Thursday, February 21, 2013

Texas journal, 1998


Journal of Quaker Workcamps International, Wichita Falls, TX
Fred Allebach 

3/30/98
I signed a Letter of Understanding, the Quaker term for a contract, with Quaker Workcamps International, committing myself to a year or more of being the on-site Project Director of QWI’s effort to help rebuild the Full Gospel Powerhouse Church of God in Christ in Wichita Falls, TX.

4/14
The Powerhouse Church was told by the architect, Wayne Lambdin, that the plans were done and would be sent by mail.

5/15
I left Tucson and drove Interstate 10 over through Lordsburg, Las Cruces, stopped in White Sands National Monument for a drive among dunes made of gypsum and then on through Ruidoso, where I could not find a room because of a big motorcycle rally and finally to some mountain road outside of town where I parked, set up my tent and spent the night.

5/16
Roswell NM was close and I spent some time poking around there. The residential neighborhoods were very nice. The houses were well kept and interesting architecturally. The Hispanic Chamber of Commerce had some nice gals who spoke with me for a while about Roswell. I found out that they go to Mexico via El Paso/ Ciudad Juarez, which is a couple of hundred miles away, that Roswell has the largest cheese factory in the US and that in Roswell, Volvo makes super sleek city buses for all over the US.  Of course Roswell is also famous for attracting aliens and judging from the bleak nothingness which surrounds town, I can see why. With little to work with visually, the mind steps in to create landscapes to interact with.

It gets progressively flatter heading east into the Permian Basin, with lots of oil pumps, some derricks and cattle. The first things you notice upon leaving the southwest in this direction is the increasing prevalence of a twangy, annoying southern accent and a general lack of vegetation. Seeing a tree is a big deal. The ground is all plowed up or filled with cows. Out in the desolate flatness there is no cover even to take a piss, you see a tree, and stop and marvel at it.  This flat area is known as the staked plains or in Spanish, the llano estacado, because little trees stand out so prominently like I observed right away.

Then, around a place called Caprock, about 60 miles east of Guthrie, on 114 out of Lubbock (which is a pit), just when I started to question if there was any nature at all left in this region, the flatness broke and there was no more agriculture, just long rolling hills with interesting rock formations here and there. And there were more trees.

It was a relief to see that I would not be living in flats where the wind blows incessantly, sucking the soul right off you. I brought it on in to Levelland TX and watched some basketball
and ordered a terrible pizza which I couldn’t finish and then in the morning it was covered with roaches. I started to feel like a real oddity amongst the cowboy hatted, twanging, truck driving rural Texans. When they heard me talk, they could instantly tell I wasn’t from these parts. I ate at a lunch buffet and when I went to pay the cashier she mumbled something which turned out to be “buffet?” and I said “Excuse me?”. She got all snooty because she knew she was a hick and couldn’t talk straight. I felt like I was in foreign country.

Some of the little towns along the road were just blown out, boarded up, hardly anything left, probably relicts of oil boom times. They had sure seen better days.

(Architect drives up to WF from Dallas to drop off plans. He had been saying all along that he mailed them.)

5/17
Wichita Falls seemed not too far on the map but it took four or more hours to get there. I got a motel and watched the Bulls beat Indiana, one last night of freedom. On the radio an ad for a paint store had a woman say “If I want to paint my wallpaper, I don’t want someone telling me not to.” Here at Johnny Hicks, we give you what you want. Doesn’t that just say it all? If I want to eat deep fat fried catfish that live in water drenched with pesticides, I don’t want no doctor telling me it ain’t good for me. Here at Johnny Hicks, you get what you want. Some old guy was mailing five roosters down at the Post Office. The PO is a neat old building, a style not too often appreciated these days, reminds me of Grand Central Station, with big high ceilings and a lot of marble and ornate metalwork.

It’s all too familiar what with the hicks and dealing with different twists on being human. Everyone has to travel their own path and sometimes one of the hardest things in life is to allow your friends, children, parents, significant others, to sidle up to life in their own peculiar way. No one knows best, only what works for them.

5/18
I went over to the office of the Full Gospel Powerhouse Church of God in Christ and met Darlene Jefferies, the church secretary and Emmett McCracken, an 80 something Quaker from Missouri who had volunteered to come and work on camp set up. We all hung out for a bit and then I started to unload my car and set up my computer, which was a good show. Work was supposed to start on breaking up the old foundation but the contractor, Mike Corbett, didn’t show up. The day generally was spent unpacking, food shopping, working on setting up the credit union account.

5/19
Mike and his crew showed up and started work and Mike spent a bit of time orienting me to his interpretation of the project. Mike is from Georgia; a real southern redneck. He is not schooled past fifth grade. We got to talking about Vietnam and that got him going, he killed forty some people and is a fighter, he in his life has beaten people and put them in the hospital with broken faces. “I’m the kind of guy that will whip you but then I’ll carry you to the hospital.” Now that is a man of honor! He said he’d bet he could whip Mike Tyson right now. He mentioned how he didn’t believe in that turning the other cheek stuff, that God wants people to defend themselves. He said that blacks don’t have the aptitude to be good construction workers and that they generally are not as smart as whites. “My best friend is black but he’s just not as smart as an average white guy, even though he tries to make up for it by trying harder...” But, Mike and I also agreed that the white people around here are a different breed too. More on that later. Mike gets going talking and doesn’t really hear what you are saying, only what he is thinking of saying next. I just have to take a guy like this and kind of wonder how I am going to deal with him for a year, almost everyday. We get along OK. I think it will be alright, just a challenge to bridge such a vast gulf in understandings of the world.

Mike said no other contractors in town wanted to build the church and that the high and mighty white people in town did not want the church built so near the main drag, so visible and lined up with all the white churches. Mike wants to build this church. I can’t second guess his motivations and will have to take him at his word, even though I have a feeling he’s not working solely from charitable motivations.

The architect has held the project up and things are about month behind. The slab should be done by now, but we have just broken ground. Apparently the architect is a real flake and gave the church a set of drawings which had no specifications on them and the city turned that down. The architect did not have the proper stamps on the blueprints from engineers etc and those parts had to be re-done.

5/23
I have been here almost a week and have my scene set up in the Pastor’s former office. I met the Pastor last night and his wife Dorothy. Dorothy was supposed to have died from cancer this past February, months ago and I guess she has it pretty bad in her ovaries, stomach, intestines and part of a lung. She was amazing! I felt like I was in the presence of someone very special. She was vibrant, open, talkative, dignified, friendly, appreciative and we talked for a long while the Reverend walked around the newly broken ground in obvious emotion about the beginning of rebuilding his church. I could alternately see in Dorothy’s eyes a deep, haunted look of despair and also a person full of spirit, deep pools of life reflecting back at me. I cannot help but be genuinely touched by witnessing this woman and how precious is her person, there with me almost as a spirit, an angel. She is right on the line of mortality, looking into the abyss, even though she has strong faith, it is still heavy duty. What is life? What is life? When you look into the eyes of a person who is supposed to be dead, that is special and powerful.

Dorothy said “I did need to lose some weight.” Apparently she is unable to eat as her stomach is collapsed on itself as well as her intestines. She can’t take or pass anything. All her nutrition comes from bags and IVs. The doctors gave her 17 days to live, they were just going to give her morphine and let her waste away, starve to death, but Dorothy copped to that and said to Ted, the Pastor, that she didn’t want to starve to death and then the MDs told Ted it would be $800 a day to feed her and he said OK and after a lot of insurance rigamarole, the upshot is that all her medical care is pro bono now. She has achieved medical miracle status.

Pastor Thompson has in the last week, had his father die, his favorite uncle go into the intensive care unit with a massive heart attack, had another uncle die, his wife needs constant care and his church was burned by arson. His son is a heretic and unsaved. This afternoon he came over with another Pastor and they started talking in parables from the Bible, illustrating how this current situation is like what happened to Isaiah and various other characters who I have heard of but don’t really know much about. This was fascinating to listen to as the Reverend laid out his troubles and travails and tried to make sense of it. “How can God be working all things for the good and have all this happen to me? I just don’t understand why?” The other Pastor tried to comfort him with interpretations of parables and how it would all work out. Pastor Thompson has put it in God’s hands now. In order for him to be a decent Pastor, he can’t succumb to being down and out for months on end, yet he is only human. To lead his flock, he must be strong and upbeat, inspiring, yet life is tough and deals some heavy blows. Faith then is what he must turn to, that this will all work out and that God has sent me, and QWI, to do good works and turn this bad situation around and transform it into good again.

I have been a little emotional at the thought of being gone from Tucson for maybe more than a year, leaving; it all just seems farther away. Maybe I’m just a little homesick and having Dad going in for an operation this coming Wednesday, I just feel like I want to be there but I’m not. My folks are getting up in years and I am appreciating them more and more. I have reflected on my life, all the years, my parents raising me up, all my memories, all the experience, and then cast it against a backdrop of mortality. I am reaching deep to try and understand what there really can be no answer to. I can see why religion is so compelling and why we have a need for something like that. The finality and irreversibility of death is such a stark contrast to being in the presence of dear and precious people. This is beginning and an ending for me and I feel at once exhilarated and sad.

Well, onto a lighter topic. You don’t see any out of state plates around here because nobody wants to come and vacation in Wichita Falls. I’m sorry. The white folks here are generally ugly and weird looking, like you would expect to see in West Virginia. They look different. It feels different here too. When you are out on the street in Tucson, there is an unspoken sense of being in on a really cool place, the mountains, the cactus, the history. Tucson has a unique and special quality to it that many places do not have. Now that I cannot walk up Finger Rock Canyon, I miss it. Before I took it for granted. That’s the way it always is.

Wichita Falls reminds me of Richmond, Indiana. There is a lot of green, a lot of trees, a lot of space. I have the feeling that I have stepped back 30 or 40 years into rural America. The old downtown is great, really interesting buildings and ruins and vignettes of old run down plumber’s yards full of old sinks and peeling paint set off against railroad tracks and lush trees. As I drove around town today for three or more hours, I saw many good photo opportunities and lament the loss of my familiar cameras as the new one Mom bought me, while functional and well appreciated, just doesn’t let me feel like I have anything to do with how the picture turns out. I will take shots of my vignettes nevertheless and send cool copies out to share with my non-Texan friends. I checked out the Wichita River today and it was pretty disappointing, all brown and full of trash and junk. At one time the city had fixed up the riverside park but it was totally deserted and eerily abandoned today, kind of like On the Beach.

The border with Oklahoma up north, east of the panhandle all the way to Arkansas is defined by the Red River. It is red because of all that red Oklahoma dirt and the Wichita River is in all likelihood, the same way. In some ways it is like King Road in Indiana back in 1977 and that feeling of lazy river, agriculture, rural, slow, easy life. Can catfish live in that red water?

Another interesting thing I saw was a large funeral procession, fifty cars at least, coming down one of the freeways and all other traffic stopped and pulled over to the side in honor of the deceased as the procession passed by. I had never seen that anywhere. That is cool. In Tucson you see funeral processions and people continue to speed about oblivious to honoring the dead. Honoring the dead is something everyone should have the time for. We are all heading that way. We all got it coming. I have been reminded of my cemetery experience in Mexico and seeing the grave of Indolfo’s father this last winter, along with one other fresh grave and then the graves become progressively less tended until at the back of the cemetery, the stones are all scattered and the wood crosses strewn and disintegrated, nature has finally taken them back, beyond all memory. Those lives, no one knows. I was there cleaning weeds from those graves. I will be heading that way one day and all the significance, importance and musings that now seem so immediate will fall away into an eternal silence. I have lately been looking at pictures in the obituaries and feeling a sense of unspeakable wonder, that there goes a life, just like me, friends and family, now gone for good. I have now gotten myself a copy of Mozart’s Requiem and I like it. I believe the story goes that Mozart ended up writing it for his own death, even though it was commissioned by a mysterious stranger. 

It has been hot and humid, oppressive, 102 with 80% humidity. I drove out to WalMart one evening and the hot wind felt like a microwave boiling my brain. It was insufferably uncomfortable. I can’t do any work without becoming drenched with sweat. I sweat a lot anyway and the humidity is something I will have to adapt to. Apparently the weather will also turn beastly cold in winter, with wind chills getting it below zero. This is “tornado alley” and for whatever reason, tornadoes rip through this area more than most others although apparently they are not known to want to come to this side of Wichita Falls, except for the one in 1979. I have had some good tornado dreams. If one is going to get you, that’s it, game over. When the horns and sirens go off, everyone has a legal right to head into the basement of any public building. The Credit Union across the street is a big building and looks safe, or at least down in the basement if everything doesn’t cave in on you. They are only open during the week, so hopefully tornadoes will keep that in mind.
I have been massively busy and the real action has not even started but I have the feeling that I will like the whole scene and time will slip by quickly because there will be not much slowness in which to notice the passage of time.

The specifics of the job are too many to describe but one is interesting. Some Quakers in Dallas (130 miles away) who have a PR firm, are going to do a press release and with the coming of the Tanzanian scouts, they say that will be national news. I am going to be dealing with Good Morning America and CNN film crews!

5/24
Fred Holland and Deborah McAlister of Holland McAlister Public Relations came up from Dallas today and our meeting was very educational for me. They know a lot I don’t know, about PR and computers. So I was all ears. They had one cool piece of info after another, websites, ideas, contacts, get the Cowboys over here. The Cowboys are BIG. I made a jokingly, half serious disparaging remark about football and the Cowboys and Fred said “what planet are you from?”

We discussed the history of Quakerism and a little about the Protestant Reformation. I mentioned to them that Mike Corbett thought Quakers were kind of like Mormons and Fred H said how we will need to be able to explain to people who Quakers are. (He fixed me up with some nice brochures from the Ft. Worth Meeting.) I told Deborah I was interested in learning about all the different sects here, as I had never seen so many different Christian denominations. She said first of all, don’t ever call a church a sect, people around here see sects as cults, as in Waco and the Branch Davidians of David Koresh fame. She also said that many Baptists here won’t admit to being Protestants, seeing the Baptist tradition as superceding the Catholics, as in John the Baptist being the founder of the Baptist church.

Deborah’s son is in jail here in Texas for forty years, for a first time possession of less than a pound of marijuana. Apparently in Texas you get two years in prison for possession of any amount of weed. No wonder there is a crisis in prison space, that is insane! I don’t see any way that type of severe penalty can be justified, it is plainly a reactionary, ill thought out policy.

Otherwise the smoke from the fires down in Mexico continues to make things feel like Seattle, with a permanent grey cast outside and widely varying reports in the paper as to how dangerous it all actually is. One newspaper article said Texas’ clean air standards are set to allow fairly dirty air to be considered OK. The author said the current standards are like setting the speed limit at 150 mph and then saying that the smoke or going 100 mph is not so bad.

Last night there were 70 mph winds and that was something. It was ripping something fierce. The noise of 70 mph wind is impressive and difficult to describe, kind of like a giant’s vacuum cleaner shifting speeds. I thought I might get my first tornado and as I looked out the front door and the wind was sucking all the blinds flat against the screens, I realized I had no where to run, if one popped down, I was dead meat.
You do have to water the foundations here in the summer because there is so much clay in the soil that when it dries out, it exudes water and everything starts moving, the house literally rocks around . You have to keep that clay wet so it doesn’t start to shrink and move the foundation and therefore, the house.

5/25
Not much new today, work on the bunk house, various cleaning and setting up bunk beds, moving mattresses, organizing stuff, sitting at the computer and consolidating and editing voluminous notes and files and texts, taking a shower, getting an ice cream, reading the paper.

5/26
Today was insane. I couldn’t do anything for the first eight hours without being interrupted at least every five or so minutes. Staying on track is a question of days and weeks rather than hours. I thought I’d better get in good with the construction workers and Tim, who came first, I told the contractor, he should be employee of the week, he’s got hustle and dedication. Tim got a big thrill out of that. That’s a trick I learned from the mighty Thompson up in Sonoma. Everybody likes the idea of employee of the week. On my quest to know the workers, I met Doodle’s brother Tom. Doodle is the son in law of the contractor and sort of Mike’s junior partner. Doodle has a band that plays rock music. I asked Tom if he played in the band and he said he used to, but “Doodle plays the Devil’s music and you have to praise the Lord in everything you do.” Doodle said “I praise the Lord every morning when I wake up and breath the fresh air.” and he went on to blow Tom off with a statement to the effect of “everybody has a hard time with me and you a’int nothin’ new”. This was followed by an awkward silence by me and the crew standing there, but Doodle out ranked Tom and so we all knew that the Lord might be all powerful, but in this instance, Doodle held sway.

Mike weighed in with some few choice statements about Yankees and how they were all snobs and cowards and aggressive only in their cars and I just had to laugh when he was saying all that because I’m a Yankee!  Mike said I sounded more like I was from Oregon or Washington. Mike also editorialized that while he could whip anybody’s ass, now picture big forearm going through the motions of an uppercut and I would not want to get hit by that arm! He is polite in his car while Yankees, who couldn’t kick anyone’s ass, were all aggressive and full of road rage. Mike has a cherry 1969 GTO that sounds awesome. It is a classic muscle car. Mike can deal though. He hears me. I am buttering him up. I do him right and show him respect and he will do the same for me. He is our man and he wants to build the church. If Mike is different, that is OK with me. Just don’t jack my jaw if you please!

As Deacon Russell and I tried to cover some logistics up drove CBS channel six and wham, I was on TV being interviewed by a babe with make-up smeared all over her face. All the guys were standing there watching me as young Maybelline stuck a microphone in my face and I had to a couple of times just out right say, you can’t put that part on (or Mike will be knockin’ you out baby)!

The logistics are mundane. I hired Rufus Jenkins to be the cook today. He is around the same age as Emmett McCracken, who clearly has a touch of Alzheimers and is our tool inventory man. Rufus was a nice guy, a little stove up and old but Darlene is his daughter and she is a big shaker in the church. I felt Rufus deserved a shot at it. If Harold could bring on Emmett (as a volunteer), I could hire Rufus. Harold backed me up 100% as we are committed to not discriminating on the basis of anything. Only flat out incompetence will get you fired from the Quakers here at QWI, although in my case I suspect I am being expected to perform to a higher standard than that. I think in the future I will suggest to Harold that hiring younger, sharper, more competent people will be a good move towards reducing stress and unnecessary complications. McCracken and I were talking about something and he came out with something about “the niggers” and I could tell he was an old time white boy even though he was a Quaker.

5/27
Well it is 9:PM and I finally have the space to breath a sigh of relief and do something pleasurable for myself only, like record some of the day’s memorable events. The Reverend was over this morning and he has a great smile and demeanor. He is a really nice guy. He is a leader and a spiritual advisor but he is also humble and unassuming. He began to expound on how he didn’t know the Lord’s purposes for when He would take Dorothy and Mike jumped right in and said “I got a personal relationship with God too and I know when God takes her, it will be because.....” And after a few go-arounds on this where Mike in his own way tried to comfort the Pastor, they started talking about fishing and which ones they throw back and where they are catching them and how the Reverend would go as far away on the water as he could, floating, his mind wandering and questioning Fate and how life can take such a beautiful woman and companion from him and he would have a fish tugging on the line and sort of wake up to it, not even notice. Dorothy went into the hospital yesterday morning and is in more serious condition than in the last 8 years. If she comes through it will be a miracle.

I had my first Newspaper interview today and the reporter was sharp, had a lot of back-up information and was clearly digging for dirt about the arson, suspects, why the insurance company hadn’t paid yet, when the church was going to sue the insurance company and why the people who were members of the church, who held the title at the time of the burning were no longer members and were also the main suspects? What about them? She also asked all kind of questions about QWI, to Mike and Russell and when she left, everyone was amazed and offended and awestruck at her chutzpah. She put us all in the same boat of being against her scrappy ass.

I got in touch with our PR guys in Dallas and got a boatload of advice, most of it good, on how to handle the media and steer them towards what you want to be made public. This is known as spin. I have three spin doctors volunteering behind me and it takes a lot of attention on my part to follow through on all they are asking me to do and know. At the same time it is novel and kind of crazy to find myself in these situations.

I went out to Office Depot today to buy a FAXphone and was able to successfully apply for non-profit status and therefore, pay no tax. The store manager said “hey, I saw you on TV last night and you looked good!” I met him yesterday and he was very friendly and helpful, along with his staff. The over-all impression I get from WF is that people are quite friendly and people realize that you get mileage out of small town courtesy. The place is small enough that jerks will become progressively isolated.

So I am going around town feeling like the TV Guy. Did everybody see me on TV? The project is gaining momentum and visibility. I look at all the stuff I have to master and be on top of and sometimes think that there is no way one person can track so many things simultaneously however I have not panicked and am using training from my Wilderness First Responder and SCA to remain calm in the face of adversity. Larry Bird is an inspiration. My spin doctors are probably working now on how to package my responses.

My credit union officer, Nancy Law, has enough clout to do me favors a regular Joe wouldn’t get, like laundering my personal checks though the QWI account and voiding fees for screw-ups on my part. People want to help out on a good cause. A local internet service provider gave me a free e-mail account and offered to make me a web page too.

5/28
The big news today, other than that the newspaper article turned out good was that the city building inspector’s office said the plans needed to be returned to the architect because there were some glaring omissions, there were no specs for fire walls, the steel beams had no specs and a structural engineer had not stamped the prints, the kitchen needs to have specs for commercial fittings, the stairways are not right. So what this all means is that no more work can proceed until the plans are sent back to the city and then approved. How long this will take is anyone’s guess. This is a major X-factor. We will have over 30 people here in 10 days to work. Work on the slab can only proceed to the level of compacting sand and no forms can be built.

Also, there is a mystery bill for $770.00 from the electrician that was not authorized by QWI or the church and it turns out Doodle told the electrician to do it. I have to tell Doodle now that he has to pay the electrician because he authorized the work. Isn’t it great that I have to do the shit work to rectify and clean up situations that I had nothing to do with. Now I have the potential to be made out as an asshole by someone I have to work with all year. I guess being a hack is part of my job too.

Here is a copy of the newspaper article:

Thursday, May 28, 1998

<Picture><Picture>

Volunteers lending power
to rebuild church at full speed

Monica Wolfson
Times Record News

The Full Gospel Power House Church of God in Christ will be rebuilt, despite having limited financial resources because the fire insurance claim has not been settled, church leaders said. Volunteers from across the country and around the world are coming to Wichita Falls this summer to lend a hand.

In coordination with Quaker Workcamps International, the church will begin housing and feeding 20 volunteers per week starting in June. The rebuilding process is expected to take a year, church deacon Russell Johnson said.

The Full Gospel Power House Church at 15th and Broad was set ablaze Nov. 20, 1996. Investigators determined the fire was arson, but still have not caught the arsonist, Assistant Fire Marshal David Collins said. Investigators have new leads, but are no further along in the case than they were last year, Collins said.

Johnson said Preferred Risk Insurance has not settled the $270,000 insurance claim, but the church is still forging ahead in rebuilding the place of worship.

"We just got to the point where we had to do something," Johnson said. The church had about 100 members before the fire. "We lost some members after the fire. They got discouraged, but I think that once they see we are going through with this, then we will get some back."

Construction started last week with the removal of the old foundation, and work on leveling the lot began this week, local contractor Mike Corbett said. The architectural drawings have been submitted to the city and are awaiting final approval.

"A lot of the church people came by last Sunday, and were so happy to see we were serious about rebuilding the church," Corbett said. "Several people from the congregation that I've met are real dedicated - it has pumped me up."

Many local companies have donated construction materials, but the church will need a constant flow of cash and material donations to complete the project, Corbett said.

Corbett and three paid construction foremen train the volunteers.

Quaker Workcamps International first contacted the church in 1996 after the widely publicized fire. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms was called in to investigate the fire because a task force had been formed to look into the unprecedented number of black churches that were burning in the South.

The church arsons prompted the Quakers to form Workcamps International, which began in 1997 as a ministry to rebuild burned black churches, said Fred Allebach, project leader with Quaker Workcamps International.

Twenty-one people from Tanzania will arrive in the city June 8, although they still have not secured visas, Allebach said. A family from Russia will arrive in July. All the volunteers are paying their own travel expenses to Wichita Falls, Allebach said.

All the visitors will stay in renovated barracks on the church property. The Quakers will have four staff members on site, including a cook. Allebach said the Quakers will coordinate the volunteers, including people who are coming from all over the United States. A contingent from New Mexico is expected to arrive June 6.

"We don't foresee any problems in getting people to volunteer," Allebach said. "We are pushing hard now for building materials."

The National Guard has said it will donate a 20-person tent, which will be used for overflow sleeping, Allebach said

"Everything that can go wrong, does go wrong," Allebach said. "You have to be flexible and go with the flow."

The church expects to break ground next week.

"Mike (Corbett) has told the young people of the church that he is going to put them to work," Johnson said. Volunteers can contact the Quakers at 766-6316 for a volunteer application, and any business interested in donating materials can call the church at 766-2927.

Staff Writer Monica Wolfson can be reached at (940) 767-8341, Ext. 532, or at mwolfson@wf.scripps.co m

<Picture><Picture><Picture><Picture><Picture><Picture><Picture>

More information on Quakers.

Picture:
Construction is set to begin in the next week or so on the Full Gospel Powerhouse Church Of God In Christ, which burned to the ground Nov. 20, 1996. The church will be rebuilt on the corner of 15th & Broad, where the original building was located.

5/29
Well, well, well.

Things sure have reached a state of being incredibly tangled and unclear and uncertain. Mike came by this morning and I approached him about the question of whether the $770.00 electric bill was included in the $3000.00 bath house price, and since Mike has just held forth for about two hours of non-stop talking, including an exact reprise of his tornado story which went on and on and on and covered every single detail that he had previously told me just days ago, I feel like a lot has been said about nothing. Mike is difficult to converse with because he has the uncanny ability to start talking right as you begin your response, so he is always drowning you out and changing the subject and you never get a chance to follow through on any clear response to anything he said.

OK, as Mike told me, Russell has already paid Mike about $3000.00 for the carpentry for the bath house and the plumbing will be at around another $3000.00 on top of that, plus the $770.00 electric on top of that, plus I believe that Russell has paid for the hot water heater in addition too. Mike donated all the materials which he said were worth a couple of thousand dollars. This is a flea bitten looking bath house for 6 or 7 thousand dollars! There was no one here to direct the labor and Mike said Doodle told the electrician to go ahead and do the electric because it needed to get done and you can’t have thirty people taking showers without lights and if the electric wasn’t water proof people would be getting electrocuted. Bla bla bla bla The foxes got into the hen house and are now trying to explain why those chickens cost so much!

