Beyond the Singing Flame
or, Monsters Are Not Going To Come Out Of The Sky And Eat You.
BETWEEN SUBTLE SHADING AND THE ABSENCE OF LIGHT LIES THE NUANCE OF IQLUSION
-- Kryptos
For I am persuaded neither life nor death
Nor angels nor powers nor things yet to be
Can separate us from our Father's love
There's nothing no nothing can come in between
No walls can be builded to fence in the soul
No cavern of darkness can hide me away
I'm sure that He loves me, He lives in my heart
For I am persuaded that He is the way
-- hymn
I've had my head in strange spaces recently.
On the one hand: my life as a mid-level IT geek and a member of a small Anglican church and a neighbourhood association.
On the other hand: involvement in web forums to do with an enigmatic physicist at the heart of the UFO mythos and the intersection of spirituality and the paranormal.
On the third hand: ideas I'm playing with for an experimental programming language which might or not ever be useful, but for the moment is a fun mental toy.
On the fourth hand: my involvement in the Interactive Fiction gaming subculture.
This journey of mine is largely what this blog is about - because I think it's important to document, even if for my own future reference - but sometimes the path gets more emotionally intense than I can put into words on screen. And sometimes I have to rethink what I am trying to do and how I am trying to go about it.
The two 'spooky' boxes that I have opened up - the psychic communities which for want of a better name I'll call the Townsend Brown cluster and the Stephen cluster - are familiar to me because I first came across them back in the 1980s. But there's a lot of unresolved emotional baggage associated with both of them.
Stephen has been called a demon, for instance, and it's not quite clear just what kind of machine Townsend Brown was building in the 1950s but there were claims that interdimensional... something... was involved. Both are the sort of people who have been accused of being the Antichrist, summoning the devil, causing the end of the world, etc, etc. Or else - with a sigh of relief - they were both safely frauds and everything said about them is utter lies.
Except that I now personally know people involved with both of these mystical gentlemen and they don't seem to be either liars or demon-summoners, and last I checked my delicious soul was still safely uneaten. For now.
Most (though not all) of my gamer friends consider everything to do with the paranormal or the soul safely nonexistent (as Science teaches, praised be Science), and happily play and write games set in H P Lovecraft's bleak nihilistic universe of cosmic terror and scientific rigour where mad alien gods eat the Earth when the stars are right.
Which is all good clean fun except that it's now becoming obvious that there really, truly is stuff out there that we don't know what it is.
You can see, perhaps, how this sort of thing can get complicated. There's fiction. There's reality. And the two... sometimes get confused.
Like, for instance, reading Clark Ashton Smith and going 'hmm, he's cribbed that from actual psychic accounts of the next dimension, because I recognise what he's talking about'.
It was as if we no longer existed, except as one divine, indivisible entity, soaring beyond the trammels of matter, beyond the limits of time and space, to attain undreamable shores. Unspeakable was the joy, and infinite the freedom of that ascent, in which we seemed to overpass the zenith of the highest star. Then, as if we had risen with the Flame to its culmination, had reached its very apex, we emerged and came to a pause.
My senses were faint with exaltation, my eyes blind with the glory of the fire; and the world on which I now gazed was a vast arabesque of unfamiliar forms and bewildering hues from another spectrum than the one to which our eyes are habituated. It swirled before my dizzy eyes like a labyrinth of gigantic jewels, with interweaving rays and tangled lustres, and only by slow degrees was I able to establish order and distinguish detail in the surging riot of my perceptions.
All about me were endless avenues of super-prismatic opal and jacinth; arches and pillars of ultra-violet gems, of transcendent sapphire, of unearthly ruby and amethyst, all suffused with a multi-tinted splendor. I appeared to be treading on jewels, and above me was a jeweled sky.
Presently, with recovered equilibrium, with eyes adjusted to a new range of cognition, I began to perceive the actual features of the landscape. With the two moth-like beings still beside me, I was standing on a million-flowered grass, among trees of a paradisal vegetation, with fruit, foliage, blossoms and trunks whose very forms were beyond the conception of tridimensional life. The grace of their drooping boughs, of their fretted fronds, was inexpressible in terms of earthly line and contour, and they seemed to be wrought of pure, ethereal substance, half-translucent to the empyrean light, which accounted for the gem-like impression I had first received.
