That's a wrap - check out my new blog!

Well friends, thanks to all of you who've read my writings up to this point. We've laughed together, cried together, endured moments of awkwardness together, and so much more which, despite the fact that I will always try, just can't be put into words. Or probably shouldn't.

Without further ado, I give you "Making it all up as I go along" - my new blog! I'll leave it for that space to explain more fully the what and the why of this new venture. I'll start postin', so update those bookmarks and blog feeds and start yer readin'!

Yikes, and Coming Soon

It just occurred to me how imposing that JOEZONE logo is at the top of the page. It's not as though it sounds like screaming which, for some, is what they hear when they see words typed in all caps. To me just now, it was a lot more like being in a seemingly empty room (ooh! the subtle foreshadowing is already beginning to work suspense like that fourth cup of coffee on a long, stationary afternoon...) and suddenly being startled by a creepy "Hello" from a guy standing directly behind you (you whip around to see him, only to notice that he's staring blankly past you into space), his voice seeming to have a built-in amplification like a bullfrog on steroids. At least, all that makes sense in my head (which is pretty much the point of this blog, anyways).

At any rate, I'd quite like to shed such a reputation.

And so, soon you may very well be coming here and seeing a brand new look and feel, as well as a somewhat-different substance to the blog-formerly-known-as-JoeZone. (But fret and fear not: the meticulously verbose and dryly-witted Joe you've come to love and very nearly send lots of money to for the purpose of expanding his blog- and song-writing craft has no intentions of going on a diet, he is just planning to give up the deep-fried-sugar-lard-cheese-cholesterol-donut-paintchip-puffs that he'd consumed for as long as love-turned-hate, to his better health and the relief of those within his immediate airspace-radius.) I don't know yet what it will be, which I think is appropriate since I don't know yet who I will be (in terms of those ever-so-slippery vocational specifics), other than who I am in the most important and ultimate sense (which, I'm learning, is enough for me - the rest will come in time; God will provide.)

So there's a little teaser of something to come. I'm already working on another post which could probably work as a good first post on the new page, not so much in the introductory sense, but perhaps more in the serendipitous, unexpectedness-of-life sense. If you're not sure what I mean by that, I could try to explain it by saying that I think the new post would be a fitting representation of the new tone I'd like to emit in the new blog, but I'm not sure that trying to explain it in such a way would really help you understand what this something is going to be like when that something hasn't been fully realized yet, much less even fully conceived, because then you get into that whole weird dynamic of more words actually serving to make something relatively simple (which I do actually believe that some critical part of this whole thing truly is) into something fairly complicated; and I think that I should most likely steer clear of generating more confusion than I am normally apt to create. So I'll simply ask y'all to wait, and soon y'all'll see what I mean.

One disclaimer I should probably make here involves the fact that my amazing wife actually helped designed this blog page, for which I am forever grateful and utterly astounded. I'm completely serious here - she never fails to amaze me in the way she can make something really cool and beautiful out of the sometimes convoluted and usually quirky (historical note: this is ironic since she was actually the first of the pair of us to have been so adjectivally and appropriately described) blob of formless, incredibly-potentialed, creative brilliance so often generated by my brain. Let it then be so disclaimed that my desire for a change in relation to my blog is not so much a makeover as it is a renovation, if indeed such a distinction can be made to mean to you what it means in my head. So then, I can only hope to be so honored as to once again reap the benefit of my lovely wife's genius, and of course, as before, and all the more, pass the awesome on to you.

Musical mysteries and missed meaning

I have what I hope will be a quick and relatively simple observation and ponder-ment. As I listen to new musical artists, it occurs to me to ask, in the form of an "I wonder...", whether their music might be unnecessarily opaque.

Now hear me out. I'm not trying to dog on good poetic lyrics, or dumb down art, or promote myself or any particular person or style of music or whatever as superior. That's not my spirit in this. But I have a couple of initial questions for those who intentionally bury the meaning of their art so deep in personal experience (or whatever kind of experience) that their hearers need to do more than just keep listening to it, in effect busting out shovels and sweating for hours just to try and uncover some meaning so they can connect with the song or the artist or whatever it is people are trying to connect with in the music.