At first Mike said Harold wrote a letter saying the bath house agreement included the electric but then he later said there was no letter and that the agreement with Harold was all on the phone. There was nothing in writing and with other people paying, these boys just started to jack up and add on. As Doodle told me earlier, “extras are what contractors live for.”

Now, Mike claims that most if not all local contractors and subcontractors do not want to work on this job for a number of reasons. One is that the church does not have enough money, that has been printed in the paper and also the sign with the thermometer outside shows the funds have not raised at all ever since the sign went up about six months ago. Since the church may not have the ability to pay, subcontractors will be/ are hesitant to go buy thousands of dollars of materials and generate payroll costs and then perhaps not be paid. Two, is that, purportedly and according to Mike, the powers that be here in WF do not want a black church at this site and contractors are threatening subcontractors that if they take the job, they will never work in WF again. He said that the only electrical contractor that will do the work is Willen Electric, for whom someone owes $770.00 and if Willen doesn’t get paid, they are not going to want to work on this job as a whole. Mike said to just have Russell pay the bill and move on because it is not worth it to alienate the only electrical contractor who has agreed to take on this job. Mike claims to have received death threats and threats to not build the church. OK OK bla bla bla

What a mess, I try to say to him, well the basic issue here is that there was a misunderstanding about exactly how much work was going to be done for the $3000.00 and then Mike goes off on tangent after tangent and he just doesn’t seem to want to see things from my perspective. He can’t understand what I am saying. He goes on and on about how electric was needed in the bath house, volunteers were coming, they needed hot water ( there is an electric hot water heater because it would have cost $600.00 just to get a gas line out there) and Russell and the Pastor both insisted that a hot water heater was necessary, upon hearing the scuttlebutt that Harold was willing to do without one, so here is an additional twist, that the perceived need for hot water may have spurred Mike and Russell to just OK whatever was necessary to get that hot water in, since it was told to me by the Pastor that it wouldn’t have been right to have people working and then not be able to get clean and take a hot shower.

Mike paints a picture of himself as being the only guy in town who is willing to build this church and that when he signed on he “didn’t know nothing about no volunteers but I agreed to work with ‘em”. He has said that it would be much more cost efficient to not work with volunteers because of the continual time needed to retrain people and that over-all we (me and Mike) would be babysitters. At that point I had to say that of course it would be more efficient to have all professional workers but the reason to have QWI is to build consciousness, to educate, to create a meaningful experience and show some compassion in a suffering world and Mike agreed but then had to add the caveat, “but you have to admit it would be more efficient to work with all professional workers” well sure it would be but the reason we are here is to build more than the church, the volunteer work and human contacts will ripple out and end up being positive in way more aspects than building the church...”but you have to admit it would be more efficient to work with all professionals” This is what it is like to talk with Mike Corbett. He doesn’t hear you, he only hears what he is going to say next.

He is a nice enough guy and we get along OK but I don’t feel that he really understands much beyond whatever is contained in his particular view of the world. He has a very limited horizon and is quite boorish and bullish about the confines of his own little world. He claims to have built high rise buildings and all sorts of stuff, so why then did he not catch the problems with the architect’s plans right off the bat? Mike is clearly culpable for some of the delays by not red flagging the plans sooner.

I have to admit that now I am discouraged. I have never been in any situation where as much went wrong in as short a period of time as this and me being responsible for it. There is so much up in the air that I can’t possibly control it all. This whole electric bill thing has put me in a very awkward situation and then the work has been stopped, no word from Russell, no work happening outside now at 10:30AM, 3 volunteers coming on the 6th, I have no tools for them to work with, if I stick the bill on Mike, how can I then ask him to borrow tools, take me to look at used hot water heaters, give us the counters he promised? It is a screwy situation. I made none of the decisions yet I am left to handle all of the disputes and mess of it all. I would just as soon wait and let Harold handle this when he gets here because all the little twists and this and that is too much for me to keep mediating and a fair amount is at stake with my political and working relationship with Mike. In SCA I was always instructed to let the SCA higher up staff handle any potentially sticky situations because then my working relationship would not be compromised. I don’t know Harold well enough now to tell if he would blow up about this or agree to wait and deal when he arrives. I have been burned in situations like this already by deciding on the spot how to deal.
We need a tent and the National Guard contact is out of town until the 6th, there is no clear place to put a tent now because of back hoe work and big piles of debris and church junk in the area where a tent might go.

I was sitting here typing and all the electric in the house went out, boom, computer gone, zap!
I go out back and power company guys have put in a new meter and said, “Oh we thought this was just a temporary, we didn’t know anybody was living here.” Lucky for me Chris told me how to have a timed backup and this entry was saved.

I stepped outside and the Reverend Thompson was sitting with Elbert and Mike Ingram. I went out and they were talking about cattle and bulls and the Reverend’s big bull he sold for $6000.00 and all the cows he had to sell to get his new car. He had show cattle. It was really uplifting to be with him because here he is with the weight of so much on his shoulders and he is telling stories about cows. He was tired from staying up all night with Dorothy, who is still in the hospital. He said “I hurt so bad I can hardly stand it.”

He started telling me how many funerals he’s done in the last eight years, aunts, uncles, mother, father and he said people think he is good at funerals. “More lies are told at funerals than anywhere else. “I tell it straight, if you live the life of a pig, you die a pig, right out in the sun. I don’t tell lies, I am here to pay one last respect to the dead.”

He is 61 years old, was born in Jamaica, Theophilus Erinozay or something, moved to Mexico and then to Oklahoma at age thirteen. We got to talking about kids not listening to their elders and he told me a story about how his father told him something and he took that advice. Well, when he was fifteen he was going with a married woman. “I was a stud. Her husband must of had a little one.” (and the Pastor showed about half the size of his pinky) “I was a pretty good stud.” She was 28, married and white and in those days it was full segregation and you didn’t get seen in the front seat of a car with a white woman. One day the married gal came over to Ted’s house driving a new car and she left it there with the keys and called a cab. She gave it to Ted. His father said, “take that car to Tulsa and put it on the lot and tell the dealer you will come back with the title” Ted did that and then arranged to meet his married white girl in an all black town. There were two all black towns in the area. She gave him the title and probably a little something else too. Ted went back to the lot, got $1500.00 and went home. His Dad then said, I want you to take that money and go to San Francisco. Two days later the girl’s father was coming around with a shotgun looking for Ted.

He came back from S.F. when he was 20 after being a prize fighter all over the country and at 21 he met Dorothy and married her when she was 16. “She’s my only wife, but not my only woman.”
So, he and Dorothy have been in WF for 40 years, have one son and one day about 15 years ago they were over in Oklahoma at a Café and an old woman kept staring at Ted and staring and Dorothy said she was going back to the motel room and the woman came over to Ted and said “You haven’t changed a bit” and Ted thought well you sure have, I don’t even know you, and then she said something about the car and he knew right away and they had a talk and Ted made sure to tell her not to say anything about him because there still might be somebody wanting to get him for what they did. The woman told Ted he was the best thing that ever happened to her. Anyway, the moral of the story is that you should listen to your elders.

I am preparing lunch in the kitchen and I can hear Mike and the electrician talking out back about how Mike beat the shit out of some black guy and the electrician said, “yeah, you got to stand up to ‘em.” The gory details of Mike’s fight were loudly broadcast until somebody got some sense and quieted down. Then later I’m working in here and Mike comes in and hangs out and we start talking about music and it turns out he is very musical and likes Jesse Colin Young, Neil Young, James Taylor and I’m looking at him and thinking, boy, I thought I was a bag of contradictions!

I talked to Russell about the electric bill and he said it wasn’t worth it to make a big deal about it and he would pay it if Harold continued to refuse to pay. Phew! Russell is also going to have me sick our spin doctor, investigative reporter attack dog on the architect. Sister Dorothy (another Dorothy) called me up, I am now Brother Fred to her, and we talked about how they all had an inspirational meeting at the place of worship last night and the Reverend was blessing them all with a new anointment, a new beginning and she said it was all really great and if there was anything she could do, just let me know. I will do a little internet work for her on grants from main line religions for burned churches.

Mike is going to lend me some tools for the few volunteers coming on the sixth and we had a nice talk about music, lifestyles, Florida, etc He has a computer game he has been playing for seven years: “I have thirty seven galaxies and there aren’t hardly no aliens in ‘em, not enough to knock me out.....”. Sometimes the absurd and the ridiculous coincide directly with real life.

Yesterday in the paper there was a huge letters section devoted to whether two books concerning same sex marriage should be permitted in the public library. This cracked open the vast rift between absolute and relative morals. I could hardly believe the literalist true believer type stuff I was reading. These folks were all quoting the Bible, hate the sin, love the sinner, homosexuality is a sin against God, no gray area, “as Bible believing, God-fearing Christians, we will not condone what God himself, in his word, condemns”, “this tolerance coupled with the accompanying cancerous tool of compromise has brought our nation to our current position of moral decay”, “the moral sinkhole that is swallowing our communities”, and here’s one from God himself, “He who rejects me and receives not my words has one that judges him; the word that I have spoken, the same shall judge him in the last day.” This strikes me as a kind of advanced form of dog training.

Obviously there can be no discussion with people like this, either you are on board or not. People cannot break through to the other side, if a choking literalism prevents realizations of a common humanity.

5/31
I switched some screens around so I could get some cross ventilation in the room where I’m sleeping and it indeed was a bit cooler as the night progressed. The only problem was that with the new window open, I could clearly hear about eight dogs which seemed to bark just about all night long. I hate barking dogs. Why don’t dog owners have the decency to shut them up? What kind of slob would let animals make such a racket all night long? You know beforehand that they are oblivious to common decency and not predisposed to changing their ways, so approaching these people will in all likelihood not be a fruitful endeavor and formal complaints and mediation will follow and bad blood engendered, all because of barking dogs.

This morning, after the $3000.00 plumbing work, all the toilets are stopped up. Plungers won’t work. I have never seen anything like this situation. How can this scene be so flaky as to have so much go wrong. Everything is going wrong in one way or another. A woman showed up to volunteer and I was told she was coming on the sixth. I guess I just have to get used to the idea that nothing should be expected to work out and when it does, then we can all praise the Lord!

Lynn Balzer, who has made up some really nice flyers for us and who lives in Spiro, OK, came to visit yesterday and stayed over night and she picked up on some of the organizational difficulties and commented that “Jesus said you can’t build on a foundation of sand”. Now why does it all have to get back to Jesus for a simple parable like that? To be a good Christian does every single situation, no matter how mundane, have to ultimately be reduced to what Jesus did and said? If a guy is going to build a house, he has to be smart enough to have a good foundation, no matter what Jesus said!

Emmett McCracken is and 83 year old Quaker guy Harold hired as one of the QWI staff. He is a nice guy but generally pretty out of it. He has a lot of experience and is a tough old booger. Who do you know who is 80 something and able to live in a camper on the back of an old Mazda rotary engine truck and dig and shovel and eat 25 prunes a day? I believe he has got some Alzheimer’s. He doesn’t quite get it that I am the director and always has some alternative suggestion to what I have seen as the most clear and efficient way to do something. He won’t do what I tell him without a lot of explanation and finally I just have to either let it be or just tell him to do it. For example, Harold ordered five dozen sheets and enough pillow cases and pillows for 30 people. We did not know this until we found the boxes in the back of a room here. Emmett had previously gone out and bought a whole bunch more pillows and sheets and when I said that we now didn’t need that many and that he should take them back, he got all kinds of ideas about why we need the 60 pillows for an average of 24 people per week. OK Emmett, we’ll just keep moving all those pillows and sheets around when they are in our way and then Harold can tell you to take them back when he gets here and also tells you I am the boss. One annoying thing, when we run the AC, Emmett keeps turning it off and onto fan only, then I find myself all sweaty in the office and go out and turn it back and it keeps going this way.

I can’t say Emmett is a bad guy, it’s just that to have a good staff, we need sharp people. One of the church people said she had someone who could be the cook, her father, Rufus Jenkins. Rufus is looking nearly as old as Emmett. Now how can I tell him and Darlene no when McCracken is here and they are all sitting around waiting to see if I will hire him or not? We’ll have to see how that all goes. If Harold can hire Emmett, I can hire Rufus.

This is all so different from SCA in that there appears to be zero structure, no Handbook, no formal directions to look at for guidance. I can take this and keep telling myself that it is all screwed up and then develop a self fulfilling prophecy or I can adjust, keep my attitude straight and modify my expectations so that flux is just the way it is, minute to minute.

******
6/1
We went to church with the congregation yesterday and the Pastor was preaching about Sampson and what God could do for a guy with the jawbone of an ass if you would just have faith. He also said a lot of good common sense stuff like “you don’t have to tell everybody you are a Christian, let your life shine, let it shine and that is good enough, people will see without you having to say anything”. He would be preaching and the women would be saying “amen!”, “that’s right!”, “praise God!”, “Hallelujah!”. After an hour or more, the Pastor asked Emmett and D. and myself to come up in front and tell everybody why we were here. He gave Emmett the microphone and then we all got a chance to speak and they were all saying “amen!” after stuff we said and it was great to feel their appreciation and see their smiles. Afterwards they had a collection and a guy was playing organ while the Pastor spoke and he caught the rhythm and the word of God came out as kind of a spoken song. When it was all over folks came to socialize and introduce themselves and then the Pastor took us out to a buffet where we hogged out on fried catfish. He told us a long story about house moving and how he had to put axle grease on the wheels to squeeze the whole deal through an underpass. By this time it was over 100 degrees out. Emmett had been sick during lunch and had to go to the bathroom about five times.

We got back to the house and D. and I then went shopping at WalMart and she donated $200.00 worth of kitchen supplies. We got back and Emmett was out back in the 108 degree sun using my good screwdriver as a crow bar trying to fix a door jam. He had turned the AC off inside. I thought this guy is going to kill himself and drive me fucking nuts.

As the day wore down we were all in the living room having a nice discussion about various topics and I felt good to be involved in something normal and fluid, just having a few laughs and people holding forth on this and that.

The dogs are amazing to bark literally all night long with almost no let up. I can see that is going to be a big problem, not to mention that the neighbor, John Martinez has a party shack directly adjacent to out bunk house. I just shut my cross ventilation window and plugged in some thick ear plugs and had to turn the fan back on high to drown them out, but then slept an extras hour to make up for the lost time dealing with dogs at 3:AM. I thought of making up cakes mixed with pure anti-freeze, of blowing them all away with a pistol, of poisoning them with strychnine laced hamburger meat. That all had to be let go of before I could drift off back to a dream about a huge tornado comin’ to get me, really close and furious and dark, where is the car!!!????, which way should I run!!!!????
Well, the day is done and it was another hot one, close to 108, just like yesterday. When the hog and cattle trucks drive up from Ft. Worth and on to Amarillo and points of unknown livestock rendevous with fate, you can smell ‘em as they pass by. Lives being trucked around for our eating pleasure. While I’m on the topic of animals, I made a frontal assault on the roaches today. Last night I saw a roach on my toothbrush and that was war. They have been crawling on my legs at night, on our plates, tables, glasses, sink and I said “the party’s over”. I got a bunch of roach motels, some kind of egg case destroyer, boric acid and pump spray and I hit ‘em hard. I hate seeing roaches on any of my stuff as I have memories of way serious infestations in Chicago. “Commander Roach, we are taking heavy losses in the kitchen, they are dying by the thousands!” “Don’t worry soldier, there’s plenty more where they came from.”

People from around here are big and fat and ugly. I fit right in! Serious though, I haven’t seen people this ugly anywhere. I go into a store and it is like the bar scene from Star Wars. People don’t care if they have fat hanging all out the side of their shirt and big blobby arms and legs rolling through the parking lot. Scruff rules and trailer trash is the norm. It is really entertaining to see people who are so different from what I am used to in AZ, CA and WA. Mike was right. This is a different breed of white people here.

Apropos of watering the foundations, I found out also that not only is it clay which tosses and turns houses but gas and oil bubbles too, which expand and contract with the season’s temperatures and jerk around the occasional house. All those derricks you see out there pumping along are sucking up natural gas or oil. The gas and oil are in bubbles and the trick is to locate a bubble, sink a line into it and start sucking. That sounds OK to me. By the way, can anyone tell me definitively where the phrase OK came from?

I’m going to Dallas tomorrow for lunch and to pick up donated goods from Fred Holland, the Quaker PR guy and also to meet with Cliff Pearson, another Quaker fellow down there who is the editor of the Dallas Peace Times.

6/3
I drove south out of WF on 281 to Jacksboro, where people go when they want their jaw jacked, stopping at Arrowhead Lake State Park to check out future camping, get-away spots. The lake was interesting for three reasons only, it was cool with wind blowing off the water, there was a colony of prairie dogs right next top the road and there were big oil derricks out in the lake, by the dam which provided some vertical relief which is very scarce in these parts. To see something tall is noteworthy around here.

I enjoyed the drive and emptied my mind of all complications and soaked in the oaky greenery and long rolling hills. I love to travel and I pulled that ace out of my sleeve and soaked it in, looking all around. Free! Free to choose any route to Dallas I wanted. The country side is actually not too bad around Jacksboro way and Jacksboro itself has a very cool, large stone building in the old downtown. I just enjoyed every moment, until I began to get into the outskirts of Dallas, whereupon the traffic thickened up to big city proportions and I was stuck at light after light and in huge freeways snaking out in all directions.

As I drove towards the Dallas skyline, I could think only of Bobby and JR and how it must have been hellish to commute like this from Southfork everyday. I arrived at Holland/ McAlister PR only a half hour late and we promptly went out to Chinese buffet where we all gorged on teriyaki chicken and all manner of tasty, meaty morsels, plate after plate after plate. Those fellas are quite a bit bigger than me, enough so as to make me appear rather svelte, so I didn’t feel too bad about porking it down. I guess you call that a relative rational for hogging out. There will always be a fat ass bigger then me! We talked turkey about the press release and I noticed the strained relations between Cliff and Fred as Fred is the boss and is paying Cliff to work on QWI stuff but Cliff is a volunteer from the Dallas Meeting and also on the Peace and Justice Committee that is working for SCYM/ QWI contacts and support, so there are blurred lines and feelings and Cliff essentially does not feel valued and wants Fred to throw him a bone but Fred is self absorbed and while he does value Cliff, maybe doesn’t have the skills or inclination to say it. It is good old boss/ employee dynamics. I could see that. Been there, done that, got the T-shirt.

Fred gave me a couple of fans and two line phones and I got in my car and drove back to WF without stopping, the fastest way possible, as it was 104 in Dallas and 108 in WF. My brain was broiling with hot wind and my drinking water was hot too. I was feeling dizzy and crazed, driving 75MPH and rolling through cowtowns and being blasted by semis pushing big tsunamis of hot air right through my open windows and practically ripping out my ear drums. Back in WF I went straight to DQ and cooled it with a large chocolate shake.

Today Harold e-mailed with the news that the Tanzanian scouts were all denied visas and that he would be arriving in WF on the 10th with 3 people instead of 26. That is just as well as there is no work to do except fix up and remodel the premises here to get ready for volunteers. Some church members are disheartened by the situation with the architect and I have been trying to bolster their spirits, as I have had an awakening of my optimistic self and I feel good. I can’t maintain seeing the glass of water as half empty. I have to continue to do the best I can. All I can do is offer the my best side to a tough situation.

Thompson and Dorothy stopped by, with Darlene carrying the bucket for her to vomit in and I had a chance to hug Dorothy a few times and shoot the breeze before they had to leave because she became ill. She just looked tired this time, wore out. The Pastor was cheerful and we hung out for a bit. It is another hot one, 108 again. We got a heat wave and it be humid too! I listen to my Messiah and that just gets me going. I love it, especially this version form the Academy of Ancient Music.

Tom, Doodle’s brother of Devil’s music fame, came by and invited me and Emmett to church tonight. They are having a revival and they will be speaking in tongues and stuff and I would kind of like to see it but it might become clear that I am possessed by the Devil himself and there’s no telling what would happen then!

Well shoot, I went, with Brother McCracken, from 7-8:30PM and I’ll tell you, it was different from what I am used to. This was a Pentecostal Revival. For the first half hour they sang sappy songs with the words projected up on two big screens. The music was pathetic compared to some of the great religious music of Bach, Handel, Baroque or Renaissance styles.  The words were stuff like we are in the river of God, bla bla bla. Emmett and I were the only ones who didn’t stand up. A lot of folks were doing the raise the hands thing, and waving them around, “praise the lord” etc I noticed one young woman in particular who was jumping up and down and giving her nubile flesh a good shake for the Lord. Religion wasn’t the only thing experiencing a revival.

Then the Evangelist came out and started talking about how some people in the church knew how to go through the motions but were really not feeling the power of God. They were acting it out. Well, Brother Wayne proceeded to put on an act for an hour, inspired by a number of conversations he had with God. He went on and on like he just had a long distance call with God and God said this and God said that and God taught him a lesson and God did this and God said that. It was like God was living in the next town over and Brother Wayne somehow had direct access to God, who magically is inaccessible to the rest of us. If Brother Wayne is in such direct contact with the creator of the universe, you’d think that God would relay a little more significant a message, be a little more magnimonious and concerned about things of larger import than the petty jive Wayne was getting after. It was really a spectacle of the most crass literalism you can imagine. How people can go for this type of stuff is really beyond me. Dad, there is no danger of me joining up with any of this kind of stuff. I might pretend for hot pooty tooty but not for reals.

I was particularly impressed with Wayne’s point that Pentecostalism is not the fastest growing religion, Islam is and then he actually said that was the Devil’s work, that Muslims were doing the work of the Devil! I could then see myself in the pictures of the Martyr’s Mirror and that if these people discovered who I really was and what I stood for, they would burn me alive. If today was back then, I would be tortured and killed as a heretic. It is really disgusting that people believe this simplistic drivel. I am shaking my head in disbelief.

The Evangelist would stalk back and forth, repeating everything three or four times and then say “You know what I’m saying?” He would be yelling and screaming, “You have to ARRIVE, with the spirit of the Holy GHOST, you have to ARRIVE with the SPIRIT of the Holy Ghost, you have to.....” There was a lot of anointment talk and Holy Ghost talk and a lot of, “If the rapture came today, would you go or be left behind? Do your sins stand between you and being taken away by the Holy Ghost?” Brother Wayne went on to prove that the signs prophesied were here now, all the people moving to Israel, wars, pestilence, homosexuality, lesbianism, it is just like Sodom and Gomorrah and God will strike them down and lay them waste, because he just put in a call to Brother Wayne and told him so directly! You better believe it or you will burn with Hellfire because it only takes Satan a few minutes, only a few basic human weaknesses to work on and you are lost, you are fundamentally flawed and need constant ministering by the likes of brother Wayne to save your soul. Oh, and by the way, here is the collection bag, don’t forget your tithing.

Wayne also hit on the mind/ heart dichotomy, implying that the mind was impure while the heart was the center of worship.

There was a distinct air of being hyped, with the easy musical hooks that clearly got the crowd going and the preacher’s and other ring leaders subtle changes of voice plus blatant appeals for participation such as “Do you love Jesus?!?!” It reminded of a magic show where the wool is being pulled over your eyes and you know it yet you suspend your critical functions to immerse yourself in the experience. It reminded me at once also of a Grateful Dead concert, with people jumping around and cutting loose, waving their hands in the air, spontaneous yelling and screaming. It was a rally, specifically designed to hype people up and steer their consciousness down a narrow path. (With the Dead, it was all free and non-coercive.)  It was also somewhat like what I would imagine a Nazi rally to be like, with the leader up front barking out simplistic jargon and the crowd all doing the salute. You could say well, religion is for the good, but that comment about the Muslims really turned me around. If these Pentecostalists believe that, then Hallelujah starts to become equivalent to Heil Hitler.

You know, if Heaven is going to be filled up with people like this, I would prefer Hell. 

Tonight we went out to look for cool photo opportunities of midwestern Americana and that was fun. We found exactly what we were looking for in giant abandoned grain silos and the abandoned Holt Hotel, resplendent in it’s squalor and grandiosity, a broken down hulk yet still in possession of a mystique and allure.

Then it was off to a Baptist church where the Powerhouse choir was going to sing and I was going to be interviewed, on Christian TV, the only Christian TV station in this part of Texas. The choir was really good, they were  genuine and all there. They sang with emotion and sincerity and covered the older song material, one that connects with the Baroque and therefore, with my interests.

The interviewer was Sameta Brown, who had upper arms bigger than my thighs, she was a big legged woman with a beautiful face and smile and she praised god that I was here in WF and while I was saying my spiel about QWI, the choir was saying Amen!, That’s right! And they were my people. I knew them on a friendship basis. I don’t quite know how to take all this religious stuff but it seems there is no escaping it. It will be good networking for me to visit other churches and meet the Pastors, get the word out that we need some help to rebuild the church for my people.

There are some really, really good looking girls in the church and in the other churches, babes of the highest degree, with crosses hanging around their necks and booty shaking inside tight dresses. I sense that the black people are not overly righteous about religion and give it  it’s place, honor it highly but when church is out, then it is time for life and all the fun it can bring. The blacks remind me somewhat of the rural Mexicans in that sitting around and talking and shooting the breeze under a tree is entirely normal, for hours and hours. The Pastor wants to take me fishing. I am thinking, looking at these women, would it be worth it to get some, to marry one, to live in WF? Could I convince them to leave? It seems the black women all have children by way more than one father and the whole family network is extended far into the community. I am looking around and thinking about extending something into the community. I would really like to get it on with some of these gals. They are hot!

Some are butt ugly too and so many people in general in WF are really obese. As I perused the meat aisle there was stuff I had never seen, cow brains, turkey necks, nasty stuff full of fat. No animal gets wasted around here. I actually seem slender around here. One woman at the laundromat, a big fat white woman had on a sweat shirt with the sleeves cut out and no bra, so you could see her nasty tits hanging there amidst the rolls of fat while she pressed her clothes. Lord help me. I have lust in my heart. I want some hot poon tang to take over my mind and body, I want to be bewitched by a soul sister. I want to get my white boy lips on some of those luscious big smackers.

I am feeling more at home now. My role is becoming clearer. With people coming I give the rap. I show them around town, I tell them what is what. I direct them and mold their expectations and bewitch them with my incessant talk about this and that. I can do that. 