Translucent, gem-like vegetation. Check. Sights which can't quite be translated into 'three-dimensional' language. Check.
Except Smith's tale is just a 'weird fiction' story from the 1930s.
Except if you read that review, it's more than that - it was actually born from a personal spiritual experience of the writer, it had a huge impact on his life, and as a story it's a wonderful allegory of the imaginative or spiritual life (and are they the same thing or two quite different things?), and the fear and wonder of facing that inward journey. Which suggests it's something more than 'just' a story.
There's more to be said, I think, about how the explosion of 'mediumship' in the late 1800s and early 1900s fed into first Theosophy in its multiple cults and factions and then the 'weird fiction' and then 'science fiction' scene and then the original somehow vanished, so that what we're left now in a lot of fantasy and speculative fiction is actually the fossils of preserved ideas from a former era. All washed up on a beach without cultural context and polished up as fictional tropes.
Take superheroes, for instance. Most superpowers from, say, the X-Men make no scientific sense whatsoever as 'physical mutations' - say Storm's ability to control the weather, or Wolverine's magic 'healing factor' which can withstand a bullet. But they make perfect sense from the 'mind over matter' perspective of a monistic-idealistic philosophy like Christian Science. If the mind creates the body, then of course it can repair it - that's how psychic healing works. So it looks to me like the ideas that fed into the 'superhero' fictional trope - now just a tiny petting zoo for growth-stunted American national gods like Superman and Batman - arose from a wider body of thought swirling around in a whole soup of mystical/scientific dreaming a hundred years ago.
And see, the wider point is that some of these very much out-there ideas, like monism and idealism, weren't fiction then and aren't fiction now. Any more than the things which Project Sign looked at in 1947 and concluded weren't any kind of illusion. Even though they got the Hollywood treatment, even though most of the truth has been wrung out of them. We don't know what these things are, but we know that they exist. Even though we've spent much of the last century denying it - to the point that we're still confused about exactly what went down.
So what kind of world does that put us into, here in the 21st century? One with wonders in it and a lot of fear... and what happens to the firmly materialist science we thought we had, which was going to save us from our nightmares of spirituality, but seems to be opening the doors to everything again?
Weird fiction isn't as fun if you know for a fact that there are actually are shadows in the dark. You tend to be always looking over your shoulder, even inside your own mind. But on the upside: shadows don't necessarily mean danger. They might be friends you've already met coming to say hello.
What we need is a new genre of 'weird fiction' which isn't weird, but points out that yes, we live on the shores of a vast sea, but it's actually a lot happier and more friendly out there than it is here.
The Epworth Phenomena
Okay, here's one thing to investigate. The Epworth Phenomena by Dudley Wright.
This is the 1917 book I found digging through references to John Wesley's journals, about Wesley's documentation of various psychic phenomena, including the haunting of his childhood home. Wesley seems to lie somewhere at the core of this space, at the intersection between spiritualism, German Mysticism and the Evangelical Church.
I do not understand this, and am hardly prepared to say that I believe it; though in any ordinary matter I should accept the word of these two men without hesitation. But, as John Wesley says, "What is it which I do comprehend, even of the things which I see daily? Truly not
"'The smallest grain of sand nor spire of grass,"'
and incomprehensibility therefore is no logical ground for disbelief. Psychologically, it is; for we must know the modus, or, in other words, must link up the new facts with others already accepted. And this is now coming about, through the work of many investigators. Myers said that in Consequence, of the corroborations of psychical research, everyone a century hence will believe in the Resurrection of Christ; whereas, without those corroborations, a century hence no one would have believed it. It may be that something of the sort way be true with regard to many now only half-believed historical narratives of the kind presented in this volume.
God Stories
Well, I'm back.
Where do I go from here? I'm not sure. For the moment, this is the website of a book I'm reading: http://godstories.com/
Brazil
From next week I will be travelling for a month to Brazil. Since I'm not entirely convinced of the stability of this site, I'll be blogging the trip at natecull.wordpress.com.
Theologica Germanica
A biography of John Wesley that I've just read noted some of the German Pietist influences of Wesley, which led me to Meister Eckhart and the Theologica Germanica (author unknown). Both of which I find very interesting, very modern, and hugely relevant to our times. There's a direct line in terms of theological flavour from Course in Miracles, through Mary Baker Eddy, back to Eckhart. (To list just one of the many lines of faith which criss-cross over this landscape, but the Course in Miracles one is particularly close to my heart at the moment.)
