I remember Mary and Joseph. They were a nice couple. It took Joseph forever to finally pop the question.

You see, they met at our church, a medium-sized un-affiliated Baptist, the only church in a nothing-special midwestern town of 1277. Our town doesn't have much time for church, or for semi-stable interpersonal groupings at all for that matter. It exists primarily as a pass-through for the cattle drivers; there are stables for the old-fashioned kind and truck stops for the modern ones. One of the stables bought some bleachers in 1953 and has since hosted a mid-sized rodeo that draws a statewide crowd in June.

You see, Mary and Joseph ho-hawed for quite some time, seeing each other in church when they both showed up on the same Sunday. There seemed to be this tension between the two that suggested that if they remained in the same physical proximity for too long, flammable objects located nearby would start to spontaneously combust.

So you see, it wasn't much surprise to us church regulars when, soon after getting engaged, it turned out that Mary was pregnant. My wife and I had been trying to have a baby for years and grumbled about how it's always the people that don't want kids that have them, and the people that want them can't. There was of course a church board meeting that, despite its agenda, was almost wholly devoted to the topic of Mary's pregnancy.

For a while there you see, things became really difficult. We suggested that they go ahead with the marriage, and simply get it over with very quickly, or wait until after the birth. The problem was, however, that Joseph was insisting that the baby wasn't his. We tried to assure him that he was forgiven and that we did not judge him for his actions, but that it was important that he take responsibility for them. After a couple weeks of this, Mary and Joseph finally decided to go together to her parent's place back East to give birth to their son. They had a very simple, small ceremony at the church and left that very afternoon. There was still a slight hint of stress behind Joseph's eyes.

But you see, upon their return some months later, things seemed remarkably different. The baby was a beautiful baby boy, one whose smile could light up the room; indeed just the presence of baby Jesus, as Mary and Joseph had so oddly named him, seemed to uplift all those around. But Joseph's attitude seemed absolutely reversed. He was now a proud father, beaming about his son to any who would look like they were listening. Mary, too, had been somehow transformed into the most determined mother of the year award. We wondered if there was something magical about "back East" or if they had seen a vision somewhere on the road through Ohio, but for the most part we just shrugged our shoulders and moved on.

So you see, it wasn't much surprise to me when a little stick of a boy, Jesus, showed up at one of our church board meetings last week…

"You're not like born again or anything, are you?" she asked me earnestly.

I thought for a moment. "Well, not really. It's just beautiful, don't you think?"

"I think it's--I don't know, it scares me," she said gently, moving her knees slightly back and forth in the bathwater, the ripples sending the soapy water highup the sides of the thin plastic tub. She sat up, her breasts hanging drenched and heavy on her chest. "That kind of language," she continued softly, "always makes me think that maybe in another lifetime I was burned at the stake." She splashed her face with water. "That stuff gives me the creeps.

"...Talking about God just seems so pointless." There was a pause as she figured out what she meant. "It's like drilling a well right by a river, you know? The water's already there; you don't have to dig for it. Whatever is good or valuable about religion is always around us. You don't have to go to church for it. To be honest, churches give me the willies. Whenever I go inside one, I feel like the whole place is pleading to some outside force, you know? Like God or whatever is outside of us, withholding the goods. I don't really buy that idea--that someone up on a hill is doling out favors, but only if we ask in a really really nice way. I don't buy it, do you?"

...Amazing, I thought, how instantly I could feel I didn't know Christy at all, and how little I felt she knew me.

There is this place deep inside where I feel I am connected to everything, not just trees and grass and dogs but buildings and stairways, rocks and sidewalks. It's a deathly quiet place that I guess I've never shared with anyone and probably couldn't, a place that is cold sober when my body is stumbling drunk, another consciousness that sits still like an antenna in tune with some other part of the galaxy. It was this part of me that I wanted to bring to our wedding, a centered space from which I could send out my oaths. I imagined that this secret antenna was my connection to whatever eternity might be and was the part of me that Christy alone perceived and loved. But in the dark of the motel room, I realized that whether I was married or not, no one would ever know all of me; my truest self would always be estranged and alone. I was incapable of expressing my limited screwball faith and I knew that, even if I could, I'd box it in so dramatically it would be trivialized.