6/6
An interesting note of yesterday, D. Rogers, a woman volunteer, put down linoleum flooring for us in the bath house. As she was working, Pastor Thompson came in and brought us three big fat fresh catfish for dinner and he sat down to shoot the breeze. He caught 17 and could have caught more if a spiny fin hadn’t of punctured his inner tube and made him have to go fix it. I was telling him that D. had done the whole interior of her own house in Houston and Thompson looked out the door with a look of real consternation at D., on her hands and knees spreading adhesive and sticking down her nice cuts. Thompson was flustered by her. Later, one of Mike’s construction workers came by and saw me caulking in the edges by the showers and after I told him D. laid the floor he said “a woman did this?” These guys are just blown away that a woman can do anything handy, apparently unused to the notion and even the sight of a talented and competent woman. I guess women around here are just expected to make babies, fry catfish and drag the brats to church. D. is your classic Quaker woman, unflappable, confident, easy, natural and comfortable with herself.

Sameta Brown came by yesterday afternoon and wanted more info about QWI and after every explanation I gave she would respond by saying something about how God was leading us and God this and God that and the Holy Ghost was going to get so and so for their evil sins. She will be hosting a Christian radio show this morning and call me up to go on the air. It seems that some folks have the God bug a little stronger than others and when you speak with them, everything is reduced to God and how he will make everything work out. You converse and say your piece and the response is inevitably that God is involved and God will see us through and God is good and on and on.

I am not used to having all my motivations ascribed to God, as in God has blessed us in sending you here. I don’t recall putting in an application with God for this job but even my boss has the God thing going and when things get tough, he pulls out the big fella and says stuff like, well God must have a reason for this, God has a design. Obviously I have had to scale back my cussing to an extreme degree and only when I am in my car alone can I cut loose with some good, satisfying profanity! All this sacred has to be balanced with a robust God dammit and son of a bitch every now and then!

It is interesting however that all this religious stuff has caused me to study up on and become more fluent on where I stand in relation to the great mysteries of life. This is properly the subject for a whole other essay and I have been working on that too. Suffice it to say that I feel my perspective has become more sophisticated in that I am including a lot more than I was when I was 28. I will paste in here some highlights of various texts that I am studying so that I will have something intelligent to say when I happen to get caught on TV again. When I am around town now, people have seen me, they know who I am, I have to be careful because I am now a public figure. I am representing more than just FCA.

edited from FCA texts 6/6/98

Compassionate people want to help others and correct perceived wrongs, injustices and inequities. These motivations, whether secular or religious, are essentially the same. I perceive certain things to be going wrong with the world and I see service as action that seeks to right those wrongs. I believe a core human attribute is to want to try and alleviate suffering.

At the heart level comes the realization of being human, more than animal and ego desires. A person can begin to see outside of themselves and recognize and identify a common humanity. When you see another human you are also seeing your self. You are the same. Thou art that.

I am searching for a larger meaning in life. Service work holds the promise of a transformational experience that satisfies these self actualization capacities. People want to be fulfilled and regardless of the reasons they use to gain this fulfillment it seems to me to be an inborn, innate, teleological tendency. Perhaps at the highest levels of being human is the urge to go outside of oneself, to make and take action in areas of concern.

Service is what Quakers/ people  do when they want to act on their principles. “Witnessing” is an expression of faith. I am steering towards my highest motivations and that is the best I can do.
The “higher” motivations are all on the same scale. It is a question of degree. Maybe you feel strongly the suffering of others and feel a need to walk the path of doing something about it. Where your reasons and motivations are will be an evolving process. Throughout life, how service is framed rests in a developmental context. 

Some endeavors can be grand with a huge impact while others are more middle of the road and still others are smaller in their effect.
The effectiveness of a group service project can all get down to how well it is all framed to the participants. How the stage gets set is very important to how the play carries on. How this all plays out in the field depends upon the honesty and forthrightness of the group and the skillful steering of the leaders. The goals and agendas involve a process. To navigate the waters of service work, some sensitivity needs to be maintained to the different reasons people see for their work.

For me personally to get to a space where I am comfortable with my motivations I really need to be working for something rather than have my primary motivations be against something.

Service work can have multiple goals at the same time. Service work has the dual benefits of materially helping people in need as well as being the vehicle for a transformational experience for all involved.

I really enjoy group building and working for a transformational experience. For me it is just great to make a difference in people’s lives.

Sometimes, but not always or even most of the time, things must be done while great distraction prowls the land.  The task is to let the True Goal become apparent as we wend our way through a set of circumstances and view objects which masquerade as The One.

If you know me, you know that I seldom speak in absolutes.  Frequently, I will say that we exist on shifting sand and that 'this could be that'.

But every once in a while The One must be seen and seized.  Steve Mueller


Here are some interesting historical connections for me as I am a Mennonite ancestor and have grown up more or less as a Quaker. My ancestry has coincided with where I am at today. I am actually a product of my ethnic background. It is fascinating to me that my own roots would be so congruent with where I stand today, as a firm believer in the right to establish my own peculiar understandings of the world. 

Protestant Reformation/ Mennonites

Before and after the Reformation, the state church, both Protestants and Catholics were persecutors of nonsubscribers. Two main issues: 1) State-Churchism vs individual conscience and choice, 2) Pacifism and non-resistance vs force of arms and coercion.

A small group of men in Zurich, Switzerland, Conrad Grebel, Felix Manz and George Blaurock, erstwhile disciples of Zwingli,  “came to believe that the name “Christian” should be applied only to those who truly practice the teachings of Jesus”, not just people who go to church.

1/21/1525 The above men baptized each other as true disciples of Christ and Anabaptism was born.

A core point was questioning the true function of the church and it’s relation to the state and the individual, membership voluntary, free from hierarchy and coercive power of old church

Christ not present in the sacraments but in the body of the believer, religion is an individual heart experience, each individual responsible to God alone for his spiritual standing, baptism only upon confession of faith.

“...frowned upon “testimony meetings” and regarded them as evidence of spiritual pride. Emphasis was placed on the deeper life with God, rather than on a noisy emotionalism.”

1660 The Martyrs Mirror, a monumental illustrated book including all known Christian martyrs from Christ to 1600.  My Mennonite ancestors were persecuted, tortured and murdered for their beliefs.

1677 William Penn visited Cresheim Germany and converted Peter Schumacher to Quakerism, Schumacher is my ancestor. Penn later preached from Schumacher’s front steps in Germantown, where I was born 13 generations later.

The Germantown Antislavery Protest of 1688. Quakers and Mennonites collaborated.


Quakerism (I am a universalist Quaker rather than “Christ centered” Quaker, so I am laying out my own twists on the common themes.)

What people are having faith in is principles, not some immutable, literal truth. The principles are the critical thing.

Bob Brown, retired theology professor from Stanford, says you cannot separate the mind and heart. A human being is a whole. Mind and heart, content and process cannot be separated. This is in direct conflict with the preaching of Brother Wayne and a lot of others who make the easy observation that the mind is false and the heart is true. My project is to understand and integrate, not to divest bone fide aspects of my self.

The Kingdom is within. There is that of God in every man. The inner light, a portion of truth is held by each person. In Quakerism the idea is to establish your own relationship with the higher forces of life. This coincides with the Mennonites to a degree.

Obviously salvation can mean a number of different things. What I see is it being  a transformation where one changes course and atones for past wrongs done, to others and oneself, and starts over. Permission is granted to begin a new. This is atonement, at-one-ment, with one’s deepest aspirations. Salvation is perhaps the process of becoming congruent with one’s deepest ideals. This can easily be put into a secular context and the notion of being reborn, resurrected, risen again, can be seen as a metaphor for pulling up one’s bootstraps and starting over after taking the wrong or personally untrue path.

“But I’ll get back, on my feet someday. The good Lord willing, if He says I may. I know that the life, I’m living’s no good. I’ll get up and live, the life I should.”  From Wharf Rat: Hunter/ Garcia

1647 first preaching of George Fox

1644-1718 William Penn, (in Jordans England, where Penn is buried, part of the Meeting House or the barn is constructed out of wood from the Mayflower), Penn drew up the constitutions of the colonies of New Jersey and PA, which had clauses for perfect religious freedom. These folks were tired of being persecuted and hassled by the state religions in Europe.

Quakers, the Society of Friends, have no creed, no statement of truth, (I believe in God the father...), no liturgy, priesthood or outward sacrament, women are equal , refuse to take an oath, are pacifists. Similarities with Mennonites.

Fox distilled themes that were formerly separate and which had no unity under a central philosophy or group of people. Fox emphasized the importance of repentance (atonement/ salvation) and personal striving for truth, insisted on inward spiritual experience, testimony against war, recognition of women’s ministry, no use of professional ministry.

The operation of spirit is not limited to time, person or place and therefore Quakers were charged with unbelief in the scriptures and Christ’s person and work.

In the early part of the 19th century there was an emphasis on the Christ within. American Friend Elias Hicks pressed the Doctrine of the Inner Light in such a way as to stress the Christ within way over the historical Christ and his work. There was a neglect and even a disparagement of the scriptures as “outward” and unnecessary. Today there are three main divisions, unprogrammed (silent meeting), programmed and evangelical Friends.

Silent meeting Quakers: the service of meeting shall depend upon spiritual guidance, earnest striving of the individual to know God for himself, danger of substituting the symbol for the reality, belief that same spirit that gave rise to the scriptures is still around today. “Quakerism is an atmosphere, a manner of life, a method of approaching questions, a habit, an attitude of mind. Attempts to enforce truth speaking by means of an oath leads to a double standard of truth.”

Today’s Quakerism: You don’t have to be a Christian to be Quaker but Quakers do acknowledge and value the historical foundations as a religious society based on the teachings of Jesus Christ, particularly as understood and articulated by George Fox. There is that of God in all people, each person holds a measure of the light or truth, all can be ministers, continuing revelation, together we may discern a fuller understanding of the truth, meetings are unprogrammed and free of ritual, pacifism, equitable allocation and stewardship of resources. Membership implies involvement in the larger community of Friends Monthly, Quarterly Meeting, Yearly, FGC etc. similar to the Thing. Business and committees run by consensus rather than majority rules. We recognize that no single individual possesses “truth” in all it’s completeness. Disagreement and even conflict are normal to life in any vital and dynamic community. Deal forthrightly conflict w/spirit of openness.

6/6
Speaking of Quakers, I went out to check on how things were going with cleaning the glue off the new floor and Emmett had dug out a bunch of my caulking job from yesterday. He is just in his own world and it is difficult to get through sometimes. He doesn’t seem to recognize that I am his boss and when I tactfully try to direct him, he has tons of hair brained ideas other than what I want to be done and finally I just have to tell him to do it or leave it all for when Harold gets here. Emmett clearly has Alzheimer’s and periodically experiences states of heightened confusion. He will repeat the same things, count incorrectly, respond inappropriately but he is still enough all there to have a good conversation. He is a sweet guy and I have to respect him for being the hard working, dust bowl, farmer that he is.

That’s the problem with people in general, they all have minds of their own and varying levels of competence in different areas and when you get a bunch of them together to do a complex task, invariably there will be discord and better ways suggested and silly mistakes and if you are not careful, lingering hard feelings. That is what happened with Lloyd Steiner up in Idaho at Elk Summit. Sometimes if you have to step in and tell somebody something, for the sake of safety of a good job, those folks become permanently alienated. Sometimes no amount of kid gloves can disguise the fact that you are overriding someone else’s judgement. Hopefully Emmett is out in right field far enough to not hold a grudge for me please asking him not to dig out my caulking job.

Here are some quotes that I have compiled which get right into my current milieu of religion and what life is all about. They have become more apropos of this essay as I have found myself closer to the threshold of what is really real....

I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary; whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.
Sir Isaac Newton 1642-1727

The Kingdom of the Father is spread upon the earth and men do not see it. Logion 113, But the Kingdom is within you and it is without you. If you will know yourselves, then you will be known and you will know that you are the sons of the Living Father. But if you do not know yourselves, then you are in poverty and you are poverty. Logion 3
Jesus, translated from the Gnostic Gospels According to Saint Thomas
The manifestation of the sacred in a stone or a tree is neither less mysterious nor less noble than it’s manifestation as a “god”. The process of sacralizing reality is the same: the forms taken by the process in man’s religious consciousness differ.
Mircea Eliade

You will say, Christ saith this and the apostles say this, but what canst thou say?
George Fox

It is the theory that decides what we can observe.
Albert Einstein

So many things fail to interest us, simply because they don’t find in us enough surfaces on which to live and what we have to do then is to increase the number of planes in our mind, so that a much larger number of themes can find a place in it at the same time.
Jose Ortega y Gassett

The effectiveness of a doctrine does not come from it’s meaning but from it’s certitude.
Eric Hoffer

The truth of direction must precede severity of observation.
Sir Francis Bacon

Primary metaphysical assumption: ultimately unexplainable primordial assumption from which the whole world is constructed, axiomatic, unexplainable, unprovable.
Gary Witherspoon

Every language contains terms that have come to attain a cosmic scope of reference, that crystallize in themselves the basic postulates of an unformulated philosophy, in which is couched the thought of a people, a culture, a civilization, even of an era.. Such are our words “reality, substance, matter, cause, space, time, past, present future.”
Benjamin L. Whorf

In choosing to view the world through one theoretical perspective rather than another... to adopt an exclusively political, social, psychological, behavioral or cognitive view, one easily forgets that one has adopted that perspective for the sake of analysis only and begins to perceive the world and our knowledge of it as inherently compartmentalized in those ways.
A. Bloom

...problem of separating mental process from mental content...Is the belief...an indication of a certain process of thinking or is it an “idea” embedded in an unremarkable logical process? Not only is such a discrimination difficult but “content” and “process” are not really distinct, in that “contents” profoundly influence “process.”   Somebody Levy

Experience is something man projects upon the outside world as he gains it in it’s culturally determined form.
Edward T. Hall

When a code is familiar enough it ceases appearing like a code, one forgets there is a decoding mechanism. The message is identified with it’s meaning.
Douglas R. Hofstadter

In our ordinary day to day experience we think we perceive the visual world objectively, as it really exists, in three dimensions, with all it’s properties of color, form and texture. According to this attitude of naive realism we regard our conscious experiences as subjective, private and derivative. However...the reverse is the case. The primary things are our own conscious experiences.
Sir John Eccles

How unjustified it is to always set up one’s own mores as absolute.
Herodotus

The responsibility merely to repeat a preexistent pattern is no longer the only possibility and man has come to realize that his greatest and most beautiful task is to construct his life after models of his own choosing or, without any models, according to his own principles.
from book: Philosophical Anthropology

...that which is, is no longer anything more than what is said...words...it is in them that what we imagine becomes what we know and on the other hand, that what we know becomes what we represent to ourselves everyday.
Michel Foucault

6/7
I will go to the Powerhouse, for the first time attending church four times from Sunday to Sunday. Maybe Thompson will take us out to the buffet again! I just bought a bargain copy of Messiah highlights yesterday and it is interesting that I have become so interested in Baroque and Renaissance church/ religious music and like to sing a long....”Glory to God!....” and all those great Messiah tunes.  I am in an overtly religious environment where folks take that stuff dead serious while I approach the music from an aesthetic, metaphorical standpoint. It sounds great. I agree that the Messiah is one of the greatest ever. It is inspiring, but I will wait till God pokes his head through the window here and says “Son, why have you doubted me for so long?” I went out to the Olympic coast years ago with the express purpose of finding a sign and with no sign, I made a sea change in my approach to the great mysteries, which ended up with me being agnostic.

Well, the Pastor did take us to lunch again and after he finished eating two huge plates full of food, one salad and the other catfish and fried chicken, he regaled us with one long monologue about all kind of stuff. He told us how Dorothy’s stomach and intestines are all folded together and the doctors told her she could never eat again. Apparently she was given 17 days to live in February. The doctors are all giving their services for free now and so is the nurse. It is an actual miracle that she is still alive. The doctors come over just to hang out and be around her.  So, Ted has been feeding her cookies and stuff and putting tacos in the blender and low and behold, she took a dump and the doctors came over and got it out of the toilet and were dumbfounded over how that could even be possible. Thompson loves to go fishing. He said he would fish for minnows in his coffee cup if that was all the fish around. Dorothy is a shop-a-holic and has over 300 pairs of shoes... so he goes on and on and on. I love to fish, she loves to shop. I got my wife a $44,000 Cadillac and mine cost $34,000. I used to get maybe $2800 a month in the pastoral offering but now with us meeting in a storefront, I get maybe $180. He goes to other churches as a guest preacher and is expected to do a special offering for that preacher and so Ted needs to have some cash to start the bidding. “I got $300 for this offering, will anybody match it?” Sometimes they can get an offering up to $5000 or more. Ted took us out to lunch on the offering from today, even though it was only around $150 or so.

At church he again came up with some cool stuff to say, touching heavily on the theme of for every thing there is a season and a time and a purpose. I didn’t know that was from the bible, I thought the Byrds made that up. Anyway the Pastor said that when the peach tree has ripe fruit, that is the time to pick it. You don’t go to the pecan tree in the summer and look for nuts, that is for the Fall. If you have saved some pecans then you are wise but that’s not the point. His point being basically to go for life and recognize when is the time to harvest and show your fruits and when is the time to wait. When it is time to go for it, don’t hold back, recognize the time, go for it, let it shine. And don’t go half way. Don’t be like wearing a dead man’s suit. A dead man looks all dressed up from the front, but in the back he don’t got nothin’ on. You want the full suit.

He got into the mind and heart but had a nicer take than Brother Wayne, he said go to school, get your education but don’t forget your heart. I feel that the Pastor Thompson has a lot of good, common sense stuff to impart to his flock, he lays it out in biblical parables with his own personal twists and it is all very accessible and easy to take, especially when you know him a bit. It is not pretentious. He is real and genuine and so are the folks from the Powerhouse.

Another parable the Pastor got into was that of Saul on his way to persecute some of the faithful and how Jesus stopped him on the road to Damascus and said “Why dost thou persecuteth me?” What I get out of this is that Jesus is standing in, metaphorically for all of humanity. Jesus is really asking, “Why do you persecute humanity for being different from yourself?” Jesus is trying to get Saul to see that Saul himself is the same as those he wants to persecute. Thou art that. I might be stretching this and am certainly no biblical scholar, but I can see that this could be metaphorical for a general lesson about tolerance and it really doesn’t matter if it is Christian or not. If people twist all biblical meaning to suit their own purposes well I guess I can do it too.

Today the congregation was really hitting it, they were singing spontaneously and it sounded good, clapping hands, amen, AMEN! That’s RIGHT! Praise God. Thank you Jesus. It is all really participatory and inclusive. If you are on board you really belong, you are in, you have respect. Meaning is given through the community and supported by sharing all the stuff they do. They all share in holding Russell’s baby, everybody holds the baby. It is a community baby. The community has strength. They had a testimony session where a lot of folks got up and gave thanks for anything they wanted, including us Quakers sitting in the back. “Thank you for the Quakers.” The Pastor can really sing too, when they were singing one number and rasing their hands and clapping, Ted was reaching up for the Lord with a mighty voice, eyes looking right through the ceiling. It is a great production and by the time all two or more hours of it is done, and we even come late because they start at 9:30 and we come at 11:30AM, you are hungry and then you go to the buffet and it is dam near 4:30 when you get back home. This is not just going to church. This is practically an all day affair and the Pastor usually goes and preaches somewhere else at night as a guest and brings his congregation with him. Today he said to bring their robes and if everybody had theirs, he would preach in his robe. They can sing and he is going to show off his choir. Hallelujah!

6/9
This afternoon and evening we had a rip roaring thunderstorm come through with a repeat of 70 mph winds, some of which tore a branch off the sycamore and dented my fender. The winds started up and you could hear the suction outside the windows like a giant revving motor. We all had to stand by the windows and watch in amazement as all sorts of debris just whipped past and dust swirled and the radio announcer came on and started talking about tornados out by Sheppard AFB. Then the rain came and hail and wind and everything became almost dark as night at 5:30PM. The temperature cooled off nicely after a fairly hot day of putting siding on the bath house from hell. The storm was savage and the equal of any Tucson monsoon, lightning would flash, an X-Ray straight to your soul and then the thunder would rip, peeling back enormous, massive shock waves of sound. We would all hunch up after the flash and then WHAM! The thunder. This went on all through dinner and then there was a short respite while I swept all the water out of the roofless bath house. You’d think for $7000.00 you could get a fucking roof. Then the rain came back for a fierce reprisal after which we all hit DQ and witnessed a fantastic sunset of huge cumulus clouds all pink and gold and greyish thunder beings contrasted below.

Emmett told us a lot about his days as a CO during WW2. He was in Trenton, MT and was the farmer for 150 people, responsible for growing the bulk of the food. He had a few good stories of slaughtering pigs and cows all by himself and how he tricked the horse into dragging a dead cow, “because a horse won’t go near somethin’ dead.” “So I backed him up to it.”

Mike came by during the day with his paintball gun and shot up the dumpster pretty good. Way to go cowboy!

6/13
I asked Harold today what he thought about forgiveness and he gave the parable of the adulteress who, for her transgression, was going to be stoned and Jesus said, “let he who is without sin cast the first stone.” This illustrates that we as humans are not perfect and will be standing in the need of forgiveness someday too, so it would behoove us to be more tolerant of people’s foibles and misdeeds. The Quaker idea of there being some of God in every person speaks to a realization that when you see another, you are seeing yourself too. The unique interiority that is you is shared in similar ways by all humans. Harold went on to talk about how the members of the churches he has rebuilt all had in common a feeling that the church burning was a transformation point for the larger purposes of God and that ultimately it would be for the good. I mentioned that religious or secular, if people don’t move on from tragedy and turn it around somehow, it will just embitter them and eat them up inside. The folks whose churches burned were doing the only thing they could do for their mental and emotional health.

When I came to terms with my burglary a few years ago, what forgiveness amounted to for me was in simply allowing myself to stop obsessing about it, the same was true for my suspension from SCA. I didn’t end up condoning what I thought was wrong, I just stopped letting it eat me up every day all day long. We got into a line about how Harold’s daughter’s friend was raped and the process of her forgiving was tough but she also wanted to see justice done. This was interesting because forgiveness then appears to be more than a mealy mouthed, milquetoast action, but something that you do as self preservation, with a certain amount of compassion but yet still with a clear eye on what is just, what is right and wrong.

Today in the paper was a square off between an atheist philosophy professor and a religious advocate. It was predictable and reminded me of my early college and university years. I had a few thoughts on this myself as the main question was “how can there be a God if there is so much evil in the world?” What I was thinking was why do people want to rip each other off, (and also kill, rape, ethnically cleanse, drag guys buy the head behind a truck etc) how can that be such a consistent and prevalent activity in human history?

What I came to was a broad realization of how all life IS on earth. All life, at the most basic level, must take other life in order to live. Life must consume itself. Animals are always taking from each other’s stashes and killing and eating each other. That is a primary condition from which we as humans are not divorced. The motivations for robbery and burglary are in many ways similar to how a coyote would eat the winter stash of a field mouse. It is flat out opportunism with no morals. I am not trying to justify robbery, just to point out that there is a pretty good precedent in nature and that may be the root of this behavior, even though the human race has the potential to behave according to higher codes of conduct, if people are not taught, they will act more like animals.

Additionally, I don’t see how the organization of the universe and the world, could possibly be set up so that humans are the only species who can be saved by a God and that somehow animals and nature are just here for us to manipulate in any way we want. To me that is absolutely absurd. Life is an mazing miracle, from the smallest tadpole and protists to our own ego heavy, self important species. The miracle of it all is no less because it is algae, corn and oak a fox or a monkey or a fish. I can’t ever possibly buy a literalist explanation of a paternalistic God and the Garden of Eden, original sin, etc, that won’t wash with the Fredster.

On another tack, lately things have been very satisfying in terms of spending money. I have spent over $5000.00 in the last week or so and that is fun! Let’s see, a FAX machine, an AC unit, a vacuum cleaner, various stuff for my computer like a cpu fan, plastic covers, mouse pad, an answering machine, all kind of food and miscellaneous stuff. I go in and buy it baby, pull out that check book and pop another one. One outrageous glitch, the Credit Union babe, Nancy Law, somehow got it mixed up on our checks and they read Ministry to Burn Churches rather than Ministry to Burned Churches. I wondered why people were looking at me kind of funny when they read the check, like I was some kind of psycho, Ku Klux Klan, Timothy McVeigh kind of guy. We will get that rectified.

Harold is a nice guy. He is the Director of QWI and my boss, in town until the end of the month to make sure we get off to a good start. He fell and broke his back in six places, broke both feet and ripped all the ribs out of his sternum. He is recovered now but pretty stove up and diabetic too, 57 and probably weighing in at 300. Harold can talk. He can sit around and blow for hours about all kinds of stuff and I have had to call him on it a few times as he just gets too far out there away from anything we were originally saying. He just likes to hold forth and I like to as well, but hopefully I am not as ignorant of other people squirming in their chairs. Medzio and I roll our eyes when Harold isn’t looking.

Medzio Kumpuni and John Swan came out with Harold. Medzio is from Tanzania and half Polish and a very nice young man. I like him a lot. The same for John, although he is a white guy from the eastern USA. It is a blessing to have two staff come out who are easy, fun, intelligent and willing to take orders.

We have had a van donated to us, with a tape deck, which is good since my Panasonic in the Toyota finally bit it after almost ten years, starting in the Rambler. Harold also brought his big red panel truck which is absolutely full of tools which are one, red hot at 108 degrees again today and two, scattered and impossible to find. Harold sits inside by the AC and orders Medzio and John and I to go out to the tool truck and get this and that and that shit is on fire and lost in a totally unorganized mess. You come back in and Harold then has more orders and I was joking Medzio if he delivered pizza too? We were laughing about being Harold’s slaves. Harold is providing the perspective that this is all a large process.

Bob and Carrol Pearson came this last week from Las Vegas, NM and they were great, very Quakerly and helpful and interesting and I was sad to see them go. We laid on our hands to them before they left and had a significant goodbye ceremony, preceded by a morning F&W style weekday Meeting, preceded by Harold talking for an hour, most of which I spent reading the sports page and the paper. If Pippen hadn’t have gone 2 for 16, the Bulls would have taken it in Chicago, but maybe he tanked it because he hates the owners so bad.

6/14
Thompson came over this morning to sit around before church and he said WF had never had white folks helping black people. Thompson said that something good would come of the burning, all things being working together for the good, and that maybe the white folks in WF and the black folks would come closer together. Apparently there is some bad blood about certain black houses being torn down and now the city repaying those people. I am wanting to ask the Reverend about race relations here but haven’t had the right moment. His real last name is Aravashanty. Theophilus Aravashanty. His daddy only changed it to Thompson because 1) he got in trouble with the law and was deported and changed it to Thompson to get back to the USA or 2) nobody could say Aravashanty and so they changed it to Thompson.

