Mindful Warmth 4 - Moving

This is one of a series of articles on my recent experiences burning wood to heat my home. You can read the earlier articles by clicking on the links below:

• 1 Introduction
• 2 Harvesting
• 3 Splitting

________________________________________

From WOODPILE

I have learned that wood must be moved several times during processing operations, and much of the effort of wood heating simply involves the act of moving it around. It seems that each chunk of wood must be moved a minimum of three times, although 4-5 times seems to be more common as I am still figuring out the best way to manage the whole process.

Actually, I am not so much managing the process just yet. I am inventing it. My mind is often taken up with figuring the most efficient layout for the various piles, scheming to find the materials to build the sheds and platforms, planning the placement and construction of each, and flowcharting it all in my head. None of it happens spontaneously. Unless I pick it up and make it happen, the wood just sits there until is sprouts mushrooms and returns back to the soil, it’s BTU’s unused. The brainpower required really is enormous. It's a good thing I have plenty to spare.

At this point, the process looks kind of like this:

Once dumped out of the truck or trailer, the large chunks must be moved to the splitting area. I usually will do this a few at a time as I need them. Once split, the logs must be moved to a drying area. For this I am using my main woodshed (actually, a platform). Since the main woodshed is still full of this year's fuel, I am preparing a secondary drying area on a group of wood pallets nearby. Once the wood in the woodshed is depleted, the pile of recently split logs on the pallets will replace it and will remain there to dry until next winter.

The main woodshed is a walk of perhaps 100 feet from the back door. Not bad in the summer, but verging on the inconvenient in 10 below January weather, with the snow hip deep. To make that trip daily to haul up the day's heat may get tedious. Therefore I have plans to stage the dried wood to a smaller intermediate woodshed near our back door. Then a load or two at a time, it will be brought inside to warm up – apparently placing cold wood in the stove is a waste of energy. Then it will finally be placed in the stove to burn.

So, my latest project is building that small woodshed on the back porch. The plan is for this woodshed to hold several weeks of split, dried wood, carried up from the main woodshed. It is about 5 steps from the back sliding door, and when finished will be covered with a modest overhanging roof and some kind of tarpaulin door to keep out blowing snow. It will be a new chore for my girls to bring up wood once or twice a week to keep this woodshed well stocked. From here it will be easy to bring it inside.

Once inside, I plan to build a small wood box that will hold one or two days worth of wood. Once placed in the box, any ice or snow can melt off, and the firewood can achieve room temperature before being placed into the firebox. I expect this box will be 3-4 feet long, perhaps 2 and a half feet front to back and about 2 and a half feet deep, with a hinged lid. It will also be the girls’ job to keep this full.

It is something to think of all those trees, growing here and there, all coming down and being cut into pieces. Then they come to my house and are broken into still smaller pieces. Then little by little they flow into my home and into my wood stove to keep my family warm. Every single piece moved by me, with the help of some good friends on occasion.

It is an amazing and gratifying thought.

Mindful Warmth 3 - Splitting

This is one of a series of articles on my recent experiences burning wood to heat my home. You can read the earlier articles by clicking on the links below:

• 1 Introduction
• 2 Harvesting

____________________________________

The wood arrives in my yard in large chunks that may be several feet in diameter. These won’t fit in the stove and even if they did would require a pretty hot fire to burn. So the wood must be split into smaller chunks, anywhere from 8 inches across down to 2 inches depending on:

• How much work you want to do: Bigger chunks require less work to split.
• How will be carrying it: I tend to split small so the girls can easily carry it.
  
• How fast you want it to burn: larger chunks will burn more slowly releasing the heat evenly over time.

Some wood splits easily along straight even grain lines. Birch is a pleasure for this reason, as are most oak and maple logs. Sometimes you will get a particular log that had a limb coming out of it, or is the crotch of two trunks. In these cases the grain goes all wavy and weird and splitting it becomes a matter of a good eye, true aim, a bit of luck and a whole lot of grunting and whacking.

There are machines to assist in splitting wood. Gas powered small engines drive a piston with a wedge on the end that can make quick work of

the nastiest piece of curly grain crotch oak you and imagine. These machines are most efficient with two people operating, one controlling the piston, the other loading and unloading the logs. For many people, owning such a machine is not a good use of capital, but renting one or borrowing one is a great way to get your wood split in a hurry.