Wesley, famously impressed by the quiet mystical spirituality of Count Zinzendorf's Moravians, later broke with them because he could not accept their quietism. It seems he had similar issues with the Theologica Germanica.
Wesley accomplished many great things in setting the template for Evangelical Christianity as an active social justice force for the next three centuries -- and as a movement-builder I think he did many things right, particularly his eclecticism -- but I also think his suspicion and dismissal of contemplative Christianity was a great loss for the set of movements he started. Wesley's model led the 18th century sea-change that turned the church from an aristocracy to an enterprise, but the worst-case scenario of that model is the Wal-Mart-isation of the church. Industrial mega-churches, like suburbia, can be hubs of religious activity and yet death-traps for the soul (and for the earth). We cannot act for justice without peace in our soul; if we try we merely create more noise, and that's what a lot of church activity right now is doing. The art of contemplation is something we will need to recover in this century, and quickly.
The good news is that all this material exists - it hasn't been lost, just ignored. And now we can access it more easily than ever.
Three Wishes
1. I wish that I lived in a world where everyone could literally see and know God; where that God existed, and that the nature of that God was pure love, was no more strange or confusing than that there is a sun in the sky.
2. I wish that I lived in a world where everyone looked after each other; where our life and work and economy and industry the geometry of our cities was structured toward the goal of doing meaningful things to help each other.
3. I wish that I would live as if I lived in such a world right now.
The thing about going through the archives of old, forbidden occult tomes from places like Spiritwritings.com - or reading some of the Christian mystics - or reading accounts of Near Death Experiences - is that after a while, a picture starts to emerge of a realm where such things really do exist.
A realm where the word 'God' doesn't mean a kind of abstract, outdated philosophical concept with a slightly musty smell of ether and phlogiston, but a literal everyday presence; one that everyone there relies on as naturally as breathing. A realm where synchronicity is taken for granted, coincidences 'just happen', if you want something it's already been planned for, and everything shines (literally) with its own inner light, which is also the light of God. As if we here in this Earth-dimension were like sleeping children who after a long illness, one day wake up to a glorious sunlit day, and laugh at our fever dreams of being in dark scary places, while at the same time marvelling at how close we came to true harm, and the skill that healed us.
It is a realm where everyone you've met is there, and they remember you fondly, and people who you've never met before walk up to you with a smile and explain how they already know you. It's like there's a secret smile on everyone's face, and sometimes it bursts out loud because nobody can keep the joy in for long.
You always knew the universe was a joke, but you thought it was a cruel one. Now you get to hear the punchline.
It is a realm where the skies are not dark, the space between the stars is not a vacuum, there is life and activity and civilisation for millions of light-years, everyone speaks with a form of telepathy, you can fly if you want (though you see the scenery better if you walk), and shaping matter with a thought is no more remarkable than downloading the latest Linux build from the Net.
It's basically one of Cory Doctorow's brightest post-cyberpunk fantasies. The world runs on adhocracy, we've got instant-access data retrieval of every shape, colour and feeling from all of inhabited history, and people are making more stuff - and more space to put it in - every day. And it's all meaningful, and all the work is voluntary.
Did I mention the glowing trees? So many people talk about those. It's often the first thing that catches your eye. The plants glow. Like they're on fire. The colours are brighter than any we have here; more frequencies, less dense matter, something. It's literally indescribable. And that's just in the first tenth of a second.
The closest thing on Earth is where you walk into a city park or square at night, and there are spotlights positioned under the trees. Green fire, in your face. Wham. For a moment, you remember.
Or you're playing an '80s videogame, one of the early abstract ones, and you've hit that zen groove, mastering the pattern, and suddenly everything's made of light, and the whole world's translucent.
Or you just put on your polarised glasses for a Dolby Digital 3-D movie, and the stereoscopic vision hits you in the face and suddenly you're in the frame of the movie. And there were dimensions you never knew existed.
It's like that.
You wake up and you're living on a friggin' Dyson Sphere inside a Matrioshka Brain sitting in hyperspace around Earth orbit and there's this whole Star Trek Federation and Prime Directive setup which has been secretly doing a Second Foundation on human history. You're living in a galaxy-size sci-fi convention and A E Van Vogt was right all along.
