Handel's Story.

Handel's Coronation Anthem, in three movements.


just back in december i had the opportunity to collaborate on the Briercrest Christmas Celebration as a Vison Team member and contributing artist. My task was to listen to the music selections, and to put something on to 3 large screens, that would sit behind the choir and be the entire backdrop for the Celebration.
Paired with our lighting design, there would be no decoration in the gigantic modern hildebrand chapel. It was a new direction for the Christmas Celebration, so the stakes were high.


I chose to complete animations in Apple's Motion for the screens, treating them as one large surface.


The night opened with Handel's Coronation Anthem, and i listened to it endlessly.
When it came time to assign imagery, the song, more than any other in the Celebration spoke itself into a story in my mind. 


All i could see when i heard the piece was the Biblical Creation Account, Genesis 1-2.  I saw the hebrew words (i studied ancient-hebrew in college) and the complex ideas show in their ancient script that is lost to our roman alphabet.  I saw colors and the flow of creation and redemption, as told from long ago.


the first movement jumps and is full of a wandering and busy Joy, i see the rainbow split from threads from the darkness, circling out and sizing out the seen spectrum.  the spectrum breaks into deeply contrasting lights as light and dark are created. A cloud and blue of day, a black and red for night. the white of cloud, the dark coffee-bean brown of soil and the clear highlights of water come together until the earth floats in the stars and in the song takes us at the end of the movement to a grove a trees that fall behind us as we move through the deep of them.


It all gets dark and blue for the second movement, and we see adam and eve, happy and in white, against the sad movement that already has let out the news of their fated fall from joy and grace. they are in love and soon, as the choir's song vamps, they are ashamed and blaming, and running.
the end of the second movement they are caught under the eye of a powerful God.


The third movement is moving through the trees again only now they are winter white and spring is breaking through and all turns green and gold.
This is the royal end and the redemption and reuniting of adam and eve, and God and humanity.


The song is such a story, with beginning middle and end, and my interpretation likely will never leave me, despite anything Handel ever intended. 


If it's a coronation, it is the story of the prodigal son who returns home after taking his father's inheritance before he dies and squandering it- only for his father to throw the greatest of feasts for him and setting a crown on his head.

Something Missing

Here is the scene:
 It was twice a weekday, morning and evening,  I'd drive down the Canada HWY 1 in an old Honda station-wagon hatchback from 89.
Take a picture of that, as i did every now and then, stopping on the side of the road.  something is missing.
Look closely at the image, all twelve mega-pixels worth, see the rough texture of the dashboard as i drive, or the rusty edges of the hood.  The image is clear, but the experience and emotion is lost.
That is not the emotion created while driving in the Honda (Goof-Troop, i called it).
To have the full experience, you need the thick drone of the tries against the pavement, the occasional squeaks in the shocks. You need the raspy hum of the motor, and vibrating rattle of the doors and windows. it all feels incomplete without that whirring fan pumping the hot air around my legs to save me from Canadian Winter.  now that's the picture i can't take. there is the moment.
I think of it and how i can look at the pictures and miss the noise that i use my iPod and headphones to do away with when i drive.

To do

I love thinking of things to do.

doing them.... is a little different.

That's true about a number of things in life for most people (like being a Rock Star, or a Pro Athlete) Errands are thing like that for me.  I love thinking of little errands, home improvements, odd jobs and possibilities. I hate taking the time to shop for lumber and to measure and get things done.  -not because i hate doing that stuff, mind you, it's because i always have a long list of much more creative and important things i'd RATHER be doing.
(i know, i broke the "never use CAPS when you blog rule", let's both move on from here)

I have big projects that i care much more about...about a mile of them. And when you put some little odd job -like registering your car- its tough to find time to do it.

The pattern is: ignore the dumb job for the highly fullfilling one, untill that becomes extremely life-and-death urgent and if you don't act on it now the Government will burn your body and force you to live as Darkman, only in a cave. Then be extremely stressed out as you try to get that errand done alongside a stack of other "dumb" errands you've ignored.