I split my wood by hand using a crude but effective tool called the monster maul. It is a steel handle about 2.5 feet long, with a large solid steel triangle welded to the end. It weighs close to 16 pounds. With it I find that I can split pretty much anything, even though it may take multiple whacks. It take a great deal more energy and strength than many people have, but I enjoy it and find that it works just fine for my purposes.

Eventually, I will add another lighter ax to my tool chest so that I can use it to split the smaller logs without having to lift the monster maul. When it comes to a log that is 26 inches across though, the M2 dependably gets the job done.

The process involves lifting the log up onto my splitting stump. The stump is a large section of tree trunk selected for its size, weight and relatively level top. Once placed on the stump, I’ll stand a pace or two back, raise the maul over my head and swing it down. If it is the first split on a large trunk, I will swing down purposefully and with all the strength and intent to go straight through down to the stump. If it is a particularly thick log, or has uneven grain, I will often penetrate but not split it on my first swing. Some logs are so tightly grained that the first few strikes will actually bounce off. But with repeated hammering, it will eventually give way, and with a satisfying crack and thud, I will have two pieces of wood on the ground where there was once a hefty log.

Subsequent splits are easy. Rather than splitting each log down the middle, I tend to strike off slabs from the outside and work my way in. It’s less work and as I have practiced my aim has improved where I am getting pretty good at striking the wood on the right spot.

This, however, is another place where one must be always mindful. If the attention wanders at the critical moment, of even if I don’t put enough strength into the blow, the maul can deflect, and small chunks of wood and my maul go flying in unexpected directions. It hasn’t happened to me yet, but I imagine that at some point it is possible that my shin or ankle might catch a fast moving 16 pound chunk of steel. I would like to avoid this occurrence and so tend to focus on what I am doing whenever splitting my logs.

I enjoy the rhythm of this work. I enjoy the sounds and smells of the cracking wood. I like feeling the axe moving downward and burying itself in the log with a thunk. I like that feel of the perfrect hit that just separates the log cleanly and evenly, ready to stack. I enjoy the slight membrane of heat coming off my skin that staves off the crisp cold air I’m working in. Again, the novelty has not worn off. It’s work, but it is play too. Perhaps this is the best quality of all real work, and to find the play hiding in the work is an art in itself.

Mindful Warmth 2 - Harvesting

This is one of a series of articles on my recent experiences burning wood to heat my home. You can read the other articles by clicking on the links below:

• 1 Introduction

__________________________________________

Wood can be delivered, cut, split and dried, but of course this increases the cost significantly. Even if it is delivered all ready to burn, it still must be stacked in a convenient sheltered location. When needed, it must be carried into the house and placed in the stove chunk by chunk. There is no automatic feed, and no thermostat that turns on the fire when the temperature dips below 68 degrees. My own nervous system (or mostly my wife’s) is the thermostat. We can’t set it and forget it; not at any point in the process. This isn’t a bad thing, but it certainly is different.

In my case, I have laid up approximately 4 cord of wood (a cord being roughly 128 cubic feet). Almost all of it I have cut, hauled, split and stacked myself, with some help from neighbors and friends. My woodpile is almost all “tornado wood, remnants of trees felled in the tornado of 2008 that passed a scant 2 miles from my house on it’s way to cutting a 40 mile swath across the eastern part of the state.

I spent that week at some of my neighbors’ houses with a chain saw cutting up downed maples, oaks, birches, poplars and pines. I sawed the trunks and limbs into sections about 2 feet long, and loaded them into pickups, trailers and the back of my Subaru. I drove them to my home and dumped them into my backyard, into an area that has since been designated as the Cellulosic Heat Processing Zone (CHPZ). It consists of several platforms composed of wood pallets laid on the marshy ground to keep the firewood from rotting, and a large raised platform I constructed out of leftover construction lumber. This will eventually be my main woodshed, but as I ran out of lumber to build the sides and roof, it is still just a platform with a tarp over the woodpile.

Cutting and splitting is just hard work, but it is not mindless work. Anyone who has ever used a chainsaw, and felt it buck, or seize when your attention wandered knows this only too clearly. This is a tool that would just as easily remove a human limb as a tree limb and which one it goes to work on has everything to do with how much attention the operator is paying each second.

