What exactly is a person supposed to do after work? We are all influenced by the people within close proximity to us on a regular basis. That narrows it down for me. I see my wife, my cat, the postman, and the young men I play basketball with at the rec.

I think of people I know who still have social lives. I am amazed. My sister, for example. Up in Oklahoma, she probably hangs out with friends three times a week at least. I don’t do anything outside of my house three times a week anymore except exercise.

I know of a whole group of people my age or a little younger who live within a radius of 8 miles from our church. Those people get together much more frequently simply because it’s more convenient. Heck, if my closest friends were only five minutes away, I’d probably see them several times a week, or at least per month. But I live twenty minutes from church, which means that no one who lives over there wants to come out here. Sure, they would come if I owned some land or an amazing pool with tropical landscaping. Anyone would take a twenty minute journey to enjoy a mini-vacation.

Such is life.

Some days, I force myself to take brief breaks outside, just to experience the weather. I was planning on doing most of my work from my laptop outside via wireless, but the router I bought was so sub par that I am taking it back.

Being outdoors is difficult sometimes. Ever since I quit smoking. That was what, a year ago already? Guess so. Time flies. Not really. I took a beating this past year – part of it, anyway.

I feel a little pressure to write something brilliant, now that Kristine has said the fam is gathered around the computer. Give a guy some time to get his bearings. I’ll find brilliance hiding somewhere. In the meantime, I just hope I can sleep without the intrusion of blogmania. Perhaps I will have to give it a different name. That one sounded rather like a video game.

He is so much more than a cartoon drawing on the front of a children’s book. He is more than the central figure of The Chronicles of Narnia. Aslan transcends story. As Stratford Caldecott says,

His reality is something else, something deeper. In fact Lewis constructed him not as a character within the story, but as the presence within the story of something more real than the story, more real than the author himself.

I love that Hollywood tried to recreate the story for us. I love that they tried. I was infinitely disappointed, though. Who wasn’t? Perhaps anyone who has yet to read the books. But C. S. Lewis did something so significant. He created a figure we all desire to know. He is fierce, wild, unpredictable, mystical, authoritative, tender, playful, strong, nurturing, and unchallengable. He is the one we want to run to when we are scared, and the one we are willing to accept correction from because we are convinced of his love. How did any one man manage to capture this in a story? I am reminded of this passage in the Bible that says, “Deep calls unto deep.” Honestly, I would never have known what that meant if someone hadn’t explained it to me. The deep passions, deep heart of God calls out unto the deep passions and the heart of mankind.

This is what it means to be human. It means to be equipped with this part of your “self” which can be touched by the calling depths of God. That is the best way I know to describe Aslan. Those are the only words to describe the sheer instinctual draw towards this fictional character. Deep calls unto deep. But just how exactly does a fictional character call out and draw so many millions of readers? Truthfully, it doesn’t. Some may claim a sort of imaginative appeal and so forth, but such explanations lack substance. What is going on here? Why do we regretfully set the book aside only to revisit the stale, stagnant perceptions of God we have always known? Because we know no better. Because we do not believe that a God anywhere in the universe could actually be as wonderful as Aslan. Well, maybe a god could be as wonderful, but no god actually is, and that’s all that matters. At least, that’s what our life experiences tell us.

Funny thing about life experiences is how subjective they are. They are at the mercy of everyone and everything near enough to have influence upon us. There are children who are abused by family members whose life experience tells them never to trust another soul again. Those life experiences are convincing. But they dictate a broken understanding of life. Maybe Aslan isn’t too good to be true. Maybe our eyes cannot see because our past lies riddled with brokenness that dictates to each one of us what must be true. It’s possible. If so, then how do we determine what to believe?

It was a long time ago. Every kid I knew seemed to have a Picture Bible. For those of you who’ve never seen a Picture Bible, it’s a comic book version of the Bible, telling many of the stories, but skipping everything not narrative. Someone thought this was a great idea. I’d like to kick that someone. I’d like to kick them very hard… in both shins… and maybe the groin. Not a very Christian-like response, eh? It’s true… Still, I can’t seem to forgive the person or persons responsible for making my life this difficult. Something about Jesus, Paul, and Moses as cartoons managed to steal just a little bit of the realism from the stories… Go figure. The more I think about it, the more horrible an idea the Picture Bible seems. It’s hard enough to understand a foreign culture. It’s even harder to understand a culture 2,000 – 4,000 years ago. But take that and turn it into a comic book, and you have plenty of reasons why a child growing into adulthood should have a problem or two comprehending the heroes of the faith. Seriously, how does one ever take the Apostle Paul seriously when the story of his blinding light encounter with Jesus sparks imagery of a pink colored man touched by crayon yellow rays? What about Jesus healing the cartoon boy? Children learn to enjoy cartoons as entertainment, and often take away morals from the story if they be present. But the Bible was intended to be far more than an extended fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm. I’ve heard some people voice the opinion that it’s often easier to be a Christian if you were not taught Christian principles as a child. Apparently, you get to avoid quite a bit of the hypocrisy we pick up on by mimicking what we don’t understand. At the same time you gain hypocrisy, your tiny developing mind learns to associate the unreal with stories of the real, making true faith that much more difficult. Some parents (especially hard right wingers who homeschool their kids) will react angrily, saying that I have just criticized the best method they have of teaching their children. To which I would reply that I have no viable solution to that dilemma. How do you teach a child the way in which he or she should go? Some children will literally love those cartoon Bible stories. But I ask you this: at what future cost? Somehow, we must learn to disentangle ourselves from the false in order to approach the real.

