I intended to write on some more influential albums from those days at the Mug, like City on a Hill: Songs of Worship and Praise, POD's Alive, or some early David Crowder Band. I wanted to go from 2002 into 2003 when I saw the rise of Todd Agnew firsthand at Metro every Monday night at Germantown Baptist to Tuesdays at the Loop at Highpoint, which was followed by his Grace Like Rain release and how I'd play it in my first apartment at Georgian Woods. But, no, I'm not going to spend time there.

I'm fast-forwarding things to 2004, a time if there was ever a time of uncertainty in my life, family, career and even where to live. I sang along to the worship in David Crowder Band's Illuminate while heading down the main drag of Flagstaff as I lived the words of Jeremy Camp's heartfelt Stay CD.

In the dark of a pre-dawn, as I was leaving behind my remaining family members and their thrust into Arizona, I said my goodbyes and with only that Chris Tomlin's Not to Us CD riding shotgun in that Silverado truck. I drove into the sunrise of I-40...

...I was alone...and I was hurting, but inexplicably, I knew I HAD to return to my home; I had to return to Memphis. Things with my family would never be again like they once were. Arizona was never me, even if I moved back there on a couple more occasions in the upcoming years. But, on that morning, the feeling I felt on that early drive, what I felt, is this moving song, Only You, off of the previously mentioned David Crowder album:

YouTube Link

And It's just You and me here now
Only You and me here now

I had a terribly uncertain future ahead of me and just a concrete bed waiting for me to lay my head. All I had was trust and a tankful of gas. Even now...my heart is moved...so many miles ago it was. Many times in my life, for a moment, I wondered why couldn't I be like my peers? They had their settled-down lives with their mortgage; they all seemingly had perfect lives; they were hired right after college graduation. They had stability and love. I seemingly was forever destined for the road.

But, then I remembered: God chose my life. He knew that if I didn't have a Fall 2000 when I had that anti-Midas touch, I would have never experienced the fullness of what an actual relationship with Him is like. I would have never found a place like the Mug if I had that corporate achievement mindset—and how this petulant child still wanted it: "Be GREAT in the eyes of men! Buy the houses, the cars, the clothes!" Is this really what I want? Stuff? I love these words from American Dream an album I listened to 2003 from Casting Crowns:

I'll take a shack on a rock
Over a castle in the sand

I had to be broken to be delivered.

Yes, one day, I'm on Wordpress, THEN I render HTML via Jekyll THEN Wordpress...AND today? Rendering my HTML! And like Jo Dee Messina sings, "I ain't never lookin' back and that's a fact!" I even have a resolution set for the new year that I'm going to stick with this static setup.

I know what you're thinking—does this re-applied Tim McGraw song capture it about me?

Cause it's all in my head
I think about it over and over again
I replay it over and over again
And I can't take it, yeah, I can't shake it

Honestly, do you want to know what it's really like in my head?

1. ST: Voyager's Seven talks to Chakotay about a conspiracy against Janeway Part 1 / Part 2
2. ...and then she turns right around...
3. ...and coherently flips the narrative with Janeway

Just crank up the playback speed and that's just about it—well, sans the body suit!

What's been holding me back from making the leap toward installing the Ruby and Jekyll combo on my MacBook is that I wasn't sure if I wanted to go in this direction because I didn't want to jack up my NEW, PRISTINE computer! I heavily considered just running a Linux VM to do my testing/development. But, hey, you don't learn if you're not willing to break stuff!

While in my first attempt I tried the official docs on Jekyllrb.com, the wheels fell off somewhere around switching over to a bash shell, for though I did install it successfully, it just would never recognize the newer version of Ruby! It'd list just that silly MacOS out-of-date 2.6 one! Egad, man, just egad!

HOWEVER...

I found a cool write-up by this guy and it totally got me the environment so that I could do my thing. I REALLY wanted to keep Zsh because...well, it's default. There's little reason for me to introduce things that might break.

And yes, my reaction when I ran ruby -v and saw "ruby 3.1.3p185," well, it went something like this with Dwight's raise ramp up.

So whala, I dropped all the Wordpress/MySQL stuff and set up a static home.

*Wait, wasn't I once in a liberal arts program doing graduate work?*

Album of the Day: The Benjamin Gate - Untitled

While I jumped the gun a little with my album selection yesterday, I decided to forego the years of 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000 and move right into 2001. The Benjamin Gate's Untitled was a really big album for me. When I view the play counts on Spotify, I find it such a shame, because it really is a good Christian album—at least for where I was in that Spring semester as a 22-year-old in that transition from the college scene to Truth. And as I listen to the music today, I am reminded of my old '93 Silverado, driving up to the Ugly Mug for another evening with that Memphis Alumni sticker freshly applied to the windshield...

...I see all the old faces with gleaming eyes and bright smiles...

...we were all so young...

...all broke...

...folks engaged in chess & Mahjong...

...laughter...

...that night of karaoke and my singing Friends in Low Places

...the Cookie Monster...

...Jones Soda...

...the poster of George Costanza in briefs on the guys' restroom wall

...photos of people wearing Ugly Mug T-shirts across the world on a bulletin board far before my first Europe visit...

...old broken couches draped with velvet material...

...a Chili's booth...

...a LOT of Coldplay Parachutes and U2 All That You Can't Leave Behind...

...grabbing another fried rice from A-Tan's, but this time watching President Bush address the nation after 9/11 from their mounted TV...

...med students ALL-THE-TIME

...buying a high school girl's duct tape wallet handiwork at the auction 'cause I knew NO ONE wanted THAT...

...watching Tom Brady's first Super Bowl against the vaunted Rams; Bucs/Raiders the following year...