We talked about revenge and anger and Ted had a clear sense of how anger and revenge are going to eat you up. He is having somewhat of a problem with that in that the woman who is the church’s primary suspect in the arson, started wanting to jump Ted’s bones a number of years ago, she offered to take care of Ted’s sex life and Ted told her that even if he was free to do that, she wasn’t his type of woman anyway. He then made sure to say that was a big mistake, never tell a woman she isn’t your type, tell her anything but that. Ted said this other lady couldn’t even be a hatband on his wife’s rottweiler. “My wife isn’t perfect, but she is 90% of what I want in a woman.” So, in addition to this other gal having had the church title in her name, and her husband leaving her because he felt something was really wrong, she was spurned by the preacher and so she started to spread rumors that Ted burned the church himself and has already collected the insurance money and paid for Dorothy’s hospital with that plus bought the new Cadillac, but Ted sold all his cows for the Cadillac, except three and a bull, and God knows that Ted didn’t burn that church. This woman has now taken up with Buchanan, with whom Ted used to be friends and who has the great junk shop and Buchanan is going to marry her. Ted and Buchanan no longer talk.

When we got to church today, the Reverend asked us to come and sit in the section of honor up by the dais and that gave me a bird’s eye view of the most devout members during the whole service.

Church today was really good. The spirit was all there. In the testimony part where everyone gets up and says thanks for getting their relatives across the dangerous roads and for everything else they feel like, thanking the Lords for all good things. One woman thanked for her dental work turning out OK, she had all her teeth pulled, “I had somethin’ on my teeth, I don’t know what it was...” but she thanked the Lord for what she had left. Today there were two organs and drums. The big organ played bass lines and the big fat sustained notes and chords while the other was actually an electric piano. During testimony individuals would spontaneously start singing and everyone would join in and the rhythm section would start up in earnest. They would get down and then ease back into testimony, the drums and organ still working so while a person was giving thanks, they had their own little rhythm to lay it on us with.

We were talking about Ted’s sex issues with Dorothy not being able to do it for four years and the other woman wanting his lovin’ and Harold said he has been impotent for ten years because of his diabetes. I asked him if Viagra did anything for him and he said he was looking into it but hadn’t tried it yet. He said it was a blessing to be impotent when he has to constantly deal with teen age girls and how he is essentially free of the constant temptation of the flesh. That will be an issue here when the Russian single woman who is 42 comes with her two sixteen year old girls, one daughter and one cousin for the whole month of July and I need to keep the office door shut to keep the cool air in. So here I am in church with people giving testimony and praising the Lord and I am lusting after hot girls and women in nice clothes shakin’ it for Jesus. It is really a sublime to the ridiculous kind of thing, Fred in the house of the Lord with eyes following those beautiful big black butts. God help me.

The choir was particularly good today. They started out with Rock of Ages and I shut my eyes and it became much more powerful. The singing and participation just sews threads deeply through the community. It is powerful participation. The music has SPIRIT and packs an emotional wallop and an x-chemistry that is equal to any of the best Dead concerts. It is performed with deep feeling. It digs down right to the core, really powerful, transformational. You shut your eyes and listen to the lead singer belt it out and the chorus then responding, oh man, it is special. The Pastor sang at the end and he is the best of the lot, way better than James Brown, he let it rip big time, a very, very good singer. He sang the words “...out of the depths of my soul, Lord I cry, Lord have mercy...I have done wrong and you have done right, Lord fix my soul tonight...” Dorothy had come in earlier for the first time since I’ve been there and she got a resounding welcome by the congregation. “Here is a miracle from God.” said the Pastor. So when he sang, he was unburdening tremendous feeling. The feeling is what music is really all about.

I thought before I came that I would find so much explicit religion to be distasteful but I am seeing that there is no reason whatsoever for me to condemn this in any way. These people are not hurting anyone and the Pastor does not preach any hate. They are OK in my book.

Last week Thompson did a healing and anointing (with a bottle of cheap olive oil from the lectern) of a woman who had bad back pains and this week she up on stage with the choir clapping, foot stomping and swaying with the beat. They sang “how exc-ellent, is thy name” with sharp stops and then full sustains and they got so wound up in this number that after it was over they had to decompress with a few minutes of “thank you Jesus” etc Connie just about came uncorked with the Holy Spirit apparently descending right into her and she was writhing and shaking and had to be helped off the stage and go to the bathroom to clear up her tears. She let it all hang out. The choir leader recommended to me two Gospel groups who would sound much like this choir. John P. Kee and New Life and Hezekiah Walker and Love Fellowship. I need to get some Gospel music!

Then, to close things out, Pastor Wittington, a friend and guest of Pastor Thompson got up and started singing and carrying on. “Tough times don’t last, tough people do. This too shall pass. Let’s keep our eyes on the prize of a higher calling in Jesus Christ.”

6/16
The following three day trip went north out of WF to Burkburnett, TX, named after Burk Burnett, a rancher who did very well as a result of the Comanche, Quanah Parker’s influence towards Indian assimilation and coexistence with the white man towards the latter part of the nineteenth century. Burk Burnett did so well that he built Quanah Parker a big house in or near Lawton, OK, where Parker entertained US presidents and foreign dignitaries. Out of TX I went north on 44 into Lawton, Oklahoma which is an absolute pit and then to 49 through the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge, with a side trip to Meers for a Meersburger of Longhorn beef. Then it was up 54 to 9E and over through Anadarko, Chickasha to 19E to Lindsay and then south on 74 through Pooleville and then all back roads to 35S to Ardmore, which is an absolute cancer of strip development, terrible, for miles and miles, just as bad as Tucson and then 70W to Waurika and then 79W to Wichita Falls.

I stopped in Lawton to check on some museums and learned a lot. The western edge of the great plains is lifted up, along with the Rocky Mts.. It is higher and drier in the western plains where short grass prairie dominates, grass 6-18" high, in eastern Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, the Texas Panhandle and western Oklahoma. Mixed grass prairie, 1 _  - 5' is generally in the Dakotas, Kansas, Nebraska and central Oklahoma. Tall grass prairie, 3 - 8' high is in Iowa, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, small parts of Michigan eastern Oklahoma and eastern Kansas. On the west, the plains run into the Rockies, on the east they run into woodlands. These woodlands in eastern Oklahoma and north central Texas are called the cross timbers. The cross timbers area extended south into the Wichita Falls area and down into Dallas with another finger extending down further west. The woods were so thick people had tremendous difficulty passing. Now the only remnants of cross timbers are in the Wichita Mountains refugium.  The southern plains end with the gulf coast and the Edwards Plateau of Texas Hill Country fame. The north the plains run into tundra.

The plains are adapted to grazing, fire and a certain low level of rainfall and there are analogous ecosystems around the world, the steppe, the veldt, the pampas. Grasslands dominate where low rain, grazing and a short fire regime give grasses the advantage over other plants. The matted roots hold the soil together through grazing, fire and drouth. Grass grows from the bottom of the stem and thus can take a fire and grow back fast. In part, the dust bowl, from 1933- 1937, was the result of almost entirely disrupting the plains ecosystem by killing all the bison, stopping the fire and plowing up all the soil.

An interesting rock type around the Oklahoma southwest is Permian red bed , which may be the ultimate source of the reddish Oklahoma soils, which clearly are run through and through with iron.

In 1492 there were over 60,000,000 buffalo. In 1889 there were only 500 left. The slaughter was unparallel by anything in the history of mankind and went a long way towards finally conquering the plains Indians by taking away their main resource.

Between 1866 and 1890, 10 million Longhorn cattle, Bos taurus texanus, were driven to railheads headed east. Longhorns were descended from Spanish stock which were periodically abandoned and became feral in the southwest during the Apache wars, Mexican-American war, the Civil War. The breed is tough and hardy from having to fend for itself. As better beef cattle replaced the Longhorn, the breed started to die out but a pure herd of 500 was chosen by ranchers and brought to the Wichita Mountain Refuge and now they can be sen in all their mottled glory. As the railroads expanded such long drives were no longer needed. The cowboy legend and the railroads crossed paths as the west was tamed and made safe for settlement. The old ways vanished as the rails brought in the new faster than the old could adapt.

I had the chance to learn a little bit about the Wichita Indians, the namesake for this incredible hot, windy but not God forsaken place. In 1591, Coronado came sliding through looking for Quivira and gold. He noted 24 different villages, some with as many as 200 grass houses and up to 1000 people per village. These were the Wichita and this was Kansas and western Oklahoma and Texas. The Wichita did seasonal agriculture with corn, squash, beans, pumpkins and mixed that with seasonal hunting of buffalo and other game in the winter. They adapted to drought by going for more hunting and with lots of rain, they could spend more time on agriculture and then trade dried produce for meat with the full time hunters and nomads like the Comanche and the Apache. The ancestors of the Apaches arrived on the southern plains by around 1400.

The Wichita were located in the right place to get horses and firearms and get in on the cutting edge of the dawn of the plains Indians horse culture. From an estimated 30,000 Wichita people there were only 1400 in 1820.

The Texas republic was established in 1836 and in 1855 Texas joined the union. The Wichita were given a reservation on the Brazos River. Hostility with the whites led to their removal to a reservation on the Washita River in west central Oklahoma. In 1900 the reservation was divided into allotments of 160 acres per person on the tribe and the rest of the land was declared “surplus” and opened to white settlers. 160 acres equals a quarter of a section. The US government was hoping the Indians would assimilate to farming and white mans ways but in the end, the old culture was broken and what was offered up in it’s place was not enough to sustain these people through the generations.

6/17
I stopped in to visit the Kiowa tribal complex outside of Mountain View and was perusing their exhibits when a man came out of the back and started to talk. He was a very friendly and personable guy, a full blood. A skin. He was the grandson of Lone Wolf, whose picture can be seen in Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. He was a tragic figure in a way because he was the museum curator but there were big holes in his knowledge about his people and his traditions. The elders are almost all gone, the language is not spoken among the majority of people, the kids don’t seem to care and some only become interested in their ancestry when they get to college and begin to want an identity in general. 

The same thing happened to the Kiowa that happened to the Wichita. They had a reservation but in 1889 and 1890 it was dissolved and everyone was deeded 160 acres and the surplus was opened up for a big land run by settlers. Three or four generations later, the original 160 acres has been inherited by so many ancestors that there is not much space or value on the individual level. A lot of these type of lands are leased for agriculture. A lot was sold in the past for very cheap by people who wanted a bottle of whiskey or didn’t know what they were doing. The end result is that the Indians have been disinherited from their land, even the generally crappy land they were removed to in Oklahoma.

In Oklahoma now there are no reservations but there are lots and lots of tribes. The tribes have complexes and headquarters and little galleries and visitor centers but they have no land as a tribe to speak of. There are no casinos. The tribes are sovereign in some senses but they don’t command any resources and they squabble with the State and the Feds about taxes on cigarettes and gas. The people generally get along with the whites because the Indians don’t have shit that white people want, no fish, no gold, no coal. They can all coexist because in some senses they are all in the same regional economic boat and the economy around southwest Oklahoma is agriculture and some manufacturing and that’s about it, some mercantile and if a guy wants to do good, he has to leave and go to Dallas or Oklahoma City. It is amazing, sad and tragic that one, two, three and four hundred years ago this was all so different.

The Delaware are here, the Nez Perce, the Illinois, the Sac and Fox, all Indians removed from ancestral lands far from Oklahoma. The Delaware signed the treaty with William Penn in 1681 but still ended up being pushed westward into Ohio, down into Texas and finally across the Red River and into Oklahoma. I went to Ft. Sill and saw the stockade and jailhouse where the Chiricahua Apaches were imprisoned. I saw Geronimo’s cell in the basement. I had read all about these places as a youth, I couldn’t get enough information and here I was later, in my mid-life, seeing the real thing.

Once the whites had exterminated the buffalo and established overwhelming military superiority in the east, it was all over for the Indians. Their former way of life was doomed and never to be seen again. With no food, no land, no autonomy, with settlers taking and moving in, it was just a major league raw deal. Now the US is over in Kosovo trying to tell the Serbs not to be beating up on the Albanians and running them out, quit that ethnic cleansing! I think the US needs to come to Oklahoma and redress some past wrongs before pulling that hypocrisy across the globe. There is unfinished moral work here at home that is too easily forgotten and swept under the rug. The Indians now don’t vote and have no political power. They are lost and forgotten until a guy goes there and sees what type of life they have.

One Indian woman at the Museum of the Southern Great Plains in Anadarko, she had a very strong individual responsibility rap. She had no sympathy for people blaming their current state of affairs on the past. She said now is your time, if you want to be an Indian, do it, don’t cry and point fingers. Some Indian kids had just come in and given her a bad time about them having to pay to get in. She was hot too. She was a woman as well as an Indian. She had essentially let go of the past and was moving on from here, from now. I can really respect that because that is exactly what is needed to get over on problems like genocide, gang violence, the ethnic conflicts between Arab and Israeli, Serb, Croat and Muslim, Protestant and Catholic, Hutu and Tutsi. If people continue to hang onto old wrongs and hatreds, it never ends, there is no resolution. The end only comes when enough folks like this friendly Indian woman decide to choose life over death, to choose fulfillment over bitterness.

The wind here is totally wild, incessant, buffeting my car this way and that, hot, unrelenting, fierce, popping tornados here and there. It goes on and on, day by day with maybe a short respite in the morning before the heat kicks things up again.

6/18
I started out today with the usual search for a restaurant. On the whole, these little and not so little Oklahoma towns have no good places to eat. There are plenty of chains which apparently have put the little Mom and Pop places under. I did find a little place in Mountain View yesterday, on 9 east of Anadarko. The place was packed with homeboys and farmers and they had cleaned out the buffet so I had to have another burger. Anadarko has zero good food, zilch and the restaurant I did find I had to send back the biscuits and gravy because the gravy was clearly just white paste with a little pepper in it.

Anadarko is the self proclaimed “Indian Capital of the USA” but it is riddled with problems and contradictions which can be found by looking just under the surface. On my way cruising for breakfast there was a big turtle in the road and as I passed by I could see it’s eyes. I thought I should stop and get it out of the road. In my rear view mirror was a big truck which appeared to intentionally veer and run over the turtle. I couldn’t believe it. As the truck passed i could see they were Indians. I was shocked and disgusted. Why would anyone kill a helpless animal? It is beyond my imagination.

After my breakfast I went to the Native American Hall of Fame, which was a big green with metal busts of famous Indians all around the edge and lots of trees and it was very well done. The only bust made of rock had the nose broken off and all the tile around the base had been vandalized just the night before. Big pieces of tile had also been smashed over the heads of Sequoyah, Osceola and Black Hawk. I had read in the morning paper how Anadarko youth crime was out of control. The kids have no tradition and no one to teach it to them. It is tragic and sad to see such a revered animal as the turtle wantonly slaughtered and the great ancestors defaced and disrespected, their dignity and examples forgotten. Can unbelieving people be civilized? With nothing to believe in, the trucks run over terrapins. With tradition broken and nothing solid ever put in it’s place, these types of tragedies are real and not pleasant to witness.

I figured I should check out Indian City, as long as I was in town and it turned out to be total schlock, a giant tourist trap with guys in costumes and a gift shop full of crap to rival any. I left right away. On the way back to town I stopped at the Apache tribal complex and it was in pitiful shape, all run down, with a cheesy tobacco shop and a bingo hall. I was lucky to run into the Kiowa museum guy and the woman at the other museum because they balanced out my impressions. I can’t say how it all really is over there and hopefully the folks will prevail and work things out in a good way.

The turn of the century architecture downtown was very cool. That is the defining characteristic of a lot of these small southwest Oklahoma towns. Anadarko had torn down quite a bit of it but there was still a goodly amount left. I stopped in at a few shops, one a gift shop selling T-shirts of London, pastel colored poofy trinkets and other similar junk and I wondered how this old woman could have stayed in business for thirty years selling this kind of stuff? Who buys that stuff anyway? She told me a little about downtown and the building’s vintage.

The town of Chickasha, pronounced Chickashay, had even more old buildings and more than twice the population of Anadarko at around 15,000. Chickasha had an antique store on 524 Chickasha Ave. 73018 that was just way too cool. The store was filled with stuff I just couldn’t stop looking at. I ended up getting a painted glass rooster and jay-bird and an old print of a parrot. It was on and on old junk that I had when I was a kid and saw at my grandparent’s homes. The shop’s content was like the Smithsonian Museum of American History but unlike a museum, every thing was for sale and I could touch it all and look through drawers and cabinets full of old photos of mule teams logging and old calenders and sheet music.

I looked in the back room and up the stairs and it reminded me of wanting to explore the attic at my grandparent’s house, the impulse and incredible compelling curiosity of the unknown of a big upstairs hiding the promise of discovery of unknown treasure. I have always enjoyed exploring stuff like that, the beach, cloistered stream beds and shadowy spaces among trees always hold the promise and surprise of discovery and the thrill of exploration. Here in Wichita Falls, at Kell House, I asked the docent if i could peek up in the attic and he wouldn’t let me. I told him he was ruining a major fantasy. Why is it that gay guys are so into bed and breakfasts and period furniture and styles?

Back on Chickasha Ave. there was a huge furniture store, four story, built in 1904, ornate metal ceilings, wrap around balcony on the second floor, big central staircase up to the second floor at the rear and full of dusty old furniture and paintings and various junk and a family sitting at a table in the back reading the paper and relaxing with their poodles. The owner was very friendly and we shot the breeze and I asked him about the local scene. He said what everyone else did and confirmed the obvious truth of this rural area: as the farmers go, so does everyone else. If there is no rain, the hot wind dries out the corn in three or four days and everybody suffers. Rain means life and abundance, fate again tied to the weather and the vagaries of the gods needing to be placated.

The farmers are the ones who buy the furniture and everything else for sale in town and also who keep their earnings in the local banks. The various manufacturing plants around pay generally lousy wages and send all their profits “back to the northeast.” I hear all this talk about growing the economy and bullshit about global trade being some mysterious savior and then I see the simple economic relations in these small town and I realize that I am seeing relics and the passing of a way of life. The world doesn’t owe these folks a living here nor does it owe the northwest loggers trees and that lifestyle. The world is kind of cruel in that way but in the big sweep, people are forced to accept change and let go of the familiar and embrace the new and unknown.
Homeboy took me upstairs, as his wife’s poodles tried to nip my heels and he said, to my dismay, that no, i couldn’t see the third and fourth floors but that he would sell the whole place for $70,000.00 This would be quite a big place for $70,000., but then you would have to live in Chickasha. The building was originally a furniture store and has been since 1904, selling couches and beds and mirrors to generations of farmers and those who came to sell other stuff to the farmers. I liked Chickasha, especially the name, which I kept saying over and over to myself as I walked around the historic district soaking in the depth and quality of this place.

The Washita River intersects the road everywhere and to the north are the Cimarron and Canadian Rivers, of historical note from my childhood reading and also of the Cheyenne and the Black Kettle massacre.

Every town still has an old movie theater with a big, ornate promenade jutting upwards out front. In Anadarko it is The Redskin, in Wichita Falls it is the Wichita, the Washita in Chickasha. In many ways being around here is like stepping back in time, 20, 30, 50, 100 years ago. The pace is slower, the attitude different, there is a touch of the south and that whole milieu. It is new and different and therefore intriguing and exciting.

The furniture man said he thought the ozone hole was good, because that would let all the pollution out, kind of like a chimney. He went on to say how an old house he had, with six chimneys, was always slamming doors shut from the suction and how the ozone hole had to be sucking bad stuff out into space just like that. It goes to show that people will compare what they know to the unknown and transpose those relations onto the unknown, as if somehow what we know will magically apply to what we don’t know. This is the old a is to b as c is to x formula.

I wanted to check out an all black town called Tatums but the AAA map showed it to be on 74 just south of 7 when it is actually on 7 just east of Ratliffe City. I missed it. I went through a place called Lindsey on the way and it had more old buildings to marvel at but I didn’t stop. I started to become hot and short tempered from driving too much on my precious time off, sucking hot wind and probably dehydrated. Then I hit Ardmore and Lone Grove, the cancerous strip development from Hell and I couldn’t even bear top stop, I had to escape, out towards Waurika, anywhere but here. I had to stop and get gas so I got a thirst buster and my attitude cooled. Still, why do city fathers ever think that such nasty strips are any good. The aesthetics are so bad and you end up sitting in traffic and waiting and waiting and people get road  rage. I can see how that kind of life is just not worth it. What kind of money and livelihood is worth having to suffer such a poor environment? Whatever the economic needs of a person, it should never have to get down to living in strip development Hell. The loss of architectural character and mass production of buildings has degraded the richness of life and created a cookie cutter world where slaves are just cogs in the wheels of the global economy. Forget that! That is not for me.

Heading towards Waurika was a big, big storm, which eventually dumped ten inches on Ringling and four over near Waurika. The road had a fuzz of rain a foot high which looked like cotton candy. It gave my dusty car a good wash. I had a repeat of strong south wind coming straight onto the driver’s side and then semi trucks coming and pushing more air, which would collapse my hood and roof with big bangs. Wham! Wham! Wham! I was white knucklin’ it.

Waurika, Oklahoma, elevation 882', has more cool buildings and thrift stores and junk shops and lush yards with big trees full of rusted cars and old farm implements and mechanic’s signs, it’s like my God what do people do out here? I was improvising on a Bob Dylan lyric “it’s not the end of the world, but it’s gettin’ there.” You go from strip Hell to trailer trash to Indian wasteland to lonely roads amongst giant ranches and fields, and then a shot of history and the shadow of better days reflected in the old buildings. This is a snapshot of southwest Oklahoma.

After the heavy rain and 100 plus degrees temperature, it was sauna city, miserable,  oppressive and thick, with storm cells all around ready to do more of the same.

This trip all together, is a journey in Americana at it’s most fascinating. I go into a new area that I know nothing about, coupled with a good curiosity and a well developed traveling style and a desire to learn. I’m having a blast. The wind and the storms continue to rip. It is a good light show and every now and then a loud crack of thunder disturbs my reverie.

I went over and asked the Motel owners “why do so many people from India have Motels?” The owner is a British educated Indian, an electrical engineer who was working in San Francisco and his wife told him to stay with that “but I had to get a Motel.” They have had this one since 1979 and it was a good place to raise their kids but they have only broken even. Waurika Oklahoma, break even and watch the storms roll by.

A lot of Indians who had less well developed language skills and not as good an education were making good money in the Motel business and homeboy decided to go for it. Now he wishes he hadn’t. The kids are all gone and now it is just Mom and Dad in Waurika, up on the hill, the A-OK Motel. They go back to India around every five years to visit their home village. “Everyone over there is a farmer.” One critical point to Indians getting involved in the Motel business is that they can borrow money out of pools, like the orientals do, with no interest, so “if they need $100,000., they can get it.” There is a communal approach to Motel buying that allows a lot of unsophisticated people to go for it. The guy here said hey, it’s not hard, there is not much you need to know, I talk better English than most of them and look at me now, I’m in Waurika and it hasn’t changed at all in twenty years.

The thunder beings are kicking ass outside. Lightning is popping and flickering by the second and deep rumbling blankets the horizon. I am listening to some Bach, who was composing just around the time whitey was beginning to make his presence felt out here on the plains, getting ready to spoil the party for the new and dynamic horse culture. Lightning snaps momentary images of cloud layers high in the sky. Gradually as the storm moves this way, the raw bolts of electricity are revealed, cutting through all the veils and then wham! there is thunder and it is close, no longer natural entertainment but real danger.

On the short ride across the border to Texas, across the Red River I was struck by two things: there is no escape from country music out here and the food is just plain bad, greasy and nasty but decently priced. The food is southwest Oklahoma sucks.

I got back to the house here and Harold had put up a giant radio antenna and snaked the wires all through my window next to my bed and then had this big radio table boxing me in at the foot of the bed. I got to looking at that and thought about last night’s storm and I said this has to be moved, I’m not having a lightning rod right next to my bed, it will ark onto the burglar bars and the steel bunk bed frame and fry my ass. So I had to spend about three hours undoing all the work they put into this deal and that was a pain.

A woman who had worked with Harold before and was here when I got back said that one of the reasons he had a big falling out with his previous organization and had to start over with QWI is that he would make unilateral decisions and over ride the Project Director, who went directly to the Board to complain and Harold was cut loose. Harold asked me if I had any problems with him to say it to him first and I am working up to it as he has gone out and spent a bunch of money on cabinets when we had agreed this morning that we need to stop spending so much money and that we could build this stuff ourselves. He also is a rambling story teller who gets off on major tangents and doesn’t seem to realize that people are rolling their eyes and getting bored by it all. Then when others say anything which he feels is trivial, he will make sarcastic comments and try to cut the discussion short. I am about to bust him on that and on spending money. He has strategically not informed me of a way to contact the Board. Now, I don’t see Harold as a bad dude. He has a big ego and is somewhat self important but to be a mover and a shaker, that may be somewhat necessary. He frames the mission to rebuild burned churches is in kind an us against them, conspiracy against us good guys kind of way, which I don’t feel is really necessary. I guess there will always be differences of opinion about big and little things and I can always get rid of the radio system and take out the cabinets if later I decide they are cumbersome or in the way. I am not letting the personal style stuff eat at me but I will address it at the right time.

6/21
I went to church this morning and the Pastor was not there. Dorothy was in the emergency room. After a shorter than usual service I went to the emergency room and after hanging out with the people in the lobby for a bit I went back to Dorothy’s room and they were just taking her upstairs and I went along. She gave me a little smile. She was curled up in the bed with an IV in her and her face was gaunt, eyes closed. Up in the hall by room 454, people came by with walkers and IVs and people were laying in bed in rooms with concerned looking family members coming in and going out. It started to make me feel sick. Dorothy had to throw up and when she was settled down I went in and she asked about Emmett and his current stomach problems. (We took him to the emergency room yesterday because he hadn’t been able to keep any food down for two days.) Dorothy said she was concerned about Mr. McCracken but hadn’t been able to do anything about it. I told her I would tell him she was concerned and then I waved and she waved back.

The doctor had told Thompson that they would just keep her pain free and let her pass on and Thompson said why can’t keep her pain free and feed her too, “at least let someone die tryin’ to live and not waiting to die.” He said that doctor was about to get his nigger up, excuse the phrase he said but that is his wife. So they are feeding her with the IV and she looks real bad, curled into a fetal position. 

6/26
Last Sunday the Pastor couldn’t come to do the service so Deacon Toles was doing his best to do some preaching. He got going on some parable and then proceeded to say “...and now in the days of divorce and...” and he pulled up short, realizing he had at least four young single mothers in the congregation before him. I could see his mind working because he knew he had backed himself into a corner, he was going to say “divorce and single parent families” but he caught himself and he said “...in these days of divorce and... whatever.” That was a moment.