(Okay, sure, maybe there's some meaning that emerges in the dialogue of connecting, but some songs are so vague that maybe a song about how cute bunnies are ends up coming across as a political statement against the current state of health care. Maybe I just don't see it, or maybe it's my personal baggage, but I'm operating out of the assumption here that the art is more meaningful when it intentionally connects people to each other and to God, and to things in the world that smell of the depth of experience of everything God is and does. There's certainly more to be said about that aspect of art, but I think that's a fair enough statement to be able to get to some of those other things.)

So here's the first question: in a marketplace where there are so many options out there, and such a saturation of the airwaves with bookoos of artists coming at you through every possible medium, can you really afford to be misunderstood? Maybe you can. This isn't a huge question for me. It just feels like the situation is unfortunately similar to a resume - if yours is difficult to read or sloppy, it gets tossed aside in less than seconds.

Here's my more important question. Are you trying to be like Jesus with all his subtlety and mystery and "wow" moments? (I'm operating out of the assumption that many people are aiming for this in the obscure elements of their art.) Here's the thing about that. Jesus may have been frequently misunderstood, but he hid his treasures out in plain view. Think about the stories he told. Wheat. Sheep. Weddings. Traveling. These are all things that the vast majority of his audiences understood from day-in/day-out ordinary life. He talked in plain language. He may have juxtaposed images and mixed metaphors a little, but my impression of his delivery style was that he wasn't gaudy and didn't overload his points with too much stuff.

I'm not saying don't try for subtlety or mystery. But my take of Jesus is that he wasn't trying to be misunderstood. I think that just happened because of the nature of human hearts and what we love more than him, so that ultimately we don't hear what we don't want to hear. Might I suggest, then, that art is more like a "connect-the-dots" picture and less like an "assembly required" product in which the manufacturer forgot to include the instructions. The aim, in the end, is to be understood.

So my appeal would be for intentionality in a certain level of clarity and transparency in song-writing. As far as I can tell, the way to go about this is to really think about your listeners even as you try to understand yourself and your world, and put to language what you're seeing and experiencing. Hopefully then the process can be valuable to you and the product valuable to them.

Men Gone Wild

So what happens when 20+ guys go out into the country to let the beer and testosterone run freely? They have a blast (quite literally, actually, what with all the guns and skeet). And a blast is what was had this weekend when a bunch of the men from church went camping a few miles west of Bryan at Oelze Meadows. Rather than giving you a run-down of the weekend, though, I'll offer you some of my personal mental snapshots as highlights...

Muchas gracias, Dairy Queen
A few days before the weekend, I went to Dairy Queen to pick up dinner. I went inside. I ordered. 15 (fifteen) - I say, fif-freakin'-teen minutes later, my steak finger basket is ready. I should also mention that hitherto they had utterly ignored my non-subtle looks of extreme displeasure. Seriously, I was steamed, or worse yet, fried. (Which is all they had to do, right? Pull the stuff out of the freezer and throw it in a basket of boiling grease. How hard is that?) So in my quest to find justice, I did what any fair-minded person would do in my situation: I walked right over to the beverage/condiment/miscellaneous-customer-self-service area and loaded up on the only thing I could physically take with me without some kind of container - napkins. I took a huge fistful of them and walked right out.

Okay - fast-forward to Friday night, the first night of the campout. Late in the afternoon I'm putting up the disc golf course so people can play it early the next day, while my friend Eric helps put up my tent. Later on I get back to the campsite and see that no one seems to have rain-flys on their tents because it's perfectly clear and the forecast is 0% chance of rain. So I decide not to put mine on. A useful detail at this point of the story is that I have a small backpacking tent, 1-2 person, which is barely big enough for 2 people, but still not big enough for me to sit up straight in. Those of you who understand the physics of weather can already see where this is going, which of course is in sharp contrast to me, who doesn't yet understand something important about the physics of weather, which of course provides the tension that keeps this plot building.

