Supafly.com

Last night I went to The Vines concert. I wasn’t expecting much, because I thought their music was a lot of hype, an industry attempt to ask forgiveness for over-produced pop. But since I hadn’t been to a concert in six months I was still excited. Plus, Matt M. printed the tickets from the Internet on an 8.5 by 11 piece of paper. That’s nifty technology.

Years ago—I can’t start a sentence like that! “Years ago” are the words of a wise Indian elder or nostalgic old man. Let’s start over: I’ve learned not to believe MTV hype. When I was in high school, I watched a “Year in Music” with MTV News. They said that punk dominated the charts. I was sitting there with my spiked hair, studded belt, and clunkin’ boots—a real punk—and hadn’t heard any punk on the radio or videos on TV. What do you mean, “charts dominated by punk”? I think I’d know.; So this year when I heard bands like The Strokes, The Hives, and The Vines were dominating the charts, I was interested to see if it would really happen.

The show was pretty ragged, and so was the crowd. The lead singer seemed so strung out on drugs—or image—he was just a character, not a real person. The distorted vocals, staggering across the stage, and alas, the smashing of the guitar. On the quiet ride home, Matt M. quoted what he had read about the band. The lead singer confessed that he has to be drugged-up to keep it up. I walked into my quiet house, and I really felt bad for him. Doesn’t he know how this story ends?

Mrs. Kobain told her son Kurt, “Don’t join this stupid club.” Now he’s dead. No more shows, no more songs, no more friends. He’s dead.

:::

“Make these broken weary bones, rise to dance again.” The music filled up the tent and the thousand people there sang along. I made my way through the back row, past dozens of old people. They were old people that you wouldn’t expect to see outside on a Friday night. They are old people you just don’t see anymore. We hide them in old folks homes while we go shopping.

Not tonight. They leaned their walkers against their lawn chairs, or sat contently in their wheel chairs. They raised their arms and sang with all the life they had. They are alive and loving it.

That whole place was alive, alive in a way I didn’t see at the Vine’s concert, or at the mall, or in MTV. Here everything seems right. Everyone is kind to one another. All insecurities are gone, even if it’s just for a few hours. We were different ages, colors, shapes and sizes, and it didn’t matter. It really doesn’t.;

I’m swinging in my hammock in my back porch. The leaves are rustling with the wind, flitting the light on the ground. I’ve doing Saturday morning chores: laundry, cleaning kitchen, ironing clothes, watering plants, raking the backyard. Now I’m listening to NPR weekend shows, letting the wind wisp through the shade.

This hammock has been my refuge all week. After spending countless hours at the studio, I’d come home and swing and read. If building a website was like making an animated movie, I’ve just finished the storyboarding. It was hard to pull myself away from the computer for so long, but it worked out well.

Ah…I could just swing here all day.

This is the first Saturday afternoon off I’ve had in…I don’t know how long. Since a couple dates canceled, I’ve got the next month off. I can’t believe it! I’ll be able to do so much work on my house. On –Damn that was a loud bird. It had to be the size of a trumpet to make a sound that loud. I almost fell out of my hammock. Where was I? On…an average week, Friday means it’s time to get on the road. Now Friday can mean relaxing, going out with friends, or building something new.

I don’t have a dining room table, but I plan on getting one this afternoon. I know exactly what I want, and it’s not cheap. But, a comfortable, strong dining room isn’t just for eating. It’ll be cool. Then I’m off to Carrie’s sixth birthday party. Her whole class is coming, so it’ll be funny to see little kids running around. I haven’t seen a lot of little kids in a long time.

Yesterday I found a website that has theme songs from old Nickelodeon shows. I turned up my speakers and waited for Real Player to kick in. I was so happy listening to these songs, I wanted to dance on my desk like I was a little kid again.

It’s been an exciting, fun week. I’m just going to swing here because I can.

It’s warm here, and girls don’t wear many clothes. Shirts stop at the rib cage and pants start, well, really low. And every girl has that tattoo above their butt cra—I mean, in their lower back. It’s almost like a mark of the female. But, this too will pass.

There will be a decade of old folks, wrinkled, hunched and ugly, sleeping their last years in an old folks home. The young nurses will joke about the tattoos that every old lady has in their lower back. Most guys have a matching tattoo, barbed and thorny, wrapped around their flabby arm or blue-veined ankle.

Will we yell at the nurse “crank it up, that’s Dr. Dre!” Will the bingo after-parties be booty dancing?

In “Road to Perdition,” there is this…spellbinding scene of dancing. It’s the early 1900s in a dancehall. The shot is down a long dance floor, with circles of dancers spinning and weaving in and out of each other. It was such a cool shot, I stopped the movie just to see it again.

What am I doing here? The music, the dancing…wow!; I wanted to go dancing. Where to tonight?

We don’t dance like that anymore. You pretty much go to a club with almost no clothes on—especially if you are a girl. When the music starts, you start pounding against each other like you are mating. Anyone will do, just whisper something in her ear and go at it.

I am a big fan of sex. As a Christian, you should be; God made it good for a reason. I am a big fan of music, dancing, celebrating. But, how has sex and dancing gotten so perverted that they are no longer good?

I just deleted a paragraph trying to define what kind of “good” I mean. But when “it’s all good”, nothing is good.

Holy?

Sex is holy, but not always. Dancing is holy, but not always.

When we reduce ourselves to animals gorging ourselves in instinct, we brutalize beauty. We’ve lost the romance and elegance of dancing, making love.

I feel insecure writing during this war, because I feel insignificant and anything I write about seems insignificant. When the war is broadcasting 24/7 as people go on with their lives, it puts things in perspective.

It’s awfully hard to complain that your coffee is too hot when the newspapers next to you reminds you that there are American POW’s.

I’ve been in the zone for the past several weeks. For the past couple months, I’ve taken dozens of meetings and countless hours of brainstorming and solidified the next version of lifeteen.com. It’s a daunting task, the scale of the project bigger than anything I’ve worked on before. So it’s been really cool the past few weeks to design the look of the website, to see a real website taking shape on my computer. Soon that same site will enter in thousands of homes every day.

It reminds me of when I was 13 working on my Eagle Scout Project. I was going to paint a huge mural on the side of a wall in downtown Hayesville. We did the drawings, go the paint, and organized the volunteers. There we were, spray-painting the side of this business. I was like, “Dad, are we really going to do this?” A month later I was skateboarding with my friends. We bought a couple cokes and sat on the curb. I looked at that huge wall thinking, “I can’t believe I really did it.”

That mural is still there, as good-looking as ever.

Who knows when this war will be over? Soon the news stations will drop that story and move on to something else. I’ll still be here, fighting for the young people of the world. One pixel at a time.