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I’ve been too busy to write in this the last couple of days, but part of that busyness has been due to seeing movies:

“I [heart] Huckabees,’” didn’t really match my expectations. For one thing, the “existentialist” in the Existentialist Detective Agency seem more like New Age motivational speakers than the embodiment of the ideas of Sartre or Kierkegaard. This film was not so much an exposition of modern philosophy as an application of some of those ideas to modern problems. Still, I liked the film, mostly for the performances of the actors. Mark Wahlburg (spelling?) stole the film with his hilarious portrayal of a firefighter, suffering his own existential crisis which seems to have been caused by his concerns over our dependence on petroleum.

I also saw “Scary Movie 3” on DVD. Justin had rented it, and he Elly watched it a few nights ago. The film kept Elly from sleeping for two days, but Justin thought it was hilarious. He was right. I laughed out loud a bunch of times.

I’ve been reading short stories in the latest McSweeney’s, and Elaine Pagels’ The Origin of Satan. The Pagels book is mostly a retread of other things she's written. It's the same story she always tells: the "institutional" church villified and persecuted diverse voices. I think this may be the last book of hers I ever read. She just keeps saying the same things over and over again.

I surfed 2-4’ Scotchmans at sunset yesterday. Very fun. There were only four of us out, and it was great.

Thursday night I played softball. I went 2/3, a great catch robbing me of a homerun and hitting 1000 for the game. We won. I think we almost got in a fight, too. People have a hard time realizing that co-ed softball in Newport Beach is not all that important.

Friday morning I surfed 2-3’ high-tide surf at 30th Street. I always feel like such a bully when I surf there. People just seem to get out of my way. I can't help it that they all seem to be shoulder-hoppers.

A few things I think I’m learning . . .

• I don’t need pressure to start working on a piece of writing; I need pressure (i.e., a deadline) to stop working.
• I am tortured in a way clergy people are not. They have settled the big issues. They have confidence about those questions; I do not.
• I don’t know what I want to do with my life. I suppose what I most want is to search for, and describe the truth, but I despair of finding the truth; but isn’t that despair a kind of truth?
• In seminary I sensed that my fellow seminarians had come to school for “ammunition,” not for education.
• Those guys that crashed those planes on 9/11 were supposed to be so fervently religious, but their God can’t do shit, that’s why they had to crash the planes for themselves; their God can't fight America for them. . . Oh, and Bush’s God can’t do shit either, that’s why he needs missiles, dirty political tricks, and Karl Rove. (See this month’s Vanity Fair article about how Bush, Rex Reed, and the Religious Right hypocrites trashed John McCain in South Carolina in 2000.) In other words, Bonhoeffer was right: the world has come of age, but some people don’t realize it yet. They continue to pretend God is doing things for them, but they end up just using God to justify all the nonsense (and evil) they want to do.
• If Barbara Walters interviewed me, I’m sure she couldn’t make me cry. This isn’t because I never cry. I cry at movies, while reading, and even sometimes when I’m watching television. But I can’t imagine a subject Barbara would bring up that would make me cry. Does this mean I’ve had a pretty easy life? Probably.
  
  Why do I like “Fight Club?”
  Because I do know what a duvet is.
  Because . . . “self-improvement is masturbation; now self-destruction . . . “
  Because I too dream of staring down on overgrown freeways from atop abandoned crumbling skyscrapers.
  “How’s that working for you . . . being clever I mean?”
  Think about “Marla” at the testicular cancer support group.
  “Soap, the hallmark of civilization.”
  Helena Bonham Carter.