So it gets dark. We knew the weather would be getting into the 40's that night, and it was becoming very cold (later I would venture a guess that the overnight low was somewhere in the mid-to-low 30's - not ideal camping weather!). I walk over to my tent at about 10:00 and see it covered in moisture. Beads of water. Things that are not quotable in print began to be said by me. I unzip (the tent) and go inside to see the water situation from there. Not good. If I touch the top of the tent, drops of water shower onto me and my pillow. Were it 90 degree weather outside, this might have been a welcome revelation of physics to me. Being as it was 40 degrees or less, this sudden emergence of grim reality was about as welcome as cold water on your face when it's near-freezing outside.

What an unfortunate situation this was quickly becoming. Just as I was teetering on the verge of despair in the cold darkness, the epiphanous light of a great idea hit me like the celestial smell of fried goodness: Dairy Queen! The napkins of justice! Yes, I thought, it just might work. Obviously, I couldn't just put the rain fly on as-is, but what I could do would be to wipe it all down, from the outside-in, and then put up the rain fly (side plug: gotta love Eddie Bauer tents, the rain flys are quite simple to put on, even in the dark!). So I got to work. After about 10-15 minutes of wiping (which I'm assuming was an unfortunate sound-spectacle for the other campers already in their tents), the moisture problem had been sufficiently managed, and the stage was set for the rain fly. This also proved to work out to my advantage in that it was really cold outside, and the fly probably decreased the wind chill in the tent. Or so I'd like to think.

Spamwich!
Moving on, another highlight of the weekend for me was my first Spamwich in probably more than 10 years. (For those of you just now joining my blog-cast, so far all I've really talked about is how I dried off my tent with a bunch of napkins from Dairy Queen. Back to the story...) Here's what you have to understand about me and my relationship to Spam (which, by the way, is a private relationship, so who are you to tell me anything about it? It's just between me and Spam. But anyways...) - Spam was the family treat in my house growing up (one of the knock-off brands, Treet, is therefore pretty aptly named, in my book). You may wonder how my parents managed it, and I basically have no earthly idea, but my sister and I always loved it when it was Spam night. Now, at this point I feel it necessary to expose a completely unfounded prejudice against a particular class of meat: "Miscellaneous". Why blame Spam for being what it is? Did the meat say, "I think I'm going to be composed of a variety of parts from a variety of different animals"? Not any more than you said, "I think I'm going to come from this woman and that man." Neither is the resemblance argument valid: Spam isn't any more responsible for resembling "real" meat than you are for resembling your parents or Creator. So back up offa Spam.

Anyways, for those of you "meat purists" out there, rest assured that the opposite end of the spectrum was represented through processing a chicken for dinner. We also had some chicken tenders that were store-bought, which ended up tasting much better than the fresher chicken, oddly enough to me (it was a little on the chewy side). So now you understand the context for the Spam - it was to stretch the limits of the experiential spectrum of meat-eating for the weekend. And it was all done in the spirit of knowing where your food comes from. Yes, indeed, I am quite aware now of where my meat comes from - even Spam (more or less, of course, which is part of the beautiful mystery of Spam).

Menergy
This is supposed to rhyme with synergy: that's important for understanding what you're about to need to understand. The coolest things happen when men find the time and space to collectively let their active imaginations run free and find full expressions. Here's the clearest way for you to get your head around the magnificent truth of this: even though I set up a disc golf course out there and played three rounds in one day (if you know me well or even just on the level of facial-recognition, you understand that disc golf is to me as something really nifty is to someone who really likes really nifty things), that wasn't at all for me the zenith of exuberant masculine awesomeness-attain-atization. But this was: skeet knock-out, soccer-baseball (even though I sucked, still cool), "who-can-launch-a-tennis-ball-the-farthest" (again, couldn't avoid the thing veering off into the woods, but who doesn't love a challenge?), "can-you-split-a-log-with-an-axe-in-one-stroke" (and yes, I most certainly can), and finally, one of my own ideas, "betcha-I-can-bury-this-hatchet-in-that-tree-over-there" (sadly, we all ran out of time on this one, but in this instance you just felt more manly and ninja-like for trying). Oh, almost forgot that we tried walking around at night to find some feral hogs that had been terrorizing the domesticated animals in the area. Not to brag or anything, but while the other guys all carried guns, the only thing I carried other than my flashlight and my formidable backbone was my hatchet. And guess what: we didn't see any hogs that night. I'll let you do the math. (Of course, be sure to leave out of the equation the fact that I went back to camp once I stepped in some water and my feet started freezing. Fact is, if I'd come upon any hogs by myself on my way back to camp, I would have fought and hatcheted them all single-handedly and been all the more a man for it.)