--from Ethan Hawke's Ash Wednesday

...originally posted on danielsjourney/blog, August 6th, 2003. I decided to read stuff from my time in Sarajevo tonight, and it turns out I have a lot of stuff from that time, and it's turned into an afternoon-long project, and I've almost compiled a chapbook's worth. This bit, not being my own, does not go into the book, but as a passage of text, so perfectly relates to so much of my life.

Rapha Gentlemen's Race - Sept. 6th, 2008 from RAPHA on Vimeo.

Pictures and write-up at the Rapha site

I can't afford a stitch of their (probably exquisitely comfortable) clothing, but I love what Rapha is doing in the culture. Neither hipster-fixie or ego-racing, they represent most of what made me fall in love with cycling in 1989. The team I rode on from junior high into college was a fairly hardscrabble set of honest central PA gentlemen and ladies. My three favorite memories from that time are:

1. The Harrisburg-Gold Mine loop. Gold Mine was the most feared climb in the area. Short but ridiculously steep. The descent down the north side started like the first big hill on your favorite roller coaster (but with a sharp right, right at the beginning) that dropped you into about a two mile long dead-straight descent where speeds over 60 mph were common. The loop was about 80 miles total, if I remember correctly.
2. After three hours of play races (6-9pm every Thursday) at Rossmoyne Park--scratch races, points races, miss-and-outs, you name it--sitting on the park bench outside of the Camp Hill 7-11 drinking Slurpees (best recovery drink ever) and talking into the night.
3. After a few hours of winter training on the mountain bikes at Lambs Gap--back then there weren't mountain bike trails, you just rode the motocross and hiking trails--defrosting in my coach's Vanagon (which had the most kick-ass heater ever) as snow began to fall.

I get super nostalgic for those days. By the time I was most of the way through college, bicycle racing had started to be more the domain of the overcompensating and asinine. The non-sanctioned races common in the 80's and early 90's had been litigiously pushed out of existence, and even mountain bike racing was becoming the domain of the Very Serious Athlete instead of just an excuse to drink beer while riding a bike.

I miss PA and riding...

BBC News - Bloom plans Sarajevo siege film:

Pirates of the Caribbean actor Orlando Bloom has announced plans to co-produce and appear in a film about the siege of Sarajevo of the early 1990s.

Speaking in the city earlier this week, the 31-year-old said he hoped the film would be made in the Bosnian capital.

The film will be based on Fools Rush In, US writer Bill Carter's memoir of living in the city during the siege.

"I read the script and the very human story at the very core of this film spoke to me very clearly," said Bloom.

The actor, who made his West End debut in the play In Celebration last year, will not be playing Carter in the proposed drama.

Shortly before leaving for Sarajevo I got an email from a friend of Bill Carter, and about one day before departing got an email from Bill himself. They had found me via a blog post I had written about his film, Miss Sarajevo (if permalinks were working on my old blog I could point to the relevant posts...I think I blogged about the email as well). Because I was a musician, he cautiously gave me contact information for his best friend in Sarajevo, a blues musician who was featured in the film. Like as with most of the Bosnians I met there, I was welcomed with weary smiles, drinks, and smokes. It was the perfect introduction, however, and allowed me instant access to the music scene there. Sarajevo is such a small town, it is easy to meet people and nearly impossible to understand them or get them to open up. Old habits, especially those developed during wartime, are hard to overcome.

via ellen

danielsjourney blog archive reader. I threw this together while messing about with Flex. I meant to vet some of the entries before posting about it, but even I don't have the constitution to read any of that stuff. If you are interesting in my blogging life prior to July 2005, it's all there...

via ehampton, learned that Karadzic was arrested! Very good news! But my first question was "How?" It's not like there has been a lack of resources on the job for the last 13 years. The following article helped answer that question a little bit.

Karadzic arrest signals new direction:

Radovan Karadzic has spent his first night in a cell at the special war crimes court in Belgrade, after 13 years on the run.

This was the arrest many people in the Balkans and beyond had come to believe would never happen.