Light bubbles in little fountains around people, like one of those retro fiber-optic sculptures. It's like an always-on mood ring and somehow it never goes out of fashion.
People pray like they breathe. A laser-beam kind of thing comes out of the sky and... the laugh behind the universe is inside your heart and... and there are no ellipses big enough.
Because, God.
He spoke to me, and whilst doing so, he leaned over me, looking into my face intently, as if he wished to impress every syllable on my memory for ever. I shall never forget his words; they are engraved on my mind, and nothing can ever eradicate them.
He said: "You are only here for a little while. Try to hold and remember all I am telling you. Do not trouble to remember the details of the scenery or anything else, beautiful as it is, but remember every word I am telling you, because time is short.
"Tell everybody-everybody that will listen -that there is this Other Life. It is a real life in a real world. It is an active, interesting world. We are happy in it. All is well with us on this plane.
"God is here.
"We are nearer Him. All the best and most hopeful ideas that Christian religion on the earth has ever held out about a future life are poor compared to this wonderful reality.
"Tell everybody. It's true."
-- Gladys Osborne Leonard, "The Last Crossing"
Poem: Seuss 2.0
We were all very very naughty and Santa Claus brought us the Internet we deserved.
If the Wi-Fi on your hi-fi on your hi-def on your Wii
is connected to the iPod that controls your PS3
and the Dosbox on your Xbox booted Linux just before
but the Bluetooth on your Blu-Ray doesn't like your MP4
and the HDCP settings on your HDMI port
tell your SDHD SD-card to suddenly abort
and the CIA are calling 'cos your SDMI mix
just got copied to the KGB instead of MI6
and your Flickr's started Twittering your pics to Wikipedia
but your router won't re-multicast your Vista multimedia
and Google Search is peeking through the Windows in your brain
and your Blackberry is bleeping 'cos it thinks it crashed a plane
patch your PHP's Apache with a picture of a badger
then go paste it up on Facebook and sign someone else's name.
The Colour of the Wheat Fields
"But now you are going to cry!" said the little prince.
"Yes, that is so," said the fox.
"Then it has done you no good at all!"
"It has done me good," said the fox, "because of the color of the wheat fields."
(I know I posted this a while ago, and I can't find where.)
My copy of Regina Dawn Akers' The Holy Spirit's Interpretation of the New Testament has arrived, and I am starting to read it, beginning with the commentary for Mark, the most direct section.
It is a challenging read. I am getting all sorts of emotional mixed messages: I like it, and I'm disturbed by it, and I'm not sure if I believe it, or not. It's definitely in the A Course In Miracles vein, but ACIM was much clearer to me. This one... bugs me.
And yet. Looking at Regina's Yahoo Group, I see this:
Last summer, I had a dream. I was standing and looking at a wheat field that stretched as far as the eyes could see. As I looked on the wheat field I heard a thought, "The cover of the book is to be this color." A few weeks later, I had the same dream again.
I am not an artist, so I called Phil Frisk, who is. I asked him if he would design a wheat-colored cover for NTI. He agreed. We didn't talk about it again and a couple of months passed, then I had another dream. In this dream I was talking to a young man who seemed to have some authority over the cover of the book. I was telling him that the logo for the Foundation for the Holy Spirit needed to be on the cover. He disagreed. I told him that the copyright for NTI belonged to the foundation, so the logo must be on the cover. He said that wouldn't do. I continued to insist, and he continued to say no. Then, he reached in his files and pulled out a picture of a sheaf of wheat. He said that this was
the picture that was to be on the cover.
The symbol of the wheat and the harvest is hugely important to me. And then this blog entry:
I saw the seeds, which had been planted in every mind, as they began to grow. Happiness sprouted in bushes of light that grew from the minds of everyone. And soon, although we still walked and lived in this world, we were focused on our minds. We knew that’s where our happiness was. We knew that Love was in our minds, and we recognized that our minds were one. So, we walked within the world of form, but we did not pay attention to it. It was no longer of value to us. We valued only the Love, Happiness and Oneness of our minds.
It bugs me because this Sunday I had a similar mental image during the sermon; the parable of the Mustard Seed. All these people with seeds of light growing within them; all good acts forming trees which shelter the world. How much of our society has already been shaped and sheltered by quiet trees of righteousness that we don't even recognise, without which we'd be living in a harsh, dead desert?