...attending movie nights followed by a Rhodes professor's discussion on A.I. Artificial Intelligence, Chocolat and Unbreakable

...my flailing attempts at romance

...building resumes and burning CDs.

I went from thinking it was some weird cult where people talked about Jesus everyday to my volunteering every Friday night from August 2001 to August 2002; I even ran the lyrics for the Sunday night worship. It was quite a transformation for a guy who once had other plans for his weekend nights at clubs. Through to the end of 2002, I'd meet up there for a Bible Study with the guys and some from Rhodes at 6 AM every Friday before the place was open, taking turns who would bring the Gibson's Donuts. And yes, the Seattle's Best coffee was free in that study, but as the Bottomless Mug was just $1, I wouldn't have minded chipping in for it! I think one of the more content times in my life was just washing the dishes by hand at the end of a Friday night, sometime past the midnight hour next to that Poplar and Highland intersection. It felt right.

I went up there everyday—as did everyone else. It was the only place I've ever experienced that was Cheers...

Sometimes you want to go
Where everybody knows your name
And they're always glad you came
You want to be where you can see
Our troubles are all the same
You want to be where everybody knows your name

I really don't know if the camaraderie would have been the same in today's Facebook. But, for the turn of the millennium, it was a special moment. Everyone was on the cusp of something. And twenty years later when I go to the grocer and see a bag of Ugly Mug Coffee on the shelf, I think of what it once was...what that place meant to me.

Today, I fired up Logos, something I haven't done in a long time, but came to attention as part of my new installs on my MacBook. On its home screen, it displayed a graphic that I just re-inserted by hand the other day into this site as featured on this post: Do Not Shut the Heavens. As I re-read the words I write, my heart was broken: I recognized my 2022's mindset is...in the weeds...purposeless. I recognized my deep longing for relationship with my God. Somewhere, I've lost that vision of the infinite. I got caught up in the day-to-day and sought the folly of the fool. I did not walk with my Father. True are these lyrics:

And He walks with me And He talks with me And He tells me I am His own And the joy we share as we tarry there None other has ever known

In the Garden, C. Austin Miles (1913)

My eyes are out-of-focus. I have let the world's troubles dominate my mind. Oh, there are always things that distract us, things that grind our gears, things that make us shake our heads; all the generational entropy that John MacArthur references for which I quote him in that 2021 post.

To my credit (at my lunch table anyway), I have not once written the word for the cool kids global pandemic on my website, despite my blogging nearly everyday when the hype was at its greatest. Not that I Voldemort-ed it, I just recognized it for it was, so I defanged it. We have no fear of the REAL slasher in the room, that industry marketed monster fed by all of those foods in the center of the grocery! Fat butt disease seems benevolent as it cheerily hands over another tub of Blue Bell ice cream with one hand while his sickle takes the legs out from another. If I have no fear of heart disease or cancer, why should I run my mouse all up and down click-bait stories about a global pandemic in name only? No, all of this drips of political might over the will of the people. Ahh, the Republic.

For those chosen by God, we recognize that even Death has no mastery over us:

O death, where is thy sting?
O grave, where is thy victory?

1 Corinthians 15:55, KVJ

Neither the iron-fisted state, the face masks of individual-destruction hegemony, nor the gods of Pfizer can restore us. It would be naive to think that is the objective, for they care little of our body, much less our soul! Most of life is folks running around saying, "Do what I say." And when folks don't get their way, because ultimately, the top dog on the hill is a finite resource, folks get red in the face and live lives of you owe me. They do not love God; they do not love their neighbor. Now, as to why we're drawn to this over and over again...perhaps its because we were all shoved out of the garden and have none to tend?

I am ever reminded how I was kicked off a treadmill in a gym in 2021. While locked in combat with the TRUE KILLER in the room, I was told by a Borg drone that "Resistance is futile." I was wearing a face mask like a diaper on my chin in a context where I was around NO one. And thus, I immediately hopped off my treadmill without not so much of a swipe down of the machine as I escaped that Borg assimilation. I haven't been back to ANY gym since! Don't tread on my treadmill! And later when I was denied entry to that outdoor 5K race, something I looked forward to for years as a pinnacle point of my fitness...well, I poured a glass of sharp lemonade and put another race in its place. My T-shirt design inspired by the Fallout 4 game...now THAT is what a pandemic looks like!

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Perhaps, I've watched WAY TOO MANY dystopian films, but it just never seemed like a pandemic to me. We haven't had population lost. We're 8 billion and counting now. We were 5.79 billion in 1996. It's just a matter of time before we spill out among the stars. No, all of that nonsense to me from 2020 just seemed like subtle commentary on the 2020 endemic of character anemia—stabbing fingers of rage in the backdrop of a good face wash of our own mortality. Forgotten was the one who stood in the mirror:

If they wanna make the world a better place,
Take a look at yourself and then make a change.

Michael Jackson, Man in the Mirror

Instead of giving that ol' wag of the finger, I gotta be the one to change. I have a God-sized hole in my heart; even the entire world just ain't enough. "Sorry, Elon, you can keep that electric car, that thing that connects brains to computers, that hyperloop that'll revolutionize transportation, that Twitter nonsense, and as far as SpaceX—OK, so that rocket thing is pretty cool—I'll take THAT! But, I'm so gonna play the theme to DS9 in its lobby!"

No, no...as for me, 2023 will be the year of Psalm 34.

And the album for today? Skillet's Alien Youth. It came to me in 2001, as I realized the money, the career—all of those lovely entries so hopefully added to a LinkedIn profile, just don't matter...this song with its Bush sound, is what life is all about: The Thirst is Taking Over.