Errands steal the thing i love most "unplanned time."  Women also steal this, but they are much more beautiful, kissable, and so forth.

The question is... what errands am i ignoring to take the time to type this?

Well, i DID (oh no, caps again!) take the time to do a shwacklaod of errands today. so there!

still, that pile is pretty big....

2010 in sum

Things that happened.

1. Came back to canada, moose jaw
2. Made the Admit You video. Enjoy.
3. Made the I Love Briercrest Videos, 1 and 2.
4. Got the VideoMaster Job at Briercrest, salary and vacation fun!
5. Amy Hansen gave in to her crazy thoughts and asked me out. We dated!!!
6. Drove to Montreal and Quebec City, Toronto, Niagara, Sault St. Marie, Winnipeg.
7. Got Anthem Back together for a show with a bunch of new songs.
8. Joined the Philly 5 crew, playing drums.
9. Got back together with Friend Friend for a while for drums and singing.
10. Played shows in Winnipeg, Edmonton, Alberta, MJ, Calgary, etc. For $
11. Went to the GMA’s “Covenant Awards” and puked in Starbucks bathroom.
12. Man Camp 2010, a much needed time in manland.
13. Created over an hour of animations for the Briercrest Christmas Celebration. A hit.
14. Started playing my first fantasy role playing game, D20 modern. In Love, for Life. Thanks To Drew Hildebrand
15. Made amazing new life-long friendships, The Sims, others,
16. Lived with The Leptich’s.
17. Moved back in with the France, and for the first time with Cappy and Campbell. Into a house! We have a yard and BBQ’s!
18. Finally got an iPhone. Life will never be the same.
19. Here for Friend Christmas- yes!
20. Watched the entire series Firefly, and Serenity, named the house after her.
21. Fringe, Dexter, 24, Apple events (watching them announce stuff).
22. All the James Bond movies with friends and olives...
23. Got engaged to Amy Hansen!
24. Drove to B.C., Vancouver Island, Victoria. Met the future in-laws on the Sheri-side
25. Valentines Party at the Pierson’s, Cabin Day with them and the Flamings, new Traditions and much love.
26. Hung with the Pierson’s in Caronport, and in Abbotsford.
27. Studio Drummer for different people’s projects at JawBone. Fun.
28. Flamings Got Preggo, Pierson’s Got Preggo, Hlady’s got Preggo and babied.
29. Eric La France got a girlfriend, Amanda Gerdes.
30. Jen Leptich got engaged!
31. Did not go to USA once this year, crazy.
32. Turned 30. Wow.
33. Bought an EX1R.
34. Sister had a baby. Little Scarlett.
35. Took a thousand pictures on my iPhone.
36. Read almost 30 books, over 10 more audio books, and hundreds of blogs and articles.
37. Achieved almost every goal I set for the year.
38. Lost over 20 pounds, ran easily over a hundred miles.
39. Gained 10 pounds back in November-December, ran 0 miles those months, haha!
40. Barely Blogged. busy writing scripts and things.

la bodega, regina

The Simple Truth.

Nothing, for me, is simple. (even that statement, upon the further reflection of typing this second one, is much too simple to be true, and it’s not.)  

It would seem simple enough to create an adage “if someone thinks something is simple, they are wrong”, though, how could such a thing be true in every context -when such few (if any) things are? That would also assume we could know every context. We already have an issue seeing correctly the contexts that we have looked at with scrutiny (we see them as far more simple then they are).  

Perhaps I’m using a rather complex bit of text to say simply that ‘everything is complex; even more complex then we now know.’  Choose something you know, really think on it, and you’ll soon see it as more complex then you thought it before, regardless of how complex you thought it before.  

There are manners of speaking, of course, wherein we include the concepts of simplicity and complexity, and, often, things can be said to be ‘simple’ in those relative circumstances. Take the idea of a problem on your computer: you can’t find a file. You search in every folder you can click on and you say “I can’t find that file”. This continues until a 12 year-old enters the scene and uses the handy search field and, like Apple Magic, the file is found. You say ‘wow’ and the 12 year-old says “it's simple.” I know, such a terrible example, it could never happen to you, but that enhances the point- we think something is complex until we think we know it.  Even engineers -who study for years- cough out the words, when they are demonstrating some complex bit of arrangement to a colleague they are exacerbated with, saying “ it’s really very simple.”