It bugs me because I don't want to believe a false gospel. I don't want to believe something that's too simple, too easy, feels too right to be true.
This Jesus attracts me, even as he scares me, and I am desperately afraid that I will find out that he's only an illusion. What he says is too radical. 'God is within you' 'We are all God's children' 'I am only an elder brother'. 'The world is not really there' 'Everything you have done is already forgiven' 'You are one with God'.
How many Jesuses are there? What was the message he taught, really? When we strip away all the layers of human interpretation, what's the core of it? 'Say the Sinner's Prayer or you'll die and burn forever'? Or 'God loves you'?
This Jesus teaches like an Easterner. Is he even a Christian?
If this is real, there's something very interesting happening this decade. The Harvest that was promised to the Pentecostals might be beginning. And, for now, they're missing it. (Though perhaps the rain, to mix metaphors, is falling everywhere.)
If it's not real, the implications are too horrible to contemplate, and I've not yet entirely freed myself of that fear.
A voice inside me says 'fear is not the Way'. But...
Meta: Desiderata
Here's a thing I want.
A canonical text encoding for blog posts: capturing time, date, user, categories, and markup including links and quotes. Preferably also an encoding for capturing comments.
I have to upgrade the web server here, and I need to be able to archive my posts from both Wordpress and Livejournal in a big dumb text file somewhere in case of meltdown. I don't trust webapps to not destroy my words, and some of these might be useful to look back on. Also, I need to somehow consolidate them into one big pile (or several small piles) at some point.
I'd rather not have lots of opaque XML markup, but I'm figuring there must be a canonical XML or YAML encoding by now for blog text, right? It's a simple, well-defined problem with an easy solution, so it's already been done, right?
(Crickets chirp).
Not bitter. Just very, very jaded.
Election
So we've had the NZ elections.
A big rightward swing: National displaces Labour as main party, ACT (effectively Libertarians for any Americans following the game at home) goes from one to five seats, Greens up two to eight seats. Maori Party goes to five seats, and Winston Peters' New Zealand First flames out entirely, game over. No tears there I'm afraid - poor Winnie has been a slick operator and told one too many outright lie to the press, as well as flirting with outright racism, and got justly burned for it.
I can quite understand why people might have voted against Helen Clark since she's pulled a few too many slick ones herself (such as ramming through prostitution decriminalisation with the slimmest of margins, I think it came down to one vote) and retroactively legalising illegal acts done by her MPs -- but given how National were fawning all over George W a few years ago and chomping at the bit to go bomb some Iraqis, as well as slavering at the chance to strip and sell off what remains of our country's infrastructure, I personally couldn't bring myself to vote for them for the rest of my lifetime. I guess it comes down to a matter of juggling priorities of evil; for me, war ranks at the top of the list, and trusting proven untrustworthy market forces right next to it. Other people presumably have different moral calculi.
But it's the people who voted ACT -- the hard-core Ayn Rand acolytes -- who I find it hardest to forgive. Surely the world financial crisis has demonstrated for all to see that bankers are not to be trusted with anything more real than a Monopoly set? How is it possible to NOT see that 'economics as usual' has brought the earth to the brink of destruction, and is pushing us beyond? I can't understand the kind of wilful blindness to reality which would make people say 'give us more of that good stuff'.
On social issues, yes, I can understand being torn. I personally vote with the Greens because they are the only party that values nonviolence and peacemaking, which seem to me to be at the core fo the Christian attitude to life. But I cannot yet bring myself to actively campaign for them, because they are also the party that fights hardest to 1) decriminalise prostitution, 2) keep on-demand abortion legal, and 3) make smacking illegal. I cannot understand that trio of stances as philosophically coherent.
I can understand being in favour of decriminalising everything, on principle, even acts I don't personally agree with. But in that case, smacking should remain legal. How can it conceivably be legally consistent to *kill* an embryo but not to *smack* a child? Only, it seems to me, if you have a definition of human life which is false, and which believes that the point of restraining family violence is to protect *society* rather than the individual - a dead baby won't grow up to be a child abuser, but a smacked baby might. Which is too much like pragmatic ends-justifies-means thinking -- and far too much, in its own mirror-image way, like the hard Right's 'lock 'em up and throw away the key' stance on crime -- for me to accept in a minority, consciously values-based party.
