Confession

Hi there everyone.

I'm probably writing a post here that I'll regret tomorrow.

I think when I first was lying in bed and had the idea of starting a blog I knew right from the start that I was going to be anonymous or pseudonymous (Is that a word - does it mean what I'm trying to make it mean?), and I knew because the fiercest and probably most hidden reason for starting a blog was to find a place to say outloud the  things I could never say In my day to day, work , family, social life.

My girlfriend is wonderful and we can always tell each other anything, but I think I just wanted somewhere to reach out, and maybe turn some people off as being self-indulgent and/or boring and maybe there would be some people out there who would relate to what I was writing about and maybe it would be a bit like reaching out and touching your finger tips against someone elses in a dark room.

So here I am. I'm listening to daft punk because there's hardly any lyrics and it keeps me awake and with brainspace to think.

I smoked tonight - for the first serious time in about a year. I'm not starting up again> I found quitting pretty easy. The smoking was deliberate. A sort of wild letting go/ being in flame.

So i smoked, ciggarettes and pot.

I just want to say here that If there's any young people/children reading this that I'm not trying to romantacise smoking of any kind. Its bad. Full stop. It fills you with poisons, shortens your beautiful, amazing God given life. Its foul and anything but cool.

If anyone reads this and feels that it warrants an adult rating on my blog then please let me know and I'll change it straight away. I'm pretty new to this. I'm not really sure yet whats ok content and not. 

Anyway, I was staying with some family and we bought some weed and beer and got really stoned together, laughed, had fun being crazy etc. That bit went for a while.

And then I had some pretty magor thoughts occur to me. I started having homo-erotic fantasies. Especially for one guy, a friend of my girlfriends.

I'm a straight, drug free Christian with a girlfriend.

This is not me.

or the problem is that it is a part of me. Theres almost a Dr Jekyl and Mr Hyde thing going on. Dr Jekyll wants to leave a peaceful, disciplined life. I love playing chess, cooking, hanging out with my family. I tell my brother not to drink because he's only 16  and in fact its a rule I police like an eagle with him. I love going to church. I love the authenticity and kindness and warmth of the people I go to church with. I love my girlfriend very much and when I get some money and am more able to be a truly equal partner in our relationship I want to ask her to marry me.

There's also a part of me that feels truly wild. Much like the Mr. Hyde character in the BBC serial "Jekyl", which was a modern reinterpratation of the Dr Jekyl and Mr Hyde story. I crave the escape of getting stoned out of my brain. The nictione lust of addiction to ciggarettes. Being a tragic crazy bohemian - which - there was a time, when I shared a studio with an x girlfriend and we helped run a student art space, drink beer, paint listening to Tom Waits and Aphex Twin and get stoned and pass out on the floor and wake up and make love on the studio floor. And being homeless and living underneath the mural at newtown that says "I have a dream" and handing out free poetry (ov variable quality).

That feeling of being alone and everywhere and invincible and wild and uninhibited. 

I seem to go in cycles. I used to go in very destructive circles. Now I don't. Its like the agreement between Jekyll and hide. Jekyll has the day, Hyde has the night. Hyde has to wear a gps which records his movements so that Jekyll can review them in the morning. In return Jekyll has to promise not to search for a cure. In fact, to never cure himself of Hyde.

They're at a deadlock.

In the end in the show Hyde eventually takes over the whole of Jekyll and gets so out of control that he is caught and performed experiments on. The experiments go wrong and somehow a sort of fusing occurs and the jekyll and hyde perform a sort of merging. Thats a pretty bad explanation of an awesome show. But the point is, maybe if that analogy holds true, theres a way as a human and a christian human to merge those  two polarities. to sort of knock of the edges of both. The path of the christian, the love and discipline and submission to God but also a sort of real expression of all the wildness and lust and darkness that instead of being denied or thrown out could be brought before the light and could be somehow enveloped and integrated into the path of Jesus and of loving God.

I've just thought that to be on the safe side I'll change my blog to have the adult warning after I post this.

