complain about a new line of toys. I’m sure I’d buy the first green one to come out and display it proudly on my shelf. But all I really need to get the nostalgic part of my brain lighting up is a return to the alien world of Mata Nui. Or, hell, even a couple more bits of concept art would be nice.

I realize now that nearly no one but me will get anything out of this post, but screw it. I wrote almost a hundred posts by now for the rest of you, it’s about time I wrote one for myself.

I Happy Am

What shall I call thee?

I happy am.

My name is joy.

- Jamel Brinkley

I talk about my problems so often on this blog that it seems fair to admit when things are going well, even if it comes off a little as bragging. At the conference track meet last week I got a personal record and scored points for the team in both the ten-kilometer and five-kilometer races (a real feat, since I spend most days after a 10k immobilized from soreness). And, at the ceremony afterwards, I won the award for highest GPA in the men’s midwest division-three track conference, which I’d always assumed was out of my reach since my GPA was .03 points away from perfect. I told myself not to rest on my laurels, that I still had a tough finals week ahead of me. But just a couple hours ago I turned the last of my papers in and feel reasonably confident that I did well on all of them. There’s nothing really to complain about in the rest of my life: I’m in a wonderful relationship, have a lot of close friends, finally found a clear path towards employment, and have most of my anxieties under control. 

I have companionship, validation, health, hope in the future. In short, I’m happy. And you have no idea how much that’s stressing me out.

I’m not sure where that stress comes from, but I can feel it all the same. Maybe it’s fear that all of this is fleeting. Even though I don’t identify as a Minnesotan, Garrison Keeler summed me up pretty well when he observed that Minnesotans prefer bad luck to good luck, because bad luck promises that times will get better, while good luck only warns that you’ve reached your peak. And I know in no uncertain terms that things won’t stay this good forever. I’ll go home tomorrow, and as much as I’ll love seeing my family, it’ll mean leaving my girlfriend and all my friends at Grinnell for three months. No matter how well I did at conference this year, I’ll be just as nervous next year. No matter how hard I worked or what grades I got this year, there’s always more to do when the year starts again. 

I also miss the feeling of anticipation that pervades the build-up to conference and finals week. No matter how stressful or painful each moment is, you always have something better to hold out for. Sometimes over the summer I’d intentionally dehydrate myself, going on long runs when I knew I hadn’t had enough to drink, because chugging that first glass of water after twelve miles in ninety degree heat was worth all the pain. Maybe I’m like that now, finally rehydrated and starting to feel a little bit sick as I look for something else to look forward to.

In my dream last night I was threatened by some kind of shotgun-wielding anarcho-communist (which is an odd thing for my subconscious to think of, because, if anarcho-communists were prone to violence, then Grinnell would have a much higher murder rate). I tried to run away, which was somehow heroic in my warped dream-logic, and got a back full of shrapnel. There was an odd sort of thrill to it, even though the pain was more than I’ve ever endured in my waking life. And in the hospital, when everyone came up to me and congratulated me for so bravely running away, I was already anxious for the time when the wound would heal and I’d be just another guy.

Maybe that’s how I am right now: I want to be sore from my race and braindead from my finals. I want to be worn out, because if I’m normal and healthy and successful, then there’s no where to go from there. But, hopefully, this is all just me acclimating to a less-stressful part of life. Maybe a lack of pain will be good for me for a while. And, if things get worse, at least I’ll know where I stand.

A Review of Some Water-Stained Dogma

At the conference meet last week, my girlfriend and I found a Little Free Library and, both being English majors and book addicts, we looked around to see if there was anything worth reading. There wasn’t, it was mostly just children's books, but there was something very much not worth reading that we had a wonderful, albeit horribly depressing, time reading together. It’s a booklet put out by the Jehovah’s Witnesses entitled What Does the Bible Really Teach? Here are some of the more memorable parts. At first I planned on categorizing each selection as either hilarious or awful, but I can’t. All of them are really both.