All in all, however, I find it pleasurable work. This could be because the experience is still novel to me. Someone who has had to do this their entire life may feel differently perhaps. It is dirty, smelly work, with it’s share of sweating, hard breathing and sore muscles involved. Yet the body adapts and I find that each chunk stored up produces a sense of emotional warmth I don’t get from fuel oil. Just knowing that I am heating my own house by my own work, not dependent upon petroleum imported from foreign nations (except for the gas to run the chain saw and drive the truck that hauls the wood) feels pretty darn good. Odd how physical ease and freedom from labor makes me ultimately FEEL more enslaved, but toil and sweat give me an ineffable sense of freedom. This is just the first part of this whole wood burning thing that seems delightfully paradoxical to me.

I have been working with borrowed chain saws, trucks and trailers. Eventually, I am going to need to buy my own tools for harvesting wood. I’m looking forward to it.

Mindful Warmth 1 - Introduction

Some parts of this country have more heat than they know what to do with. In these northern climes, heat becomes a precious thing between October and April. It doesn’t come naturally. It must be made. And the making of it doesn’t come cheap. During the winter heating is a major part of the family budget, whether that heat comes from oil, gas, electric, wood pellets, or good old fashioned burning logs.

Most of those heat sources don’t require much thought beyond the writing of the check. You pay your money, and the guy comes with the big truck and fills that 250 gallon tank in the basement full of heating oil (basically diesel fuel). Or the gas guy comes and fills that big gas bottle outside with propane. Natural gas isn’t as common in this part f the country, but for those places that do have it, it works pretty much like electricity, piped directly into the house. Both sources come over the wire (or through the pipe) and you just pay the bill. You can arrange to have your wood pellets delivered, and you must then fill the hopper, but once the hopper is full, you’re good for a while.

Burning wood, though, that takes thought. I have been burning wood now for almost a week. I have been preparing to burn wood for about a year and a half. I must say that heating your house by burning wood is a qualitatively different experience from any other type of heating method I have experienced. It is a mindful, and intentional in a way that separates it from other common forms of household heating. This makes it perhaps the most eccentric and philosophical method of home heating. Perhaps you would see that as an undesirable quality – why would you want to have to think about your heat?

My answer to this is “because heat is costly,” and the cost is not measurable in mere dollars and cents. The extraction, processing, transport and distribution of energy makes up an enormous sector of our economy. It employs highly paid professionals like engineers and scientists as well as skilled and hard working technicians who run the machines, often in extreme and dangerous climates. Let’s not forget the risk-taking entrepreneurs who stake enormous wealth to find and develop this energy. If they win the bet, the payoff is big. Really big.

Governments negotiate for the rights to acquire energy. Elections can swing on it. Regimes rise and fall with it. Wars are fought over it.

So I view heating my home with wood as doing energy for amateurs. I am neither engineer nor scientist, nor wildcat roughneck. I’m just some guy who wants to keep his family warm through the snowy frigid winter months. I want to do it myself, instead of paying someone to do it.

Heating with wood may be cheaper in cash, but it is certainly more expensive in terms of attention, much like playing the piano yourself requires much greater attention than listening to a concert on a CD in the car. Wood heat is mindful heat. It is warmth that requires attention.

Operator, Get me Jesus

Our church is doing something new next week. We are a pretty small group, somewhat scattered geographically. We want to have an impact for Jesus, and are realizing that it might be a very good thing if we went to him in prayer more. So we are going to attempt to eliminate excuses about travel time, gas money and so on by holding a prayer meeting by conference call.

Reminds me of this song...

Fox Hunts

I first saw a fox do this on a PBS Nature program on Yellowstone. I couldn't get that video pasted in here, but this is a reasonable substitute for if you can't use the link above. No explanation needed as to why I love this piece of video.

Moosilauke at Low Res

I realized recently that a few of the videos I have up on Youtube have not been actually posted here.

This was taken a few years ago during a hike I took up Mt. Moosilauke in NH. I had been up north on business, and I needed a break. So I brought my gear with me and made plans to play hooky for the rest of the day. It had been raining, but that is no impediment to the truly psycho...er...I mean dedicated hiker. I changed out of my suit and into my walking clothes and headed up. I only had a few hours before dark to make 8 miles up and back, so I did not dawdle. It began to clear a bit after I reached the summit. It was a great walk. Being in mid November, I pretty much had the mountain to myself.

