Forcing Myself to Write

I'm not really feeling well right now. A little dizziness, a little body aching, and I've got the chills, even though the thermostat is around 80 degrees. But I've been thinking a couple of thoughts lately, and I wanted to share. So if this is incoherent, bear with me.

The other day I started thinking about the plot of land that is directly across from the church building that I grew up going to-- First Baptist Church Chandler. Some of my earliest memories are of that piece of land, and I've been thinking that there is a lot to be said about life and culture and society just using that land as a metaphor. I've even had the thought that it might become the centerpiece of my novel, whenever I choose to write it. (A little side note, please encourage me to start writing. It always helps when I have people telling me they think I can do it.)

So, anyway, the land. One of my very first memories is of being a little kid and playing in the old dilapidated barn that used to occupy the land across from the church. Me and my best friend Corey Ashley, and his sister Hallee, once the invitation and benediction were over, would dart out the doors to play in that old barn. Actually, Corey's family on his dad side owned the land, I think. We'd run across the street (which is actually only about the distance of the width of the house we live in,) and have to crawl through the barbed wire to get to the barn, which consisted of hay to feed to horses (I forgot to mention, there were horses,) and the coolest old time soda machine. The rest was just a series of mazes and crevices. We would climb to the top of one of the floors and jump down into the hay. Actually, Corey would climb to the top of one of the floors and jump down into the hay... I was genrerally too afraid. I remember one time him telling me and Hallee that he saw a grass snake in the barn a few days before, which scared the crap out of me. (I wasn't saying shit back then.)

Over time, and I'm not good with years, some in the church determined it would be a good thing to buy the land, just in case they wanted to build on it in the future, and also to prevent anyone else from buying it and building low-income housing, aka-- black people. I remember sitting in church business meetings that I wasn't allowed to vote in, and seeing grown people verbally fighting over the land. Eventually the land buying faction won the contest and the church owned the land.

The first line of business once the land was bought? Tear down the old barn, get rid of the barbed wire, and move the church office into a small house that was located on the back side of the barn, toward the next street. Kind of a sweeping away of the past. This was probably my first experience of wanting to hold on to the past, and wanting to force others to do the same.

My junior high and high school years the field acted as a nothing more than a filler between the church and the office, a game field, and a makeshift unpaved parking lot.

And now I'm starting to feel dizzy and nauseaus. I'll finish the story later.

Oh, what the hell. I'll finish it now.

A few years ago they decided that they needed to building a new church building on the plot of land across the street. So they built and and it's the most horrible sight you've ever seen. Why is it that churches these days feel that all they have to do with building a new building is to plop down a concret slab, build an aluminum building, and stack bricks about a fourth of the way up. There's no sense of history, no sense of beauty. Just wanting to be cheap and throw something up that is going to be as painless as possible.

Well, that's all about that.

Big Fish

Kyle and I ended up seeing Big Fish today, rather than the Return of the King-- since we had a meeting to go to at 6. I'd seen the movie before with Blake, but fell sound asleep about halfway through and missed the best parts. I'll talk more about it later, but I'll let you know now that it was an amazing movie.

Bye.