But of course I can't really argue, and don't particularly want to, that abortion should be *recriminalised*, since using state violence in that way also seems an anti-Christian way of approaching things, let alone the whole complexity of feminism and women's rights which would suggest that as a male, I should have no voice in what is ultimately a woman's choice, and to a point I can respect that. I believe I *can* make a principled argument that abortion can be best seen as a horribly misguided modernist medical procedure, like electroshock and lobotomy, which has massive consequences to the mother which the medical profession has not yet addressed, and that a more enlightened future society will view it with distaste. And the flip side of seeing abortion as an evil is also that I should be in favour of policies that support as much as possible unmarried mothers who choose to raise children, since it's a huge sacrifice being asked of them; and for that reason, the Labour and Green stance in favour of state funds for families with children seems like both a moral and just use of my tax money, and as a single person myself, not really doing much to further the human race, it seems like part of my income is justly owed to those who do have children.
So I have no problem with taxes, and in fact I'm very suspicious of any party offering tax *cuts* since it seems like that's the government asking me to turn *my* back on those who Christ is asking me to support. I'd much rather have higher taxes, as long as I knew they were being used wisely to purchase collective services at a fair price and supporting those who need them, than higher discretionary income, and then a casino-like maze of lying private hucksters that I have to waste *my* valuable time deciphering in order to work out where to best spend my money. Some things are best left to the individual; but buying large-scale services like national healthcare and housing and infrastructure, where I don't have any personal expertise, are probably not among them, and further privatisation will most likely hurt me rather than improve my life.
I'm frankly terrified of all the right-wing rhetoric about 'making our streets safe' and 'three strikes and you're out', because again, this seems like it will do nothing but increase the violence level in our society, and I'm definitely against that.
If the Green party asks me to agree philosophically with a wider agenda of absolute sexual permissivism, and claim that all consensual sex acts are by definition *moral* and must be described as such, no, sorry, I can't agree with that, due to a fundamental conflict with my understanding of Christian values; however, that same Christian value system as I understand it tells me that society should be less violent, and to the extent that criminalising *any* activity adds to social violence, we should probably make more immoral things legal rather than less; and while I don't agree that morality is completely relative (that's a contradiction in terms to me - if something is *moral* it is by definition an *absolute*, otherwise it's just a *preference* or a local *adaptation* and talk of morals does not apply), I'm not in favour of *imposing* morality by law, since I don't believe it can be.
So I end up coming to a similar voting position to Greens on many social issues, except for starting from completely different axioms and not really being able to share a common language - which is why campaigning and discussing policy becomes hugely emotionally painful, because the religiously-based moral framework I come from is considered backward and frankly evil to many of my Left friends, and their moral system on sexuality is equally alien to me. (But I feel equally alienated not just from the Left, but from most of society today, even the Right.)
On the other hand, I'm deeply in favour of caring for the Earth, and working to make our society more energy efficient and locally-based, and the Greens are again about the only party which takes localisation, fair trade, ethical purchasing, animal welfare, and climate change seriously.
So that's my labryinthine internal anguish which leads me to my voting decision, ill-fitting as it often seems, and I assume other people make similar complex choices. At least I hope they do; sometimes I ungraciously suspect my fellow citizens of doing the equivalent of tossing darts at a dartboard and saying 'I'll vote for John Key because he has a nice honest face and a clean tie, and you can always trust a banker, can't you?
Well, I can't, and I fear for the next three years, because it seems like the same people who got the world into its current mess are going to be the ones trying to get us out; that doesn't seem like a recipe for success.
And in any case, I'm not sure that we necessarily *want* the economy to be 'functioning' again just like before, because even at full power it's still just a frighteningly efficient planet-wrecking machine. We need an economy based on *reality* -- ecology and spirituality, the things that underly all our social inventions -- rather than self-referential 'economics'.
Nevertheless, we've made our national political bed and are going to be stuck with it, and I'm no particular fan of violent insurrection, so the next question is how to reconcile my fears for the future and my distrust of the present and my bitterness toward those people whose choices of governance seem to me to be utterly without serious thought and moral merit -- how to reconcile all this with a theology that says 'actually, when it comes down to it, God is present everywhere in everything and even mistakes work out for good, and nothing is ever actually broken forever'. And love those with whom I disagree, on all sides of the political spectrum.
