A Rainy Reprieve

People love it when it rains in the Southwest - especially here in Roswell, New Mexico. It is raining now, outside my window, gently, as I type this. I was supposed to go to work this morning, but the rain will delay our work. I am a roofer. A blue collar worker. I like it very much. Even though I have plenty of snobby background, there is nothing like working off my abundant male energy on the roof of a house in 90-degree weather.

This area is blessed with the most ebullient cloud formations I have ever seen in real life. The sky is so big. The wind carries the water droplets across the land, where they explode onto the Roswell sky in every direction. Artists over the past century have flocked here in smallish numbers to paint the towering arrangements of clouds. Victor Higgins is my favorite sky painter. Look him up.

Normally it is very hot here. This first-floor apartment is usually muggy and suffocating, even when the weather takes a turn for the cooler. I usually prefer no clothes at all when I am indoors. The blinds shut, of course.

The Bible Kids Part 1

So I'm sitting on the steps of Center Church waiting for my free bag lunch to pull up in a van. That van comes around every Saturday and Sunday afternoon. Suddenly, three guys appear and start milling about, walking up to my fellow beggars, offering flyers.

"Can I give one of these to you?" says one.

"Sure, I'll take one," I say, taking the flyer. I skim the backside of it.

Missionaries. Christian ones.

"Any particular denomination?" I ask.

The man hesitates for a moment, shrugs, says, "Born again."

"OK," I say.

We both pause and stare at each other for another moment.

"Do," he stammers, "you know who Jesus Christ is?"

"Yeah, he died for my sins."

"That's right."

I nod.

"Have you ever considered what he has to offer you?" he asks. By now the other two guys have sauntered up and surrounded me with gentle eyes. I don't mind. I take a quick visual survey of all three of these guys, take a breath, sit up straight, smile, and say:

"Well, what's your pitch?"

They chuckled and gave me the usual pitch. You know the one: Have you accepted Jesus into your heart, he died on the cross for your sins, salvation is yours if you follow God's commandments, here, have another flyer, a different one this time, can we talk to you about Jesus, Jesus changed my life, he's going to change yours too, awe shucks I'm so happy about Jesus and I really mean it.

Cool part about these guys is they knew their stuff. If I said something about being a seeker and answering any door that knocks, they rattled off a Bible quote, with citations, something about seeking and Jesus saying, Behold, I stand at the door and knock.

I am impressed enough at that quick citation. A few more of these quick scholarly responses and I am convinced I could have an interesting conversation with these missionaries. Two of the three are well versed and aged enough in their studies to be able to take me on in conversation maturely and without triteness.

Only one of them is your stereotypical starry-eyed ruby-cheeked spewer of stale sayings who, I'm sure, Jesus would have left to his fishing: Uh, thanks kid, I would love for you to put away your nets once and for all and help Me to convince men to follow Me and thus become yourself a fisher of men like Simon called Peter and his brother Andrew here, but, uh, you're just so good at fishing for fish. God needs you there, just plain old fishin'. That's a good boy. Bye bye, now!
I don't mean to poke fun at the poor chap, but he's just so cheesy I don't really believe him. As a non-Christian, I pray for the guy's faith.

The three of them took me to a Subway, bought me a sandwich (that's right, a sandwich, after I had gotten my free hors d'oeuvre-size PB&J sandwich, five or six potato chips, and a couple of swigs of a juice that is blue, all in a deceptively large brown paper bag from the previously mentioned van), and conversed with me for an hour. The cheesy kid slid me a very pretty Bible with silver-edged pages. As he slid it across the table, I looked up at him to confirm that it was a gift, and he gave me a cheesy look of kindness. I thanked him from the cheesiest part of my heart. I ate the Italian combo with Swiss cheese and downloaded my Coke.

(Part II will relate the Bible study session I had with these same guys about three weeks later.)

Gangs in the Military

From The Magazine : Radar Online Annotated

Lax enlistment standards have inadvertently allowed known members of the Crips, Bloods, Latin Kings, and various white supremacist groups to join the military.