The poor video quality can be blamed on the fact that I shot this in 15 second clips with my 2 megapixel digital camera.

The Tyrant's Forge

Much to think about in this short quote. Read it three times. I found that in a single reading I tended to catch only the buzzwords, but not some of the more fundamental ideas.

"Bad men cannot make good citizens. It is when a people forget God that tyrants forge their chains. A vitiated state of morals, a corrupted public conscience, is incompatible with freedom. No free government, or the blessings of liberty, can be preserved to any people but by a firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, frugality, and virtue; and by a frequent recurrence to fundamental principles."

-Patrick Henry

Hallo-weenie

I'm not a big Halloween guy. It's OK, but I don't get particularly exercised about it either way. I think part of that comes from the fact that growing up, the trick or treat thing was not very practical. I lived in a rural area where the density of housing was pretty thin compared to city or suburban neighborhoods. To really canvas a reasonable number of houses would literally require a few miles of walking on streets without street lights. Now the challenge wasn't that my Mom objected to all this on safety grounds. That wasn't her issue at all. While I do remember one time when I was very little when my Mom drove us around to some houses around town, as I grew older we were pretty much on our own. If we wanted to engage in the Halloween ritual, it was our responsibility to come up with a costume. If we wanted to trick or treat, that was fine, but we were walking. When asking for candy (which I'm not all that crazy about anyways...I've always been much fonder of baked goods) involves that much work, it just becomes less important.

And while the whole satanic scariness sturm und drang that infected the evangelical subculture of the 70's and 80's gave me some thought, I never really got that upset about that angle either. We are pretty far removed from the ancient druids. Whatever spiritual teeth may have existed in the rituals of defunct cults of bygone eras have long ago been pulled, leaving Halloween an ineffectual doddering invalid that can't even manage to gum the demonic candy it is blamed for chewing up and spitting all over our children.

I have a hard time thinking that kids begging for candy while wearing Scooby Doo outfits and princess dresses are really channeling demons. Unless you consider incipient diabetes and insulin hangovers as demonic.

Having said that, I don't care for some of the costumes I'm seeing over the past few years, although mostly on aesthetic grounds. I think dressing up as a movie monster a la Chucky the killer Cabbage Patch Kid, or Jason the Hockey Mask Slicer is kind of lame. I understand that these are the monsters of our time -- I just don't like them. When Dracula and Frankenstein were the dominant monster stories, those were the costumes. Today our monsters are, I think, more monstrous and more monstrously bland for it. To read Dracula, and to read Frankenstein (and to a lesser extent to see the movies) one catches glimpses of deeper aspects of the human condition. These stories show us something about ourselves. Even ghost characters have some kind of mirroring charm. But these latest movie monsters, if they are mirroring our selves or our human plight, it seems to me mostly a dismal and wretched view. These guys aren't really even fun. They are one sided and ultimately banal, in spite of the temporary terror they inspire.

Moreover, they are humorless. Vampire jokes abound, and Frankenstein humor is plentiful. The jokes that arise out of these slasher stories are grim and gritty; to hear them makes me feel like I've just eaten sand.

And as monsters they are purely materialistic, without spiritual dimension. There is no spiritual fear involved. Our older monsters seemed dangerous because in large part the danger they presented went far beyond physical danger. There was something of them that always endangered our souls (even Frankenstein...where the real monster was not the creature, but the Doctor who toyed with God's work by reanimating the dead). Today's slasher monsters are merely gaping pits full of blood and screams and darkness; the terror they induce arises from a soulless view of humanity. All of the terror is fear of physical death - albeit by a variety of creative and dramatic means.

So as you see, all my objections seem pathetic and anemic, a matter of taste rather than of principle.

I guess I'm probably both over simplifying and over-analyzing, but that's what blogs are for. I was inspired to this rant by an article in the NY Times on how schools are systematically de-fanging the celebration of Halloween by attempting to remove any remaining vestiges of fright from the children's costumes. Reading the article, I found myself rooting for both sides of the argument, but also not really caring. I don't see this as a critical front of any kind of culture war and it seems odd the people get so exercised about it either way. Mostly, I think the whole thing is kind of funny, but I can't quite explain why.