Beating up the skeptics
Perhaps some of you are off-put or doubtful concerning my perception or anyone's potential perception towards such expressions of masculinity as positive in any way. You might suggest that boys shouldn't belch and that men should stick to safer pursuits like bowling and ping-pong (which is a totally empty argument, that such a person would have known if they'd seen Balls of Fury). You might even go so far as to say something like, "Aren't there better ways for men to be men without being so (insert derogatory adjective)?" To which I could only respond with a shrug. Oh, and then I would pummel you with my freshly inspired virility.

Tidbits

First, my oh-so-typical disclaimer: today's post is a little out-of-the-ordinary for me, seeing as I'm about to write about a number of unrelated things (other than the fact that they are all reflections on recent happenings in my life, which, unfortunately, doesn't provide near the unity one would hope for in a blog of this caliber, owing to the fact that I'm not so much the type of guy who "has it all together", though I am able usually to "find it when I need it", so...), rather than my usual unabridged ramblings aimed at exhausting singular subjects, or more accurately your attention spans for those subjects; and yet, some things are not out-of-the-ordinary for me in today's blog at all, like my preoccupation with hyphenated-word-strings. Love those things! They're like cream gravy - they should be used liberally at every possible opportunity.

So, on to the first tidbit: I got a haircut last week. (Sorry, this isn't the type of blog where you're going to find pictures. Not that I don't like those types of blogs, and not that posting pictures on a blog necessarily makes it "one-of-those-types-of-blogs" [is it okay to hyphenate word-strings inside of quotation marks? Maybe that type of thing is like putting parentheses inside of parentheses - you can get away with it, but then you're really testing your limits {which, as a little brother, I must admit is something that comes pretty much second-nature to me}] - all I'm saying is, I don't have any pictures for you. Gee whiz, Toto - give a guy a break.) Anyways, I think that was the first time in probably... ever that I've waited over an hour to get my haircut. (I had a coupon.) But that's not the point. Actually, waiting that long wasn't so bad, seeing as it allowed me to do a little Culture-Watching (if this was a talk show, there would be a special theme song playing right now). So here's my latest puzzlement over the psyche of my fellow Americans, particularly those of my fellow males. What makes a guy want to get a haircut? For me, if you saw me two weeks ago, you'd know that my motivation in getting "buzzed" (I do drink alcohol, but always responsibly and in small quantities, so I look elsewhere for those conscience-boundary-stretching-thrills [I am paying for a haircut, after all, rather than letting my wife cut it for me, as has been the case for several years {she was sick that week}]) was concern for my life: my mop was getting so unwieldy that I risked it fluffing up onto my face at night - as it got displaced by my head hitting the pillow - and choking out my airflow. But here's what I'm wondering: what is the point of getting a haircut when you look as if you literally just walked out of a previous human-grooming establishment and straight into the one where I was waiting to get mine? Seriously, dudes - I just need you to enlighten me on this one - what's the deal? Is a little scruff or shag (not in the Austin Powers sense) really such a bad thing? And please tell me you don't iron your clothes. At the very least, someone please, please tell me that you have no idea what the "color-wheel" is or how it works. Otherwise, I am forced to admit my "lostness" in the world of whatever-you-would-collectively-call-this-stuff.