What I Found in the Garden

So I'm tilling and I'm toiling, weeding and woiling, making rhymes no matter what words I must invent, and this is what I found. In the garden.

Little shards of broken glass from when the house was still being rebuilt
Weeds
One grub
10 worms, which, I recently learned, are more expensive by the pound than ground beef
A dead bird, rotted and decayed and headless
Yellow tulips
Dirt
Sand
Rocks
Three cigarette butts, none of them mine
A box of matches promoting a club that is "The Sexy Side of Nightlife"
A small metal pole with a hook on the end, embedded in the dirt
Leaves
A lot of those little winged spores you used to call "helicopters" when you were a little kid
Parsley
A 10-gallon bucket with a section of power vacuum tubing in
A three-tiered wooden rack full of dead potted plants
A concrete gutter beneath the storm drain
A plastic gutter next to the concrete one
My cat, alive, walking
My fingers
An idea for a blog entry

And that's it. Thank you for your time.

The Exciting Story of My Name

Hello. I am The Man. I am not "the man" in that I am the best at something. Nor am I "the man" in that I am in some kind of position in which I would be able to oppress you, your co-workers, or your loved ones. No. Furthermore, just because the word "The" appears in front of my name (capitalized, no less), that doesn't mean I am the only man in existence. If that were the case, my name would be "The Only Man". If I were the only man in existence, I would be very unhappy indeed, and I would likely not have the spiritual fortitude to go on blogging as I do. Even if there were many, many women, and I were given free reign to sow my wild oats where'er I may pine (and sow I would, in accordance with the strictest of dutiful feelings), I would still feel ill at ease without the warm feelings of brotherhood that I derive specifically from my not being the only man in existence. That not being the case, my name is The Man.

Still, some of you may wonder why I would choose such a boastful-sounding name if I do not in fact think that I am the best or most god-like man there is. The answer to that question (if I may be so bold as to interpret your wondering as a question) is actually a pretty exciting story. The story goes like this: I was trying to think of a good name for a blog. Suddenly, Man of Many Words occurred to me as a thought-provoking possibility. I looked it up, and lo and also behold, the URL was, in fact, available. This was a sign from Zeus, probably. I had to get right down to the job. I started the blog, began writing and posting, and soon enough, I had a fully functional blog. I was elated. I submitted it to a random god for approval, and great Ra the sun god answered with his great rays of light, even though it was really cloudy out at the time, and I couldn't really see the rays, per se, but I could imagine them, above the clouds like that, me standing there in the rain catching pneumonia and thinking, "Wow", and realizing I was definitely right about what the gods think. It was a true epiphany, a sort of spiritual awakening, and I was filled with a great sense of being right about most things, like when I argue with people and they tell me I don't have a firm grip on reality. You can imagine my delight. This called for a celebration.

Alas, my work is never finished. I needed to come up with some kind of recurring theme, a motif if you will, for tying it all together. I don't know much about graphic design or HTML, so I couldn't use a logo or something like that. My spirits slouched. I paced nervously. My brow furrowed. A bead of sweat formed in my armpit. Then it hit me: I would use the same word in different contexts as the element titles in both sidebars. O Muse, I thank thee for thy bounty. But wait. What word would I use? I looked to Pooh for inspiration: Think, think. Think, think. Ah-ha! Man of Many Words..."Man"..."The Man"! As in, "The Man" who writes this blog! What elegance! What simplicity! But I was not keen to let hubris get the better of me and so again rolled up my sleeves and went to work, typing "The Man" in all my sidebar titles, preceding the words with verbs like "Meet" and "Quote" and "Brand" and "Raid". I had my motif. I was finished, at least for now, and a respite was deserved. I lay myself down for a long nap. I woke up a little later, had some macaroni, and called my boss to explain why I haven't been showing up for work. The happiest happiness of them all was the realization that, now, after all this time, "The Man" is not only my pen name, but it is also a short form of "Man of Many Words". Thus, I am both a man and an abstract object known as a blog.

That is the story of my name, and that is the miracle of Christmas. God bless us, everyone.