Poetry Boat and Smoker's Tree
From Chapter 13As a pastime, my friends and I often walk to the lakes in our neighborhood to sit by our favorite trees, talk, smoke, and read poetry. After a long day of painting houses, I join them to just sit and look out at the world, take it all in. Sailboats glide across the horizon line. Couples walk by holding hands. We daydream. Once, in a moment of great understanding, we determined to save up and buy our own little boat, a Poetry Boat. We daydream about carrying it above our heads down to the water, singing as we go, oars in hand, toting a backpack full of books and luncheon. We'd raise a mast and hoist a decorated sail. The whole idea is to spend an afternoon on a lake—sipping cold ones, reading, just listening to the music of God in the world, just looking out at the curvature of the sun.
The way God light shines everywhere in the world—refracted, shining through the world at an angle—is what I like to call the curvature of the sun. There is no irrefutable argument for God. We do not see him walking down the street or dancing on the clouds. This is because God reveals himself in our daily lives the way sunlight is revealed through the atmosphere or through a prism—refracted, brightly colored, dancing everywhere. On a graph, a curve is a line showing how one quantity varies with respect to another. Graphs are ugly things. But on any given day, a curve is how the mud and poetry of being human varies with respect to God. It's beautiful, like a boy and a girl making eyes at one another from across a dance floor. Our daydream of a Poetry Boat is a pure Christian indulgence, a gawking at God from across a dance floor. It's like a portable hermitage, a spiritual retreat, a place from which we can savor and enjoy God. Though refracted, his activity is everywhere, dancing and colorful. The curvature of the sun is the romance of God, his story in our lives and in the world ...
The Vintage Music Company
From Chapter 4After lunch at the Wienery, James and I headed down to the Vintage Music Company, a record shoppe (it really is a shoppe). It doesn't look like much from the outside: just a nondescript brick building on the corner of Cedar Ave and East 38th Street. But enter the doors, and you've entered a reservoir of musical wealth. Here, if you don't know what you're looking for, like me, you rarely buy anything. They use near-ambiguous genres like pre- and post-war vocal and jazz, and the fastidiously categorized 78s are arranged by serial number and packaged in faceless brown sleeves. Boxes and crates crowded with records litter the floor. I just like it here because when you enter, you are immediately overwhelmed by the musty air smell of aged paper and sleek vinyl. I like the bronze busts of Beethoven and Mozart and the gramophone horns.
Coming here today with James I couldn't help but think about how this little music shoppe is like marriage: if you don't know what you're looking for before you enter, you'll quickly get overwhelmed. You might even give up. It's not for window shoppers. It's for serious music collectors, only those who really care, who really want to listen ...
Grave Yard
Excerpt From Chapter 1Christianity isn't classy, and it isn't for prudes. Though it may well be answerable for a lot of high-art and highbrow thought, it's also guilty of highballs and high-heels. Christianity is true-to-life. It's chaste, yes, and holy; but it's equally sexually exciting and intoxicating.
For Christians, everything is compelling and sacred—everything except corruptions and inversions of real things. Mud & Poetry is about what a single, Christian person like me finds compelling and sacred about sex, love, God, and everything in between. They're all related in the plainest yet most momentous ways. God is building his community here on earth, and he's using ordinary, unsophisticated, soil-like mediums to give it shape—relevant to this little book's theme, the plain marriages of everyday men and women. It's unpretentious. It's sexual. It's lowborn and muddy. But it's alluringly holy.
And so this is why I begin with dirt. If ever I marry, I would like to marry in a graveyard ...
Victoria's Secret
Excerpt From Chapters 2 & 9In high school girls make lists outlining sought after attributes of future husbands: short hair, lots of money, no tattoos or piercings, probably wearing pleated kakis. Whether it was the tattoos or the money, I never seemed to make the cut, but that's not the only reason why I don't like the idea of making a list. When you meet someone, wouldn't you want more than what you thought up yourself? If I actually met the woman of my dreams, I would meet nothing but the hardcover, feminine edition of my own imagination. I'd want to keep her, for sure, but as one might keep a collector's item—unopened, and with the original dust jacket. It would be boring. I would rather be taken aback, surprised by how very different this woman is, not comforted by how perfectly she fits into my checklist.
Don't get me wrong, though: it's all in the details. It's good to know what you like and what you don't like. Sometimes you just have to lay down the law: I'm sorry, I can't date you because you have a Bluetooth cell-phone earpiece stuck in your ear, you smoke, you sport a Calvin peeing sticker, when I drink you don't look better, you drive a PT Cruiser, etc. But still, as a general principle, I don't like the idea of the suitor-sweetheart checklist. It tends to close more doors than it opens. So I don't have a checklist. Or, at least I thought I didn't until I had my Victoria's Secret Revelation ...
Galactic Pizza
From Chapter 8My friend Catherine from the coffee shop I work at is a screenwriter. I sometimes walk down to her apartment to smoke cigarettes and drink wine in coffee mugs and listen to Bob Dylan or Iron & Wine on her turntable. It's convicting to be friends with someone like Catherine. She cares about people and the environment and animals more than most people I know, including myself. I wish more Christians were like her.