The Pastor came by today and you could see he was in bad shape, lack of sleep, torn up inside and suffering. We talked about how the one doctor had advised Dorothy and Ted last Sunday, to just let the doctors medicate her, stop feeding her and let her go out with no pain. The doctor said her bowels were and stomach were collapsed and closed down and then in the hospital she took a couple of big ones and then another one when she got back home. I thought she was going to die last Sunday and here she is back home. It is clear she is not going to recover to normal health but she is hanging on way past all odds now. The drama is going on for all involved and it is cause to wonder about a lot of things.

Harold gently spoke about how the doctor was playing god and how that was unacceptable. Then Harold started telling the Pastor about a recent book by a French guy called The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. This man had been completely paralyzed by an accident, except for eye movements. Somehow he caught the attention of one of the nurses with his eyes and from that moment, they figured out how his blinks could be translated into the French alphabet and then he wrote the book and the butterfly was set free.

The Pastor’s eyes were all full of tears as he heard this story. You could see his respect for Brother Harold. Yesterday Harold held forth for Deacon Ray and Ray is a guy who clearly respects his elders a lot. Harold can talk and he just went on and on and on and Ray graciously sucked it all up. Ray said he didn’t know how to light a hot water heater, on account of him having been raised by his Mom and Aunt, and him “not having been taught those type of things.”

The church folks are sincerely grateful that these white folks are here to help them. There is a distinct advantage to them having someone like Harold around. Harold is bible studied, a weighty friend, he knows his stuff about construction and about the history of arson burned churches. Now that he is leaving, I am going to have to be that person for the church. I am going to have to learn how to talk the talk and shake the religious grapevine to get some help in donations, support and volunteers. Harold is a pain in the ass in some ways with his incessant babble and carrying on endlessly and straying so far from the topic that you almost hesitate to ask him a question for fear of the length of the response. He is oblivious to the way people react to his long monologues. But in any case, he commands the territory of interfaith church rebuilding and he is sincere and genuine and any problems I have with him are most certainly not at the level of premises. For me and him it is a question of style rather than content. Harold can get up and really captivate the congregations because he has biblical knowledge he can draw off of. Like the Pastor, he is not dogmatic or rigid with his interpretations of Christianity. Harold is a real Quaker, eccentric, wordy and active on his principles. Brother McCracken is a birthright Quaker who has lost some of his marbles. He is a few tacos short of a combination plate. He clearly has some type of dementia.

I am a heretic, liberal, science spewing, relativistic, universalist Quaker. Where I stand spiritually is entirely open to question. A new TV reporter from channel 6 came by the other day and she was a knock out black woman with big geri curls and shiny red lipstick and sparkling big white teeth and a nice tight dress and an alluringly nice software package underneath. I have been reading Tom Kochman’s Black and White Styles in Conflict and I had just finished the chapter about how white people don’t expect their women to be sexually aggressive and how it is all a kind of beat around the bush kind of game, like saying “let’s go listen to some music.” when you really mean “I want to fuck you like a wild sow.” A community black might say “ hey baby, you sure are looking good, I’d sure like to shake down some of your peaches.” They don’t play around with the intention. The intention is clear.

So, fate had it that Jon had just been up in the attic crawling over emphysema insulation and he was heading for the shower just as Tara was there and I saw the opportunity to make a mild sexual comment and experiment with how she would take it. I made some comment about putting studs from the shower on TV and she said “then all the women will come running.” It worked! 

So, she and the camera man got me back by the bath house with the camera running and asked me a few questions about QWI and then when the camera was off, Tara asked about Quakers. I laid out the Reformation and Anabaptists and George Fox and oppression by state religions and emigration to Pennsylvania and religious freedom and Tara said “well, where is Jesus Christ in all that?” So I told her about Christ centered Friends and Evangelical Friends and universalist Friends and she got onto the fact that I was a universalist and then the whole discussion became more of a lecture by her about the bible and the truth and God’s only chosen son and bla bla bla and then she would ask me more about Quakers and I would say something and she would go off, not hearing anything I said and I’m standing there on the one hand wishing she would just dry up and blow away and on the other hand those shiny lips in the grips of passion. She is going on about Ephesians :109 and how Christ this and Christ that and I am at once disgusted and wanting to fuck her.

I couldn’t tell what I really thought about her rap, that she was a small minded bigot who’s same exact attitude has contributed to all of today’s and all of history’s problems. I saw that I was fronting for QWI, I was representing QWI and I had to stand there and be lectured by a literalist who was not about to take any point i made seriously at all. I said, “well,  you can see by all the different Christian denominations that there is no one way...” But bla blab bla bla.

I have a lot to learn and this religion arena is pretty much all new to me. I never had to suck up too much Jesus stuff with the Quakers but now it is becoming clear that I need to learn more about it, just to be able to defend myself and speak intelligently with other religious folks. I hope some of the old Quakers who come here will help me to see more clearly what this stuff is all about. This will be good for my education. The interfaith context takes some of the edge off  literalism but there will be the occasional true believer who I want answers for. I don’t want to simply fall back on my old standard arguments, this is a chance to learn some new material and look at life a different way.  I can’t believe that a morality play as deep and compelling as Christianity could all be reduced to a merely black and white, simplistic level of jargon. There has to be more depth to it. Maybe some people are educated with the material to only a certain level and they can’t go beyond that, it is the same as with any type of knowledge. There have to be more thoughtful, intelligent and complex thinkers who have grappled with Christianity and come up with better than what Tara was saying.

I had a thought about what Harold said about the Christian way being a more compassionate, community oriented path than the Old Testament. My hottest girlfriends were Jewish and my best friends are Jewish. I don’t have any need to compare my beliefs against theirs, to try to make myself look good. Texts and doctrines can be twisted any way a person wants. This harkens back to Eric Hoffer’s quote that the truth of a doctrine has more to do with it’s certitude than with any inherent truth it might have.

6/28
The Pastor today was getting on about “a changed mind” and how it is within a person to be changed by all kind of things. He said when you get a new car you are changed, when you get a new computer you just sit there and look at it, when you get a new wife you just admire her lying there sleeping. The women gasped a little at that. But then he built towards his point, that your mind can be changed within, you can get a new attitude and the whole world looks different. You can walk over a man down on the sidewalk and you can step on him or you can give him a hand up.

I get a lot of the messages from the Pastor and Christianity filtered through hundreds of years of suffering and oppression by whites over blacks. The general message laid out by Thompson is one of absolute forgiveness of the oppressors. That the brutal murders in Jasper, TX happened recently and the fact that we whites are here and have established a presence at the church for all to see, is about as heavy duty as it gets. The statement is: we are bridging the gap here in Wichita Falls already, the solidarity seen in Jasper is here as well. The Pastor and his flock are highly appreciative and obviously cognizant that what is happening here is not your average, run-of-the-mill situation, a bunch of white folks coming to help rebuild a black church. The Pastor talks on Sunday about how the word is not owned exclusively by any denomination, how it is OK to respect others with different twists. We are covering some good ground.

Reverend Thompson was getting into a little Satan action and he said Satan will always turn up, “like a bad penny.” he gets every body laughing with his anecdotes.
6/29
An interesting thing has come up. People are so into e-mail and getting on-line that it has become a problem. So many folks want computer time and enough are good enough to constantly be changing my settings and doing who knows what with my personal material. I am going to have to come up with some big limitations and perhaps deny the use of the computer to volunteers because it is too distracting to have the on-line world always dangling like a carrot, always available to punch in a few letters and numbers and listen to that strange tooting and then see which strangers and friends have deposited a precious few sentences or a paragraph in your in box. I like e-mail myself but it does not seem to have the quality and thoughtfulness of a letter. E-mail is much more frequently like a clipped conversation with little of significance exchanged.

Today was a watershed. Charles Brickey is here and he is a very competent carpenter who is leading the volunteers on putting roof on the bath house. I decided today that the sleeping situation was just plain too hot for people to feel comfortable here. There was no comfortable space for folks to look forward to going at night. Sleep was dreaded as a tossing and turning, hellish, sweat drenched experience that was accentuated by barking dogs, mosquitos and various disturbing noises and fears of ants crawling into sweat soaked clothing, so I said OK, I’m am going to lay out for two new AC units, $600.00 and now the troops have hope, they are happier, the psychology has changed, there is a haven from the beastly heat. Charles and I also bought a lot of the roofing material and we carpentered the new 10,000 btu unit AC into the bunk house as well as ripped two by fours for making trusses tomorrow.

The cooks started in earnest today and we are getting three for the price of one. Darlene’s daddy, Rufus Jenkins is the head cook, but he comes along with Darlene and another daughter, Michelle. They are good and having them here adds a nice homey atmosphere. Things are moving.

Last but not least: I called the city building inspector and spoke with him and then called the architect. The architect said he was going to fax the changes in 15 minutes and shoot if he didn’t and then Mr Bobby Teague approved the changes over the phone and I went down there and paid the city $1366.23 and walked out with the permit and the contractor’s set of plans. We have the green light and Mr Myles will start on Monday on finishing the foundation and steel work. I had a chance to ask the planning dept guys about some of the old buildings in Wichita, which is how the homeboys refer to Wichita Falls and some of the coolest ones are going to be saved and turned into apartments. Good for them. We talked architecture and that was fun. The new architecture here is now officially starting, after a month and a half of red flags and gray areas. It feels good.

7/1
The following are my notes from last night’s group meeting:

Notes from group/ staff meeting 6/30/98    Fred Allebach

The meeting began by addressing the issue of Erin Hull, a 19 year old volunteer, being invited by Michelle Jenkins, the cook’s daughter, to go to a dance club/bar on Friday night and stay out to 2:AM and then sleep over at Michelle’s house. Erin was pouting and putting up a pretty good bad attitude because I told her I didn’t want her to go. We were going to go to the library but her attitude had to be addressed and I brought up the signed project discipline form, the onus on group experience, the red flags involved in going to a bar. I was secure in that no matter what was aid, she was not going. Erin was unable to respond initially and was crying. I was embarrassed and disappointed by the QWI staff reaction to my concerns. Jon, Medzio and Emmett all said they didn’t see any problems with this plan. I was left hanging on the clothesline with every rationale I presented being countered by Jon and Emmett, so I started to feel that this was really untenable and I said so to the staff, that it was unacceptable to have such a disparity among the staff as to what the proper boundaries of this program are. What it boiled down to was that Jon, being young, responded as a participant would, Emmett didn’t fully grasp the issues and Medzio also took the tack of permitting Erin to go.

Lucky for me Charles Brickey, another volunteer, jumped in to help me and reinforce the voice of responsibility, safety, liability and of honoring the project discipline. Charles helped me to rally and we also identified other issues that were troubling to Erin, such as not being kept busy all day, age and gender differences and the need to have a well defined schedule of recreational opportunities.

Why is the group experience so important? The group experience and group process are important because that is the crucible of learning and sharing, where relationships are made and begin to grow, where the sharing together becomes important. The power of a group experience is in the togetherness and through that and a shared task of working for something larger than ourselves that we are transformed. We find the vigor and meaning and purpose of life right here in these things. 

So the conversation went around and around, with Erin still saying nothing and I finally had to say to Jon, “I feel you are trying to find a way around everything I am saying, do you understand why I am voicing my concerns? As a staff I am needing your support.” We had a turning point after plenty of talk and me reframing and reexplaining the reasons why Erin going out alone, without staff, to a bar was unacceptable and also that Erin began to speak, which allowed Charles and I to directly address her rather than have Jon and Emmett speaking for her by proxy.

When Erin began to come around was when it became clear to her that going to a movie or going bowling was a whole different animal than going to a bar and that yes, she could go to a movie and Charles felt that was OK, group-wise, with him. The point was not that I was singling her out but that the same issues apply to any group of any size and the nature of the experience here.

Notes from the meeting:

1- Participation is as important as the goal of completing a task, the process is as important as the outcome. Volunteers need to have meaningful work and cannot be allowed to stand around without a clear idea of what to do, what needs to be done and the instruction to go after those tasks and feel involved and able to contribute. The Safety Officer/ Tool Steward staff person needs to be the one who applies this on the ground.

2- Medzio will identify and complete a list of recreational options. Staff will post options and make volunteers aware of options. Volunteers need to bring personally generated options to the group before they get their heart set on doing something.

Interacting with church members and age set church members for younger folks was seen as desirable, having the church send members over and/or QWI volunteers and staff going to weekly prayer meetings to meet and interact with the congregation.

3- A strong orientation will frame the experience in such a way as to explain unknowns ands establish appropriate boundaries, especially for going out individually. Orientation needs to stress the community and group nature of the program and that work is the core of why we are here, recreation and having fun are definitely important but what we are all about is service and working for the Powerhouse. Emmett suggested as part of orientation, why did you come? What do you expect to get out of it? Orientation needs to include a history of QWI. What is QWI? Why ministry to burned churches? What is service? Medzio suggested obtaining a VCR and TV so we can show QWI video as a part of the orientation.

4- It is clear that staff needs to get on the same page as to what this program is about, what appropriate boundaries are for volunteers and what staff responsibility is in creating a meaningful experience for the volunteers. The disparity of understanding was striking. Particularly, the issue of volunteers going out individually needs to be addressed and staff need to understand the rationales and reasons for why the group experience is primary and be able to articulate that. As in any employment situation, staff may have their own viewpoints on a subject but when they are employed by an organization with a particular program, staff need to represent that program. That is what they are being paid for. It is clear that staff now have not really taken the time to study and know their roles, in spite of previous meetings highlighting the letters of understanding and what we supposed to be doing. This being demonstrated by the differences between all and the Director on the subject of appropriate boundaries and the need to be sensitive to and engage volunteers during the work and recreational day.

5- Erin will work on the internet to find websites about burned churches and work up information packets to enhance our understanding of the problem and the issues involved.

11:39PM
I just got in from chasing Brother McCracken down out on the street. He went to church at 7:PM and some church members came by here at 8:15PM. Emmett had been driving around for about three hours lost. I saw him go around in a circle once and miss the right way and then I went out to wait for him but he turned out on Kell, the total wrong way. I saw him start to go around in circles out there and ran over and directed him this way. He saw me and said “what are you doing out here?” I told him where to go and then he drove right past the house. He said, “I get turned around now more than I used to.”.......

Erin had a terrible case of homesickness tonight and you could hear her in the office wailing “I want to go hooooooome.” I felt bad for her and reached out to talk and she could still smile. I tried to frame things up for her, that she is not the only one, that it is natural that I was homesick too, that it is one of life’s passages and that she, being a recent high school grad, is just going through a couple of heavy passages right now but they are passages we all must make. I arranged to have Michelle come over and get her, to sleep at Michelle’s house, as one of Erin’s problems was in being surrounded by strange men and then sleeping alone. Michelle is cool. She looks exactly like Aunt Jemima and is very personable, friendly and highly educated. She is Rufus’ daughter.

Today another of Rufus’ daughters, Darlene, had her daughter, Angie come by and Angie had her son Ray with her. Rufus said “come over here and see your grand daddy, your grand daddy likes to see you. I aint seen you in a long time.”

7/2
This morning the Pastor came around and saw Emmett and said “McCracklin, how you doin’?” We were also talking about meat and using the whole animal and he said with a pig, “they use em’ from the rooter to the tooter.”

It was hellishly hot today, insane, too hot to think and we are out there putting a roof on the bath house. This was not a good day for me. I only slept 5 _ hours last night. Erin started out good but then Emmett started moving in and taking away her jobs and Jon could not manage the situation effectively. Emmett has a way of getting under your feet and in the way and Erin doesn’t have the savvy to tell him to get back. I tried to explain to Jon that Erin needed to be lined out on a task that she could focus on all day, but then I look over there and she is obviously lost. Jon was unable to engage her and do his own work. So I send her in to Medzio to get her on the computer to research black church burnings and soon she is out talking with Michelle. I think Erin has an extremely short attention span and not much initiative, which is a bad combination anyway but then overlay that with a funky situation like this where it is tremendously hot and she came to help build a church and there is none of that to do and it is just fucked up. Erin seems to demand that she be led and entertained and taken care of at every step and she is not really stepping up to meet this experience. Erin is a sweet young girl but she has a lot of growing up to do. She doesn’t have any skills and can barely hammer a nail but carpentry is what we are doing now. Tonight she wanted to skip dinner with us and go with Michelle and Rufus and I initially said yes to get her out of my hair but then I reconsidered and came back and asked her to stay for dinner and to be part of the group she signed up to participate with. Then Michelle gets an attitude and she and Rufus leave without saying goodbye. I eventually end up giving Erin a ride over there to spend the night and we get terribly lost due to Erin’s poor writing of the directions and the folks don’t even invite me in at the door.

My staff is so young and they are inexperienced in group work. They are more focused on themselves and their needs than that of the job or the experience, so I am constantly having to reel them in from one or another misjudgement or from a lack of focus on what needs to be happening. For example, we need to be doing some work outside and Medzio is in here making up a file about who got baseball hats. For pity’s sake, can I be expected to anticipate all problems and lay them all out? I was up till past midnight last night with Erin’s teenage nervous breakdown and Emmett getting lost. I get 5 _ hours sleep and then work all day in the hot sun with constant bullshit happening with the staff and Erin and a pouting cook’s daughter. This is starting to suck pretty good.

Russell from the church is not really handling his end of the job. He says he will come by and he doesn’t. He says he will get the steel here this week but has done nothing so far. He needs to get materials on the job and he is not. I have six women coming this Saturday, three of the Russians at 11:45PM, that will be the Fourth of July.

Harold took the title and insurance papers for the van and the registration is expired so we cannot drive it until he gets temporary tags in Washington DC and sends them here. There is not one van available to rent in Wichita Falls, not one! There is not even a six passenger car to be rented. We need transportation to get out of the house and satisfy the needs for recreation but it looks like we will have nothing for a week or more. I am feeling disillusioned now. After so much stuff constantly going wrong, how much can a guy take? QWI has not paid me for three weeks of work I should have been paid for. They cannot get it together to pay on time. I am having trouble sleeping because of the constant flux and flow of issues and problems. If something does go right, it’s effect seems to be short lasting. What am I going to do with six idealistic people on Monday with no work for them and no transportation. Even the local charity guy who said he would call back has not responded to five straight calls. I need to develop some other work for these folks but Russell is pulling away his energy. Darlene can’t make decisions independently of Russell, so it is a combination of chicken with no head and left hand not knowing what the right is doing.

I don’t have my personal space because this room is the office too and people are constantly coming in and trying to get on the computer or the phone rings or somebody has a cut or something. SCA was an absolute cakewalk compared to this. I don’t know how much more of this constant trouble I can take. I will be needing some gravy soon. Hopefully Amazing Ann, who is coming this Saturday can help me get my head screwed on straight. I need an oversight committee like she suggested.

I found evidence of people surfing for X rated sites on my computer today. My staff needs to be focusing on how to present the program successfully and how to create a positive experience for Erin and they are looking at pictures of girls being fucked by huge wet dicks. I may have to put the computer off limits to all except me and keep the door locked. The other day I was taking a great nap and Medzio knocked, walked in and started typing and got on line. I am going to have to get him straight pretty soon. I am in too bad a mood now, that wouldn’t be right. Medzio is a good guy but he is unconscious of a lot. This morning he felt it was OK to be reading a magazine during the morning meditation and bristled at my telling him he couldn’t do that, that the job demands him to participate. He doesn’t like to go to church either and that is supposed to be mandatory. Am I supposed to force my employee to go to church? I just don’t feel a lot of initiative from Jon or Medzio in the areas where I want it, in the social, experiential, counseling aspects. They do good focusing on specific tasks that they can do alone or with an adult, but i have to pull all the strings otherwise. That leaves me to administer, recruit, and have to get out there and tell them what to do to handle the volunteers, then I pass through the dining room and get roped into a conversation with someone, the phone rings, I see something I need to tell someone and I am going herky jerky from one thing to another, unable to clearly focus and make progress in any discreet areas. It is really quite frustrating. Maybe I am just dehydrated.

7/4
Jon and I took the kitten to the pound yesterday and it was sad. I knew it was the ride of death and the kitty was very cute. We got inside and immediately smelled urine and some low-brow type asked if he could take the kitten and a nice woman came from behind him and got the kitten and took it away. I had to sign a receipt. It says: All animals received by the Humane Society of Wichita County and it’s agents become at once the property of the Humane Society....and the managers of the Animal Shelter reserve the right to dispose of all such animals at their discretion and will release no information thereto.

Here I have a receipt which equals a life of a cute kitten. I feel like a Nazi.

Charles Brickey came and did a bang up job by putting a roof on our bath house, making the trusses himself by ripping down some old two by sixes. Brick was funny, he went overt to Circle K in the morning to get the paper and came back saying “man there were some good looking quail over there.” I said “quail?” and he said “yeah, split tail quail.” Brick also told a good story about one of his old gym teachers who had really big, long arms. They called him Chimp and all the kids would be saying it real fast behind his back like chimp, chimp and it really used to get him wild. One day Charles put a banana skin in his grade book and Chimp went berserk. God we laughed at that. We had a great laugh session last night and it felt great.

Tonight the Russians are coming. They will be here at 11:45PM, a bit late but I must stay up and welcome them. Today I wrote an e-mail to Harold:

Dear Harold,

Jon left this afternoon as he was able to get an $85.00 flight to Dulles as
compared to hundreds more in the middle of next week. We have no safety
officer and that may actually be OK for a while as the slab and plumbing
aspects of the job will not demand lots of volunteers and I can step up for
working outside and let Medzio do more office stuff. When we start to see
carpentry on the horizon, that is when volunteers will become more useful.


There is no steel on the site now but Russell may come through on that.
Russell seems to have withdrawn from the process and in spite of assurances
on his part and promises to come over, he frequently does not come through.
I can't make Russell over into how I want him to be or how he should be for
the church. The consequences are that the church will just have to spend
money on materials that could be donated and they will run out of funds
sooner.

I see Russell as being quite naive about construction and contractors and
these guys are going to fleece him and the church for all they can get by
working time and materials and fast talking him.  I don't have all the
knowledge to say what is right or not with the building process. My primary
responsibilities are elsewhere anyway.

We have already seen the outrageous prices the electrician charges, $770.00
labor for those wires in the bath house, $1,110.00 for one and a half day's
work upgrading the electric outside. This is not NYC! So, the church is
probably going to eat it big time on the costs. I offered to have Charles
Brickey give Russell some advice on handling contractors and Russell said
he would come by but never did. Russell is choosing to take a certain path.
I don't understand why and I don't see anyone at the church with the time
or sophistication to devote to really running the job and insuring that
they don't totally get taken to the bank. I have explained to the Pastor
and Darlene that Russell is not involved as much as he needs to be and
that in his absence, Mr. Miles will just go ahead and order the steel
anyway, and the concrete too and the church will just have to pay for what
was promised as a donation. Maybe the church just has a higher crisis
threshold and when it starts to get clear that things are going awry, they will
take a hold of Russell and either motivate him or replace him.

Charles Brickey successfully put up the bath house roof along with Jon. Now
we have just the one side to finish and we will be in the land of make
work. Hank Grieb from X-Mas in April has not returned about 8 calls in a
row. My plan B now is to have Darlene buy us some paint and I will have the
Russians and Erin and Ann Sieber paint the outside of the house.

Personally I have had to let go and tell myself, hey, I am not responsible
for the state of things now, I came to manage the volunteers to rebuild a
church and it is going on two months now with no church to build. We have
successfully gotten our work camp infrastructure in place, probably for a
pretty decent price over-all. Now we are on threshold of having five or six
volunteers and not much to do. It IS difficult to keep people busy all day
on tasks that are not really necessary! This situation is not of my making
and all I can do is explain how it got this way. Psychologically I cannot
accept responsibility for there being little work. I can do the best I can
to keep people happy and appraised but I see trouble on the horizon if we
don't get some work for the volunteers.

This is not a fun position to be in and like I said, I have had to just let
go of beating myself up about stuff that is beyond my control. If the
volunteers complain, I will refer them to Russell or the architect. You can
let me vent and blow a bit can't you?

I hope you had a productive FGC.

Sincerely, Fred

When I let go of the pressure, which I put on myself about things that are beyond my control, I feel much better. I am in a difficult spot and I can’t fast talk my way out of it to the volunteers. I will just have to shoot straight and let the cards fall where they may.

7/6
Today we started out to do some carpentry and inventory and I simply didn’t have enough work to keep three teens and Olga busy. The language and communication is a problem with the Russians, especially Olga and to some extent her daughter, Anna. The niece, Anna P. has the tendency to pout and withdraw and ignore, which is really just what I need! The challenges come like ocean swell, one after another with a big one every fifth wave. The tide comes in and goes out on the emotional beach of QWI. The church awaits rebuilding and here amidst the flotsam and jetsam are a few nice shells and shiny rocks for me, the beachcomber, to admire. Other things washed in I can only stand and wonder how something could get like that? How could such good intentions be so hard to manifest?

7/8
Here is some text from my incipient weekly report to the director of QWI:

7/7//98
Fred Allebach

Dear Harold,

Here is your first weekly report, although much more than a week has gone by since I arrived.

The Russians and Ann Sieber arrived this past Saturday, Ann in the evening and the Russians at around twelve midnight.

Erin Hull was very homesick and her mother said it would be OK for her to stay with Michelle, the cook’s daughter in the evenings during her first week here. Other members of the congregation

came and took Erin out and now that there are some other volunteers here of her own gender and age set, she seems to have settled down quite a bit. It was a rocky road to stay with her during her adjustment period as she had never been away from home before. Erin has grown a lot.

The Pastor has been by a lot and last week he dug up the front gardens and planted radishes. He also brought Dorothy over and Charles Brickey and Erin got to meet her. She stayed for around a half hour. I got to see her for a few minutes after I came back from taking a stray kitten to the pound that Jon and Charles had brought back the evening before. The kitten promptly went under the bath house and meowed all night and all day. I felt bad to have to bring it in, for an almost certain sentence of death.

With the cooks here there is much more traffic from the congregation and Thompson has approached me asking the best ways for the members to support QWI and I told him the best way was for people to invite us to their houses and socialize with us.

We have had to become much more aware of recreational aspects of the program as it is difficult to keep  fifteen, sixteen and nineteen year old girls focused on adult type things. So, we went to the movies last night, will go bowling tonight and will continue to explore things like that at the same time we are needing to draw some boundaries and put forth the notion that this is not summer camp and we are not here just to entertain people and that folks have to rely on their own inner resources to some extent.