Yes. It’s true. I’m a recovering idiot. Ten years of my life, I wasted. Ten years, smoking a pack per day, drinking a case of Dr. Pepper, and eating junk food. At that time, eating wisely meant buying a few cans of tuna, a bottle of Miracle Whip, and a loaf of bread. That was my “eating healthy.” Don’t get me wrong – tuna’s great, as long as you don’t eat too much of it and die of mercury poisoning.

What really bugs me is that I spent so many years listening to people tell me how bad these things were and didn’t care. I couldn’t have cared less. All I cared about was feeling good. What a joke. Feeling good is a subjective term, based loosely on how stupid a person is for overdosing on various poisonous substances which offer brief feelings of euphoria in exchange for a shorter life sentence (or at least “span”).

More thoughts soon…

It’s a relentless, dogged pursuit of your children. B2C businesses study human behavior relentlessly to determine the most effective means of reaching their primary customers: your kids. Before you get all holier than thou, consider why your kids are the focus of retail marketing. Hmm… Well, most of them don’t have jobs yet. Most of them don’t drive cars yet. Most of them can’t vote yet (except for the next American Idol). Most of them can’t drink, buy cigarettes, or join the military.

So what makes this pre-teen to teenager so commercially powerful? The answer is simple, though many parents ignore the truth. Parents make teenagers the single most powerful consumer group in the United States of America. How? By giving them fistfuls of cash and/or credit cards and hours and hours of unsupervised time in which to spend it. American capitalism, though perhaps not as ethically and morally astute as it should be, is no fool. Parents throw money at their kids to spend – possibly to atone for the guilt of not spending time with them – and marketing agencies have taken the time to learn where and how those kids live. In today’s American society, you simply cannot reach children and teenagers unless you have a visible presence in what is being called by BtoB Magazine as “social media” channels. Social media includes blogs, podcasts, and networking sites like MySpace.

Yes, we must mention MySpace yet again. It appears that only Google and Yahoo receive as much or more public attention as MySpace. One can hardly ignore one of the most popular and influential channels of entertainment and communication among the most important generational consumer base. I must pause to follow a rabbit trail for a moment. Since MySpace is one of the most important virtual sites in the world, how is it that the company has yet to realize that the ads posted on a member’s home page should correspond to that person’s interests? I am a married man, and MySpace knows that from my profile. Why can’t they find a more appropriate ad for me than some gigantic dating website ad? What a waste of someone’s money! There’s not a chance in hell that I am going to be a profitable client to them, so why isn’t MySpace following Google’s lead and offering keyword relevant ads?

My trail is over. That happens to be one of my biggest pet peeves at present. I hate dating ads and it insults me that one of the largest online companies in the world cannot manage to figure out that I’m not interested in the crap they’re selling. According to Ellis Booker, Editor of BtoB, “there is a major shift, largely generational, in online consumption habits. A part of this shift involves a growing reliance on ‘authentic,’ word-of-mouth sources, in addition to traditional media and corporate outlets.” What Booker is trying to say is that another generation has come onto the stage, searching for something their parents’ generation didn’t offer them: authenticity. Blogs are tremendously effective marketing channels because of the confessional/journal style in which the content is written. The entire blog genre was, at least originally, intended to be a more personal and authentic medium of expression for individuals.

Some agencies are over-exploiting blogs now as well; the result is the lessening of the power of blog authority. It’s a given that anything successful will be copied a dozen to a thousand times until the success has been completely drained. It is my prediction that effective blog marketing will peak within a year and then begin a descending pattern towards its death gurgle. That is, unless marketers learn from past mistakes and stop trying to flood an already saturated market. But whether the messages come through blogs, podcasts, MySpace, or something new, your children are the primary targets.

is it true you turn into something other than what I’ve known? is it true you become something new?