The other night we were sitting on her stoop when the Galactic Pizza Man drove by. Galactic Pizza is in Uptown, Minneapolis, our stomping grounds. Their deliverymen (Catherine would have me say delivery-people) drive around in tiny electric cars dressed like super heroes, saving the neighborhood one great pizza at a time. Last year a guy on the street yoinked an old lady's purse and ran. A Galactic Pizza Person on delivery saw the robbery and chased the terrorist down, demanding back the purse. The thief was apparently so startled by the Superman garb he handed the purse over readily, as if grateful to wash his hands of the matter.
Catherine and I were sitting on her front stoop when the Galactic Pizza Person goes by, and she tells me about how her friend and roommate just moved out and how she doesn't like the silence of an empty apartment. She tells me how she listens to Elliott Smith none stop these days because she's lonely, and about how she once got high and ordered some Galactic Pizza just because she needed a knight in shining armor to break the silence, the loneliness. That night Galactic Pizza Person was her hero. Catherine's an idealist in her own way, like me, and almost apologizes for being afraid of silence, of being lonely. But I can't point any fingers. I don't think we were meant to be alone. It runs against us, goes against the nature of things ...
Sunny Side Up Café
From Chapter 3Sometimes my friends and I go out for breakfast at the Sunnyside Up Café. It's the tackiest greasy spoon in town. For some reason when we're there we end up bantering about starting a Band of Brigands. We would cruise the country on our bikes, stirring up trouble, wielding unorthodox weapons. Stephen says he'd be infamously known as The Destroyer of Cities. He's good at coming up with cool names. I can only think of dumb names like, Tyler the Criminal, or Tyler the Terrible. He also gets the Vincent 1950 Black Shadow. Since the cool bike's taken, I opt for the less glamorous but nonetheless sleek Honda Shadow Spirit. We usually end up arguing about what we would call our hypothetical biker gang, who would get the black leather jacket, the red handkerchief, and other such matters of import. We go home full of eggs, agitated, and dreaming of the Open Road.
Sometimes I feel guilty about wanting a motorcycle. In my mind it's something a savvy bachelor would get, one of his many diversions. I don't want to be the guy who gets a new toy every week, anything that will delay a responsible, familial life. But I can't help it. I want to feel the sun on my shoulders and the pavement beneath me. I want to feel the wind in my hair, to smell the world around me. It's more than a bachelor's dream. I think it's more like the longing St. Francis had for open fields, or the way St. Benedict dreamed of an ordered life around Christ. I think of the Desert Fathers retreating to the desolate places to pray. I get itchy feet for these prayer spaces. I want to go out and see the world. I want to see it the way the mystics saw it, full of the activity of God, like the monks of yore ...
Bob's Java Hut
From Chapter 8And so I am sitting with my friend Karen from church at Bob's Java Hut, the caffeine outpost on Lyndale where the bikers hang out. Here you can expect to rub elbows with bearded drywall hangers, wannabe punk rockers and hard-luck java-mongers alike.
They lift a big garage door that opens to a sidewalk with plastic tables that get hot in the sunlight. Motorcycles line the curb. The sidewalk is where the smokers loiter. It's also where Karen and I can drink our coffee and watch traffic. I like Karen. I call her Karen the Otolaryngologist. She goes to medical school and studies diseases of the ear and throat. She talks about science and math a lot and I like to get lost in her words, words like: bisector, rheumatological and gradient. It's almost too bad, I sometimes think, that our conversations tend to revolve around Christian spirituality because in consequence, I don't get to hear her talk science and math. It's OK, though: Christianity has it's own full-bodied, almost ritzy words, words like omnipotent, degeneracy, triune and apocalyptical.
Karen and I talk about Jesus a lot because we're both going through a lot of transition. I think we're like a lot of other Christians our age. For those of us who grew up in the church we eventually reach a point in life where we need to make our faith in Jesus our own. We try to imagine how Christianity's going to mold our adult lives, and then we try to act on it.
The Wienery
From Chapter 4It's a perfect spring Saturday in Minneapolis, and my old friend James and I are eating lunch at the Wienery. Even though we're sitting on old-school malt shop stools, it still feels like we're more in a machine shop than an eatery. Everything here is either stainless steel or beat-to-hell laminate. You almost expect to see an exciting Swimsuit Calendar hanging proudly behind the grill. There isn't one. But a huge swordfish and a deer's head with antlers are mounted on the far wall. It's not as if anyone's looking, though. In this cozy, clean and stalwart hole-in-the-wall anyone can be a regular: pauperized students, luckless locals, and senior executives all line up around the same bar, all order the same best dogs and sandwiches in town (all under five bucks), and all deliberate with their waistlines over the extra buck for the piping-hot, house-cut fries.
We lucked ourselves onto stools by the window that looks out on Cedar Avenue. It's a bright day, and all of this—the crowded grill, the smell of wieners and coffee, the mismatched chairs—all of this together has mollycoddled me into a state of complete repose. Maybe it's because wieners and an ill-assorted crowd are the perfect cure to a Friday night out. Maybe it's because I'm a sucker for cheap, delicious, metallic coffee. Maybe this is what James had in mind when he brought me here today.
"I'm going to marry Margaret," he says, completely out of the blue. I scramble to finish chewing, while my mind scavenges for reference points. The last time we talked about Margaret he was thinking about breaking up with her. And that was about three months ago. I have no idea what to say ...