And so it goes, from some odd clever person to another, in a wide cycle of one-ups-man-ships that we enjoy around the globe daily. But it's quite a different thing, to know how to 'simply talk to a girl', than to understand the complexities of why this young specimen of the species Homo sapien [latin for ‘knowing’ or ‘wise’ ‘man’] seems to desire so strongly to talk to her at all (especially when he would be awfully unhappy if all he got to do was simply talk to her.)

I really do scratch my head weekly, as terribly simple and ignorant words fly from pulpits around the spinning earth... and simple people enjoy them.  I guess I just have too deep a sense of the paramount atrocity that conflating ideas reek upon civilization.  We live in an elaborately involved complex of realities (reality meaning a 'realm of consciousness'). You are blind to the reality experienced on the other side of the globe, until the New York Times posts an article about it with photos that make you feel you get enough of a glimpse to open your mind to some other reality some other poor soul is living far away from you and your take on things.  The universe is a multiverse, and a complicated and labyrinthine one at that. You hardly can look closely at something you see every day, only to notice a tangled and bewildering existence that baffles the mind (at least my mind). This is why I hate pictures of human skin, where, all the land of small creatures it truly is, is exposed and in color. I like to believe that if you zoomed in on my skin, you’d simply see the smooth skin I see. Not the cracks of my lego-body much too closely resembling the lego building blocks of my monkey cousin, I hope isn’t as related to me as some apes claim. I’d rather pretend I’m not the universe to a host of living things -mostly inside me- and so I do, and I say “I’m simply me- take a look- do you see anything else here? No, of course you don’t, it's just me, plain and simple.” 

There is no truth that is straightforward.  Even reading this sentence you are reading something completely different than I’m thinking as I type- and there is no way around it, italics of not. I know that there is a limited range of meaning, I’m only pointing out that the considering of such things is vastly convoluted, if not Byzantine.  Hence the misunderstandings, and why else would you be asking yourself what exactly the point of this particular arrangement of the alphabet is.  The point is that “ghsdjkdhakdhsad” is the only simple thing in existence. There is no such thing as “chaos.” The nano-second you label it with some simple word to pretend you understand it, you err  Chaos is better revealed in the agonizingly ordered stacks of baseball cards sitting in attics across america. Chaos is starting each sentence with a capital letter.  One reason I think so many people want to find a “God” is only to simplify the myriad of multifarious possibilities. How exceptionally annoyed I can be, when kindhearted folks attempt to placate my sprawling mental voyages by trying to moralize me into accepting ‘what is so simple.’  I will not feel guilty for not being as ignorant as the next guy, no matter how ignorant I’m doomed to be, in my limited cubicle of perception.  I don’t mind not being able peel back the curtain on the heavens, as much as being told that I am not allowed to look for the seams.

If the existential moment wasn’t a thorny, knotty, nexus lying outside the peripheral vision of the masses (obsessed with ignoring pictures of creatures on their skin) we might have less killing in the name of invisible creations, and no need to drink imported beer.  If, at midnight, I’m not so sure of the senseless (literally) things that no one is sure of, then, at midnight, I just may be that much more brilliantly honest. Or perhaps the great canvass, that this checkered and variegated reality is but a thread in, alludes me. Plus... I’m tired.

Blank and Loud.

Maybe I’ve been slow to post, as of late.

And what of my silence, of my failure to express?  True, I’ve felt fatigued and emptied by all the expression needed for day to day life. And yet, there is more. I also feel a bit stuffed with thoughts I only share with myself, and an increasing awareness of my uniqueness in the world. 

My thoughts are not revolutionary so much as they are isolating.

Maybe I feel like a man who stands before his peers to tell a tale, and estimates that they are too numerous to have but a few who care or are capable of understanding.