All True Believers Get Elephants: Yeah, I get it: everyone wants a fulfilling marriage, three happy kids, and a long beach on a sunny day to stroll down. But really? An elephant? Also, why does that girl get her own elephant and her poor brother only gets a pail and beach-ball? Did the elephant-owning-girl command her elephant to eat her other brother and, if so, why is he so happy about it? And, more generally, is getting an elephant from God necessarily a good thing? I mean, what if God’s elephant tramples your kid? Are you still supposed to love the elephant? Or what if you just don’t want an elephant? Will God get offended if you ask for something that’s a little easier to take care of? This raises a whole host of complex theological issues, none of which are so much as mentioned in the pamphlet. 

Hamfisted Apocalypse-Porn: “With each passing year, the world is becoming more and more dangerous. It is overrun with warring armies, dishonest politicians, hypocritical religious leaders, and hardened criminals. The world as a whole is beyond reform. The Bible reveals that the time is near when God will eliminate the wicked world during his war of Armageddon. This will make way for a righteous new world.” I can’t tell if it’s hilarious that they think people will fall for this, or terrible that people actually do. Because the first two sentences could come right out of any political attack ad (likely Republican, but I know Democrats aren’t above this). They play up vague and poorly supported fears, then offer salvation in some big, straightforward, easy action: vote or join the church. It demands such an odd mix of cynicism and trust, and asks little critical thought. I’ll admit it, it’s sometimes enticing to write off the whole world as doomed and dream of something better. But attaining the dream is never as simple as passive faith. I doubt that God has a master plan for remaking the world beyond encouraging us to do it.

3. Blood Transfusions (Part I): Something interesting and truly disturbing that I learned from this pamphlet: Jehovah’s witnesses use obscure Biblical laws (which, by the way, also allow slavery and demand liberal use of the death penalty) to oppose life-saving blood transfusions. There’s no moral justification, just blind faith without context or reflection. Still, on the morbidly-comical side of things, there’ a funny visual of someone getting a beer-transfusion straight into their vein, which I guess is a metaphor or something.

4. White Jesus: Credit where credit is due, Jehovah’s Witnesses actually make a sincere, if underemphasized, appeal to diversity (more on that later), showing multicultural communities in their illustrations. But they undo any goodwill by repeatedly showing Jesus, and other Biblical figures, as pasty white. Jesus lived in a desert; he had the skin tone that would get him stopped by the TSA if He were alive today. This is a pretty wide-spread misconception, and I’d wear myself out if I pointed it out everywhere I saw it, but since the Jehovah’s Witnesses also make such a big stink about Jesus not being born in December and Christmas being a pagan festival, that this lapse in historical accuracy seems pretty incriminating.

5. Sin: While we’re on the topic of race, I think that the fact that they personify sin with heavy-set, tattoo-laden, distinctly non-white guys showing off knives and guns reveals their prejudices. Also sinful: hiding a stolen hookah pipe under your probably-also-stolen fur coat or being the protagonist of a noir film, apparently.

6. Blood transfusions (part 2): And then there’s a two-page spread of a very avid coin collector, a man angrily miming eating a hotdog at his wife (who seems very disappointed that she married such a moron), someone appreciating the finer things in life, and a bishop holding up a finger to quiet the congregation as he delivers an eloquent burp. All in all, it's a hilariously overblown walkthrough of the four deadly sins (coin-collection, hotdog eating, happiness, and burping in church). But what is the deal with the woman looking of the brink of ecstasy while getting a blood transfusion? Do these people know how blood transfusions even work? I dunno, maybe whoever wrote this took the gin-transfusion example too literally. There are also soldiers lining the bottom, and I do have to say that I admire Jehovah’s Witnesses for their commitment to pacifism. But they never actually mention pacifism in the pamphlet. I guess opposing war isn't a politically viable stance for the church, but hating blood transfusion is?

7. Gender roles: Good news: there’s nothing explicitly homophobic in this pamphlet. Bad news: it pretty clearly lays out a heterosexual couple with children as the only real sort of family, and endorses terrible gender norms to boot. It claims that “A wife does well to remember that in God’s view, a quiet and mild spirit is of great value... By displaying such a spirit, she will find it easier to demonstrate godly subjection, even under trying circumstances.” Jesus never married, had women among His followers, and many women in the early Christian church joined specifically to avoid these kinds of subjugating marriages that the Jehovah’s Witnesses are endorsing. It really gets to me that so many people, Christian and non-Christian alike, see Christianity as a force of sexism. Often it is, but it doesn’t have to be, and shouldn’t be.

