random anxieties of existence

remember those scratch-and-sniff things? of course they still exist, but i haven't smelled one in a while. now all we have are those horrid cardboard car scents: those leaves of aesthetic tragedy. the one i'm thinking of has a strawberry scent. it might have been strawberry shortcake - that little red-headed girl with strawberries painted all over her ginormous hat, a hat ten times the size of her head. this reminds me of those markers you can buy that smell, too, often like berries of some sort. i can remember the blueberry ones the best. which scents do you remember?  when Jodi and i (and sometimes Justin, Dan, Kaia or some other participant) would take empty milk jugs and stealthily place them on Mark Vust's doorstep (our Resident Director), i would sometimes smell the rotting milk. it didn't smell good. i'll give you that. but it was certainly a powerful scent. smelling things reminds me of how much i love life. like when i'm in a forest ...

this left shoe of mine is very squeaky today.  his brother glides quietly along the polished floors, polite and well-behaved, as though lost in profound meditation in these silent monk corridors, while he obnoxiously shouts echoing obcenities at passers-bye that have the ill-fortune to be in the wake of yet another disrupting college student.

"In order to reach God, freedom, and immortality, speculative reason must use principles that in fact extend merely to objects of possible experience; and when these principles are nonetheless applied to something that cannot be an object of experience, they actually do always transform it into an appearance, and thus they declare all practical expansion of reason to be impossible. I therefore had to annul knowledge in order to make room for faith."   Dogmatism in metaphysics: "Encourages them (youth) quite early and strongly to reason with ease about things of which they understand nothing and into which, moreover, neither they nor anyone else in the world will ever have any insight"

Today I received this envelope in the mail. It says on it "Opening this envelope may change your life!" My first reaction was "Yeah right. Whatever." Of course I didn't think it would for a moment. Then I realized just how wrong my perception was. Unconsciously I was thinking "I mean, it would be nice if it changed my life, but it's really not going to," instead of "If this was true, it would be the worst thing that could happen to me!" I'll let Paul elucidate:  "Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ. For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love he predestined us to be adopted as his sons through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will-- to the praise of his glorious grace, which he has freely given us in the One he loves. In him we have redemption throu...

so reads the cover to fight club, the movie of a man who meets someone who he thinks is everything he wants to be only to find out that someone is his worst nightmare and that someone is himself.  you see, on this globe there will always be a part of us which is that someone we once thought we wanted to be only to find out that he is everything we have grown to hate. that demon within started feeding with the first forbidden fruit and hasn’t stopped feasting since. he has grown oh so fat that one is scarcely able to step around him upon encountering oneself, especially in a culture worshipping self-indulgence and painless existence. the fattest demons are those who use the lie that alcohol will make them disappear. they are the ones that command constant drink or else their dictatorship is too painfully real.  in the Christian’s life, such rulers have been cast out by the throne of grace. all-too-frequently, however, the empty hole where they used to be still resembl...