The Major League Baseball Playoffs are underway. Just a minute ago, Edgardo Alfonzo hit a high fly to center that Juan Pierre couldn't track properly. The ball fell on the warning track, allowing Barry Bonds to score. I like the Marlins, but it serves them right that Bonds got an insurance run. They intentionally walked him like punks even though there were two outs and nobody on. So he gets on first, steals second, scores on the fly ball that coulda and shoulda been caught. No different than if they had pitched to him and he'd hit it into McCovey Cove.

The Giants are going all the way this year. Flat out fact. I'm saying it now.

Had a fairly intense afternoon at work today. The residential treatment program that I supervise has some unhappy clients who had a lot of complaining to direct my way. The specifics aren't that important for blogging purposes, but it sure has me thinking a lot about human discontent. There are times in life where I seriously just wonder what is it that drives us so relentlessly to a condition of unhappiness. Yes, I realize that the people I was talking to today are emotionally damaged teenage girls - not exactly the most representative cross-section of humanity. But at the same time, they are not all that different from the rest of us, maybe in some ways just more raw and honest with how they express their frustrations.

Anyway, my wandering mind gets me thinking about what kind of soul nourishment these kids would need in order to arrive at a more stable point where they can maintain healthy relationships with others and feel better about themselves. They are very afflicted with deep wells of anger and resentment and their life experience has given them plenty of reason to feel that way, especially as they see how unfairly things turned out for them. Rationalizations of "we've all had our burdens to bear" don't work too well with these girls. Or any of us, when it gets right down to our pitiful self-centered whiny phases of life.

Victimization is a really hard thing to work out from under, especially when we find ourselves more or less forced to rely on "authority figures" to get the help we need when we can't alleviate the pain by ourselves. That's the dilemma that I see a lot of our clients get stuck in. They are aggravated with having to live in an institutional setting even though they are significantly responsible for making bad choices that led to their placement. They have a hard time staying out of conflict and when conflict happens, they react poorly, aggressively, impulsively, foolishly. Then they get mad at anyone who wants to hold them accountable for their misbehavior. And it's stubborn, misguided pride that prevents them from just sitting down, shutting up and listening to what others are trying to teach them. Of course, I'm telling this story from the "staff" side. The girls are also busy trying to get their side of the story across and often resort to rudeness or worse to try and make points that seem so important to them. And so often they find that they get blown off or taken as a joke when they overdo the bluster. Which tends to just infuriate them all the more.

Somehow, some way, I find myself just wanting to introduce them to God, if I can presume to put it that way. But that is a lot harder, it seems, than it ought to have to be.

Yesterday I mentioned this visit from the gas company. In the process of doing their digging, they found this very large and heavy boulder buried under my lawn. They pulled it to the surface and gave me the choice to keep it or not. I liked the idea of having this big ol' rock as some kind of ornamental thing to look at in my yard somewhere. But when Julie and I talked about it, we realized the difficulty of moving it so we tentatively decided to just have them take it away. But this morning, Derek (our youngest son) said he wanted to keep it so that swung our vote.

So after dinner tonight, our task was to get the boulder off of our front sidewalk so that no one would stumble across it in the dark, fall down, get hurt and sue us.

It turned out that moving this boulder was a much more difficult ordeal than I expected! I thought between myself and my three sons, we could get it rolled up our driveway, no problem.

But that is one heavy rock!

We tried rolling it, but it was very awkward and every time we flipped it we had this panicky jumble of feet and legs jumping out of the way to avoid being crushed. We wrapped some ropes around it and then tied those ropes to the base of the rear seat in our minivan, to drag the rock up the driveway, but then the rope snapped after we had just traveled a few feet.

So we had the rock now in the center of our driveway and it was dark outside. We got a few boards together to provide us some leverage, which helped considerably. But it just came back down to two of us (Brandon and me) pushing on one side and two others (Curt and Julie) pulling with ropes on the other, with Derek positioning the boards to prevent rollback. After we got the boulder up to the top of the driveway incline, we shoved it into a little area right by the front corner of our house where we had very little chance of running into it when we backed our vehicles out onto the street.