8. Multiculturalism: Aside from the tacit implications of having a white guy in a suit surrounded by adoring stand-ins for various cultures, why the hell is there a cowboy in the back left? Are cowboys their own ethnicity now? Between this, the elephant thing, and the booze-injections, I’m starting to think that the Jehovah’s Witnesses have a much livelier theology than they’re letting on.

9. Basically the Entire Book: Just look at the title: “What Does the Bible Really Teach?” The arrogance there makes me angry as soon as I read it, the same way that touching a stove causes pain on contact. There’s such a lack of humility before God and the universe, to assume that you know the final truth. Because we can’t ever know for sure. That doubt is what makes faith stronger than dogma: that we wrestle with inconsistencies and anxieties, and come out stronger from it. If you want to see what I mean, read Job; not the mangled interpretation that this pamphlet provides, but the real, viscerally painful text. The Bible isn't simple, faith is never really resolved, we just have to keep wrestling with it and hope that truth is somewhere out there. It's not religion because it doesn't have that essential element of doubt or unknown, and it's not science because it doesn't have any evidence. I really don't know what else to say about it, except that I hope no Jehovah’s Witnesses come to my door anytime soon, because I might have too many things to talk about with them.

Noir

I told myself that I wasn’t slacking off senior year when four out of my six classes were some variant of English, that I was just studying what I loved. It probably didn’t help my case that one of those classes, Film and Literature I, was just sitting in a dark classroom watching movies while guys in the row behind me workshopped explicit texts to send to their girlfriends. It’s sad that no one but me seemed to really give a damn about it, because the teacher prepared a course load of great films from two often-forgotten and essentially American genres: Western and noir. Western was okay, though the iconography didn’t get to me (I’d had my fill of cowboys and outlaws, going to elementary school in Texas and all). But film noir became a minor obsession of mine for more than a year after that. After getting down the basic classics in that class, I explored the classic crime novels of the 20’s, the modern deconstructions and re-imaginings, and even the weird sci-fi hybrids spawned in the cyberpunk genre. My first year in college I played a D&D character who was some fantasy-world parallel to the early American shamus. I wrote my own crime novella, even, and then found out from my workshop at the New York State Summer Writer’s Workshop that the archaic slang I’d used was unintelligible to anyone in this century. In short, I was in deep with the genre.

And you know what? I’m not embarrassed of that. Noir gets a bad rap in pop culture for being too cynical and too poorly lit and too attached to the generic alcoholic who has to be a total jerk to everyone before he can actually get out and solve a crime. But, for all the charges of being too solemn, classic crime has a real sense of fun. My dad has a theory that musicians are best when they take themselves “just the right amount of serious,” and I’d argue that applies to all art. If so, then noir is some of the best out there: even as the characters are faced with a constant stream of murders (the highest body-count I’ve ever seen is around forty in Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest), there’s always a bounce to the language, a light beat of pun and poetry threaded through just about everything. 

Also, as convoluted as the plots get, it’s satisfying to see them click at the end. Some crime writers say that the plots are meant to get so complicated that you lose track of them, they become a vague story-static that fades out as the real heart of the narrative comes into focus. That’s true sometimes, not others, but even when the author clearly doesn’t care much about the drama-puzzle that supposedly started all this off, you can’t help but get invested in it. There was some quote I read somewhere, though it was so long ago that I don’t know if it was a scientific study or random observation, that said hardly anyone ever walks out of a theater when a mystery film was playing. It could suck, but everyone still needs to know how it will end.

But I think the way I fell hard for it means more than noir simply being a good genre. The stories always centered their action on the sort of guy who would go to parties alone and chat without really talking. In short, the kind of guy I was in high school and early college. I’d gone through middle and high school promised a gang of quirky sidekicks and romantic fulfillment by young adult literature, possibly with magic or superpowers somewhere in the mix. Since one genre had sold me short, it only made sense to move on to another. They gave the kind of loner-aimlessness I felt a purpose, and in the process they gave me an aura of cool too, even if I was the only one who could see it. No wonder that I spent the summer after high school writing a novel about an Edina-analogue where an occult conspiracy had grown among the honor students, and only one ennui-ridden boy could hope to take them down. (It was terrible, by the way.)