Maybe it’s the fatalistic feeling that nothing can really change anyway, only evolve, like the microevolution of bacteria inside our tylenol-subdued heads. Why then speak?

If early life is a growing and building, than maybe maturity is simply that which was built being attacked and then many parts of it/us dying, save the few pieces that have the unusual composition to survive. Those remaining pieces grow and are what’s left of us, if anything.  Maybe that is why some wither so fast and why some last an age.  The ones who last are like super-bugs, immune to life’s anti-bacteria. Maybe that’s why many adults live as shadows of the children they once were, like mutant, surviving-strains; a piece of what had been, the remnant that survives, however twisted and different.

Maybe what I am as an adult, is simply what is left over from the killing of my feeble pieces by life.  

A rock can brake a window, but an opportunity can break your concentration, or even your mind, if you allow your imagination to get ahold of it.  I think people both need imagination to survive as humans, and that it keeps them from really living. Imagination is what allowed us to build the first bed, when we’d slept on the ground. It is also what keeps us up at night, what strangles us in a hundred-thousand ridiculous and dangerous religions, and what makes us hate our present realities.

For my part, I love opportunities, and don’t fear them. Somewhere in my mind as a child the notion grew that one who misses opportunities is the real fool of life. They complain and muse of the life they can imagine, but aren’t ever offered.  But on the other hand,  All an opportunity needs to do, is to show up with his many kin, and the food is set out for that monstrous imagination to feast on and reign. His rule is a mad, slow, death. And so, we don’t fear an opportunity as much as we fear his arriving with many brothers and sisters. 

Opportunities disconnect you from yourself and your own will, since they are offered from outside you.  You can serve opportunities because they are all around you, and never accomplish anything you’d actually like to do. Besides that even, often we’d have no idea of what we’d like to do -because of how we have strong imaginations and can pretty much imagine a million things that we would love to do, though the lot of them are bunk.

I’m not venting out because I feel surrounded by choking opportunities (my starry array of opportunities are checked by a deeply conceived plan I’ve set out for myself).  I assume it looks that way.

Perhaps I wanted to type away until I started using words like “bunk” and “microevolution.”  Or, perhaps I, like you, simply wanted to see what I would come up with. Perhaps I wanted to illustrate in this arrangement of linear symbols knitted into prose, that poetic blank and loud.  Loud in its echoing waves of existence, while blank in  its state of existence.  The Blank and Loud is the opportunity to speak, and then not to. It is the opportunity to write to you while keeping my life and oscillating thoughts strictly to myself.

It must be a place-holder card of sorts, to stand for all the things it would take me too long to say. Things I really have been thinking about.

what a strange post.

Misty Thought

Tired.

Emotionally so, I think.

Eyes closed, as to sleep, but my mind is a fire of a thousand flames.

Amy asks me what I’m thinking about- holding my hand.

It would feel like picking a single grain out of a thousand to choose a single thought and claim it as the one I was thinking.

I realize that sometimes, like now, my thoughts are a million drops of water in the air, like the mist of a waterfall, akin to the Buddhist universe. Like the blood in my body, a million mental streams of thought pour through my consciousness.

I’m thinking about my future, about relationships in general, about how I don’t like trash in cars, about cheating couples and the fate of any relationship. I’m thinking about amy being a Blue and my being a Yellow, and if that means she’ll be loyal and never cheat on me. I’m thinking about how when I choose to say something or write something down, the streams of thought narrow and the midst hits land to become a single, strong, thought.

I’m thinking of how I don’t like cats and how I like dogs, but would prefer to not have any pet to look after. 

Maybe I’m feeling more than thinking.

Maybe the two aren’t as antithetic as people are prone to paint them.

They are strewn as a dichotomy, but I might want to find that false.

I think of how I often secretly don’t believe that feelings are anything more than thoughts that get mis-labeled because they are different. Like the way kids in the deep corners of china are told and believe that ‘white people’ or ‘americans’ are aliens from outer-space, and thats why they look so different.