The language differences with the Russians are more pronounced with Olga, who can only communicate in the simplest of terms. Olga is bright and cheerful despite her communication problems. The girls are better with English. Olga’s daughter is well adjusted. The niece, who, is fifteen, has a tendency to be pouty, putting up blank expressions and to be impatient. We have at once with the girls, teen issues and language issues and structural issues of having none of the work they expected to be doing. .

Ann has been very helpful and jumped right in at a level surpassing the daily contributions of the staff. Generally it is an intimidating prospect to be managing a group like we have right now and not have a clear idea of when we will work on the church and to be floundering for work in the community and needing to address the quality of the group’s experience. It is understandably very difficult to be inspired and excited on a continuous basis about a project that has so many unclear aspects.

Well, since I wrote this, this morning, our work camp dynamic has reached the lowest point yet. Medzio said he never had seen things reach this point in the other camps. We just had two teenage meltdowns at once, a disagreement between Erin and Medzio, the two Russian girls giving Erin the cold treatment, Erin giving Medzio the cold treatment.  The actual differences are extremely petty yet the psychological fall out from who doesn’t like what who said or miscommunications unable to be resolved, is distracting at the least and fairly bothersome at the worst. When you layer this on to an inability to communicate with the Russians and the fact that the project is not started, then it is a BAD mixture.

Sometimes the moment seems to take an eternity. The good, or bad thing (in the case of Eros type love), is that you do come out on the other side and this evening brought some respite as we went bowling. The Russian girls did not want to go and Medzio stayed with them. They seem to be relaxing more. I taught one of them a song on my guitar and Olga is having fun. 

7/8
Emmett seems to be deteriorating. I have noticed as well as Medzio and Ann has seen how he is. He can’t stay focused on the tools and doesn’t know where most of them are although he is “waking up early and eating in case the contractor comes and I need to be ready with the tools.” We all know the contractor is not coming tomorrow. This just demonstrates that he has trouble, to put it lightly, following the gist of what is happening here or even the flow of a conversation and will interject an entirely unrelated statement when we are talking about something else. If I tell him the girls have been shelving books for the last two days and we all know the steel is not here, he will just say the same thing over and over again.

When the young teens are lined out on a simple task, myself or Medzio or Jon, had to get Emmett away from them because he would stand close by and try to direct them and take the work actually right out of their hands.

Emmett has gotten lost almost every time he goes out at night. He went to church last Wednesday evening at 7:PM and did not return until midnight. I saw him out on Broad and 15th driving in circles around the block and ran out and he then went over to Holliday and started to drive circles out Kell and back to Holliday. I ran out there and finally stopped him and he said “what are you doing here?” I told him how to get back and he drove right past the church and down the street. He got lost last night when we were out and came back covered with sweat and looking terrible.

Emmett did the dishes last night and when I went in to get a glass of water I saw the dishwater was absolutely filthy with grease and I checked the dishes and they were all covered with a thick film of grease. Medzio and I did them all over again. I went outside last evening before bowling and all the same tools from the mornings work were in the same places and the truck was open.

So, you can tell that while Emmett is certainly willing to be involved, he takes more than some maintenance. When I have teen crises and all kind of other stuff, the last thing I need is to have the nightcap with re-doing greasy dishes and Emmett getting lost and driving off without telling anyone. It is not the end of the world but we are going to have to start limiting him. I am telling you this for your information. If things are screwy here and I tell you about it, then you know. I wouldn’t know how to go about easing Emmett out of here, that would be very awkward. He has better than two months left on his plans to be here.

So, with two staff and teens and no real work, everyday becomes a challenge. I have asked Medzio to concentrate on the social aspects of the camp and pay attention to the administrative things second. I need staff behind me in addressing the tone of the camp. Ann has been great and has fresh energy and a willingness to be creative and involved. She has helped to smooth the differences between all the aggrieved parties without having a big, awkward psychology meeting with people who don’t speak English too good. She suggested to me that I make a deadline and that if after that deadline, things were still in limbo here, that I, and the camp, go on standby status until there is real work to do.

Yesterday I laid out some of my feelings to Russell and Darlene, which resulted in us going bowling with lots of church people and having FUN! They responded. I like and respect them all and want to do right by them but you can see that this kind of middle realm, indeterminate, no work, no purpose state, cannot go on indefinitely. As the director, I would suggest that you make some Plan Bs as to this project, in the event that things just keep on going the way they are. Hopefully all will fall into place but there is the possibility that they won’t.

Well, here goes another day and hopefully today will be the tomorrow everyone keeps talking about!

OK, I went out to the breakfast table and there is total silence, no words at all. That is pathetic! We have a group check in and no one says anything. I hate that worse than anything, pouty looking teens who won’t say a word. We are going to try a group process thing from Ann, let’s see about that. Erin seems to have regressed to her former level of having everything be a problem and the whole scene appears to be one giant soap opera.

The cooks are having problems with Ann and also the Russian girls not eating their food, they don’t like Medzio either. The cooks feel the tension and needed to blow some steam to me. They are OK now. Ann is rubbing the girls and some of the congregation members the wrong way with her style, they feel it is too namby pamby and too in your face. Ann is bringing a California, Esalen, group encounter style which is OK with me, anything to get people to open up. Erin said the group work Ann tried, to get the group to even talk to each other, was “like kindergarten.” It is a question of who will go off next and get angry and need attention and pout. In our group meeting of this morning Erin looked at the ground, along with the other girls and just as with breakfast, no one said a word or would respond. I am left on the clothesline. Somebody help me now. Then Ann jumps in and they shrink back some more.

I really have never been in any situation like this. From the start all kinds of things have continued to go wrong, to the point where, for my own mental health, I had to stop expecting anything to go the right way. It is beyond my experience to have to front for a project that is not happening, to feel responsible for and have to deal with the consequences of things that are beyond my control. I have no one to turn to, to give me advice. I am alone with no oversight committee or other adults who can steer me into a space where I can make sense of all this. The mental and emotional states of the volunteers weigh heavily upon me and while I try to make things better, I fear I am failing. It is starting to get to me and in many ways, I feel powerless to effect the dynamic that is developing. No amount of talk can change that a bad situation is a bad situation.
It is so welcome to just sit with adults and talk, as I did this morning when all volunteers are at the YWCA serving up a free lunch. How pleasant to be able to converse and laugh and discuss things without having to worry about who is mad at who.

Mr. Myles has received the steel paperwork and apparently the steel companies will donate $6000.00 worth of material and the church will only have to pay for $3000.00.  The delivery could be soon but apparently Myles wants to wait for Mike Corbett to return from Georgia, which should be today or tomorrow. Tomorrow, again.

I guess the tone of this report is that when it rains, it pours. There have been good moments and all is not completely in a state of confusion. This is the way it is and hopefully things will fall into place soon so that the primary reason we are here, to build a church, will be manifest and all else can follow from that. When all is following from a maybe, there is no way to build a solid foundation. 

OK, that is the downside, if I express my feelings, don’t panic. The church members have rallied and come by frequently, they are kind and generous and concerned. McCracken has a great smile. The girls are outside singing with my guitar. They had a good time at the Y and we got free passes to the Y for swimming etc. We got paid and that feels good. The tone has shifted more towards the normal range and that is just GREAT! Maybe I am too sensitive, I don’t know. Life touches me and I can’t pretend to be macho and unscathed by the emotional environment. Ann is out there singing and she can’t keep a melody, it sounds terrible but she is trying and it feels good anyway.

7/9
I taught young Anna how to play the Star of the County Down and Here Comes The Sun and she is into it. We played spades with the Russian girls while Olga drew a picture of me. We had a lot of good laughs and got loose. The battery died on the tool truck while Medzio had it out and i took Olga with me to give him a jump. I like Olga. She actually looks quite similar to my maternal grandmother. She is 42. She is very cute with a nice smile which is open yet shy. I see her as kind of like an angel, beautiful and worthy of a certain respect that I may not grant others. She asked me if I was married or had any kids.  She was surprised I was single. We get along good. She is married with a sixteen year old daughter and a younger son. We have a month. Could it be Bridges of Wichita County?

The daughter and niece don’t even compare to Olga. A real woman puts girls in their place. I can’t lust after Olga like I do hot bodies and body parts, I see her whole and that is what I appreciate. Shit, Olga can hammer and nail and measure and those girls can’t touch that. She has a good attitude and demeanor despite being unable to communicate. She hit two strikes in a row last night at the bowling alley in spite of never having bowled before.

I got a big hug a few weeks ago from Dorothy Buckner down at church and to be enveloped by willing, soft flesh, and a lot of it too, was kind of nice. I had never felt attracted to larger sizes but now that I have been in Texas and that is pretty much your garden variety kind of gal, I have seen that I can get excited. Where do I get off being a bucket ass myself and only wanting to look at skinny girls and women?

7/12
I took Erin and the Russian girls, Olga and Medzio and Michelle to Oklahoma for a day trip tracing my initial journey to the museums and the mountains. This time we added a picnic lunch at Ft. Sill, a trip to Geronimo’s grave and a stop at The Holy City, a theme based on what a small village might have been like at Christ’s time. The chapel was similar to a small Mexican church, intimate and colorful. We also stopped at a trading post near Quanah Parker’s Star House but the caretaker had gone five minutes earlier. I must go back. At the post and mangy, blind dog came out from behind the counter and Michelle just about went haywire trying to get away from it, a classic example of the irrational fear of dogs sometimes displayed by black people, she nearly knocked over a couple of displays and ran outside screaming.

I have been reading Elaine Pagels, Adam, Eve and the Serpent and as a result of attending Pentecostal church for the last eight Sundays, some things are starting to gel in my understanding. To be human is to have dilemmas far and above what animals must deal with. Humans have the capacity to make God-like decisions concerning the fate of, for example, the land, other animals, other humans and with this power comes the real necessity of having a system of ethics so that this power may be wielded humanely, i.e. not as an animal. God-like power can get to people and lead them astray. Astray from what? Astray from being human.

The teachings of the Bible and other holy books and systems of morals and ethics are at the baseline, codes of behavior that seek to model the highest forms of human behavior, through stories and allegories, to illustrate what the pitfalls are and what is the high ground.

I can see through our species eyes, we have had the necessity to come to grips with God-like power and maybe we frame this in metaphysical, transcendent terms and then this is contrasted against our weakness as revealed in our pitiful animal natures of wanting sex, intoxication and power. To be a true believer, as a Catholic, Quaker, Jew, Buddhist or Pentecostalist, means having faith that the choices made will be only the most humane, compassionate and righteous. I don’t see this as being a bad way to go at all.

But, people get hung up on the notion that their own particular group projection of the highest human capacities, is somehow better than another’s and then we all start to slip lower down into the animal in us that is so hard to escape because that is the precise dilemma. We are ethical animals who don’t always measure up. It is darn near impossible to purge the animal out of a guy and that is why religion keeps being so compelling, because it offers the crazy hope that we can be at once, animal and God. Maybe the God will last for a week, a month or a year, but one day that animal will raise it’s head.

Jesus gets after this idea: “You have heard that it was said ‘You shall not commit adultery’ But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” This sheds a little more light on Jimmy Carter’s famous phrase as President  “ I have lust in my heart.” The animal is there and it is a constant battle to be human. Perhaps Satan is nothing more than a representation of our animal heritage and the constant animal within us. Show me a guy who does not commit adultery in his heart every now and then.

At church today the Pastor had a couple of good ones, about Jason and the Mennonites, the Canaanites and all those other “ites.” I don’t know shit about the Bible but I do know there weren’t no Mennonites back then. He was carrying on today and I got a bit tired of it, how all the relying on oneself and one’s own knowledge was false compared to the heart, the way of Jesus.

Elaine Pagels addressed the idea of interpretation and the cut on people called “literalists.” She said that no one can read the Bible and not interpret it, it takes an interaction and a dynamic with the material, there is no way around the interpretation. I can see this is like me getting my first Grateful Dead album, there is something there of enough interest for me to want to pursue it, to find out where it will all lead. What does religion look like when you know most of the allegories, when you know the story? I don’t know now. I am entirely ignorant of the Bible. Although, as Elaine points out, there is no escape from the effects of the Bible in the world today. Christianity has imbued my white guy world with certain precepts that are largely unconscious. The material has worked it’s way into the culture to such a depth that only through study, can the wheat be separated from the chaff. This sort of lends an air of credence to the notion of an unconscious, a body of material which governs yet is unknown to the conscious mind. I have certain attitudes about sex, work, ethics, behavior because they are woven deeply into the fabric of my culture and shared by others who reinforce it in my daily life. I may be more of a Christian than I ever thought.

These Elaine Pagels books are going to be fun, especially coupled with my reality here in helping to rebuild a burned church and having much intercourse with religion and religious people. I like to be learning and growing, that is where it is really at.

Dear Harold,

I'm sorry to appear to be sounding alarms and then back-tracking, kind of
like the boy who cried wolf. This is not easy territory, but it is easier
than teen age nervous breakdowns.

I have been struggling with how to handle Brother McCracken, (the Pastor
was corrected today about his name not being McCracklin and he said “Oh,
Cracken as in crackin’ an egg” and we all laughed, some with embarrassment
at the preacher’s ribald treatment of elder McCracken. Emmett has been
going to church at every opportunity, twice on Sunday, and during the week
too. Emmett  said today in church after the Pastor asked him to speak that
they would not be rid of him that easy, even though is an unprogrammed
Quaker.
I feel now like it would be cruel to cut Emmett loose, he is like the
kitten, the lamb, he is helpless, old, senile, wanting to remain among the
living and vital yet clearly losing it a piece at a time. I don’t know if I
could tell him he needs to go. How do you tell a man he is losing his mind?
Independence and volition are some of our most precious capacities and to
come to the point of losing them, that just gets to the core of us being
humans. I would rather put up with him and his foibles than have his exile
and slow deterioration alone on my conscience.

When it gets down to it, I can’t put my own ease ahead of a man’s life. It
has taken me a while to reach this space. Up until now I have seen
McCracken as sort of a pain in the ass, but when it comes down to me having
to pass judgement on a man and send him away merely because he leaves the
fly swatter on the table over and over again and he washes the toilets with
the kitchen sponge or he can’t remember stuff right, I can’t do it. He has
become a member of this community, especially of the church community.
Whatever comes down, I think it should be slow and easy and the Reverend
Thompson involved. I will have to involve Thompson. He is busy with serious
matters but me and Ted need to talk anyway. The church folks now insure
that Emmett is brought back safely from any service he attends and Medzio
and I discreetly work with preventing him from going out alone at night to
the store. Medzio has been very good at engaging Emmett in conversation.

Shoot, I was glad to let Emmett wash the dishes tonight  and he seemed glad
that I didn't give him a bad time about it or pick at him. Maybe that all
objects and utensils are not perfectly straight is OK and honoring a
person's humanity is more important.

I have to err on the side of compassion for Emmett’s good will and his
innocence. Someone else will have to come and get him out if they want to.
He has no family, he never married, he is alone. How can I kick a guy like
that out of a meaningful place where he is at home?

This is tough stuff and as you can see, when it gets down to brass tacks, I
talk and complain and rant and rave but I would rather eat all my words and
start over with Emmett with a new concept in my mind than to suddenly
uproot him when he is intending to stay. It would not be right. If I have
enough of a problem, then I will have to address Emmett with that directly,
as it should be done.

When I am faced with the reality of having to really confront the issues, I
see that many of the issues are with me rather than Emmett and as the man
on the scene here, I am willing to open my heart more and include more, for
Emmett's sake. I may have to become more honest and forthright and this
experience is certainly deepening me as a human being.

And now, stay tuned for some scenes from the next episode of Texas.....

Sincerely, Fred

7/14
The project has hit another snag. This time it is the plans again but now it is a problem with the contractor, Mike Corbett, having missed a fairly critical detail. The work on the slab and foundation is contingent upon specifications provided by the steel supplier’s engineers. These specs were not taken care of by Mike, or by the slab man or the steel supplier and the problem arose, it seems, because the supplier had to go through the plans to figure out exactly how much steel would be needed. Once the plans were looked at with a critical eye, it became apparent that there was some sort of steel prefabricated building involved with the sanctuary and the weight of that, not having been figured by the architect because the plans state that it will be figured by the steel company, directly impacts how big or small the piers and the foundation underneath need to be.
So we cannot proceed with anything until all this is rectified by Mike and the steel people.

Mike blames this on the architect. I look at Mike and see his company is named MC Drywall and wonder why he missed the engineer’s stamp and other drawing problems previously and now he appears to have not understood this aspect of the plans. Mike is very good at evading responsibility and fingering other people but it is starting to become clear to me that there are some basis competency issues going on and I wonder when the next surprise will emerge from the plans?

Mr. Myles, the foundation man told me that the reason that these problems are coming up is because the job is being dome time and materials. It does seem odd that a million dollar job would be done on that basis but that is what Mike has talked the church into. If the job was all out to bid and various subcontractors had been able to preview the plans and make estimates based on the plans, all of the problems we have had so far would have been caught a long time ago. Mike claims he is the only person in WF who would do the job because the rest of the contractors are racist and the city doesn’t want the church here on Broad St. WF is a small playing field but there is Lawton and other towns around. I think Mike saw this job as a big cash cow. The church people are unsophisticated in construction and contracting and Mike and the subs saw all that coming as a big fat padding of their wallets.

There is no incentive other than honor, to work fast and hard in a time and materials basis. A guy cam stretch the work a little here and there and take it easy and there is no pressure. You can go get lunch and take an extra half hour here and an extra hour there. With a bid, if you don’t work hard you start to earn less money and there is plenty of incentive to perform. I have advised Russell to think of a plan B, where a new and different set of plans, a smaller church and a new contractor might be brought in. I advised Harold that QWI might pull back and go on stand-by with this project, until the contractor and church get the construction going and there is actually something for us to do. Myles said it would be a month and a half from the time he starts work on the slab until there is any carpentry. We have no volunteers to speak of, just a few older women, so I told Harold, hey, let’s call a spade a spade, this project is sputtering and shows all signs of keeping on that way. If QWI is really low on money, which it is, then we cannot keep on pouring money down the drain and have no project. Here in WF we have spent $12,000.00 in the last two months to prepare and supply the work camp. Harold has probably spent two times that on supplies and salaries, travel etc. Mike said yesterday, “I started out thinking I was doing something good and everything keeps going wrong.”

7/17
Olga left this morning with her niece and daughter who were 15 and 16 respectively. They were here just a little under two weeks. The girls were very rude and ill mannered. I will not miss the girls at all. After me going way out of my way to be polite to them and cater to their needs and take them traveling, the girls got on the bus and did not even bother to say thank you or even good bye. Medzio and Emmett have gone back to bed as it is 5:30 AM. I am here alone.

Olga and I started to develop some simpatico and it was clear that we enjoyed each other’s company. I started to wonder whether I should come on a bit stronger to her or hang back.  It was a dilemma because I felt the need to respect her daughter and niece, to respect her marriage yet I was certainly receiving signals. I didn’t want to look a gift horse in the mouth. She said she was glad to have come here and that her husband was gone all day and up to 9:PM working. She didn’t like only seeing him on weekends.

She told me she was sad to be leaving because she had met me.

We were joking around about me crossing some double yellow lines while driving and I drew an imaginary line in the car and said “you better not cross this line.” She said “what if I cross line?” I said “you’ll find out.” She didn’t understand and eventually after some explanation she got it and said “Are you afraid of me?” I knew we were getting to the moment of truth and it was time to put up or shut up. We had already been talking about fate and destiny and I had managed to communicate to her that fate had her in St Petersburg and me in the USA. So I said sometimes there are things you really want but you can’t have them, that she was married with kids in Russia and I wanted her but she had to leave. She said “Is dangerous if I kiss you?” (Think fast Freddy) “Oh no, I would like that.” This is all on the way to SAM’S Club. I told her a little about why one kiss could be dangerous, how after one kiss it is hard to stop and she understood I wasn’t talking about a peck on the cheek and she then said “just friendly kiss.”

We got her film at SAM’S and drove home, had dinner and since it was their last night and the brats wanted to go to the movies and it was the last chance to do anything with Olga, I went along. Olga wanted me to see City of Angels and we went in and sat together. As the movie went on we held each other’s arms and hands and as the story unfolded I began to see the irony of this being so nice with Olga. The angel gave up all of eternity for one kiss and one night with the woman he loved. They quoted some Hemingway about eating oysters by the sea and how the taste began to them feel more alive again. In the end there was a tragedy and the woman was killed and the angel was left alone, with his free will and humanity, left to carry on. There Olga and I are holding hands in the movie, real life intersecting  with a Hollywood love story.

There was some fate and tragedy here, a beautiful and sweet woman passes by. She is friendly and charming and she likes me. She has a whole other life yet for two weeks she is here alone, with daughter and niece. I could hear waves breaking on an ocean of passion. I could sense the potentials of a whole other life. What could have been but was not. Fate, destiny, tragedy. I could have slipped and fallen a lot farther than I did. A colorful bird or butterfly is passing by only to disappear as quickly as it came, this fleeting brush with Olga is over. She told me I needed to visit St. Petersburg, for a $450.00 round trip ticket from NYC in winter. Maybe.

Later in the day I spoke with the QWI treasurer and he pretty much laid it out, we have no money, the party is over. Harold has been trying to hang on at all costs but faith is only going to get a nigger so far. This is a reality check and there is no money to pay for staff to keep the operation going.

I am at a crossroads. I notified SCA that I am available. They may or may not have anything. I have options, I could go travel. I love to travel. I could line up work and set a schedule. I could do all sorts of things for myself but the reason I wanted to come here in the first place was to work for things larger than myself. I am about more than survival and just looking out for my own ass. If I cut and run now that will say a lot about what I really represent in terms of service. I could help a lot if I stayed on voluntarily, worked things out with Russell and Mike and saw things through. I also see this situation is beyond my control and I really just need to let the Powerhouse figure out these details and I can come back when all is square and running the way it was originally intended.

My parents immediately saw things through only a practical lens and even now that I am onto something of high quality, it can still be reduced to only naked self interest. I am having to question my motivations now. Do I take the money and run? Did I come here just to make money? Is the goal and are the relations I have established more significant to me than my own pleasure or ability to make another few thousand dollars?

If I was getting some local pussy this would be easier but that is still putting my own needs above what I see as the higher. It is interesting to be reading Elaine Pagels now because this can be framed as derivative of early Christian fever/ fervor to serve the higher purposes. Those things played out 2000 years ago and they are still playing. If we were Pagans, Olga would have given it up with no question because clearly we were simpatico enough to be doing a little fucking. I would be bagging Darlene and Vicki and Dorothy Buckner too because we all get along great. Why not fuck and enjoy life? The black folks seem to have that figured out pretty good because every single family has kids by different mothers and fathers and that is accepted. The family is what results from a life of allowing the moment and passions to unfold as they will. The Pagels line is that sex became to be seen as interfering with serving the purposes of the new age, serving the higher kingdom of God. Even then people could see that passion of the flesh was extremely powerful. If a guy is always thinking of his next release of the flesh, is there any more to life? This is where the hidden force of Christianity creeps into our lives, at least into my western life, in breaking down attitudes towards sexuality. Why aren’t I getting a lot more pussy than I am? Because I am all fucked up by submerged Christian attitudes about sex as well as what is implicitly seen as a “higher” way.


Sure, sex can take over and people can repeat ad nauseam the patterns of passion, divorce, splitting up and going for yet another new affair. The moments that lie therein are an eternity of feelings and passion. That is why in the City of Angels, an angel could choose one night of fleshy passion over an eternity of not ever feeling any of that. There is a natural developmental cycle and I can see that what I am framing as the “higher” can co-exist with getting laid all the time. It all gets down to feeding your desires, higher, lower, who cares? There is no way to tell. A guy can analyze this all to death and sterility. What does it take to feel alive and to experience the mystery, majesty and power of being alive? There is no one answer.

7/19
Today was perhaps my last time, for a while anyway, of going to church with the Powerhouse and it was good. We sang, the Pastor led the church in a fevered prayer during which people were ranting and hollering and Vicki Lundy got so far out there that the spirit possessed her, shaking and crying and she testified that the church needed to work harder to build, people needed to step up and be counted.

Sister Holloburton was here today. She is a missionary from the regional Church of God in Christ and the Pastor let her get up there and she went on and on, taking us well past a two and a half hour service.

Afterwards, Darlene and Vicky and Dorothy Buckner cooked us a fried catfish dinner at Thompson’s house and we had a fine day and meal of fellowship and conversation and good old time religion. We talked about fishing and snakes and frogs and catching frogs for their legs and how to best plant tomatoes, and tornadoes and I made small talk with a sweet young woman named Aretha, Thompson’s niece. She was from Oklahoma.

Thompson’s brother, Peter Gordon, told me about Oklahoma in the old days when people lived way back in the woods, blacks and Indians, living in caves, tipis and how when the Five Civilized Tribes were exiled to Oklahoma, they brought black slaves with them. Dorothy Thompson is a mix of three different kind of Indians and Black. Her family name was Cudjoe and she grew up in Sasakawa, Oklahoma. When Thompson courted Dorothy, she was 16 and wild for him, he had her eating out of his hand and running for miles to meet him in small towns. Now Dorothy is hooked to an IV and gaunt, ill, but hanging in there. As a young and middle aged woman she was really a ravishing beauty with a fantastic smile and a sweet voice and personality. She still has all those qualities as now she stands close to the abyss.
At one point around the table, Sister Holloburton asked the Pastor if, even after being saved, a person can waiver in their faith. Shit yeah I thought and the Pastor said yes and then he got off on preaching around the table about Jesus going to some garden and how some of his disciples went to sleep and he went on and on and I started yawning and had to go over to the couch and crash out with the rest of the folks stuffed with catfish and sweating and listening to cartoons on the TV as we deliriously dozed to the Pastor preaching and Bugs Bunny crashing and banging.

It is impressive to me how the church people can be faced with what amounts to multiple tragedies and set backs and they can sit around and laugh and be great people. After church we can joke and lie around the couch at Thompson’s and talk all kind of stuff and all the Jesus feeling seems about a million miles away. They talk about affairs and extra women and you can see that all the families are an incredible mix of different mothers and fathers and people being related in all kind of ways. Darlene’s four girls all seem to have different fathers. This is encouraging to a fellow like me who is attracted to these big beautiful black women who have such an open spirit. Maybe I can eventually leave a legacy here in WF, “Oh yeah, remember old Fred, he’s her Daddy.” Give me five minutes with Aretha and we’ll be headin’ that way.