So maybe crime fiction doesn’t take itself too seriously, but its readers and viewers do. Or at least one reader and viewer in particular. And maybe that’s okay. I actually think it was better to focalize that angst in the foggy streets of some unnamed 1920's boom town where a gunshot just rang out around the corner than let it all keep buzzing in my head. The catharsis that the first noir films offered their 1950's audiences, still shell-shocked from the second world war, is probably much the same that I felt, though my problems feel a whole lot smaller in comparison. I don’t read much crime fiction anymore (though that novella is a full novel now, and about to start its fourth round of revisions). But I've still got a fondness for what I used to see in it.

Miracle and Prayer

The Jaguar All-Terrain Challenge at Highland Hills Park during my cross country season of eighth grade was supposed to be my first three mile race. By mile one, I was praying for it to be over. I tried and failed to keep up a decent pace and I bent my head, clasped my hands, and thought Dear God, I would be so grateful if I didn’t have to keep this up for two more miles. A few feet later I took a sharp turn out of the woods and found myself a hundred meters from the finish line.

I wasn’t particularly grateful when I saw that my prayers had been answered; it just meant that my least favorite part of any race, the sprint to the finish, was closer. And when I learned that the course had accidentally been measured almost two miles short, I wasn’t grateful that God had dulled the mind of some parent plotting the trail, just resentful that I’d wasted my one, and maybe only, miracle on something as stupid as a cross country race.

Even though I’ve been a Christian all my life and went to some flavor of Sunday school five times a week as a kid, I never really bought into the idea that God skews the odds in favor of the faithful. This skepticism probably links back to childhood bitterness from the time in Vacation Bible School when the teacher opened class by asking everyone what they prayed for. The rest of the kids, who seemed to have a blurred distinction between God and Santa, gave typically Texan answers: a four-wheeler, a nice dress to wear to church, an assault rifle to call one’s own. When it got to me, I said what I was sure the right answer: “I pray that God makes me more faithful and nicer to everyone.” And, when I didn’t attain priesthood, or even a round of applause, I think my soul mutated into the weird species I became.

But, even if I wanted to believe in miracles or prayer, I’d have a hard time defending it to myself.  Because how do you explain the people who don’t get their miracles? If you can pray away cancer, then does that mean everyone who dies of it is really just suffering from weak faith? That seems cruel, and a recipe for self-hatred as soon as you face hardship. We’ve all heard miracle stories, but I’ve never seen a real one for myself, though I’ve seen plenty of bad situations meet their harsh and predictable end, and plenty of tragedies arise from nowhere. Of the nine kids in my second grade class, eight are still alive. From my six third grade classmates, only five are left. Every one of those kids loved God and prayed their hardest. That just doesn’t make any sense.

Since childhood, but especially after I started hearing about my classmates’ deaths, I came up with an idea of God as some sort of divine telepath. You could pray, and maybe get an answer or good advice, but you’d never get anything tangible. Logic governed everything physical, God’s domain only stretched into your mind, which might just be your own delusions anyway. It was an odd faith, one that imagined a God with absolute power over everything, but who never really did much with it for some reason. But it was the only way to walk the line between two intolerable ideas: that my classmates and cousin and great-uncle and the grandparents I never met and everyone else that I’ve known who has died are gone, and that some God had consciously chosen that they should suffer and rot and leave here forever.

I’ve gotten into a habit on this blog of digging a hole and then challenging myself to find a way out of it. But now I’m in too deep, my funny little anecdote about a wasted miracle in middle school landed me in a conundrum that no one has ever proposed a real way out of. If I knew why good people die, why there is pain in the world, then it would be a real shame to waste it on a blog post that maybe fifty people will read.

The best I can come up with is that prayers and miracles do have their place. Not after the fact, of course. After the fact you just have to mourn and hope that there is some meaning underneath all of this, someplace better that your loved one went to, some reasoning that transcends understanding. But whenever I get an email from my church about someone in a dire situation, I can’t help but pray. Because even if God is nothing but a holy comforter, even if God is nothing at all, there’s no harm in it, and there’s a whole lot of good in hope. 

And maybe prayers should be more than requests anyway. Maybe, for every second that’s pleasant, or even normal, there should be gratitude too.