Cheese!

Brent and Marci have gone out of town for the weekend, and they asked me to look after Brie, their dog. They've been gone since yesterday, and I slept at the house with her last night just so she wouldn't feel alone. Alas! All she wanted to do at 11pm was go outside and play. It's hard to turn down such an earnest, stupid animal, so I got me a glass of wine, went outside, and threw frisbee with her. The wine helped.

Today I pretty much left her alone from 7am to 5pm, so to make up for it I took her to Sequoia Hills. We took a pleasant stroll through the fields by the river. At one point we found a branch on the ground and played fetch with it for a while. A couple walked by soon after with their dogs, and I thought the new dogs might be a problem when they ran after the stick with Brie. Oddly enough, when Brie, in her enthusiasm, overshot the stick by a good three yards (we took a while to figure out each others default throw-fetch distances), the other dogs were polite enough to not pick it up. When Brie eventually brought it back, I threw it again, and again all the other dogs ran after it, and again they politely stepped aside and let Brie pick it up. They was some kind of dogs' honor-code going on.

I did get really worried, though, when they started sniffing her butt. That's when I called her back and waited for them to leave. That's how dogs greet each other, of course, but I didn't want to risk anything untoward happening in broad daylight. There're kids in that park.

Brie didn't have a leash on, and on the way to the car, I regretted that. She ran quite a bit ahead of me at one point and then disappeared from view into the bushes by the river. She hadn't indicated any desire to get wet, yet, so I wasn't on the alert for that. I got real worried though, when she stayed out of sight for longer than I liked, so I started calling her name and picking up the pace. I arrived at the spot where she'd disappeared, and found two girls sitting by the river, their dog, which was in the river, and Brie, who had decided that one dog in the river is reason enough for two dogs to be in the river. I wasn't too happy about that, seeing as how she was supposed to be in the front seat of my car very soon.

After we'd sat around a bit and she dried out some, we got back into the car and headed home. We played a little more fetch with her ball, and then I tried to sing her a couple of songs on guitar to see if dogs appreciated that sort of thing. At the very least, I found out that Brie didn't appreciate that sort of thing coming from me. That's ok. Not all girls dig the singing-songwriting tragic hero act.

My Soul And My Blog

Ken, the other guitar player and all-round okay fella on our worship team (the first all-round okay fella would be Tyler... I'm just a jerk) had this to say when the subject of blogging came up during practice on Tuesday: he would blog, except he didn't really want his friends to know any of the disparaging things he might have to say about other folks. There'd just be too much he couldn't say. Of course, I told him a blog didn't need to be that way. A lot of them are. My sister's blog, for instance, can be pretty honest and introspective. But then you can also find a blog like Dave Barry's, which is basically a collection of funny links. I recently read through a co-worker's blog which is composed of truly random tidbits: songs, sarcasms, links, anecdotes that may or may not go anywhere, and lines from comicbooks and movies. A blog can talk about as many or as few aspects of life as you want it to.

This blog is whatever it is. I do talk about my thoughts sometimes, but mostly they are the carefree ones. A person might protest that, for that, this blog lacks honesty, and paints an incomplete portrait or its author. No one has made that protest, yet, but if there was such a person, I would say in reply that I don't give a flip. I don't consider this a proper or adequate forum with which to share my deepest, darkest, and most sorrowful concerns. They are there. If my manner seems aloof, both in person and in writing, it's only because I have raged and still rage constantly against myself, and have, on many occasions, taken my own intellectual and spiritual frustrations far too seriously. I think in circles all the time; I don't feel a need to write in circles too. I think most of my friends are smart enough to pick up on this, from the songs I've written or the places where I choose to speak, or, in many cases, remain silent. The rest probably think I'm a funny and/or annoying idiot, which is fine, because in many ways, they are not wrong.

Where then do my concerns go? I do have friends I confide in, friends whom I often think of as brothers. They are very few, which is actually exactly how many you want for this sort of thing. More importantly, I try and try to bring my concerns before the feet of His throne. I don't always succeed, mostly because I don't always believe that He who makes all things new would know the proper way or even care to make me anew, over and over. But He is always good and faithful. Maybe, someday in this lifetime, He'll see fit to fix my jerk-ness.

And yes, that was a pretty unimaginative title for a blog entry. Hey, it's not like I'm paid to write these :p.