BTW - my kids are dressing up as a Peacock, and as Nancy Drew. Those are their own choices, and they are putting together their own costumes. They will be doing the candy begging circuit with some friends as a gang in a van.

Hungry? or just Snacky?

Listening to the radio on one of my looonnnggg drives today. On Point, a pretty good issues and interviews radio show produced by WBUR of Boston had an hour on "Jobs and the Class of 2009." It featured a panel of three recent grads discussing their not too terribly successful attempts at finding work so far. I got the distinct feeling that they weren't so much searching for gainful employment as they were rooting through the refrigerator trying to find something to eat. I noted that none of them seemed truly hungry. They were still at that sort of snacky stage where they knew they wanted something to eat, but weren't quite sure what and they seemed more than willing to stand there with the door propped open until inspiration struck. I wondered how long it would take before pretty much anything mom plopped down in front of them would be the most delicious thing ever.

Of course, this is because the question you face at 24 is very different than the question you face at 46. Early on it's about passion, joy, meaning. How can I find a job that I love? What do I really enjoy doing?

At least, that's the question if you are a middle-class recent college grad who has supportive parents with a basement room with free internet access. On the other hand, when middle aged become a more important descriptor than middle-class; when dependents become a bigger fact than dependence; when you have no financial margin and not even any margarine...the choice becomes simple, although not necessarily easier.

I found the discussion fascinating, but I kept thinking about what these kids will do in 20 years if they find themselves in a similar spot. Probably, like me, they will take a job selling appliances, while launching out on an entrepreneurial adventure just to try to forestall the foreclosure monsters and keep everyone in shoes and oatmeal a little longer. And...be grateful for the opportunity. At a certain point, fulfillment becomes more about a full belly then a full heart.

And that's OK.

11:11

Rodrigo y Gabriela have come out with a new album titled 11:11. Holy Smokes. All new original material, no covers. What I have heard is just outstanding and every bit as energetic and passionate as their original album. This is music that make my hair stand on end and puts fire in my belly.

This is a live performance of one of the numbers from the new album. I love how Gabriela is so sweet, with her halting french at the beginning, but give her box with some strings on it and she is all business.

Nutty (and bolty) Anglicans

Thanks to InternetMonk, I'm pulling this pretty terrific video over that has an outstanding (and very thorough) explanation of what exactly is going on in those wooly Anglican worship services. You know, wazzup with all those robes and candles and smoke and chanting and kneeling and all that crazy stuff. It turns out that there's a reason for all that, and the reason is that it all points to Jesus -- just not with words. Could it be that we can actually worship God with water, bread, wine, cloth and all those mundane material things? Could we even use our bodies? (gasp!) As if Jesus actually is the Lord of all of it, and not just the ethereal and intellectual. A pox on gnosticism.

I particularly loved his take on the the Anglican Altar Call, the reaffirmation of baptism through the use of the aspergillium, the historical development and essential meaning of vestments, his simple explanation of real presence, and the description of Anglicanism as holding that delicate spot astride both the Protestant and Roman traditions. This resonates powerfully with me.

The Nuts and Bolts of Anglican Liturgy from St. Peter's Anglican Church on Vimeo.

It's Just Snacktime Before we have Coffee Downstairs

My church is in the middle of a four week series on Communion. The readings and sermons and prayers all will focus around communion, with the purpose of exploring it's meaning and how Christ meets us in the bread and the cup. Best of all, we are celebrating the feast every Sunday for four Sundays in a row. I never really understood the once a month thing. If it were up to me it would be every Sunday 52 weeks a year. Talk about being fundamentalist -- that just seems fundamental to me.

I came across this interesting post at the blog "2 Ages Verging" on why Evangelicals don't get the sacraments. Ryan Cordle posits that it has much to do with the fact that evangelicals don't seem to want to face up to death. He might have something there except that most evangelicals don't make any connection with death and the eucharist. It may be true the Ev's are dense about death, but if there is no connection between death and the sacraments, then it seems unlikely that this is what causes evangelicals to miss the point.

Worth reading anyways.