I sent my girlfriend a text tonight telling her about my fantasies and asking wether she'd be prepared to have a threesome with me and her male friend. i couldn't call her. Its like 4 in the morning. I had to tell her though. She is the only person in the world who I tell absolutely everything to. More than I could ever  say in my blog, or tell anyone else. This felt like such a big thing I had to tell her. I really want her phone to be on silent so she can get it in the morning. I think I was afraid that If i waited until I was osber I would never be able to say the things I wanted to say to her.

We had sort of mentioned it before and she had said she would kind of like it

So thats about it. I suppose to a lot of christians reading this I am just following the devil that I am walking away from the light.

But putting all attempta at providing a biblicly sound opinion aside; Isn't the core message of Jesus that he loves us. That he loves the leppers and the outcasts. I don't want to always be a leper and outcast but while i am one. While I feel unable to stop myself shouldn't I still keep walking with god. Or keep talking to god at least. Bringing it before him. Thats what we are told to do as christians. To bring all of us before God. I know what I am doing is probably wrong but it feels like a part of me and even if it is dark and sinfull shouldn't I still bring it before Jesus?

Some Pics From The Vault

This was a series I did called "The Problem With Sex" after having a big fight with an ex-girlfriend and feeling particularly confused about life.

Thank You Mystery Man

My grandma went shopping yesterday and as she always does took "the food purse" with her. 

N.B The food purse is a red leather purse with a strap attached so you can wear it like a handbag. At the beginning of each week Grandma, Mum and I all put in our respective contributions for the week and whenever someone needs to buy food or house products they take the food purse ( I tend to take some money out and transfer it to my wallet because as chained to societally defined gender roles as this makes me, I just feel silly wearing a shiny red purse/handbag thing).

Anyway, while she was ambling through the neon aisles of our local Coles, possibly hypnotised by the post-Christmas musac, the latch on the food purse failed in such a way as to let all the money (a few hundred dollars) fall out silently onto the cold white floor.

Grandma only noticed the truancy of the grocery funds when she went to pay at the check out. I wasn't there, but from the way she described it to me and knowing my grandmother she would have been seriously panicking. 

She told the checkout girl that she'd be back and frantically checked all the aisles for the money.  It wasn't there, she looked everywhere and couldn't find it.

She returned to the checkout and explained her bad luck to the girl serving her. The girl commiserated with her saying how terrible it was to lose that much money but said maybe she should check with the front desk just in case someone had handed it in.

Not expecting any luck Grandma went up to the cigarette counter, and would you believe it, they had her money. A young man had handed it in. It was all there to the cent.

He didn't leave any contact details so we had no way of thanking him. It would be a pretty huge co-incidence for him to read this blog, but either way, I still wanted to thank him.

So thank you mystery man. What you did was very good and kind. People like you make the world a better place.

Girl In Bed

I sketched this sitting on the floor while watching my beautiful girlfriend snooze in bed (apologies to her for her semi-abstract form).

A Photo I Took A While Ago

I thought I'd start leaking some drawings/paintings/photos of mine out onto my blog bit by bit.

Here is a photo I took in sydney a year or so ago.

I don't have model releases for any of the people in the photo. If you're one of those people and you're reading this and you don't want the photo up, please let me know and I'll take it down. Does anyone know the rules around candid photography and model releases etc.?

Open Letter To Dennis

I was googling some info about chess strategy the other night when I stumbled across a really interesting blog post by a guy called Dennis M (namely Dennis M's Chess Site). 

The post was entitled "Christians Can Play Chess... at least some of them, under certain circumstances". I don't want to try and describe the post in too much depth for fear of mis-representing it, I recommend anyone who's interested to follow my link and check it out.

A loose paraphrase is - Its a post questioning, exploring and discussing the validity or moral position of being a Christian who plays chess. Dennis seemed to be arguing that although there can be arguments made for the beauty of the game, and for its strength in bringing people together that the main reason people play chess is to win, or to put it better, playing chess engenders competition and the urge to be better than someone else, therefore being "un-christian".

This was really interesting for me as I'm both a Christian and a someone who has just started developing an interest in chess. Also this is the sort of question that I plague myself with constantly. Is this or that behaviour Christian? Is this or that activity more or less christian?