The scene here at the house is going to start winding down. One last volunteer is here until Saturday and there is not a tremendous amount of physical work to do but pack things up and store them in the bunk house or the office. We will have a meeting on Tuesday with the church, the contractor, me and Reggie Smith from the Council of National Black Churches. This meeting should give me and the other players an indication of where things will be standing in the next few months and what the future may look like. With my schedule, I can be available on very short notice and with the uniqueness of building bridges with the Black community like this, I really want to do more. Even if this means that my day to day reality may include having to hassle kids and adults about the most trivial types of chickenshit stuff about dishwashing, fly swatting, toilet hygiene and cleaning up after their own sorry asses. I will need my number two to be much more social and involved so that I don’t feel responsible for every small detail. I need staff who are competent, independent, have good judgement, who are personable and can deal with lots of stress and be able to rebound and not develop sullen bad attitudes.

First we will need a project and hopefully the Powerhouse can pull it all together and QWI can get it’s house in order and Mike will prove to be competent and equal to all of his talk. 

7/19/98
Fred Allebach

I have started to become under impressed by Medzio as an employee. As an individual he is fine with me. I want to emphasize that Medzio is a well educated, intelligent, worldly guy. I get along fine person to person with him. As an employee I am having problems with his level of motivation and initiative as well as ability to follow direction and meet the requirements of his job description. I can see that he was hired mainly as a photographer and to interpret Swahili for the Tanzanians who never came. That has left him exposed to meet responsibilities he was perhaps not expecting and maybe not qualified for.  It really just cooks my socks that he is getting paid as much as me for so much less work and less taking of responsibility. In the future, with so much more real responsibility, the Director should not be on equal pay with other staff.

Allow me to site some examples which I see as adding up to a pattern of poor performance.

Medzio always seems to have an excuse for not going to church, even though it goes with the job to participate with the experience in general.  The church people are interested in him and he is not there. He has only been to church once. Today, on the last day for him to go, he skipped church and then dinner at Thompson’s house. Maybe he is tired of being paraded around as an African/ Polish guy and having to handle the same sets of predictable questions. His lack of participation has been questioned by the church members and the volunteers.

I was kind of taken aback by his reading a magazine during morning meditation and said to him that was not acceptable. What I see from just these last two indications of non-participation is a person who is not studying his job description and is putting his individual interests ahead of the job. This is not somebody who really wants this job and is interested in performing to be good at this. When a person is serious about their job they are eager to perform and pull their weight. When someone is not serious about their job description, they are insubordinate and seek ways to avoid responsibility. I see Medzio as being here for other reasons, probably one: roped in by Harold for film and Swahili and two, to make good pocket change on summer break from college.

We have a pretty high profile in the community here and Medzio has said that he will refuse to speak with any reporters, TV or otherwise and that is just something he will not do. How does one get off with that when dealing with the media and publicity is part of the job and part of the mission?

I asked Medzio if he would pick up Eleanor at the airport and he said he couldn’t do it because he would get lost, he has such a bad sense of direction. I find this to be highly, highly unbelievable. Tonight he is out to a camera store with no apparent problems. These things would be acceptable maybe as individual aberrations, but taken collectively, they add up to a pattern. The pattern is of someone who does not want to do their job and has excuses for why they can’t do this or that. The excuses come on a frequent enough basis to make me wonder. I can overlook a few things but when there are so many excuses you see through them.

Apparently also Medzio has an eye problem and cannot work in direct sun. I was not appraised of this beforehand. With no Tool Man on staff, that left me to have to keep my finger on the pulse of the all work camp aspects and work the volunteers all day too. That type of physical problem really limits the utility of a staff person expected to be a jack of all trades.

I have also asked Medzio not to run the AC in his room while he is not in there yet every time I check, the AC is on. There is no reason to keep the AC on when one is not in a bedroom, but this has become a point of contention and I believe, willful insubordination. If we are out of money and AC in the summer is a major expense, why leave it on when you are not even using the room? “Oh I forgot.” or such excuses are really lame. That kind of attention to detail is not what you want from your number two man and demonstrates a cavalier attitude and a kind of screw you, I will do what I want kind of feeling.

I also am not impressed by Medzio’s  level of initiative and needing to be told just about everything I see needing to be done and when I ask for some things to be done, like in the absence of Cooks, cook dinner and fold some sheets I previously washed and dried. Medzio sleeps all afternoon and I end up doing those things myself.  Maybe I am disillusioned by thinking that the Director maybe should not have to be always be covering every detail.

With no cooks, we all have to do dishes and clean the house. With three people only and of those Medzio and myself the only fully functional ones, we have to wash dishes more frequently. Medzio has now claimed that he has done enough dishes and he feels like the maid and will not do the current ones in the sink, he refuses, even though he was here at the house by himself all afternoon and did no QWI work at all. He could have made a bank deposit as well but he seems to have reached a point of total lack of initiative. I also found two big knives in the sink, obscured under the water and asked Medzio if he would please not do that. I got a whole lot of jive about how they needed to soak because the handles were greasy. Do you risk a nasty cut just to wash a knife handle? I am out all afternoon taking care of Eleanor and come back to a full boat of dishes. That is petty, prima donna kind of stuff, to refuse to work because you feel you have done enough already. This refusing to work at particular things is not a quality you want out of a staff.

This brings up another issue in that I have hardly taken one nap and in the afternoons.  I am the one handling volunteers, phones, issues, meetings, while Medzio takes a daily nap of one or two hours. As soon as Eleanor Hammond arrived, he went to take a nap rather than welcome her. Medzio claims to be unable to function without a nap but give me a break, what kind of professional administrative job comes with getting a nap everyday?

I leave copy work on the copy machine and it is not seized, the dishes sit in the sink all day while we are at church and at dinner at Thompson’s. The only thing I can see being done in the last few days is entering a few numbers on the work log and stuffing a package full of pictures. Maybe the dissolution of the work camp and the reality that there is not a whole lot to do, creates the atmosphere for sullen despondence and a kind of who cares mentality. The accounting work I asked Medzio to do was half done and sloppy. I had to do it over myself.

Some volunteers, church people and cook staff have pointed out that they were expecting more involvement from Medzio and he seemed to be hiding in the office and avoiding participation.  Maybe he is moody and shy and introspective and international and not suited to a highly social American  setting and job description. That’s OK, but I get the feeling sometimes  I have another volunteer on my hands here instead of a peer who is pulling down the same pay as me.

One day I asked him to handle some issues between the cooks and the Russians and he had to come back in the office and interrupt me about how to handle what sauce to put on the rice. This just demonstrates that Medzio has not really expected to rise to a level of authority and has not taken the initiative to seek out and fill needs, as the famous metaphor goes. I thought I was being fairly explicit by getting everyone’s letter of understanding out and saying that I expected people to study that stuff and to know it and do it. I wanted people to step up and not wait to be told. I would prefer people to err on the side of being decisive rather than being helpless and in need of constant guidance.

Now, Medzio can be an engaging, interesting guy and can work as a team player but he seems to drop the ball a lot. He has the skills but prefers to keep to himself. I get the sense that he is selfish, maybe without seeing that clearly and puts his own needs above that of the community and his job here. If I appear to be ripping him now, it is because it has been frustrating to face some stone walling and to deal with this for weeks and weeks. Like I said, he is a nice guy, so my feelings here are and have been tempered with compassion and wanting to see the bright side.

If we were going to be carrying on and the scene was up and running, I would recommend that Medzio be given the opportunity to perform on a trial basis and if we could go beyond the conditions and the misgivings and the excuses and see that he really wanted to be doing this work, then fine. In the future I would hire him only with specific conditions, i.e. photography and Swahili and not in a position of social, community responsibility. He has not demonstrated that this type of work is really what he wants to be doing. He can become a staff liability and so I recommend that he be used only on a conditional basis and if he does not perform adequately, he can be sent home. That doesn’t mean I think he is a bad guy, but if the shoe doesn’t fit, why pretend?

Certainly this has been a difficult situation and I cannot get off as appearing to be a perfect specimen of human behavior myself. I am not without fault and perhaps my own inexperience in dealing with a staff like Medzio has exacerbated the problems. It is a power struggle in a way in that he resists my direction and seems to resent doing tasks assigned to him. With no apparent initiative, I have to tell him everything except to go to the Post Office, which he can’t wait to do. This ending has been difficult on people in many ways and the weeks of Erin Hull and the Russians and Eleanor Hammond  has demonstrated that QWI needs staff who have very strong social and psychological skills as well as people who want to be here and have enough initiative to work without having to be told everything.


7/20
I woke up this morning and had to piss like crazy and I didn’t feel like putting any closes on so I just scooted out past the door to the living room and sure enough, old Eleanor saw me and later complained. She wouldn’t stop talking about it and how people from the south are more uptight about nudity and how this and how that. “You know shower curtains are not to keep the water in the shower.” I tried a few responses until I was finally became fed up of the repetition and just ignored her. You can’t get around an occasional nude shot in a work camp or communal living situation and if people are going to be super sensitive about their bodies, they should stay home and hide.

There isn’t shit to do. Tomorrow we have the summit meeting and after that it is wait until it is time to go. I may go early and make Medzio stay here with Eleanor since his flight is Saturday. I am ready to blow. I made tentative plans with Mike Gray to go back to Trigo Moreno, in Sonora, Mexico for two weeks at the end of August. That will be my third time there and I know the people, so it will be fun.

It all winds down and ends after such high hopes and noble expectations.

7/21
The Dallas Cowboys football team is doing their preseason training here in WF and the town is going wild, Cowboys stuff and posters everywhere. I could care less about football and the Cowboys so I decided to razz all the locals here at the house by saying I was going to go out to practice and start yelling “Cowboys Suck!!!!!” That got these folks going like you wouldn’t believe, telling me how bad the fans would beat me and then me telling them there wasn’t a Cowboy fan out there I couldn’t whip. I started to do the Ali Shuffle and the Bruce Lee kick ‘em in the chin kick and we all got some great laughs out of that. It has become a good ongoing joke and when I see Darlene out on the street in her car when I am driving the van, I’ll roll down the window and yell “Cowboys Suck!” People need to have some jokes and jive going or life can get too serious and that is just no fun.

I went over to the bank the other day and the tellers were closed and a woman told me i had to go to the draft room. I said what? She said the draft room. I said I’m sorry, where is the draft room and she said no, the drive through, I would have to stand on line at the drive through. These folks sure do talk funny.

7/22
Reggie Smith form the CNBC. Council of National Black Churches, came to Wichita Falls, yesterday for the shakedown meeting with Mike, Doodle, the Pastor, Russell, Darlene and myself. At first Reggie wasn’t there and Mike carried on about how the latest glitch was not his fault. The church people were skeptical. Mike wasn’t very convincing. He seemed more like a stuck pig than a good general contractor.

Then Reggie came and boy, he is just what this church rebuilding process really needed, a sharp, intelligent, tactful, knowledgeable and directive person. He pulled out his cell phone and called a steel company engineer in Denver and straightened out this steel shit as we all sat there whopper jawed. Reggie looked at the plans for the first time and illuminated more details in one hour than Mike had in two months. We could all see Mike was an amateur compared to Reggie. Here was Mike, who told me black people couldn’t work construction being made to look the fool over the building plans by a black man. This was something to witness. Mike ranted and raved and said “tell ‘em I did good, tell ‘em the architect had the plans all messed up....” Mike did not seem to notice that he was appearing rather foolish as he thought he was among equals with Reggie and explaining all this arcane stuff to us dumb onlookers. Anyone could see Mike was over his head. Maybe he can do the job. He’s not a bad guy, just a simpleton with a big ego and a big mouth. Mike needs to always be smelling like a rose and does not admit to any responsibility from the negative zone.
In the middle of the meeting, McCracken perks up and holds forth on how he is supposed to be taking care of the tools and such and he can stay around if need be to help out. Everybody was like wow, where is his mind at. The poor fellow is losing his mind and doesn’t know it.

I can’t say how impressed by Reggie Smith I am. The Powerhouse situation looked terrible a few days goad now there is optimism. I have the sense now that we are not the only ones. It seemed like everything in the world was happening great except for our little corner, where everything was going wrong. Now I can see that all church rebuilding projects encounter similar type delays, flakiness, difficulties and so on and so forth.

QWI was just too eager to be here. Harold had to have a project and he did not have the administrative infrastructure and policy based experience to assess when to come into this project. Even though there was a letter of understanding signed with the church, contractor and QWI, that wasn’t worth shit when the plans turned out to be no good. So, QWI needed a project, Harold needed a project, and he overextended himself, wanting to do good. We spent $25,000 on infrastructure and supplies for the work camp, ran out of money and need to pull back at least three months before volunteers can do anything.

7/24
Basically the situation here devolved for a number of reasons, the primary one being the architect did not draw complete plans and also failed to get the proper engineering drawings done on the plans. The second major reason for delays is the contractor, Mike Corbett’s inability to decipher the plans properly and notice the major things wrong right away. The third reason, combining with the other two, is the church’s naivete, not knowing what questions to ask and failure to keep the pressure and heat on Mike and the architect. The fourth reason, thrown in with all of the above is QWI entering in and raising the expectations of the church and volunteers and the whole South Central Yearly Meeting, that we would be working and serving the greater needs of a ministry to burned churches.

This all came crashing down for QWI when Harold ran out of money and the Treasurer, Tom Wolfe, told him he had to pull back and stop hemorrhaging money into a situation where there was no work to be done. Reggie Smith asked me why we stayed here so long when the project was dead in the water. We kept believing that “maybe next week” or “maybe tomorrow”, that things would break and the project would be a go. Now we are out of here, this will be among the last entries of this diary. It was a good idea, it’s just that the timing was wrong.

I don’t think Mike will pan out as the contractor, he has been exposed as less than competent, even though he doesn’t realize this. Russell is pretty shy however and not very assertive and Mike will probably last a while before Russell and the church have to find a new general contractor. I don’t see Mike as being good with volunteers either, he is too much of a good old boy to have the savoir faire to handle all the diversity that is going to be thrown at him with lots of volunteers who will in all likelihood, be unable to hammer a nail or figure out what to do.

Harold is plugging away in Washington DC, stunned by this latest development and trying to raise money to keep his QWI ship afloat. He told me if I had another job offer to take it because there are no guarantees that this particular project or QWI will remain viable options in the future.

I went to return the ice machine today and get my $400.00 refund from when McCracken bought it more than two months ago. The machine broke after about a week’s use and I spent $50.00 to find out it was worthless and another $75.00 to have it moved back to the previous owner’s yard. We spent $125.00 for a week’s worth of ice. On the way back to the mover’s office to get my receipt, a fellow rode with me to tell me directions. We talked a little about the church and he said he was in a ministry to prisons, “we go to the prison and try to save a few souls.” I’m driving down Southwest parkway and it is 105 degrees and this guy is talking about saving souls, this life sure is something!  This soul sacrifice, salvation, resurrection, new age coming, the rapture, the Holy Spirit, this stuff is really a force out here in the Texas Bible Belt. Maybe because there is so little culture and so little scenery, people are left to turn inward in this way?

Here is some side material I have been working on:

The Interpretation of Justification:  the Schism Between Lutheran and Catholic

Justification, for Christians, is the way sinning humanity is made acceptable to God and for salvation. And central to Luther’s theological objection to Rome was the definition of justification. Catholic theology held that the sinner is saved by the free gift of God’s grace–unearned and not in principle earnable - and by good works done after receiving that grace. In the 1500's, those works included prayers, penance and--articularly objectionable to Luther–the payment of cash indulgences to the church.

His study of the New Testament led him to a belief that grace is wholly up to God, that good works are no factor, and that faith alone is necessary and sufficient for salvation.

Each side condemned the other for heresy. Persecution, war and inquisition– in both directions–further tainted the relationship.

Is there any fundamental unity of the Christian church today? People can get pretty hung up on interpretation and doctrine. I like the ecumenical movement. That displays a wider range of thinking and people there have to be less dogmatic. Dogma of any flavor is generally distasteful.

Belief that eternal life is at the same time a result of grace and a reward from God for good works is a paradox. You can’t have it both ways. Why do things always have to be one or the other?

Even if the issue of justification is settled, other major questions continue to split the two churches: the role of the pope, Mary and the saints, baptism, ordination of women and others. Accord on justification is necessary before work proceeds on those other questions, theologians from both sides agree.

But the Catholic suggestion to clarify this issue by combining grace and the reward for good

works is a strategy for unification that already failed, 457 years ago. That reading is what is referred to technically as “double justification.” “It has been tried.”



This is why Glen has a problem with “good works”, not because being a virtuous person is not enough to gain a nigger a measure of heaven, but because “good works” is still being interpreted according to it’s Martin Luther era meaning of paying the Catholic church off to get to heaven or doing penance to get there as well.

In the context of my searching for the meaning of service, penance might be seen as working purely for self advancement. The higher levels of service clearly are good works in the best sense of the words. These motivations are not purely ego, self advancement type stuff. That would be what you would have seen by niggers paying the church off to get to heaven. Service gets a person outside of themself and that is a good work at a higher level than solely for one’s own purposes. Good works here is definitely different than what was meant by the term 500 years ago. If we cannot learn from history and we stay stuck in the old meanings, that is really no where. It’s stupid.
The religion section of the Dallas paper is always interesting for the comments you get from the conservatives regarding any “interpretation “ of the Bible. Fact is, as my main Elaine points out, all of the Bible is “interpreted”, it was written by men, there is no way to not interact with the material and not interpret it through the filters of one’s culture and individual experience. The notion that some texts are a direct pipeline to the truth and all people are capable of unambiguously understanding that truth in the same way, is really far fetched The following quote is interesting in this regard:

“The greatest deception which egotism perpetrates is when a man’s imagination leads him to think that his beliefs affect any truth.”  1925 edition of the Baptist Standard Here is a fellow on the total opposite side of the fence from me. I am a firm believer that truth is nothing without faith and belief.

This illustrates how people get really stuck on believing that their own particular holy way is the only one that is valid. It is the same old shit. I am in it too. I won’t give up what I see as right thinking. In a search to understand these things, I can only look at this type of statement and this situation as indicative of true believer status. There is no discussion. True believers are vigilant and will dispute any assertions that run contrary to their faith. In this sense I am not quite a true believer in anything but I do have well developed and evolving thoughts.

Here are some of my thoughts from my sociology class last Fall:

FCA 2/13/98    SOC 103    Untitled Essay

Having read most of the assigned articles I am coming away feeling that many of the essays are framed in a very aggressive us against them context. The goal and the agenda are not to create a

tolerant society but to tear down white men, patriarchy and the American political and economic systems. The analyses do not seek to understand events from a larger perspective. I see a lot of partial arguments and the incompleteness leads me to believe the analysis is shallow.

I am not without sympathy for people who are suffering and I am not an apologist for an exploitive economic system but somehow I find myself getting lumped in with what many consider to be an evil force. Our first class discussion dealt with stereotypes and from the assigned reading, I feel stereotyped. The generalities that people are using about white people and patriarchy are offensive to me because they are so partial and make so little effort to recognize any common humanity. White people and white men are not all one way and to identify some suspected politics with skin color or gender is racism and sexism all over again. I’m sorry but a group of people can’t be reduced by their skin color or sex. It doesn’t work

I can see that if any of these angry people ever found themselves in the driver’s seat they would be just as bad as the powers they are so forcefully against now. I look to people like Nelson Mandela, the Dalai Lama, Martin Luther King, Mohandas Ghandi, Mother Teresa. These people have defined the high ground. Self righteousness pales against what these people have accomplished. Why do some people feel a need to tear others down to build themselves up? Why not be for something rather than against something?

An interesting illustration of the issues I am working over is the 2/13 Star article about a 400-year-old conflict between Spain and the Pueblo Indians. The Indians are bitter about the cruelty of the conquest and don’t want New Mexico to honor it’s Spanish heritage. Don Juan de Onate went to NM with the express purpose of subduing the natives and converting them to Catholicism. He went to assimilate them.  I can see that Indians would not want to honor that, but 400 years is a long time to hold a grudge. A historian in the article said, “the whole world was brutal at that time” and that is true.

This caused me to think. The world was very brutal then. In addition to the Spanish Inquisition the SW Indians had a major slave trade going amongst themselves. Athabascan invaders displaced, raided, enslaved and killed. No people are ever going to be immune from the excesses inherent to being human. I can’t generalize about “the Indians” because they were/are as different from each other as from anyone else. The major part of human history reflects brash opportunism and the audacity to invent, change and challenge the old with the new. This has left some people in the dust while the audacious go for arrows, boats, agriculture, domestication, metal, firepower, books,  radio, TV, NASA and the internet.

This article and situation reminds me of the erstwhile Yugoslavia and how ancient hatreds had been cultivated  from battles long ago and with the correct series of events, those civilized people became totally savage. If people hang on to negative feelings and cultivate the culture of the victim, what happens when those people get some power? They turn around and victimize the former conquerors. No one has learned anything and we are back to square one.  How far are people going to go back and be willing to contest past injustices? The Lutherans, Zwingli Reformed Church and the Catholics absolutely savaged my ancestors. My people were drowned, burned at the stake and tortured for their beliefs but it would do me or none of the above people any good to act like it happened yesterday. There has to be some cultural statute of limitations and people have to move on and deal with the now.

To be human is one thing. To have a particular culture is another. I think human characteristics transcend culture. I think it is not only the culture or society or premise that drives people but also their basic capacities as human beings. These capacities are inventiveness, exploration, adaptiveness, imagination, creativity, intellect, emotion etc. I am integrating psychology with anthropology and sociology. Maybe how we act and the universality of many human things, which cut across every society and culture, could just be a function of the organization of the human brain.

I had the thought today about why not look back through history and find every group who was on top, who had succeeded in gaining dominance or who maybe were just plain successful, and then vilify them for being the oppressors of everyone who was not on top. This automatically penalizes anyone who is successful for whatever reason. In this manner you could say Egyptian civilization was corrupt. The cities which first gave rise to agriculture and political stratification were corrupt. The Aztecs sacrificed human life for an unsubstantiated belief and they were corrupt. Anatomically modern man was corrupt for pushing the neanderthals to extinction. It starts to look in history’s eye as not so much that people were corrupt but that they were just different. They were who they were. If any people had boats, guns and horses would they just stay home? If there is the ability there will come the desire to use that ability. 

Human societies have always been hierarchical and out of such a solid tradition it is hard to all of a sudden eliminate all hierarchies. No one person or group could ever unify a species so profoundly dedicated to difference. That people stand out differently as a result of their positions in society is natural, be that good or bad. People will always be bitter that they are not the dominant group. That’s human nature.

I have questioned, why is it bad to be seen as successful? It  is true that no one likes the top dog and there is constant competition to displace that dog. The irony and the paradox are that once the old dog is gone, the new one is just the same. The self righteous minorities of today are the oppressors of tomorrow. That some women are so angry at men belies the fact that to create any more men or women demands that men and women be attracted to each other. If the feminist agenda is successful, what would come after the defeat of patriarchy and would that be necessarily any more benevolent for people in general? I believe matriarchy could be just as oppressive but I don’t hear the feminists proposing anything new, just to tear down the old.

It is without doubt that the US now is the dominant country in the world. In the US there are dominant groups. Is this all because of ruthlessness? Is some of this merely the luck of the draw? Could some of this be a result of the differences between Protestant and Catholic states and their different strategies for conquest and development? That a people are successful does not automatically mean they are morally corrupt. The principles upon which this country was founded were revolutionary in this world. We were and are not perfect. No one ever can be. Our methods are not always in line with our ideals. Whose are? A very strong case can be made that the principles of religious freedom and freedom of speech in the US are liberating far beyond anything ever seen before. These very freedoms are what makes possible this intense questioning of how our society should be. We will not be burned at the stake or be called a heretic just for exploring what is the right way to go.

Looking back on the history of humanity, there have always been top dogs and members of the pack. With hierarchical animals like dogs or people, there has to be a leader. The reason that dogs are such successful domestic animals is that we have the same type of group behavior. We are both hierarchical, group oriented animals.  Egalitarianism, although it is a great idea, has never really panned out for people because inevitably someone always puts their own interests first. Even Native Americans acted this way in some groups with boss men and an underclass and women relegated to slave like status. These people were capable of the same exact barbarity as their human cousins all over this earth. To be savage, intolerant, dominating and in control is not just a function of the white male of particular west European ancestry.  It is a capacity shared by all humans. Given the chance, any group can be like this. What I notice is a conspicuous absence of any messages of reconciliation and understanding. I think the book is partial and biased for not presenting these views. Identity politics or the politics of difference seems to still need a bogey man. I feel defensive because that bogey man is stereotyped as me.

What is becoming clearer to me is that if there is to be a solution to any of this human strife, it will have to be at the level of the idea, and not reduced to the level of a particular truth owned by a specific group of people for various reasons. If some high ground is to be attained, a commonality has to be established among all people. What possible idea could be big enough to include all people today? I don’t know. The whole earth metaphor is available now. I’m not the Messiah. I have mentioned my heros.

That we and all species are all citizens of the planet is a common factor. That we can even conceive of the planet level is a big step. This could be, as Joseph Campbell said, the next level of mythology, the whole earth as seen from space. It shows us how all the little differences pale against eternity and the vastness of space. When we can see ourselves as alone in space with one planet, our planet, all of us together, all species, all life, then that is a new look at cooperation. That could be the link we need to all get on the same page. Otherwise we could end up tearing at each other’s throats like the animals we are and like we have shown we can be.

What needs to be covered and dealt with is our differences, economically, genetically, socially, culturally and religiously.

7/26
Well, I escaped from the Texas heat wave. I’m now at 4000' in Tucumcari, NM. Texas is far behind. It was so hot, for so long, I won’t miss being uncomfortable like that. 

Today was my last service with the Powerhouse and the Pastor let it all hang out. He can flat out sing! “Oh Lord” he sang, face twisted with emotion. The audience answered “Ooh Lord.” “Oh Loooord.” “Ooooh Looord.”  And it went on like that for a long time. There was a very good organist today and she and the Pastor set each other off, they were jamming.

When I left, the Pastor said he didn’t have words to describe the way he felt. “Fred, you are like a brother to me.” I felt a solid connection with him too. We became tight in a relaxed way and I feel we got totally over on race. It didn’t matter.

Deacon Ray got up and gave us an object lesson. Someone had stolen some stuff from him and he found out who and where it was. He was fixing to go kick some ass when his young son and daughter, the lovely seventeen year old Keisha Newton, prevailed upon him to cool off. And then Ray said, “I was leaning on my own understanding rather than that of the Lord. I could have gone over there and got in a lot of trouble, so I just put it all in the hands of the Lord.”