Second tidbit. Went to a lecture on bioterrorism by a guy who is over the Homeland Security department in the Health Science Center at A&M. He talked about Anthrax a lot at first - scary, but not the end of the world. But you know what would be? Bird flu. His exact words were "Mission Impossible" if it became weaponized or the strain evolved to be contagious human-to-human-wise. (Roughly translated into civilian terms: if that happens, we're screwed.) A couple of reactions to this:
-Our government takes threats seriously, and has a heavy weight on its shoulders. Too heavy, in fact.
-Even in the face of an insurmountable challenge like a super-pathogen that we can't defend against, optimism and faith in the power of the people to take steps to get to a point where we can survive it leads us to keep plodding along towards being more prepared for such doomsday scenarios.
-If the people of God are looking for points of contact between the Gospel and the felt needs of our culture, this is just such a point. What do we do in the case of an evil we just can't resist? Pray to God! Confess that only he can save.
-I hope that when the time comes, I'm not afraid to say just that. I need to keep my eyes and ears open for the opportunity.

Well, that's it for now. Thanks for reading. If you've got a minute, drop me a quick response. I'd love to know who's reading my blog so I know better how to adapt my awkward humor to fit my audience. If I haven't offended your sensibilities even in some small way, then there is much work to do. Now leaving JoeZone, Population: his name is Me.

Six years

So we're officially one week into our seventh year of marriage today. We had a good anniversary, a good year last year, and expect more good things from the Lord in the one that began with pump-nog just a few days ago. In that spirit, I'd like to venture out there and say that I've got a good woman and a good thing going, despite the times when I tend to act contrarily. In fact, I'd go as far as to say that we get along pretty well for people who often don't get along very well.

Acappellacizing

MUSIC!!!!! That's how one of the weirdest songs I've ever sung begins - with the whole choir singing in unison, at forte or above, a couple of sustained, majestic notes in praise of, and in an "Ode to [,] Music". (Those of you literary experts who frequent my blog - can you use the brackets that way? Well, either way, I just did... so pretty soon it will be catching on everywhere.) That's what the song is called - Ode to Music. Now, I'm sorry if I'm stepping on the toes of those who happen to think fondly of this particular piece, but personally I find it a little creepy.

Which is what I'm wondering could be the reaction to my music of those people who aren't used to hearing music that's been turned from perfectly acceptable instrumental songs into all-vocal arrangements, or who are used to hearing their favorite hymns minus all the fluff and 'personality'. But all personality aside (which for me is sometimes like trying to stuff a large tent into a tiny container that it only fit in before you bought it and used it), I hope you like the music. I want you to like me. Please.

Obviously, since I'm blogging about it, there were a few things I was hoping to explain about my music. Mainly back-story, and a little fore-story, and just a pinch of contempor-story.

In high school and college a thing I really liked doing was taking old hymns or contemporary 'worship' music and rearranging it, and also recording it myself (or with friends from time to time) on a multi-track recorder, before the advent of the PC. (At the risk of dating myself, I remember as a kid getting really excited about this Commodore 64 program that would take 30-45 minutes to load which, once it was fully loaded, involved a dot on a screen that you could move around and change the colors of - a paint program.) That's more or less what I've got up on MySpace right now. Special thanks to my friend Cory Martin (the number one friend and a member of these guys) for singing with me on It Is Well, my friend Ross King for letting me use his song In Need, my wife-friend Kathryn for singing with me on said song, and finally a certain person who wished to remain anonymous for his contributions. Okay, so now I'm just name dropping...

About eight or nine months ago, I started trying to write original music for the first time. I don't have any examples or demos of this right now, but I hope to develop this over the next little bit of my life, so that all this really cool stuff in my head can get out there on the web and then you can download it into yours. Pretty much all of my first original songs are introspective, reflective. I anticipate that later songs will be more extrospective (actually, I just looked it up - this really is a word), because it's like Jesus said, "Before you start blowing a lot of hot air, brush your teeth." At least, I think he said something like that.