Short Takes September 09

A few random quick observations:

Walking through Boston Commons yesterday and received an insight into why Hollywood movie productions cost in the millions. Several large party tents were set up for cast and crew to prep for scenes, and presumably for extras to hang out, etc. Each of these enormous white tents (the kind used for outdoor wedding receptions) was service by an enourmous portable air conditioning unit. Air conditioned tents. In Boston in September on a day that maybe topped out at 70 degrees. Not saying that's a bad thing, but..it may explain some things.

Reading a collection of Jack London's short stories. We've all read To Build a Fire -- it's in every high school American Lit anthology. I am struck by the muscularity of his prose. It is not spare and telegraphic like Hemingway's. It is extraordinarily rich, with almost painful attention to moment by moment detail. Highly descriptive, using the whole range of all the parts of speech. But it is not flowery or fluffy. It fairly pounds you over the head, but in the most fascinating and engaging way. Very american. He should get more attention than Hemingway. It's much better stuff. (with the possible exception of H's The Big Two Hearted River -- his only short that I really liked).

Took the kids up Mt. Major on Sunday. It's a nice 4 hour hike up and back if you take your time. About 1.5 miles up. About 3 miles going down the back way. Went up it barefoot. I tell you what, that gets people's attention. Some are impressed. Others decidedly not so much -- they seem to think it's a little loopy. It certainly changes one's gait and the way one walk. I spent much more attention and energy on where to place my feet. It was a good experiment which I will probably repeat. I need to toughen up my feet more, or get some moccasin-like shoes. I have my eyes on something call Vibram FiveFingers. Gotta save up my dough first.

My wife is involved in a "bible study" at the home school co-op with which we are involved. Something for the parents to do while the kids are in their classes. It's put out by Focus on the Family with backing of such luminaries as Os Guinness and RC Sproul. It is about TRUTH! I looked through the first chapter notes. I have no quarrel with it, but I mentioned that it really holds no interest for me for the simple reason that I have very little interest anymore in arguing with anyone. The conversation turned to time she recently spent with a neighbor who has led a tough life -- let's just say one that is fairly overflowing with humanity. As a result, her speech and conduct is broad and coarse. Even so we both know her and like her. As the Bride described their weekend to me and we talked we agreed that telling this woman where she was wrong would be useless at best, and more likely completely counterproductive. What she needs is not truth, but love. It is conceivable that love and grace would open the door to truth, but that love and grace would have to come first. Yeah. I'm pretty much done arguing with people.

Some other books I'm reading or have read recently:

Evangelical is not Enough by Thomas Howard

Tehanu by Ursula LeGuin

Small Strong Congregations by Kennon Callahan

The Shack by William Young

Band of Brothers by Stephen Ambrose

Rice and Vampyres

Vampires are trendy.

150 years ago, I imagine very few people had any concept of "vampire." The concept existed in folklore of many cultures, but doesn't seem to have been a strong motif. In the beginning of the 19th century, some writers began using the folkloric material continuing in fits and starts until Bram Stoker writes the quintessential vampire novel, Dracula at the end of the century. It is quite a powerful and beautiful work by the way, and one I recommend. From that point vampire is ushered into the popular imagination. From there, it was mostly the work of movies, radio and television -- mass media -- to take the vampire and defang it. In spite of Nosferatu, the Hollywood vampire soon became a symbol of camp and mockery. As the world left behind it's belief in good and evil, especially of any kind of supernatural good or evil, the mills of Hollywood mashed and rehashed the legend of the Dracul until it was more of a joke than anything else. Certainly by the time I was growing up, no one really shivered in horror at the thought of the blood drinking undead. There have been many appearances of vampires in popular entertainment, mostly using it as a convenient plot device, like time travel, to bring conflict and suspense to a story. Dark Shadows, Night Stalker, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Need I say more?

But even as the vampire seemed stalled in either black capes or mindless minions of darkness, Anne Rice reinvented the vampire completely with her group of novels that became knows as The Vampire Chronicles. First released in the early 1970's, the core of these stories dwelt in three volumes. Interview with a Vampire, The Vampire LeStat, and Queen of the Damned. I did not discover these until the late 1990's, when I was approaching 40 years of age, and they completely entranced me on several levels. I will come back to this in a bit.

Now as if out of the blue we have Twilight and True Blood, and suddenly vampires are sexier and more hip than ever. I'm not necessarily saying this is bad...I haven't really paid much attention to either one. I just find it fascinating that vampires have suddenly taken on a certain fashionability.