Now isn’t that interesting, to not trust your own understanding in general and to see that as ego, as the self, the debased and fallen, disgraced and unworthy Adam. The free will we have is not to be trusted. We should only be leaning on Jesus. I can’t go for that. I’m sorry. In the above instance however, Ray was able to prevent a big incident, where the head Deacon of the Powerhouse would be tossed in jail for whipping somebody’s ass. Ray could do it too. He is a big strong guy. The Christian tenets show some real value here in preventing violence. I see this as being right for the wrong reasons. A person  can deplore and shun violence without having to deny the self where those impulses arise. Because people are not perfect does not mean that everything about them must be rejected. The baby can stay just get rid of the bath water.

In the paper yesterday were a bunch of responses to a letter about how Cowboys fans should be going to church instead of being out there watching the summer training camp. Big mistake. The responses let it be known in no uncertain terms that the letter writer should get a life. What kind of prude, uptight, stuck up folks would bash the Cowboys?!?! The Cowboys are exactly right behind Jesus, the Holy Spirit and God in WF. The Pastor tired to get into a little condemnation of Cowboy mania but he didn’t take it too far. He is smart enough to make a point and then let his flock be Cowboys fans if they want to. The Pastor has tremendous common sense. He is wise. He is down home. He can drive his message in to the barn in any number of ways. He has been around the block and around the country. He knows what it means to be human.

Letters in the paper were begging any Cowboy to come visit Uncle Bob in the hospital, give more autographs at camp, do this, do that. This Cowboy fever is really unbelievable but I can see that in a little burg like WF, with essentially nothing to do, having the Cowboys come would be a big deal. Everybody has Cowboy hats and T-shirts and bumper stickers. Can you imagine a world where the Cowboys are the most exciting and compelling thing around?

My stay in WF was an opportunity to explore the meaning of Christianity, through attending a Pentecostal church, working for a Ministry to Burned Churches, reading Elaine Pagels about Adam and Eve and the Serpent , listening to all kind of Baroque religious music and having previously attended Quaker Meeting all Winter and Spring of this year.

So far I have approached it in the abstract, in an academic manner, incorporating a bit here and there from my own meditations. I have not been saved or converted, even though it is tempting to become a true believer. As a true believer you are relieved of the necessity of thinking and of taking responsibility for your actions. I say to myself “ how can I possibly go for that?” I need to be able to think!

It is so amazingly improbable that God and Jesus are always behind the scenes, never revealing themselves, permitting untold suffering and savagery. Why would the revelations only happen for three years, two thousand years ago and that is it? It is a lot to ask a person to believe, while daily we witness unimaginable deprivation and suffering.

It is a confidence game and Pastors, Priests and preachers are the confidence men. Thompson’s job is to tend his flock. He needs to keep them having faith, keep working them over. And the Deacons take up the offering and pay Ted to do the job. They are poor but they still ante up and pay. Thank you Jesus! They belong and participate and it all gives meaning to life. It is really real. I can see it as a game from the perspective of an outsider, a non-believer, a heretic, but on the inside, this is all genuine stuff.

How could I be a church goer and still maintain what I need to feel OK and intelligent? I feel that to a major extent, I would have to really dumb down to be a true believer. I can admit that to know the greatest mysteries, I would need faith. Why do I need to have faith in something I can’t know anyway? It is all with myself to reach my highest capacities, if there is God, then God is right here inside me and not out there somewhere. What is essentially an individual journey gets reduced and collapsed into conforming to a group dogma.

It is absurd to think that in the end true believers will be rewarded for their lack of critical thought and I will be punished for being a seeker. That does not add up. I’m sorry. I will gladly burn for that and I have heard that Hell is actually more fun than Heaven.

The Pastor said a number of times, if you are not against us, then you are for us. He was grappling with how people of other faiths and races and countries could come and help him and his congregation? How could people so wound up in owning the truth see outside of that enough to come help another denomination? That is the interfaith, universal, ecumenical spirit. Ecumenical efforts are more at creating a unity among the Christian world. Interfaith universalism is going to include all faiths and be harder for people to handle. A universalist perspective, like mine, will be an anathema to any one even slightly rigid. The Pastor had to deal. This was real, we were there. He and his people were just great. We didn’t get stuck on the fine points and allowed our humanity to shine through. We let what was inside shine and that has no boundaries. That is human.

We went out to dinner with some Methodists and they were cracking on the Mormons and the Jews and my homeboy Pentecostals. Shoot, even my elderly Quaker companion was seriously anti-Mormon, to the point of not even wanting to listen to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. This territory is a minefield of faith and belief. It is nice to find a person like Thompson who can be a Pastor and a human being too.

7/28
I’m in Show Low now at a State Park listening to Renaissance and Baroque California Mission music. This is appropriate because I am now back in the lands of historical Spanish influence. It feels good to be here. I don’t miss Wichita Falls or Texas one bit. North central Texas is a pit of zero culture. There is nothing there but to work and go to church. There isn’t even a sense of history as with Oklahoma. I don’t see how people can stand to live there. You would need some hot pooty tooty on a daily basis.

Although I was not born here in the Southwest region, I have lived in Tucson for 16 years, have studied the local and regional history, lived in and studied the desert, visited and lived in Mexico and speak OK Spanish. I feel connected to this region more than anywhere else.

I spent last night in Gallup, NM. Gallup is very similar to Flagstaff. There is a railroad running through the middle of town, there is an older section,  a big strip development and lots of Indians. Just like with the Blacks in WF, there is a lot of mixture between the Anglos, Mexicans, Spanish  and Indians. Folks are coming in all shades and degrees of color. In 400 years you would expect as much. A lot of Indians you see are mixed.

I stopped at Zuni Pueblo and met a fellow up at Black Rock who told me to stop at the church in town and they would take me over to the old Mission, in the plaza of old Zuni. I went over there and a nice woman led me to the Mission, through the old adobe buildings and women hanging wash and into the historic plaza. There was a cemetery in the church yard. What a sense of history and tradition! Off in the distance the thunder beings and puffy white clouds set off the red sandstone mesas and the dark green pine. There is big space, big history and it goes deep, down through the strata into a mysterious space where human traidtion intersects the history of the earth itself.

In Philadelphia you might marvel at the old colonial buildings, William Penn, the founding fathers but in the sedimentary plateau country you become captivated by a deeper history in more than one way.

As the Zuni woman unlocked the church door, I had all my attic fantasy needs taken care of. Here I was entering a Mission built in the 1600's. Man, what a feeling, to see the inside, at Zuni. The upper walls were being painted with murals depicting traditional Zuni religion and life ways. Scaffolding was erected all along one side. There were also really old pictures of Jesus and the Virgin of Guadalupe was front and center in a big piece behind the dais and the pulpit. The Virgin connects the whole region.

I asked my guide how the priest felt about mixing the symbols Catholicism with the Kachinas dancing across the sky? She said about 80% of the Zuni are Catholic but that they still go with the old ways too. It is the same as my Kiowa friend who told me about how most of them had taken the Jesus road but they still respected and tried to connect with their own past and history.
It is amazing that there is this syncretism all through the areas of New Spain, where Catholicism put it’s pageantry strategically in place of the Indians harvest and ceremonial cycles. There is the same stuff, from Argentina to Chiapas to Acoma and Zuni. It is a sacred mixture of Christianity and the deep spiritual animism of the Indians.

This is bringing me back to my youthful search and striving to read about and understand the Indians. The Indian way is as deep, sincere and meaningful as any Christian way. I am breaking some new ground here for myself in seeing what is at the core of ethnicity. Culture inevitably has religion as a major component and in order to come to grips with being human, a person has to come to grips with religious questions.

As far as culture and life ways go, at a small museum in Zuni there was a booklet made by grammar school students which was very telling. The theme was Zuni people, then and now. Then: we didn’t have Miss Zuni Now: we have Miss Zuni and so on and so forth about clothes, transportation, food, housing, etc. You can see the difference between the old photos and today with trucks and crackerjack construction, the old ways have fallen aside. You can feel the cultural shifts. Change has come to town. What that means to the individual Zuni is not for me to say. All I can see is the Kachinas and Jesus and the Virgin of Guadalupe all cohabiting in a beautiful old building.

First the Indians, then other strange Indians, then come the Spanish, the Mexicans, La Raza, the Anglos, then the Yuppies. Change, change, change. People coming and building new types of houses, changing the way things were. In Concha, AZ I met an old fellow, “Porfie”. He had an inviting junk shop and he and his wife were real friendly. We sat around and talked for an hour or so about gentrification and how Porfie’s property taxes had gone from $90.00 a year to $900.00 because of all the Anglos moving in and wanting a school, a library and a fire department. Porfie and Concha did just fine with what they had before.

Porfirio is a born and bred Hispano, of direct Spanish descent. He is not a Mexican. I asked him about that and he said sure there is a little difference but he was born HERE, he is from Concha. His daughters all married Anglos. He sells his stuff to Mexicans and Indians. Sure they are different but Porfie plays the differences down. I like that. That is my kind of guy. Both of us don’t like yuppies in Explorers invading the countryside. We want controlled growth but we want it to apply to everyone except us.

At the museum in St. Johns, AZ, formerly El Vadito, where there is a crossing of the Little Colorado River, there are local families who can trace their ancestry to Don Juan de Onate’s exploration party, Chavez, Gallego, homeboys who came up that way and never left. The Mormons came too and gained a foothold.

There is a lot of room here and for hundreds of years it has been enough. Now there is a new invasion of yuppies and Santa Fe type movie star tourists. It is too bad because the new stuff is like weak Kool-Aid compared to the strength and power of the history of this area. Maybe yesterday always seems better because it is what we know. We can look askance at things like the wheel, the bow and arrow, the atlatl, metallurgy, the telegraph, telephone, railroad, clocks, printing presses, TV, radio, airplanes and computers. These things have all represented major challenges to the ways that came before and maybe it always seemed that we would be going to hell in a handbasket as a result of the new. The world has always been changing, only now, in many ways we are running out of space to make mistakes.

I have often wondered about road kill, all that life smashed, mashed and crushed to death. What happens to the consciousness of an insect that is instantly obliterated into a clear splat of formerly living fluids on your windshield? What becomes of the armadillo or the hare? The squirrel is crunched and rolls over and over to a stop while the shocked driver must ponder the very core of existence. Are we all just random life here on earth in the midst of incredible and amazing odds? How highly improbable that we would become conscious of being conscious solely by random forces. Are the clouds and beauty of the sunset all we are ever going to get? Does this tremendous mystery, all of the universe, the infinite expanse of matter and space, time bent around pinheads crowded with angels, does this in any way imply there is more? Is there a creator? Does the incredible intricacy of life imply any sense of higher purpose when the business of life at the bottom is all about killing and eating other life? Is there a conscious creative force and if there is, how could we possibly know? There are certainly creative forces which are entirely unconscious or which operate at levels not able to be described in the terms of consciousness, such as ocean currents, clouds and evolution. They are animate. Why is the moniker animal reserved for life only when other, inorganic process are equally animate?

It is anyone’s guess. I have seen for a long time the difference between faith and fact. There is really no comparison. It is apples and oranges.

There is, however, a space in the secular mind, where even though a fellow might be trying to tow the empirical line, a guy just has to admit he can’t know certain things. If you can’t know it, why pussy foot around with a lot of jive pretending you really do? Faith is faith and fact is fact. Some might confuse fact with fiction and indeed there is no universal reason we can look back to for any answers. When you really get down to it, a fact is all a guy wants one to be! Fact and faith are inseparable pieces of a unified human way of understanding life through the veil of culture and religion. People have argued and fought and killed and brutalized each other over just such material as this. We really want to be right in the worst way.

Let me be right for me, as long as I do no harm and I am just. I take not your possessions or your wife or your life. I cannot help being me. I do this not to antagonize you. Permit me to be human just like you would want for yourself.

I am here among the dramatic storm clouds of Arizona August, among the ponderosa and my memories of education, Mexicans, Blacks, Hispanos and all kinds of motherfuckers, all kinds of lessons and insights. I am 41 and no closer than I was when I was 18 or 28 touching the same material. Maybe when I was a kid I had it the most straight, that all of this pretense and white man’s striving paled in comparison to any kind of genuine culture. Yet where would I be if I couldn’t indulge in the mighty abstractions made possible by being born and living in the modern world? What it gets down to is where a person touches life, where their baggage and wagon meet the road and how they as individuals handle the material and situations they are dealt. 

8/1/98 Hutch’s Pool

As I was waiting for the tram a Forest Service guy came over and asked how heavy my pack was? I said “about sixty pounds.” He said “do you walk up hill with that?” shaking his head in disbelief. I said “yes but slowly.” He then asked if I had “anything with me in case I got in trouble?” I didn’t know what he meant at first. I thought maybe he was talking about weed or booze. I said “I don’t understand what you mean.” and he said “nevermind.” Then it became clear to me that he meant a gun.

He asked me if I had any bug spray. I said “no.” He shook his head some more looking at me and asked again if I didn’t have anything with me in case I got in trouble. He then said “you are a lot braver than me.” I said to him “this is not my first hike.” We talked some more about bugs and how I could possibly stand it when they are crawling up my nose and in my ears and in my eyes? I told him the first line of defense against bugs is psychological. If you start letting them really get to you the battle is already lost regardless if there is any bug spray involved or not. If a guy can’t take a few bugs he might as well stay home. My protagonist agreed with that and then drifted off to finish his work of emptying garbage cans.

A lot of quail were walking by too in good looking skimpy outfits and darned if one didn’t appear with the shortest of shorty shorts imaginable, a fantastic tan and huge tits all hanging and busting out of a skampy top. I thought to myself wow, get a load of that and coming right this way too! I had my back pack out and she came right up to me and started asking questions. “How long are you going to be out?” “Where are you going?” She was really friendly. As we spoke, my eyes were taking a hike and independent excursion all of their own. I haven’t seen a tan like that ever. Her body was toned and fit. Little hairs stood out on firm skin that dove down into the nerve endings of her flesh. Her name was Shoshana and she teaches high school at Santa Rita. She runs 8 - 10 miles a day and her own personal marathon once a month. She is not a triathlete because “that is too much time to spend on yourself.” She went scuba diving in Mexico by herself. She went to Central America by herself. She was attracted to me because I was going out by myself.

As we carried on I decided that her tits were fake. She had them done. She was probably about my age and women of that vintage don’t have tits that bust out skin tight and that have no jiggle to them at all. She said she could tell I was in the helping professions, into service just by looking in my eyes. If she could tell that then she surely must have known that I wanted to fuck her like a wild sow, even though her fake tits were totally crass. She might not have been so into herself as to devote the time to triathlete training but she did have time for being in totally great shape and for spruced up titties.

She was a combination of a little too much new age lingo with pushy New York Jew with a highly fuckable body. If you ever got your hands on something like that it would be a combination of heaven and hell all at once.



So here I am in Sabino Canyon again. I saw all the places I was with my SCA’s. I saw Hutch’s Pool and remembered the flash flood, remembered the ringtail’s getting the rube’s hamburgers right off the grill. “What are those things man?” 

There was a nice storm this afternoon and another one this evening.  The creek has risen about a foot although it has not turned brown. The vegetation within the banks shows evidence of heavy flooding, probably snow melt floods from the record El Nino snow pack on Mt. Lemmon.

I had an insight on the way up here today. The same places where I had so much immediacy and so much emotion with my SCA’s, those places don’t hold the same punch any longer. I visited here in the Fall after that summer of 1992 and the place seemed alive with the spirits and memories of those kids. The years have rolled by and the same saguaros are here, silent and unmoving. As the moments slip by they are gone forever, fading ever more remotely from significance and immediacy. The time with those teens is gone for good. These are new moments now.

What does it matter to the saguaro and the oaks that we had a great time out here eight years ago? What does it matter to the rocks that there are saguaros and oaks? When generations and centuries, millenniums, eons and epochs have passed, all of that will be forgotten just as the lives and times of the people who preceded us Anglos and Spanish and Mexicans here in the Tucson valley. The moment rules. The now is where I forever stand

8/2
As individuals we act out the peculiar drama of our species. What else can we do? We are bound by our nature to work within certain parameters, human parameters. Other individuals of other species do the same. All of our individual actions merge into a larger collective picture which can be called nature, all of life. All the big and little processes change over time, rise and fall, come and go, it is life, constantly changing, constantly marvelous and infinitely mysterious.

How is it that we assume this has all been created? By what forces has life in all it’s astounding complexity and staggering variety of forms been created? Can we be so arrogant as to assume our own understanding is at the same level as the creator? Big questions :: no answers.

Elaine Pagels talks about the early Christians challenging the Pagan beliefs of the Romans. She talks about how the pagan gods were used to justify slavery and prostitution and how with the Christian God all were created equal, women, slaves, races all equal in the eyes of God. This was while the Christians were being persecuted and before they became the state religion of the Roman empire, before they themselves found ways to justify slavery, racism and other forms of discrimination.

Here in the midst of pure nature with no humanity around  except me, I can see things through pagan eyes. I can see how a tree would have a spirit and how all trees would have a collective larger consciousness, the god of trees and how this extends into a pagan pantheon of spirits and gods of nature and life. This is a way of understanding the world by extension with what you already know, by using metaphors. If I have a spirit then a tree must have a spirit and all life as well have spirits too...

If we take our own societies and families and use them as metaphors for how gods and God relate to us, then we are transposing the known onto the unknown. A is to B as C is to X. God is the Father. We are the children. This is all we can do because in reality we cannot imagine or make metaphors with things and processes unknown to us. How can you compare something you have no words for or experience with? The unknown inevitably gets reduced to the known.

A creator or creative force that deals at the level of atoms and quarks and electrons and suns and galaxies and DNA and universes and the crystalline structures of minerals and rocks, that creative force is so much more than an anthropomorphic “Father”. When you look at things this way it is easy to see we just use that metaphor to make it easy for ourselves. It is simpler, more comforting and less messy to believe the easy stuff. The easy stuff is for mass consumption.

I went for a nice walk up past the confluence of Lemmon Creek and Sabino Creek, having found a number of nice pools where I relaxed, had a luxuriant empty mind, thought a little and got entirely too much sun. The sun of Tucson summer snuck up on me through the cool breezes and by being  wet down by refreshing stream water. While it all felt great in the moment later I came to regret my indulgence and momentary pleasure.

Now back at camp the gnats have driven me into the tent. They don’t seem to bite but they sure can hassle. My friend the garbage man stands as a spectre. An ant bites me on the nuts. How can you take it? If you want to be out here you just do. The sound of distant thunder rumbles long and low. The creek gurgles. Inside this tent I have been to Mt. Olympus, La Push, the Olympic coast, North Cascades, the Yolla Bollys, Trinity Alps, Mexico. This is my adventure shack given as a gift by my great friend the Mighty Mountain Man. I am naked and hot but if I don’t move at all I will not sweat.

I went up for an after sunset swim in the big pool and it was very nice to have it all to myself. Hutch’s Pool.  800,000 people in Tucson and I am the only one who will walk 2.5 miles in August through the Sonoran Desert to have it. It doesn’t seem that outrageous to me but maybe I am crazier than I thought.

I walked down to have a look at the camp of my previous neighbors who were shooting off fire crackers last night. Maybe they left some good gear. I am not above scavenging what others lose. There was a big pile of spaghetti and meatballs, gum drops scattered everywhere, toilet paper in the bushes, french bread, ravioli, shoes, stickers, paper and all manner of other trash. What can I say, they obviously didn’t know anything about conservation or low impact camping. They were ignorant and cannot be blamed for not knowing but all the same it is a shame to witness this grossly disrespectful behavior. What could they possibly have been thinking? The Forest Service has minimal information posted, no check in, no permits and so they must constantly be picking up trash after folks like this.
8/3
I reread Tom Kochman’s Black and White Styles in Conflict and have been intrigued by a point made about who is responsible for a person’s feelings. Community Black people see the individual as responsible for their own feelings while White people tend to see others as responsible for respecting their sensibilities. A White person can say to someone, “you made me feel bad.” while a Black person would not automatically assume their mental state derived from someone else’s actions.

I have run across inumerable situations where people have accused me of violating their sensibilities, where I have been made out to be insensitive and the bad guy. What I am seeing now is that this is a cultural thing with White people and not necessarily a universal truth of human relations. It cuts both ways too because when I look at some situations and in my mind try to lay blame on others for how I feel, I see that as in some ways not accepting responsibility for my own mental state. My mental state is hypothetically able to be under my own control at all times and it can be seen as a cop out to blame one’s own feelings on another person. Of course we would have to account for assholes, some people just are assholes.

8/4 Mt Bigelow 4:PM
I woke at 5:AM this morning, dawn and put on coffee water and started to pack and get ready to hike back. It took less than two hours to hike the 2.5 miles to the end of the Sabino road and according to plan I was in the shade most of the time, skating behind ridge lines, the early morning sun unable to burn me any more. My pink skin could not take any more than absolutely necessary.

Last night I was stripping bushes of their woody flood detritus to make a smoky fire to fend off the gnats. After I had the fire smoking and going nicely and touched all my dinner implements to start cooking I looked up and noticed that the bush I had my hands all in was nothing other than a huge poison ivy plant. Fuck! I immediately went swimming to wash off the residue as best I could but it seems now that I have it all over my body.

Now I am at 8000' or more and it is nice and cool. I had not had enough camping and drove up here to Mt. Lemmon for a few more days of nature. There are signs all around saying how this is bear country and not to leave food yet there is a fucking pile of ravioli and a half full soda just across the way. There are wrappers and empty cans and toilet paper is everywhere. It must suck to be the Forest Service slugs who have to clean up after these ignorant slobs.

8/5
I finished my first Elaine Pagels book at a picnic table down by Marshall Gulch. It was a great read. I am copacetic with her that in my own efforts to understand the great mystery of life I can’t go with literal interpretations of holy books. That would be too fantastic and against all my experience and knowledge.

What I can see is humanity grappling heavily with it’s consciousness and ability to discern good and evil, right and wrong, the solid path, the correct way. With a species that is conscious of it’s own consciousness there is almost a limitless degree of reflection possible. We are free to explore the territory of the mind and the imagination, to meander and allow ourselves to entertain the wildest fantasies, possibilities, postulations and theories. Inevitably, like huskies and baboons, we seem to end up fighting a never ending battle to see who will be the top dog. Ironically the new one ends up being just the same as the old. All that squabbling and fighting and violence to become in the end just what you were fighting against.

If we were to admit that ethics, good and evil, were situational and individual, that just blows most established religion out of the water. This is a political arena as well as an arena of any ultimate truths and regardless of the particular truth involved, people are invested in fighting that insuring that their particular version remains on top. To admit that ethics are situational is tantamount to allowing each dog to be it’s own master and that puts a lot of lead dogs and mushers right out of business. As Pagels pointed out, the church hierarchy and orthodoxy has a vested interest in maintaining itself. With no flock who needs shepherds?

Can a modern guy like me who knows science and evolution and genetics and geology and the possibility of knowing all rational explanations for all phenomena, pass himself off to himself as without need of any spirit or any type of religious experience? I don’t think so. People, and all animals as well, have a deep need to belong to and be involved in corporate endeavors where the whole is larger than the sum of the parts. This participation gives meaning to life. It is not rational but it feels good. We want to belong and to feel good and to participate in what is perceived as deep endeavors. This is the impulse which drives the religious experience. This is my hypothesis as of 8/6.

8/9
I went to Meeting today and that felt good. I met a woman interested in service, spoke with some Mexicans about starting projects and educational work in Nogales and spoke with David Perkins about Hermosillo, Trigo Moreno. During Meeting there were messages about simplicity and our consumer culture and also about the bombings in Africa and the importance of living up to the highest ideals of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

I enjoyed connecting my reading of Pagels and the similar messages of Christianity in the first two centuries, of the Gnostic Christians and of George Fox and the Quakers. By serendipity I am a Quaker, grew up in Quaker Meeting, Quaker camps, Quaker college and now I am finding a connection with it on a personal level. The connection is that there is a tradition of honoring individual searching, of respecting the paths individuals take to connect with life’s mysteries.

Now in 1998 there is no way I can ignore science. I cannot have a literal religious perspective. That won’t work. In order for religion to work for me it has to incorporate my understanding of how the universe is working. I can’t be seeing Corvettes and have people all telling me horses are where it’s at. My understanding of Quakerism and religion demands a big time upgrade to the late 20th century. I feel that the long tradition of tolerance and individual exploration in Quakerism gives me that space. It is cool that this goes back 2000 years, even though that is not so much time in the big picture it is enough to give me the feel of a solid tradition in the human realm. Today was a good meditation in Meeting. I could feel the power of the silence and felt it connecting me to all of my previous Meetings and insights. Many years I had Meeting outside at Farm and Wilderness and nature wove itself deeply into my soul. I felt that all come back even though my main project now is to be exploring history and connecting it to my present.

11/9/99
At work yesterday I caught a snatch on the radio about how the Pastor of the Full Gospel Powerhouse had been arrested for arson and conspiring to commit insurance fraud, along with three others. At least two of the other three were the folks who had held the lease and then left the church. This is rather shocking. Thompson has only been accused at this point, two weeks before the statute of limitations was up. Still, it is a terrible twist on an already sad story.

Preacher Charged in Church Blaze

.c The Associated Press

 
WICHITA FALLS, Texas (AP) - A minister and three other people have been charged with burning down his church in 1996 to collect a $270,000 insurance policy.

The fire had once been investigated by the National Church Arson Task Force, which was formed to look into dozens of blazes at predominantly black churches, mainly in the South.

The Rev. Theophilus Thompson, pastor of the Full Gospel Power House Church of God in Christ, and the other three were arrested less than two weeks before a three-year statute of limitations ran out.

Thompson, who formed the predominantly black church in 1960, posted a $150,000 bond and was released Monday. He is accused of organizing criminal activity and arson along with Wilma Monday, Dusty Dean Williams and Christopher Charles Johnson.

Ms. Monday, the former owner of the church; Williams, 25; and Johnson, 22; were being held in the Wichita County Jail in lieu of $150,000 bonds.

Witnesses have quoted Williams as saying that Thompson wanted to burn the church for insurance money, according to a statement released by the Wichita Falls Fire Department. It was unclear what Ms. Monday's relationship was with Williams and Johnson, but informants said Ms. Monday paid Williams to burn the church.

After the National Church Arson Task Force investigated, an ATF agent said authorities had ruled out race and revenge as possible motives for the fire, in which flames reached 80 feet high.

Nobody was hurt in the blaze. The damage was estimated at $250,000.

Thompson's telephone number was unlisted and he could not be reached for comment Monday. Calls to his church went unanswered.

AP-NY-11-09-99 0001EST

Copyright 1999 The Associated Press. The information contained in the AP news report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or otherwise distributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press.  All active hyperlinks have been inserted by AOL.












 

























No comments:

Post a Comment