Emotions: separated thoughts, so we can fear them and have distance between us and them.

It does help, I admit, psychologically speaking, to separate the energies of the brain into an ‘intellectual’ spectrum and an ‘emotional’ one. It’s pragmatic to do so, and helpful.

It does not follow that emotions are not thoughts.

I think now that my thoughts are more like a wide river of ideas flowing in the same direction, rather than a scattered mist.

It is very much like me to sit and have a million thoughts simultaneously, like seeds of corn popping in the microwave, each thought bearing a bit of fruit.

Feeling can be so much like thinking. I know that it’s been proven that a lot of what we ‘feel’ is simply our unconscious mind and it’s calculations affecting the body and conscious mind. The deductions of your unconscious mind leak into your conscious mind and you feel scared, because the logic of your situation doesn’t add up. 

I like sometimes, to sit and let my mind blur to a large mist of calculations and unemotional considerations. When I think of them being unemotional, I guess I mean emotional, just not stressful. 

If we are simply bio-computers, like some posit, the price we pay for being soft is that we feel that terrible ‘stress’ often, and in a plethora of ways. I’d much rather monitor a ‘stress meter’ on my arm and not feel a thing, than to be occasionally overwhelmed and irrational and stupid because my insides worry about how I will ever get along in life.

I guess this is how I veg. I stop pinning down my thoughts to specific words and motives, and turn them loose like birds from the cage. I mist.

I think I haven’t blogged in a long time because of how must mental pinning down my life and work have required the past few months. 

When I am free of that, I catch-up on my mist time, where I let my mind sway in a gigantic tide of ocean, and natural wave and teem with life.

I guess I could always blog on my mist itself. Aim it as a river. Not too much as to destroy it or introduce too much motive or stress. But enough to write something down. Beats staring out the car window as we drive from Quebec City back to Montreal and down to Toronto.

Birthday Journal 2009.

Dec 16 2009 Pyeongtaek, South Korea.

I always write a journal on my birthday. Usually it’s the sort of reflective drivel I hope everyone writes; full of narcissistic lusting that life was as sweet as we can imagine to be. 

 I can be happy everyday of my life, but my birthday comes and I’m a glum little dude unable to find the daylight through the dark.   As you imagine, I’ve had plenty of ‘great’ birthdays i tried to enjoy. Emotionally, I only watched and interacted on them as through thick prison glass. Some were good though.

This year was different, not unlike last year, which also broke the pattern by failing 3 of my 5 birthday traditions. 

1.Write a song on my birthday.

2.Be on mainland north america

3.Write my Journal in pencil in a notebook and never share it.

4.See below.

I woke up this morning ...or rather, didn't sleep last night, and asked myself what I asked myself three or four days ago: Will I be sad on my birthday?

You - “what a sad stupid strange question to ask yourself...” 

Me-  Either way you look at it, your birthday comes and you finally consider if you actually like your life. A lot of people don’t. 

I totally dig my life, but I guess I’m always wanting more (pretend you didn’t hear that).

I thought about whether I'd be happy, like last year, or not.  The thinking of it got me thinking.

It’s really my choice.

I can set down daft feelings of being ‘unsatisfied’ or ‘wishing my life was different than it is’, and decide to NOT get all sad. That means no “God, I’m why am I still waiting for you to do ‘this’ or ‘that’.. Still waiting waiting sad waiting, where is it?!!!”.  It means no phrases that start with “I wish....”  

It’s tempting to use my crazy imagination to fantasize that I was Emperor of the Free World or some sort of miraculous end-of-days prophet that billions recognized as a great holy man.  I kind of love role-play and putting myself in other peoples shoes, and that can be a place to run, when I have things to deal with I don’t want to deal with. Stress enters, I leave. 

But last November I pressed a huge button I found hanging over my life. It was there all along and I guess the thing terrified me and to be honest the last thing I wanted to do was hit that button.  It was painted black in nail polish and so it looked like sticky death to me. Maybe.

If my outer world was like a tornado ripping apart towns and farmland, my inner-world was a Hurricane, sweeping up not only cows and farm hands that took too long to find cover, but oceans and cities. 