When I read Dennis' post I had a strong reaction to it. I wanted to talk to him about it and wrote a comment back immediately. Unfortunately I wasn't a member of blogger at that point and therefore wasn't allowed to comment. So now that I am a blogger member I went back to comment and realised that the post on Dennis' site was four years old and that year he had stopped blogging on blogger and setup a new blog on another site. I didn't think it would be very relevant trying to post to the old site or even his new site for that matter. Dennis would have moved on by now. But I still wanted to say what i had said to myself and written down that morning. As i realised after I had written it that it was important to me. Maybe if there's another Christian out there ( or non Christian) who feels the same as me and if they read this, maybe they won't feel alone.

So anyway, below is what i wrote down in notepad at 3 am that morning after reading Dennis' post.

I've left it as I wrote that morning, as although I'm sure I could check up on some bible dictionaries and think it through more clearly and come up with a more theologically sound response I really felt what I was writing and for once I want my heart to win out over my head:

The most important thing as Christians is that we love God and love Jesus with all our hearts and minds.

Jesus is not calling anyone to be perfect. Jesus loves us in our imperfect, messed up world. That is what makes the Gospel of Jesus so amazing. The love and the grace and the fact that we can't earn it or lose it.

It is patronising to God to try and take it on ourselves as humans to judge the validity of competition and all competitive sport/games as "Christian" or "non-Christian". God created us, and chess and he created in us the desire to compete. People have been competing for thousands of years and not, do I believe, to the general detriment of good will or love. I love my girlfriend deeply and even know that she is fragile and a bit prone to being sensitive when it comes to competition. But if she wants to play a game of chess with me, even though I know losing will hurt her feelings (not saying that I always win or anything), I will still play competitively and still love her. These things aren't mutually exclusive. 

I don't think God wants us to drain all passions from ourselves - walking around as complimenting, smiling, polite robot drones from some pleasantville nightmare. 

God knows the darkness in us. He knows our worries and loves and the things that we are passionate about. He wants us to walk towards the light but he wants us to be real, to be fully human. The most complete revelation of God ever to have occurred was in a form both fully human and fully divine. We don't move closer to divinity by denying our humanity. 

I don't know if this ramble is making much sense. It's 3 am over here in Australia. I just came back from a concert where I danced to loud music and laughed and jumped up and down and was overwhelmed by fantastic rock music and walked away a person who still loves God and is amazed by the beauty that God creates in this world. 

I want to give my life to God and to my church - I also want to live a life full of love and praise, and not anxiety and pedantry. I hope that doesn't sound to harsh. I have an anxious disposition myself and tend to get anal about lots of things and worry that I'm not being a good enough person for God. Maybe I needed to write this for myself as much as anyone else.

Much love to all you wonderful people on this blog.

"Do not owe people anything, except always owe love to each other, because the person who loves others has obeyed all the law."

Romans 13:8

Hello World

I was walking to the local supermarket along the busy road near my old house and looking at the palm trees that dotted the long traffic island park that let me imagine I was walking to the local supermarket some place in California when I noticed a guy riding his bike towards me.

This guy was some way off yet. I noticed him because he was big; a really muscly, buff guy riding a bike that would have looked tough on a smaller man but that he made look fragile. He had chocolate skin and thick dreadlocks tied back in a bun. I could see the tendons on his forearms tensing even from a hundred metres away.
As this guy rode towards me he was singing. But rather than a song it was just sound effects. A sort of wooshing, and yelping, and wheeing. it went like this:

"WHEEEEEEEE! YAAAAAAAAAY! WWWWOOOOOOOOOOO! YIPEEEEEEE! HERE WE GO! WEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!"

He had a high pitched soft voice and as I got closer I saw a huge smile on his face. I nearly broke into laughter. This great big tough looking guy riding his bike and singing to himself like a little kid. It was wonderful, and hilarious. I couldn't wait to get home and tell my lovely other. I just didn't get it... it wasn't what I was expecting.

Then he got closer, and closer still, until I stepped off the footpath to let him past. And as I did I noticed something magical. A little baby girl, tiny and soft and full of giggles sitting in her little bike chair, hidden from the front, singing along with her dad.

It made my day.