But that's still just one third of the length of the driveway. And the spot that Julie picked for the rock to sit in our backyard is in the FAR BACK CORNER (of course) so I'm thinking I may just head down to U-Rent-It and see what the going rate is for one hour's borrow of a refrigerator dolly...

If I had a digital camera I'd link up some pictures.

A few random Ashleigh Brilliant quotes:

"What makes the Universe so hard to comprehend is that there's nothing to compare it with."

"Bring me a dictionary: I want to know the meaning of Life."

"Whatever became of Eternal Truth?"

"Science may one day discover what Faith has always known."

My front yard got ripped up today by the gas company. They sent out a crew of guys to fix an underground leak and move my gas meter from our basement to the outside of my house. In the process, they cut one of my underground sprinkler lines, so they're gonna have to come out and fix it tomorrow. They were already planning to be here to spread some topsoil and re-seed the areas they tore into.

So much for today's news.

I should use this blog to talk more about "where postmodernism, Christianity and suburban American culture meet." As of late, I've been thinking about this in relation to politics. Specifically, reflecting on the role that George W. Bush plays in the conscience of American Christianity. I was at Baker Book House several days ago and I saw this print by Ron DiCianni called "Praying for Peace." If you don't want to visit the link, I'll describe it to you: It's a painting of GWB standing at a podium with the Presidential Seal on it, and he is flanked by the "spirits" of Abraham Lincoln and George Washington, who each have a hand on his shoulder in a "laying on of hands" manner, and all of them have their heads bowed in a posture of prayer. Technically, the painting is skillfully rendered. But the piety and patriotism and sentimentality of the composition are what I find most striking. As I said on my radical-middle email list, I have a hard time imagining a leading Christian artist creating such a portrait of Bill Clinton or the first President Bush, for that matter. GWB has captured the evangelical imagination as a politician in a way that no one else has in recent years. Reagan is the only other one who comes to mind, but I wasn't as tuned in to Reagan's iconic functions back when he was president so I really can't say.

Now I happen to consider our current President to be sorely unqualified for his job and deficient in his performance, so I am not the most fair-minded guy to evaluate whatever it is that's going on between him and the evangelical community. He has clearly conducted and portrayed himself in a way that conservative Christians appreciate, and I suppose that a lot of that has to do with his mannerisms and the way he cites scripture and makes other references to his faith in his public statements. In many ways, he's cut from the same cloth as a lot of the church elder figures that many American Christians are familiar with. It's what we might call a "man in charge" mentality, with just enough of that reg'lar fella persona mixed in (whether he happens to be kidding around or "darn serious" as the situation calls for.) Not everyone finds that kind of personality attractive, but we are used to our leaders acting that way. Which I suppose is as good a reason as any to explain the apparently unswerving confidence that his supporters have in his presidency and administration.

Personally, I think that most Bush supporters must be so deeply invested in their need to believe that he is "the right man" for these times that they've become blind to the reality that America is being radically transformed in negative, damaging ways that will take us a long time to correct after his term has come to an end. Which I hope will be January of 2005.

My family is hooked on fantasy games. I came home from work today and my wife and youngest son are playing Animal Crossing. I come downstairs to find my twin sons each playing Ragnarok Online on two of our three computers. (The third one is not very functional right now - keyboard problems, and it's an old-style connection so it's hard to replace since I can't find them for sale in retail outlets.) I was in a hurry to get on the computer so I could see how Pedro Martinez did, since he's my star pitcher for my fantasy baseball team which is on the verge of making the playoffs.

Is this pathetic, or just typical? It seems like a lot of us Americans are pretty dependent on our ability to create small virtual environments where we can be a lot more in control and easily satisfied than we typically experience in everyday life. It's like one form of escapism or another is essential to get us through each day.

I could go on more at length about this - I already had, but I accidentally left the first entry I wrote and lost it, even though I followed the prompt to save my blog - but I don't feel like recreating what I already wrote so I think I'll simply let this observation speak for itself...

It's time for me to update. I'm almost a whole week into September and none of my faithful readers have any idea of what I've been up to!