 I drove from Moose Jaw to LA and hit ‘RESET’ on my life.

I was done. Done complaining. Done dreaming. Done fighting. Done hiding. Done worrying about myself, done worrying about everyone else.

But you know this, no?

Well last year I went Jim Carey and enjoyed saying yes to happiness and fun in a Hawaiian winter with my baby bro (Willy the wise) visiting our mama.  I won’t tell you what I did, that one’s for me. It was a best-ist birthday.  But that reset button must have had more nail polish than I thought, because It took a bit of work to press it in all the way.

I spent most of this past year all alone, hermiting in the caves of california, complete with wifii.  I really needed it.  I loved it.  Imagine a living without a hurricane going on in your head and your heart. Thats how good it was, like a buddhist in tibet in some flick that makes our western lives look ridiculously busier than they ever should be.

The start of my RESET was that there was a lot of stuff I was doing to myself in my own choices that I had been blaming on God, Fate, and Others.

I had Jonny Rempel’s mom called me today and her and little koreans sang me happy birthday in korean. The funny part about that is that I am in korea, and they are in in Strathmore, Alberta.  I love life. Talking to my Jonathon was rich, guys like me and King David need them, maybe that’s why I have so many.

I decided that if God has given me  a choice in how I would feel about today, then my choice would be that it was be an awesome king-day without a gloomy moment.

I get taken out to dinner tonight by John and Ferial. They’ve taken me to many exquisite and superb restaurants. Right now though, I only feel like running off to McDonald's... I have few hours till they get off work... Plenty of time to google McDonald's and go on another Korean Birthday Adventure...

I’ve already been on a few today.  One involved me wandering out of the city into a village to meet up with a massive FIRE.  I think they thought I started it, because I’m white  (note: this was a “no-iPod” walk, quite different than the standard iPod walk).

I need to go and see how well I’ve learned how to read Korean, it is my birthday after all and I’m not going to spend it typing to you all day on the computer, I don’t care who you are.

Closing thought from, Kurt Cobain  that popped up on my gmail this morning: “Wanting to be someone else is a waste of the person you are.".   To prove how insensitive I can be, I’ll admit that when I read that, I didn’t go “awww”, I went “isn’t killing yourself with a shotgun also a waste of the person you are?” 

I guess it shows I have a ways to go yet.

But thats enough about me.

We Want To Join A Story

Let a story hit you, a second or so of solitude, and you have a life-moment.  You might enter the apartment and notice the lights left on, as you read the note on the door reminding you to shut them off. You’re too focused or too unfocused to lash yourself.  You ignore the call of computers and the 'webbing' because you desire a bit of space, and sit on the sofa.  There it is. 

The story gets to you as you stare out at the world you are in. You shut off all wishing and intentions enough to see it for the thing it is. Just your life in its present position. No more, no less. Nothing bad happened today, but you feel a longing to have that thing the characters in the story -like most stories- have. Resolution. Redemption. Purpose.

You wish your life was like a story, a book, a movie. At any stage along the way you could bolster and solace yourself by knowing there is a purpose and resolution coming, indeed. You hold back the usual regimen of aims, ambitions, and emotional energy thrown out at the plans and hopes for your life, used to excuse the vain content of each numbered day to your thinking brain.  A sadness skulks inside your emotional boundary.  Time to jump up and put away your coat and shrug it off. Things are heading somewhere, you tell yourself.

I think one of the reasons a worldview like Christianity grabs my ear and heart in tandem, is that it collects the oddly drab and indefinable moments of our aspirational days and sets them into the storyline of a comedy.  There the characters never fail to face cruelties and conflicts, yet the resolution to such striving is set into the machine already.  In the Christian worldview, history spreads out on that great canvas called time progressing to its deliberate end. Each of us have our meaning therein.  In that space our in-betweens and irksome realities of the ‘now’  hold a tempo. They can be sorted into plot-points in a sequence purposed to entail the significance and redemption we often covet.

We want to join a story, 

and the prophets say we are part of a story.