The Hunting Party is actually a really good movie that is a fictional re-telling of a real-life reporter's attempt to find Karadzic after the war. Don't let the Richard Gere part fool you--it really is a great movie! And if you're curious what this whole business is about, it's a fun way to get caught up.

Funicular. I rode this one a bunch of times during a very interesting week of my life. See also. via

Packing, going through this box of really old stuff that would probably break everyone's heart but mine. I wrote a lot. And I was really into Jesus for a while there, but in this incredibly juvenile way.

But in the middle is a piece of paper printed off a dot-matrix printer, in the upper-right corner, written in red pen, it says, "Fall or Spring 94-95."

Most of it isn't worth sharing. But the first line is this:

She stood at her patio doors, feeling French...

stumbled upon this looking for something much more recent. done by joshuarudd.com for integrationresearch.org for christmas 2004 campaign for the best social software ever, smartcommons

Just wondering: how much and for how long can someone perform premeditated character assassination on me to such a degree? I understand the psychology of it, and will spare you dear reader (that's just part of it). But I do know that it has to be more tiring for the hater than for the receiver of said hate. And man, I'm tired of receiving it! So how do these people feel? Wouldn't they rather be happy?

And I guess there you have it. All I can do is choose to be happy. yay.

You thought you could keep me from loving
You thought you could feed on my soul
But while you were busy destroying my life
What was half in me has become whole

So this is how it feels
To breathe in the summer air
The feel the sand between my toes
And love inside my ear
All those things that you taught me to fear
I've got them in my garden now
And you're not welcome here

from a song i posted in an mp3 mix also a long time ago.

the record is so much better now. i can't wait to get it out so everyone can hear it

This is very close to where I grew up. In fact, I know the road. I probably rode my bike by like 1000 times while training.

I don't remember when it was, either end of 2000 or beginning of 2001. After I had finished my work day, we walked down to the dock and took the ferry across to Manly. It was about a half hour ferry ride.

I don't remember how we heard about it, but we learned of a restaurant that one walked to via a beautiful seaside path. So we strolled through the promenade to the beach, as we had once or twice before, then to the right down the boardwalk to the end of the beach. Then, hand in hand along the path, no idea as to how far we must walk to reach this venue. Taking pictures of the water swirling in the rocks. Gawking at the mansions up the cliff to our right.

Soon a very small beach, almost a lagoon, appeared, as did the restaurant in question. We sat and had a fantastic meal no doubt consisting of local wine and fish. Then we went back to the apartment the same way we had come. By then it was dark, and our bellies full and our hearts happy, that was about as god damn perfect as it gets.

Today through my normal RSS reading, I discoverd Google had recently done some arial photography of the area in question. The entire walk can be seen in that view. The restaurant must be nestled under some trees. I believe it was just off the lagoon beach.

I would share the link with her, with a note something to the effect of, "Wasn't that awesome?" But I fear her recollection of many past events might be different, and as such, invalidating. I prefer both the joy and the longing of my version.

jordoncooper.com: Interviewing Daniel Miller (May 2005)

I got lost once walking back to Johnny's at 4am, and it was cold and I was tired, but at one point it was like a music video--there were people falling headfirst out of pubs onto the sidewalk in front of me, a car pulled up and a gang of people jumped out of it, ran into an alley beside me, and two of the guys started fighting. It was frightening and invigorating and I remember that 2 hour walk fondly.

...I was seeing how well I Googled "daniel miller web development" and this was my only entry on the first page of results (still not bad considering I have not promoted myself as such in years). I used this interview as my "about" section for a good year or so. I like it. I like that Jordon's site has lots of Googlejuice too! :)

It is also the only written account of the night described in the quote above. Something else happened that night that I also remember fondly but rarely speak of.

It's a long thread I shant explain, but I had to post Hide Away by Adam Again, the band that wrote the song (Dig) that inspired Don't Tell Me, and from which Don't Tell Me stole lyrics for the outro.

While I'm at it, here's It's All Right.

And shit, Relapse.

And I uploaded Good Cop Bad Cop by Everything But the Girl a while back but never posted it.

http://www.becherovka.cz/en/ !!

yes. oh yes. ano.