So here's the lowdown. Busy as usual at work. My assistant Kristen is about to go on a trip to Europe which will increase my workload a bit over the next few weeks. But overall things are going well. We have some girls ready to leave our program, which is good. We'll just have to wait and see what the new girls are like and how they will affect the atmosphere in our home.

Tomorrow morning, I'm going to attend worship at Park Congregational Church in downtown Grand Rapids. I've been there before, but last Sunday, I showed up late to their service, at which the almost certain to be next mayor of Grand Rapids, George Heartwell, was delivering a Labor Day sermon. I happened to run into Ron Skidmore, who is their Adult Education coordinator. We exchanged greetings and he told me about his role with the church and the upcoming program that is going to start tomorrow as the church returns to its normal schedule, now that summer's over. He leads a guided contemplative prayer service which starts at 9:00am, and then he teaches a class at 9:45 am. My overall impressions of him and this aspect of the church's ministry were quite positive - I had a kind of instinctive reaction that this just may be pretty close to what I'm looking for.

Park Church is an old congregation - in fact, their church is the second oldest church building in the city - built in 1869, I believe. It's quite ornate inside. Original Tiffany stained glass windows, for starters. I am actually kind of excited to see what this will be like. One of the biggest adjustments I'll have to make, though, is that I'll have to head out the door pretty quickly after helping my sons with their paper route. That's different. I've gotten used to having a bit of time to myself on Sunday mornings as everyone else heads off to church. Now I'll be the first one out the door, and I'll have to find time to shower and shave before the boys do.

Also, I'm excited for a new NFL season to start tomorrow. Yes, there was that Thursday night game, which was cool and all, but there's nothing quite like a Sunday afternoon when the league is in action all around the USA. And speaking of sports, my fantasy baseball team is in first place and gearing up for our league's playoffs, if all goes well over the next week or so. However, my team is in just a wee bit of trouble - I was leading this week's game handily up until this afternoon, but my opponent has Roy Halladay on his staff and the Blue Jays pitcher is having a career week, pitching 10 shutout innings against the Tigers today and giving Brad, his fantasy owner, a lead of six points against me. Unbelievable! My own ace, Esteban Loaiza, got the win today, but wasn't nearly as effective, giving up 5 runs in 7 innings. But we each have several players going tonight, so I may still regain the lead and get the win this week. In any case, Keith, who is pursuing me, is also losing so right now, I'm still in good shape as I will at least maintain the lead I currently have, if the results don't change between now and tomorrow night.

What else? I'm loading up my computer with music. I have about 250 hours of music in my Windows Media Player now. That's over 10 days straight without a repeat. But when I put the player on "All Music - Random," it still seems to play many of the same songs, for some reason. It's a lot of fun to have all my CDs loaded in and ready to go, where I don't have to choose but can let the computer decide what to play next.

I've been going through my new DVDs. Watched Blade Runner again. That is a very good movie. Excellent cinematography, more than anything. The story is also cool, but mostly, Blade Runner is about atmosphere.

I also saw a preview, with Julie, of a new Diane Lane movie, Under the Tuscan Sun. An ultimate chick flick. Woman gets dumped by her no-good low-life husband who she supported, gets lots of money from the settlement, takes a trip to Europe paid for by her sympathetic lesbian couple pals, buys an Italian villa on a whim, and has the adventure of her life as she sorts out where to go next. Full of great food, hot dark-haired Latin Lover types, gorgeous scenery, music, romance, and just enough heartbreak to keep it all poignant. An entertaining movie but also formulaic and a bit absurd. But we saw it for free, which is a plus. Now I'm giving it some word of mouth which is exactly what the studio wants me to do after letting me in to a preview screening for no charge.

I also bought the Two Towers DVD. I've only watched a few of the special features, but not the main film yet. Maybe we'll check it out tonight. Other DVDs I've obtained recently but not watched yet: Casablanca (new 2-disc special edition release), Silent Running, and Hamlet (2000 Ethan Hawke version.)

I spent most of today cleaning my basement family room and shampooing my carpet and upholstery, just to let you know. "

OK, enough blogging for now.