Now Doug Wilson weighs in on why all this hubbub about vampires is bad because it makes light of evil. If a vampire is a symbol of evil then of course we should “honor the symbol” and stop making it all sexy and stuff. Well far be it from me to dare to disagree with Mr. Wilson, who could effortlessly dismember me with his tongue alone, never mind his pen. Far be it from me indeed, but I think he is really missing some pretty big chunks of what we might call “the point.”

Symbols can certainly be enduring, but are seldom static and are constantly subject to re-imagining or even re-purposing. Witness the Christmas Tree, the Easter Egg, and even the cross itself. What is the literary purpose of the vampire as symbol? It is, I think, more complex than an initial cursory look might suggest.

I’ll be coming back to this, in particular to discuss the work of Anne Rice along these lines, and in particular to look at how her work has now transformed into a truly fascinating re-imagining of the gospel stories. She no longer writes vampire books because the process of writing them, and exploring the deeper themes suggested actually led her out of her self proclaimed atheism and back to Jesus and to His church. That’s a fascinating story.

So why am I getting all worked up about this? Mostly because I have found the work of Anne Rice, so easily dismissed because it is about vampires, to have been profoundly influential. Early on I detected in her writing a seeking and searching for truth, and discerned her direction and pointing toward Jesus. I am most gratified that I was right, and I am enjoying watching her publishing her journey, both in essay format and in her fiction.

Look here to read about it and we’ll talk more later.

There's Reform, and Then There's REFORM!

I've tried to write about this several times, but the whole expanse of it just seems to get away from me. Rather than write a full and reasoned treatise, here are just a few observations.

I think that the whole idea of Health Insurance may be completely wrong. Insurance is for disasters, not for bills. With life insurance, the payout is at least predictable based on the policy your purchase, so the actuaries can figure out the pricing accordingly. Medical bills are notoriously unpredictable, so huge margins must be built in.

• Imagine sending the bill for your brake work or your oil changes to your auto insurance company. That's not what insurance is for. Insurance is for crashes. Repair insurance is available, but we call it an extended warranty. Most financial advisors will tell you it's a bad deal. Insurance is for crashes. For repairs, you plan, save or use your credit card.
  
  
• Health insurance makes the insurance company the customer, not the patient. The money comes from the insurance company, so the medical provider is much more interested in doing things that make the insurance companies happy. This has to skew things.
  
  
• Making the government the insurer really won't help this. It doesn't matter if the government does a good job of it or not. The concept is skewed from the get go.

So it seems to me that Health Care reform -- real reform -- is not about deciding who insures who. It should be about getting rid of insurance altogether and finding other ways to finance medical expenses.

This isn't all my idea. I was kind of thinking about this, but in a very fuzzy and undefined way, and then I read David Goldhill's article in The Atlantic Monthly called How American Health Care Killed My Father. Not sure I see all his solutions, but I think they are much closer to real reform than what is going on now.

One Possible Response to 9/11

I've been thinking a lot lately about carrying a gun.

This would involve some expense, a lot of training and practice, a definite adjustment in lifestyle and habits, and a some amount of legal work to secure the appropriate permits and government permissions.

I would also involve a certain amount of explaining. Not all the time, since the idea of concealed carry is that it is concealed. Most people should have no idea that you are carrying a weapon. Nevertheless, I would expect that many of my friends and acquaintances would be somewhat put off if they did know. And some of them might react very strongly against it.

And that's fine. I have my reasons. I am purposely not going to make a defense of carrying a gun here in this post, although I might later. If you are interested in learning any variety of reasons why an American citizen might want to go about armed, you can simply google about and you will find many many essays on why it ought to be considered not only a right, but a responsibility. Some of it is pretty gassy stuff, full of dramatic hamfisted emotional appeals and proclamation, but a lot of it is worth considering.

I'm mostly throwing this up to see what anyone else thinks about it. Especially as a christian, to many it will just rub the wrong way. Here are a couple of things to consider:

• Are we citizens, or are we subjects? Should this make a difference in our conduct?
• Self defense is a legal construct. Does it have any biblical basis? In what circumstances?
• On what basis could a Christian ever consider doing violence to another human? Especially since our Great Example seems to have raised victimhood to a moral imperative. Or is this a misunderstanding?

Any comments?