 In a life-moment you expect they are right.

Korean December II: John's Genius

John Trammell knows where he is, on the ground, at all times.

he doesn't get lost like mere mortal men. Over a week with him winding down back alleys and weaving through crowds, if he says "we are two blocks east of where ___ is located" then you know its true. We all say "no john" and then he is right. we knew it.  I should add that Subways don't count, and Ferial is the one who you rely on is any subway situation, also, she is great at reading Korean.

That said,

John wanted us all, last week, to go to a resturant in Seoul he schemed off an article in the New York Times, and some of us naysayers  were skeptical about it being worth the price... it was the best food, almost ever ever. Surely will be the best meal we'll have here, and every bite was a dream sequence.

The place is called  Chamsutgol, where their star dish is  galbi (beef short rib), they bring you the raw meat to cook on your table top grill, and here they provide real sutbul (wood charcoal) -- a real treat as it adds a smoky flavor. One of the signature dishes we had here is the galbitang (stewed beef ribs), but you'd better arrive early because they only make 40 orders of it per day. 

One of the best places i'll ever eat in my life, thank you John the Genius,  this experience is up there with Greg Bowcock taking us to House of Nanking in San Francisco.

Last night we found a great sushi place John took us to and insisted we must try, after he did a bit research and got a hunch about it. It's the first one John and Ferial have been able to stomach here. Apparently Korean sushi is very very different than the Japanese style we enjoy in the Americas, and it is not a good difference to lovers of the other style.  We found a winner though, and it was worth the cash John spent on it. 

Thanks John, that was sooo good.

I think the place was called Marie and Mare, or something like that (next to Mr. Pizza, who’s slogan is “Love for Women!”) It is good, so...next time you’re in Pyeongtaek, you know where to go to curb your need for good Sushi.

Korean December

How to get by in Korea: have friends there that help you get by.

This week marks the end of my time in Korea as a tourist, bumping around Pyeongtaek and Seoul with the Trammells, The Majzoubs, and King Rempel.

I was supposed to leave at 5:40 Sunday evening, but alas, The Creech strikes again, adventure emerges.

A lunch with some key people, an made impression, and then the offer... 

Now I’m staying for a month or so.

I get to spend the next weeks coming here in Korea, spending a bunch of time on my Masters Thesis Project toward my MFA at AAU, soaking up the culture, and spending dear time with friends.  Part Hermit, Part Student, Part Tourist, Part Friend, Part Facebook Junkie.  All good things, maybe.

I get to spend a few days living with Jonny Random himself ( he is Bill Gates, Billy Graham, and Bill Cosby mixed together) before he returns to the Great White North, which you can bet is full of heaven-minded time, much appreciation of his genius, and fellowship par excellence .

I took a long walk on Sunday and almost missed the house church at the Trammell’s because I got terribly lost in some rice fields. They live on the edge of this mega-city-thing, so you can walk under an overpass and into some fields. I didn’t think I could get lost, now I know I can. Humble Pie eaten. Tastes so good... Not. I blame having inspiring music on my iPod, thanks for nothing Steve Jobs you wonderful man... or.. thanks for everything. yes.

Allow me to break down my time thus far: Great Restaurants, Friends, hugs, New Friends, Busses, Trains, Taxi Cabs, Subways, Markets, standing about and chatting with Muhi as John and the girls shopped till they dropped. These are the things dreams are made of.

Also, I ran into the only Korean I know in Korea, by chance, turning a corner in Seoul. A city-area of 25 million peeps, in a country of 48 million. 

We pass through an alley way and Sang-Don of Fender Hall is there in the flesh!  He notices the ever-tall John Trammell, and we meet him and his fiance. How cool is life?

I love getting to see how my friends are living overseas, to see their little community, their place of work, their spiritual and social lives, not to mention their Kindles.

Kindles are awesome. I’m seriously considering one, just to make use of the mountain of PDF books I own on my computer that I would never want to read on my computer screen. Death to eyes! ...maybe I’ll wait for the money to start rolling in.